Chapter 12

   Cazaril’s eyes pulled open against the glue that rimmed their lids. He stared up without comprehension at a ragged gray rift in the sky, framed in black. He licked crusted lips, and swallowed. He lay on his back on hard boards—the bracing frame inside Fonsa’s Tower. Recollection of the night came rushing back to him.
   I live.
   Therefore, I have failed.
   His right hand, reaching blindly about him, encountered an inert little mound of cold feathers, and recoiled. He lay panting in remembered terror. A cramp gnawed his gut, a dull ache. He was shivering, damp, chilled through, as cold as any corpse. But not a corpse. He breathed. And so, likewise, must Dondo dy Jironal, on… was this his wedding morning?
   As his eyes slowly adjusted, he saw he was not alone. Lined up along the crude rail that bounded the workmen’s platform, a dozen or more crows perched in the shadows, utterly silent, nearly still. They all seemed to be staring down at him.
   Cazaril touched his face, but no wounds bled there—no bird had tried an experimental peck yet. “No,” he whispered shakily. “I am not your breakfast. I’m sorry.” One rustled its wings uneasily, but none of them flapped away at the sound of his voice. Even when he sat up, they shifted about but did not take to the air.
   All was not drowned blackness since the night before—fragments of a dream coursed through his memory. He had dreamed that he was Dondo dy Jironal, roistering with his friends and their whores in some torchlit and candle-gilded hall, the board gleaming with silver goblets, his thick hands glittering with rings. He had toasted the blood-sacrifice of Iselle’s maidenhood with obscene jests, and drunk deeply… then he’d been taken with a cough, a scratching in his throat that needled rapidly to pain. His throat had swelled, closing shut, choking him, cutting off his air, as if he were being strangled from the inside out. The flushed faces of his companions had whirled about him, their laughter and derision turning to panic as it was forced upon them by his purpling livid features that he was not clowning. Cries, wine cups knocked over, shocked fearful hisses of Poison! No last words squeezed through that inward-strangled throat, past that thickening tongue. Just silent convulsions, laboring heart racing, viselike pain in the chest and head, black clouds shot with red boiling up in his darkening vision…
   It was only a dream. If I live, so does he.
   Cazaril lay back down upon the hard boards, curled around his bellyache, for half the turning of a glass, exhausted, despairing. The row of crows kept watch over him in unnerving silence. It gradually came to him that he would have to go back. And he hadn’t planned a return route.
   He might climb down the bracing frames… but that would leave him standing in the bottom of a bricked-up tower atop a years-long accumulation of guano and detritus, crying to be let out. Could anyone even hear him through the thick stone? Would they take his muffled voice for an echo of the crows’ caws, or the howling of a ghost?
   Up, then? Back the way he’d come in?
   He stood at last, pulling himself up by the rail—even now, the crows did not fly away—and stretched his cramped and aching muscles. He had to physically shove a couple of crows from the railing to clear a place to stand; they flapped off indignantly, but still with that uncanny silence. He rucked up the brown gown, tucked hem in belt. When he balanced on the rail, it was a short reach to the tower’s rim. He grasped, heaved. His arms were strong, and his body was lean. One hideous moment of consciousness of the air below his bare kicking legs, and he was up over the stones and out onto the slates. The fog was so thick, he could barely see down into the courtyard below. Dawn, or just after dawn, he guessed; the lesser denizens of the castle would already be awake, this tag-end-of-autumn morning. The crows followed him solemnly, flapping up one by one through the gap in the roof to find perches on stone or slate. Their heads turned to track his progress.
   He had a vision of them, mobbing him to spoil his next leap from the tower up to the main block, revenging their comrade. And then another vision, as his feet scrambled and his arms shook, of letting go, letting it all go, and falling to his welcome death on the stones below. A wrenching cramp coiled in his gut, driving out his breath in a gasp.
   He would have let go then, except for the sudden terror that he might survive the fall, leg-smashed and crippled. Only that drove him up over the eaves to the slates of the main block’s roof. His muscles cracked as he lifted himself. His hands were scraped raw by their frantic gripping.
   He was not sure, in this paling fog, which of the dozen dormer windows erupting out of the slates he’d emerged from last night. Suppose someone had come along and closed and locked it, since? He inched slowly along, trying each one. The crows followed, stalking along the gutters, flapping up in brief hops, their clawed feet slipping on the slates, too, at times. The mist beaded, glistening, on their feathers, and in his beard and hair, silver sequins on his black vest-cloak. The fourth casement window swung open to his scrabbling fingers. It was the unused lumber room. He slid through, and slammed it upon his black-liveried escort just in time to stop a couple of the birds from flying in after him. One bounced off the glass with a thud.
   He crept down the stairs to his floor without encountering any early servants, stumbled into his chamber, and closed the door behind him. Tight-bladdered and cramping, he used his chamber pot; his bowels voided frightening blood clots. His hands trembled as he washed them in his basin. When he went to fling the bloodied wash water out into the ravine, the opening window dislodged two silent, sentinel crows from the stone sill. He closed it tight again and locked the latch.
   He weaved to his bed like a man drunk on his feet, fell into it, and wrapped his coverlet around himself. As his shivering continued, he could hear the sounds of the castle’s servants carrying water or linens or pots, feet plodding up stairs and down corridors, an occasional low-voiced call or order.
   Was Iselle being waked now, on the floor above, to be washed and attired, bound in ropes of pearls, chained in jewels, for her dreadful appointment with Dondo? Had she even slept? Or wept all night, prayed to gods gone deaf? He should go up, to offer what comfort he could. Had Betriz found another knife? I cannot bear to face them. He curled tighter and shut his eyes in agony.
   He was still lying in bed, gasping in breaths perilously close to sobs, when booted steps sounded in the corridor, and his door banged open. Chancellor dy Jironal’s voice snarled, “I know it’s him. It has to be him!”
   The steps stalked across his floorboards, and his coverlet was snatched from him. He rolled over and stared up in surprise at dy Jironal’s steel-bearded, panting face glaring down at him in astonishment.
   “You’re alive!” cried dy Jironal. His voice was indignant.
   Half a dozen courtiers, a couple of whom Cazaril recognized as Dondo’s bravos, crowded dy Jironal’s shoulder to gape at him. They had their hands upon their swords, as if prepared to correct this mistaken animation of Cazaril’s at dy Jironal’s word. Roya Orico, clad in a nightgown, a shabby old cloak clutched about his neck by his fat fingers, stood at the back of the mob. Orico looked… strange. Cazaril blinked, and rubbed his eyes. A kind of aura surrounded the roya, not of light, but of darkness. Cazaril could see him perfectly clearly, so he could not call it a cloud or a fog, for it obscured nothing. And yet it was there, moving as the man moved, like a trailing garment.
   Dy Jironal bit his lip, his eyes boring into Cazaril’s face. “If not you—who, then? It has to be someone… it has to be someone close to… that girl! The foul little murderess!” He spun around and stormed out, curtly motioning his men to follow him.
   “What’s afoot?” Cazaril demanded of Orico, who had turned to waddle after them.
   Orico looked back over his shoulder, and spread his hands in a wide, bewildered shrug. “Wedding’s off. Dondo dy Jironal was murdered around midnight last night—by death magic.”
   Cazaril’s mouth opened; nothing came out but a weak, “Oh.” He sank back, dazed, as Orico shuffled out after his chancellor.
   I don’t understand.
   If Dondo is slain, and yet I live… I cannot have been granted a death miracle. And yet Dondo is slain. How?
   How else but that someone had beaten Cazaril to the deed?
   Belatedly, his wits caught up with dy Jironal’s.
   Betriz?
   No, oh no…!
   He surged out of bed, fell heavily to the floor, scrambled to his feet, and staggered after the crowd of enraged and baffled courtiers.
   He arrived at his invaded office antechamber to hear dy Jironal bellowing, “Then bring her out, that I may see!” to a disheveled and frightened-looking Nan dy Vrit, who nevertheless blocked the doorway to the inner rooms with her body as though ready to defend a drawbridge. Cazaril nearly fainted with relief when Betriz, frowning fiercely, came up behind Nan’s shoulder. Nan was in her nightdress, but Betriz, rumpled and weary-looking, was still wearing the same green wool gown she’d had on last night. Had she slept? But she lives, she lives!
   “Why do you make this uncouth roaring here, my lord?” Betriz demanded coldly. “It is unseemly and untimely.”
   Dy Jironal’s lips parted in his beard; he was clearly taken aback. After a moment, his teeth snapped closed. “Where is the royesse, then? I must see the royesse.”
   “She is sleeping a little, for the first time in days. I’ll not have her disturbed. She’ll have to exchange dreams for nightmare soon enough.” Betriz’s nostrils flared with open hostility.
   Dy Jironal’s back straightened; his breath hissed in. “Wake her? Can you wake her?”
   Dear gods. Might Iselle have…? But before this new panic closed down Cazaril’s throat, Iselle herself appeared, pushed between her ladies, and walked coolly forward into the antechamber to face dy Jironal.
   “I do not sleep. What do you want, my lord?” Her eyes passed over her brother Orico, hovering at the edge of the mob, and dismissed him with contempt, returning to dy Jironal. Her brows tensed in wariness. No question but that she understood whose power forced her to her unwelcome wedding.
   Dy Jironal stared from woman to woman, all indisputably alive before him. He wheeled around and stared again at Cazaril, who was blinking at Iselle. Aura flared around her, too, just like Orico, but hers was more disturbed, a churning of deep darkness and luminous pale blue, like the aurora he’d once seen in the far southern night sky.
   “Whoever,” grated dy Jironal. “Wherever. I’ll find the filthy coward’s corpse if I have to search all of Chalion.”
   “And then what?” inquired Orico, rubbing his unshaven jowls. “Hang it?” He returned a raised-brow look of irony for dy Jironal’s driven glare; dy Jironal whirled and stamped back out. Cazaril stepped aside to let the entourage pass, his gaze flicking covertly from Orico to Iselle, comparing the two… hallucinations? No one else here pulsed like that. Maybe I’m sick. Maybe I’m mad.

   “Cazaril,” said Iselle in urgent bewilderment as soon as the men had cleared the outer door—Nan hurried to shut it behind the invaders—“what has happened?”
   “Someone killed Dondo dy Jironal last night. By death magic.”
   Her lips parted, and her hands clasped together like a child just promised its heart’s desire. “Oh! Oh! Oh, this is welcome news! Oh, thank the Lady, oh, thank the Bastard—I will send such gifts to his altar—oh, Cazaril, who—?”
   At Betriz’s look of wild surmise in his direction, Cazaril grimaced. “Not me. Obviously.” Though not for want of trying.
   “Did you—” Betriz began, then pressed her lips closed. Cazaril’s grimace tilted in appreciation of her delicacy in not inquiring, out loud before two witnesses, if he’d plotted a capital crime. He hardly needed to speak; her eyes blazed with speculation.
   Iselle paced back and forth, almost bouncing with relief. “I think I felt it,” she said in a voice of great wonder. “In any case, I felt something… midnight, around midnight, you said?” No one had said so here. “An easing of my heart, as if something in me knew my prayers were heard. But I never expected this. I’d asked the Lady for my death…” She paused, and touched her hand to her broad white forehead. “Or what She willed.” Her voice slowed. “Cazaril… did I… could I have done this? Did the goddess answer me so?”
   “I… I don’t see how, Royesse. You prayed to the Lady of Spring, did you not?”
   “Yes, and to Her Mother of Summer, both. But mostly to Spring herself.”
   “The Great Ladies grant miracles of life, and healing. Not death.” Normally. And all miracles were rare and capricious. Gods. Who knew their limits, their purposes?
   “It didn’t feel like death,” Iselle confessed. “And yet I was eased. I took a little food and didn’t throw it up, and I slept for a time.”
   Nan dy Vrit nodded confirmation. “And glad I was of it, my lady.”
   Cazaril took a deep breath. “Well, dy Jironal will solve the mystery for us, I’m sure. He’ll hunt down every person to die last night in Cardegoss—in all of Chalion, I have no doubt—until he finds out his brother’s murderer.”
   “Bless the poor soul who put his vile plans in such disarray.” Formally, Iselle touched forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, spreading her fingers wide. “And at such a cost. May the Bastard’s demons grant him what mercy ever they can.”
   “Amen,” said Cazaril. “Let’s just hope dy Jironal finds no close comrades or family to wreak his vengeance upon.” He wrapped his arms around his belly, which was cramping again.
   Betriz came near him and stared him in the face, her hand going out but then falling back hesitantly. “Lord Caz, you look dreadful. Your skin is the color of cold porridge.”
   “I’m… ill. Something I ate.” He took a breath. “So we prepare today not for grievous wedding but joyous funeral. I trust you ladies will contain your glee in public?”
   Nan dy Vrit snorted. Iselle motioned her to silence, and said firmly, “Solemn piety, I promise you. And if it is thanksgiving and not sorrow in my heart, only the gods shall know.”
   Cazaril nodded, and rubbed his aching neck. “Usually, a victim of death magic is burned before nightfall, to deny the body, the divines say, to uncanny things that might want to move in. Apparently, such a death invites them. It will be a terribly hurried funeral for such a high lord. They’ll have to assemble all before dark.” Iselle’s coruscating aura was making him almost nauseated. He swallowed, and looked away from her.
   “Then, Cazaril,” said Betriz, “for pity’s sake go lie down till then. We’re safe, all unexpectedly. You need do no more.” She took him by his cold hands, clasped them briefly, and smiled in wry concern. He managed a wan return smile, and retreated.


* * *

   He crawled back into his bed. He had lain there perhaps an hour, bewildered and still shivering, when his door swung open and Betriz tiptoed in to stare down at him. She laid a hand across his clammy forehead.
   “I was afraid you’d taken a fever,” she said, “but you’re chilled.”
   “I was, um… chilled, yes. Must have thrown off my blankets in the night.”
   She touched his shoulder. “Your clothes are damp through.” Her eyes narrowed. “When was the last time you ate?”
   He could not remember. “Yesterday morning. I think.”
   “I see.” She frowned at him a moment longer, then whirled and went out.
   Ten minutes later, a maid arrived with a warming pan full of hot coals and a feather quilt; a few minutes after that, a manservant with a can of hot water and firm instructions to see him washed and put back to bed in dry nightclothes. This, in a castle gone mad with the disruption of every courtier and lady at once trying to prepare themselves for an unscheduled public appearance of utmost formality. Cazaril questioned nothing. The servant had just finished tucking him into the hot dry envelope of his sheets when Betriz reappeared with a crockery bowl on a tray. She propped his door open and seated herself on the edge of his bed.
   “Eat this.”
   It was bread soaked in steaming milk, laced with honey. He accepted the first spoonful in bemused surprise, then struggled up on his pillows. “I’m not that sick.” Attempting to regain his dignity, he took the bowl from her; she made no objection, as long as he continued to eat. He discovered he was ravenous. By the time he’d finished, he’d stopped shivering.
   She smiled in satisfaction. “Your color’s much less ghastly now. Good.”
   “How fares the royesse?”
   “Vastly better. She’s… I want to say, collapsed, but I don’t mean overcome. The blessed release that comes when an unbearable pressure is suddenly removed. It’s a joy to look upon her.”
   “Yes. I understand.”
   Betriz nodded. “She’s resting now, till time to dress.” She took the empty bowl from him, set it aside, and lowered her voice. “Cazaril, what did you do last night?”
   “Nothing. Evidently.”
   Her lips thinned in exasperation. But what use was it to lay the burden of his secret upon her now? Confession might relieve his soul, but it would put hers in danger in any subsequent investigation that demanded oath-sworn testimony from her.
   “Lord dy Rinal had it that you paid a page to catch you a rat last night. It was that news that sent Chancellor dy Jironal pelting up to your bedchamber, dy Rinal told me. The page said you’d claimed you wanted it to eat.”
   “Well, so. It’s no crime for a man to eat a rat. It was a little memorial feast, for the siege of Gotorget.”
   “Oh? You just said you’d eaten nothing since yesterday morning.” She hesitated, her eyes anxious. “The chambermaid also said there was blood in your pot that she emptied this morning.”
   “Bastard’s demons!” Cazaril, who had slid down into his covers, struggled up again. “Is nothing sacred to castle gossip? Can’t a man even call his chamber pot his own here?”
   She held out a hand. “Lord Caz, don’t joke. How sick are you?”
   “I had a bellyache. It’s eased off now. A passing thing. So to speak.” He grimaced, and decided not to mention the hallucinations. “Obviously, the blood in the pot was from butchering the rat. And the bellyache just what I deserved, for eating such a disgusting creature. Eh?”
   She said slowly, “It’s a good story. It all hangs together.”
   “So, there.”
   “But Caz—people will think you’re strange.”
   “I can add them to the collection along with the ones who think I rape girls. I suppose I need a third perversion, to balance me properly.” Well, there was being suspected of attempting death magic. That could balance him over a gallows.
   She sat back, frowning deeply. “All right. I won’t press you. But I was wondering…” She wrapped her arms around herself, and regarded him intently. “If two—theoretical—persons were to attempt death magic on the same victim at the same time, might they each end up… half –dead?”
   Cazaril stared back—no, she didn’t look sick—and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Given all the various vain attempts that people have made to compel the gods with death magic, if it could happen that way, it surely would have before now. The Bastard’s death demon is always portrayed in the Temple carvings with a yoke over his shoulders and two identical buckets, one for each soul. I don’t think the demon can choose differently.” Umegat’s words came back to him, I’m afraid that’s just the way it works. “I’m not even sure the god can choose differently.”
   Her eyes narrowed further. “You said, if you weren’t back this morning, not to worry for you, or look for you. You said you’d be all right. You also said, if the bodies are not burned properly, terrible uncanny things happen to them.”
   He shifted uncomfortably. “I made provision.” Of sorts.
   “What provision? You sneaked away, leaving none who cared for you to know where to look or even whether to pray!”
   He cleared his throat. “Fonsa’s crows. I climbed over the roof to Fonsa’s Tower to, ah, say my prayers last night. If, if things had, ah, come out differently, I figured they’d clear up the mess, just as their brethren clean up a battlefield, or a stray sheep lost over a cliff.”
   “Caz aril!” she cried in indignation, then hastily lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Caz, that’s, that’s… you mean to tell me you crawled off all alone, to die in despair, expecting to leave your body to be eaten by… that’s horrid!”
   He was startled to see tears welling in her eyes. “Hey, now! It’s not so bad. Right soldierly, I thought.” His hand began to reach for the drops on her cheeks, then hesitated and fell back to his coverlet.

   Her fists clenched in her lap. “If you ever do anything like that again without telling me—telling anyone—I’ll, I’ll… slap you silly!” She knuckled her eyes, rubbed her face, and sat up, her spine stern. Her voice returned abruptly to a conversational tone. “The funeral has been set for an hour before sunset, at the temple. Do you mean to go, or will you stay in bed?”
   “If I can walk at all, I’m going. I mean to see it through. Every enemy of Dondo’s will be there, if only to prove they didn’t do it. It’s going to be a remarkable event to behold.”


* * *

   The funeral rites at the temple of Cardegoss were far more heavily attended for Dondo dy Jironal than they had been for poor lonely dy Sanda. Roya Orico himself, soberly garbed, led the mourners from the Zangre walking in loose procession down the hill. Royina Sara was carried in a sedan chair. Her face was as blank as though carved from an ice block, but her raiment was a shout of color, festival gear from three holidays jumbled together, draped and spangled with what looked like half the jewels from her jewel case. Everyone pretended not to notice.
   Cazaril eyed her covertly, but not for the sake of her bizarrely chosen clothing. It was the other garment, the shadow-cloak, visible-invisible twin to Orico’s, that tugged and twisted at his mind’s eye. Teidez wore another such dark aura, blurring along with his steps down the cobbled streets. Whatever the black mirage was, it seemed to run in the family. Cazaril wondered what he would see if he could look upon Dowager Royina Ista right now.
   The archdivine of Cardegoss himself, in his five-colored robes, conducted the ceremony, so crowded it was held in the temple’s main courtyard. The procession from the Jironals’ palace placed the bier with Dondo’s body down a few paces in front of the gods’ hearth, a round stone platform with a pierced copper tent raised over it on five slim pillars to protect the holy fire from the elements. A shadowless gray light filled the court as the cold wet day sank toward foggy evening. The air was hazy violet with a clashing mйlange of the incenses burned in the prayers and rites of cleansing.
   Dondo’s stiff body, laid out on the bier and banked around with flowers and herbs of good fortune and symbolic protection—too late, Cazaril thought—had been dressed in the blue-and-white robes of his holy generalship of the Daughter’s military order. The sword of his rank lay unsheathed upon his chest, his hands clasped over the hilt. His body did not seem particularly swollen or misshapen—dy Rinal whispered the gruesome rumor that it had been tightly wrapped with linen bands before being dressed. The corpse’s face was hardly more puffy than from one of Dondo’s morning hangovers. But he would have to be burned with his rings still on. They’d never pry them from those sausage fingers without the aid of a butcher’s knife.
   Cazaril had managed the walk down from the Zangre without stumbling, but his stomach was cramping again now, unpleasantly distended against his belt. He took what he hoped was an unobtrusive place standing behind Betriz and Nan in the crowd from the castle. Iselle was pulled away to stand between the chancellor and Roya Orico in the position of a chief mourner that her brief betrothal bequeathed her. She was still shimmering like an aurora in Cazaril’s aching eyes. Her face was stern and pale. The sight of Dondo’s body had apparently drained her of any impulse to an unseemly display of joy.
   Two courtiers stepped forth to deliver seemingly heartfelt eulogies upon Dondo that Cazaril entirely failed to relate to the erratic real life of the man cut down here. Chancellor dy Jironal was too overcome to speak very long, though whether with grief or rage or both it was hard to tell beneath that steely surface. He did announce a purse of a thousand royals reward for information leading to the identification of his brother’s murderer, the only overt reference made this day to the abrupt manner of Dondo’s death.
   It was clear that a large purse had been laid down on the temple altar. What seemed all the dedicats, acolytes, and divines of Cardegoss were massed in robed blocks to chant the prayers and responses in both unison and harmony, as though extra holiness were to be obtained by volume. One of the singers, in the green-robed squad of altos, caught Cazaril’s inner eye. She was middle-aged and dumpy, and she glowed like a candle seen through green glass. She looked up once directly at Cazaril, then away, back to the harried divine who directed their orisons.
   Cazaril nudged Nan and whispered, “Who is that woman acolyte on the end of the second row of the Mother’s singers, do you know?”
   She glanced over. “One of the Mother’s midwives. I believe she’s said to be very good.”
   “Oh.”
   When the sacred animals were led forth, the crowd grew attentive. It was by no means clear which god would take up the soul of Dondo dy Jironal. His predecessor in the Daughter’s generalship, though a father and grandfather, had been claimed at once by the Lady of Spring in whose long service he had died. Dondo himself had served in the Son’s military order as an officer in his youth. And he was known to have sired a scattering of bastards, as well as two scorned daughters by his late first wife, left to be raised by country kin. And—unspoken thought—as his soul had been carried off by the Bastard’s death demon, it had surely passed through the Bastard’s hands. Might those hands have closed upon it?
   The acolyte-groom carrying the Daughter’s jay stepped forth at Archdivine Mendenal’s gesture, and raised her wrist. The bird bobbed, but clung stubbornly to her sleeve. She glanced up at the archdivine, who frowned and gave her a little nod toward the bier. Her nostrils flared in faint protest, but she obediently stepped forward, wrapped both hands around the jay, and set it firmly down upon the corpse’s chest.
   She lifted her hands. The jay lifted its tail, dropped a blob of guano, and shot skyward, trailing its embroidered silk jesses, screeching piercingly. At least three men in Cazaril’s hearing choked and hissed but, at the sight of the chancellor’s set teeth, did not laugh aloud. Iselle’s eyes blazed like cerulean fires, and she cast her glance demurely downward; her aura roiled. The acolyte stepped back, head tipped up, following the bird’s flight anxiously. The jay came to roost on the ornaments at the top of one of the ring of porphyry pillars circling the court, and screeched again. The acolyte glared at the archdivine; he waved her hastily away, and she bowed and retreated to go try to coax the bird back to her hand.
   The Mother’s green bird also refused to leave its handler’s arm. Archdivine Mendenal did not repeat the previous disastrous experiment, but merely nodded her back to her place in the circle of creatures.
   The Son’s acolyte dragged the fox by its chain to the edge of the bier. The animal whined and snapped, its black claws scrabbling noisily on the tiles as it struggled to get away. The archdivine waved him back.
   The stout gray wolf, sitting on its haunches with its great red tongue lolling out of its unmuzzled jaws, growled deeply as its gray-robed handler suggestively lifted its silver chain. The vibrato resonated around the stone courtyard. The wolf lowered itself to its belly on the tiles, and stretched out its paws. Gingerly, the acolyte lowered his hands and stood down; his glance at the archdivine shouted silently, I’m not touching this. Mendenal didn’t argue.
   All eyes turned expectantly to the Bastard’s white-robed acolyte with her white rats. Chancellor dy Jironal’s lips were pressed flat and pale with his impotent fury, but there was nothing he could do or say. The white lady took a breath, stepped forward to the bier, and lowered her sacred creatures to Dondo’s chest to sign the god’s acceptance of the unacceptable, disdained, discarded soul.
   The moment her hands released the silky white bodies, both rats sprang away to either side of the bier as though shot from catapults. The acolyte dodged right and left as though unable to decide which sacred charge to chase after first, and flung up her hands. One rat scurried for the safety of the pillars. The other scampered into the crowd of mourners, which stirred around its track; a couple of ladies yipped nervously. A murmur of astonishment, disbelief, and dismay ran through the array of courtiers and ladies, and a stream of shocked whispers.
   Betriz’s was among them. “Cazaril,” she said anxiously, crowding back under his arm to hiss in his ear, “what does it mean? The Bastard always takes the leftovers. Always. It is His, His… it’s His job. He can’t not take a severed soul—I thought He already had.”
   Cazaril was stunned, too. “If no god has taken up Lord Dondo’s soul… then it’s still in the world. I mean, if it’s not there, then it has to be here. Somewhere…” An unquiet ghost, a revenant spirit. Sundered and damned.
   The ceremonies stopped dead as the archdivine and Chancellor dy Jironal retreated around the hearth for a low-voiced conversation, or possibly argument, from the rise and chop of swallowed words that drifted back to the curious crowd waiting. The archdivine popped around the hearth to call an acolyte of the Bastard to him; after a whispered conference, the white-garbed young man departed at a run. The gray sky overhead was darkening. A subdivine, in a burst of initiative, struck up an unscheduled hymn from the robed singers to cover the gap. By the time they’d finished, dy Jironal and Mendenal had returned.
   Still they waited. The singers embarked on another hymn. Cazaril found himself wishing he’d used Ordol’s Fivefold Pathway for something other than a prop to cover his naps; alas, the book was still back in Valenda. If Dondo’s spirit had not been taken by the servant-demon back to its master, where was it? And if the demon could not return except with both its soul-buckets filled, where was the sundered soul of Dondo’s unknown murderer now? For that matter, where was the demon? Cazaril had never read much theology. For some reason now obscure to him, he’d thought it an impractical study, suited only to unworldly dreamers. Till he’d waked to this nightmare.
   A scritching noise from his boot made him look down. The sacred white rat was stretching itself up his leg, its pink nose quivering. It rubbed its little pointed face rapidly against Cazaril’s shin. He bent and picked it up, meaning to return it to its handler. It writhed ecstatically in his cupped hands, and licked his thumb.
   To Cazaril’s surprise, the wheezing acolyte returned to the temple courtyard leading the groom Umegat, dressed as usual in the tabard of the Zangre. But it was Umegat who stunned him.
   The Roknari shone with a white aura like a man standing in front of a clear glass window at a sea dawn. Cazaril shut his eyes, though he knew he didn’t see this with his eyes. The white blaze still moved behind his lids. Over there, a darkness that wasn’t darkness, and two more, and an unrestful aurora, and off to the side, a faint green spark. His eyes sprang open. Umegat stared straight at him for the fraction of a second, and Cazaril felt flensed. The roya’s groom moved on, to present himself with a diffident bow to the archdivine, and step aside for some whispered conference.
   The archdivine called the Bastard’s acolyte to him, who had recaptured one of her charges; she gave up the rat to Umegat, who cradled it in one arm and glanced toward Cazaril. The Roknari groom trod over to him, humbly excusing himself through the crowd of courtiers, who barely glanced at him. Cazaril could not understand why they did not open before that bow wave of his white aura like the sea before a spinnaker-driven ship. Umegat held out his open hand. Cazaril blinked down stupidly at it.
   “The sacred rat, my lord?” prompted Umegat gently.

   “Oh.” The creature was still sucking on his fingers, tickling them. Umegat pulled the reluctant animal off Cazaril’s sleeve as though removing a burr and just prevented its mate from springing across to take its place. Juggling rats, he walked quietly back to the bier, where the archdivine waited. Was Cazaril losing his mind—don’t answer that —or did Mendenal barely keep himself from bowing to the groom? The Zangre’s courtiers seemed to see nothing unreasonable in the archdivine calling in the roya’s most expert animal-handler in this awkward crisis. All eyes were locked on the rats, not on the Roknari. The unreason was all Cazaril’s.
   Umegat held the creatures in his arms and whispered to them, and approached Dondo’s body. A long moment, while the rats, though quiescent, made no move to claim Dondo for their god. At last Umegat backed away, and shook his head apologetically to the archdivine, and gave up the rats to their anxious young woman.
   Mendenal prostrated himself between the hearth and the bier for a moment of abject prayer, but rose again soon. Dedicats were bringing out tapers to light the wall lanterns around the darkening courtyard. The archdivine called forth the pallbearers to take up the bier to Dondo’s waiting pyre, and the singers filed out in procession.
   Iselle returned to Betriz and Cazaril. She rubbed the back of her hand across eyes rimmed with dark circles. “I don’t think I can bear any more of this. Dy Jironal can see to his brother’s roasting. Take me home, Lord Caz.”
   The royesse’s little party split off from the main body of mourners, not the only wearied persons to do so, and exited through the front portico into the damp dusk of the autumn day.
   The groom Umegat, waiting with his shoulders propped against a pillar, shoved himself upright, came toward them, and bowed. “My lord dy Cazaril. Might I have a brief word?”
   It almost surprised Cazaril that the aura did not reflect off the wet pavement at his feet. He gave Iselle an apologetic salute and went aside with the Roknari. The three women waited at the edge of the portico, Iselle leaning on Betriz’s arm.
   “My lord, at your earliest convenience, I beg that I might have some private audience with you.”
   “I’ll come to you at the menagerie as soon as I have Iselle settled.” Cazaril hesitated. “Do you know that you are lit like a burning torch?”
   The groom inclined his head. “So I have been told, my lord, by the few with eyes to see. One can never see oneself, alas. No mundane mirror reflects this. Only the eyes of a soul.”
   “There was a woman inside who glowed like a green candle.”
   “Mother Clara? Yes, she just spoke to me of you. She is a most excellent midwife.”
   “What is that, that anti-light, then?” Cazaril glanced toward where the women lingered.
   Umegat touched his lips. “Not here, if you please, my lord.”
   Cazaril’s mouth formed a silent Oh. He nodded.
   The Roknari swept him a lower bow. As he turned to pad quietly into the gathering gloom, he added over his shoulder, “You are lit like a burning city.”

Chapter 13

   The royesse was so drained by the ordeal of Lord Dondo’s odd funeral that she was stumbling by the time they had climbed to the castle again. Cazaril left Nan and Betriz making sensible plans to put Iselle straight to bed and have the servants bring a plain dinner to their chambers. He made his way back out of the main block to the Zangre’s gates. Pausing, he glanced out over the city to see if a column of smoke was still rising from the temple. He fancied he saw a faint orange reflection on the lowering clouds, but it was too dark by now to make out anything more.
   His heart leapt in shock at the sudden flapping around him as he crossed the stable yard, but it was only Fonsa’s crows, mobbing him again. He fended off two that attempted to land on his shoulder, and tried to wave them away, hissing and stamping. They hopped back out of reach, but would not leave, following him, conspicuously, all the way to the menagerie.
   One of Umegat’s undergrooms was waiting by the wall lanterns bracketing the aisle door. He was a little, elderly, thumbless man, who gave Cazaril a wide smile that showed a truncated tongue, accounting for a welcome that was a kind of mouthed hum, the meaning made clear by his friendly gestures. He slid the broad door back just enough to admit Cazaril before him, and shooed away the crows who tried to follow, scooping the most persistent one back out the gap with a flip of his foot before closing it.
   The groom’s candlestick, shielded by a blown-glass tulip, had a thick handle made for him to wrap his fingers around. By this light he guided Cazaril down the menagerie’s aisle. The animals in their stalls snuffled and thumped as Cazaril passed, pressing to the bars to stare at him from the shadows. The leopard’s eyes shone like green sparks; its ratcheting growl echoed off the walls, not low and hostile, but pulsing in a weirdly inquiring singsong.
   The menagerie’s grooms had their sleeping quarters on half the building’s upper floor, the other half being devoted to the storage of fodder and straw. A door stood open, candlelight spilling from it into the dark corridor. The undergroom knocked on the frame; Umegat’s voice responded, “Good. Thank you.”
   The undergroom gave way with a bow. Cazaril ducked through the door to see a narrow but private chamber with a window looking out over the dark stable yard. Umegat pulled the curtain across the window and bustled around a rude pine table that held a brightly patterned cloth, a wine jug and clay cups, and a plate with bread and cheese. “Thank you for coming, Lord Cazaril. Enter, please, seat yourself. Thank you, Daris, that will be all.” Umegat closed the door. Cazaril paused on the way to the chair Umegat’s gesture had indicated to stare at a tall shelf crammed with books, including titles in Ibran, Darthacan, and Roknari. A bit of gold lettering on a familiar-looking spine on the top shelf caught his eye, The Fivefold Pathway of the Soul. Ordol. The leather binding was worn with use, the volume, and most of its company, free of dust. Theology, mostly. Why am I not surprised?
   Cazaril lowered himself onto the plain wooden chair. Umegat turned up a cup and poured a heavy red wine into it, smiled briefly, and held it out to his guest. Cazaril closed his shaking hands around it with vast gratitude. “Thank you. I need that.”
   “I should imagine so, my lord.” Umegat poured a cup for himself and sat across the table from Cazaril. The table might be plain and poor, but the generous braces of wax candles upon it gave a rich, clear light. A reading man’s light.
   Cazaril raised the cup to his lips and gulped. When he set it down, Umegat immediately topped it up again. Cazaril closed his eyes and opened them. Open or shut, Umegat still glowed.
   “You are an acolyte—no. You’re a divine. Aren’t you,” said Cazaril.
   Umegat cleared his throat apologetically. “Yes. Of the Bastard’s Order. Although that is not why I am here.”
   “Why are you here?”
   “We’ll come to that.” Umegat bent forward, picked up the waiting knife, and began to saw off hunks of bread and cheese.
   “I thought—I hoped—I wondered—if you might have been sent by the gods. To guide and guard me.”
   Umegat’s lip quirked up. “Indeed? And here I was wondering if you had been sent by the gods to guide and guard me.”
   “Oh. That’s… not so good, then.” Cazaril shrank a little in his seat, and took another gulp of wine. “Since when?”
   “Since the day in the menagerie that Fonsa’s crow practically jumped up and down on your head crying This one! This one! My chosen god is, dare I say it, fiendishly ambiguous at times, but that was a little hard to miss.”
   “Was I glowing, then?”
   “No.”
   “When did I start, um, doing that?”
   “Sometime between the last time I saw you, which was late yesterday afternoon when you came back to the Zangre limping as though you’d been thrown from a horse, and today at the temple. I believe you may have a better guess than I do as to the exact time. Will you not take a little food, my lord? You don’t look well.”
   Cazaril had eaten nothing since Betriz had brought him the milk sops at noon. Umegat waited until his guest’s mouth was full of cheese and chewy crust before remarking, “One of my varied tasks as a young divine, before I came to Cardegoss, was as an assistant Inquirer for the Temple investigating alleged charges of death magic.” Cazaril choked; Umegat went on serenely, “Or death miracle, to put it with more theological accuracy. We uncovered quite a number of ingenious fakes—usually poison, though the, ah, dimmer murderers sometimes tried cruder methods. I had to explain to them that the Bastard does not ever execute unrepentant sinners with a dirk, nor a large hammer. The true miracles were much more rare than their notoriety would suggest. But I never encountered an authentic case where the victim was an innocent. To put it more finely still, what the Bastard granted was miracles of justice.” His voice had grown crisper, more decisive, the servility evaporating out of it along with most of his soft Roknari accent.
   “Ah,” Cazaril mumbled, and took another gulp of wine. This is the most wit-full man I have met in Cardegoss, and I’ve spent the last three months looking past him because he wears a servant’s garb. Granted, Umegat apparently did not wish to draw attention to himself. “That tabard is as good as a cloak of invisibility, you know.”
   Umegat smiled, and took a sip of his wine. “Yes.”
   “So… are you an Inquirer now?” Was it all over? Would he be charged, convicted, executed for his murderous, if vain, attempt on Dondo?
   “No. Not anymore.”
   “What are you, then?”
   To Cazaril’s bewilderment, Umegat’s eyes crinkled with laughter. “I’m a saint.”
   Cazaril stared at him for a long, long moment, then drained his cup. Amiably, Umegat refilled it. Cazaril was certain of very little tonight, but somehow, he didn’t think Umegat was mad. Or lying.
   “A saint. Of the Bastard.”
   Umegat nodded.
   “That’s… an unusual line of work, for a Roknari. How did it come about?” This was inane, but with two cups of wine on an empty stomach, he was growing light-headed.
   Umegat’s smile grew sadly introspective. “For you—the truth. I suppose the names no longer matter. This was a lifetime ago. When I was a young lord in the Archipelago, I fell in love.”
   “Young lords and young louts do that everywhere.”
   “My lover was about thirty then. A man of keen mind and kind heart.”
   “Oh. Not in the Archipelago, you don’t.”
   “Indeed. I had no interest in religion whatsoever. For obvious reasons, he was a secret Quintarian. We made plans to flee together. I reached the ship to Brajar. He did not. I spent the voyage seasick and desperate, learning—I thought—to pray. Hoping he’d made it to another vessel, and we’d meet in the port city we’d chosen for our destination. It was over a year before I found out how he’d met his end, from a Roknari merchant trading there whom we had once both known.”
   Cazaril took a drink. “The usual?”
   “Oh, yes. Genitals, thumbs—that he might not sign the fifth god—” Umegat touched forehead, navel, groin, and heart, folding his thumb beneath his palm in the Quadrene fashion, denying the fifth finger that was the Bastard’s—“they saved his tongue for last, that he might betray others. He never did. He died a martyr, hanged.”
   Cazaril touched forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, fingers spread wide. “I’m sorry.”
   Umegat nodded. “I thought about it for a time. At least, those times when I wasn’t drunk or vomiting or being stupid, eh? Youth, eh. It didn’t come easily. Finally, one day, I walked to the temple and turned myself in.” He took a breath. “And the Bastard’s Order took me in. Gave a home to the homeless, friends to the friendless, honor to the despised. And they gave me work. I was… charmed.”
   A Temple divine. Umegat was leaving out a few details, Cazaril felt. Forty years or so of them. But there was nothing inexplicable about an intelligent, energetic, dedicated man rising through the Temple hierarchy to such a rank. It was the part about shining like a full moon over a snowfall that was making his head reel. “Good. Wonderful. Great works. Foundling hospitals and, um, inquiries. Now explain why you glow in the dark.” He had either drunk too much, or not nearly enough, he decided glumly.
   Umegat rubbed his neck and pulled gently on his queue. “Do you understand what it means to be a saint?”
   Cazaril cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You must be very virtuous, I suppose.”
   “No, in fact. One need not be good. Or even nice.” Umegat looked wry of a sudden. “Grant you, once one experiences… what one experiences, one’s tastes change. Material ambition seems immaterial. Greed, pride, vanity, wrath, just grow too dull to bother with.”
   “Lust?”
   Umegat brightened. “Lust, I’m happy to say, seems largely unaffected. Or perhaps I might grant, love. For the cruelty and selfishness that make lust vile become tedious. But personally, I think it is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one’s god.” Umegat emptied his cup. “The gods love their great-souled men and women as an artist loves fine marble, but the issue isn’t virtue. It is will. Which is chisel and hammer. Has anyone ever quoted you Ordol’s classic sermon of the cups?”
   “That thing where the divine pours water all over everything? I first heard it when I was ten. I thought it was pretty entertaining when he got his shoes wet, but then, I was ten. I’m afraid our Temple divine at Cazaril tended to drone on.”
   “Attend now, and you shall not be bored.” Umegat inverted his clay cup upon the cloth. “Men’s will is free. The gods may not invade it, any more than I may pour wine into this cup through its bottom.”
   “No, don’t waste the wine!” Cazaril protested, as Umegat reached for the jug. “I’ve seen it demonstrated before.”
   Umegat grinned, and desisted. “But have you really understood how powerless the gods are, when the lowest slave may exclude them from his heart? And if from his heart, then from the world as well, for the gods may not reach in except through living souls. If the gods could seize passage from anyone they wished, then men would be mere puppets. Only if they borrow or are given will from a willing creature, do they have a little channel through which to act. They can seep in through the minds of animals, sometimes, with effort. Plants… require much foresight. Or”—Umegat turned his cup upright again, and lifted the jug—“sometimes, a man may open himself to them, and let them pour through him into the world.” He filled his cup. “A saint is not a virtuous soul, but an empty one. He—or she—freely gives the gift of their will to their god. And in renouncing action, makes action possible.” He lifted his cup to his lips, stared disquietingly at Cazaril over the rim, and drank. He added, “Your divine should not have used water. It just doesn’t hold the attention properly. Wine. Or blood, in a pinch. Some liquid that matters.”
   “Um,” managed Cazaril.

   Umegat sat back and studied him for a time. Cazaril didn’t think the Roknari was looking at his flesh. So, tell me, what’s a renegade Roknari Temple divine scholar-saint of the Bastard doing disguised as a groom in the Zangre’s menagerie? Out loud, he managed to pare this down to a plaintive, “What are you doing here?”
   Umegat shrugged. “What the god wills.” He took pity on Cazaril’s exasperated look, and added, “What He wills, it seems, is to keep Roya Orico alive.”
   Cazaril sat up, fighting the slurry that the wine seemed to be making of his brains. “Orico, sick?”
   “Yes. A state secret, mind you, although one that’s grown obvious enough to anyone with wits and eyes. Nevertheless—” Umegat laid his finger to his lips in a command of discretion.
   “Yes, but—I thought healing was the province of the Mother and the Daughter.”
   “Were the roya’s illness of natural causes, yes.”
   “Unnatural causes?” Cazaril squinted. “The dark cloak—can you see it, too?”
   “Yes.”
   “But Teidez has the shadow, too, and Iselle—and Royina Sara is tainted as well. What evil thing is it, that you would not let me speak of it in the street?”
   Umegat put his cup down, tugged on his bronze-gray queue, and sighed. “It all goes back to Fonsa the Fairly-Wise and the Golden General. Which is, I suppose, history and tale to you. I lived through those desperate times.” He added conversationally, “I saw the general once, you know. I was a spy in his princedom at the time. I hated everything he stood for, and yet… had he given me a word, a mere word, I think I might have crawled after him on my knees. He was more than just god-touched. He was avatar incarnate, striding toward the fulcrum of the world in the perfected instant of time. Almost. He was reaching for his moment when Fonsa and the Bastard cut him down.” Umegat’s cultured voice, lightly reminiscent, had dropped to remembered awe. He stared into the middle distance of his memory.
   His gaze jumped out of the lost past and back to Cazaril. Remembering to smile, he held out his hand, thumb up, and waggled it gently from side to side. “The Bastard, though the weakest of His family, is the god of balance. The opposition that gives the hand its clever grip. It is said that if ever one god subsumes all the others, truth will become single, and simple, and perfect, and the world will end in a burst of light. Some tidy-minded men actually find this idea attractive. Personally, I find it a horror, but then I always did have low tastes. In the meantime, the Bastard, unfixed in any season, circles to preserve us all.” Umegat’s fingers tapped one by one, Daughter-Mother-Son-Father, against the ball of his thumb.
   He went on, “The Golden General was a tidal wave of destiny, gathering to crash upon the world. Fonsa’s soul could match his soul, but could not balance his vast fate. When the death demon carried their souls from the world, that fate overflowed to settle upon Fonsa’s heirs, a miasma of ill luck and subtle bitterness. The black shadow you see is the Golden General’s unfulfilled destiny, curdling around his enemies’ lives. His death curse, if you will.”
   Cazaril wondered if this explained why all of Ias’s and Orico’s military campaigns that he’d ever been in had fared so ill. “How… how may the curse be lifted?”
   Umegat sighed. “In six years, no answer has been given me. Perhaps it will run out in the deaths of all who flowed from Fonsa’s loins.”
   But that’s… the roya, Teidez—Iselle!
   “Or perhaps,” Umegat continued, “even then, it will continue to trickle down through time like a stream of poison. It should have killed Orico years ago. Contact with the sacred creatures cleanses the roya from the corrosion of the curse, but only for a little time. The menagerie delays his destruction, but the god has never told me why.” Umegat’s voice went glum. “The gods don’t write letters of instruction, you know. Not even to their saints. I’ve suggested it, in my prayers. Sat by the hour with the ink drying on my quill, entirely at His service. And what does He send instead? An overexcited crow with a one-word vocabulary.”
   Cazaril winced in guilt, thinking of that poor crow. In truth, he felt far worse about the crow’s death than Dondo’s.
   “So that’s what I’m doing here,” said Umegat. He glanced up keenly at Cazaril. “And so. What are you doing here?”
   Cazaril spread his hands helplessly. “Umegat, I don’t know.” He added plaintively, “Can’t you tell? You said… I was lit up. Do I look like you? Or like Iselle? Or Orico, even?”
   “You look like nothing I’ve seen since I was lent the inner eye. If Iselle is a candle, you are a conflagration. You are… actually quite disturbing to contemplate.”
   “I don’t feel like a conflagration.”
   “What do you feel like?”
   “Right now? Like a pile of dung. Sick. Drunk.” He swirled the red wine in the bottom of his cup. “I have this belly cramp that comes and goes.” It was quiescent at the moment, but his stomach was still swollen. “And tired. I haven’t felt this tired since I was sick in the Mother’s house in Zagosur.”
   “I think,” Umegat spoke carefully, “that it is very, very important that you tell me the truth.”
   His lips still smiled, but his gray eyes seemed to burn. It occurred to Cazaril then that a good Temple Inquirer would likely be charming, and adept at worming confidences from people in his investigations. Smooth at getting them drunk.
   You laid down your life. It’s not fair to whine for it back now.
   “I attempted death magic upon Dondo dy Jironal last night.”
   Umegat looked neither shocked nor surprised, merely more intent. “Yes. Where?”
   “In Fonsa’s Tower. I crawled over the roof slates. I brought my own rat, but the crow… it came to me. It wasn’t afraid. I’d fed it, you see.”
   “Go on…” breathed Umegat.
   “I slew the rat, and broke the poor crow, and I prayed on my knees. And then I hurt. I wasn’t expecting that. And I couldn’t breathe. The candles went out. And I said, Thank you, because I felt…” He could not speak of what he’d felt, that strange peace, as if he’d lain down in a place of safety to rest forever. “And then I passed out. I thought I was dying.”
   “And then?”
   “Then… nothing. I woke up in the dawn fog, sick and cold and feeling an utter fool. No, wait—I’d had a nightmare about Dondo choking to death. But I knew I’d failed. So I crawled back to bed. And then dy Jironal came bursting in…”
   Umegat drummed his fingers on the table a moment, staring at him through slitted eyes. And then he stared with his eyes closed. Open again. “My lord, may I touch you?”
   “All right…” Briefly, as the Roknari bent over him, Cazaril feared some unwelcome attempt at intimacy, but Umegat’s touch was as professional as any physician’s; forehead, face, neck, spine, heart, belly… Cazaril tensed, but Umegat’s hand descended no farther. When he finished, Umegat’s face was set. The Roknari went to fetch another jug of wine from a basket by the door before returning to his chair.
   Cazaril attempted to fend the jug from his cup. “I’ve had enough. I’ll be stumbling if I take any more.”
   “My grooms can walk you back to your chambers in a little while. No?” Umegat filled his own cup instead, and sat again. He ran his finger over the tabletop in a little pattern, repeated three times—Cazaril wasn’t sure if it was a charm or just nerves—and finally said, “By the testimony of the sacred animals, no god accepted the soul of Dondo dy Jironal. Normally, that is a sign that an unquiet spirit is abroad in the world, and relatives and friends—and enemies—rush to buy rites and prayers from the Temple. Some for the sake of the dead—some for their own protection.”
   “I am sure,” said Cazaril a little bitterly, “Dondo will have all the prayers that money can buy.”
   “I hope so.”
   “Why? What…?” What do you see? What do you know?
   Umegat glanced up, and inhaled. “Dondo’s spirit was taken by the death demon, but not passed to the gods. This we know. It is my conjecture that the death demon could not return to its master because it was prevented from taking the second and balancing soul.”
   Cazaril licked his lips, and husked fearfully, “How, prevented?”
   “At the instant of attempting to do so, I believe the demon was captured—constrained—bound, if you will—by a second and simultaneous miracle. Judging by the distinctive colors boiling off you, it was from the holy and gracious hand of the Lady of Spring. If I am right, the acolytes of the Temple can all go back to bed, for Dondo’s spirit is not abroad. It is bound to the death demon, who is bound in turn to the locus of the second soul. Which is presently bound to its still-living body.” Umegat’s finger rose to point directly at Cazaril. “There.”
   Cazaril’s jaw fell open. He stared down at his aching, swollen belly, and back up at the fascinated… saint. Briefly, he was put in mind of Fonsa’s entranced crows. Violent denial boiled to his lips, and caught there, stopped by his inner sight of Umegat’s clear aura. “I didn’t pray to the Daughter last night!”
   “Apparently, someone did.”
   Iselle. “The royesse said she prayed. Did you see her as I saw her today—” Cazaril made inarticulate motions with his hands, not knowing what words to use to describe that roiling perturbation. “Is that what you see in me? Does Iselle see me as I do her?”
   “Did she say anything about it?” asked Umegat.
   “No. But neither did I.”
   Umegat gave him that sidewise stare again. “Did you ever see, when you were in the Archipelago, the nights when the sea was Mother-touched? The way the wake glowed green in the breaking waves of a ship’s passage?”
   “Yes…”

 “What you saw around Iselle was such a wake. The passage of the Daughter, like a lingering perfume in the air. What I see in you is not a passage but a Presence. A blessing. Far more intense. Your corona is slowly dying down—the sacred animals should be less enthralled by you in a day or two—but at the center there sits a tight blue core of sapphire, into which I cannot see. I think it is an encapsulation.” He brought his cupped hands together like a man enclosing a live lizard.
   Cazaril swallowed, and panted, “Are you saying the goddess has turned my belly into a perfect little annex of hell? One demon, one lost soul, sealed together like two snakes in a bottle?” His clawed hands went to his stomach, as if ready to rip his guts apart on the spot. “And you call it a blessing?”
   Umegat’s eyes remained serious, but his brows crimped in sympathy. “Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view? If it’s any consolation to you, I imagine Dondo dy Jironal is even less happy about this development than you are.” He added after a thoughtful moment, “I can’t imagine the demon is too pleased with it, either.”
   Cazaril nearly convulsed out of his chair. “Five gods! How do I rid myself of this—this—this—horror?”
   Umegat held up a restraining hand. “I… suggest… that you not be in a great rush about that. The consequences could be tangled.”
   “How, tangled? How could anything be more tangled than this monstrosity?”
   “Well”—Umegat leaned back and tented his hands together—“the most obvious way to break the, ah, blessing, would be by your death. With your soul freed from its material locus, the demon could fly away with you both.”
   A chill stole over Cazaril, as he remembered how his belly cramp had almost betrayed him to a fall when jumping the roof gap at dawn. He took refuge from his drunken terror in a dryness to match Umegat’s. “Oh, wonderful. Have you any other cures to suggest, physician?”
   Umegat’s lips twitched, and he acknowledged the jibe with a brief wave of his fingers. “Likewise, should the miracle cease that you presently host—should the Lady’s hand lift,” Umegat mimed someone opening their hands as if to release a bird, “I think the demon would immediately attempt to complete its destiny. Not that it has a choice—the Bastard’s demons have no free will. You can’t argue with or persuade them. In fact, there’s no use talking to one at all.”
   “So you’re saying that I could die at any moment!”
   “Yes. And this is different from your life yesterday in what way?” Umegat cocked his head in dry inquiry.
   Cazaril snorted. It was cold comfort… but comfort still, in a backhanded sort of way. Umegat was a sensible saint, it seemed. Which was not what Cazaril would have expected… had he ever met a saint before? How would I know? I walked right past this one.
   Umegat’s voice took on a tinge of scholarly curiosity. “Actually, this could answer a question I’ve long had. Does the Bastard command a troop of death demons, or just one? If all death miracles in the world cease while the demon is bound in you, it would be compelling evidence for the singularity of that holy power.”
   A ghastly laugh pealed from Cazaril’s lips. “My service to Quintarian theology! Gods—Umegat—what am I to do? There has never been any of this, this god-touched madness in my family. I’m not fit for this business. I am not a saint!”
   Umegat opened his lips, but then closed them again. He finally said, “One grows more accustomed with use. The first time I hosted a miracle I wasn’t too happy either, and I’m in the trade, so to speak. My personal recommendation to you, tonight, is to get pie-eyed drunk and go to sleep.”
   “So I can wake in the morning both demon-ridden and with a hangover?” Granted, he couldn’t imagine getting to sleep under any other circumstances, apart from a blow to the head.
   “Well, it worked for me, once. The hangover is a fair trade for being so immobilized one cannot do anything stupid for a little while.” Umegat looked away for a moment. “The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs. If you are become their tool, it is for a greater reason, an urgent reason. But you are the tool. You are not the work. Expect to be valued accordingly.”
   While Cazaril was still trying, unsuccessfully, to unravel that, Umegat leaned forward and poured fresh wine into Cazaril’s cup. Cazaril was beyond resistance.
   It took two undergrooms, an hour or so later, to guide his slithering steps across the wet cobbles of the stable yard, past the gates, and up the stairs, where they poured his limp form into his bed. Cazaril wasn’t sure just when he parted from his beleaguered consciousness, but never had he been more glad to do so.

Chapter 14

   Cazaril had to allow Umegat’s wine this much merit—it did mean he spent the first few hours of the next morning wishing for death rather than dreading it. He knew his hangover was passing off when fear began to regain the upper hand.
   He found oddly little regret in his heart for his own lost life. He’d seen more of the world than most men ever did, and he’d had his chances, though the gods knew he’d made little enough of them. Marshaling his thoughts, as he sheltered under his covers, he realized with some wonder that his greatest dismay was for the work he’d be forced to leave undone.
   Fears he’d had no time for during the day he’d stalked Dondo now crowded into his mind. Who would guard his ladies, if he were to die now? How much time was going to be granted to him to try to find some better bastion for them? On whom could they be safely bestowed? Betriz might find protection as the wife, say, of a stout country lord like March dy Palliar. But Iselle? Her grandmother and mother were too weak and distant, Teidez too young, Orico, apparently, entirely the creature of his chancellor. There could be no security for Iselle until she was out of this cursed court altogether.
   Another cramp riveted his attention again on the lethal little hell in his belly, and he peered worriedly down under the tent of his sheet at his knotted stomach. How much was this dying going to hurt? He had not passed so much blood this morning. He blinked around his chamber in the early-afternoon light. The odd hallucinations, pale blurred blobs at the corners of his vision that he had earlier blamed on last night’s wine, were still present. Maybe they were another symptom?
   A brisk knock sounded at his chamber door. Cazaril crawled from his warm refuge and, walking only a little bent over, went to unlock it. Umegat, bearing a stoppered ewer, bade him good afternoon, stepped within, and closed the door behind him. He was still faintly radiant: alas, yesterday hadn’t been a bizarre bad dream after all.
   “My word,” the groom added, staring about in astonishment. He waved his hand. “Shoo! Shoo!”
   The pale blurred blobs swirled about the chamber and fled into the walls.
   “What are those things?” Cazaril asked, easing back into his bed. “Do you see them, too?”
   “Ghosts. Here, drink this.” Umegat poured from the ewer into the glazed cup from Cazaril’s washbasin set, and handed it across. “It will settle your stomach and clear your head.”
   About to reject it with loathing, Cazaril discovered it to be not wine but some sort of cold herbed tea. He tasted it cautiously. Pleasantly bitter, its astringency made a most welcome sluicing in his sticky mouth. Umegat pulled a stool over to his bedside and settled cheerfully. Cazaril squeezed his eyes shut, and open again. “Ghosts?”
   “I’ve never seen so many of the Zangre’s ghosts collected in one place. They must be attracted to you just like the sacred animals.”
   “Can anyone else see them?”
   “Anyone with the inner eye. That’s three in Cardegoss, to my knowledge.”
   And two of them are here. “Have they been around all this time?”
   “I glimpse them now and then. They’re usually more elusive. You needn’t be afraid of them. They are powerless and cannot hurt you. Old lost souls.” In response to Cazaril’s rather stunned stare, Umegat added, “When, as happens from time to time, no god takes up a sundered soul, it is left to wander the world, slowly losing its mindfulness of itself and fading into air. New ghosts first take the form they had in life, but in their despair and loneliness they cannot maintain it.”
   Cazaril wrapped his arms around his belly. “Oh.” His mind tried to gallop in three directions at once. So what was the fate of those souls the gods did accept? And just what exactly was happening to the enraged spirit so miraculously and hideously lodged in him? And… the Dowager Royina Ista’s words came back to him. The Zangre is haunted, you know. Not metaphor or madness after all, it appeared, but simple observation. How much else, then, of the eerie things she’d said might be not derangement, but plain truth—seen with altered eyes?
   He glanced up to find Umegat regarding him thoughtfully. The Roknari inquired politely, “And how are you feeling today?”
   “Better this afternoon than this morning.” He added a little reluctantly, “Better than yesterday.”
   “Have you eaten?”
   “Not yet. Later, perhaps.” He rubbed a hand over his beard. “What’s happening out there?”
   Umegat sat back and shrugged. “Chancellor dy Jironal, finding no candidates in the city, has ridden out of Cardegoss in search of the corpse of his brother’s murderer and any confederates left alive.”
   “I trust he will not seize some innocent in error.”
   “An experienced Inquirer from the Temple rides with him, which should suffice to prevent such mistakes.”
   Cazaril digested this. After a moment, Umegat added, “Also, a faction in the military order of the Daughter’s house has sent couriers riding out to all its lord dedicats, calling them to a general council. They mean not to allow Roya Orico to foist another commander like Lord Dondo onto them.”
   “How should they defy him? Revolt?”
   Umegat hastily waved away this treasonable suggestion. “Certainly not. Petition. Request.”
   “Mm. But I thought they protested last time, to no avail. Dy Jironal will not be wanting to let control of that order slip from his hands.”
   “The military order is backed by the whole of its house, this time.”
   “And, ah… what have you been doing today?”
   “Praying for guidance.”
   “And did you get an answer?”
   Umegat smiled ambiguously at him. “Perhaps.”
   Cazaril considered for a moment how best to phrase his next remark. “Interesting gossip you’re privy to. I take it, then, that it would now be redundant for me to go down to the temple and confess to Archdivine Mendenal for Dondo’s murder?”
   Umegat’s brows went up. “I suppose,” he said after a moment, “that it should not surprise me that the Lady of Spring has chosen a sharp-edged tool.”
   “You are a divine, a trained Inquirer. I didn’t imagine you could, or would, evade your oaths and disciplines. You immobilized me to give yourself time to report, and confer.” Cazaril hesitated. “That I am not presently under arrest should tell me… something about that conference, but I’m not at all sure what.”
   Umegat studied his hands, spread on his knees. “As a divine, I defer to my superiors. As a saint, I answer to my god. Alone. If He trusts my judgment, so perforce must I. And so must my superiors.” He looked up, and now his gaze was unsettlingly direct. “That the goddess has set your feet on some journey on her behalf—courier—is abundantly plain from Her hour-by-hour preservation of your life. The Temple is at… not your service, but Hers. I think I can promise you, none shall interfere with you.”
   Cazaril was stung into a wail. “But what am I supposed to be doing?”
   Umegat’s voice grew almost apologetic. “Speaking just from my own experience, I would surmise—your daily duties as they come to you.”
   “That’s not very helpful.”
   “Yes. I know.” Umegat’s lips twitched in a dry humor. “So the gods humble the would-be wise, I think.” He added after a moment, “Speaking of daily duties, I must return now to mine. Orico is unwell today. Feel free to visit the menagerie anytime you are so moved, my lord dy Cazaril.”
   “Wait—” Cazaril held out a hand as Umegat rose. “Can you tell me—does Orico know of the miracle of the menagerie? Does he understand—does he even know he is accursed? I’ll swear Iselle knows naught of it, nor Teidez.” Royina Ista, on the other hand… “Or does the roya just know he feels better for contact with his animals?”
   Umegat gave a little nod. “Orico knows. His father Ias told him, on his deathbed. The Temple has made many secret trials to break this curse. The menagerie is the only one that has seemed to do any good.”
   “And what of the Dowager Royina Ista? Is she shadowed like Sara?”
   Umegat tugged his queue and frowned thoughtfully. “I could better guess if I’d ever met her face-to-face. The dy Baocia family removed her from Cardegoss shortly before I was brought here.”

  “Does Chancellor dy Jironal know?”
   The frown deepened. “If he does, it was not from my lips. I have often cautioned Orico not to discuss his miracle, but…”
   “If Orico has kept something from dy Jironal, it would be a first.”
   Umegat shrugged acknowledgment, but added, “Given the early disasters in his reign, Orico believes that any action he dares take will rebound to the detriment of Chalion. The chancellor is the tongs by which the roya attempts to handle all matters of state without spilling his bane thereupon.”
   “Some might wonder if dy Jironal is the answer to the curse, or part of it.”
   “The proxy seemed to work at first.”
   “And lately?”
   “Lately—we’ve redoubled our petitions to the gods for aid.”
   “And how have the gods answered?”
   “It would seem—by sending you.”
   Cazaril sat up in renewed terror, clutching his bedclothes. “No one sent me! I came by chance.”
   “I’d like an accounting of those chances, someday soon. When you will, my lord.” Umegat, with a deeply hopeful gaze that frightened Cazaril quite as much as any of his saintly remarks, bowed himself out.


* * *

   After a few more hours spent cowering under his quilts, Cazaril decided that unless a man could dither himself to death, he wasn’t going to die this afternoon. Or if he was, there was nothing he could do about it. And his stomach was growling in a decidedly unsupernatural fashion. As the chill autumn light faded he crept out of bed, stretched his aching muscles, dressed himself, and went down to dinner.
   The Zangre was extremely subdued. With the court plunged into deep mourning, no fкtes or music were offered tonight. Cazaril found the banqueting hall thin of company; neither Iselle’s household nor Teidez’s were present, Royina Sara absented herself, and Roya Orico, his dark shadow clinging about him, ate hastily and departed immediately thereafter.
   The reason for Teidez’s absence, Cazaril soon learned, was that Chancellor dy Jironal had taken the royse with him when he rode out on his mission of investigation. Cazaril blinked and fell silent at this news. Surely dy Jironal could not be attempting to continue the seduction by corruption his brother had taken so well in hand? Downright austere by comparison to Dondo, he had not the taste or style for such puerile pleasures. It was impossible to imagine him roistering with a juvenile. Was it too much to hope he might be reversing his strategy for ascendancy over Teidez’s mind, taking the boy up after a true fatherly manner, apprenticing him to statecraft? The young royse was half-sick with idleness as well as dissolution; almost any exposure to men’s work must be medicine for him. More probably, Cazaril thought wearily, the chancellor simply dared not let his future handle upon Chalion out of his grip for an instant.
   Lord dy Rinal, seated across from Cazaril, twisted his lips at the half-empty hall and remarked, “Everyone’s deserting. Off to their country estates, if they have ’em, before the snow flies. It’s going to be a gloomy Father’s Day celebration, I warrant. Only the tailors and seamstresses are busy, furbishing up mourning garb.”
   Cazaril reached through the ghost-smudge that was hovering next to his plate and washed down the last bite of his repast with a gulp of well-watered wine. Four or five of the revenants had trailed after him to the hall and now clustered about him like cold children crowding a hearth. He had chosen somber clothing himself tonight, automatically; he wondered if he should trouble himself to obtain the full correct lavenders and blacks such as dy Rinal, always fashionable, now sported. Would the abomination locked in his belly take it as hypocrisy, or as a gesture of respect? Would it even know? New-riven from its body, how much of its repulsive nature did Dondo’s soul now retain? These weathered old spirits seemed to watch him from the outside; was Dondo watching him from the inside? He grinned briefly, as an alternative to startling poor dy Rinal with a fit of screaming. He managed a politely inquiring, “Do you stay or go?”
   “I go, I think. I’ll ride down with Marchess dy Heron as far as Heron itself, and then cut over the lower passes to home. The old lady might be glad enough of another sword in her party that she’d even invite me to stay.” He took a swallow of wine and lowered his voice. “If not even the Bastard would take Lord Dondo off our hands, you realize he must still be about somewhere. One trusts he’ll just haunt Jironal’s palace where he died, but really, he could be anywhere in Cardegoss. And he was vicious enough before he was murdered; he’s bound to be vengeful now. Slain the night before his wedding, gods!”
   Cazaril made a neutral noise.
   “The chancellor seems set on calling it death magic, but I shouldn’t wonder if it was poison after all. No way of telling, now the body’s burned, I suppose. Convenient for somebody, that.”
   “But he was surrounded by his friends. Surely no one could have administered—were you there?”
   Dy Rinal grimaced. “After Lady Pig? No. Thanks be to all her squeals, I was not present at that butchering.” Dy Rinal glanced around, as if afraid a ghost with a grudge might be sneaking up on him even now. That there were half a dozen within his arm’s reach was evidently not apparent to him. Cazaril brushed one away from his face, trying not to let his eyes focus on what, to his companion, must seem empty air.
   Ser dy Maroc, the roya’s wardrobe-master, strolled up to their table saying, “Dy Rinal! Have you heard the news from Ibra?” Belatedly, he observed Cazaril leaning with elbows on the board opposite and hesitated, flushing slightly.
   Cazaril smiled sourly. “One trusts you’re getting your gossip from Ibra from more reliable sources these days, Maroc?”
   Dy Maroc stiffened. “If the Chancellery’s own courier be one, yes. He came in pell-mell while my head tailor was refitting Orico’s mourning garb, that he had to let out by four fingerbreadths—anyway, it’s official. The Heir of Ibra died last week, all suddenly, of the coughing fever in South Ibra. His faction has collapsed, and rushes to make treaty with the old Fox, or save their lives by sacrificing each other. The war in South Ibra is ended.”
   “Well!” Dy Rinal sat up and stroked his beard. “Do we call that good news, or bad? Good for poor Ibra, the gods know. But our Orico has chosen the losing side again.”
   Dy Maroc nodded. “The Fox is rumored to be most wroth with Chalion, for stirring the pot and keeping it boiling, not that the Heir needed help putting wood on that fire.”
   “Perhaps the old roya’s taste for strife shall be buried with his firstborn,” said Cazaril, not too hopefully.
   “So the Fox has a new Heir, that child of his age—what was the boy’s name?” said dy Rinal.
   “Royse Bergon,” Cazaril supplied.
   “Aye,” said dy Maroc. “A young one indeed. And the Fox could drop at any moment, leaving an untried boy on the throne.”
   “Not so untried as all that,” said Cazaril. “He’s seen the prosecution of one siege and the breaking of another, riding in his late mother’s train, and survived a civil war. And one would think a son of the Fox could not be stupid.”
   “The first one was,” said dy Rinal, unassailably. “To leave his supporters in such naked disarray.”
   “One cannot blame death of the coughing fever on a lack of wit,” said Cazaril.
   “Assuming it really was the coughing fever,” said dy Rinal, pursing his lips in new suspicion.
   “What, d’you think the Fox would poison his own son?” said dy Maroc.
   “His agents, man.”

  “Well, then, he might have done it sooner, and saved Ibra a world of woe—”
   Cazaril smiled thinly, and pushed up from the table, leaving dy Rinal and dy Maroc to their tale-spinning. His wine-sickness was past, and he felt better for his dinner, but the shaky exhaustion that remained was not anything he was accustomed to calling well. In the absence of any summons from the royesse, he made his way back to his bed.
   Wearied beyond fear, he fell asleep soon enough. But around midnight, he was brought awake with a gasp. A man’s screams echoed distantly in his head. Screams, and broken weeping, and choked howls of rage—he bolted upright, heart pounding, turning his head to locate the sound. Faint and strange—might it be coming from across the ravine from the Zangre, or down by the river below his window? No one from the castle seemed to respond, no footsteps, or cries of inquiry from the guards… In another few moments, Cazaril realized he was not hearing the tormented howls with his ears, any more than he saw the pale smudges floating around his bed with his eyes. And he recognized the voice.
   He lay back down, panting and curled around himself, and endured the uproar for another ten minutes. Was the damned soul of Dondo preparing to break free of the Lady’s miracle and haul him off to hell? He was about to leave his bed and run to the menagerie, all in his nightdress, pound on the doors and wake up Umegat and beg the saint for help—could Umegat do anything about this?—when the cries faded again.
   It was about the hour of Dondo’s death, he realized. Perhaps the spirit took up some special powers at this time? He couldn’t tell if it had or had not done so last night, he’d been so sodden drunk. One uneasy nightmare had blended in mad fragments with all the others.
   It might have been worse, he told himself as his heart gradually slowed again. Dondo might have been given an articulate voice. The thought of Dondo’s ghost made nightly free to speak to him, whether in rage or abuse or vile suggestion, broke his courage as the plain howls had not, and he wept for a little in the sheer terror of the imagining.
   Trust the Lady. Trust the Lady. He whispered some incoherent prayers, and slowly regained control of himself. If She had brought him this far for some purpose, surely She would not abandon him now.
   A new horrible thought occurred to him, as he told Umegat’s sermon over in his mind. If the goddess only entered the world by Cazaril renouncing his will on Her behalf, could wanting desperately to live, an act of will if ever there was one, be enough to exclude Her, and Her miracle? Her protective encapsulation might pop like a soap bubble, releasing a paradox of death and damnation… Following this logic loop around and around was enough to keep him awake for hours, as the night slowly wore itself out. The square of his chamber’s window was growing faintly gray before he dropped again into blessed unconsciousness.


* * *

   So it was that, flanked by his ghostly outriders, he climbed the stairs late the following morning to his office antechamber. He felt stupid and eroded from lack of sleep, and he looked forward without enthusiasm to a week’s worth of neglected correspondence and bookkeeping, dropped in disordered piles on his desk from the hour of Iselle’s disastrous betrothal.
   He found his ladies up betimes. In the sitting room just past the frontier of his office, all his good new schoolroom maps were spread out on a table. Iselle leaned on her hands, staring down at them. Betriz, her arms folded under her breasts, stood watching over her shoulder and frowning. Both young women, and Nan dy Vrit, who sat sewing, wore the blacks and lavenders of strict formal court mourning, a prudent dissimulation of which Cazaril approved.
   As he entered, he saw next to Iselle’s hand a scattering of paper scraps with scribbled lists, some items scratched through, some circled or ticked with checks. Iselle scowled and pointed to a spot on the map marked with a sturdy hat pin, and said over her shoulder to her handmaiden, “But that’s no better than—” She broke off when she saw Cazaril. The dark, invisible cloak still clung about her; only an occasional faint thread of blue light still glinted in its sluggish folds. The ghost-blobs veered violently away from it and, only partly to Cazaril’s relief, vanished from his second sight.
   “Are you all right, Lord Caz?” Iselle inquired, looking at him with her brows drawing down. “You don’t look well.”
   Cazaril bowed greeting. “My apologies for absenting myself yesterday, Royesse. I was taken with a… a colic. It has mostly passed off now.”
   Nan dy Vrit, from her seat in the corner, looked up from her sewing with an unfriendly stare to remark, “The chamber woman had it that you were taken with a bad head from drinking and carousing with the stable grooms. She said she saw you come in so drunk after Lord Dondo’s funeral you could barely stagger.”
   Conscious of Betriz’s unhappy scrutiny, he said apologetically, “Drinking yes; carousing, no. It won’t happen again, milady.” He added a little dryly, “It didn’t answer anyway.”
   “It’s a scandal to the royesse, that her secretary be seen so inebriated that he—”
   “Hush, Nan,” Iselle interrupted this lecture impatiently. “Leave be.”
   “What’s this, Royesse?” Cazaril gestured at the pin-studded map.
   Iselle drew a long breath. “I’ve thought it through. I’ve been thinking for days. As long as I remain unwed, plots will swirl about me. I don’t doubt dy Jironal will produce some other candidate to try to bind me and Teidez to his clan. And other factions—now it’s revealed that Orico would willingly bestow me on a lesser lord, every lesser lord in Chalion will begin badgering him for my hand. My only defense, my only certain refuge, is if I am married already. And not to a lesser lord.”
   Cazaril’s brows rose. “I confess, Royesse, my own thoughts have been running something along those lines.”
   “And swiftly, swiftly, Cazaril. Before they can come up with someone even more disgusting than Dondo.” Her voice was edged with stress.
   “Even our dear chancellor must find that a daunting challenge,” he murmured diffidently, and had the satisfaction of drawing a brief bark of laughter from her. He pursed his lips. “The need is great, I grant you, but the danger is not so instantly pressing as all that. Dy Jironal himself will block the lesser lords for you, I am sure. Your first line of defense must be to block dy Jironal’s next candidate. Although, thinking over his family, it’s not clear to me who he can offer up. His sons are both married, or he might have put forth one of them in place of Dondo. Or offered himself, were he not wed.”
   “Wives die,” said Betriz darkly. “Sometimes, they even die conveniently.”
   Cazaril shook his head. “Dy Jironal has planned his family alliances with care. His daughters-in-law—his wife, too—are his links to some of the greatest families in Chalion, the daughters and sisters of powerful provincars. I don’t say he wouldn’t seize a vacancy, but he dare not be seen or even suspected of creating one. And his grandsons are toddlers. No, dy Jironal must play a waiting game.”
   “What about his nephews?” said Betriz.
   Cazaril, after a pause for thought, shook his head again. “Too loose a connection, not controlled enough. He desires a subordinate, not a rival.”
   “I decline,” said Iselle through her teeth, “to wait a decade to be wed to a boy fifteen years younger than I am.”
   Cazaril glanced involuntarily at Lady Betriz. He himself was fifteen years older than—he thrust the discouraging thought from his mind. The evil barrier between them now was less surmountable than merely that of youth versus age. Life does not wed death.
   “We’ve placed a pin in the map for every unwed ruler or heir we can think of between here and Darthaca,” said Betriz.
   Cazaril advanced and looked over the map. “What, even the Roknari princedoms?”
   “I wanted to be complete,” said Iselle. “Without them, well… there weren’t very many choices. I admit, I don’t much like the idea of a Roknari prince. Leaving aside their horrid squared-off religion, their custom of choosing as heir any son at all, whether of true wife or concubine, makes it nearly impossible to tell if one is wedding a future ruler or a future drone.”
   “Or a future corpse,” said Cazaril. “Half the victories Chalion ever gained over the Roknari were the result of some embittered failed candidate stabbing his princely half brother in the back.”
   “But that leaves only four true Quintarians of rank,” put in Betriz. “The roya of Brajar, Bergon of Ibra, and the twin sons of the high march of Yiss just across the Darthacan border. Who are twelve years old.”
   “Not impossible,” said Iselle judiciously, “but March dy Yiss would have no natural reason to ally with Teidez, later, against the Roknari. He shares no borders with the princedoms and does not suffer from their depredations. And he pays fealty to Darthaca, who has no interest in seeing a strong, united alliance of Ibran states arise to put an end to the perpetual war in the north.”
   Cazaril was pleased to hear his own analysis coming back to him in the royesse’s mouth; she’d paid more attention during her geography lessons than he’d thought. He smiled encouragingly.
   “And besides,” Iselle added crossly, “Yiss has no coastline either.” Her hand drifted unhappily across the map to the east. “My cousin the roya of Brajar is quite old, and they say is grown too sodden with drink to ride to war. And his grandson is too young.”
   “Brajar does have good ports,” said Betriz. She added more dubiously, although in the tone of one pointing out an advantage, “I suppose he wouldn’t live very long.”
   “Yes, but what help could I be to Teidez as a mere dowager royina? It’s not as though I might tell a, a stepgrandson how to deploy his troops!” Iselle’s hand trailed back to the opposite coast. “And the Fox of Ibra’s eldest son is married, and his younger not the heir, and the country is convulsed with civil strife.”
   “Not anymore,” said Cazaril abruptly. “Did no one tell you the news that came yesterday from Ibra? The Heir is dead. Struck down in South Ibra—the coughing fever. No one doubts that young Royse Bergon will take his place. He’s been loyal to his father throughout the whole mess.”
   Iselle turned her head and stared at him, her eyes widening. “Really…! How old is Bergon, again? Fifteen, was he not?”
   “He must be rising sixteen now, Royesse.”