THE BONE DOLL’S TWIN

Book One of the Tamír Triad

Lynn Flewelling

COPYRIGHT

Voyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2001

Copyright © Lynn Flewelling 2001

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007354412

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007392261

Version: 2016-03-14

DEDICATION

for l.e. and the knapp kids up the magic staircase a long time ago

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Skalan Year

Maps

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Keep Reading

About the Author

About the Publisher

THE SKALAN YEAR *

I. Winter Solstice – Mourning Night and Festival of Sakor; observance of the longest night and celebration of the lengthening of days to come.

1. Sarisin Calving.

2. Dostin Hedges and ditches seen to. Peas and beans sown for cattle food.

3. Klesin Sowing of oats, wheat, barley (for malting), rye. Beginning of fishing season. Open water sailing resumes.

II. Vernal Equinox – Festival of the Flowers in Mycena. Preparation for planting, celebration of fertility.

4. Lithion Butter and cheese making (sheep’s milk pref.) Hemp and flax sown.

5. Nythin Fallow ground ploughed.

6. Gorathin Corn weeded. Sheep washed and sheared.

III. Summer Solstice

7. Shemin Beginning of the month – hay mowing. End of the month and into Lenthin – grain harvest in full swing.

8. Lenthin Grain harvest.

9. Rhythin Harvest brought in. Fields plowed and planted with winter wheat or rye.

IV. Harvest Home – finish of harvest, time of thankfulness.

10. Erasin Pigs turned out into the woods to forage for acorns and beechnuts.

11. Kemmin More plowing for spring. Oxen and other meat animals slaughtered and cured. End of the fishing season. Storms make open water sailing dangerous.

12. Cinrin Indoor work, including threshing.

* A 360-day year with four 3-day seasonal festivals.

MAPS

PART ONE

Document Fragment Discovered in the East Tower of the Orëska House

An old man looks back at me from my mirror now. Even among the other wizards here in Rhíminee, I’m a relic of forgotten times.

My new apprentice, little Nysander, cannot imagine what it was like to be a free wizard of the Second Orëska. At Nysander’s birth this beautiful city had already stood for two centuries above her deep harbour. Yet to me it shall always and forever be ‘the new capital’.

In the days of my youth, a whore’s cast-off like Nysander would have gone unschooled. If he were lucky he might have ended up as a village weather-caller or soothsayer. More likely, he would have unwittingly killed someone and been stoned as a witch. Only the Lightbearer knows how many god-touched children were lost before the advent of the Third Orëska.

Before this city was built, before this great House of learning was gifted to us by its great founder, we wizards of the second Orëska made our own way and lived by our own laws.

Now, in return for service to the Crown we have this House, with its libraries, archives, and its common history. I am the only one still living who knows how dear a price was paid for that.

Two centuries. Three or four lifetimes for most people; a mere season for those of us touched by the Lightbearer’s gift. ‘We wizards stand apart, Arkoniel,’ my own teacher, Iya, told me when I was scarcely older than Nysander is now. ‘We are stones in a river’s course, watching the rush of life whirl past.’

Standing by Nysander’s door tonight, watching the lad sleep, I imagined Iya’s ghost beside me and for a moment it seemed as if it was my younger self I gazed at; a plain, shy nobleman’s son who’d shown a talent for animal charming. While guesting at my father’s estate, Iya recognized the magic in me and revealed it to my family. I wept the day I left home with her.

How easy it would be to call those tears foreshadowing – that device the playwrights are so enamoured of these days. But I have never quite believed in fate, despite all the prophecies and oracles that shaped my life. There’s always a choice in there somewhere. I’ve seen too often how people make their own future through the balance of each day’s little kindnesses and cruelties.

I chose to go with Iya.

Later, I chose to believe in the visions the Oracle granted to her and to me.

By my own choice, I helped rekindle the power of this good strong country, and so may rightly claim to have helped the fair white towers of Rhíminee rise against this blue western sky.

But on those few nights when I sleep deeply, what do I dream of?

An infant’s cry, cut short.

You might think after so many years that it would be easier to accept; that one necessary act of cruelty could alter the course of history like an earthquake shifts a river’s course. But that deed, that cry, lies at the heart of all the good that came after, like a grain of sand at the heart of a pearl’s glowing nacre.

I alone carry the memory of that infant’s brief wail, all those years ago.

I alone know of the filth at the heart of this pearl.

CHAPTER ONE

Iya pulled off her straw wayfarer’s hat and fanned herself with it as her horse laboured up the rocky trail towards Afra. The sun stood at noon, blazing against the cloudless blue. It was only the first week of Gorathin, far too early for it to be this hot. It seemed the drought was going to last another season.

Snow still glistened on the peaks overhead, however. Now and then a plume of wind-blown white gusted out against the stark blue of the sky, creating the tantalizing illusion of coolness, while down here in the narrow pass no breeze stirred. Anywhere else Iya might have conjured up a bit of wind, but no magic was allowed within a day’s ride of Afra.

Ahead of her, Arkoniel swayed in his saddle like a shabby, long-legged stork. The young wizard’s linen tunic was sweated through down the back and stained drab with a week’s worth of road dust. He never complained; his only concession to the heat was the sacrifice of the patchy black beard he’d cultivating since he turned one and twenty last Erasin.

Poor boy, Iya thought fondly; the newly shaven skin was already badly sunburnt.

Their destination, the Oracle at Afra, lay at the very heart of Skala’s mountainous spine and was a gruelling ride any time of year. Iya had made the long pilgrimage twice before, but never in summer.

The walls of the pass pressed close to the trail here, and centuries of seekers had left their names and supplications to Illior Lightbearer scratched into the dark stone. Some had simply scratched the god’s thin crescent moon; these lined the trail like countless tilting smiles. Arkoniel had left one of his own earlier that morning to commemorate his first visit.

Iya’s horse stumbled and the reason for their journey bumped hard against her thigh. Inside the worn leather bag slung from her saddle horn, smothered in elaborate wrappings and magic, was a lopsided bowl crudely fashioned of burnt clay. There was nothing remarkable about it, except for the fierce aura of malevolence it gave off when not hidden away. More than once over the years she’d imagined throwing it over a cliff or into a river; in reality, she could no more have done that than cut off her own arm. She was the Guardian; the contents of that bag had been her charge for over a century.

Unless the Oracle can tell me otherwise. Fixing her thin, greying hair into a knot on top of her head, she fanned again at her sweaty neck.

Arkoniel turned in the saddle and regarded her with concern. His unruly black curls dripped sweat beneath the wilted brim of his hat. ‘You’re red in the face. We should stop and rest again.’

‘No, we’re nearly there.’

‘Then have some more water, at least. And put your hat back on!’

‘You make me feel old. I’m only two hundred and thirty, you know.’

‘Two hundred and thirty two,’ he corrected with a wry grin. It was an old game between them.

She made a sour face at him. ‘Just wait until you’re in your third age, my boy. It gets harder to keep track.’

The truth was, hard riding did tire her more than it had back in her early hundreds, although she wasn’t about to admit it. She took a long pull from her waterskin and flexed her shoulders. ‘You’ve been quiet today. Do you have a query yet?’

‘I think so. I hope the Oracle finds it worthy.’

Such earnestness made Iya smile. This journey was merely another lesson as far as Arkoniel knew. She’d told him nothing of her true quest.

The leather bag bumped against her thigh like a nagging child. Forgive me, Agazhar, she thought, knowing her long-dead teacher, the first Guardian, would not have approved.

The last stretch of the trail was the most treacherous. The rock face to their right gave way to a chasm and in places they rode with their left knees brushing the cliff face.

Arkoniel disappeared around a sharp bend, then called back, ‘I can see Illior’s Keyhole, just as you described!’

Rounding the outcropping, Iya saw the painted archway glowing like a garish apparition where it straddled the trail. Stylized dragons glowed in red, blue and gold around the narrow opening, which was just wide enough for a single horseman to pass through. Afra lay less than a mile beyond.

Sweat stung Iya’s eyes, making her blink. It had been snowing the first time Agazhar brought her here.

Iya had come later than most to the wizardly arts. She’d grown up on a tenant farm on the border of Skala’s mainland territory. The closest market town lay across the Keela River in Mycena, and it was here that Iya’s family traded. Like many bordermen, her father had taken a Mycenian wife and made his offerings to Dalna the Maker, rather than Illior or Sakor.

So it was, when she first showed signs of magic, that she was sent back across the river to study with an old Dalnan priest who’d tried to make a drysian healer of her. She soon earned praise for her herb craft, but as soon as the ignorant old fellow discovered that she could make fire with a thought, he bound a witch charm to her wrist and sent her home in disgrace.

With this taint on her, she’d found little welcome in her village and no prospect of a husband.

She was a spinster of twenty-four when Agazhar happened across her in the market square. He told her later that it was the witch charm that had caught his eye as she stood haggling with a trader over the price of her goats.

She’d taken no notice of him, thinking he was just another old soldier finding his way home from the wars. Agazhar had been as ragged and hollow-cheeked as any of them, and the left sleeve of his tunic hung empty.

Iya was forced to take a second look when he walked up to her, clasped her hand, and broke into a sweet smile of recognition. After a brief conversation, she sold off her goats and followed the old wizard down the south road without a backward glance. All anyone would have found of her, had they bothered to search, was the witch charm lying in the weeds by the market gate.

Agazhar hadn’t scoffed at her fire making. Instead, he explained that it was the first sign that she was one of the god-touched of Illior. Then he taught her to harness the unknown power she possessed into the potent magic of the Orëska wizards.

Agazhar was a free wizard, beholden to no one. Eschewing the comforts of a single patron, he wandered as he liked, finding welcome in noble houses and humble ones alike. Together he and Iya travelled the Three Lands and beyond, sailing west to Aurënen where even the common folk were as long-lived as wizards and possessed magic. Here she learned that the Aurënfaie were the First Orëska; it was their blood, mingled with that of Iya’s race, that had given magic to the chosen ones of Skala and Plenimar.

This gift came with a price. Human wizards could neither bear nor sire children, but Iya considered herself well repaid, both in magic and later, with students as gifted and companionable as Arkoniel.

Agazhar had also taught her more about the Great War than any of her father’s ballads or legends, for he’d been among the wizards who’d fought for Skala under Queen Ghërilain’s banner.

‘There’s never been another such war as that, and pray Sakor there never shall be again,’ he’d say, staring into the campfire at night as if he saw his fallen comrades there. ‘For one shining span of time wizards stood shoulder to shoulder with warriors, battling the black necromancers of Plenimar.’

The tales Agazhar told of those days gave Iya nightmares. A necromancer’s demon – a dyrmagnos, he called it – had torn off his left arm.

Gruesome as these tales were, Iya still clung to them, for only there had Agazhar given her any glimpse of where the strange bowl had come from.

Agazhar had carried it then; never in all the years she’d known him had he ever let it out of his possession. ‘Spoils of war,’ he’d said with a dark laugh, the first time he’d opened the bag to show it to her.

But beyond that, he would tell her nothing except that the bowl could not be destroyed and that its existence could not be revealed to anyone but the next Guardian. Instead, he’d schooled her rigorously in the complex web of spells that protected it, making her weave and unweave them until she could do it in the blink of an eye.

‘You’ll be the Guardian after me,’ he reminded her when she grew impatient with the secrecy. ‘Then you’ll understand. Be certain you choose your successor wisely.’

‘But how will I know who to choose?’

He’d smiled and taken her hand as he had when they’d first met in the marketplace. ‘Trust in the Lightbearer. You’ll know.’

And she had.

At first she couldn’t help pressing to know more about it – where he’d found it, who had made it and why, but Agazhar had remained obdurate. ‘Not until the time comes for you to take on the full care of it. Then I will tell you all there is to know.’

Sadly, that day had taken them both unawares. Agazhar had dropped dead in the streets of Ero one fine spring day soon after her first century. One moment he was holding forth on the beauty of a new transformation spell he’d just created; the next, he slipped to the ground with a hand pressed to his chest and a look of mild surprise in his fixed, dead eyes.

Scarcely into her second age, Iya suddenly found herself Guardian without knowing what she guarded or why. She kept the oath she’d sworn to him and waited for Illior to reveal her successor. She’d waited two lifetimes, as promising students came and went, and said nothing to them of the bag and its secrets.

But as Agazhar had promised, she’d recognized Arkoniel the moment she first spied him playing in his father’s orchard fifteen years earlier. He could already keep a pippin spinning in midair and could put out a candle flame with a thought.

Young as he was, she’d taught him what little she knew of the bowl as soon as he was bound over to her. Later, when he was strong enough, she taught him how to weave the protections. Even so, she kept the burden of it on her own shoulders as Agazhar had instructed.

Over the years Iya had come to regard the bowl as little more than a sacred nuisance, but that had all changed a month ago when the wretched thing had taken over her dreams. These ghastly interwoven nightmares, more vivid than any she’d ever known, had finally driven her here, for she saw the bowl in all of them, carried high above a battlefield by a monstrous black figure for which she knew no name.

‘Iya? Iya, are you well?’

Iya shook off the reverie that had claimed her and gave him a reassuring smile. ‘Ah, we’re here at last, I see.’

Pinched in a deep cleft of rock, Afra was scarcely large enough to be called a village and existed solely to serve the Oracle and the pilgrims who journeyed here. A wayfarer’s inn and the chambers of the priests were carved like bank swallow nests into the cliff faces on either side of the small paved square. Their doorways and deep-set windows were framed with carved fretwork and pillars of ancient design. The square was deserted now, but a few people waved to them from the shadowy windows.

At the centre of the square stood a red jasper stele as tall as Arkoniel. A spring bubbled up at its base and flowed away into a stone basin and on to a trough beyond.

‘By the Light!’ Arkoniel exclaimed. Dismounting, he turned his horse loose at the trough and went to examine the stele. Running his palm over the inscription carved in four languages, he read the words that had changed the course of Skalan history three centuries earlier. ‘“So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.”’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘This is the original, isn’t it?’

Iya nodded sadly. ‘Queen Ghërilain placed this here herself as a thank offering right after the war. The Oracle’s Queen, they called her then.’

In the darkest days of the war, when it seemed that Plenimar would devour the lands of her neighbors Skala and Mycena, the Skalan King Thelátimos had left the battlefields and journeyed here to consult the Oracle. When he returned to battle, he brought with him his daughter, Ghërilain, then a maiden of sixteen. Obeying the Oracle’s words, he anointed her before his exhausted army and passed his crown and sword to her.

According to Agazhar, the generals had not thought much of the King’s decision. Yet from the start the girl proved god-touched as a warrior and led the allies to victory in a year’s time, killing the Plenimaran Overlord single-handedly at the Battle of Isil. She’d been a fine queen in peace, as well, and ruled for over fifty years. Agazhar had been among her mourners.

‘These markers used to stand all over Skala, didn’t they?’ asked Arkoniel.

‘Yes, at every major crossroads in the land. You were just a babe when King Erius tore them all down.’ Iya dismounted and touched the stone reverently. It was hot under her palm, and still as smooth as the day it left the stonecutter’s shop. ‘Even Erius didn’t dare touch this one.’

‘Why not?’

‘When he sent word for it to be removed the priests refused. To force the issue meant invading Afra itself, the most sacred ground in Skala. So Erius graciously relented and contented himself with having all the others dumped into the sea. There was also a golden tablet bearing the inscription in the throne room at the Old Palace. I wonder what happened to that?’

But the younger wizard had more immediate concerns. Shading his eyes, he studied the cliff face. ‘Where’s the Oracle’s shrine?’

‘Further up the valley. Drink deeply here. We must walk the rest of the way.’

Leaving their mounts at the inn, they followed a well-worn path deeper into the deep cleft. The way became steeper and more difficult as they went. There were no trees to shade them, no moisture to lay the white dust that hung on the hot midday air. Soon the way dwindled to a faint track winding up between boulders and over rock faces worn smooth and treacherous by centuries of pilgrim’s feet.

They met two other groups of seekers coming in the opposite direction. A knot of young soldiers were laughing and talking bravely, all but one young man who hung back from his fellows with the fear of death clear in his eyes. The second group clustered around an elderly merchant woman who wept silently as the younger members of her party helped her down the treacherous path.

Arkoniel eyed them nervously. Iya waited until the merchant’s party had disappeared around a bend, then sat down on a rock to rest. The way here was hardly wide enough for two people to pass and held the heat like an oven. She took a sip from the skin Arkoniel had filled at the spring. The water was still cold enough to make her eyes ache.

‘Is it much further?’ he asked.

‘Just a little way.’ Promising herself a cool bath at the inn, Iya stood and continued on.

‘You knew the King’s mother, didn’t you?’ Arkoniel said, scrambling along behind her. ‘Was she as bad as they say?’

The stele must have gotten him thinking. ‘Not at first. Agnalain the Just, they called her. But she had a dark streak in her that worsened with age. Some say it came from her father’s blood. Others said it was because of the trouble she had with childbearing. Her first consort gave her two sons. Then she seemed to go barren for years and gradually developed a taste for young consorts and public executions. Erius’s own father went to the block for treason. After that no one was safe. By the Four, I can still remember the stink of the crow cages lining the roads around Ero! We all hoped she’d improve when she finally had a daughter, but she didn’t. It only made her worse.’

It had been easy enough in those black days for Agnalain’s eldest son, Prince Erius – already a seasoned warrior and the people’s darling – to argue that the Oracle’s words had been twisted, that the prophecy had referred only to King Thelátimos’ actual daughter, not to a matrilineal line of succession. Surely brave Prince Erius was better suited to the throne than the only direct female heir; his half-sister Ariani was just past her third birthday.

Never mind the fact that Skala had enjoyed unparalleled prosperity under her queens, or that the only other man to take the throne, Ghërilain’s own son Pelis had brought on both plague and drought during his brief reign. Only when his sister had replaced him on the throne had Illior protected the land again as the Oracle had promised.

Until now.

When Agnalain died so suddenly, it was whispered that Prince Erius and his brother Aron had had a hand in it. But the rumour had been whispered with relief rather than condemnation; everyone knew Erius had ruled in all but name during the last terrible years of his mother’s decline. The renewed rumblings from Plenimar were growing too loud for the nobles to risk civil war on behalf of a child queen. The crown passed to Erius without challenge. Plenimar attacked the southern ports that same year and he drove the invaders back into the sea and burned their black ships. This seemed to lay the prophecy to rest.

All the same, there had been more blights and drought in the past nineteen years than even the oldest wizards could recall. The current drought was in its third year in some parts of the country, and had wiped out whole villages already decimated by wildfires and waves of plague brought in from the northern trade routes. Arkoniel’s parents had died in one such epidemic a few years earlier. A quarter of Ero’s population had succumbed in a few months’ time, including Prince Aron, as well as Erius’ consort, both daughters, and two of his three sons, leaving only the second youngest boy, Korin, alive. Since then, the words of the Oracle were being whispered again in certain quarters.

Iya had her own reasons now for regretting Erius’ coup. His sister, Ariani, had grown up to marry Iya’s patron, powerful Duke Rhius of Atyion. The couple was expecting their first child in the fall.

Both wizards were sweating and winded by the time they reached the tight cul-de-sac where the shrine lay.

‘It’s not quite what I expected,’ Arkoniel muttered, eyeing what appeared to be a broad stone well.

Iya chuckled. ‘Don’t judge too quickly.’

Two sturdy priests in dusty red robes and silver masks sat in the shade of a wooden lean-to beside the well. Iya joined them and sat down heavily on a stone seat. ‘I need time to compose my thoughts,’ she told Arkoniel. ‘You go first.’

The priests carried a coil of heavy rope to the well, motioning for Arkoniel to join them. He gave Iya a nervous grin as they fixed a loop of it around his hips. Still silent, they guided him into the stone enclosure to the entrance to the oracle chamber. From the surface, this was nothing but a hole in the ground about four feet in diameter.

It was always daunting, this act of faith and surrender, and more so the first time. But as always, Arkoniel did not hesitate. Sitting with his feet over the edge, he gripped the rope and nodded for the priests to let him down. He slid out of sight and they paid out the line until it went slack.

Iya remained in the lean-to, trying to still her racing heart. She’d done her best for days not to think too directly on what she was about to do. Now that she was here, she suddenly regretted her decision. Closing her eyes, she tried to examine this fear, but could find no basis for it. Yes, she was disobeying her master’s injunction, but that wasn’t it. Here on the very doorstep of the Oracle, she had a premonition of something dark looming just ahead. She prayed silently for the strength to face whatever Illior revealed to her today, for she could not turn aside.

Arkoniel’s twitch on the rope came sooner than she’d expected. The priests hauled him up and he hurried over and collapsed on the ground beside her, looking rather perplexed.

‘Iya, it was the strangest thing!’ he began, but she held up a warning hand.

‘There’ll be time enough later,’ she told him, knowing she must go now or not at all.

She took her place in the harness, breath tight in her chest as she hung her feet over the edge of the hole. Grasping the rope with one hand and the leather bag with the other, she nodded to the priests and began her descent.

She felt the familiar nervous flutter in her belly as she swung down into the cool darkness. She’d never been able to guess the actual dimensions of this underground chamber; the silence and faint movement of air against her face suggested a vast cavern. Where the sunlight struck the stone floor below, it showed the gently undulating smoothness of stone worn by some ancient underground river.

After a few moments her feet touched solid ground and she stepped free of the rope and out of the circle of sunlight. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out a faint glow nearby and walked towards it. The light had appeared from a different direction each time she’d come here. When she reached the Oracle at last, however, everything was just as she remembered.

A crystal orb on a silver tripod gave off a wide circle of light. The Oracle sat next to it on a low ivory stool carved in the shape of a crouching dragon.

This one is so young! Iya thought, inexplicably saddened. The last two Oracles had been old women with skin bleached white by years of darkness. This girl was no more than fourteen, but her skin was already pale. Dressed in a simple linen shift that left her arms and feet bare, she sat with her palms on her knees. Her face was round and plain, her eyes vacant. Like wizards, the sibyls of Afra did not escape Illior’s touch unscathed.

Iya knelt at her feet. A masked priest stepped into the circle of light with a large silver salver held out before him. The silence of the chamber swallowed Iya’s sigh as she unwrapped the bowl and placed it on the salver.

The priest presented it to the Oracle, placing it on her knees. Her face remained vacant, betraying nothing.

Doesn’t she feel the evil of the thing? Iya wondered. The unveiled power of it made Iya’s head hurt.

The girl stirred at last and looked down at the bowl. Silvery light bright as moonshine on snow swelled in a nimbus around her head and shoulders. Iya felt a thrill of awe. Illior had entered the girl.

‘I see demons feasting on the dead. I see the God Whose Name Is Not Spoken,’ the Oracle said softly.

Iya’s heart turned to stone in her breast, her worst fears confirmed. This was Seriamaius, the dark god of necromancy worshipped by the Plenimarans, who’d come so close to destroying Skala in the Great War. ‘I’ve dreamt this. War and disasters far worse than any Skala has ever known.’

‘You see too far, Wizard.’ The Oracle lifted the bowl in both hands and by some trick of the light her eyes became sunken black holes in her face. The priest was nowhere to be seen now, although Iya had not heard him leave.

The Oracle turned the bowl slowly in her hands. ‘Black makes white. Foul makes pure. Evil creates greatness. Out of Plenimar comes present salvation and future peril. This is a seed that must be watered with blood. But you see too far.’

The Oracle tilted the bowl forward and bright blood splashed out, too much for such a small vessel. It formed a round pool on the stone floor at the Oracle’s feet. Looking into it, Iya caught the reflection of a woman’s face framed by the visor of a bloody war helm. Iya could make out two intense blue eyes, a firm mouth above a pointed chin. The face was harsh one moment, sorrowful the next, and so familiar that it made her heart ache, though she couldn’t say then of whom those eyes reminded her. Flames reflected off the helm and somewhere in the distance Iya heard the clash of battle.

The apparition slowly faded and was replaced by that of a shining white palace standing on a high cliff. It had a glittering dome, and at each of its four corners stood a slender tower.

‘Behold the Third Orëska,’ the Oracle whispered. ‘Here may you lay your burden down.’

Iya leaned forward with a gasp of awe. The palace had hundreds of windows and at every window stood a wizard, looking directly at her. In the highest window of the closest tower she saw Arkoniel, robed in blue and holding the bowl in his hands. A little child with thick blond curls stood at his side.

She could see Arkoniel quite clearly now, even though she was so far away. He was an old man, with a face deeply lined and weary beyond words. Even so, her heart swelled with joy at the sight of him.

‘Ask,’ the Oracle whispered.

‘What is the bowl?’ she called to Arkoniel.

‘It’s not for us, but he will know,’ Arkoniel told her, passing the bowl to the little boy. The child looked at Iya with an old man’s eyes and smiled.

‘All is woven together, Guardian,’ the Oracle said as this vision faded into something darker. ‘This is the legacy you and your kind are offered. One with the true queen. One with Skala. You shall be tested with fire.’

Iya saw the symbol of her craft – the thin crescent of Illior’s moon – against a circle of fire and the number 222 glowing just beneath it in figures of white flame so bright they hurt her eyes.

Then Ero lay spread before her under a bloated moon, in flames from harbour to citadel. An army under the flag of Plenimar surrounded it, too numerous to count. Iya could feel the heat of the flames on her face as Erius led his army out against them. But his soldiers fell dead behind him and the flesh fell from his charger’s bones in shreds. The Plenimarans surrounded the King like wolves and he was lost from sight. The vision shifted dizzyingly again and Iya saw the Skalan crown, bent and tarnished now, lying in a barren field.

‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated,’ the Oracle whispered.

‘Ariani?’ Iya asked, but knew even as she spoke that it had not been the Princess’ face she’d seen framed in that helm.

The Oracle began to sway and keen. Raising the bowl, she poured its endless flow over her head like a libation, masking herself in blood. Falling to her knees, she grasped Iya’s hand and a whirlwind took them, striking Iya blind.

Screaming winds surrounded her, then entered the top of her head and plunged down through the core of her like a shipwright’s augur. Images flashed by like wind-borne leaves: the strange number on its shield, and the helmeted woman in many forms and guises – old, young, in rags, crowned, hanging naked from a gibbet, riding garlanded through broad, unfamiliar streets. Iya saw her clearly now, her face, her blue eyes, black hair, and long limbs like Ariani’s. But it was not the Princess.

The Oracle’s voice cut through the maelstrom. ‘This is your Queen, Wizard, this true daughter of Thelátimos. She will turn her face to the west.’

Suddenly Iya felt a bundle placed in her arms and looked down at the dead infant the Oracle had given her.

‘Others see, but only through smoke and darkness,’ said the Oracle. ‘By the will of Illior the bowl came into your hands; it is the long burden of your line, Guardian, and the bitterest of all. But in this generation comes the child who is the foundation of what is to come. She is your legacy. Two children, one queen marked with the blood of passage.’

The dead infant looked up at Iya with black staring eyes and searing pain tore through her chest. She knew whose child this was.

Then the vision was gone and Iya found herself kneeling in front of the Oracle with the unopened bag in her arms. There was no dead infant, no blood on the floor. The Oracle sat on her stool, shift and hair unstained.

‘Two children, one queen,’ the Oracle whispered, looking at Iya with the shining white eyes of Illior.

Iya trembled before that gaze, trying to cling to all she’d seen and heard. ‘The others who dream of this child, Honoured One – do they mean her well or ill? Will they help me raise her up?’

But the god was gone and the girl child slumped on the stool had no answers.

Sunlight blinded Iya as she emerged from the cavern. The heat took her breath away and her legs would not support her. Arkoniel caught her as she collapsed against the stone enclosure. ‘Iya, what happened? What’s wrong?’

‘Just … just give me a moment,’ she croaked, clutching the bag to her chest.

A seed watered with blood.

Arkoniel lifted her easily and carried her into the shade. He put the waterskin to her lips and Iya drank, leaning heavily against him. It was some time before she felt strong enough to start back for the inn. Arkoniel kept one arm about her waist and she suffered his help without complaint. They were within sight of the stele when she fainted.

When she opened her eyes again she was lying on a soft bed in a cool, dim room at the inn. Sunlight streamed in through a crack in the dusty shutter and struck shadows across the carved wall beside the bed. Arkoniel sat beside her, clearly worried.

‘What happened with the Oracle?’ he asked.

Illior spoke and my question was answered, she thought bitterly. How I wish I’d listened to Agazhar.

She took his hand. ‘Later, when I’m feeling stronger. Tell me your vision. Was your query answered?’

Her answer obviously frustrated him, but he knew better than to press her. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I asked what sort of wizard I’d become, what my path would be. She showed me a vision in the air, but all I could make out was an image of me holding a young boy in my arms.’

‘Did he have blond hair?’ she asked, thinking of the child in the beautiful white tower.

‘No, it was black. To be honest, I was disappointed, coming all this way just for that. I must have done something wrong in the asking.’

‘Sometimes you must wait for the meaning to be revealed.’ Iya turned away from that earnest young face, wishing that the Lightbearer had granted her such a respite. The sun still blazed down on the square outside her window, but Iya saw only the road back to Ero before her, and darkness at its end.

CHAPTER TWO

A red harvest moon cast the sleeping capital into a towering mosaic of light and shadow that nineteenth night of Erasin. Crooked Ero, the capital was called. Built on a rambling hill overlooking the islands of the Inner Sea, the streets spread like poorly woven lace down from the walls of the Palatine Circle to the quays and shipyards and rambling slums below. Poor and wealthy alike lived cheek-by-jowl, and every house in sight of the harbour had at least one window facing east towards Plenimar like a watchful eye.

The priests claim Death comes in the west door, Arkoniel thought miserably as he rode through the west gate behind Iya and the witch. Tonight would be the culmination of the nightmare that had started nearly five months earlier at Afra.

The two women rode in silence, their faces hidden by their deep hoods. Heartsick at the task that lay before them, Arkoniel willed Iya to speak, change her mind, turn aside, but she said nothing and he could not see her eyes to read them. For over half his life she’d been teacher, mentor, and second mother to him. Since Afra, she’d become a house full of closed doors.

Lhel had gone quiet, too. Her kind had been unwelcome here for generations. She wrinkled her nose now as the stink of the city engulfed them. ‘You great village? Ha! Too many.’

‘Not so loud!’ Arkoniel looked around nervously. Wandering wizards were not as welcome here as they had been, either. It would go hard with them all to be found with a hill witch.

‘Smells like tok,’ Lhel muttered.

Iya pushed back her hood and surprised Arkoniel with a thin smile. ‘She says it smells like shit here, and so it does.’

Lhel’s one to talk, Arkoniel thought. He’d kept upwind of the hill woman since they’d met.

After their strange visit to Afra they’d gone first to Ero and guested with the Duke and his lovely, fragile princess. By day they gamed and rode. Each night Iya spoke in secret with the Duke.

From there, he and Iya spent the rest of that hot, sullen summer searching the remote mountain valleys of the northern province for a witch to aid them, for no Orëska wizard possessed the magic for the task that Illior had set them. By the time they found one, the aspen leaves were already edged with gold.

Driven from the fertile lowlands by the first incursions of Skalan settlers, the small, dark-skinned hill people kept to their high valleys and did not welcome travellers. When Iya and Arkoniel approached a village, they might hear dogs barking the alarm, or mothers calling their children; by the time they reached the edge of a settlement, only a few armed men would be in sight. These men made no threats, but offered no hospitality.

Lhel’s welcome had surprised them when they’d happened across her lonely hut. Not only had she welcomed them properly, setting out water, cider, and cheese, but she claimed to have been expecting them.

Iya spoke the witch’s language, and Lhel had picked up a few words of Skalan somewhere. From what Arkoniel could make out between them, the witch was not surprised by their request. She claimed her moon goddess had shown them to her in a dream.

Arkoniel felt very awkward around the woman. Her magic radiated from her like the musky heat of her body, but it was more than that. Lhel was a woman in her prime. Her black hair hung in a tangled, curling mass to her waist and her loose woollen dress couldn’t mask the curves of hip and breast as she sauntered around her little hut, bringing him food and the makings for a pallet. He didn’t need an interpreter to know that she asked Iya if she might sleep with him that night or that she was both offended and amused when Iya explained the concept of wizards’ celibacy to her. The Orëska wizards reserved all their vitality for their magic.

Arkoniel feared that the witch might change her mind then, but the following morning they woke to find her waiting for them outside the door, a travelling bundle slung ready behind the saddle of her shaggy pony.

The long journey back to Ero had been an awkward time for the young man. Lhel delighted in teasing him, making certain that he saw when she lifted her skirts to wash, and losing no opportunity to bump against him as she moved about their camp each night, plucking the year’s last herbs with her knobby, stained fingers. Vows or not, Arkoniel couldn’t help but notice and something in him stirred uneasily.

When their work in Ero was finished this night, he would never see her again and for that he would be most thankful.

As they rode across an open square, Lhel pointed up at the red full moon and clucked her tongue. ‘Baby caller moon, all fat and bloody. We hurry. No shaimari.’

She brought two fingers towards her nostrils in a graceful flourish, mimicking the intake of breath. Arkoniel shuddered.

Iya pressed one hand over her eyes and Arkoniel felt a moment’s hope. Perhaps she would relent after all. But she was merely sending a sighting spell up to the Palatine ahead of them.

After a moment she shook her head. ‘No. We have time.’

A cold salt breeze tugged at their cloaks as they reached the seaward side of the citadel and approached the Palatine gate. Arkoniel inhaled deeply, trying to ease the growing tightness in his chest. A party of revellers passed them, and by the light of the linkboys’ lanterns Arkoniel stole another look at Iya. The wizard’s pale, square face betrayed nothing.

It is the will of Illior, Arkoniel repeated silently. There could be no turning aside.

Since the death of the King’s only female heir, women and girls of close royal blood had died at an alarming rate. Few dared speak of it aloud in the city, but in too many cases it was not plague or hunger that carried them down to Bilairy’s gate.

The King’s cousin took ill after a banquet in town and did not awaken the next morning. Another somehow managed to fall from her tower window. His two pretty young nieces, daughters of his own brother, were drowned sailing on a sunny day. Babies born to more distant relations, all girls, were found dead in their cradles. Their nurses whispered of night spirits. As potential female claimants to the throne dropped away one by one, the people of Ero turned nervous eyes towards the King’s young half sister and the unborn child she carried.

Her husband, Duke Rhius, was fifteen years older than his pretty young wife and owned vast holdings of castles and lands, the greatest of which lay at Atyion, half a day’s ride north of the city. Some said that the marriage had been a love match between the Duke’s lands and the Royal Treasury, but Iya thought otherwise.

The couple lived at the grand castle at Atyion when Rhius was not serving at court. When Ariani became pregnant, however, they had taken up residence at Ero, in her house beside the Old Palace.

Iya guessed that the choice was the King’s rather than hers, and Ariani had confirmed her suspicions during their visit that summer.

‘May Illior and Dalna grant us a son,’ Ariani had whispered as she and Iya sat together in the garden court of her house, hands to her swelling belly.

As a child Ariani had adored her handsome older brother, who’d been more like a father to her. Now she understood all too well that she lived at his whim; in these uncertain times, any girl claiming Ghërilain’s blood posed a threat to the new male succession, should the Illioran faction fight to re-establish the sacred authority of Afra.

With every new bout of plague or famine, the whispers of doubt grew stronger.

In a darkened side street outside the gate Iya cloaked herself and Lhel in invisibility, and Arkoniel approached the guards as if alone.

There were still a great many people abroad at this hour, but the sergeant-at-arms took special note of the silver amulet Arkoniel wore and called him aside.

‘What’s your business here so late, Wizard?’

‘I’m expected. I’ve come to visit my patron, Duke Rhius.’

‘Your name?’

‘Arkoniel of Rhemair.’

A scribe noted this down on a wax tablet and Arkoniel strolled on into the labyrinth of houses and gardens that ringed this side of the Palatine. To the right loomed the great bulk of the New Palace, which Queen Agnalain had begun and her son was finishing. To the left lay the rambling bulk of the Old Palace.

Iya’s magic was so strong even he couldn’t tell if she and the witch were still with him, but he didn’t dare turn or whisper to them.

Ariani’s fine house stood surrounded by its own walls and courtyards; Arkoniel entered by the front gate and barred it behind him as soon as he felt Iya’s touch on his arm. He looked around nervously, half expecting to find the King’s Guard lurking behind the bare trees and statuary in the shadowed garden, or the familiar faces of the Duke’s personal guard. There was no one here, not even a watchman or porter. The garden was silent, the air heavy with the scent of some last hardy bloom of autumn.

Iya and the witch reappeared beside him and together they headed across the courtyard towards the arched entrance. They hadn’t gone three steps when a horned owl swooped down and pounced on a young rat not ten feet from where they stood. Flapping for balance, it dispatched the squeaking rodent, then looked up at them, eyes like gold sester coins. Such birds were not uncommon in the city, but Arkoniel felt a thrill of awe; owls were the messengers of Illior.

‘A favourable omen,’ Iya murmured as it flapped away, leaving the dead rat behind.

The Duke’s steward, Mynir, answered her knock. A thin, solemn, stoop-shouldered old fellow, he’d always reminded Arkoniel of a cricket. He was one of the few who would help carry his master’s burden in the years to come.

‘Thank the Maker!’ the old man whispered, grasping Iya’s hand. ‘The Duke is half out of his mind –’ He broke off at the sight of Lhel.

Arkoniel could guess the man’s thoughts: witch, unclean, handler of the dead, a necromancer who called up demons and ghosts.

Iya touched his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Mynir, your master knows. Where is he?’

‘Upstairs, Mistress. I’ll fetch him.’

Iya held him a moment longer. ‘And Captain Tharin?’ Tharin, the knight in charge of the Duke’s personal guard, was seldom far from Rhius’ side. Illior had not spoken for him, but Iya and Rhius had not discussed how he was to be kept away from this night’s business.

‘The Duke sent him and the men to Atyion for the rents.’ Mynir led them into the darkened audience hall. ‘The women have all been sent to sleep at the Palace, so as not to disturb the Princess in her labour. It’s just your Nari and myself tonight, Mistress. I’ll fetch the Duke.’ He hurried up the sweeping staircase.

A fire burned in the great fireplace across the chamber, but no lamps were lit. Arkoniel turned slowly, trying to make out the familiar shapes of furniture and hangings. This house had always been alive with music and gaiety. Tonight it seemed like a tomb.

‘Is that you, Iya?’ a deep voice called. Rhius strode down the stairs to meet them. He was nearly forty now, a handsome, broadly built warrior, with arms and hands knotted from a life spent clutching a sword or the reins. Tonight, however, his skin was sallow beneath his black beard and his short tunic was sweated through as if he’d been running or fighting. Warrior that he was, he stank of fear.

He stared at Lhel, then seemed to sag. ‘You found one.’

Iya handed her cloak to the steward. ‘Of course, my lord.’

A ragged scream rang out overhead. Rhius clutched a fist to his heart. ‘There was no need for the herbs to start the birthing pangs. Her waters broke at mid-morning. She’s been like this since sunset. She keeps begging for her own women –’

Lhel muttered something to Iya, who interpreted the question for the Duke.

‘She asks if your lady has any issue of blood?’

‘No. Your woman keeps claiming all is well, but …’

Upstairs, Ariani screamed again and Arkoniel’s stomach lurched. The poor woman had no idea who was in her house this night. Iya had given the couple her solemn pledge to protect any daughter born to the royal house; she had not revealed to the child’s mother the means the Lightbearer had given her to do so. Only Rhius knew. Ambition had guaranteed his consent.

‘Come, it’s time.’ Iya started for the stairs but Rhius caught her by the arm.

‘Are you certain this is the only way? Couldn’t you just take one of them away?’

Iya regarded him coldly. She stood two steps above him and in this light she looked for an instant like a stone effigy. ‘The Lightbearer wants a queen. You want your child to rule. This is the price. The favour of Illior is with us in this.’

Rhius released her and sighed heavily. ‘Come then, and let’s be done with it.’ Rhius followed the two women up and Arkoniel followed him, close enough to hear the Duke murmur, ‘There will be other babes.’

Princess Ariani’s bedchamber was stifling. The others went to the bed, but Arkoniel halted just inside the doorway, overwhelmed by the heavy odour of the birthing chamber.

He’d never seen this part of the house before. Under different circumstances he’d have thought it a pretty room. The walls and carved bed were covered with bright hangings embroidered with fanciful underwater scenes, and the marble mantle was carved with dolphins. A familiar workbasket lay on a chair by the shuttered window; a cloth head and arm protruded from beneath the half-open lid – one of the Princess’s lady dolls, half finished. Ariani was famous for her clever handiwork and all the great ladies of Ero and some of the lords had one.

Tonight the sight of this one knotted Arkoniel’s guts.

Through the half-open bed hangings he could see the bulging curve of Ariani’s belly and one clenched hand gleaming with costly rings. A plump, sweet-faced serving woman stood over Ariani, murmuring to her as she bathed the labouring woman’s face. This was Nari, a widowed kinswoman of Iya’s, chosen to be the child’s wet nurse. Iya had intended for Nari to bring her own babe to be the companion of Ariani’s, but the gods had other plans. A few weeks earlier Nari’s child had succumbed to pneumonia. Even in her grief, Nari had faithfully squeezed the milk from her breasts to keep it flowing. The front of her loose gown was stained with it.

Lhel set to work, issuing quiet orders while she laid out the things she needed at the end of the bed: bunches of herbs, a thin silver knife, needles of bone, a skein of silk thread, impossibly fine.

Ariani lurched up with another wail and Arkoniel caught a glimpse of her face, glassy-eyed and drugged now, behind a tangle of lustrous black hair.

The Princess was not much older than he was, and though he seldom allowed himself to think on it, he had harboured a secret admiration for her ever since her marriage to Rhius had brought Arkoniel into her sphere. Ariani was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and she’d always treated him graciously. Hot shame washed over him; this was how her kindness was repaid.

Too soon Iya turned and motioned for him to join her by the bed. ‘Come, Arkoniel, we need you now.’

He and Nari held Ariani’s feet as the witch felt between her thighs. Ariani moaned and tried weakly to pull away. Blushing furiously, Arkoniel kept his face turned away until Lhel had finished her examination, then hastily retreated.

Lhel washed her hands in a basin, then bent to pat Ariani’s cheek. ‘Is good, keesa.’

‘There are – there are two, aren’t there, Midwife?’ Ariani gasped faintly.

Arkoniel shot Iya a concerned look, but she only shrugged. ‘A woman needs no midwife to tell her how many babes she has in her belly.’

Nari brewed a dish of tea from some of the witch’s herbs and helped Ariani to sip it. After a few moments, the woman’s breathing slowed and she grew quiet. Climbing onto the bed, Lhel massaged Ariani’s belly, all the while murmuring to her in a soothing, singsong voice.

‘The first child must be turned into position to enter the world so that the other may follow,’ Iya translated for Rhius, who stood now in agonized silence by the head of the bed.

Lhel moved so that she was kneeling between Ariani’s knees, still rubbing her belly. After a few moments the witch let out a soft cry of triumph. Watching from the corner of his eye, Arkoniel saw her lift a wet little head into view with one hand. With the other, she held the child’s nostrils and mouth shut until the rest of it was birthed.

‘A girl keesa!’ she announced, taking her hand from the child’s face.

Arkoniel let out a gasp of relief as the girl child sucked in her first lungful of air. This was the shaimari, the ‘soul’s breath’ that the witch was so concerned with.

Lhel cut the birth cord with her silver knife and held the child up for all to see. The baby was well formed under the birth muck, and had a thick head of wet black hair.

‘Thank the Lightbringer!’ Rhius exclaimed, leaning down to kiss his sleeping wife’s brow. ‘A first born girl, just as the Oracle promised!’

‘And look,’ said Nari, leaning forward to touch a tiny wine-coloured birthmark on the child’s left forearm. ‘She has a favour mark, too, just like a rosebud.’

Iya gave Arkoniel a tight, triumphant smile. ‘Here’s our future queen, my boy.’

Tears of joy blurred Arkoniel’s vision and tightened his throat, but the moment was tainted by the knowledge that their work was not yet finished.

While Nari bathed the girl child, Lhel began coaxing forth the twin. Ariani’s head lolled limp against the pillow. Rhius retreated to the fireplace, mouth set in a grim line.

Tears of a different sort stung Arkoniel’s eyes. Forgive us, my sweet lady, he prayed, unable to look away.

Despite Lhel’s efforts, the second child came wrong way around, a footling breach. Muttering steadily in her own tongue, Lhel worked the other leg free and the little body slid out.

‘Boy keesa,’ Lhel said softly, hand poised to cover the child’s face as it emerged, to prevent that all-important first breath so that the soul might not be fixed in the flesh.

Suddenly, however, there was a loud clatter of horsemen in the street outside, and a shout of, ‘Open in the name of the King!’

Lhel was as startled as the rest of them. In that instant of distraction the child’s head slipped free of his mother’s body and he sucked a breath, strong and clear.

‘By the Light!’ Iya hissed, whirling on the witch. Lhel shook her head and bent over the squirming babe. Arkoniel backed quickly away, unable to watch what must follow. He shut his eyes so tightly he saw flashes of light behind the lids, but he could not escape the sound of the child’s loud, healthy cry, or the way it suddenly choked off. The silence left in its wake left him dizzy and sick.

What followed seemed to take a very long time, although in truth they had only minutes. Lhel took the living child from Nari and placed her on the bed next to her dead twin. Chanting over them, she drew patterns in the air and the living child went still as death. When Lhel took up her knife and needle, Arkoniel had to turn away again. Behind him, he could hear Rhius weeping softly.

Then Iya was at his side, pushing him out into the cold corridor. ‘Go downstairs and hold off the King. Keep him as long as you can! I’ll send Nari down when it’s safe.’

‘Hold him off? How?’

The door swung shut in his face and he heard the key turn.

‘Very well, then.’ Arkoniel dried his face on his sleeve and ran his hands back through his hair. At the top of the staircase he paused and turned his face up to the unseen moon, sending a silent prayer to Illior. Aid my faltering tongue, Lightbearer, or cloud the King’s eyes. Or both, if it’s not asking too much.

He wished now that Captain Tharin was here. The tall, quiet knight had a manner that put everyone at their ease. With a lifetime of hunting, fighting and court intrigue behind him, he was far better suited than a green young wizard to entertain a man like Erius.

Mynir had lit the bronze lamps that hung between the painted stone pillars in the hall and stoked the fire with cedar logs and sweet resins to make a fragrant blaze. Erius stood beside the hearth, a tall and daunting figure in the firelight and Arkoniel bowed deeply to him. Like Rhius, the King had been shaped by a lifetime of war, but his face was still handsome and filled with a youthful good humour that even a childhood spent in his mother’s court had not extinguished. Only in recent years, as the royal tomb filled with the bodies of his female kin, had some come to regard that kindly visage as a mask for a darker heart, one that perhaps had learned his mother’s lessons after all.

As Arkoniel had suspected, the King had not come alone. His court wizard, Lord Niryn, was there, as close to the King as the man’s own shadow. He was a plain fellow somewhere in his second age, but whatever gifts he possessed had lifted him high and quickly. For years Erius had had no more use for wizards than his mother, but since the death of the King’s wife and children, Niryn’s star had risen steadily at court. Lately he’d taken to wearing his thick red beard forked and had affected costly white robes embroidered with silver.

He acknowledged Arkoniel with a slight nod, and the younger wizard bowed respectfully.

Erius had brought along a priest of Sakor, as well, together with a dozen of his own Guard in their pick spurs and gold badges. Arkoniel’s stomach did an uneasy roll as he caught the glint of mail beneath their red tunics and saw the long knives they carried at their belts. It seemed an odd sort of company to bring into his sister’s house on such an occasion.

He forced a respectful smile, wondering bitterly who had alerted Erius. One of the household women, perhaps? Clearly Erius had been prepared for this visit, despite the hour. The King’s greying beard and curly black hair were neatly combed. His velvet robes looked as fresh as if he’d been on his way to the audience hall. The Sword of Ghërilain, symbol of Skalan rule, hung at his hip.

‘My king,’ Arkoniel bowed again. ‘Your honoured sister is still in the midst of her pains. Duke Rhius sends his respects and asks me to sit with you until he is able to attend you himself.’

Erius raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Arkoniel? What are you doing here? Last I knew, neither you nor that mistress of yours practices midwifery.’

‘No, my king. I was guesting here tonight and have been making myself useful.’ Arkoniel was suddenly aware of the other wizard’s steady gaze. Niryn’s bright brown eyes protruded a bit, giving him a perpetually surprised air that the younger wizard found unsettling. He carefully veiled his mind, praying he was strong enough to keep Niryn from his thoughts without the other man suspecting.

‘Your honoured sister’s labour is a difficult one, I fear, but she will be delivered soon,’ he continued, then wished he hadn’t. The King had attended the births of all his own children. If Erius decided to go upstairs, there was nothing he could do, short of magic, to prevent it. With Niryn here, even that risky avenue was closed to him.

Perhaps Illior had heeded his prayer after all, for Erius shrugged agreeably and sat down at a gaming table by the hearth. ‘How’s your skill with the stones?’ he asked, waving Arkoniel to the other chair. ‘These birthings generally take longer than you’d expect, especially the first. We may as well pass the time pleasantly.’

Hoping his relief was not too obvious, Arkoniel sent Mynir off for wine and sweets, then settled down to losing as best he could.

Niryn sat beside them, pretending to observe the play, but Arkoniel still felt the pressure of his regard. Sweat prickled under his arms and down his back. What did the man want? Did he know something?

He nearly dropped the gaming stones when Niryn suddenly asked, ‘Do you dream, young man?’

‘No, my lord,’ Arkoniel replied. ‘Or if I do, I don’t recall them when I wake up.’

This was true enough; he seldom dreamed in the normal sense, and foreknowing dreams had so far proven to be outside his ken. He waited for Niryn to pursue the question, but he only sat back and stroked the tips of his forked beard, looking bored.

Arkoniel was in the midst of his third game of Geese and Squares when Nari came downstairs.

‘Duke Rhius sends his regards, your majesty,’ she said, curtsying low. ‘He asks if you would like your new nephew brought down to view?’

‘Nonsense!’ Erius exclaimed, setting the stones aside and rising. ‘Tell your master his brother is happy to come to him.’

Again, Arkoniel had an uneasy sense that the King meant more than he said.

That sense grew stronger when Niryn and the priest accompanied them upstairs. Nari caught Arkoniel’s eye as they followed and gave him a quick nod; Iya and Lhel must already be safely away. Entering Ariani’s room, Arkoniel could sense no trace of magic, Orëska or otherwise.

Duke Rhius stood on the far side of the bed, holding his wife’s hand. The Princess was still blessedly asleep, no doubt well drugged. With her black hair combed back smoothly and a hectic spot of colour high on each cheek, she looked like one of her own dolls.

Rhius lifted the swaddled child from the bed and brought it to the King. He’d recovered enough to act his part with dignity.

‘Your nephew, my liege,’ he said, placing the infant in Erius’ arms. ‘With your leave, he shall be named Tobin Erius Akandor, in honour of your father’s line.’

‘A son, Rhius!’ Erius undid the swaddling with a gentle, practiced hand.

Arkoniel held his breath and blanked his mind as Niryn and the priest extended their hands over the sleeping child. Neither appeared to notice anything amiss; Lhel’s magic had covered all trace of the abomination she’d wrought on the little body. And who would think to look for hill witch magic in the chamber of the King’s own sister?

‘A fine boy, Rhius, to bear such a name!’ Erius exclaimed. The birthmark caught his eye. ‘And look at the favour mark he bears. On his left arm, too. Niryn, you know how to read such things. What does this one mean?’

‘Wisdom, your majesty,’ the wizard told him. ‘A most favourable trait in your son’s future companion.’

‘Indeed it is,’ the King said. ‘Yes, you have my leave, Brother, and my blessing. And I’ve brought a priest to make an offering for our little warrior.’

‘You have my thanks, Brother,’ said Rhius.

The priest went to the hearth and began his droning prayers, casting resins and little wax offerings into the flames.

‘By the Flame, he’ll make a great playfellow for my Korin in a few years’ time,’ the King went on. ‘Just think of the two of them, hunting and learning the sword together when your Tobin comes to join the Companions. Just like you and I were, eh? But there was a twin, too, I believe?’

Yes, thought Arkoniel, the King’s spies had been thorough, after all.

Nari bent down and lifted another tiny bundle from behind the bed. Keeping her back to the Princess, she brought it around to the King. ‘A poor little girl child, my king. Never drew breath.’

Erius and the others examined the dead child just as closely, moving its flaccid limbs about, verifying the gender and feeling its chest and neck for signs of life. Watching from the corner of his eye, Arkoniel saw the King cast quick, questioning look at his wizard.

‘They know something. They’re seeking something,’ Arkoniel thought dizzily. Niryn’s question about dreams suddenly took on a dire resonance. Had the man had a vision of his own, a vision of this child? If so, then Lhel’s magic did its work again, for the older wizard replied with a quick shake of his head. Whatever they were looking for, they hadn’t found it here. Arkoniel glanced away before any expression of relief could betray him.

The King handed the body back to Nari and clasped Rhius by the shoulders. ‘It’s a hard thing, losing a child. Sakor knows I still grieve for my lost ones and their dear mother. It’s cold comfort for you, I know, but it’s best this way, before you’d both become attached.’

‘As you say,’ Rhius replied softly.

Giving Rhius a last brotherly thump on the shoulder, Erius went to the bed and kissed his sister gently on the forehead.

The sight made the blood pound in Arkoniel’s head as he thought of the swordsmen in the hall below. This usurper, this killer of girls and women, might love his little sister enough to spare her life, but as the Lightbearer had shown, that forbearance did not extend to her children. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor as the King and his councillors swept out, imagining how differently this little drama would have played out if Erius had found a living girl child here.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Arkoniel’s knees turned to water and he sank into a chair.

But the ordeal was not yet over. Ariani opened her eyes and saw the dead child Nari held. Pulling herself up against the bolsters, she held out her arms for it. ‘Thank the Light! I knew I heard a second cry, but I had the most awful dream …’

The nurse exchanged a look with Rhius and Ariani’s smile faltered. ‘What is it? Give me my child.’

‘It was stillborn, my love,’ Rhius said. ‘Let it be. Look, here’s our fine son.’

‘No, I heard it cry!’ Ariani insisted.

Rhius brought little Tobin to her, but she ignored him, staring instead at the child the nurse held. ‘Give him to me, woman! I command it!’

There was no dissuading her. Ignoring the soft cry of the living child, she took the dead one in her arms and her face went whiter still.

Arkoniel knew in that instant that Lhel’s magic could not deceive the child’s mother the way that it had the others. Twisting his mind to sight through her eyes, he caught a glimpse of the strips of skin Lhel had cut from each child’s breast and sewn with spider-fine stitches into the wound left on its twin, just over the heart. With this exchange of flesh, the transformation had been sealed. The girl child would retain the semblance of male form for as long as Iya deemed necessary, just as her dead brother had taken her form to deceive the King.

‘What have you done?’ Ariani gasped, staring up at Rhius.

‘Later, my love, when you’re rested. Give that one back to Nari and take your son. See how strong he is? And he has your blue eyes …’

‘Son? That is no son!’ Ariani cut him off with a venomous glare. No amount of reasoning prevailed. When Rhius tried to take the dead child from her, she lurched from the bed and fled to the far corner of the room, clutching the tiny corpse against her stained nightdress.

‘This is too much!’ Arkoniel whispered. Going to the frantic woman, he knelt before her.

She looked up at him in surprise. ‘Arkoniel? Look, I have a son. Isn’t he pretty?’

Arkoniel tried to smile. ‘Yes, your highness, he’s – he’s perfect.’ He touched her brow gently, clouding her mind and sending her once more into a deep sleep. ‘Forgive me.’

He reached for the little body, then froze in fear.

The dead child’s eyes were open. Blue as a kitten’s one moment, the irises went black as Arkoniel watched and fixed accusingly on him. An unnatural chill radiated from the little body, slowly spreading to envelop the wizard.

This was the cost of that first breath. The spirit of the murdered child had been drawn into its body just long enough to take hold and become a ghost, or worse.

‘By the Four, what’s happening?’ Rhius rasped, leaning over him.

‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Arkoniel said quickly, though in truth this tiny unnatural creature struck fear to the core of his heart.

Nari knelt beside him and whispered, ‘The witch said to take it away quickly. She said you must put it in the ground under a large tree. There’s great chestnut in the rear courtyard by the summer kitchen. The roots will hold the demon down. Hurry! The longer it stays here, the stronger it will grow!’

It took every bit of courage Arkoniel possessed to touch the dead child. Taking it from Ariani’s arms, he covered its face with a corner of the wrappings and hurried out. Nari was right; the waves of icy coldness pouring from the lifeless body grew stronger by the moment. It made his joints ache as he bore it downstairs and out through the back passage of the house.

The moon watched like an accusing eye as Arkoniel placed his cursed burden at the foot of the chestnut tree and mouthed, forgive me once more. But he expected no forgiveness for this night’s work and wept as he wove his spell. His tears fell on the little bundle as he bent to watch it sink down into the earth’s cold embrace between the gnarled roots.

The faint wail of an infant came to him on the cold night air and he shuddered, not knowing if it came from the living child or the dead one.

CHAPTER THREE

For all their power, these Orëska wizards are very stupid. And arrogant, Lhel thought as Iya urged her down a back stair and away from the cursed house.

The witch spat thrice to the left, hoping to cut the bad luck that had bound them together all these weeks. A real storm crow, this wizard. Why hadn’t she seen it sooner?

Lhel had scarely had time to finish the last stitch on the living child before the elder wizard was urging her away. ‘I’m not finished! The spirit –’

‘The King is downstairs!’ Iya hissed, as if this should mean something to her. ‘If he finds you here, we’ll all be spirits. I will force you if I must.’

What choice did she have? So Lhel had followed the wizard away, thinking, Be it on your head, then.

But the further they got from that house, the more it weighed on her heart. To treat the dead so brutally was a dangerous affront to the Mother, and to Lhel’s craft. This wizard woman had no honour, to abandon a child’s spirit like that. Arkoniel might have been made to listen, but Lhel had long since realized that he had no voice in the matter. Their god had spoken to Iya and Iya would listen to no other.

Lhel spat again, just for good measure.

Lhel had dreamed the coming of the two wizards for a full month before they’d appeared in her village: a man boy and a woman who carried a strange burden in a bag. Every divination she’d done as she awaited their arrival indicated that it was the Mother’s will. Lhel must give them whatever aid they asked. When Iya and Arkoniel did finally arrive, they claimed that a vision from their own moon god had brought them to her. Lhel had taken this as an auspicious sign.

Still, she had been surprised at the nature of their request. Orëska must be a pale, milk-fed sort of magic indeed, for two people possessed of such powerful souls not have the craft to make a simple skin binding. Had she understood then the true depth of their ignorance, she might have tried to share more of her knowledge with them before the time came to use it.

But she hadn’t understood until it was too late, until the moment her hand had faltered, letting the boy child draw his first breath. Iya would not wait for the necessary cleansing sacrifice. There was no time for anything but to complete the binding and flee, leaving the angry new spirit lost and alone.

Lhel balked again as the city gate came into sight ahead of them. ‘You cannot leave such a spirit earthbound!’ she said again, struggling to free her wrist from Iya’s grasp. ‘It grows to a demon before you know it, and then what will you do, you who couldn’t bind it in the first place?’

‘I will deal with it.’

‘You are a fool.’

The taller woman turned, bringing their faces close together. ‘I am saving your life, woman, and that of the child and her family! If the King’s wizard caught so much as a whiff of you we’d all be executed, starting with that baby. She’s all that matters now, not you or me or anyone else in this whole wretched land. It’s the will of Illior.’

Once again, Lhel felt the massive power coursing through the wizard. Different Iya might be and possessed of unfamiliar magic, but there was no question that she was god-touched, and more than a match for Lhel. So she’d let herself be led away, leaving the child and its skin-bound twin behind in the stinking city. She hoped Arkoniel had found a strong tree to hold the spirit down.

They bought horses and travelled together for two days. Lhel said little, but prayed silently to the Mother for guidance. When they reached the edge of the highlands, she allowed Iya to give her into the care of a band of caravaneers heading west into the mountains. As they parted, Iya had even tried to make peace with her.

‘You did well, my friend,’ she said, her hazel eyes sad as she took Lhel’s hands. ‘Stay safe in your mountains and all will be well. We must never meet again.’

Lhel chose to ignore the thinly veiled threat. Fishing in a pouch at her belt, she drew out a little silver amulet made in the shape of a full moon flanked on either side by slender crescents. ‘For when the child takes woman form again.’

Iya held it on her palm. ‘The Shield of the Mother.’

‘Keep it hidden. It’s only for women. As a boy, she must wear this.’ She gave Iya a short hazel twig capped on both ends with burnished copper bands.

Iya shook her head. ‘It’s too dangerous. I’m not the only wizard to have studied your ways.’

‘Then you keep them for her!’ Lhel urged. ‘This child will need much magic to survive.’

Iya closed her hand around the amulets, wood and silver together. ‘I will, I promise you. Farewell.’

Lhel stayed with the caravan for three days, and each day the black, cold weight of the dead child’s spirit lay heavier on her heart. Each night its cry grew louder in her dreams. She prayed to the shining Mother to show her why she had sent her here to create such a thing and what she must do to make the world right again.

The Mother answered, and on the third night Lhel danced the dreamsleep dance for her guides, seducing away just enough of their thoughts to remove any memory of her and the supplies she took with her.

Guided by a waning white sliver of moon, she threw her travelling sack over her horse’s neck and turned back for the stinking city.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the uneasy days following the birth, only Nari and the Duke attended Ariani. Rhius sent word to Tharin, sending the captain on to the estate at Cirna to keep him away a while longer.

A silence fell over the household; black banners flew on the roof peaks, proclaiming mourning for the supposed stillbirth. On the household altar, Rhius set a fresh basin of water and burned the herbs sacred to Astellus, who smoothed the water road to birth and death and protected new mothers from childbed fever.

Sitting at Ariani’s bedside each day, however, Nari knew it was not birthing fever that ailed the woman, but a deep sickness of heart. Nari was old enough to remember Queen Agnalain’s last days and prayed that her daughter was not afflicted with the same curse of madness.

Day after day, night after night, Ariani tossed against her pillows, waking to cry out, ‘The child, Nari! Don’t you hear him? He’s so cold.’

‘The child is well, your highness,’ Nari told her each time. ‘See, Tobin is in the cradle here beside you. Look how plump he is.’

But Ariani would not look at the living child. ‘No, I hear him,’ she would insist, staring around wildly. ‘Why have you shut him outside? Fetch him in at once!’

‘There’s no child outside, your highness. You were only dreaming again.’

Nari spoke the truth, for she’d heard nothing, but some of the other servants claimed to have heard an infant’s cry in the darkness outside. Soon a rumour spread through the house that the second child had been stillborn with its eyes open; everyone knew that demons came into the world through such births. Several serving maids had been sent to Atyion already with orders to keep their gossip to themselves. Only Nari and Mynir knew the truth behind the second child’s death.

Loyalty to the Duke guaranteed Mynir’s silence. Nari owed allegiance to Iya. The wizard had been a benefactress to her family for three generations and there were times during those first few chaotic days when only that bond kept the nurse from running back to her own village. Iya had said nothing of demons when Nari agreed to serve.

In the end, however, she stayed for the child’s sake. Her milk flowed freely as soon as she put the dark-haired little mite to her breast and with it all the tenderness she’d thought she’d lost when her husband and son had died. Maker knew neither the Princess nor her husband had any to spare for the poor child.

They must all call Tobin ‘he’ and ‘him’ now. And thanks to the outlandish magic the witch had worked with her knives and needles, Tobin was to all appearances a fine healthy boy child. He slept well, nursed vigorously, and seemed happy with whatever attention was paid him, which was little enough by his own folk.

‘They’ll come ’round, little pet my love,’ Nari would croon to him as he dozed contentedly in her arms. ‘How could they not and you so sweet?’

As Tobin thrived, however, his mother sank ever faster into a darkness of spirit. The bout of fever passed but Ariani kept to her bed. She still would not touch her living child, and she would not even look at her husband, or her brother either, when he came to call.

Duke Rhius was near despair. He sat with her for hours, enduring her silence, and brought in the most skilled drysians from the temple of Dalna. The healers found no illness of the body to cure.

On the twelfth day after the birth, however, the Princess began to show signs of rallying. That afternoon, Nari found her curled in an armchair next to the fire, sewing a doll. The floor around her was littered with scraps of muslin, clumps of stuffing wool, snippets of embroidery silks and thread.

The new doll was finished by nightfall – a boy with no mouth. Another just like it followed the next day, and another. She did not bother to dress the things, but cast each aside as soon as the last stitch was tied off and immediately began on another. By week’s end half a dozen of the things were lined up on the mantelpiece.

‘They’re very pretty, my love, but why not finish the faces?’ Duke Rhius asked, sitting faithfully by her bedside each night.

‘So they won’t cry,’ Ariani hissed, needle flying as she stitched an arm to a wool-packed body. ‘The crying is sending me mad!’

Nari looked away so as not to embarrass the Duke by seeing his tears. It was the first time since the birth that Ariani had spoken to him.

This seemed to encourage the Duke. He sent for Captain Tharin that very night and began to talk of the child’s presentation feast.

Ariani told no one of the dreams that plagued her. Who could she tell? Her own trusted nurse, Lachi, had been sent away weeks ago, replaced by this stranger who would not leave her side. Nari was some relation of Iya’s, Rhius had told her, and that only made Ariani hate her all the more. Her husband, the wizards, this woman – they’d all betrayed her. When she thought of that terrible night, all she remembered was a circle of faces looking down on her without pity. She despised them.

Exhaustion and grief had weighed down on her like a stack of wool quilts at first, and her mind had drifted in a grey fog. Daylight and darkness seemed to play sport with her; she never knew what to expect when she opened her eyes, or whether she dreamed or woke.

At first she thought that the horrid midwife Iya had brought had returned. But soon she realized it must be a dream or waking vision that brought the dark little woman to her bedside each night. She always appeared surrounded by a circle of shifting light, mouthing silent words at Ariani and gesturing with stained fingers for her to eat and drink. It went on for days, this silent pantomime, until Ariani grew used to her. At last she began to make out something of what the woman whispered and the words pulled fire and ice through her veins.

It was then that Ariani began to sew again, and forced herself to eat the bread and thin soups Nari brought to her. The task the witch had set for her would take strength.

The child’s presentation took place a fortnight after the birth. Ariani refused to come downstairs and Nari thought this just as well. The Princess’ strength was returning, but she was still too strange for company. She would not dress and seldom spoke. Her shining black hair was dull and tangled for want of care and her blue eyes stared strangely, as if she was seeing something the rest could not. She slept, she ate, and she sewed doll after mouthless doll. Duke Rhius saw to it that word of a difficult lying-in was spread around the Palatine, as well as rumours of his wife’s deep and continuing grief over the loss of the dead girl child.

Her absence did not mar the celebration too badly. All the principal nobles of Ero crowded into the great hall that night until the whole room seemed to shimmer with jewels and silks under the flickering lamps. Standing with the servants by the wine table, Nari saw some whispering behind their hands and overheard a few speaking of Agnalain’s madness, wondering how the daughter could have gone the way of the mother so quickly and with no warning at all.

It was unseasonably warm that night, and the soft patter of autumn rain swept in through the open windows. The men of the Duke’s personal guard stood at attention flanking the stairs, resplendent in new green and blue. Sir Tharin stood to the left of the stairs in his fine tunic and jewels, looking as pleased as if the child were his own. Nari had taken to the lanky, fair-haired man the day she met him, and liked him all the better for the way his face lit up the first time he saw Tobin in his father’s arms.

The King stood in the place of honour at the right of the staircase, holding his one remaining child on one broad shoulder. Prince Korin was a bright, plump child of three, with his father’s dark curls and bright brown eyes. He bounced excitedly, craning his neck for a look at his new cousin as Rhius appeared at the top of the stairs. The Duke was resplendent in his embroidered robe and circlet. Tobin’s dark head was just visible above the edge of his silken wrappings.

‘Greetings and welcome, my King and my friends!’ Duke Rhius called out. Descending to where the King stood, he went down on one knee and held the child up. ‘My king, I present to you my son and heir, Prince Tobin Erius Akandor.’

Setting Korin down beside him, Erius took Tobin in his arms and showed him to the priests and assembled nobles. ‘Your son and heir is acknowledged before Ero, my brother. May his name be spoken with honour among the Royal Kin of Skala.’

And that was that, though the speechifying and drinking of toasts would go on half the night. Nari shifted restlessly. It was past time to feed the child and her breasts ached. She smiled as she heard a familiar hiccuping whimper. Once Tobin started squalling for his supper they’d soon let him go, and she could retreat to her quiet chamber at the top of the house.

Just then one of the serving maids let out a startled squeak and pointed to the wine table. ‘By the Four, it just toppled over!’

The silver mazer for Rhius’s toast lay on its side, its contents splashed across the dark polished wood beside the honey cake.

‘I was looking right at it,’ the maid went on, voice beginning to rise dangerously. ‘Not a soul was near it!’

‘I can see that!’ Nari whispered, silencing her with a pinch and a glare. Whisking off her apron, she blotted up the spilled wine. It stained the linen red as blood.

Mynir snatched the cloth away and balled it tightly under his arm, hiding the stain. ‘By the Light, don’t let any of the others see!’ he whispered. ‘That was a white wine!’

Looking down at her hands, Nari saw that they were stained red, too, where the wine had wet them, though the droplets still clinging inside the rim of the cup were a pale golden colour.

There was just time to send the trembling girl away to fetch a fresh mazer before the nobles came to make their toasts. Tobin was growing restless and fussy. Nari held him while the Duke raised the cup and sprinkled a few drops of wine over the child, then a few more over the honey cake in the traditional offering to the Four. ‘To Sakor, to make my child a great and just warrior with fire in his heart. To Illior, for wisdom and true dreaming. To Dalna, for many children and long life. To Astellus, for safe journeys and a swift death.’

Nari exchanged a quick look of relief with the steward as the droplets sank away, leaving the cake’s sticky surface unstained.

As soon as the brief ceremony was finished Nari carried Tobin upstairs. The babe knew her and squirmed and grunted, nuzzling at her bodice.

‘You’re a pet, you are,’ Nari murmured absently, still shaken by what she’d witnessed. She thought of the spell sticks Iya had left with her, wondering if she should use one to summon the wizard back. But Iya had been very clear; she was only to use those in the direst circumstances. Nari sighed and hugged Tobin closer, wondering where such portents would lead.

Passing Ariani’s door in the upper corridor, Nari caught sight of a small patch of red on the wall, just above the rushes that covered the floor. She bent for a closer look, then pressed a hand over her mouth.

It was the bloody print of an infant’s hand, splayed like a starfish. The blood was still bright and wet.

‘Maker keep us, it’s in the house!’

Cheers and applause burst out below. She could hear the King proclaiming a blessing for Tobin’s health. With trembling fingers, Nari wiped at the mark with the edge of her skirt until the handprint smeared to a pinkish smudge. Nari pushed the rushes up to cover it, then slipped into Ariani’s chamber, fearful of what she might find.

The Princess sat by the fire, sewing away as madly as ever. For the first time since the birth, she had changed her nightdress for a loose gown and put on her rings again. The hem was damp and streaked with mud. Ariani’s hair hung in damp strands around her face. The window was shut tight as always, but Nari could smell the night air on her, and the hint of something else besides. Nari wrinkled her nose, trying to place the raw, unpleasant odour.

‘You’ve been outside, your highness?’

Ariani smiled down at her needlework. ‘Just for a bit, Nurse. Aren’t you pleased?’

‘Yes, my lady, but you should have waited and I’d have gone with you. You’re not strong enough to be out on your own. What would the Duke say?’

Ariani sewed on, still smiling over her work.

‘Did you see anything … unusual out there, your highness?’ Nari hazarded at last.

Ariani pulled a tuft of wool from a bag beside her and tucked it into the muslin arm she’d sewn. ‘Nothing at all. Off with you now, and fetch me something to eat. I’m famished!’

Nari mistrusted this sudden brightness. As she left, she could hear Ariani humming softly to herself, and recognized the tune as a lullaby.

She was halfway to the kitchens when she placed the smell at last and let out a snort of relief. Tomorrow she must tell the servants to bring in one of the hounds to root out the dead mouse spoiling somewhere along the upper corridor.

CHAPTER FIVE

Arkoniel left Ero not knowing when he would see Ariani or her child again. He met up with Iya at an inn in Sylara and together they set off to begin the next long stage of their mission.

Despite Arkoniel’s strong misgivings, Iya decided that it would be safest for everyone if they kept their distance from the child. When Arkoniel told her of his strange conversation with Niryn, it only strengthened her resolve. Nari and the Duke could send word to them by sending messages to several inns that Iya frequented in her travels. For emergencies, she’d left Nari with a few small tokens; painted rods that released a simple seeking spell when broken. No matter how far away Iya might be, she would feel the magic and return as quickly as she could.

‘But what if we’re too far away to reach them in time?’ Arkoniel fretted, unhappy with the situation. ‘And how can we leave them like that? It all went wrong in the end, Iya. You didn’t see the demon in the dead child’s eyes. What if the tree can’t hold it down?’

But she remained adamant. ‘They are safest with us away.’

And so they began their long wandering quest, seeking out anyone who had a spark of magic in them, sounding out loyalties, listening to fears, and – with a select few – cautiously sharing a glimpse of Iya’s vision: a new confederation of Orëska wizards. She was patient, and careful in her choices, winnowing out the mad and the greedy and those too loyal to the King. Even with those she deemed trustworthy she did not reveal her true purpose, but left them a small token – a pebble picked up on the road – and the promise that she would call on them again.

Over the next few years Niryn’s words would come back to haunt them, for it seemed that they were not the only ones spreading the idea of unity. They learned from others they met on the road that the King’s wizard was gathering a following of his own at court. Arkoniel wondered what answer these wizards had given to Niryn’s oblique question, and what their dreams had been.

The drought that had heralded Tobin’s birth broke, only to be followed by another the following summer. The further south they went, the more often they heard stories of empty granaries and sickly livestock. Disease walked the land in hunger’s wake, striking down the weak like a wolf culling a flock. The worst was a fever brought in by traders. The first sign was bloody sweat, often followed by black swellings in the armpits and groin. Few who showed both symptoms survived. The Red and Black Death, as it came to be called, struck whole villages overnight, leaving too few living to bury the dead.

A plague of a different sort struck the eastern coast: Plenimaran raiders. Towns were looted and burned, the old women killed, the younger ones and the children carried off as slaves in the raider’s black ships. The men who survived the battle often met a crueller fate.

Iya and Arkoniel entered on such village just after an attack and found half a dozen young men nailed by the hands to the side of a byre; all had been disemboweled. One boy was still alive, begging for water with one breath and death with the next. Iya gently gave him both.

Iya continued Arkoniel’s education as they travelled, and was pleased to see how his powers flourished. He was the finest student she’d ever had, and the most curious; for Arkoniel there were always new vistas ahead, new spells to master. Iya practiced what she jokingly referred to as ‘portable magics’, those spells which relied more on wand and word than weighty components and instruments. Arkoniel had a natural talent for these, and was already beginning to create spells of his own, an unusual accomplishment for one so young. Driven by his concern for Rhius and Ariani, he experimented endlessly with seeking spells, trying to extend their short range, but with no success.

Iya explained repeatedly that even Orëska magic had its limits, but he would not be put off.

In the houses of the richer, more sedentary wizards, particularly those with noble patrons, she saw him linger longingly in well-equipped workrooms, examining the strange instruments and alchemists’ bowls he found there. Sometimes they guested long enough for him to learn something from these wizards and Iya was delighted to see him so willingly adding to what she could teach him.

Content as always to wander, Iya could almost at times forget the responsibility that hung over them.

Almost.

Living on the road, they heard a great deal of news but were little touched by most of it. When the first rumours of the King’s Harriers reached them, Iya dismissed them as wild tales. This became harder to do, however, when they met with a priest of Illior who claimed to have seen them with his own eyes.

‘The King has sanctioned them,’ he told Iya, nervously fingering the amulet on his breast, so similar to the ones they wore. ‘The Harriers are a special guard, soldiers and wizards both, charged with hunting down traitors to the throne. They’ve burned a wizard at Ero, and there are Illioran priests in the prison.’

‘Wizards and priests?’ Arkoniel scoffed. ‘No Skalan wizard has ever been executed, not since the necromantic purges of the Great War! And wizards hunting down their own kind?’

But Iya was shaken. ‘Remember who we are dealing with,’ she warned when they were safely alone in their rented chamber. ‘Mad Agnalain’s son has already killed his own kin to preserve his line. Perhaps there’s more of his mother in him than we feared.’

‘But it’s Niryn leading them,’ Arkoniel reminded her, thinking again of the way the wizard had watched him the night of Tobin’s birth. Had he been seeking out followers even then? And what had he found in his Harriers, that he hadn’t seen in Arkoniel?

PART TWO

From the private journal of Queen Tamír II, recently discovered in the Palace Archives (Archivist’s note: passage undated)

My father moved us to that lonely keep in the mountains not long after my birth. He put it about that my mother’s health required it, but I’m sure by then all Ero knew she’d gone mad, just as her mother had. When I think of her at all now, I remember a pale wraith of a woman with nervous hands and a stranger’s eyes the same colour as my own.

My father’s ancestors built the keep in the days when hill folk still came through the passes to raid the lowlands. It had thick stone walls and narrow windows covered by splintery red and white painted shutters – I remember amusing myself by picking off the scaling flakes outside my bedchamber window as I stood there, watching for my father’s return.

A tall, square watchtower jutted from the back of the keep, next to the river. I used to believe the demon lurked there, and watched me from its windows whenever Nari or the men took me outside to play in the courtyards or the meadow below the barracks house. I was kept inside most of the time, though. I knew every dusty, shadowed room of the lower floors by the time I could walk. That crumbling old pile was all the world I knew, my first seven years – my nurse and a handful of servants my only companions when Father and his men were gone, which was all too often.

And the demon, of course. Only years later did I have any inkling that all households were not like my own – that it was unusual for invisible hands to pinch and push, or for furniture to move about the room by itself. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on Nari’s lap as she taught me to bend my little fingers into a warding sign …

CHAPTER SIX

Tobin knelt on the floor in his toy room, idly pushing a little ship around the painted harbour of the toy city. It was the carrack with the crooked mast, the one the demon had broken.

Tobin wasn’t really playing, though. He was waiting, and watching the closed door of his father’s room just across the corridor. Nari had closed the door when they went in to talk, making it impossible to eavesdrop from here.

Tobin’s breath came out in a puff of white vapour as he sighed and bent to straighten the ship’s little sail. It was cold this morning; he could smell frost on the early morning breeze through the open window. He opened his mouth and blew several short breaths, making brief clouds over the citadel.

The toy city, a gift from his father on his last name day, was his most treasured possession. It stood almost as tall as Tobin and took up half of this disused bedchamber next to his own. And it wasn’t just a toy, either. It was a miniature version of Ero itself, which his father had made for him.

‘Since you’re too young to go to Ero, I’ve brought Ero to you!’ he’d said when he gave it to him. ‘You may one day live here, even defend it, so you must know the place.’

Since then, they’d spent many happy hours together, learning the streets and wards. Houses made from wooden blocks clustered thickly up the steep sides of the citadel, and there were open spaces painted green for the public gardens and pasturage. The great market square had a temple to the Four surrounded by trader’s booths made of twigs and bright scraps of cloth. Baked clay livestock of all sorts populated the little enclosures. The blue painted harbour that jutted from one side of the city’s base outside the many gated wall was filled with pretty little ships that could be pushed about with a pole.

The top of the hill was flat and ringed with another wall called the Palatine Circle, though it wasn’t exactly round. Inside lay a great clutter of houses, palaces, and temples, all with different names and stories. There were more gardens here, as well as a fish pool made from a silver mirror and an exercise field for the Royal Companions. This last interested Tobin very much; the Companions were boys who lived at the Old Palace with his cousin, Prince Korin, and trained to be warriors. His father and Tharin had been Companions to King Erius when they young, too. As soon as Tobin had learned this, he wanted to go at once but was told, as usual, that he must wait until he was older.

The biggest building on the Palatine was the Old Palace. This had a roof that came off and several rooms inside. There was a throne room with a tiny wooden throne, of course, and a tiny tablet of real gold beside it, set in a little wooden frame.

Tobin lifted this out and squinted at the fine words engraved on it. He couldn’t read them, but he knew them by heart: ‘So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated.’ Tobin knew the legend of King Thelátimos and the Oracle by heart, too. It was one of his father’s favourite stories.

The city was populated by several score of little wooden stick people. He loved these the best of anything in the city and smuggled whole families of them back to his bed to hold and talk to under the covers at night while he waited for Nari to come up to bed. Tobin put the golden tablet back, then lined up half a dozen stick people on the practice ground, imagining himself among the Companions. Opening the flat, velvet lined box his father had brought home from another journey, he took out the special people and lined them up on the palace roof to watch the Companions at their exercises. These people – The Ones Who Came Before – were much fancier than the stick ones; all but one was made of silver. They had painted faces and clothes and each carried the same tiny sword at their side, the Sword of Queen Ghërilain. His father had taught him their names and stories, too. The silver man was King Thelátimos and next to him in the box was his daughter, Ghërilain the Founder – made queen of Skala because of the Oracle’s golden words. After Ghërilain came Queen Tamír, who was poisoned by her brother who’d wanted to be king, then an Agnalain and another Ghërilain, then six more whose names and order he still mixed up, and then Grandmama Agnalain the Second. The first and last queens were his favourites. The first Ghërilain had the finest crown; Grandmama Agnalain had the nicest painting on her cloak.

The last figure in the box was a man carved of wood. He had a black beard like Tobin’s father, a crown, and two names: Your Uncle Erius and The Present King.

Tobin turned the king over in his hands. The demon liked to break this one. The little wooden man would be standing on the Palace roof or lying in his place in the box when suddenly his head would fly off or he’d split right down the middle. After many mendings, Your Uncle was all misshapen.

Tobin sighed again and put them all carefully back in the box. Not even the city could hold his attention today. He turned and stared at the door, willing it to open. Nari had gone in there ages ago! At last, unable to stand the suspense any longer, he crept across the corridor to listen.

The rushes covering the floor were old and crunched beneath his slippers no matter how carefully he tiptoed. He looked quickly up and down the short passage. To his left lay the stairs to the great hall. He could hear Captain Tharin and old Mynir laughing about something there. To his right, the door beside his father’s was tightly shut and he hoped this one stayed that way; his mama was having another one of her bad spells.

Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he pressed his ear to the carved oak panel and listened.

‘What harm can there be, my lord?’ That was Nari. Tobin wiggled with delight. He’d nagged for weeks to get her to do battle on his behalf.

His father rumbled something, then he heard Nari again, gently cajoling the way she did sometimes. ‘I know what she said, my lord, but with all respect, he’s growing up strange kept apart like this. I can’t think she wants that!’

Who’s strange? Tobin wondered. And who was this mysterious ‘she’ who might object to him going to the town with Father? It was his name day, after all. He was seven today; surely old enough at last to make the journey. And it wasn’t so far to Alestun; when he picnicked on the roof with Nari, they could look east over the valley and see the cluster of roofs beyond the forest’s edge. On a cold day he could even make out smoke rising from the hearth fires there. It seemed a small thing to ask for a present, just to go, and it was all he wanted.

The voices went on, too soft now to make out.

Please! he mouthed, making a luck sign to the Four.

The brush of cold fingers against Tobin’s cheek made him jump. Turning, he was dismayed to find his mother standing right there behind him. She was almost like a ghost herself, a ghost Tobin could see. She was thin and pale, with nervous hands that fluttered about like dying birds when she wasn’t sewing the pretty rag dolls, or clutching the ugly old one she was never without. It was tucked under her arm just now and seemed to be staring at him, even though it had no face.

He was as surprised to find her here as he was to see her free. When Tobin’s father was home she always kept to herself and avoided him. Tobin liked it better when she did.

It was second nature for him now to steal a quick look into his mama’s eyes; Tobin had learned young to gauge the moods of those around him, especially his mother’s. Usually she simply looked at him like a stranger, cold and distant. When the demon threw things or pinched him, she would just hug her ugly old doll and look away. She almost never hugged Tobin, though on the very bad days, she spoke to him as if he were still a baby, or as if he were a girl. On those days Father would shut her up in her chamber and Nari would make the special teas for her to drink.

But her eyes were clear now, he saw. She was almost smiling as she held out a hand to him. ‘Come, little love.’

She’d never spoken to him like that before. Tobin glanced nervously at his father’s door, but she bent and captured his hand in hers. Her grip was just a little too tight as she drew him to the locked door at the end of the corridor, the one that led upstairs.

‘I’m not allowed up there,’ Tobin told her, his voice hardly more than a squeak. Nari said the floors were unsound up there, and that there were rats and spiders as big as his fist.

‘You may come up with me,’ she said, producing a large key from her skirts and opening the forbidden door.

Stairs led up to a corridor that looked very much like the one below, with two doors on either side, but this one was dusty and dank smelling, and the small, high-set windows were tightly shuttered.

Tobin glanced through an open door as they passed and saw a sagging bed with tattered hangings, but no rats. At the end of the corridor his mother opened a smaller door and led him up a very steep, narrow stairway lit by a few arrow slits in the walls. There was hardly enough light to make out the worn steps, but Tobin knew where they were.

They were in the watchtower.

He pressed one hand to the wall for balance, but pulled it away again when his fingers found patches of something rough that scaled away at his touch. He was scared now, and wanted to run back down to the bright, safe part of the house, but his mother still held his hand.

As they climbed higher, something suddenly flittered in the shadows overhead – the demon, no doubt, or some worse terror. Tobin tried to pull free but she held him fast and smiled at him over her shoulder as she led him up to a narrow door at the top.

‘Those are just my birds. They have their nests here and I have mine, but they can fly in and out whenever they wish.’

She opened the narrow door and sunlight flooded out. It made him blink as he stumbled over the threshold.

He’d always thought the tower was empty, abandoned, except perhaps for the demon, but here was a pretty little sitting room furnished more nicely than any of the rooms downstairs. He gazed around in amazement; he’d never imagined his mother had such a delightful secret place.

Faded tapestries covered the windows on three sides, but the west wall was bare and the heavy shutters open. Tobin could see sunlight shining on the snow-covered peaks in the distance, and hear the rush of the river below.

‘Come, Tobin,’ she urged, going to table by the window. ‘Sit with me a while on your name day.’

A little spark of hope flared up in Tobin’s heart and he edged further into the room. She’d never remembered his birthday before.

The room was very cozy and comfortable. A long worktable stood against the far wall, piled with doll making goods. On another table finished dolls, dark-haired and mouthless as always, but dressed in tunics of velvet and silk fancier than any Tobin owned, sat propped in a double rank against the wall.

Perhaps she brought me here to give me one for my name day, he thought. Even without mouths, they were very pretty. He turned hopefully to his mother. For an instant he could almost see how she’d smile, telling him to pick whichever one he liked best, a special present just from her. But his mama just stood by the window, plucking restlessly at the front of her skirt with the fingers of her free hand as she stared down at the bare table in front of her. ‘I should have cakes, shouldn’t I? Honey cakes and wine.’

‘We always have them in the hall,’ Tobin reminded her, casting another longing glance at the dolls. ‘You were there last year, remember? Until the demon knocked the cake on the floor and …’

He faltered to a stop as other memories of that day came back. His mother had burst into tears when the demon came, then started screaming. His father and Nari had carried her away and Tobin had eaten his broken bits of cake in the kitchen with Cook and Tharin.

‘The demon?’ A tear rolled down his mother’s pale cheek and she hugged the doll tighter. ‘How can they call him that?’

Tobin looked to the open doorway, gauging an escape. If she started screaming now he could run away down the stairs, back to people who loved him and could be counted on to do what he expected. He wondered if Nari would be angry with him for going upstairs.

But his mother didn’t scream. She just sank into a chair and wept, clutching the ugly doll to her heart.

He started to edge his way towards the door, but his mama looked so terribly sad that instead of running away, he went to her and rested his head on her shoulder, the way he did with Nari when she was sad and homesick.

Ariani put an arm around him and pulled him close, stroking his unruly black hair. As usual, she hugged too hard, stroked too roughly, but he stayed, grateful for even this much affection. For once, the demon let him be.

‘My poor little babies,’ she whispered, rocking Tobin. ‘What are we to do?’ Reaching into her bodice, she took out a tiny pouch. ‘Hold out your hand.’

Tobin obeyed and she shook out two small objects: a silver moon charm, and a little piece of wood capped on both ends with the red metal he’d seen on the backs of shields.

She picked up one, then the other, and pressed them to Tobin’s forehead as if she expected something to happen. When nothing did, she tucked them away again with a sigh.

Still holding Tobin close, she rose and drew him to the window. Lifting him up with surprising strength, she stood him on the wide stone sill. Tobin looked down between the toes of his slippers and saw the river rushing in white curls around the rocks below. Frightened again, he gripped the window casing with one hand, his mother’s thin shoulder with the other.

‘Lhel!’ she shouted at the mountains. ‘What are we to do? Why don’t you come? You promised you’d come!’

She gripped the back of Tobin’s tunic, pushing him slightly forward, threatening his balance.

‘Mama, I want to get down!’ Tobin whispered, clutching her harder:

He turned his head and looked into eyes that were cold and hard again. For an instant she looked as if she didn’t know who he was or what they were doing here at this window so high above the ground. Then she yanked him back and they both tumbled to the floor. Tobin bumped his elbow and let out a yelp of pain.

‘Poor baby! Mama’s sorry,’ his mama sobbed, but it was the doll she rocked in her arms as she crouched there on the floor, not him.

‘Mama?’ Tobin crept to her side, but she ignored him.

Heartbroken and confused, he ran from the room, wanting nothing more than to escape the sound of her sobs. He was almost to the bottom of the tower when something pushed him hard in the back and he fell the last few steps, banging his shins and scuffing his palms.

The demon was with him, a dark shape flitting just at the edge of his vision. Tobin couldn’t recall just when he’d begun to see it, but he knew he hadn’t always been able to. It darted close and yanked at a stray lock of his hair.

Tobin struck out wildly. ‘I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you!’

Hate you! echoed back from the shadows overhead.

Tobin limped back downstairs to the toy room, but even here the daylight seemed tarnished. The savour of his earlier excitement had been leeched away, and his shins and hands hurt. All he wanted was to burrow under his bedcovers with the current family of friendly little wooden people waiting there. As he turned to go, his father came in.

‘There you are!’ Rhius exclaimed, hoisting Tobin up in his strong arms and giving him a kiss. His beard tickled and suddenly the day seemed a little brighter. ‘I’ve looked high and low for you. Where have you been? And how did you manage to get so dusty?’

Shame welled up in Tobin’s chest as he thought of the disastrous visit. ‘I was just playing,’ he said, staring down at the heavy silver broach on his father’s shoulder.

Rhius slipped a rough, callused finger under Tobin’s chin and examined a smudge on his cheek. Tobin knew his father was thinking of the demon; this at least they both understood without the need for words.

‘Well now, never mind that,’ he said, carrying Tobin next door to his room where they found Nari laying out a new set of clothes on the bed. ‘Nari tells me you’re old enough to ride down to Alestun with me and look for a name day present. What do you think of that?’

‘I can go?’ Tobin cried, all dark thoughts swept away for the moment.

‘Not looking like that, you can’t!’ his nurse exclaimed, sloshing water into the basin on his washstand. ‘How did you manage to get so dirty this early in the day?’

His father winked at him and went to the door. ‘I’ll meet you in the front court when you’re presentable.’

Tobin forgot all about his scraped shins and sore elbow as he dutifully scrubbed his face and hands, then stood as still as he could while Nari combed the tangles she called rats’ nests from his hair.

Dressed at last in a fine new tunic of soft green wool and fresh leggings, he hurried down to the courtyard. His father was waiting, as promised, and all the rest of the household with him.

‘Blessings of the day, little prince!’ everyone cried, laughing and hugging him.

Tobin was so excited that at first he didn’t even notice Tharin standing off to one side, holding the bridle of a bay gelding Tobin had never seen before.

The horse was a few spans shorter than his father’s black palfrey and fitted out with a child-sized saddle. His rough winter coat and mane had been curried until they shone.

‘Blessings, my son,’ Rhius said, lifting Tobin up into the saddle. ‘A lad old enough to ride to town needs his own horse to go on. He’s yours to care for, and to name.’

Grinning, Tobin twitched the reins and guided the bay into a walk around the courtyard. ‘I’ll call him Chestnut. That’s the colour he is, just like a chestnut shell.’

‘Then you could also call him Gosi,’ his father told him with a twinkle in his eye.

‘Why is that?’

‘Because this isn’t just any horse. He’s come all the way from Aurënen, just as my black did. There are no finer mounts than that. All the nobles of Skala ride Aurënfaie horses now.’

Aurënfaie. A flicker of memory stirred. Aurënfaie traders had come to their gate one stormy night – wonderful, strange looking folk with long red scarves wrapped around their heads and tattoos on their cheeks. Nari had sent him upstairs too early that night, but he’d hidden at the top of the stairs and watched as they did colourful magics and played music on strange instruments. The demon had scared them away and Tobin had seen his mother laughing with her doll in the shadows of the disused minstrel’s gallery. It was the first time he’d ever realized he might hate her.

Tobin pushed the dark thoughts away; that had been a long time ago, nearly two years. Aurënen meant magic and strange folk who bred horses fit for Skalan nobles. Nothing more.

He leaned down to stroke the gelding’s neck. ‘Thank you, Father! I’ll call him Gosi. Can I go to Aurënen someday?’

‘Everyone should go to Aurënen. It’s a beautiful place.’

‘Here, take these to make a name day offering at the temple.’ Nari passed him up several little packets tied up in clean cloth. Tobin proudly stowed them away in his new saddle pouch.

‘I’ve a gift for you, too, Tobin.’ Captain Tharin pulled a long, cloth-wrapped parcel from his belt and handed it up to him.

Inside Tobin found a carved wooden sword nearly as long as his arm. The blade was thick and blunt, but the hilt was nicely carved and fitted with real bronze quillons. ‘It’s handsome! Thank you!’

Tharin gave him a wink. ‘We’ll see if you thank me after we start using it. I’m to be your swordmaster. I think we’ll wear out a good many of those before we’re done, but there’s the first.’

This was as good a gift as the horse, even if the blade wasn’t real. He tried to brandish his new weapon, but it was heavier than he’d thought.

His father chuckled. ‘Don’t you worry, my boy. Tharin will soon put you through your paces. You’d best leave your weapon with Mynir for now, though. We don’t want you getting into any duels your first time abroad.’

Tobin surrendered it grudgingly to the steward, but soon forgot all about it as he rode out of the gate and across the bridge behind his father and Tharin. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have to stop at the far end and wave goodbye to them. As they continued down through the meadow, he felt like a warrior already, heading off to see the wide world.

Just before they entered the trees, however, he felt a sudden chill crawling between his shoulder blades, as if an ant had fallen down his tunic. Turning, he glanced back at the keep and thought he saw the shutters at the watchtower’s south window move. He turned away quickly.

Leaves like round gold coins paved the forest road. Others like hands of red or orange wavered overhead, together with oak leaves shiny and brown as polished leather.

Tobin amused himself by practicing with rein and knees, getting Gosi to trot at his command.

‘Tobin rides like a soldier already, Rhius,’ Tharin remarked, and Tobin’s heart swelled with pride.

‘Do you ride your horse at the Plenimarans in battle, Father?’ he asked.

‘When we fight on land, but I have a great black war horse called Sakor’s Fire for that, with iron shoes that the smiths sharpen before every battle.’

‘Why have I never seen that horse?’ Tobin demanded.

‘He stays at Atyion. That sort of mount is only suited for battle. He’s strong and fast and has no fear of blood or fire, but it’s rather like riding a crate on square wheels. Old Majyer here and your Gosi are proper riding mounts.’

‘Why can’t I ever go to Atyion?’ Tobin asked, and not for the first time.

The answer often varied. Today his father just smiled and said, ‘You will, someday.’

Tobin sighed. Perhaps now that he was old enough to ride his own horse, ‘someday’ would come soon?

The ride to town was much shorter than Tobin had imagined. The sun had moved less than two hours across the sky when they passed the first cottages beside the road.

The trees grew thinner here, mostly oak and aspen, and Tobin could see herds of pigs snuffling in the mast beneath their branches. A mile or so further and the forest gave way to open meadow, where herds of sheep and goats grazed under the watchful eye of shepherds not much older than Tobin. They waved to him and he returned the gesture shyly.

They soon met more people on the road, driving carts pulled by goats or oxen, or carrying loads in long baskets on their backs. A trio of young girls in short, dirty shifts stared at Tobin as he rode past, and talked to each other behind their hands as they followed him with their eyes.

‘Get home to your mothers,’ Tharin growled in a voice Tobin had never heard him use before. The girls jumped like startled rabbits and fled across the ditch but Tobin could hear laughter in their wake.

A river flowed down out of the hills to the town and the road bent to follow its bank to Alestun. Fields laid out in broad strips surrounded the town. Some were tilled for spring; others were yellow and brown with autumn stubble.

His father pointed to a group of people at work in a barley field, gathering the last sheaves of the harvest. ‘We’ve been lucky here. In some parts of the country the plague has killed off so many folk the fields have gone to ruin for want of labourers. And those who don’t die of the illness starve.’

Tobin knew what plague was. He’d heard the men talking about it in the barracks yard when they thought he couldn’t hear. It made your skin bleed and black lumps grow under your arms. He was glad it hadn’t come here.

By the time they neared the wooden palisade of the town, Tobin was round-eyed with excitement. There were more people than ever here and he waved to them all, delighted to see so many folk at once. Many waved back, and saluted his father respectfully but a few stared at him as the girls by the road had.

Just outside the walls a mill stood on the riverbank. There was a large oak tree beside it, full of children, girls and boys alike, swinging out over the water on long ropes tied to its branches.

‘Are they being hanged?’ Tobin gasped as they rode past. He’d heard of such punishments but hadn’t pictured it quite like this. The children seemed to be enjoying themselves.

His father laughed. ‘No, they’re playing at swings.’

‘Could I do that?’

The two men exchanged an odd look that Tobin couldn’t quite decipher.

‘Would you like to?’ asked Tharin.

Tobin looked back at the laughing children clambering like squirrels among the branches. ‘Maybe.’

At the gate a pikeman stepped forward and bowed to his father, touching a hand to his heart. ‘Good day to you, Duke Rhius.’

‘Good day to you, Lika.’

‘Say, this fine young fellow wouldn’t be your son, would he?’

‘Indeed he is, come to visit at last.’

Tobin sat up a little straighter in his saddle.

‘Welcome, young prince,’ Lika said, bowing to Tobin. ‘Come to see the pleasures of the town? It’s market day, and there’s lots to look at!’

‘It’s my name day!’ Tobin told him.

‘Blessings on you, then, by the Four!’

Alestun was only a small market town, but to Tobin it seemed a vast city. Low, thatch-roofed cottages lined the muddy streets, and there were children and animals everywhere. Pigs chased dogs, dogs chased cats and chickens, and small children chased each other and everything else. Tobin couldn’t help staring, for he’d never seen so many children in one place. Those who noticed him stopped to stare back or point and he began to feel rather uncomfortable again. A little girl with a wooden doll tucked under her arm gazed at him and he scowled back at her until she looked away.

The square was too crowded for riding, so they left their mounts with an ostler and continued on foot. Tobin held tightly to his father’s hand for fear he’d be lost forever in the throng if they got separated.

‘Stand up tall, Tobin,’ his father murmured. ‘It’s not every day a prince comes to Alestun market.’

They went first to the shrine of the Four, which stood at the centre of the square. The shrine at the keep was just a stone niche in the hall, carved and painted with the symbols of the four gods of Skala. This one looked more like Cook’s summer kitchen. Four posts supported the thatch roof and each was painted a different colour: white for Illior, red for Sakor, blue for Astellus, and yellow for Dalna. A small offering brazier burned at the foot of each. An elderly priestess sat on a stool inside, surrounded by pots and baskets. She accepted Tobin’s offerings, sprinkling the portions of salt, bread, herbs and incense onto the braziers with the proper prayers.

‘Would you like to make a special prayer, my prince?’ she asked when she’d finished.

Tobin looked to his father, who smiled and gave the priestess a silver sester.

‘To which of the Four do you petition?’ she asked, laying a hand on Tobin’s head.

‘Sakor, so that I can be a great warrior, like my father.’

‘Bravely said! Well then, we must make the warrior’s offering to please the god.’

The priestess cut a bit of Tobin’s hair with a steel blade and kneaded it into a lump of wax, along with salt, a few drops of water, and some powders that turned the wax bright red.

‘There now,’ she said, placing the softened wax in his hand. ‘Shape it into a horse.’

Tobin liked the smooth feel of the wax under his fingers as he pinched and moulded it. He thought of Gosi as he fashioned the animal’s shape, then used his fingernail to make lines for the mane and tail.

‘Huh!’ the priestess said, turning it over in her hands when he’d finished. ‘That’s fine work for a little fellow like you. I’ve seen grown men not do so well. Sakor will be pleased.’ She made a few designs on the wax with her fingernail, then gave it back to him. ‘Make your prayer, and give it to the god.’

Tobin bent over the brazier at the foot of the Sakor post and inhaled the pungent smoke. ‘Make me a great warrior, a defender of Skala,’ he whispered, then cast the little figure onto the coals. Acrid green flames flared up as it melted away.

Leaving the shrine, they plunged again into the market day crowd. Tobin still held his father’s hand, but curiosity was quickly replacing fear.

Tobin recognized a few faces here, people who came to sell their goods to Cook in the kitchen courtyard. Balus the knife grinder saw him and touched his brow to Tobin.

Farmers hawked their fruits and vegetables from the backs of carts. There were piles of turnips, onions, rabes, and marrows, and baskets of apples that made Tobin’s mouth water. One sour smelling cart was stacked with waxed wheels of cheese and buckets of milk and butter. The next was full of hams. A tinker was selling new pots and mending old ones, creating a continuous clatter in his corner by the town well. Merchants carried their wares in baskets hanging from shoulder yokes, crying, ‘Almond milk!’ ‘Good marrow bones!’ ‘Candles and flints!’ ‘Coral beads for luck!’ ‘Needles and thread!’

This must be what Ero is like! Tobin thought in wonder.

‘What would you like for your present?’ his father asked, raising his voice to be heard over the din.

‘I don’t know,’ Tobin replied. All he’d wanted, really, was to come here, and now he had, and been given a horse and a sword into the bargain.

‘Come on, then, we’ll have a look around.’

Tharin went off on business of his own and his father found people who needed to talk to him. Tobin stood patiently by as several of his father’s tenants brought him news and complaints. Tobin was half-listening to a sheep farmer rattle on about blocked teats when he spied a knot of children gathered at a nearby table. Bolder now, he left his father and sidled over to see what the attraction was.

A toy maker had spread her wares there. There were the tops and whirligigs, cup and ball sets, sacks of marbles and a few crudely painted linen gaming boards. But what caught Tobin’s eye were the dolls.

Nari and Cook said that his mother made the prettiest dolls in Skala and he saw nothing here to contradict them. Some were carved from flat pieces of wood, like the one he’d seen the little girl carrying. Others were made of stuffed cloth, like his mother’s, but they were not so well shaped and had no fine clothes. All the same, their embroidered faces had mouths – smiling mouths – that gave them a friendly, comfortable look. Tobin picked one up and squeezed it. The coarse stuffing crunched nicely under his fingers. He smiled, imagining tucking this funny little fellow under his covers with the wooden family. Perhaps Nari could make some clothes for it …

Glancing up, he saw that the other children and the merchant were all staring at him. One of the older boys sniggered.

And then his father was beside him again, angrily snatching the doll from his hands. His face was pale, his eyes hard and angry. Tobin shrank back against the table; he’d never seen his father look like that before. It was the sort of look his mother gave him on her worst days.

Then it was gone, replaced by a stiff smile that was even worse. ‘What a silly thing that is!’ his father exclaimed, tossing the doll back onto the pile. ‘Here’s what we want!’ He snatched something up from the table and thrust it into Tobin’s hands – a sack of clay marbles. ‘Captain Tharin will pay you, Mistress. Come on, Tobin, there’s more to see.’

He led Tobin away, gripping him too hard by the arm. Tobin heard a burst of mean laughter behind them from the children and some man muttering, ‘Told you he was an idiot child.’

Tobin kept his head down to hide the tears of shame burning his eyes. This was worse, far worse, than the scene with his mother that morning. He couldn’t imagine what had made his father so angry or the townspeople so mean, but he knew with a child’s sudden, clear conviction that it was his fault.

They went straight back to the ostler for the horses. No more town for him. As Tobin went to mount, he found he was still holding the marbles. He didn’t want them, but didn’t dare anger his father further by throwing them away, so he jammed them into the neck of his tunic. They slid down to where his belt cinched in, heavy and uncomfortable against his side.

‘Come on, let’s go home,’ his father said, and rode away without waiting for Tharin.

Silence hung heavily between them on the homeward journey. Tobin felt like a hand was clutching his throat, making it ache. He’d learned long ago how to cry silently. They were halfway home before his father looked back and saw.

‘Ah, Tobin!’ He reined in and waited for Tobin to ride up beside him. He didn’t look angry anymore, just weary and sad as he gestured vaguely back towards the town and said, ‘Dolls … they’re silly, filthy things. Boys don’t play with them, especially not boys who want to grow up to be brave warriors. Do you understand?’

The doll! A fresh wave of shame washed over Tobin. So that was why his father had been so angry. His heart sank further as another realization came clear. It was why his mother hadn’t given him one, that morning, too. It was shameful of him to want them.

He was too shocked at himself to wonder why no one, not even Nari, had thought to tell him.

His father patted his shoulder. ‘Let’s go home and have your cake. Tomorrow Tharin will start your training.’

But by the time they reached home he was feeling too sick in his stomach to eat any honey cake or wine. Nari felt his forehead, pronounced him played out, and put him to bed.

He waited until she was gone, then reached under his pillow for the four little stick people hidden there. What had been a happy secret now made his cheeks burn. These were dolls, too. Gathering them up, he crept next door and put them down in one of the toy city’s market squares. This was where they belonged. His father had made them and put them here, so it must be all right to play with them here.

Returning to his room, Tobin hid the unwanted sack of marbles at the very back of his wardrobe. Then he crawled between the cold sheets and said another prayer to Sakor that he would be a better boy and make his father proud.

Even after he cried again, it was hard to sleep. His bed felt very empty now. At last he fetched the wooden sword Tharin had given him and cuddled up with that.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tobin didn’t forget the bad memories of that name day, but – like the unwanted sack of marbles gathering dust at the back of his wardrobe – he simply chose not to touch them. The other gifts he’d received kept him happily occupied over the next year.

He learned sword play and archery in the barracks yard with Tharin, and rode Gosi every day. He no longer cast a longing eye at the Alestun road. The few traders they met on the mountain track bowed respectfully; no one pointed at him here, or whispered behind their hands.

Remembering the pleasure he’d felt making the wax horse at the shrine, he begged bits of candle end from Cook’s melting pot, and soon the window sill in his bedchamber was populated with tiny yellow animals and birds. Nari and his father praised these, but it was Tharin who brought him lumps of clean new wax so that he could make bigger animals. Delighted, Tobin used the first bit to make him a horse.

On his eighth name day they went to town again and he was careful to behave himself as a young warrior should. He made fine wax horses at the shrine, and no one snickered later when he chose a fine hunting knife as his gift.

Not long after this, his father decided it was time for Tobin to learn his letters.

Tobin enjoyed these lessons at first, but mostly because he loved sitting in his father’s chamber. It smelled of leather and there were maps and interesting daggers hanging on the walls.

‘No Skalan noble should be at the mercy of scribes,’ his father explained, setting out parchments and a pot of ink on a small table by the window. He trimmed a goose quill and held it up for Tobin to see. ‘This is a weapon, my son, and some know how to wield it as skilfully as a sword or dagger.’

Tobin couldn’t imagine what he meant but was anxious as always to please him. In this, however, he had little luck. Try as he might, he simply could not understand the connection between the crooked black marks his father drew on the page and the sounds he claimed they made. Worse yet, his fingers, so adept at moulding wax or clay from the riverbank, could not find a way to control the scratchy, skittering quill. It blotted. It wandered. It caught on the parchment and spat ink in all directions. His lines were wiggly as grass snakes, his loops came out too large, and whole letters ended up backwards or upside down. His father was patient but Tobin was not. Day after day he struggled, blotching and scratching along until the sheer frustration of all made him cry.

‘Perhaps we’d best leave this for later,’ his father conceded at last.

That night Tobin dreamt of burning all the quills in the house, just in case his father changed his mind.

Fortunately, Tobin had no such difficulty learning the sword. Tharin had kept his promise; whenever he was at the keep, they met to practice in the barracks yard or the hall. Using wooden swords and bucklers, Tharin taught Tobin the rudiments of sweeps and blocks, how to attack and how to defend himself. Tobin worked fiercely at these lessons and kept his pledge to the gods and his father in his heart; he would be a great warrior.

It was not a difficult one to keep, for he loved arms practice. When he was little he’d often come with Nari to watch the men spar among themselves. Now they gathered to watch him, leaning out the barracks windows or sitting on crates and log stools in front of the long building. They offered advice, joked with him, and stepped out to show him their own special tricks and dodges. Soon Tobin had as many teachers as he wanted. Tharin sometimes paired him against left-handed Manies or Aladar, to demonstrate how different it was to fight a man who held his weapon on the same side as your own. He couldn’t properly fight any of them, small as he was, but they went through the motions in mock fights and showed him what they could. Koni the fletcher, who was the smallest and youngest of the guard, was closest to him in size. He took a special interest in Tobin, too, for they both liked to make things. Tobin made him wax animals and in return Koni taught him how to fletch arrow shafts and carve twig whistles.

When Tobin had finished his practice for the day the others would shoot with him, or tell stories of the battles they’d fought against the Plenimarans. Tobin’s father was the great hero of these tales, always in the forefront, always the bravest on the field. Tharin figured large as well, and was always at his father’s side.

‘Have you always been with Father?’ he asked Tharin one winter day as they rested between drills. It had snowed the night before. Tharin’s beard was white around his mouth where his breath had frozen.

He nodded. ‘All my life. My father was one of your grandfather’s liegemen. I was his third son, born at Atyion the same year as your father. We were raised together, almost like brothers.’

‘So you’re almost my uncle?’ Tobin said, pleased with the notion.

Tharin tousled Tobin’s hair. ‘As good as, my prince. When I was old enough, I was made his squire and later he made me a knight and granted me my lands at Hawkhaven. We’ve never been separated in battle.’

Tobin pondered all this a moment, then asked, ‘Why don’t I have a squire?’

‘Oh, you’re young for that yet. I’m sure you will when you’re a bit older.’

‘But not one I’ve grown up with,’ Tobin pointed out glumly. ‘No boy has been born here. There aren’t any other children at all. Why can’t we go live at Atyion, like you and Father did? Why do the children in the village point and stare at me?’

Tobin half expected Tharin to put him off, talk of other things the way his father and Nari always did. Instead, he just shook his head and sighed. ‘Because of the demon, I suppose, and because your mama is so unhappy. Your father feels it’s best this way, but I don’t know …’

He looked so sad as he said it that Tobin almost blurted out what had happened that day in the tower. He’d never told anyone about that.

Before he could, however, Nari came to fetch him. He promised himself he would tell Tharin the following day during their ride, but Koni and old Lethis came too, and he didn’t feel right speaking in front of anyone else. Another day or two passed and he forgot about it, but his trust in Tharin remained.

As Cinrin wore on there was little snow, hardly enough to dust the meadow, but the weather turned bitter cold. Tharin kept the men busy hauling firewood from the forest and everyone slept in the hall, where the hearth fire burned night and day. Tobin wore two tunics and his cloak indoors. During the day Cook kept a firepot burning in the toy room so that he could amuse himself there, but even so he could still see his breath on the air.

The river froze hard enough to walk on and some of the younger soldiers and servants went skating, but Nari would only let Tobin watch from the bank.

He was playing alone upstairs one bright morning when he caught the sound of a horse galloping up the frozen road. Soon a lone rider in a streaming red cape came riding up the meadow and across the bridge. Leaning out over the sill, Tobin saw his father come out to greet the man and welcome him inside. He recognized the red and gold badge all too well; this was a messenger from the King and that usually meant only one thing.

The man did not stay long however, and was soon off again down the road. As soon as Tobin heard him clatter across the bridge he hurried downstairs.

His father was by the hearth studying a long scroll weighted down with the King’s seals and ribbons. Tobin sat down beside him and peered at the document, wishing that he could read it. Not that he needed to, to know what the message was. ‘You have to leave again, don’t you, Father?’

‘Yes, and very soon, I’m afraid. Plenimar is taking advantage of the dry winter to raid up the Mycenian coast. The Mycenians have appealed to Erius for aid.’

‘You can’t sail at this time of year! The sea’s too stormy, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, we must ride,’ his father replied absently. He already had that faraway look in his eyes and Tobin knew he was thinking of supplies and horses and men. That would be all he and Tharin would talk about around the hearth at night until they left.

‘Why is Plenimar always making war?’ Tobin asked, angry with these strangers who kept causing trouble and taking his father away. The Sakor festival was only a few weeks away and his father was sure to leave before then.

Rhius looked up at him. ‘You remember the map I showed you, how the Three Lands lie around the Inner Sea?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, they were all one land once, ruled by priest kings called Hierophants. They had their capital at Benshâl, in Plenimar. A long while ago the last Hierophant divided the lands up into three countries, but the Plenimarans never liked that and have always wanted to reclaim all the territory for their own.’

‘When can I go to war with you?’ Tobin asked. ‘Tharin says I’m doing very well at my lessons!’

‘So I hear.’ His father hugged him, smiling in the way that meant no. ‘I’ll tell you what. As soon as you’re big enough to wear my second hauberk, you may come with me. Come, let’s see if it fits.’

The heavy coat of chain hung on a rack in his father’s bedchamber. It was far too big, of course, and puddled around Tobin’s feet, anchoring him helplessly in place. The coif hung over his eyes. Laughing, his father placed the steel cap on Tobin’s head. It felt like he was wearing one of Cook’s soup kettles; the end of the long nasal guard hung below his chin. All the same, his heart beat faster as he imagined the tall, strong man he’d someday be, filling all this out properly.

‘Well, I can see it won’t be much longer before you’ll be needing this,’ his father chuckled. And with that he dragged the rack across the corridor to Tobin’s bedchamber and spent the rest of the afternoon showing him how to keep the mail oiled and ready.

Tobin still clung to the hope that his father and the others could stay until the Sakor festival, but his father’s liegemen, Lord Nyanis and Lord Solari, soon arrived with their men. For a few days the meadow was full of soldiers and their tents, but within the week everyone was gone to Atyion, leaving Tobin and the servants to celebrate without them.

Tobin moped about for a few days, but Nari cajoled him out of his dark mood and sent him off to help deck the house. Garlands of fir boughs were hung over every doorway, and wooden shields painted gold and black were hung on the pillars of the hall. Tobin filled the offering shelf of the household shrine with an entire herd of wax horses for Sakor. The following morning, however, he found them scattered across the rush-covered floor, replaced by an equal number of dirty, twisted tree roots.

This was one of the demon’s favourite tricks, and one Tobin particularly hated, since it upset his father so. The Duke would always go pale at the sight of them. Then he had to burn sweet herbs and say prayers to cleanse the shrine. If Tobin found the roots first, he threw them away and cleaned the shelf with his sleeve so his father wouldn’t know and be sad.

Scowling to himself now, Tobin pitched the whole mess into the hearth fire and went to make new horses.

On Mourning Night Cook extinguished all but one firepot to symbolize Old Sakor’s death and everyone played games of Blindman’s Gambit by moonlight in the deserted barracks yard.

Tobin was hiding behind a hayrack when he happened to glance up at the tower. A faint glimmer of forbidden firelight showed through the shutters. He hadn’t seen his mother in days and that suited him very well. All the same, a shiver danced up the knobs of his spine as he pictured her up there, peering out at him.

Suddenly something heavy knocked him to the ground and a burning pain blossomed in his right cheek, just below his eye. The invisible attacker vanished as quickly as it had come and Tobin blundered out from behind the rack, sobbing with fear and pain.

‘What is it, pet?’ Nari cried, gathering him into her arms.

Too shaken to answer, he pressed his throbbing cheek against her shoulder as she carried him into the hall.

‘Someone strike a light!’ she ordered.

‘Not on Mourning Night …’ the housemaid, Sarilla, said, hovering at her side.

‘Then fetch the reserve coals and blow up enough flame to see by. The child’s hurt!’

Tobin curled tightly against her, eyes shut tight. The pain was subsiding to a dull ache, but the shock of the attack still made him tremble. He heard Sarilla return, then the creak of the firepot lid.

‘There now, pet, let Nari see.’

Tobin lifted his head and let her turn his cheek towards the dim glow. Mynir and the others stood in a circle around them, looking very worried.

‘By the Light, he’s bitten!’ the old steward exclaimed. ‘Go fetch a basin and a clean cloth, girl.’ Sarilla hurried off.

Tobin raised a hand to his cheek and felt sticky wetness there.

Nari took the cloth Sarilla fetched and wiped his fingers and cheek. It came away streaked with blood.

‘Could it have been one of the hounds, Tobin? Perhaps one was sleeping in the hayrack,’ Mynir said anxiously. Dogs couldn’t abide Tobin; they growled and slunk away from him. There were only a few old ones left at the keep now, and Nari wouldn’t let them in the house.

‘That’s no dog bite,’ Sarilla whispered. ‘Look, you can see –’

‘It was the demon!’ Tobin cried. There had been moonlight enough to see that nothing with a proper solid body had been behind that rack with him. ‘It knocked me down and bit me!’

‘Never mind that,’ Nari said soothingly, turning the rag to a clean side and sponging away his tears. ‘Never you mind. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Come to bed now, and Nari will keep that old demon away.’

Tobin could hear the others still whispering to each other as she led him towards the stairs.

‘It’s true, what they say!’ Sarilla was whimpering. ‘Who else does it attack like that? Born cursed!’

‘That’s enough, girl,’ Mynir hissed back. ‘There’s a cold, lonesome road outside for those who can’t keep their mouths shut.’

Tobin shivered. So even here, people whispered.

He slept deeply with Nari close beside him. He woke alone, but well tucked in and could tell by the slant of the sun through the shutters that it was mid-morning.

Disappointment swept away all the terror of the night before. At the dawn of Sakor’s day he and Mynir always woke the household to the new year, beating on the shield gong by the shrine. The steward must have done it without him this year and he hadn’t even heard.

He padded barefoot across the cold floor to the small bronze mirror above his washbasin and inspected his cheek. Yes, there it was; a double line of red teeth marks, curved like the outline of an eye. Tobin bit his forearm just hard enough to leave an impression in the skin and saw that the two marks looked very much the same. Tobin looked back at the mirror, staring into his own blue eyes and wondering what sort of invisible body the demon had. Until now it had only been a dark blur he sometimes saw from the corner of his eye. Now he imagined it as one of the goblins in Nari’s bedtime tales – the ones she said looked like a boy burned all over in a fire. A goblin with teeth like his. Was that what had been lurking at the edges of his world all this time?

Tobin glanced nervously around the room and made the warding sign three times over before he felt brave enough to get dressed.

He was sitting on the bed tying the leather lacings over his trouser legs when he heard the door latch lift. He glanced up, expecting Nari.

Instead, his mother stood framed in the doorway with the doll. ‘I heard Mynir and Cook talking about what happened last night,’ she said softly. ‘You slept late this Sakor’s Day.’

This was the first time in more than year that they’d been alone together. Since that day in the tower.

He couldn’t move. He just sat staring, with the leather lacing biting into his fingers as she walked to him and reached to touch his cheek.

Her hair was combed and plaited today. Her dress was clean and she smelled faintly of flowers. Her fingers were cool and gentle as she smoothed his hair back and examined the swollen flesh around the bite. There were no shadows in her face today that Tobin could see. She just looked sad. Laying the doll aside on the bed, she cradled his face in both hands and kissed him on the brow.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured. Then she pushed his left sleeve back and kissed the wisdom mark on his forearm. ‘We’re living in an ill-starred dream, you and I. I must do better by you, little love. What else do we have but each other?’

‘Sarilla says I’m cursed,’ Tobin mumbled, undone by such tenderness.

His mother’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but her touch remained gentle. ‘Sarilla is an ignorant peasant. You mustn’t ever listen to such talk.’

She took up the doll again, then reached for Tobin’s hand. Smiling, she said, ‘Come, my dears, let’s see what Cook has for our breakfast.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Since that strange Sakor’s Day morning, his mother ceased to be a ghost in her own household.

Her first acts were to dismiss Sarilla and then dispatch Mynir to the town to find a suitable replacement. He returned the following day with a quiet, good-natured widow named Tyra who became her serving maid.

Sarilla’s dismissal frightened Tobin. He hadn’t cared much for the girl, but she’d been a part of the household for as long as he could remember. His mother’s dislike of Nari was no secret, and he was terrified that she might send the nurse away, too. But Nari stayed and cared for him as she always had, without any interference.

His mother came downstairs nearly every morning now, properly dressed with her shining black hair braided or combed in a smooth veil over her shoulders. She even wore some scent that smelled like spring flowers in the meadow. She still spent much of the day sewing dolls by the fire in her bedchamber, but she took time now to look over the accounts with Mynir and came out to the kitchen yard with Cook to meet the farmers and peddlers who called. Tobin came along, too, and was surprised to hear of famine and disease striking in nearby towns. Before now, those were things that always happened far away.

Still, as bright as she was during the day, as soon as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen the light seemed to go out of her, too, and she’d retreat upstairs to the forbidden third floor. This saddened Tobin at first, but he was never tempted to follow and the next morning she would reappear, smiling again.

The demon seemed to come and go with the daylight, too, but it was most active in the dark.

The teeth marks it left on Tobin’s cheek soon healed and faded, but his terror of it did not. Lying in bed beside Nari each night, Tobin could not rid himself of the image of a wizened black form lurking in the shadows, reaching out with taloned fingers to pinch and pull, its sharp teeth bared to bite again. He kept the covers pulled up to his eyes and learned to drink nothing after supper, so that he wouldn’t have to get up in the dark to use the chamber pot.

The fragile peace with his mother held, and a few weeks later Tobin walked into his toy room to find her waiting for him at a new table.

‘For our lessons,’ his mother explained, waving him to the other chair.

Tobin’s heart sank as he saw the parchments and writing materials. ‘Father tried to teach me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t learn.’

A small frown creased her forehead at the mention of his father, but it quickly passed. Dipping a quill into the inkpot, she held it out to him. ‘Let’s try again, shall we? Perhaps I’ll be a better teacher.’

Still dubious, Tobin took it and tried to write his name, the only word he knew. She watched him struggle for a few moments, then gently took back the quill.

Tobin sat very still, wondering if there would be an outburst of some sort. Instead, she rose and went to the windowsill, where a row of his little wax and wooden carvings stood in a row. Picking up a fox, she looked back at him. ‘You made these, didn’t you?’

Tobin nodded.

She examined each of the others: the hawk, the bear, the eagle, a running horse, and the attempt he’d made at modelling Tharin holding a wood splinter sword.

‘Those aren’t my best ones,’ he told her shyly. ‘I give them away.’

‘To whom?’

He shrugged. ‘Everyone.’ The servants and soldiers had always praised his work and even asked for particular animals. Manies had wanted an otter and Laris a bear. Koni liked birds; in return for an eagle he’d given Tobin one of his sharp little knives and found him soft bits of wood that were easy to shape.

As much as Tobin loved pleasing them all, he always saved his best carvings for his father and Tharin. It had never occurred to him to give one to his mother. He wondered if her feelings were hurt.

‘Would you like to have that one?’ he asked, pointing to the fox she still held.

She bowed slightly, smiling. ‘Why, thank you, my lord.’

Returning to her chair, she placed it on the table between them and handed him the quill. ‘Can you draw this for me?’

Tobin had never thought to draw anything when it was so easy to model them. He looked down at the blank parchment, flicking the feathered end of the quill against his chin. Pulling the shape of something from soft wax was easy; to make the same shape real this way was something else again. He imagined a vixen he’d seen in the meadow one morning and tried to draw a line that would capture the shape of her muzzle and the alert forward set of her ears as she’d hunted mice in the grass. He could see her as clearly as ever in his mind, but try as he might he couldn’t make the pen behave. The crabbed scrawl it drew looked nothing like the fox. Throwing the quill down, he stared down at his ink-stained fingers, defeated again.

‘Never mind, love,’ his mother told him. ‘Your carvings are as good as any drawing. I was just curious. But let’s see if we can make your letters easier for you.’

Turning the sheet over, she wrote for a moment, then sanded the page and turned it around for Tobin to see. There, across the top, were three A’s, written very large. She dipped the pen and gave it to him, then rose to stand behind him. Covering his hand with hers, she guided it to trace the letters she’d drawn, showing him the proper strokes. They went over them several times, and when he tried it alone he found that his own scrawls had begun to resemble the letter he was attempting.

‘Look, Mama, I did it!’ he exclaimed.

‘It’s as I thought,’ she murmured as she drew out more practice letters for him. ‘I was just the same when I was your age.’

Tobin watched her as she worked, trying to imagine her as a young girl in braids who couldn’t write.

‘I made little sculptures, too, though not nearly as nice as yours,’ she went on, still writing. ‘Then my nurse taught me doll making. You’ve seen my dolls.’

Thinking of them made Tobin uncomfortable, but he didn’t want to seem rude by not answering. ‘They’re very pretty,’ he said. His gaze drifted to her doll, slumped in an ungainly heap on the chest beside them. She looked up and caught him staring at it. It was too late. She knew what he was looking at, maybe even what he was thinking.

Her face softened in a fond smile as she took the ugly doll onto her lap and arranged its misshapen limbs. ‘This is the best I ever made.’

‘But … well, how come it doesn’t have a face?’

‘Silly child, of course he has a face!’ She laughed, brushing her fingers across the blank oval of cloth. ‘The prettiest little face I’ve ever seen!’

For an instant her eyes were mad and wild again, like they had been in the tower. Tobin flinched as she leaned forward, but she simply dipped the pen again and went on writing.

‘I could shape anything with my hands, but I couldn’t write or read. My father – your grandfather, the Fifth Consort Tanaris – showed me how to teach my hand the shapes, just as I’m showing you now.’

‘I have a grandfather? Will I meet him someday?’

‘No, my dear, your grandmama poisoned him years ago,’ his mother said, busily writing. After a moment she turned the sheet to him. ‘Here now, a fresh row for you to trace.’

They spent the rest of the morning over the parchments. Once he was comfortable with tracing, she had him say the sounds each letter represented as he copied them. Over and over he traced and repeated, until by sheer rote he began to understand. By the time Nari brought midday meal up to them on a tray, he’d forgotten all about his grandfather’s curious fate.

From that day on, they spent part of each morning here as she worked with surprising patience to teach him the letters that had eluded him before. And little by little, he began to learn.

Duke Rhius stayed away the rest of the winter, fighting in Mycena beside the King. His letters were filled with descriptions of battles, written as lessons for Tobin. Sometimes he sent gifts with the letters, trophies from the battlefield: an enemy dagger with a serpent carved around the hilt, a silver ring, a sack of gaming stones, a tiny frog carved from amber. One messenger brought Tobin a dented helmet with a crest of purple horsehair.

Tobin lined the smaller treasures up on a shelf in the toy room, wondering what sort of men had owned them. He placed the helmet on the back of a cloak-draped chair and fought duels against it with his wooden sword. Sometimes he imagined himself fighting beside his father and the King. Other times, the chair soldier became his squire and together they led armies of their own.

Such games left him lonesome for his father, but he knew that one day he would fight beside him, just as his father had promised.

Through the last grey weeks of winter Tobin truly began to enjoy his mother’s company. At first they met in the hall after his morning ride with Mynir. Once or twice she even went with them and he was amazed at how well she sat her horse, riding astride with her long hair streaming free behind her like a black silk banner.

For all her improvement with him, however, her attitude towards the others of the household did not change. She spoke seldom to Mynir and almost never to Nari. The new woman, Tyra, saw to her needs and was kind to Tobin, too, until the demon pushed her down the stairs and she left without even saying goodbye. After that, they made do without a maid.

Most disappointing of all, however, was her continuing coldness towards his father. She never spoke of him, spurned any gifts he sent, and left the hall when Mynir read his letters by the hearth each night to Tobin. No one could tell him why she seemed to hate him so, and he didn’t dare ask his mother directly. All the same, Tobin began to hope. When his father came home and saw how improved she was, perhaps things might ease between them. She’d come to love him, after all. Lying in bed at night, he imagined the three of them riding the mountain trails together, all of them smiling.

CHAPTER NINE

Tobin and his mother were at his lessons one cold morning at the end of Klesin when they heard a rider approaching the keep at a gallop.

Tobin ran to the window, hoping to see his father on his way home at last. His mother followed and rested a hand on his shoulder.

‘I don’t know that horse,’ Tobin said, shading his eyes. The rider was too muffled against the cold to recognize at a distance. ‘May I go see who it is?’

‘I suppose so. Why don’t you see if Cook has anything nice for us in the larder, too? I could do with an apple. Hurry back now. We’re not done for today.’

‘I will!’ Tobin called, dashing off.

There was no one in the hall, so he went through to the kitchen, and saw with delight that it was Tharin being greeted by Nari and the others. His beard had grown long over the winter. His boots were filthy with mud and snow and he had a bandage wrapped around one wrist.

‘Is the war over? Is Father coming home?’ Tobin cried, throwing himself into the man’s arms.

Tharin lifted him up, nose to nose. ‘Yes to both, little prince, and he’s bringing some guests with him. They’re just behind me.’ He set Tobin back on his feet. He was trying to smile, but Tobin read something else in the lines around the man’s eyes as he glanced at Nari and the steward. ‘They’ll be here soon. You run along and play now, Tobin. Cook doesn’t need you underfoot. There’s much to do.’

‘But –’

‘That’s enough,’ Nari said sharply. ‘Tharin will take you out for a ride later. Off with you now!’

Tobin wasn’t used to being dismissed like this. Feeling sulky, he dawdled back towards the hall. Tharin hadn’t even said who Father was bringing. Tobin hoped it was Lord Lyanis or Duke Archis. He liked them the best of all his father’s liegemen.

He was halfway across the hall when he remembered that his mother had asked for an apple. They couldn’t very well scold him for coming back for that.

The kitchen door was open and as he approached, he heard Nari say, ‘What is the King doing coming here, after all these years?’

‘For the hunting, or so he claims,’ Tharin replied. ‘We were on our way home the other day, nearly in sight of Ero, when Rhius happened to mention the fine stag hunting we have here. The King took it into his head for an invitation. He’s struck with these strange whims more often now …’

The King! Tobin forgot about apples as he scurried back upstairs, thinking instead of the little wooden figure in the box – The Present King, Your Uncle. Tobin wondered excitedly if he’d be wearing his golden crown, and if he’d let Tobin hold Ghërilain’s sword.

His mother was still by the window. ‘Who was that on the road, child?’

Tobin ran to the window but couldn’t see anyone coming yet. He flopped down in his chair, panting for breath. ‘Father sent Tharin ahead – the King – the King is coming! He and Father are –’

‘Erius?’ Ariani shrank back against the wall, clutching the doll. ‘He’s coming here? Are you certain?’

The demon’s cold, angry presence closed in around Tobin, so strong it felt hard to breathe. Parchments and inkpots flew from the table and scattered across the dusty floor.

‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ he whispered, suddenly afraid of the wild look in his mother’s eye.

With a choked cry, she lunged for him and half-dragged, half carried him from the room. The demon raged around them, blowing up the dry rushes into whirling clouds and knocking the lamps from their hooks. She paused in the corridor, looking wildly around as if seeking some way to escape. Tobin tried not to whimper as her fingers dug into his arm.

‘No, no, no!’ she muttered. The rag doll’s blank, dingy face peeped out at Tobin from under her arm.

‘Mama, you’re hurting me. Where are we going?’

But she wasn’t listening to him. ‘Not again. No!’ she whispered, pulling him towards the third-floor stairs.

Tobin tried to pull away but she was too strong for him. ‘No, Mama, I don’t want to go up there!’

‘We must hide!’ she hissed, gripping him by both shoulders now. ‘I couldn’t last time. I would have. By the Four, I would have but they wouldn’t let me! Please, Tobin, come with Mama. There’s no time!’

She pulled him up the stairs and along the corridor to the tower stairs. When Tobin tried to pull away this time, unseen hands shoved him forward from behind. The door flew open before them, slamming back against the wall so hard that one of the panels splintered.

Panicked birds flapped and screeched around them as she wrestled Tobin up the stairs to the tower room. This door slammed shut behind them and the wine table flew across the room, narrowly missing Tobin’s shoulder as it smashed across the doorway, blocking his escape. Dusty tapestries flew from the walls and the shuttered windows banged wide. Sunlight flooded in on all sides, but the room remained dim and deathly cold. Outside they could hear a great company of riders now, coming up the road.

Ariani released Tobin and paced frantically around the room, weeping with one hand pressed over her mouth. Tobin cowered by the broken table. This was the mother he knew best – hurtful and unpredictable. The rest of it had all been a lie.

‘What are we to do?’ she wailed. ‘He’s found us again. He can find us anywhere. We must escape! Lhel, you bitch, you promised me …’

The jangle of harness grew louder outside and she dashed to the window overlooking the front court. ‘Too late! Here he is. How can he? How can he?’

Tobin crept up beside her, just close enough to peek down over the sill. His father and a group of strangers in scarlet cloaks were dismounting. One of them wore a golden helmet that shown in the sun like a crown.

‘Is that the King, Mama?’

She yanked him back, clutching him so close that his face was pressed against the doll. It had a sour, musty smell.

‘Mark him,’ she whispered, and he could feel her trembling. ‘Mark him, the murderer! Your father brought him here. But he won’t have you this time.’

She dragged him to the opposite window, the one that overlooked the mountains to the west. The demon overturned another table, spilling mouthless dolls across the floor. His mother whirled at the noise, and Tobin’s head hit the corner of the stone sill hard enough to daze him. He felt himself falling, felt his mother pulling at him again, felt sunlight and wind on his face. Opening his eyes, he found himself hanging out over the sill, looking down at the frozen river.

Just like the last time she’d brought him here.

But this time she was crouched on the sill beside him, tear-stained face turned to the mountains as she grasped the back of Tobin’s tunic and tried to pull him out.

Overbalancing, he thrashed back wildly, grasping for anything – the window casing, his mother’s arm, her clothing – but his feet were already tipping up over his head. He could see the dark water moving like ink beneath the ice. For an instant his mind skittered on ahead; would the ice break when he landed on it?

Then his mother screamed and tumbled past him, skirts and wild black hair billowing around her as she fell. For an instant they looked one another straight in the eye and Tobin felt as if a bolt of lightning passed between them, joining them just for a second eye to eye, heart to heart.

Then someone had Tobin by the ankle, dragging him roughly back into the room. His chin struck the outer edge of the sill and he spun down into darkness with the taste of blood in his mouth.

Rhius and the King were about to dismount when they heard a shriek echo behind the keep.

‘By the Flame! Is it that demon of yours?’ Erius exclaimed, looking around in alarm.

But Rhius knew the demon had no voice. Pushing past the other riders, he ran out the gate, seeing already in his mind’s eye what he should have anticipated, what he would see again and again in his dreams for the rest of his life: Ariani at an upper window that should have been tightly shuttered, catching the glint of her brother’s golden helm at the bottom of the meadow, imagining …

He stumbled along the riverbank, following the keep wall around a final corner. There he stopped, and let out an anguished cry at the sight of bare white legs splayed awkwardly between two boulders at the river’s edge. He ran to her and tugged down her skirts, which had blown up around her head as she’d fallen. Looking up, he saw the tower bulking over them. There were no other windows on this side but the single square one directly overhead. The shutters were open.

A rock had broken her back, and her head had struck the ice and split. Black hair and red blood spread out around her face in a terrible corona. Her beautiful eyes were open and fixed in an expression of anguish and outrage; even in death she accused him.

Recoiling from that gaze, Rhius staggered back into the arms of the King.

‘By the Flame,’ Erius gasped, staring down at her. ‘My poor sister, what have you done?’

Rhius clutched his fists against his temples, resisting the urge to pull back and strike the man in the face.

‘My king,’ he managed, sinking down beside her. ‘Your sister is dead.’

Tobin remembered falling. As consciousness gradually returned he became aware of a hard floor under him and instinctively pressed his belly to it, too terrified to move. Somewhere nearby echoing voices were talking all at once but he couldn’t understand the words. He didn’t know where he was or how he had got there.

Opening his heavy eyelids at last, he realized that he was in the tower room. It was very quiet here.

The demon was with him. He’d never felt it so strongly. But there was something different about it, though he couldn’t say just what.

Tobin felt very strange, like he was in a dream, but the pain in his chin and mouth told him he wasn’t. When he tried to remember how he’d gotten up here his mind went all fuzzy and loud, as if his head was full of bees.

His cheek hurt where it was pressed to the stone floor. He turned his head the other way and found himself looking into the blank face of his mama’s doll, which lay just inches from his outstretched hand.

Where could she be? She never left the doll behind, not ever.

Father won’t let me keep it, he thought. But suddenly he wanted it more than anything in the world. It was ugly and he’d hated it all his life, but he reached out for it anyway, remembering his mama saying so fondly, This one is the best I ever made. It was almost as if she’d just spoken the words aloud.

Where is she?

The buzzing in his head grew louder as he sat up and hugged the doll. It was small and coarse and lumpy, but solid and comforting all the same. Looking around dizzily, he was surprised to see himself squatting by a broken table across the room. But this Tobin was naked and filthy and angry and his face was streaked with tears. This other self held no doll; he still covered his ears with both hands to block out something neither of them wanted to remember.

Nari cried out once then clamped a hand over her mouth as the Duke staggered into the hall with Ariani’s broken body in his arms. Nari could see at once that she was dead. Blood ran from the woman’s ears and mouth; her open eyes were fixed as stones.

Tharin and the King followed close behind. Erius kept reaching out to touch his sister’s face, but Rhius wouldn’t let him. He got as far as the hearth before his knees buckled. Sinking down, he gathered her closer and buried his face in her black hair.

It was probably the first time since Tobin’s birth that he’d been able to embrace her, thought Nari.

Erius sat heavily on one of the hearth benches, then looked up at her and those of his entourage who’d followed. His face was grey and his hands shook.

‘Get out,’ he ordered, not focusing on anyone in particular. He didn’t have to. Everyone scattered except Tharin. The last Nari saw of him, he was still standing a little way off, watching the two men with no expression at all.

Nari was halfway up the stairs before it occurred to her that Tobin had been at lessons with his mother that morning.

She took the remaining stairs two at a time and ran down the corridor. Her heart skipped a painful beat as she took in the smashed lamps on the floor. Tobin’s bedchamber and toy room were both empty. The writing things they’d been using were strewn across the floor and one of the chairs lay on its side.

Fear closed a fist around Nari’s heart. ‘O Illior, let the child be safe!’

Rushing back into the corridor, she saw the door leading to the third floor standing open.

‘Maker’s mercy, no!’ she whispered, hurrying up.

Upstairs, torn hangings were strewn around the dank corridor. They seemed to catch at Nari’s feet as she ran to the broken tower door and on up the narrow stairs beyond. She hadn’t been welcome here when Ariani lived; even now she felt like a trespasser. What she saw as she reached the top of the stairs drove out all such doubts.

The tower room was choked with broken furniture and dismembered dolls. All four windows stood open, but the room was dark and fetid. She knew that smell.

‘Tobin, are you here, child?’

Her voice hardly seemed to penetrate the small space, but she heard clearly enough the sound of ragged breathing and followed it to the corner furthest from the fatal window. Half hidden under a fallen tapestry, Tobin sat curled against the wall, his thin arms locked around his knees, staring wide-eyed at nothing.

‘Oh, my poor pet!’ Nari gasped, falling to her knees beside him.

The child’s face and tunic were streaked with blood, making her fear at first that Ariani had tried to cut his throat, that he would die here in her arms, that all the pain and lies and waiting had been for nothing.

She tried to pick him up but Tobin pulled away and curled tighter into his corner, his eyes still vacant.

‘Tobin, pet, it’s me. Come now, let’s go down to your room.’

The child didn’t move or acknowledge her presence. Nari settled herself closer beside him and stroked his hair. ‘Please, pet. This is a nasty cold place to be. Come down to the kitchen for a nice cup of Cook’s good soup. Tobin? Look at me, child. Are you hurt?’

Heavy footsteps pounded up the tower stairs and Rhius burst in with Tharin on his heels.

‘Did you –? O, thank the Light!’ Rhius stumbled over shattered furniture to kneel beside her. ‘Is he badly hurt?’

‘No, just very frightened, my lord,’ Nari whispered, still stroking Tobin’s hair. ‘He must have seen …’

Rhius leaned in and cupped Tobin’s chin gently, trying to raise the boy’s head. Tobin jerked away.

‘What happened? Why did she bring you here?’ Rhius asked softly.

Tobin said nothing.

‘Look around you, my lord!’ Nari stroked Tobin’s black hair back from his face to examine the large bruise blossoming there. The blood on his face and clothes came from a crescent-shaped cut on the point of his chin. It wasn’t large, but it was deep. ‘She must have seen the King ride in with you. It’s the first time since … well, you know how she was.’

Nari looked more closely into Tobin’s colourless face. No tears, but his eyes were wide and fixed, as if he were still watching whatever had happened here.

He didn’t resist when his father lifted him in his arms and carried him down to his bedchamber. But he didn’t relax either, and remained curled in a tight ball. There was no question of getting his soiled clothing off yet, so Nari took off his shoes, bathed his face, and tucked him into bed with extra quilts. The Duke knelt beside the bed and took one of Tobin’s hands in his, murmuring softly to him and watching the pale face on the pillow for any response.

Turning, Nari saw Tharin standing just inside the door, pale as milk. She went to him and took his cold hand in hers.

‘He’ll be fine, Tharin. He’s just badly frightened.’

‘She threw herself from the tower window,’ Tharin whispered, still staring at Rhius and the boy. ‘She took Tobin with her – look at him, Nari. Do you think she tried –?’

‘No mother could do such a thing!’ In her heart, however, she wasn’t so certain.

They remained there for some time, still as a mummer’s tableau. At last Rhius got to his feet and ran a hand absently down the front of his bloodied tunic. ‘I must attend the King. He means to take her back to the royal tomb at Ero.’

Nari knotted her hands angrily in her apron. ‘For the child’s sake, shouldn’t we wait?’

Rhius gave her a look so filled with bitterness that the words withered on her tongue. ‘The King has spoken.’ Wiping again at his tunic, he left the room. With a last sad look at the sleeping child, Tharin followed.

Nari pulled a chair up next to the bed and patted Tobin’s thin shoulder through the quilts. ‘My poor dear little one,’ she sighed. ‘They won’t even let you mourn her!’

Stroking the sleeping child’s brow, she imagined what it would be like to bundle him up and carry him far away from this house of misery. Closing her eyes, she imagined raising him as her own in some simple cottage, far from kings and ghosts and madwomen.

Tobin heard wailing and huddled up more tightly as it grew louder. Gradually, the sobbing voice changed to the sound of a strong east wind buffeting itself against the walls of the keep. He could feel the weight of heavy blankets pressing down on him, but he was still so cold.

Opening his eyes, he blinked at the small night lamp guttering on the stand by his bed. Nari was asleep in a chair beside it.

She’d put him to bed in his clothes. Slowly uncurling his cramped body, Tobin rolled to face the wall and pulled the rag doll out of his tunic.

He didn’t know why he had it. Something bad had happened, something so bad that he couldn’t make himself think what it was.

My mama is …

He squeezed his eyes shut and hugged the doll tightly.

If I have the doll, then my mama is …

He didn’t recall hiding the doll under his clothes, didn’t recall anything really, but he hid it again now under the covers, pushing it all the way down the bed with his feet, knowing he must find a better place very soon. He knew it was wicked to want it, shameful for a boy who was going to be a warrior to need a doll, but he hid it all the same, full of shame and longing.

Perhaps his mama had given it to him, after all.

Slipping back into a broken doze, he dreamed over and over again of his mother passing the doll to him. Every time she was smiling as she told him that it was the best she ever made.

CHAPTER TEN

Tobin was made to stay in bed for two days. At first he slept much of the time, lulled by the sound of the rain pelting steadily against the shutters and the groan and grumble of the river ice breaking up.

Sometimes, half awake, he thought his mama was in the room with him, standing at the foot of his bed with her hands clasped tight the way she had when she saw the King riding up the hill. He’d be so certain she was there that he could even hear her breathing, but when he opened his eyes to look she wasn’t.

The demon was, though. Tobin could feel it hovering around him all the time now. At night he pressed closer to Nari, trying to pretend he didn’t feel it staring at him. Yet powerful as it was, it didn’t touch him or break anything.

By afternoon on the second day he was awake and restless. Nari and Tharin sat with him during the day, telling stories and bringing him little toys as if he were a baby. The other servants came too, to pat his hand and kiss his brow.

Everyone came except Father. When Tharin explained at last that he’d had to go back to Ero with the King for a little while Tobin’s throat ached, but he couldn’t find the tears to cry.

No one spoke of his mother. He wondered what had happened to her after she’d gone to the tower, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. In fact, he didn’t feel like speaking at all, and so he didn’t, not even when the others coaxed him. Instead, he played with his wax or burrowed under the blankets, waiting for everyone to go away. The few times that he was left to himself, he took the rag doll from its new hiding place behind the wardrobe and just held it, looking down at the blank circle of cloth where its face should be.

Of course he has a face. The prettiest …

But it wasn’t pretty at all. It was ugly. Its stuffing was lumpy and clumped inside and he could feel little sharp bits like splinters in the uneven legs and arms. Its thick muslin skin was dingy and much patched. He did discover something new, though; a thin, shiny black cord tied tightly around its neck, so tight that it didn’t show unless he bent the head sharply back.

Ugly as it was, Tobin thought he could smell the flower scent his mother had worn during those last happy weeks on it, and that was enough. He guarded the doll jealously and, when he was finally allowed up on the third day, he moved it to the bottom of the old chest in the toy room.

The weather had turned cold again and sleet was hissing down outside. The toy room was dim and dreary in this light. There was dust on the floor and on the flat roofs of the city’s wooden block houses; the little wooden people lay scattered about the Palatine like the plague victims his father had written of. In the corner, the Plenimaran chair warrior seemed to mock him and he took it apart, throwing the cloak into the empty wardrobe and putting the helmet away in the chest.

Wandering over to the writing table by the window, Tobin gingerly touched the things he and his mother had shared – the parchments, sand shaker, scraping blades, and quills. They’d laboured through almost half the alphabet. Sheets of new letters in her bold, square hand lay waiting for his practice. He picked one up and sniffed it, hoping to catch her scent here, too, but it only smelled of ink.

The sleet had given way to early spring rain when his father came back a few days later. He looked strange and sad and no one seemed to know what to say to him, not even Tharin. After supper that night Rhius sent everyone out of the hall, then took Tobin onto his lap by the fire. He was quiet for a long time.

After a while he raised Tobin’s bruised chin and looked into his face. ‘Can’t you speak, child?’

Tobin was shocked to see tears trickling down into his father’s black and silver beard. Don’t cry! Warriors don’t cry, he thought, frightened to see his brave father weeping. Tobin could hear the words in his head, but he still couldn’t make any sounds come out.

‘Never mind, then.’ His father pulled him close and Tobin rested his head against that broad chest, listening to the comforting thump of his father’s heart and grateful not to have to watch those tears fall. Perhaps that’s why his father had sent everyone away; so they wouldn’t see.

‘Your mother … she wasn’t well. Sooner or later, you’ll hear people say she was mad, and she was.’ He paused and Tobin felt him sigh. ‘What she did in the tower … it was the madness. Her mother had it, too.’

What had happened in the tower? Tobin closed his eyes, feeling strange all over. The bees had started buzzing in his head again. Did making dolls drive you mad? He remembered the toy maker he’d seen in town. He hadn’t noticed anything wrong with her. Had his grandmama made dolls? No, she’d poisoned her husband …

Rhius sighed again. ‘I don’t think your mama meant to hurt you. When she was in her bad spells, she didn’t know what she was doing. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

Tobin didn’t understand at all, but he nodded anyway, hoping that would satisfy his father. He didn’t like thinking about his mother now. When he did, he seemed to see two different people and that made him feel afraid. The mean, distant woman who had the ‘bad, spells’ had always been frightening. The other – the one who had shown him how to trace letters, who rode astride with her hair flying in the wind and smelled like flowers – she was a stranger who’d come to visit for a little while, then abandoned him. In Tobin’s mind, she had disappeared from the tower like one of her birds.

‘Someday you’ll understand,’ his father said again. He pulled Tobin up and looked at him again. ‘You are very special, my child.’

The demon, who’d been so quiet, snatched a tapestry from the wall across the room and ripped it violently up the middle, snapping the wooden rod that held it. The whole thing fell to the floor with a clatter, but his father paid it no mind. ‘You’re too young yet to think about it, but I promise you that you will be a great warrior when you’re grown. You’ll live in Ero and everyone will bow to you. Everything I’ve done, Tobin, I’ve done for you, and for Skala.’

Tobin burst into tears and pressed his face against his father’s chest again. He didn’t care if he ever lived in Ero or any of the rest of it. He just didn’t want to see this strange new look on his father’s face. It reminded him too much of his mother.

The one with bad spells.

The next day Tobin gathered up the parchments and quills and inkpots and put them away in an unused chest in his bedroom, then placed the doll under them, hidden in an old flour sack he found in the kitchen yard. It was risky, he knew, but it made him feel a little better to have the doll close by.

After that he could look into his own shadowed eyes in the mirror by his washstand and mouth my mama is dead without feeling anything at all.

Whenever his mind strayed to why she was dead or what had happened that day in the tower, however, his thoughts would scatter like a handful of spilled beans and a hot red ache would start under his breastbone, burning so bad that he could hardly breathe. Better not to think of it at all.

The doll was a different matter. He didn’t dare let anyone know about it, but he couldn’t leave it alone. The need to touch it woke him in the middle of the night and drew him to the chest. Once he fell asleep on the floor and woke just in time to hide it from Nari as she awakened the next morning.

After that he sought out a new hiding place for it, settling at last on a chest in one of the ruined guest chambers upstairs. No one seemed to care anymore if he came up there. His father spent most of his time shut away in his chamber. Now that most of the servants had run away or been dismissed, Nari did more work around the keep during the daytime, cleaning and helping Cook in the kitchen. Tharin was there as always, but Tobin didn’t feel like riding or shooting, or even practicing at swords.

His one companion during the long, dreary days that spring was the demon. It followed him everywhere, and lurked in the shadows of the dusty upstairs room when he visited the doll. Tobin could feel it watching him. It knew his secret.

Tobin was pushing a little stick person around the streets of his city a few days later when Tharin appeared in the doorway.

‘How goes life in Ero today?’ Tharin sat down beside him and helped set some of the clay sheep back on their feet in their market enclosure. There were raindrops in his short blond beard, and he smelled like fresh air and leaves. He didn’t seem to mind that Tobin said nothing. Instead, he carried on the conversation for both of them, just as if he knew what Tobin was thinking. ‘You must be missing your mother. She was a fine lady in her day. Nari tells me she brightened up these past few months. I hear she was teaching you your letters?’

Tobin nodded.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Tharin paused to arrange a few sheep more to his liking. ‘Do you miss her?’

Tobin shrugged.

‘By the Flame, I do.’

Tobin looked up in surprise and Tharin nodded. ‘I watched your father court her. He loved her then, and she him. Oh, I know it must not have seemed so to you, but that’s how it was before. They were the handsomest pair in all Ero – him a warrior in his prime, and her the fair young princess, just come into womanhood.’

Tobin fiddled. with a toy ship. He couldn’t imagine his parents acting any differently towards one another than they ever had.

Tharin got up and held out a hand to Tobin. ‘Come on, then, Tobin, you’ve moped around inside long enough. The rain’s stopped and the sun’s shining. It’s fine shooting weather. Go fetch your boots and cloak. Your weapons are downstairs where you left them.’

Tobin let himself be pulled up and followed the man out to the barracks yard. The men were lounging in the sun and greeted Tobin with false heartiness.

‘There he is at last!’ grey-bearded Laris said, swinging Tobin up on his shoulder. ‘We’ve missed you, lad. Is Tharin putting you back to your lessons?’

Tobin nodded.

‘What’s that, young prince?’ Koni chided playfully, giving Tobin’s foot a shake. ‘Speak up, won’t you?’

‘He will when he’s ready,’ said Tharin. ‘Fetch the Prince’s sword and let’s see how much he remembers.’

Tobin saluted Tharin with his blade and took his position. He felt stiff and clumsy all over as they began the forms, but by the time he reached the final set of thrusts and guards, the men were cheering him on.

‘Not bad,’ said Tharin. ‘But I want to see you out here every day again. The time will come when you’ll be glad of all these exercises. Now let’s see how your bow arm is.’

Ducking into the barracks, he returned with Tobin’s bow and practice arrows, and the sack of shavings they used for a target. He tossed the sack out into the middle of the yard, about twenty paces away.

Tobin checked his string, then fitted an arrow to it and pulled. The arrow flew high and awry and landed in the mud near the wall.

‘Mind your breathing and spread your feet a little,’ Tharin reminded him.

Tobin took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he drew again. This time the arrow struck home, skewering the bag and knocking it several feet.

‘That’s the way. And again.’

Tharin only allowed him three arrows at practice. After he shot them all, he was to think about how to improve his shooting as he collected them.

Before he could do so this time, Tharin turned to Koni. ‘Do you have those new arrows fletched for the Prince?’

‘Right here.’ Koni reached behind the barrel he was sitting on and brought out a quiver with half a dozen new shafts fletched with wild goose feathers. ‘Hope they bring you luck, Tobin,’ he said, presenting them to the boy.

Pulling one out, Tobin saw that it had a small round stone for a point head. He grinned up at Tharin; these were hunting arrows.

‘Cook has a hankering to cook some rabbit or grouse,’ Tharin told him. ‘Want to help me find supper? Good. Laris, go ask the Duke if he’d like to join a hunting party. Manies, got Gosi saddled.’

Laris hurried off, only to return alone a few moments later shaking his head.

Tobin hid his disappointment as best he could as he rode up the muddy mountain road with Tharin and Koni. The trees were still bare, but a few green shoots were already pushing up through last year’s leaves. The first hint of true spring was on the air, and the forest smelled of rotting wood and wet earth. When they reached what Tharin judged to be a promising stretch of woods, they dismounted and set off along a faint, winding trail.

This was the first time Tobin had ever travelled so far into the forest. The road was soon lost from sight behind them and the trees grew thicker, the ground rougher. With only their own careful footsteps to break the quiet, he could hear the eerie squeak of trees rubbing together, and the patter of little creatures in the undergrowth. Best of all, the demon hadn’t followed. He was free.

Tharin and Koni showed him how to call the curious grouse into the open, mimicking its funny puk puk puk call. Tobin pursed his lips as they did, but only a faint popping sound came out.

A few birds answered Tharin’s call, poking their heads from the undergrowth or hopping up on logs to see what was going on. The men let Tobin shoot at all of them and he finally hit one, knocking it off a fallen tree.

‘Well done!’ said Tharin, clapping him on the shoulder proudly. ‘Go on and gather your kill.’

Still clutching his bow, Tobin hurried to the tree and peered over it.

The grouse had fallen over on its breast, but it wasn’t dead. Its striped head was twisted to the side and it stared up at him with one black eye. Its tail fan beat weakly as he bent over it, but the bird couldn’t move. A drop of bright blood welled at the tip of its beak, red as …

Tobin heard a strange buzzing, like bees, but it was too early in the year. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the damp ground, looking up into Tharin’s worried face as the man chafed his wrists and chest.

‘Tobin? What’s wrong with you, lad?’

Puzzled, Tobin sat up and looked around. There was his bow lying on the damp ground, but no one seemed upset about that. Koni was sitting on the fallen tree beside him, holding the dead grouse up by its feet.

‘You got him, Prince Tobin. You knocked old Master Grouse right off his log. What did you go and faint for, eh? Are you sick?’

Tobin shook his head. He didn’t know what had happened. Reaching for the bird, he spread its tail and admired the fan of barred feathers.

‘It was a fine shot, but I think perhaps that’s enough for today,’ said Tharin.

Tobin shook his head again, more vigorously this time, and jumped up to show them how well he was.

Tharin hesitated a moment, then laughed. ‘All right then, if you say so!’

Tobin shot another grouse before dusk and by the time they started down the road everyone had forgotten all about his silly faint, even Tobin.

Over the next few weeks the days grew longer and they spent more time in the forest. Spring came to the mountains, clothing the trees in fresh new green and pulling tender shoots and colourful mushrooms up through the brown loam. Does came out into the forest clearing to teach their spotted fawns to graze and Tharin would not shoot them, just grouse and rabbits.

They stayed out all day sometimes, cooking their kills on sticks over a fire when the hunting was good, eating the bread and cheese Cook sent along when it wasn’t. Tobin didn’t care either way, so long as it meant being outdoors. He’d never had so much fun.

Tharin and Koni taught Tobin how to keep his bearings in the trees using the sun’s position over his shoulder. They came across a nest of wood snakes in a rock pile, still sluggish from their winter sleep and Koni explained how to tell if they were vipers or not by the shape of their heads. Tharin showed him the tracks and spoor of the creatures that shared this forest. There were mostly signs of rabbits and fox and stag. As they walked along a game trail one day, however, Tharin suddenly bent down next to patch of soft earth.

‘See that?’ he said, pointing out a print broader than his hand. It looked something like a hound’s, but rounder. ‘That’s a catamount. This is why you play in the courtyard, my lad. A big she cat with cubs to feed would consider you a good day’s catch.’

Seeing Tobin’s look of alarm, he chuckled and ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘You’re not likely to see one in daylight, and as summer comes they’ll move back up into the mountains. But you don’t ever want to be out here alone at night.’

Tobin took in all these lessons eagerly, and made a few observations of his own: the inviting gap beneath a fallen tree, a sheltered circle of rocks, a shadowy hole beneath a boulder – all fine hiding spots, big enough for the troublesome doll. For the first time, he wondered what it would be like to walk here alone and explore these hidden places by himself.

His father hunted with them now and then, but he was too quiet for Tobin to feel comfortable around him. Most days he stayed shut up in his room, just as Tobin’s mother had.

Tobin would steal to his father’s door and press his ear to it, aching for things to be the way they had been. Before.

Nari found him there one afternoon and knelt down, putting her arms around him. ‘Don’t fret,’ she whispered, stroking his cheek. ‘Men do their grieving alone. He’ll soon be right again.’

But as wildflowers burst out to carpet the new grass in the meadow, Rhius remained a shadow in the house.

By the end of Lithion the roads were dry enough to drive the cart to market. On market day, Cook and Nari took Tobin with them into Alestun, thinking it would be treat for him to ride Gosi beside the cart. He shook his head, trying to tell Nari that he didn’t want to go, but she clucked her tongue at him, insisting he’d enjoy the ride.

There were a few new lambs and kids in the meadows around the town, and the fields of young oats and barley looked like soft woollen blankets thrown on the ground. Wild crocus grew thickly at the edges of the road and they stopped to gather handfuls of these for the shrine.

Alestun held no charm for Tobin now. He ignored the other children and never allowed himself to look at any dolls. He added his flowers to the fragrant piles around the pillar of Dalna and waited stoically for the adults to finish their business.

They arrived home that evening to find Rhius and the others in the courtyard, packing their horses to leave. Tobin slid off Gosi’s back and ran to his father.

Rhius. took him by the shoulders. ‘I’m needed at court. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

‘So will I, little prince,’ Tharin promised, looking sadder than his father did to be leaving.

I need you here! Tobin wanted to cry out. But words still would not come, and he had to turn away so they wouldn’t see his tears. By nightfall they were gone, leaving him lonelier than ever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Iya and Arkoniel spent the late winter months just outside Ilear, guesting with a wizard named Virishan. This woman had no vision except her own, which drove her to seek out and shelter god-touched children among the poor. She had fifteen young students, many of them already severely crippled or battered by the ignorant folk they’d been born to. Most of them would never amount to much as wizards, but what humble powers they’d retained were cherished and coaxed forth under Virishan’s patient tutelage. Iya and Arkoniel gave what help they could in return for shelter, and Iya left Virishan one of her pebbles when they departed.

When the weather cleared they made their way to Sylara, where Iya had arranged passage south. They reached it just before sundown and encountered an unusual number of people on the road, all streaming into the little port.

‘What’s going on?’ Arkoniel asked a farmer. ‘Is it a fair?’

The man eyed their silver amulets with distrust. ‘No, a bonfire stoked with your kind.’

‘The Harriers are there?’ asked Iya.

The man spat over his shoulder. ‘Yes, Mistress, and they’ve brought a gang of traitors who dared speak against the King’s rule. You’d do best to steer clear of Sylara today.’

Iya reined her horse to the side of the road and Arkoniel followed. ‘Perhaps we should take his advice,’ he muttered, looking nervously around at the crowd. We’re strangers here, with no one to vouch for us.’

He was right, of course, but Iya shook her head. ‘The Lightbearer has put an opportunity in our path. I want to see what they do, while we’re still unknown to them. And that’s something we should make certain of, too. Take off your amulet.’

Leaving the road, she led him to a small oak grove on a nearby hill. Here, protected by a circle of stones and sigils, they left their amulets and every other accoutrement that marked them as wizards except the leather bag.

Trusting that their plain travelling garb would excite no suspicion, they rode on to Sylara.

Even without his amulet, Arkoniel couldn’t help glancing around nervously as they entered the town. Could these Harriers recognize a wizard merely by his powers? Some of the rumours they’d picked up invested the white clad wizards with powers beyond the normal range. If so, they’d chosen an odd place to show them off. Sylara was nothing but a rambling, dirty harbour town.

The waterfront was already crowded with spectators. Arkoniel could hear jeers and catcalls echoing across the water as they made their way down the muddy street to the shore.

The crowd was too thick to get through, so Iya paid a taverner to watch from a squalid little upper room that overlooked the waterfront. A broad platform had been set up here, built between two stone jetties. Soldiers wearing dark grey tabards with the outline of a flying hawk stitched in red across the breast stood two deep on the landward side. Arkoniel counted forty in all.

Behind them stood a long gibbet and a knot of wizards by two large wooden frames. These last looked like upended bedframes, but larger.

‘White robes,’ Iya muttered, looking at the wizards.

‘Niryn’s fashion. He had on a white robe the night Tobin was born.’

Six people already dangled from the horizontal pole of the gibbet. The four men hung limp at the end of their halters; one still wore the robes of a priest of Illior. The remaining two, a woman and a boy, were so small that their weight was not enough to snap their necks. Bound hand and foot, they bucked and twisted wildly.

Fighting for life, or death? Arkoniel wondered, horrified. They reminded him perversely of a butterfly he’d watched emerge from its winter chrysalis – suspended beneath a branch by a bit of silk, it had twitched and jiggled inside the shiny brown casing. These two looked like that, but their struggle would not end in wings and colour.

At last some soldiers grabbed their legs and hauled them down to snap their necks. A few cheers went up among the crowd, but most of the onlookers had fallen silent.

Arkoniel clutched the window frame, already nauseous, but there was worse to follow.

The wizards had remained motionless near the wooden frames all this time. As soon as the last of the hanged went still, they spread out in a line across the platform, revealing the two naked, kneeling men they’d been shielding with their circle. One was an old man with white hair, the other was young and dark. Both wore thick iron bands around their necks and wrists.

Arkoniel squinted down at the Harrier wizards and let out a gasp of dismay. He couldn’t make out faces at this distance, but he recognized the forked red beard of the man standing closest to the frames.

‘That’s Niryn himself!’

‘Yes. I didn’t realize there were so many, but I suppose there would have to be … Those prisoners are wizards. See those iron bands? Very powerful magic, that. They cloud the mind.’

Soldiers pulled the prisoners to their feet and bound them spread-eagled on the frames with silver cables. Now Arkoniel could see the complex spell patterns that covered each man’s chest. Before he could ask Iya what these signified she let out a groan and clutched his hand.

When the victims were secured the wizards flanked them in two rows and began their incantations. The old man fixed his gaze stoically on the sky, but his companion panicked, screaming and imploring the crowd and Illior to save him.

‘Can’t we do –’ Arkoniel staggered as a blinding ache struck him behind the eyes. ‘What is it? Do you feel it?’

‘It’s a warding,’ Iya whispered, pressing a hand to her brow. ‘And a warning to any of us who might be watching.’

The crowd had gone completely silent now. Arkoniel could hear the chanting growing louder and louder. The blur of words was unintelligible, but the throbbing in his head grew stronger and spread to his chest and arms until his heart felt as if it was being squeezed between heavy stones. He slowly slid down to his knees in front of the window, but could not look away.

Both prisoners began to shake violently, then shrieked as white flames sprang from their flesh to engulf them. There was no smoke. The white fire burned with such intensity that within a few moments nothing was left on the frames but shrivelled black hands and feet dangling from the silver bonds. Iya was whispering hoarsely beside him, and he joined her in the prayer for the dead.

When it was over, Iya slumped down on the narrow bed and wove a spell of silence around them with shaking fingers. Arkoniel remained where he was under the window, unable to move. For a long time neither could speak.

At last Iya whispered, ‘There was nothing we could have done. Nothing. I see their power now. They’ve banded together and joined their strength. The rest of us are so scattered …’

‘That, and the King’s sanction!’ Arkoniel spat out. ‘He’s his mad mother’s son after all.’

‘He’s worse. She was insane, where he is ruthless, and intelligent enough to turn wizards against their own kind.’

Fear kept them in the tiny room until nightfall, when the tavern keeper shooed them out to make way for a whore and her cully.

The taverns were open and there were still many people on the street, but none ventured out onto the platform. Torches had been left burning there. Arkoniel could see the bodies on the gibbet swinging in the night breeze. The frames, however, were gone.

‘Should we go see if there’s anything to be learned?’

‘No.’ Iya drew him hastily away. ‘It’s too dangerous. They might be watching.’

Slipping out of town by the darkest alleys, they rode back to the grove and gathered their tools. But when Arkoniel reached for the amulets, Iya shook her head. They left them where they lay and rode on without speaking until the town was far behind them.

‘Eight wizards could do that, Arkoniel, just eight!’ Iya burst out at last, voice shaking with fury. ‘And there was nothing we could do against them. I begin to see more clearly now. The Third Orëska the Oracle revealed to me in my vision – it was a great confederation of wizards in a shining palace of their own at the heart of a great city. If eight are enough to carry out the evil we witnessed here, what could a hundred accomplish for good? And who could stand against us?’

‘Like in the Great War,’ said Arkoniel.

Iya shook her head. ‘That union lasted only as long as the war, and in the face of the most horrible conflict and upheaval. Think what we could do with peace and time enough to work! Imagine – the knowledge you and I have collected in our travels combined with that of a hundred other wizards? And think of Virishan’s poor children? Imagine them saved sooner and brought up in such a place, with dozens of teachers instead of one, and whole libraries of wisdom to draw from?’

‘But instead, that same power is being used to divide us against ourselves.’

Iya stared into the distance, her face unreadable in the starlight. ‘Famine. Disease. Raiders. Now this. Sometimes, Arkoniel, I see Skala like a sacrificial bull at Sakor-tide. But instead of a clean stroke of the sword to kill it, it’s being stuck over and over with little knives until it weakens and falls to its knees.’ She turned grimly to Arkoniel. ‘And there’s Plenimar just across the water, scenting blood like a wolf.’

‘It’s almost as if Niryn has had the same vision, but turned it on its head,’ Arkoniel murmured. ‘Why would the Lightbearer do that?’

‘You saw the priest on the gibbet, my boy. Do you really think it’s Illior who guides him?’

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