Ferda’s badge and colors would gain him admittance anywhere in the sacred precincts. “Run to the temple. Find Archdivine Mendenal. Let no one and nothing keep you from coming instantly to him. Tell him what has transpired here, and have him send Temple physicians—tell him, Umegat needs the Mother’s midwife, the special one. He’ll know what you mean. Hurry!”
   Palli, already kneeling beside Umegat, added, “Give me your cloak. And run, boy!”
   Ferda tossed his cloak at his commander, whirled, and was gone before Palli drew a second breath. Palli began to wrap the gray wool around the unconscious Roknari.
   Cazaril turned back to Teidez, whose eyes were darting this way and that in growing uncertainty. The royse retreated to the life-emptied husk of the leopard, six feet from nose to tail tip lying limply on the tiles. Its beautiful spotted fur hid the mouths of its wounds, marked by matted blood on its sides. Cazaril thought of dy Sanda’s pierced corpse.
   “I slew it with my sword, because it was a royal symbol of my House even if it was ensorcelled,” Teidez offered. “And to test my courage. It clawed my leg.” He bent and rubbed awkwardly at his right shin, where his black trousers were indeed ripped and hanging in blood-wet ribbons.
   Teidez was the Heir of Chalion, and Iselle’s brother. Cazaril could not wish the beast had bitten out his throat. Should not, anyway. “Five gods, how did you come by this black nonsense?”
   “It is not nonsense! You knew Orico’s illness was uncanny! I saw it in your face—Bastard’s demons, anyone could see it. Lord Dondo told me the secret, before he died. Was murdered—murdered to keep the secret, I think, but it was too late.”
   “Did you come up with this… plan of attack, on your own?”
   Teidez’s head came up, proudly. “No, but when I was the only one left, I carried it through all by myself! We had been going to do it together, after Dondo married Iselle—destroy the curse, and free the House of Chalion from its evil influence. But then it was left to me. So I made myself his banner-carrier, his arm to reach from beyond the grave and strike one last blow for Chalion!”
   “Ah! Ah!” Cazaril was so overcome, he stamped in a circle. But had Dondo believed his own rubbish, or had this been a clever plan to use Teidez, obliquely and unprovably, to disable or assassinate Orico? Malice, or stupidity? With Dondo, who could tell? “No!”
   “Lord Cazaril, what should we do with these Baocians?” Foix’s voice inquired diffidently.
   Cazaril looked up to find the disarmed Baocian guard captain held between Foix and one of the Zangre guards. “And you!” snarled Cazaril at him. “You tool, you fool, you lent yourself to this, this stupid sacrilege, and told no one? Or are you Dondo’s creature still? Ah! Take him and his men and lock them in a cell, until…” Cazaril hesitated. Dondo was behind this, oh yes, reaching out to wreak chaos and disaster, it bore his stamp—but for once, Cazaril suspected, Martou was not behind Dondo. Quite the opposite, unless he missed his guess. “Until the chancellor is notified,” Cazaril continued. “You there—” A downward sweep of his arm commanded another Zangre guard’s attention. “Run to the Chancellery, or Jironal Palace or wherever he may be found, and tell him what has happened here. Beg him to wait upon me before he goes to Orico.”
   “Lord Cazaril, you cannot order my guards arrested!” cried Teidez.
   Cazaril was the only one here with the air, if not the fact, of authority needed to carry out this next step. “You are going straight to your chamber, until your brother orders otherwise. I will escort you there.”
   “Take your hand off me!” Teidez yelped, as Cazaril’s iron grip closed around his upper arm. But he did not quite dare to struggle against whatever he was seeing in Cazaril’s face.
   Cazaril said through his teeth, in a voice dripping false cordiality, “No, indeed. You are wounded, young lord, and I have a duty to help you to a physician.” He added under his breath, to Teidez’s ear alone, “And I will knock you flat and drag you, if I have to.”
   Teidez, recovering what dignity he could, grumbled to his guard captain, “Go quietly with them, then. I’ll send for you later, when I have proved Lord Cazaril’s error.” Since his two captors had already spun the captain around and were marching him out, this ended up addressed to the Baocian’s back, and fell a little flat. The injured grooms had crept up to Palli’s side, and were trying to help him with Umegat. Palli glanced over his shoulder and gave Cazaril a quick, reassuring wave.
   Cazaril nodded back, and, under the guise of lending support, strong-armed the royse out of the nightmarish abattoir he had made of the roya’s menagerie. Too late, too late, too late… beat in his brain with every stride. Outside, the crows were no longer whirling and screaming in the air. They hopped about in agitation upon the cobbles, seeming as bewildered and directionless as Cazaril’s own thoughts.
   Still keeping a grip on Teidez, Cazaril marched him through the Zangre’s gates, where, now, more guards had appeared. Teidez closed his lips on further protest, though his sullen, angry, and insulted expression boded no good for Cazaril later on. The royse scorned to favor his wounded leg, though it left a trail of bloodied footprints across the cobbles of the main courtyard.
   Cazaril’s attention was jerked leftward when one of Sara’s waiting women and a page appeared in the doorway to Ias’s Tower. “Hurry, hurry!” the woman urged the boy, who dashed toward the gates, white-faced. He nearly caromed off Cazaril in his haste.
   “Where away, boy?” Cazaril called after him.
   He turned and danced backward for a moment. “Temple, lord. Dare not stay—Royina Sara—the roya has collapsed!” He turned and sprinted in earnest through the gates; the guards stared at him, and, uneasily, back toward Ias’s Tower.
   Teidez’s arm, beneath Cazaril’s hand, lost its stiff resistance. Beneath his scowl, a scared look crept into his eyes, and he glanced aside warily at his self-appointed detainer.
   After a moment’s indecision, Cazaril, not letting go of Teidez, wheeled around and started for Ias’s Tower instead. He hurried to catch up with the waiting woman, who had ducked back inside, and called after her, but she seemed not to hear him as she scurried up the end stairs. He was wheezing as he reached the third floor, where Orico kept his chambers. He stared in apprehension down its central corridor.
   Royina Sara, her white shawl bundled about her and a woman at her heels, was hurrying up the hall. Cazaril bowed anxiously as she came to the staircase.
   “My lady, what has happened? Can I help?”
   She touched her hand to her frightened face. “I scarcely know yet, Castillar. Orico—he was reading aloud to me in my chambers while I stitched, as he sometimes does, for my solace, when suddenly he stopped, and blinked and rubbed his eyes, and said he could not see the words anymore, and that the room was all dark. But it wasn’t! Then he fell from his chair. I cried for my ladies, and we put him in his bed, and have sent for a Temple physician.”
   “We saw the roya’s page,” Cazaril assured her. “He was running as fast as he could.”
   “Oh, good…”
   “Was it an apoplexy, do you think?”
   “I don’t think… I don’t know. He speaks a little, and his breath is not very labored… What was all that shouting, down by the stables, earlier?” Distractedly, not waiting for an answer, she passed him and mounted the stairs.
   Teidez, his face gone leaden, licked his lips but said no more as Cazaril turned him around and led him down to the courtyard.
   The royse did not find his voice again till they were mounting the stairs in the main block, where he repeated breathlessly, “It cannot be. Dondo told me the menagerie was black sorcery, a Roknari curse to keep Orico sick and weak. And I could see that it was so.”
   “A Roknari curse, there truly is, but the menagerie is a white miracle that keeps Orico alive despite it. Was. Till now,” Cazaril added bitterly.
   “No… no… it’s all wrong. Dondo told me—”
   “Dondo was mistaken.” Cazaril hesitated briefly. “Or else Dondo wished to hurry the replacement of a roya who favored his elder brother with one who favored himself.”
   Teidez’s lips parted in protest, but no sound came from them. Cazaril didn’t think the royse could be feigning the shocked look in his eyes. The only mercy in this day, if mercy it was—Dondo might have misled Teidez, but he seemed not to have corrupted him, not to that extent. Teidez was tool, not co-conspirator, not a willing fratricide. Unfortunately, he was a tool that had kept on functioning after the workman’s hand had fallen away. And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?
   The sallow fellow who was the royse’s secretary-tutor looked up in surprise from his writing desk as Cazaril swung the boy into his chambers.
   “Look to your master,” Cazaril told him shortly. “He’s injured. He is not to quit this building until Chancellor dy Jironal is informed what has occurred, and gives him leave.” He added, with a little sour satisfaction, “If you knew of this outrage, and did nothing to prevent it, the chancellor will be furious with you.”
   The man paled in confusion; Cazaril turned his back on him. Now to go see what was happening with Umegat…
   “But Lord Cazaril,” Teidez’s voice quavered. “What should I do?”
   Cazaril spat over his shoulder, as he strode out again, “Pray.”

Chapter 18

   As he turned onto the end stairs, Cazaril heard a woman’s slippers scuffing rapidly on the steps. He looked up to find Lady Betriz, her lavender skirts trailing, hurrying down toward him.
   “Lord Cazaril! What’s going on? We heard shouting—one of the maids cried Royse Teidez has run mad, and tried to slay the roya’s animals!”
   “Not mad—misled. I think. And not tried—succeeded.” In a few brief, bitter words, Cazaril described the horror in the stable block.
   “But why?” Her voice was husky with shock.
   Cazaril shook his head. “A lie of Lord Dondo’s, nearly as I can tell. He convinced the royse that Umegat was a Roknari wizard using the animals to somehow poison the roya. Which turned the truth exactly backwards; the animals sustained Orico, and now he has collapsed. Five gods, I cannot explain it all here upon the stairs. Tell Royesse Iselle I will attend upon her soon, but first I must see to the injured grooms. Stay away—keep Iselle away from the menagerie.” And if he didn’t give Iselle action, she’d surely take it for herself… “Wait upon Sara, both of you; she’s half-distracted.”
   Cazaril continued on down the stairs, past the place where he had been—deliberately?—decoyed away by his own pain, earlier. Dondo’s demonic ghost made no move to grip him now.
   Back at the menagerie, Cazaril found that the excellent Palli and his men had already carried off Umegat and the more seriously injured of the undergrooms to the Mother’s hospital. The remaining groom was stumbling around trying to catch a hysterical little blue-and-yellow bird that had somehow escaped the Baocian guard captain and taken refuge in the upper cornices. Some servants from the stable had come over and were making awkward attempts to help; one had taken off his tabard and was sweeping it up, trying to knock the bird out of the air.
   “Stop!” Cazaril choked back panic. For all he knew, the little feathered creature was the last thread by which Orico clung to life. He directed the would-be helpers instead to the task of collecting the bodies of the slain animals, laying them out in the stable courtyard, and cleaning up the bloody mess on the tiles inside. He scooped up a handful of grains from the vellas’ stall, remains of their last interrupted dinner, and coaxed the little bird down to his own hand, chirping as he’d seen Umegat do. Rather to his surprise, the bird came to him and suffered itself to be put back into its cage.
   “Guard it with your life,” he told the groom. Then added, scowling for effect, “If it dies, you die.” An empty threat, though it must do for now; the grooms, at least, looked impressed. If it dies, Orico dies? That suddenly seemed frighteningly plausible. He turned to lend a hand in dragging out the heavy bodies of the bears.
   “Should we skin them, lord?” one of the stable hands inquired, staring at the results of Teidez’s hellish hunt piled up outside on the paving stones.
   “No!” said Cazaril. Even the few of Fonsa’s crows still lingering about the stable yard, though they regarded the bloody carcasses with wary interest, made no move toward them. “Treat them… as you would the roya’s soldiers who had died in battle. Burned or buried. Not skinned. Nor eaten, for the gods’ sakes.” Swallowing, Cazaril bent and added the bodies of the two dead crows to the row. “There has been sacrilege enough this day.” And the gods forfend Teidez had not slain a holy saint as well as the sacred animals.
   A clatter of hooves heralded the arrival of Martou dy Jironal, fetched, presumably, from Jironal Palace; he was followed up the hill by four retainers on foot, gasping for breath. The chancellor swung down from his snorting, sidling horse, handed it off to a bowing groom, and advanced to stare at the row of dead animals. The bears’ dark fur riffled in the cold wind, the only movement. Dy Jironal’s lips spasmed on unvoiced curses. “What is this madness?” He looked up at Cazaril, and his eyes narrowed in bewildered suspicion. “Did you set Teidez onto this?” Dy Jironal was not, Cazaril judged, dissimulating; he was as off-balance as Cazaril himself.
   “I? No! I do not control Teidez.” Cazaril added sourly, “And neither, it appears, do you. He was in your constant company for the past two weeks; had you no hint of this?”
   Dy Jironal shook his head.
   “In his defense, Teidez seems to have had some garbled notion that this act would somehow help the roya. That he’d no better sense is a fault of his age; that he had no better knowledge… well, you and Orico between you have served him ill. If he’d been more filled with truth, he’d have had less room for lies. I’ve had his Baocian guard locked up, and taken him to his chambers, to await…” the roya’s orders would not be forthcoming now. Cazaril finished, “your orders.”
   Dy Jironal’s hand made a constricted gesture. “Wait. The royesse—he was closeted with his sister yesterday. Could she have set him on?”
   “Five witnesses will say no. Including Teidez himself. He gave no sign yesterday that this was in his mind.” Almost no sign. Should have, should have, should have…
   “You control the Royesse Iselle closely enough,” snapped dy Jironal bitterly. “Do you think I don’t know who encouraged her in her defiance? I fail to see the secret of her pernicious attachment to you, but I mean to cut that connection.”
   “Yes.” Cazaril bared his teeth. “Dy Joal tried to wield your knife last night. He’ll know to charge you more for his services next time. Hazard pay.” Dy Jironal’s eyes glittered with understanding; Cazaril took a breath, for self-control. This was bringing their hostilities much too close to the surface. The last thing he desired was dy Jironal’s full attention. “In any case, there is no mystery. Teidez says your amiable brother Dondo plotted this with him, before he died.”
   Dy Jironal stepped back a pace, eyes widening, but his teeth clenched on any other reaction.
   Cazaril continued, “Now, what I should dearly like to know is—and you are in a better position to guess the answer than I am—did Dondo know what this menagerie really did for Orico?”
   Dy Jironal’s gaze flew to his face. “Do you?”
   “All the Zangre knows by now: Orico was stricken blind, and fell from his chair, during the very moments his creatures were dying. Sara and her ladies brought him to his bed, and have sent for the Temple physicians.” This answer both evaded the question and abruptly redirected dy Jironal’s attention; the chancellor paled, whirled away, and made for the Zangre gates. He did not, Cazaril noted, stay to inquire after Umegat. Clearly, dy Jironal knew what the menagerie did; did he understand how?
   Do you?
   Cazaril shook his head and turned the other way, for yet another weary march down into town.
   Cardegoss’s Temple Hospital of the Mother’s Mercy was a rambling old converted mansion, bequeathed to the order by a pious widow, on the street beyond the Mother’s house from the Temple Square. Cazaril tracked Palli and Umegat through its maze to a second-floor gallery above an inner courtyard. He spotted the chamber readily by the reunited dy Gura brothers standing guard outside its closed door. They saluted and passed him through.
   He entered to find Umegat laid out unconscious upon a bed. A white-haired woman in a Temple physician’s green robes bent over him stitching up the lacerated flap of his scalp. She was assisted by a familiar, dumpy middle-aged woman whose viridescent tinge owed nothing to her green dress. Cazaril could still see her faint effulgence with his eyes closed. The archdivine of Cardegoss himself, in his five-colored vestment, hovered anxiously. Palli leaned against a wall with his arms crossed; his face lightened, and he pushed to his feet when he saw Cazaril.
   “How goes it?” Cazaril asked Palli in a low voice.
   “Poor fellow’s still out cold,” Palli murmured back. “I think he must have taken a mighty whack. And you?”
   Cazaril repeated the tale of Orico’s sudden collapse. Archdivine Mendenal stepped closer to listen, and the physician glanced over her shoulder. “Had they told you of this turn, Archdivine?” Cazaril added.
   “Oh, aye. I will follow Orico’s physicians to the Zangre as soon as I may.”
   If the white-haired physician wondered why an injured groom should claim more of the archdivine’s attention than the stricken roya, she gave no more sign than a slight lifting of her eyebrows. She finished her last neat stitch and dipped a cloth in a basin to wash the crusting gore from the shaved scalp around the wound. She dried her hands, checked the rolled-back eyes under Umegat’s lids, and straightened. The Mother’s midwife gathered up Umegat’s cut-away left braid and the rest of the medical mess, and made all tidy.
   Archdivine Mendenal clutched his fingers together, and asked the physician, “Well?”
   “Well, his skull is not broken, that I can feel. I shall leave the wound uncovered to better mark bleeding or swelling. I can tell nothing more until he wakes. There’s naught to do now but keep him warm and watch him till he stirs.”
   “When will that be?”
   The physician stared down dubiously at her patient. Cazaril did, too. The fastidious Umegat would have hated his present crumpled, half-shorn, desperately limp appearance. Umegat’s flesh was still that deathly gray, making his golden Roknari skin look like a dirty rag. His breath rasped. Not good. Cazaril had seen men who looked like that go on to recover; he’d also seen them sink and die.
   “I cannot say,” the physician replied at last, echoing Cazaril’s own mental diagnosis.
   “Leave us, then. The acolyte will watch him for now.”
   “Yes, Your Reverence.” The physician bowed, and instructed the midwife, “Send for me at once if he either wakes, or takes a fever, or starts to convulse.” She gathered up her instruments.
   “Lord dy Palliar, I thank you for your aid,” the archdivine said. He added, “Lord Cazaril, please stay.”
   Palli said merely, “You’re entirely welcome, Your Reverence,” then after a heartbeat, as the hint penetrated, “Oh. Ah. If you’re all right, Caz…?”
   “For now.”
   “Then I should perhaps return to the Daughter’s house. If you need anything, at any time, send for me there, or at Yarrin Palace, and I’ll ’tend upon you at once. You should not go about alone.” He gave Cazaril a stern look, to be sure this was understood as command and not parting pleasantry. He, too, then bowed, and, opening the door for the physician, followed in her wake.
   As the door closed, Mendenal turned to Cazaril, his hands outstretched in pleading. “Lord Cazaril, what should we do?”
   Cazaril recoiled. “Five gods, you’re asking me?”
   The man’s lips twisted ruefully. “Lord Cazaril, I’ve only been the archdivine of Cardegoss for two years. I was chosen because I was a good administrator, I fancy, and to please my family, because my brother and my father before him were powerful provincars. I was dedicated to the Bastard’s Order at age fourteen, with a good dower from my father to assure my care and advancement. I have served the gods faithfully all my life, but… they do not speak to me.” He stared at Cazaril, and glanced aside to the Mother’s midwife, with an odd hopeless envy in his eyes, devoid of hostility. “When a pious ordinary man finds himself in a room with three working saints—if he has any wits left—he seeks instruction, he does not feign to instruct.”
   “I am not…” Cazaril bit back the denial. He had more urgent concerns than arguing over the theological definition of his current condition, though if this was sainthood, the gods must exceed themselves for damnation. “Honorable Acolyte—I’m sorry, I have forgotten your name?”
   “I am Clara, Lord Cazaril.”
   Cazaril gave her a little bow. “Acolyte Clara. Do you see—do you not see—Umegat’s glow? I’ve never seen him when—is it supposed to go out when a man is asleep or unconscious?”
   She shook her head. “The gods are with us waking and sleeping, Lord Cazaril. I’m sure I don’t have the strength of sight you do, but indeed, the Bastard has withdrawn his presence from Learned Umegat.”
   “Oh, no,” breathed Mendenal.
   “Are you sure?” said Cazaril. “It could not be a defect in my—in your second sight?”
   She glanced at him, wincing a little. “No. For I can see you plainly enough. I could see you before you came in the door. It is almost painful to be in the same room with you.”
   “Does this mean the miracle of the menagerie is broken?” asked Mendenal anxiously, gesturing at the unconscious groom. “We have no dike now against the tide of this black curse?”
   She hesitated. “Umegat no longer hosts the miracle. I do not know if the Bastard has transferred it to another’s will.”
   Mendenal wheeled to stare hopefully at Cazaril. “His, perhaps?”

   She frowned at Cazaril, absently holding her hand to her brow as if to shade her eyes. “If I am a saint, as Learned Umegat has named me, I am only a small domestic one. If Umegat’s tutelage had not sharpened my perceptions over the years, I should merely have thought myself unusually lucky in my profession.”
   Luck, Cazaril couldn’t help reflecting, had not been his most salient experience since he’d stumbled into the gods’ maze.
   “And yet the Mother only reaches through me from time to time, then passes on. Lord Cazaril… blazes. From the day I first saw him at Lord Dondo’s funeral. The white light of the Bastard and the blue clarity of the Lady of Spring, both at once, the constant living presence of two gods, all mixed with some other dark thing I cannot make out. Umegat could see more clearly. If the Bastard has added more to the roil already there, I cannot tell.”
   The archdivine touched brow, lips, navel, groin, and heart, fingers spread wide, and stared hungrily at Cazaril. “Two gods, two gods at once, and in this room!”
   Cazaril bent forward, hands clenching, hideously reminded by the pressure of his belt of the terrifying distention beneath it. “Did Umegat not make known to you what I did to Lord Dondo? Did you not talk to Rojeras?”
   “Yes, yes, and I spoke to Rojeras too, good man, but of course he could not understand—”
   “He understood better than you seem to. I bear death and murder in my gut. An abomination, for all I know taking physical and not just psychic form, engendered by a demon and Dondo dy Jironal’s accursed ghost. Which screams at me nightly, by the way, in Dondo’s voice, with all his vilest vocabulary, and Dondo had a mouth like the Cardegoss main sewer. With no way out but to tear me open. It is not holy, it is disgusting!”
   Mendenal stepped back, blinking.
   Cazaril clutched his head. “I have terrible dreams. And pains in my belly. And rages. And I’m afraid Dondo is leaking.”
   “Oh, dear,” said Mendenal faintly. “I had no idea, Lord Cazaril. Umegat said only that you were skittish, and it was best to leave you in his hands.”
   “Skittish,” Cazaril repeated hollowly. “And oh, did I mention the ghosts?” It was surely a measure of… something, that they seemed the least of his worries.
   “Ghosts?”
   “All the ghosts of the Zangre follow me about the castle and cluster around my bed at night.”
   “Oh,” said Mendenal, looking suddenly worried. “Ah.”
   “Ah?”
   “Did Umegat warn you about the ghosts?”
   “No… he said they could do me no harm.”
   “Well, yes and no. They can do you no harm while you live. But as Umegat explained it to me, the Lady’s miracle has delayed the working out of the Bastard’s miracle, not reversed it. It follows that, hm, should Her hand open, and the demon fly away with your soul—and Dondo’s, of course—it will leave your husk with a certain, um, dangerous theological emptiness which is not quite like natural death. And the ghosts of the excluded damned will attempt to, er, move in.”
   After a short, fraught silence, Cazaril inquired, “Do they ever succeed?”
   “Sometimes. I saw a case once, when I was a young divine. The degraded spirits are shambling stupid things, but it’s so very awkward to get them out again once they take possession. They must be burned… well, alive is not quite the right term. Very ugly scene, especially if the relatives don’t understand, because, of course, being your body, it screams in your voice… It would not, in the event, be your problem, of course, you would be, um, elsewhere by then, but it might save, hm, others some painful troubles, if you make sure you always have someone by you who would understand the necessity of burning your body before sunset…” Mendenal trailed off apologetically.
   “Thank you, Your Reverence,” said Cazaril, with awful politeness. “I shall add that to Rojeras’s theory of the demon growing itself a new body in my tumor and gnawing its way out, should I ever again be in danger of getting a night’s sleep. Although I suppose there’s no reason both could not occur. Sequentially.”
   Mendenal cleared his throat. “Sorry, my lord. I thought you should know.”
   Cazaril sighed. “Yes… I suppose I should.” He looked up, remembering last night’s scene with dy Joal. “Is it possible… suppose the Lady’s grip loosened just a little. Is it possible for Dondo’s soul to leak into mine?”
   Mendenal’s brows rose. “I don’t… Umegat would know. Oh, how I wish he would wake up! I suppose it would be a faster way for Dondo’s ghost to get a body than to grow one in a tumor. You would think it would be too small.” He made an uncertain measuring gesture with his hands.
   “Not according to Rojeras,” said Cazaril dryly.
   Mendenal rubbed his forehead. “Ah, poor Rojeras. He thought I had taken a sudden interest in his specialty when I asked about you, and of course, I did not correct his misapprehension. I thought he was going to talk for half the night. I finally had to promise him a purse for his ward, to escape the tour of his collection.”
   “I’d pay money to escape that, too,” Cazaril allowed. After a moment he asked curiously, “Your Reverence… why was I not arrested for Dondo’s murder? How did Umegat finesse that?”
   “Murder? There was no murder.”
   “Excuse me, the man is dead, and by my hand, by death magic, which is a capital crime.”
   “Oh. Yes, I see. The ignorant are full of errors about death magic, well, even the name is wrong. It’s a nice theological point, d’you see. Attempting death magic is a crime of intent, of conspiracy. Successful death magic is not death magic at all, but a miracle of justice, and cannot be a crime, because it is the hand of the god that carries off the victim—victims—I mean, it’s not as if the roya can send his officers to arrest the Bastard, eh?”
   “Do you think the present chancellor of Chalion will appreciate the distinction?”
   “Ah… no. Which is why Umegat advised that the Temple prefer a discreet approach to this… this very complicated issue.” Mendenal scratched his cheek in new worry. “Not that the supplicant of such justice has ever lived through it, before… the distinction was clearer when it was all theoretical. Two miracles. I never thought of two miracles. Unprecedented. The Lady of Spring must love you dearly.”
   “As a teamster loves his mule that carries his baggage,” said Cazaril bitterly, “whipping it over the high passes.”
   The archdivine looked a little distraught; only Acolyte Clara’s lips twisted in appreciation. Umegat would have snorted, Cazaril thought. He began to understand why the Roknari saint had been so fond of talking shop with him. Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.
   “Yes, but,” said Mendenal. “Umegat concurred—so extraordinary a preservation must surely be for an extraordinary purpose. Have you… have you no guess at all?”
   “Archdivine, I know naught.” Cazaril’s voice shook. “And I am…” he broke off.
   “Yes?” encouraged Mendenal.
   If I say it aloud, I will fall to pieces right here. He licked his lips, and swallowed. When he forced the words from his tongue at last, they came out a hoarse whisper. “I am very frightened.”
   “Oh,” said the archdivine after a long moment. “Ah. Yes, I… I see that it would be… Oh, if only Umegat would wake up!”
   The Mother’s midwife cleared her throat, diffidently. “My lord dy Cazaril?”
   “Yes, Acolyte Clara?”
   “I think I have a message for you.”
   “What?”
   “The Mother spoke to me in a dream last night. I was not altogether sure, for my sleeping brain spins fancies out of whatever is common in my thoughts, and I think often of Her. So I had meant to take it to Umegat today, and be guided by his good advice. But She said to me, She said”—Clara took a breath, and steadied her voice, her expression growing calmer—“‘Tell my Daughter’s faithful courier to beware despair above all.’”
   “Yes?” said Cazaril after a moment. “And…?” Blast it, if the gods were going to trouble to send him messages in other people’s dreams, he’d prefer something less cryptic. And more practical.
   “That was all.”
   “Are you sure?” asked Mendenal.

   “Well… She might have said, her Daughter’s faithful courtier. Or castle-warder. Or captain. Or all four of them—that part’s blurred in my memory.”
   “If it is so, who are the other three men?” asked Mendenal, puzzled.
   The unknowing echo of the Provincara’s words to him in Valenda chilled Cazaril to the pit of his aching belly. “I… I am, Archdivine. I am.” He bowed to the acolyte, and said through stiff lips, “Thank you, Clara. Pray to your Lady for me.”
   She gave him a silent, understanding smile, and a little nod.
   Leaving the Mother’s acolyte to keep close watch over Umegat, the archdivine excused himself to go attend upon Roya Orico, and with a shy diffidence invited Cazaril to accompany him to the Zangre gates. Cazaril found himself grateful for the offer and followed him out. His earlier towering rage and terror had long since passed, leaving him limp and weak. His knees buckled on the gallery stairs; but for catching the railing he would have tumbled down half a flight. To his embarrassment, the solicitous Mendenal insisted Cazaril be carried up the hill in his own sedan chair, hoisted by four stout dedicats, with Mendenal walking beside. Cazaril felt a fool, and conspicuous. But, he had to admit, vastly obliged.


* * *

   The interview Cazaril had been dreading did not take place until after supper. Summoned by a page, he climbed reluctantly to the royesse’s sitting room. Iselle, looking strained, awaited him attended by Betriz; the royesse waved him to a stool. Candles burning brightly in all the mirrored wall sconces did not drive away the shadow that clung about her.
   “How does Orico go on?” he asked the ladies anxiously. They had neither of them come to supper in the banqueting hall, instead remaining with the royina and the stricken roya above stairs.
   Betriz answered, “He seemed calmer this evening, when he found he was not completely blind—he can see a candle flame with his right eye. But he is not passing water properly, and his physician thinks he is in danger of growing dropsical. He does look terribly swollen.” She bit her lip in worry.
   Cazaril ducked his head at the royesse. “And were you able to see Teidez?”
   Iselle sighed. “Yes, right after Chancellor dy Jironal dressed him down. He was too distraught to be sensible. If he were younger, I would name it one of his tantrums. I’m sorry he is grown too big to slap. He takes no food, and throws things at his servants, and now he’s freed from his chambers, is refusing to come out. There’s nothing to do when he gets like this but to leave him alone. He’ll be better tomorrow.” Her eyes narrowed at Cazaril, and her lips compressed. “And so, my lord. Just how long have you known of this black curse that hangs over Orico?”
   “Sara finally talked to you… did she?”
   “Yes.”
   “What exactly did she say?”
   Iselle gave a tolerably accurate summation of the story of Fonsa and the Golden General, and the descent of the legacy of ill fortune through Ias to Orico. She did not mention herself or Teidez.
   Cazaril chewed on a knuckle. “You have about half the facts, then.”
   “I do not like this half portion, Cazaril. The world demands I make good choices on no information, and then blames my maidenhood for my mistakes, as if my maidenhood were responsible for my ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.” Steel rang in these last words, unmistakably.
   He bowed his head in apology. He wanted to weep for what he was about to lose. It was not to shield her maiden innocence, nor Betriz’s, that he had kept silent for too long, nor even dread of arrest. He had feared to lose the paradise of their regard, been sickened with the horror of becoming hideous in their eyes. Coward. Speak, and be done.
   “I first learned of the curse the night after Dondo’s death, from the groom Umegat—who is no groom, by the way, but a divine of the Bastard, and the saint who hosted the miracle of the menagerie for Orico.”
   Betriz’s eyes widened. “Oh. I… I liked him. How does he go on?”
   Cazaril made a little balancing gesture with one hand. “Badly. Still unconscious. And worse, he’s”—he swallowed, Here we go —“stopped glowing.”
   “Stopped glowing?” said Iselle. “I didn’t know he’d started.”
   “Yes. I know. You cannot see it. There’s… something I haven’t told you about Dondo’s murder.” He took a breath. “It was me who sacrificed crow and rat, and prayed to the Bastard for Dondo’s death.”
   “Ah! I’d suspected as much,” said Betriz, sitting straighter.
   “Yes, but—what you don’t know is, I was granted it. I should have died that night, in Fonsa’s tower. But another’s prayers intervened. Iselle’s, I think.” He nodded to the royesse.
   Her lips parted, and her hand went to her breast. “I prayed that the Daughter spare me from Dondo!”
   “You prayed—and the Daughter spared me.” He added ruefully, “But not, as it turned out, from Dondo. You saw how at his funeral all the gods refused to sign that his soul was taken up?”
   “Yes, and so he was excluded, damned, trapped in this world,” said Iselle. “Half the court feared he was loose in Cardegoss, and festooned themselves with charms against him.”
   “In Cardegoss, yes. Loose… no. Most lost ghosts are bound to the place where they died. Dondo’s is bound to the person who killed him.” He shut his eyes, unable to bear looking at their draining faces. “You know my tumor? It’s not a tumor. Or not only a tumor. Dondo’s soul is trapped inside of me. Along with the death demon, apparently, but the demon, at least, is blessedly quiet about it all. It’s Dondo who won’t shut up. He screams at me, at night. Anyway.” He opened his eyes again, though he still did not dare look up. “All this… divine activity has given me a sort of second sight. Umegat has it—there is a little saint of the Mother in town who has it—and I have it. Umegat has—had—a white glow. The Mother Clara shines a faint green. They have both told me I am mostly blue and white, all roiling and blazing.” At last, he forced himself to look up and meet Iselle’s eyes. “And I can see Orico’s curse as a dark shadow. Iselle, listen, this is important. I don’t think Sara knows this. It’s not just a shadow on Orico. It’s on you and Teidez, too. All the descendants of Fonsa seem to be smeared by this black thing.”
   After a little silence, sitting stiff and still, Iselle said only, “That makes a sort of sense.”
   Betriz was eyeing him sideways. By the testimony of his belt, his tumor was not grown more gross than before, but her gaze made him feel monstrous. He bent a little over his belly and managed a weak, unfelt grin in her direction.
   “But how do you get rid of this… haunting?” Betriz asked slowly.
   “Um… as I understand it, if I am killed, my soul will lose its anchor in my body, and the death demon will be released to finish its job. I think. I’m a little afraid the demon will try to trick or betray me to my death, if it can; it seems a trifle single-minded. It wants to go home. Or, if the Lady’s hand opens, the demon will be released, and wrench my soul from my body, and off we all go together again the same.” He decided not to burden her with Rojeras’s other theory.
   “No, Lord Caz, you don’t understand. I want to know how you can get rid of it without dying.”
   “I’d like to know that, too,” Cazaril sighed. With an effort, he straightened his spine and managed a better smile. “It doesn’t matter. I traded my life for Dondo’s death of my own free will, and I’ve received my due. Payment of my debt is merely delayed, not rescinded. The Lady apparently keeps me alive for some service I have yet to perform. Or else I would slay myself in disgust and end it.”
   Iselle, eyes narrowing at this, sat up and said sharply, “Well, I do not release you from my service! Do you hear me, Cazaril?”
   His smile grew more genuine, for an instant. “Ah.”
   “Yes,” said Betriz, “and you can’t expect us to get all squeamish just because you’re… inhabited. I mean… we’re expected to share our bodies someday. Doesn’t make us horrible, does it?” She hesitated at where this metaphor was taking her.
   Cazaril, whose mind had been shying from just that parallel for some time, said mildly, “Yes, but with Dondo? You both drew the line at Dondo.” In truth, every man he’d ever killed had traveled back up the shock of his sword arm into his memory, and rode with him still, in a sense. And so we bear our sins.
   Iselle put her hand to her lips in sudden alarm. “Cazaril—he can’t get out, can he?”
   “I pray to the Lady he may not. The idea of him seeping into my mind is… is the worst of all. Worse even than… never mind. Oh. That reminds me, I should warn you about the ghosts.” Briefly, he repeated what the archdivine had told him about making sure his body was burned, and why. It afforded him an odd relief, to have that out. They were dismayed, but attentive; he thought he might trust them to have the courage for the task. And then was ashamed to have not trusted their courage earlier.
   “But listen, Royesse,” he went on. “The Golden General’s curse has followed Fonsa’s get, but Sara is shadowed, too. Umegat and I both think she married into it.”
   “Her life has certainly been made miserable enough by it,” agreed Iselle.
   “It therefore follows logically, that you might marry out of it. It is a hope, anyway, a great hope. I think we should turn our minds to the matter—I would have you out of Cardegoss, out of the curse, out of Chalion altogether, as soon as may be arranged.”
   “With the court in this uproar, marriage arrangements are out of—” Iselle paused abruptly. “But… what about Teidez? And Orico? And Chalion itself? Am I to abandon them, like a general running away from a losing battle?”
   “The highest commanders have wider responsibilities than a single battle. If a battle may not be won—if the general cannot save that day, at least such a retreat saves the good of another day.”
   She frowned doubtfully, taking this in. Her brows lowered. “Cazaril… do you think my mother and grandmother knew of this dark thing that hangs over us?”
   “Your grandmother, I don’t know. Your mother…” If Ista had seen the ghosts of the Zangre for herself, she must have been lent the second sight for a time. What did this imply? Cazaril’s imagination foundered. “Your mother knew something, but I don’t know how much. Enough to be terrified when you were called to Cardegoss, anyway.”
   “I’d thought her overfussy.” Iselle’s voice lowered. “I’d thought her mad, as the servants whispered.” Her frown deepened. “I have a lot to think about.”
   As her silence lengthened, Cazaril rose, and bade both ladies a polite good night. The royesse acknowledged him with an absent nod. Betriz clasped her hands together, staring at him in agonized searching, and dipped a half curtsey.
   “Wait!” Iselle called suddenly as he reached the door. He wheeled around; she sprang from her chair, strode up to him, and gripped both his hands. “You are too tall. Bend your head,” she commanded.
   Obligingly, he ducked his head; she stood on tiptoe. He blinked in surprise as her young lips planted a firm and formal kiss upon his brow, and then upon the back of each hand, lifted to her mouth. And then she sank to the floor in a rustle of perfumed silk, and as his mouth opened in inarticulate protest, she kissed each booted foot with the same unhesitating firmness.
   “There,” said Iselle, rising. Her chin came up. “Now you may be dismissed.”
   Tears were running down Betriz’s face. Too shaken for words, Cazaril bowed deeply and fled to his unquiet bed.

Chapter 19

   Cazaril found the Zangre eerily quiet the following day. After Dondo’s death the court had been alarmed, yes, but excited and given over to gossip and whispering. Now even the whispering was stilled. All who had no direct duties stayed away, and those who had inescapable tasks went about them in a hurried, apprehensive silence.
   Iselle and Betriz spent the day in Ias’s tower, waiting upon Sara and Orico. At dawn, Cazaril and the grim castle warder oversaw the cremation and burial of the remains of the animals. For the rest of the day, Cazaril alternated feeble attempts to attend to the mess on his desk with trudges down to the temple hospital. Umegat lay unchanged, gray and rasping. After his second visit, Cazaril stopped in at the temple itself and prayed, prostrate and whispering, before all five altars in turn. If he was in truth infected with this saint-disease, dammit, shouldn’t it be good for something?
   The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs, Umegat had said. Yes? It seemed to Cazaril that this bargain ought to run two ways. If people stopped lending the gods their wills by which to do miracles, eh, what would the gods do about it then? Well, the first thing to happen would be that I’d drop dead. There was that. Cazaril lay a long time before the altar of the Lady of Spring, but here found himself mute, not even his lips moving. Abashed, ashamed, despairing? But wordy or wordless, the gods returned him only the same blank silence, five times over.
   He was reminded of Palli’s insistence that he not go about alone when, slogging back up the hill, he passed dy Joal and another of dy Jironal’s retainers entering Jironal Palace. Dy Joal’s hand curled on his sword hilt, but he did not draw; with polite, wary nods, they walked wide about each other.
   Back in his office, Cazaril rubbed his aching brow and turned his thoughts to Iselle’s marriage. Royse Bergon of Ibra, eh. The boy would do as well as any and better than most, Cazaril supposed. But this turmoil in the court of Chalion made open negotiations impossible to carry out; it would have to be a secret envoy, and soon. Running down the list in his mind of courtiers capable of such a diplomatic mission turned up none Cazaril would trust. Running down the much shorter list of men he could trust turned up no experienced diplomats. Umegat was laid low. The archdivine could not leave in secret. Palli? March dy Palliar had the rank, at least, to demand Ibra’s respect. He tried to imagine honest Palli negotiating the subtleties of Iselle’s marriage contract with the Fox of Ibra, and groaned. Maybe… maybe if Palli were sent with an extremely detailed and explicit list of instructions…?
   Needs must drive. He would broach it to Palli tomorrow.


* * *

   Cazaril prayed on his knees before bed to be spared from the nightmare that had recurred three nights running, where Dondo grew back to life size within his swelling stomach and then, somehow dressed in his funeral robes and armed with his sword, carved his way out. Perhaps the Lady heard his plea; at any rate, he woke at dawn, his head and heart pounding, from a new nightmare. In this one, Dondo somehow sucked Cazaril’s soul into his own belly in his place, and escaped to take over Cazaril’s body. And then embarked on a career of rapine in the women’s quarters while Cazaril, helpless to stop him, watched. To his dismay, as he panted in the gray light and regained his grip on reality, Cazaril realized his body was painfully aroused.
   So, was Dondo plunged into a lightless prison, sealed from sound, deprived of sensation? Or did he ride along as the ultimate spy and voyeur? Cazaril had not imagined making love to Be—to any lady since this damned affliction had been visited upon him; he imagined it now, a crowded quartet between the sheets, and shuddered.
   Briefly, Cazaril envisioned escaping by the window. He might squeeze his shoulders through, and dive; the drop would be stupendous, the crunch at the end… quick. Or with his knife, taken to wrists or throat or belly or all three… He sat up, blinking, to find a half a dozen phantasms gathered avidly around him, crowding each other like vultures around a dead horse. He hissed, lurched, and swiped his arm through the air to scatter them. Could a body with its head smashed in be animated by one of them? The archdivine’s words implied so. Escape through suicide was blocked by this ghastly patrol, it seemed. Dreading sleep, he stumbled from bed and went to wash and dress.
   Coming back from a perfunctory breakfast in the banqueting hall, Cazaril encountered a breathless Nan dy Vrit upon the stairs.
   “My lady begs you ’tend upon her at once,” Nan told him, and Cazaril nodded and pushed up the steps. “Not in her chambers,” Nan added, as he started past the third floor. “In Royse Teidez’s.”
   “Oh.” Cazaril’s brows rose, and he turned instead to pass his own chamber and go down the hall to Teidez’s, Nan at his heels.
   As he entered the office antechamber, twin to Iselle’s above, he heard voices from the rooms opening beyond; Iselle’s murmur, and Teidez’s, raised: “I don’t want anything to eat. I don’t want to see anyone! Go away!”
   The sitting room was cluttered with weapons, clothes, and gifts, strewn about haphazardly. Cazaril picked his way across to the bedchamber.
   Teidez lay back on his pillows, still in his nightgown. The close, moist air of the room smelled of boy sweat, and another tang. Teidez’s secretary-tutor hovered anxiously on one side of the bed; Iselle stood with her hands on her hips on the other. Teidez said, “I want to go back to sleep. Get out.” He glanced up at Cazaril, cringed, and pointed. “I especially don’t want him in here!”
   Nan dy Vrit said, in a very domestic voice, “Now, none of that, young lord. You know better than to talk to old Nan that way.”
   Teidez, cowed by some ancient habit, went from surly to whiney. “I have a headache.”
   Iselle said firmly, “Nan, bring a light. Cazaril, I want you to look at Teidez’s leg. It looks very odd to me.”
   Nan held a brace of candles high, supplementing the wan gray daylight from the window. Teidez at first clutched his blankets to his chest, but didn’t quite dare fight his older sister’s glare; she twitched them out of his hands and folded them aside.
   Three scabbed, parallel grooves ran in a spiral partway around the boy’s right leg. In themselves, they did not appear deep or dangerous, but the flesh around them was so swollen that the skin was shiny and silvery. Translucent pink drainage and yellow pus oozed from their edges. Cazaril forced himself to keep his expression even as he studied the hot red streaks climbing past the boy’s knee and winding up the inside of his thigh. Teidez’s eyes were glazed. He jerked back his head as Cazaril reached for him. “Don’t touch me!”
   “Be still!” Cazaril commanded in a low voice. Teidez’s forehead, beneath Cazaril’s wrist, was scorching.
   He glanced up at the sallow-faced secretary, watching with a frown. “How long has he been feverish?”
   “Just this morning, I believe.”
   “When did his physician last see this?”
   “He would not have a physician, Lord Cazaril. He threw a chair at me when I tried to help him, and bandaged it himself.”
   “And you let him?” Cazaril’s voice made the secretary jump.
   The man shrugged uneasily. “He would have it so.”
   Teidez grumbled, “Some people obey me. I’ll remember who, too, later.” He glowered up at Cazaril through half-lowered lashes, and stuck out his lower lip at his sister.
   “He’s taken an infection. I’ll see that a Temple physician is sent in to him at once.”
   Teidez, disgruntled, wriggled back down under his covers. “Can I go back to sleep now? If you don’t mind. And draw the curtain, the light hurts my eyes.”
   “Yes, stay abed,” Cazaril told him, and withdrew.
   Iselle followed him into the antechamber, lowering her voice. “It’s not right, is it?”
   “No. It’s not. Good observation, Royesse. Your judgment was correct.”
   She gave him a satisfied nod, and he bowed himself out and made for the end stairs. By Nan dy Vrit’s shadowed face, she at least understood just how not-right it was. All Cazaril could think of, as he hastened down the stairs and back across the stones of the courtyard toward Ias’s Tower, was how very seldom he’d seen any man, no matter how young or strong, survive an amputation that high upon the thigh. His stride lengthened.
   By good luck, Cazaril found dy Jironal at once, in the Chancellery. He was just sealing a saddlebag and dispatching a courier with it.
   “How are the roads?” dy Jironal asked the fellow, who was typically lean and wiry and wore the Chancellery’s tabard over an odd assortment of winter woolens.
   “Muddy, m’lord. It will be dangerous to ride after dark.”
   “Well, do your best,” dy Jironal sighed, and clapped him on the shoulder. The man saluted and made his way out past Cazaril.
   Dy Jironal scowled at his new visitor. “Cazaril.”
   “My lord.” Cazaril offered a fractional bow and entered.
   Dy Jironal seated himself on the edge of his desk, and folded his arms. “Your attempt to hide behind the Daughter’s Order in its plot to unseat me is doomed to fail, you know,” he said conversationally. “I intend to see that its failure will be miserable.”
   Impatiently, Cazaril waved this aside. He’d have been more surprised had dy Jironal not had an ear in the order’s councils. “You have much worse troubles this morning than anything I can offer you, my lord.”
   Dy Jironal’s eyes widened in surprise; his head tilted in an attitude of sudden attention. “Oh?”
   “What did Teidez’s wound look like when you saw it?”
   “What wound? He showed me no wound.”
   “On his right leg—he was scratched by Orico’s leopard, apparently, while he was killing the poor beast. In truth, the marks didn’t look deep, but they’ve taken an infection. His skin burns. And you know how a poisoned wound sometimes throws out feverish marks upon the skin?”
   “Aye,” said dy Jironal uneasily.
   “Teidez’s run from ankle to groin. They look like a bloody conflagration.”
   Dy Jironal swore.
   “I advise you pull that troop of useless physicians off of Orico for a moment and send them across to Teidez’s chambers. Or you could lose two royal puppets in one week.”
   Dy Jironal’s glare met Cazaril’s like flint on steel, but after one fierce inhalation he nodded and shifted to his feet. Cazaril followed him out. Corrupted with greed and familial pride dy Jironal might be, but he wasn’t incompetent. Cazaril could see why Orico might have chosen to endure much, in exchange for that.
   After assuring himself that dy Jironal was climbing the stairs to Orico’s chambers with due haste, Cazaril turned back down them. He’d had no word from the temple hospital since last night; he wanted to check again on Umegat. He made his way out the Zangre gates past the ill-fated stable block. A little to his surprise, he spotted Umegat’s tongueless undergroom climbing the hill toward him. The man waved his thumbless hand when he saw Cazaril, and hurried his step.
   He arrived breathless and smiling. His face was marked with livid bruises, red-purple around one eye, from the futile fight in the menagerie, and his broken nose was still swollen, its lacerated edge dark and scabbed. But his eyes were shining in their wrecked matrix; he almost danced up to Cazaril.
   Cazaril’s brows rose. “You look happy—what, man, is Umegat awake?”
   He nodded vigorously.
   Cazaril grinned back at him, faint with relief.
   He spoke a mumbled sort of gargle, of which Cazaril made out perhaps one word in four, but enough to gather he was on some urgent errand. He motioned Cazaril to wait outside the silent, dark menagerie, and returned in a few minutes with a sack tied to his belt and clutching a book, which he brandished happily. By which Cazaril understood Umegat was not only awake, but well enough to want his favorite book—Ordol, Cazaril noted with bemusement. Glad of the stout little man’s company, Cazaril walked beside him down into town.
   Cazaril reflected on the fellow’s stigmata of martyrdom, displayed with such seeming indifference. It was silent testimony of horrendous torment, endured in the name of his god. Had his terror lasted an hour, a day, months? It was not quite possible to be sure whether the softened roundness of his appearance was the result of castration or just old age. Cazaril couldn’t very well ask him his story. Just attempting to listen to his badly mouthed ordinary exchanges was a painful strain upon the ears and attention. He didn’t even know if the fellow was Chalionese or Ibran, Brajaran or Roknari, or how he had come to Cardegoss, or how long he had served with Umegat. Doing his daily duties as they came to him. He stumped along now with the book under his arm, eyes bright. So, this was what a faithful servant of the gods, heroic and beloved, ended up looking like.
   They arrived at Umegat’s chamber to find him sitting up in bed against some pillows. He was pale and washed-out, his prickly scalp puckered along its stitches, remaining hair a tumbled rat’s nest, lips crusted, his face unshaved. The tongueless groom rummaged in his sack, pulled out some shaving gear, and waved it triumphantly in the air; Umegat smiled wanly. He stared at Cazaril, not lifting his head from the pillow. He rubbed his eyes, and squinted uncertainly.
   Cazaril swallowed. “How do you feel?”

   “Headache,” Umegat managed. He snorted softly. Finally, he said, “Are all my beautiful creatures dead?” His tongue was thick, his voice low and a little slurred, but he seemed coherent enough.
   “Nearly all. There was one little blue-and-yellow bird got away. It’s back safely in its cage now. I let no one make trophies of them. I saw them cremated like fallen soldiers yesterday. Archdivine Mendenal has undertaken to find their ashes a place of honor.”
   Umegat nodded, then winced. His crusted lips tightened.
   Cazaril glanced at the undergroom—yes, this man had to be one of those who knew the truth—and back to Umegat, and said hesitantly, “Do you know you’ve stopped glowing?”
   Umegat blinked rapidly at him. “I… suspected it. At least you are much less disturbing to look upon, this way.”
   “Your second sight is taken from you?”
   “Mm. Second sight is redundant to reason anyway. You live, therefore I know perfectly well the Lady’s hand still grips you.” He added after a moment, “I always knew it was only lent to me for a time. Well, it was quite a ride while it lasted.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Quite a ride.” He turned his face away. “I could have borne it being taken back. To have it knocked from my hands… I should have seen it coming.”
   The gods should have warned you…
   The little elderly undergroom, whose face had drooped at the pain in Umegat’s voice, picked up the book and held it out consolingly.
   Umegat smiled weakly and took it tenderly from him. “At least I have my old profession to fall back on, eh?” His hands smoothed the pages open to some familiar spot, and he glanced down. His smile faded. His voice sharpened. “Is this a joke?”
   “Is what a joke, Umegat? It is your book, I saw him bring it from the menagerie.”
   Umegat struggled awkwardly to sit upright. “What language is this?”
   Cazaril advanced and glanced over his shoulder. “Ibran, of course.”
   Umegat paged through the book, fingers shaking, his eyes twitching over the pages, his breath coming faster through lips open in something like terror. “It is… it is gibberish. It’s just, just… little blotches of ink. Cazaril!”
   “It is Ibran, Umegat. It’s just Ibran.”
   “It is my eyes. It is something in me…” He clutched his face, rubbed his eyes, and cried suddenly, “Oh, gods!” and burst into tears. The tears became wracking sobs on the third breath. “I am punished!”
   “Get the physician, fetch the physician,” Cazaril cried to the frightened-looking undergroom, and the man nodded and sped away. Umegat’s clutching fingers were tearing the pages in his blind grip. Awkwardly, Cazaril tried to help him, patting his shoulder, straightening the book and then taking it away altogether. The coolly resisted breakdown, having breached Umegat’s walls in this unguarded spot, poured through, and the man wept—not like a child. No child’s sobs were ever this terrifying.
   After agonizing minutes, the white-haired physician arrived and soothed the distraught divine; he seized upon her in hope, and would scarcely let her hands go free to carry out her business. Her explanation that many men and women taken with a palsy-stroke improved in a few days, people carried in by anxious relatives even walking out on their own a few days later, did the most to help him regain his shattered self-control. It took all his strength of mind, for her further tests, conducted after sending a passing dedicat running to the order’s library, revealed he could not read Roknari nor Darthacan either, and furthermore, his hands had lost the ability to wield a pen to make any kind of letters.
   The quill fell from his awkward grip, trailing ink across the linens, and he buried his face in his hands, groaning again, “I am punished. My joy and my refuge, taken from me…”
   “Sometimes, people can relearn things they have forgotten,” the physician said tentatively. “And your understanding of the words in your ears has not been taken, nor your recognition of the people you know. I have seen that happen, with some afflicted people. Someone could still read books aloud to you…”
   Umegat’s eyes met those of the tongueless groom, who was standing to one side still holding the Ordol. The old man scrubbed his fist across his mouth and made an odd noise down in his throat, a whimper of pure despair. Tears were running from the corners of his eyes down his seamed face.
   Umegat’s breath puffed from his lips, and he shook his head; drawn from his trouble by its reflection in that aged face, he reached across to grip the undergroom’s hand. “Sh. Sh. Aren’t we a pair, now.” He sighed, and sank back on his pillows. “Never say the Bastard has no sense of humor.” After a moment his eyes closed. Exhausted, or shutting it all out, Cazaril was not sure which.
   He choked down his own terrified demand of, Umegat, what should we do now? Umegat was in no condition to do anything, even give direction. Even pray? Cazaril hardly dared ask him to pray for Teidez, under the circumstances.
   Umegat’s breath thickened, and he dropped into an uneasy doze. Softly, careful to make no sound, the undergroom laid out his shaving gear on a side table and sat patiently to await his wakening again. The physician made notes and left quietly. Cazaril followed her out to the gallery overlooking the courtyard. Its central fountain was not playing in this chill, and the water in it was dark and scummy in the gray winter light.
   “Is he punished?” he asked her.
   She rubbed the back of her neck in a weary gesture. “How do I know? Head injuries are the strangest of all. I once saw a woman whose eyes appeared wholly undamaged go blind from a blow to the back of her head. I’ve seen people lose speech, lose control of half their body but not the other half. Are they punished? If so, the gods are evil, and that I do not believe. I think it is chance.”
   I think the gods load the dice. He wanted to urge her to take good care of Umegat, but clearly she already was doing so, and he didn’t want to sound frantic, or as though he doubted her skill or dedication. He bade her a polite good morning instead, and took himself off to track down the archdivine and apprise him of the ugly turn of Teidez’s wound.
   He found Archdivine Mendenal in the temple at the Mother’s altar, celebrating a ceremony of blessing upon a rich leather merchant’s wife and newborn daughter. Cazaril perforce waited until the family had laid their thanksgiving offerings and filed out again before approaching him and murmuring his news. Mendenal turned pale, and hurried off to the Zangre at once.
   Cazaril had developed unsettling new views of the efficacy and safety of prayer, but laid himself down on the cold pavement before the Mother’s altar anyway, thinking of Ista. If there was little hope of mercy for Teidez’s own sake, lured into violent sacrilege and left there by Dondo, surely the Mother might spare some pity for his mother Ista? The goddess’s message to him via Her acolyte’s dream the other day had sounded merciful. In a way. Though it might prove to be merely brutally practical. Prone on the polished patterned slates, he could feel the lethal lump in his belly, an uncomfortable mass seeming the size of his doubled fists.
   He rose at length and sought out Palli at Provincar dy Yarrin’s narrow old stone palace. Cazaril was conducted by a servant to a guest chamber at the back of the house. Palli was seated at a small table, writing in a ledger, but laid his quill aside when Cazaril entered and motioned his visitor to a chair across from him.
   As soon as the servant had shut the door behind him Cazaril leaned forward and said, “Palli, could you, at need, ride courier to Ibra in secret for the Royesse Iselle?”
   Palli’s brows climbed. “When?”
   “Soon.”

   He shook his head. “If by soon you mean now, I think not. I am much taken up with my duties as a lord dedicat—I have promised dy Yarrin my voice and my vote in the Council.”
   “You could leave a proxy with dy Yarrin, or some other trusted comrade.”
   Palli rubbed his shaven chin, and vented a dubious, “Hm.”
   Cazaril considered claiming to be a saint of the Daughter, and pulling rank on Palli, dy Yarrin, and their entire military order. It would require complicated explanations. It would require divulging the secret of Fonsa’s curse. It would entail not merely admitting, but asserting, his… peculiar disorder. God-touched. God-ravished. And sounding as mad or madder than Ista ever had. He compromised. “I think this may be the Daughter’s business.”
   Palli’s lips screwed up. “How can you tell?”
   “I just can.”
   “Well, I can’t.”
   “Wait, I know. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray for guidance.”
   “Me? Why don’t you?”
   “My nights are… full.”
   “And since when did you believe in prophetic dreams? I thought you always claimed it was nonsense, people fooling themselves, or pretending to an importance they could otherwise never claim.”
   “It’s a… recent conversion. Look, Palli. Just do it for, for the experiment. To please me, if you will.”
   Palli made a surrendering gesture. “For you, yes. For the rest of it…” His black brows lowered. “Ibra…? Just who would I be riding in secret from?”
   “Dy Jironal. Mostly.”
   “Oh? Dy Yarrin might be interested in that. Something in it for him?”
   “Not in any direct way, I don’t think.” Cazaril added reluctantly, “And likewise secret from Orico.”
   Palli sat back, his head tilting. His voice lowered. “Coy, Caz. Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?”
   “Worse,” Cazaril sighed. “Theology.”
   “Eh?”
   “Oh, that reminds me.” Cazaril pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to decide if his headache was getting worse. “Tell dy Yarrin his councils are being reported by some spy to dy Jironal. Though he may be canny enough to realize it already, I don’t know.”
   “Worse and worse. Are you getting enough sleep, Caz?”
   A bark of bitter laughter broke from Cazaril’s lips. “No.”
   “You always did go strangely fey when you were overtired, y’know. Well, I’m not riding anywhere on the basis of a bunch of dark hints.”
   “In the event, you’d be given full knowledge.”
   “When I am given full knowledge, then I’ll decide.”
   “Fair enough,” Cazaril sighed. “I will discuss it with the royesse. But I didn’t want to propose to her a man who would fail her.”
   “Hey!” said Palli indignantly. “When have I failed?”
   “Never, Palli. That’s why I thought of you.” Cazaril grinned and, with a little grunt of pain, pushed to his feet. “I must return to the Zangre.” Briefly, he described the unpleasant progression of Teidez’s claw mark.
   Palli’s face grew very sober indeed. “Just how bad is it?”
   “I don’t…” Caution tempered Cazaril’s frankness. “Teidez is young, strong, well fed. I see no reason why he cannot throw off this infection.”
   “Five gods, Caz, he’s the hope of his House. What will Chalion do if he doesn’t? And Orico laid low as well!”
   Cazaril hesitated. “Orico… hasn’t been well for some time, but I’m sure dy Jironal never imagined them both becoming so sick at once. You might note to dy Yarrin that our dear chancellor is going to be fairly distracted for the next few days. If the lord dedicats want to get past him to Orico’s bed and get anything signed, now might be their best chance.”
   He extracted himself from Palli’s cascade of second thoughts, although not from Palli’s insistence that he take the dy Gura brothers for escort. Climbing the hill once more, his circling calculations of how to effect Iselle’s escape from the wreck of her cursed House spiraled inward on a much simpler grim determination not to fall down in front of these earnest young men, to be hauled home stumbling with his arms across their shoulders.


* * *

   Cazaril found the third-floor corridor of the main block promisingly crowded upon his return. Green-robed physicians and their acolyte assistants scurried in and out. Servants hurried with water, linens, blankets, strange drinks in silver ewers. As Cazaril lingered, wondering what assistance he might offer, the archdivine emerged from the antechamber and started down the corridor, his face set and introspective.
   “Your Reverence?” Cazaril touched his five-colored sleeve in passing. “How goes the boy?”
   “Ah, Lord Cazaril.” Mendenal turned aside briefly. “The chancellor and the royesse have given me purses for prayers on his behalf. I go to set them in motion.”
   “Do you think… prayers will do any good?” Do you think any prayers will do good?
   “Prayer is always good.”
   No, it’s not, Cazaril wanted to reply, but held his tongue.
   Mendenal added suggestively, lowering his voice, “Yours might be especially efficacious. At this time.”
   Not so far as Cazaril had noticed. “Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.”
   “Ah,” said Mendenal uneasily. He managed a smile, and took polite leave.
   Royesse Iselle stepped into the corridor and glanced up and down it. She spied Cazaril and motioned him to her.
   He bowed. “Royesse?”
   She, too, lowered her voice; everyone here seemed to speak in hushed tones. “There is talk of an amputation. Can you—would you be willing—to help hold him down, if it chances so? I think you are familiar with the procedure?”
   “Indeed, Royesse.” Cazaril swallowed. Nightmare memories of bad moments in field hospitals flitted through his mind. He had never been able to decide if the men who tried to take it bravely or the men whose minds broke in terror were the hardest for their helpers to endure. Better by far the men who were unconscious to start with. “Tell the physicians I am at their service, and Lord Teidez’s.”
   Cazaril could hear from the antechamber where he leaned against the wall to wait just when the proposal was floated to Teidez. The boy was going to be of the second category, it seemed. He cried, and bellowed that he would not be made a cripple by traitors and idiots, and threw things. His rising hysteria was only calmed when a second physician opined that the infection was not gangrene after all—Cazaril’s nose agreed—but rather, blood poisoning, and that amputation would do more harm than good now. Treatment was reduced to a mere lancing, although from Teidez’s yells and struggles it might as well have been an amputation. Despite the draining of the wound, Teidez’s fever soared; servants brought buckets of cold water to make him a bath in a copper tub in the sitting room, then the physicians had to wrestle him into it.
   Between physicians, acolytes, and servants, they seemed to have enough hands for these practical tasks, and Cazaril withdrew for a time to his own office on the floor above. There he diverted his mind by writing tart letters to those town councils late with their royally mandated payments to the royesse’s household, which was all of them. They had sent letters of excuse claiming poor crops, banditry, plague, evil weather, and cheating tax gatherers. Six towns’ worth of troubles; Cazaril wondered if Orico had pulled a fast one with his betrothal gift and dumped the six worst towns on his rent rolls onto his sister and Dondo, or whether all of Chalion was in such disarray.
   Iselle and Betriz came in, looking weary and strained.
   “My brother is more ill than I have ever seen him,” Iselle confided to Cazaril. “We are going to set up my private altar and pray before dinner. I’m wondering if we should perhaps fast as well.”
   “I think what may be needed here are not others’ prayers, but Teidez’s himself; and not for health, but for forgiveness.”
   Iselle shook her head. “He refuses to pray at all. He says it’s not his fault, but Dondo’s, which is certainly true up to a point… He cries he never intended to hurt Orico, and they are slanderers who say so.”
   “Is anyone saying so?”
   Betriz put in, “No one says it to the royesse’s face. But there are strange rumors among the servants, Nan says.”
   Iselle’s frown deepened. “Cazaril… could it be?”
   Cazaril leaned his elbows on his table and rubbed the ache between his brows. “I think… not on Teidez’s part. I believe him when he says it was Dondo’s idea. Dondo, now, of him I would believe anything. Think it through from his point of view. He marries Teidez’s sister, then arranges for Teidez to ascend the throne while still a minor. He knew from watching his brother Martou just how much power a man may wield sitting in a roya’s pocket. Grant you, I don’t know how he intended to rid himself of Martou, but I am certain Dondo meant to be the next chancellor, perhaps regent, of Chalion. Maybe even roya of Chalion, depending on what evil chances he could arrange for Teidez.”
   Iselle caught her lower lip in her teeth. “And here I thought you had only saved me.” She touched Cazaril briefly on the shoulder and passed on into her chambers.
   Cazaril accompanied Iselle and Betriz on their predinner visit to Orico. Orico, though no better, was no worse. They found him arrayed in fresh linens, sitting up in bed, and being read to by Sara. The roya spoke hopefully of an improvement in his right eye, for he thought he could now see shapes moving. Cazaril thought the physician’s diagnosis of dropsy all too likely, for Orico’s gross flesh was swollen even more grossly; the roya’s thumbprint, placed upon the tight fat of his face, stayed pale and visible for a long time. Iselle downplayed the alarming reports of Teidez’s infection to Orico, but in the antechamber on the way out spoke frankly to Sara. Sara’s lips tightened; she made little comment to Teidez’s sister, but Cazaril thought that here at least was one who did not pray for the bewildered brutal boy.
   After supper, Teidez’s fever rose even higher. He stopped fighting and complaining, and fell into lassitude. A couple of hours before midnight, he seemed to fall to sleep. Iselle and Betriz at last left the royse’s antechamber and climbed to their own rooms for some rest.
   Close to midnight, unable to sleep for sake of his usual anticipations, Cazaril again went down the corridor to Teidez’s chambers. The chief physician, going to wake the boy to administer some fever-reducing syrup, fresh-concocted and delivered by a panting acolyte, found that Teidez could not be roused.
   Cazaril trudged up the stairs to report this to a sleepy Nan dy Vrit.
   “Well, there’s naught Iselle can do about it,” opined Nan. “She’s just dropped off, poor girl. Can we not let her sleep?”
   Cazaril hesitated, then said, “No.”
   So the two tired, worried young women dressed themselves again and trooped back down to Teidez’s crowded sitting room. Chancellor dy Jironal arrived, fetched from Jironal Palace.
   Dy Jironal frowned at Cazaril, and bowed to Iselle. “Royesse. This sickroom is no place for you.” His sour glance back to Cazaril silently added, Or you.
   Iselle’s eyes narrowed, but she replied in a quiet, dignified voice, “None here has a better right. Or a greater duty.” After a brief pause, she added, “And I must bear witness on my mother’s behalf.”
   Dy Jironal inhaled, then apparently thought better of whatever he’d been about to say. He might profitably save the clash of wills for some other time and place, Cazaril thought. There would be opportunities enough.
   Cold compresses failed to lower Teidez’s fever, and needle pricks failed to rouse him. His anxious attendants were thrown into a flurry when he had a brief seizure. His breathing became even more rasping and labored than the unconscious Umegat’s had been. Out in the corridor, a quintet of cantors, one voice from each of the five orders, sang prayers; their voices blended and echoed, a heartbreakingly beautiful background of sound to these dreadful doings.
   The harmonies paused. In that moment, Cazaril realized the labored breathing from the bedchamber beyond had stopped. Everyone fell silent in the face of that silence. One of the several attendant physicians, his face drained and wet with tears, came to the antechamber and called in dy Jironal and Iselle for witnesses. Voices rose and fell, very soft and low, from Teidez’s bedchamber for a moment or two.
   Both were pale when they came out again. Dy Jironal was pale and shocked; even to the last, Cazaril realized, the man had been expecting Teidez to pull through and recover. Iselle was pale and nearly expressionless. The black shadow boiled thickly about her.
   Every face in the antechamber turned toward her, like compass needles swinging. The royacy of Chalion had a new Heiress.

Chapter 20

   Iselle’s eyes, though reddened with fatigue and grief, were dry. Betriz, going to support her, dashed tears from the corners of hers. It was a little hard to tell which young woman leaned upon the other.
   Chancellor dy Jironal cleared his throat. “I will take word of this bereavement to Orico.” Belatedly, he added, “Allow me to serve you in this, Royesse.”
   “Yes…” Iselle looked around the chamber a little blindly. “Let all these good people go about their tasks.”
   Dy Jironal’s brows drew down, as though a hundred thoughts flitted behind his eyes, and he scarcely knew which to grasp first. He glanced at Betriz, and at Cazaril. “Your household… your household must be increased to match your new dignity. I shall see to it.”
   “I cannot think about all these things now. Tomorrow will be soon enough. For tonight, my lord Chancellor, please leave me to my sorrow.”
   “Of course, Royesse.” Dy Jironal bowed, and made to depart.
   “Oh,” Iselle added, “pray do not dispatch any courier to my mother until I can write a letter to include.”
   In the doorway, dy Jironal paused and gave another half bow in acknowledgment. “Certainly.”
   As Betriz escorted Iselle out, the royesse murmured to Cazaril in passing, “Cazaril, ’tend on me in half an hour. I must think.”
   Cazaril bent his head.
   The crowd of courtiers in the antechamber and sitting room dispersed, but for Teidez’s secretary, who stood looking bereft and useless. Only the acolytes and servants whose task it now was to wash and prepare the royse’s body remained. The stunned and distraught chorus of cantors sang one last prayer, this time a threnody for the passage of the dead, their voices choked and wavering, and then they, too, turned to make their way out.
   Cazaril was not sure if his head or his belly ached more. He fled into his own chamber at the end of the hallway, shut the door behind him, and braced himself for Dondo’s nightly onslaught, not, his knotting stomach told him, to be any further delayed.
   His familiar cramps doubled him over as usual, but to his surprise, Dondo was silent tonight. Was he, too, daunted by Teidez’s death? If Dondo had intended the boy’s destruction to follow from Orico’s, he had it now—too late to serve any purpose he’d pursued in life.
   Cazaril did not find the silence a respite. His heightened sensitivity to that malevolent presence assured him Dondo was still trapped within him. Hungry. Angry. Thinking? Intelligence had not been a notable characteristic of Dondo’s spewing before now. Perhaps the shock of his death was passing off. Leaving… what? A waiting. A stalking? Dondo had been a competent hunter, once.
   It occurred to Cazaril that while the demon might seek only to fill its two soul-buckets and return to its master, Dondo likely did not share that desire. The belly of his best enemy was a hateful prison to him, but neither the Bastard’s purging hell nor the chilled forgetfulness of a gods-rejected ghost was a very satisfactory alternative fate. Exactly what else might be possible Cazaril could scarcely imagine, but he was intensely aware that if Dondo sought a physical form through which to reenter the world, his own was closest to hand. One way or another. His hands kneaded his belly, and he tried to decide, for the hundredth time, how fast his tumor was really growing.
   The cramps and the wracking quarter hour of terror passed. Iselle’s request returned to his mind. Composing the necessary letter to Ista informing her of her son’s death would be excruciating; little wonder Iselle should desire assistance. Unequal to the task though Cazaril felt himself to be, whatever she asked of him in her grief and devastation he must undertake to supply. He uncurled himself, heaved out of bed, and climbed the stairs.
   He found Iselle already seated at his antechamber desk, his best parchment, pens, and sealing wax laid out before her. Extra candles were lit all around the chamber, driving back the dark. Upon a square of silk, Betriz was just laying out and counting over an odd little pile of ornaments: brooches, rings, and the pale glowing heap of Dondo’s rope of pearls that Cazaril had not yet had opportunity to deliver to the Temple.
   Iselle was frowning down at the blank page and turning her seal ring round and round on her thumb. She glanced up, and said in a low voice, “Good, you’re here. Close the door.”
   He shut it quietly behind him. “At your service, Royesse.”
   “I pray so, Cazaril: I pray so.” Her eyes searched him.
   Betriz said, in a worried voice, “He is so sick, Iselle. Are you sure?”
   “I am sure of nothing but that I have no time left. And no other choices.” She drew a long breath. “Cazaril, tomorrow morning I want you to ride to Ibra as my envoy to arrange my marriage to Royse Bergon.”
   Cazaril blinked, laboring to catch up with a baggage train of thought evidently already far down the road. “Chancellor dy Jironal will never let me leave.”
   “Of course it can’t be openly.” Iselle made an impatient gesture. “So you will ride first to Valenda, which is nearly on the way, as my personal courier to take the news of my brother’s death to my mother. Dy Jironal will agree, delighted, he’ll think, to see the back of you—he’ll doubtless even lend you a courier’s baton by which to commandeer horses from the Chancellery’s posting houses. You know by noon tomorrow he’ll have stuffed my household with his spies.”
   “That was very clear.”
   “But after you stop in Valenda, you’ll ride not back to Cardegoss, but on to Zagosur, or wherever Royse Bergon is to be found. In the meantime, I will insist that Teidez be buried in Valenda, his beloved home.”
   “Teidez couldn’t wait to get out of Valenda,” Cazaril pointed out, beginning to feel dizzy.
   “Yes, well, dy Jironal doesn’t know that, does he? The chancellor would not let me out of Cardegoss and his eye for any other reason, but he cannot deny the demands of family piety. I will enlist Sara’s support in the project, too, first thing tomorrow morning.”
   “You are doubly in mourning now, for your brother and his. He cannot foist another fiancй upon you for months yet.”
   She shook her head. “An hour ago, I became the future of Chalion. Dy Jironal must take and keep hold of me if he means to control that future. The critical moment is not the beginning of my mourning for Teidez, but of the beginning of my mourning for Orico. At which time—and not before—I pass into dy Jironal’s control absolutely. Unless I am married first.
   “Once I’m out of Cardegoss, I mean not to go back. In this weather, Teidez’s cortege could be weeks on the road. And if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I’ll find other delays. By the time you return with Royse Bergon, I should still be safe in Valenda.”
   “Wait, what—return with Royse Bergon?”
   “Yes, of course you must bring him to me. Think it through. If I leave Chalion to be wed in Ibra, dy Jironal will declare me in rebellion, forcing me to return at the head of a column of foreign troops. But if I seize my ground from the very first instant, I will never have to wrest it back. You taught me that!”
   I did…?
   She leaned forward, growing more intent. “I will have Royse Bergon, yes, but I will not give up Chalion to get him, no, not one yard of soil. Not to dy Jironal, and not to the Fox either. These are my terms. Bergon and I will each of us inherit our respective crowns to ourselves. Bergon will hold authority in Chalion as roya-consort, and I will hold authority in Ibra as royina-consort, each through the other, reciprocally and equally. Our future son—the Mother and Father willing—to inherit and join them into one crown thereafter. But my future authority in Chalion is to be mine, not made over as dowry to my spouse. I will not be turned into a Sara, a mere and disregarded wife, silenced in my own councils!”
   “The Fox will be greedy for more.”
   Her chin came up. “This is why I must have you as my envoy and no other. If you cannot get me Royse Bergon on terms that do not violate my future sovereignty, then turn around and ride home. And upon Orico’s death, I will raise my banner against dy Jironal myself.” Her mouth set in a grim line; her black shadow roiled. “Curse or no curse, I will not be Martou dy Jironal’s bridled mare to ride to his spurring.”
   Yes—Iselle had the nerve, the will, and the wit to resist dy Jironal as Orico did not; as Teidez would never have. Cazaril could see it in her eyes, could see armies with pennoned lances writhing in the black dark hanging around her like a pall of smoke from a burning town. This was the form that the curse of her House would take in the next generation: not personal sorrow, but civil war between royal and noble faction, tearing the country apart from end to end.
   Unless she could shrug off House and curse both, and pass into the protection of Bergon…
   “I will ride for you, Royesse.”
   “Good.” She sat back and swept her hand over the blank parchments. “Now we must make several letters. The first shall be your letter of authority to the Fox, and I think it should be in my own hand. You’ve read and written treaties. You must tell me all the right phrases, so I do not sound like an ignorant girl.”
   “I’ll do my best, but am no lawyer, Iselle.”
   She shrugged. “If we succeed, I will have swords to back my words. And if we do not, no legal niceties will make them stand. Let them be plain and clear. Begin…”
   A grueling three-quarters of an hour of lip-biting concentration resulted in a clean draft, which Iselle signed with a flourish and sealed with her seal ring. Betriz, meanwhile, had finished collecting and inventorying the little pile of coins and jewelry.
   “Is that all the coin we have?” asked Iselle.
   “Unfortunately, yes,” sighed Betriz.
   “Well, he’ll just have to pawn the jewelry when he gets to Valenda, or some other safe place.” Iselle wrapped the silk around the gauds and shoved them across the table to Cazaril. “Your purse, my lord. Daughter grant it is enough to get you there and back.”
   “More than enough, if I am not cheated.”
   “Mind you, this is to spend, not save. You are to put on a good show as my representative in Ibra. Remember to dress. And Royse Bergon is to travel in a style befitting his rank and mine, and no shame to Chalion.”
   “That could be tricky. I mean, without the army. I will bend my thoughts to it. Much will depend on, well, a number of unsettled things. Which reminds me. We must have a secure means of communication. Dy Jironal or his spies will surely be making all efforts to intercept any letters you receive.”
   “Ah.”
   “There is a very simple cipher that is nonetheless nearly impossible to break. It depends upon having two copies of the same printing of some book. One goes with me, one stays with you two. Three-number sequences pick out words—page number, line number, and rank in the line—which the recipient then works backward to find the word again. You do not always use the same numberings for the same words, but find them on another page, if you can. There are better ciphers, but there is no time to teach them to you. I, uh… have not two of any book, though.”
   “I will find two such books before you leave tomorrow,” said Betriz sturdily.
   “Thank you.” Cazaril rubbed his forehead. It was madness to undertake to ride, sick and maybe bleeding, over the mountains in midwinter. He would fall off his horse into the snows and freeze, and he and his horse and his letters of authorization would all be eaten by the wolves.
   “Iselle. My heart is willing. But my body is occupied territory, half-laid waste. I am afraid I will fail in the journey. My friend March dy Palliar is a good rider and a strong sword arm. May I offer him as your envoy instead?”
   Iselle frowned in thought. “I think it will be a duel of wits with the Fox for the hand of Bergon, not a duel of steel. Better to send the wits to Ibra and keep the sword in Chalion.”
   Beguiling thought, to leave Iselle and Betriz not unguarded after all, but with a strong friend to call upon… a friend with friends, aye. “In either case, may I bring him into our councils tomorrow?”
   Iselle glanced across at Betriz; Cazaril did not see any clear signal pass between them, but Iselle nodded decisively. “Yes. Bring him to me at the earliest possible instant.”
   The royesse pulled another piece of paper toward her and picked up a fresh quill. “Now I shall write a personal letter to the Royse Bergon, which you shall take sealed and pass to him unopened. And after that”—she sighed—“the letter to my mother. I think you cannot help me with either of these. Go get some sleep, while you can.”
   Dismissed, he rose and bowed.
   As he reached the door, she added softly, “I’m glad it shall be you to tell her the news, Cazaril, and not some random Chancellery courier. Though it will be hard.” She drew a deep breath and bent to the paper. The candlelight made her amber hair glow in an aureole about her abstracted face. Cazaril left her in the pool of light, and stepped into the darkness of the cold corridor.

* * *

   Cazaril was awakened at dawn by insistent knocking at his chamber door. When he stumbled out of bed and went to unlock it he found not the page with some summons that he’d expected, but Palli.
   The normally neat Palli looked as though he had dressed in the dark, by guess; his hair was bent with sleep and sticking out in odd directions. His eyes were wide and dark. The yawning dy Gura brothers, looking sleepy but cheerful, smiled at Cazaril from their station in the corridor as Palli shouldered within. Cazaril handed out his bedside candle for the taller of them, Ferda, to light from the wall sconce; he handed it back to his lord and commander Palli, who took it with hands that shook slightly. Palli didn’t speak till the door closed behind him and Cazaril.
   “Bastard’s demons, Caz! What is all this about?”
   “Which what?” asked Cazaril in some confusion.
   Palli lit another brace of candles on Cazaril’s washstand and whirled about. “Pray for guidance, you said. In my sleep, if you please. I was killed five times in my dreams last night, I’ll have you know. Riding somewhere. Each time more horribly. In the last dream, my horses ate me. I don’t want to put my leg across anything, horse, mule, or sawhorse, for a week at least!”
   “Oh.” Cazaril blinked, taking this in. It seemed clear enough. “In that case, I don’t want you to ride anywhere.”
   “That’s a relief.”
   “I must go myself.”
   “Go where? In this weather? It’s snowing now, you know.”
   “Ah, it wanted only that. Hasn’t anyone told you yet? Royse Teidez died about midnight last night, of his infected wound.”
   Palli’s face abruptly sobered; his mouth formed a silent “O.” “That changes things in Chalion.”
   “Indeed. Let me dress, and then come upstairs with me.” Hastily, Cazaril splashed chill water on his face and shrugged into yesterday’s clothes.
   In the chambers above, Cazaril found Betriz also still dressed in last night’s black-and-lavender court mourning. It was plain she had not yet slept. Cazaril drew the dy Gura brothers out of sight of the corridor and closed them in his office antechamber. He and Palli entered the sitting room.
   Betriz’s hand touched a sealed packet waiting on a small table. “All the letters are ready to go to”—she glanced at Palli and hesitated—“Valenda.”
   “Is Iselle asleep?” Cazaril asked quietly.
   “Resting only. She’ll want to see you. Both.” Betriz disappeared into the bedchambers for a moment, from which floated low murmuring, then returned with a pair of books under her arm.
   “I sneaked down to the roya’s library and found two identical volumes. There weren’t many true duplicates. I thought I’d better take the biggest, so as to have more words to choose from.”
   “Good,” said Cazaril, and took one from her. He glanced at it, and choked back a black laugh. Ordol, read the gold letters on the spine. The Fivefold Pathway. “Perfect. I need to brush up on my theology.” He laid it down with the packet of letters.
   Iselle emerged, wrapped in a heavy blue velvet dressing gown from which the white lace of her nightgown peeped. Her amber hair cascaded down across her shoulders. Her face was as pale and puffy with lack of sleep as Betriz’s. She nodded to Cazaril and to Palli. “My lord dy Palliar. Thank you for coming to my aid.”
   “I, uh…” said Palli. He cast a rather desperate glance at Cazaril, What am I agreeing to?
   “Will he ride for you?” Betriz asked Cazaril anxiously. “You should not attempt this, you know you should not.”
   “Ah… no. Palli, instead I’m asking you to swear service and protection to the Royesse Iselle, personally, in the names of the gods, and especially the Lady of Spring. There is no treason in this; she is the rightful Heiress of Chalion. And you will thus have the honor of being the first of her courtiers to do so.”
   “I, I, I… I can swear my fealty in addition to what I have sworn to your brother Orico, lady. I cannot swear to you instead of to him.”
   “I do not ask for your service before what you give to Orico. I only ask for your service before what you give to Orico’s chancellor.”
   “Now, that I can do,” said Palli, brightening. “And with a will.” He kissed Iselle’s forehead, hands, and slippers, and, still kneeling before her skirts, swore the oaths of a lord of Chalion, witnessed by Betriz and Cazaril. He added, still on his knees, “What would you think, Royesse, of Lord dy Yarrin as the next holy general of the Daughter’s Order?”
   “I think… such great preferences are not yet mine to give. But he would certainly be more acceptable to me than any candidate from dy Jironal’s clan.”
   Palli nodded slow approval of her measured words and rose to his feet. “I’ll let him know.”
   “Iselle will need all the practical support you can give her, all through the funeral for Teidez,” said Cazaril to Palli. “He is to be buried in Valenda. Might I suggest she select your troop from Palliar to be part of the royse’s cortege? It will give you good excuse to confer often, and will assure that you are by her side when she rides out of Cardegoss.”
   “Oh, quick thinking,” said Iselle.
   Cazaril didn’t feel quick. He felt his wits were laboring along after Iselle’s as though in boots coated with twenty pounds of mud. Each. The authority that had fallen to her last night seemed to have released some coiled energy within her; she burned with it, inside her cocoon of darkness. He was afraid to close his eyes, lest he see it blazing in there still.
   “But must you ride alone, Cazaril?” asked Betriz unhappily. “I don’t like that.”
   Iselle pursed her lips. “As far as Valenda, I think he must. There is scarcely anyone in Cardegoss I would trust to dispatch with him.” She studied Cazaril in doubt. “In Valenda, perhaps my grandmother may supply men. In truth, you should not arrive at the Fox’s court alone and unattended. I don’t want us to appear desperate to him.” She added a trifle bitterly, “Although we are.”
   Betriz plucked at her black velvets. “But what if you fall ill on the road? Suppose your tumor grows worse? And who would know to burn your body if you die?”
   Palli’s head swiveled round. “Tumor? Cazaril! What is this, now?”
   “Cazaril, didn’t you tell him? I thought he was your friend!” Betriz turned to Palli. “He means to jump on a horse and ride—ride!—off to Ibra with a great uncanny murderous tumor in his gut, and no help on the road. I don’t think that’s brave, I think it’s stupid. To Ibra he must go, for want of any other equal to the deed, but not alone like this!”
   Palli sat back, his thumb across his lips, and studied Cazaril through narrowing eyes. He said at last, “I thought you looked sick.”
   “Yes, well, there’s nothing to be done about it.”
   “Um… just how bad… I mean, um, are you…”
   “Am I dying? Yes. How soon? No one knows. Which makes my life different from yours, as Learned Umegat points out, not at all. Well, who wants to die in bed?”
   “You did, you always said. Of extreme old age, in bed, with somebody’s wife.”
   “Mine, by preference,” Cazaril sighed. “Ah, well.” He managed not to look at Betriz. “My death is the gods’ problem. For me, I ride as soon as a horse can be saddled.” He grunted to his feet, and collected the book and the packet.
   Palli glanced at Betriz, who clenched her hands together and stared beseechingly at him. He muttered an oath under his breath, stood, and strode abruptly to the door to the antechamber, which he jerked open. Foix dy Gura, his ear to the other side, staggered upright, and blinked and smiled at his commander. His brother Ferda, leaning on the opposite wall, snorted.
   “Hello, boys,” said Palli smoothly. “I have a little task for you.”


* * *

   Cazaril, Palli at his heels, strode out the Zangre gates dressed for winter riding, the saddlebag slung over his shoulder heavy with a change of clothes, a small fortune, theology, and arguable treason.
   He found the dy Gura brothers already in the stable yard before him. Sped back to Yarrin Palace by Palli’s urgent orders, they had also changed out of their blue-and-white court dress into garb more practical for riding, with tall and well-worn boots.
   Betriz was with them, wrapped in a white wool cloak. They had their heads close together, and Betriz was gesticulating emphatically. Foix glanced up to see Cazaril approaching; his broad face set in a sober and rather intimidated expression. He made a motion, and said something; Betriz glanced over her shoulder, and the conversation abruptly ceased. The brothers turned around and made small bows to Cazaril. Betriz stared at him steadily, as if his face were some lesson he’d set her to memorize.
   “Ferda!” said Palli. The horse-master came to attention before him. Palli withdrew two letters from his vest-cloak, one sealed, one merely folded. “This”—he handed the folded paper to Ferda—“is a letter of authorization from me, as a lord dedicat of the Daughter’s Order, entitling you to whatever assistance you may need to draft from our sister chapters on your journey. Any costs to be settled up with me at Palliar. This other”—he handed across the sealed letter—“is for you to open in Valenda.”
   Ferda nodded, and tucked them both away. The second letter of hand put the dy Gura brothers under Cazaril’s command in the name of the Daughter, with no other details. Their trip to Ibra was going to make an interesting surprise for them.
   Palli walked about them, inspecting with a commander’s eye. “You have enough warm clothes? Armed for bandits?” They displayed polished swords and readied crossbows—bowstrings protected from dampness, with a sufficiency of quarrels—gear all in good condition. Only a few flakes of snow now spun through the moist air to land on wool and leather and hair, there to melt to small droplets. The dawn snowfall had proved a mere dusting, here in town. In the hills it would likely be heavier.
   From beneath her cloak, Betriz produced a fluffy white object. Cazaril blinked it into focus as a fur hat in the style of Chalion’s hardy southern mountaineers, with flaps meant to be folded down over the ears with the fur inward and tied under the chin. While both men and women wore similar styles, this one was clearly meant for a lady, in white rabbit skin with flowers brocaded in gold thread over the crown. “Cazaril, I thought you might need this in the high passes.”
   Foix raised his brows and grinned, and Ferda snickered behind his hand. “Fetching,” he said.
   Betriz reddened. “It was the only thing I could find in the time I had,” she said defensively. “Better than having your ears freeze!”
   “Indeed,” said Cazaril gravely. “I do not have so good a hat. I shall be very grateful.” Ignoring the grinning youths, he took it from her and knelt to pack it carefully in his saddlebag. It wasn’t just a gesture to gratify Betriz, though he smiled inwardly at her sniff in Ferda’s direction; when the brothers met the winter wind in the border mountains, those grins would vanish soon enough.
   Iselle appeared through the gates, in a velvet cloak so dark a purple as to be almost black, attended by a shivering Chancellery clerk who handed over a numbered courier’s baton in exchange for Cazaril’s signature in his ledger. He clapped the ledger shut and scurried back over the drawbridge and out of the cold.
   “You were able to get dy Jironal’s order?” Cazaril inquired, tucking the baton into a secure inner pocket of his coat. The baton would command its bearer fresh horses, food, and clean, if hard and narrow, beds in any Chancellery posting house on the main roads across Chalion.
   “Not dy Jironal’s. Orico’s. Orico is still roya in Chalion, though even the Chancellery clerk had to be reminded of the fact.” Iselle snorted softly. “The gods go with you, Cazaril.”
   “Alas, yes,” he sighed, then realized that had been not an observation, but a farewell. He bowed his head to kiss her chilled hands. Betriz eyed him sideways. He hesitated, then cleared his throat and took her hands as well. Her fingers spasmed around his at the touch of his lips, and her breath drew in, but her eyes stared away over his head. He straightened to see the dy Gura brothers shrinking under her glower.
   A Zangre groom led out three saddled courier horses. Palli clasped hands with his cousins. Ferda took the reins of what proved to be Cazaril’s horse, a rangy roan that matched his height. The muscular Foix hastened to give him a leg up, and as he settled in the saddle with a faint grunt inquired anxiously, “Are you all right, sir?”
   They hadn’t even started yet; what had Betriz been telling them? “Yes, it’s all fine,” Cazaril assured him. “Thank you.” Ferda presented him with his reins, and Foix assisted him in tying on his precious saddlebags. Ferda leapt lightly aboard his horse, his brother climbed more heavily onto his, and they started out of the stable yard. Cazaril turned in his saddle to watch Iselle and Betriz making their way back across the drawbridge and through the Zangre’s great gate. Betriz looked back, and raised her hand high; Cazaril returned the salute. Then the horses rounded the first corner, and the buildings of Cardegoss hid the gate from his view. A single crow followed them, swooping from gutter to cornice.
   On the first street, they met Chancellor dy Jironal riding slowly up from Jironal Palace, flanked by two armed retainers on foot. He’d obviously been home to wash and eat and change his clothes, and attend to his more urgent correspondence. Judging from his gray face and bloodshot eyes, he’d had no more sleep than Iselle the night past.
   Dy Jironal reined in, and gave Cazaril an odd little salute. “Where away, Lord Cazaril”—his eye took in the light courier saddles, stamped with the castle-and-leopard of Chalion—“upon my Chancellery’s horses?”

  Cazaril returned a half bow from his saddle. “Valenda, my lord. The Royesse Iselle decided she did not want some stranger bearing the bad news to her mother and grandmother, and has dispatched me as her courier.”
   “Mad Ista, eh?” Dy Jironal’s lips screwed up. “I do not envy you that task.”
   “Indeed.” Cazaril let his voice go hopeful. “Order me back to Iselle’s side, and I shall obey you at once.”
   “No, no.” Dy Jironal’s lip curled just slightly in satisfaction. “I can think of no man more fitted for this sad duty. Ride on. Oh—when do you mean to return?”
   “I’m not yet sure. Iselle desired me to be sure her mother was going to be all right before I returned. I do not expect Ista to take the news well.”
   “Truly. Well, we’ll watch for you.”
   I wager you will. He and dy Jironal exchanged guarded nods, and the two parties rode on in their opposite directions. Cazaril glanced back to catch dy Jironal glancing back, just before he turned the corner toward the Zangre’s gates. Dy Jironal would know no ambush could now catch Cazaril’s start on the courier horses. The return was another opportunity. Except that I won’t be coming back on this road.
   Or at all? He’d turned over in his mind all the disasters that might follow failure; what would be his fate if he succeeded? What did the gods do with used saints? He’d never to his knowledge met one, save perhaps, now, Umegat… a thought that was not, upon consideration, very reassuring.
   They reached the city gate and crossed over the bridge to the river road. Fonsa’s crow did not follow farther, but perched upon the gate’s high crenellations and vented a few sad caws, which echoed as they descended into the ravine. The Zangre’s cliff wall, naked of verdure in the winter, rose high and stark across the dark, rapid water of the river. Cazaril wondered if Betriz would watch from one of the castle’s high windows as they passed along the road. He wouldn’t be able to see her up there, so high and shadowed.
   His bleak thoughts were scattered by the thud and splash of hooves. An inbound courier flashed past them, galloping horse lathered and blowing. He—no, she—waved at them in passing. Female couriers were much favored by some of the Chancellery’s horse-masters, at least on the safer routes, for they claimed their light weight and light hands spared the animals. Foix waved back, and turned in his saddle to watch her flying black braids. Cazaril didn’t think he was just admiring her horsemanship.
   Ferda nudged his mount up next to Cazaril’s. “May we gallop now, my lord?” he asked hopefully. “Daylight is dear, and these beasts are fresh.”
   But five gods, I’m not. Cazaril took a breath of grim anticipation. “Yes.”
   He clapped his booted heels to the roan’s side, and the animal bounded into a long-strided canter. The road opened before them across the snow-streaked dun landscape, winding into gray mists heavy with the faint sweet rot of winter vegetation. Vanishing into uncertainty.