Chapter 1

   Ista leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below. Their horses’ hooves scraped on the old cobblestones, and their good-byes echoed in the portal’s vaulting. Her earnest brother, the provincar of Baocia, and his family and retinue were last of the many to leave, two full weeks after the divines had completed the funeral rites and ceremonies of the interment.
   Dy Baocia was still talking soberly to the castle warder, Ser dy Ferrej, who walked at his stirrup, grave face upturned, listening to the stream, no doubt, of final instructions. Faithful dy Ferrej, who had served the late Dowager Provincara for all the last two decades of her long residence here in Valenda. The keys of the castle and keep glinted from the belt at his stout waist. Her mother’s keys, which Ista had collected and held, then turned over to her older brother along with all the other papers and inventories and instructions that a great lady’s death entailed. And that he had handed back for permanent safekeeping not to his sister, but to good, old, honest dy Ferrej. Keys to lock out all danger… and, if necessary, Ista in.
   It’s only habit, you know. I’m not mad anymore, really.
   It wasn’t as though she wanted her mother’s keys, nor her mother’s life that went with them. She scarcely knew what she wanted. She knew what she feared—to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her. An enemy might drop his guard, weary of his task, turn his back; love would never falter. Her fingers rubbed restlessly on the stone.
   Dy Baocia’s cavalcade filed off down the hill through the town and was soon lost from her view among the crowded red-tiled roofs. Dy Ferrej, turning back, walked wearily in through the gate and out of sight.
   The chill spring wind lifted a strand of Ista’s dun hair and blew it across her face, catching on her lip; she grimaced and tucked it back into the careful braiding wreathing her head. Its tightness pinched her scalp.
   The weather had warmed these last two weeks, too late to ease an old woman bound to her bed by injury and illness. If her mother had not been so old, the broken bones would have healed more swiftly, and the inflammation of the lungs might not have anchored itself so deeply in her chest. If she had not been so fragile, perhaps the fall from the horse would not have broken her bones in the first place. If she had not been so fiercely willful, perhaps she would not have been on that horse at all at her age… Ista looked down to find her fingers bleeding, and hid them hastily in her skirt.
   In the funeral ceremonies, the gods had signed that the old lady’s soul had been taken up by the Mother of Summer, as was expected and proper. Even the gods would not dare violate her views on protocol. Ista imagined the old Provincara ordering heaven, and smiled a little grimly.
   And so I am alone at last.
   Ista considered the empty spaces of that solitude, its fearful cost. Husband, father, son, and mother had all filed down to the grave ahead of her in their turn. Her daughter was claimed by the royacy of Chalion in as tight an embrace as any grave, and as little likely to return from her high place, five gods willing, as the others from their low ones. Surely I am done. The duties that had defined her, all accomplished. Once, she had been her parents’ daughter. Then great, unlucky Ias’s wife. Her children’s mother. At the last, her mother’s keeper. Well, I am none of these things now.
   Who am I, when I am not surrounded by the walls of my life? When they have all fallen into dust and rubble?
   Well, she was still Lord dy Lutez’s murderer. The last of that little, secret company left alive, now. That she had made of herself, and that she remained.
   She leaned between the crenellations again, the stone abrading the lavender sleeves of her court mourning dress, catching at its silk threads. Her eye followed the road in the morning light, starting from the stones below and flowing downhill, through the town, past the river… and where? All roads were one road, they said. A great net across the land, parting and rejoining. All roads ran two ways. They said. I want a road that does not come back.
   A frightened gasp behind her jerked her head around. One of her lady attendants stood on the battlement with her hand to her lips, eyes wide, breathing heavily from her climb. She smiled with false cheer. “My lady. I’ve been seeking you everywhere. Do… do come away from that edge, now…”
   Ista’s lips curled in irony. “Content you. I do not yearn to meet the gods face-to-face this day.” Or on any other. Never again. “The gods and I are not on speaking terms.”
   She suffered the woman to take her arm and stroll with her as if casually along the battlement toward the inner stairs, careful, Ista noted, to take the outside place, between Ista and the drop. Content you, woman. I do not desire the stones.
   I desire the road.
   The realization startled, almost shocked her. It was a new thought. A new thought, me? All her old thoughts seemed as thin and ragged as a piece of knitting made and ripped out and made and ripped out again until all the threads were frayed, growing ever more worn, but never larger. But how could she gain the road? Roads were made for young men, not middle-aged women. The poor orphan boy packed his sack and started off down the road to seek his heart’s hope… a thousand tales began that way. She was not poor, she was not a boy, and her heart was surely as stripped of all hope as life and death could render it. I am an orphan now, though. Is that not enough to qualify me?
   They turned the corner of the battlement, making toward the round tower containing the narrow, winding staircase that gave onto the inner garden. Ista cast one last glance out across the scraggly shrubs and stunted trees that crept up to the curtain wall of the castle. Up the path from the shallow ravine, a servant towed a donkey loaded with firewood, heading for the postern gate.
   In her late mother’s flower garden, Ista slowed, resisting her attendant’s urgent hand upon her arm, and mulishly took to a bench in the still-bare rose arbor. “I am weary,” she announced. “I would rest here for a time. You may fetch me tea.”
   She could watch her lady attendant turning over the risks in her mind, regarding her high charge untrustingly. Ista frowned coldly. The woman dropped a curtsey. “Yes, my lady. I’ll tell one of the maids. And I’ll be right back. ”
   I expect you will. Ista waited only till the woman had rounded the corner of the keep before she sprang to her feet and ran for the postern gate.
   The guard was just letting the servant and his donkey through. Ista, head high, sailed out past them without turning round. Pretending not to hear the guard’s uncertain, “My lady…?” she walked briskly down the steepening path. Her trailing skirts and billowing black velvet vest-cloak snagged on weeds and brambles as she passed, like clutching hands trying to hold her back. Once out of sight among the first trees, her steps quickened to something close to a run. She had used to run down this path to the river, when she was a girl. Before she was anybody’s anything.
   She was no girl now, she had to concede. She was winded and trembling by the time the river’s gleam shone through the vegetation. She turned and strode along the bank. The path still held its remembered course to the old footbridge, across the water, and up again to one of the main roads winding around the hill to—or from—the town of Valenda.
   The road was muddy and pocked with hoofprints; perhaps her brother’s party had just passed on its way to his provincial seat of Taryoon. He had spent much of the past two weeks attempting to persuade her to accompany him there, promising her rooms and attendants in his palace, under his benign and protective eye, as though she had not rooms and attendants and prying eyes enough here. She turned in the opposite direction.
   Court mourning and silk slippers were no garb for a country road. Her skirts swished around her legs as though she were trying to wade through high water. The mud sucked at her light shoes. The sun, climbing the sky, heated her velvet-clad back, and she broke into an unladylike sweat. She walked on, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and foolish. This was madness. This was just the sort of thing that got women locked up in towers with lack-witted attendants, and hadn’t she had enough of that for one lifetime? She hadn’t a change of clothes, a plan, any money, not so much as a copper vaida. She touched the jewels around her neck. There’s money. Yes, too much value—what country-town moneylender could match for them? They were not a resource; they were merely a target, bait for bandits.
   The rumble of a cart drew her eyes upward from picking her way along the puddles. A farmer drove a stout cob, hauling a load of ripe manure for spreading on his fields. He turned his head to stare dumbfounded at the apparition of her on his road. She returned him a regal nod—after all, what other kind could she offer? She nearly laughed out loud, but choked back the unseemly noise and walked on. Not looking back. Not daring to.
   She walked for over an hour before her tiring legs, dragging the weight of her dress, stumbled at last to a halt. She was close to weeping from the frustration of it all. This isn’t working. I don’t know how to do this. I never had a chance to learn, and now I am too old.
   Horses again, galloping, and a shout. It flashed across her mind that among the other things she had failed to provision herself with was a weapon, even so much as a belt knife, to defend herself from assault. She pictured herself matched against a swordsman, any swordsman, with any weapon she could possibly pick up and swing, and snorted. It made a short scene, hardly likely to be worth the bother.
   She glanced back over her shoulder and sighed. Ser dy Ferrej and a groom pounded down the road in her wake, the mud splashing from their horses’ hooves. She was not, she thought, quite fool enough or mad enough to wish for bandits instead. Maybe that was the trouble; maybe she just wasn’t crazed enough. True derangement stopped at no boundaries. Mad enough to wish for what she was not mad enough to grasp—now there was a singularly useless lunacy.
   Guilt twinged in her heart at the sight of dy Ferrej’s red, terrified, perspiring face as he drew up by her side. “Royina!” he cried. “My lady, what are you doing out here?” He almost tumbled from his saddle, to grasp her hands and stare into her face.
   “I grew weary of the sorrows of the castle. I decided to take a walk in the spring sunshine to solace myself.”
   “My lady, you have come over five miles! This road is quite unfit for you—”
   Yes, and I am quite unfit for it.
   “No attendants, no guards—five gods, consider your station and your safety! Consider my gray hairs! You have stood them on end with this start.”
   “I do apologize to your gray hairs,” said Ista, with a little real contrition. “They do not deserve the toil of me, nor does the remainder of you either, good dy Ferrej. I just… wanted to take a walk.”
   “Tell me next time, and I will arrange—”
   “By myself.”
   “You are the dowager royina of all Chalion,” stated dy Ferrej firmly. “You are Royina Iselle’s own mother, for the five gods’ sake. You cannot go skipping off down the road like a country wench.”
   Ista sighed at the thought of being a skipping country wench, and not tragic Ista anymore. Though she did not doubt country wenches had their tragedies, too, and much less poetic sympathy for them than did royinas. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him in the middle of the road. He made the groom give up his horse, and she acquiesced to being loaded aboard it. The skirts of this dress were not split for riding, and they bunched uncomfortably around her legs as she felt for the stirrups. Ista frowned again as the groom took the reins from her and made to lead her mount.
   Dy Ferrej leaned across his saddle bow to grasp her hand, in consolation for the tears standing in her eyes. “I know,” he murmured kindly. “Your lady mother’s death is a great loss for us all.”

  I finished weeping for her weeks ago, dy Ferrej. She had sworn once to neither weep nor pray ever again, but she had forsworn herself on both oaths in those last dreadful days in the sickroom. After that, neither weeping nor praying had seemed to have any point. She decided not to trouble the castle warder’s mind with the explanation that she wept now for herself, and not in sorrow but in a sort of rage. Let him take her as a little unhinged by bereavement; bereavement passed.
   Dy Ferrej, quite as tired out as she by the past weeks of grief and guests, did not trouble her with further conversation, and the groom did not dare. She sat her plodding horse and let the road roll up again beneath her like a carpet being put away, denied its use. What was her use now? She chewed her lip and stared between her horse’s bobbing ears.
   After a time, its ears flickered. She followed its snorting glance to see another cavalcade approaching down a connecting road, some dozen or two riders on horses and mules. Dy Ferrej rose in his stirrups and squinted, but then eased back in his saddle at the sight of the four outriders clad in the blue tunics and gray cloaks of soldier-brothers of the Daughter’s Order, whose mandate encompassed the safe conveyance of pilgrims on the road. As the party rode closer, it could be seen that its members included both men and women, all decked out in the colors of their chosen gods, or as close as their wardrobes could manage, and that they wore colored ribbons on their sleeves in token of their holy destinations.
   The two parties reached the joining of the roads simultaneously, and dy Ferrej exchanged reassuring nods with the soldier-brothers, stolid conscientious fellows like himself. The pilgrims stared in speculation at Ista in her fine somber clothes. A stout, red-faced older woman—she’s not any older than I am, surely—offered Ista a cheery smile. After an uncertain moment, Ista’s lips curved up in response, and she returned her nod. Dy Ferrej had placed his horse between the pilgrims and Ista, but his shielding purpose was defeated when the stout woman reined her horse back and kneed it into a trot to come up around him.
   “The gods give you a good day, lady,” the woman puffed. Her fat piebald horse was overburdened with stuffed saddlebags and yet more bags tied to them with twine and bouncing as precariously as its rider. It dropped back to a walk, and she caught her breath and straightened her straw hat. She wore Mother’s greens in somewhat mismatched dark hues proper to a widow, but the braided ribbons circling her sleeve marched down in a full rank of five: blue wound with white, green with yellow, red with orange, black with gray, and white twined with cream.
   After a moment’s hesitation, Ista nodded again. “And you.”
   “We are pilgrims from around Baocia,” the woman announced invitingly. “Traveling to the shrine of the miraculous death of Chancellor dy Jironal, in Taryoon. Well, except for the good Ser dy Brauda over there.” She nodded toward an older man in subdued browns wearing a red-and-orange favor marking allegiance to the Son of Autumn. A more brightly togged young man rode by his side, who leaned forward to frown quellingly around him at the green-clad woman. “He’s taking his boy, over there—isn’t he a pretty lad, now, eh?”
   The boy recoiled and stared straight ahead, growing flushed as if to harmonize with the ribbons on his sleeve; his father was not successful in suppressing a smile.
   “—up to Cardegoss to be invested in the Son’s Order, like his papa before him, to be sure. The ceremony is to be performed by the holy general, the Royse-Consort Bergon himself! I’d so like to see him. They say he’s a handsome fellow. That Ibran seashore he comes from is supposed to be good for growing fine young men. I shall have to find some reason to pray in Cardegoss myself, and give my old eyes that treat.”
   “Indeed,” said Ista neutrally at this anticipatory, but on the whole accurate, description of her son-in-law.
   “I am Caria of Palma. I was wife of a saddler there, most lately. Widow, now. And you, good lady? Is this surly fellow your husband, then?”
   The castle warder, listening with obvious disapproval to such familiarity, made to pull his horse back and fend off the tiresome woman, but Ista held up her hand. “Peace, dy Ferrej.” He raised his brows, but shrugged and held his tongue.
   Ista continued to the pilgrim, “I am a widow of… Valenda.”
   “Ah, indeed? Why, and so am I,” the woman returned brightly. “My first man was of there. Though I’ve buried three husbands altogether.” She announced this as though it were an achievement. “Oh, not all together, of course. One at a time.” She cocked her head in curiosity at Ista’s high mourning colors. “Did you just bury yours, then, lady? Pity. No wonder you look so sad and pale. Well, dear, it’s a hard time, especially with the first, you know. At the beginning you want to die—I know I did—but that’s just fear talking. Things will come about again, don’t you worry.”
   Ista smiled briefly and shook her head in faint disagreement, but was not moved to correct the woman’s misapprehension. Dy Ferrej was clearly itching to depress the creature’s forwardness by announcing Ista’s rank and station, and by implication his own, and perhaps driving her off, but Ista realized with a little wonder that she found Caria amusing. The widow’s burble did not displease her, and she didn’t want her to stop.
   There was, apparently, no danger of that. Caria of Palma pointed out her fellow pilgrims, favoring Ista with a rambling account of their stations, origins, and holy goals, and if they rode sufficiently far out of earshot, with opinions of their manners and morals thrown in gratis. Besides the amused veteran dedicat of the Son of Autumn and his blushing boy, the party included four men from a weavers’ fraternity who went to pray to the Father of Winter for a favorable outcome of a lawsuit, a man wearing the ribbons of the Mother of Summer, who prayed for the safety of a daughter nearing childbirth, and a woman whose sleeve sported the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, who prayed for a husband for her daughter. A thin woman in finely cut green robes of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order, with a maid and two servants of her own, turned out to be neither midwife nor physician, but a comptroller. A wine merchant rode to give thanks and redeem his pledge to the Father for his safe return with his caravan, almost lost the previous winter in the snowy mountain passes to Ibra.
   The pilgrims within hearing, who had evidently been riding with Caria for some days now, rolled their eyes variously as she talked on, and on. An exception was an obese young man in the white garb, grimed from the road, of a divine of the Bastard. He rode along quietly with a book open atop the curve of his belly, his muddy white mule’s reins slack, and glanced up only when he came to turn a page, blinking nearsightedly and smiling muzzily.
   The Widow Caria peered at the sun, which had topped the sky. “I can hardly wait to get to Valenda. There is a famous inn where we are to eat that specializes in the most delicious roast suckling pigs.” She smacked her lips in anticipation.
   “There is such an inn in Valenda, yes,” said Ista. She had never eaten there, she realized, not in all her years of residence.
   The Mother’s comptroller, who had been one of the widow’s more pained involuntary listeners, pursed her mouth in disapproval. “I shall take no meat,” she announced. “I made a vow that no gross flesh would cross my lips upon this journey.”
   Caria leaned over and muttered to Ista, “If she’d made a vow to swallow her pride, instead of her salads, it would have been more to the point for a pilgrimage, I’m thinking.” She sat up again, grinning, the Mother’s comptroller sniffed and pretended not to have heard.
   The merchant with the Father’s gray-and-black ribbons on his sleeve remarked as if to the air, “I’m sure the gods have no use for pointless chatter. We should be using our time better—discussing high-minded things to prepare our minds for prayer, not our bellies for dinner.”
   Caria leered at him, “Aye, or lower parts for better things still? And you ride with the Father’s favor on your sleeve, too! For shame.”
   The merchant stiffened. “That is not the aspect of the god to which I intend—or need—to pray, I assure you, madam!”
   The divine of the Bastard glanced up from his book and murmured peaceably, “The gods rule all parts of us, from top to toe There is a god for everyone, and every part.”
   “Your god has notably low tastes,” observed the merchant, still stung.
   “None who open their hearts to any one of the Holy Family shall be excluded. Not even the priggish.” The divine bowed over his belly at the merchant.
   Caria gave a cheerful crack of laughter—the merchant snorted indignation, but desisted. The divine returned to his book.
   Caria whispered to Ista, “I like that fat fellow, I do. Doesn’t say much, but when he speaks, it’s to the point. Bookish men usually have no patience with me, and I surely don’t understand them. But that one does have lovely manners. Though I do think a man should get him a wife, and children, and do the work that pays for them, and not go haring off after the gods. Now, I have to admit, my dear second husband didn’t—work, that is—but then, he drank. Drank himself to death eventually, to the relief of all who knew him, five gods rest his spirit.” She signed herself, touching forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, spreading her hand wide over her plump breast. She pursed her lips, raised her chin and her voice, and called curiously, “But now I think on it, you’ve never told us what you go to pray for, Learned.”
   The divine placed his finger on his page and glanced up. “No, I don’t think I have,” he said vaguely.
   The merchant said, “All you called folk pray to meet your god, don’t you?”
   “I have often prayed for the goddess to touch my heart,” said the Mother’s comptroller. “It is my highest spiritual goal to see Her face-to-face. Indeed, I often think I have felt Her, from time to time.”
   Anyone who desires to see the gods face-to-face is a great fool, thought Ista. Although that was not an impediment, in her experience.
   “You don’t have to pray to do that,” said the divine. “You just have to die. It’s not hard. ”He rubbed his second chin “In fact, it’s unavoidable.”
   “To be god-touched in life, ” corrected the comptroller coolly. “That is the great blessing we all long for.”
   No, it’s not. If you saw the Mother’s face right now, woman, you would drop weeping in the mud of this road and not get up for days. Ista became aware that the divine was squinting at her in arrested curiosity.
   Was he one of the god-touched? Ista possessed some practice at spotting them. The reverse also held true, unfortunately. Or perhaps that calflike stare was just shortsightedness. Discomforted, she frowned back at him.
   He blinked apologetically and said to her, “In fact, I travel on business for my order. A dedicat in my charge came by chance across a little stray demon possessed by a ferret. I take it to Taryoon for the archdivine to return to the god with proper ceremony.”
   He twisted around to his capacious saddlebags and rummaged therein, trading the book for a small wicker cage. A lithe gray shape turned within it.
   “Ah-ha! So that’s what you’ve been hiding in there!” Caria rode closer, wrinkling her nose. “It looks like any other ferret to me.” The creature stood up against the side of the cage and twitched its whiskers at her.
   The fat divine turned in his saddle and held up the cage to Ista’s view. The animal, circling, froze in her frown, for just a moment, its beady eyes glittered back with something other than animal intelligence. Ista regarded it dispassionately. The ferret lowered its head and backed away until it could retreat no farther. The divine gave Ista a curious sidelong look.
   “Are you sure the poor thing isn’t just sick?” said Caria doubtfully.
   “What do you think, lady?” the divine asked Ista.
   You know very well it has a real demon. Why do you ask me? “Why—I think the good archdivine will certainly know what it is and what to do with it.”
   The divine smiled faintly at this guarded reply. “Indeed, it is not much of a demon.” He tucked the cage away again. “I wouldn’t name it more than a mere elemental, small and unformed. It hasn’t been long in the world, I’d guess, and so is little likely to tempt men to sorcery.”
   It did not tempt Ista, certainly, but she understood his need to be discreet. Acquiring a demon made one a sorcerer much as acquiring a horse made one a rider, but whether skilled or poor was a more open question. Like a horse, a demon could run away with its master. Unlike a horse, there was no dismounting. To a soul’s peril, hence the Temple’s concern.
   Caria made to speak again, but the path to the castle split off at that point, and dy Ferrej reined his horse aside. The widow of Palma converted whatever she’d been about to say to a cheery farewell wave, and dy Ferrej escorted Ista firmly off the road.
   He glanced back over his shoulder as they started down the bank into the trees. “Vulgar woman. I’ll wager she has not a pious thought in her head! She uses her pilgrimage only to shield her holiday-making from the disapproval of her relatives and get herself a cheap armed escort on the road.”
   “I believe you are entirely right, dy Ferrej.” Ista glanced back over her shoulder at the party of pilgrims advancing down the main road. The Widow Caria was now coaxing the divine of the Bastard to sing hymns with her, though the one she was suggesting more resembled a drinking song.
   “She had not one man of her own family to support her,” dy Ferrej continued indignantly. “I suppose she can’t help the lack of a husband but you’d think she could scare up a brother or son or at least a nephew. I’m sorry you had to be exposed to that, Royina.”
   A not entirely harmonious but thoroughly good-natured duet rose behind them, fading with distance.
   “I’m not,” said Ista. A slow smile curved her lips. I’m not.

Chapter 2

   Ista sat in her mother’s rose arbor twisting a fine handkerchief in her fingers. Her lady attendant sat near her, poking at a piece of embroidery with a needle as narrow as, though rather sharper than, her mind. Ista had paced the garden round and round in the cool morning air till the woman, her voice rising, had begged her to stop. She paused now in her sewing to stare at Ista’s hands, and Ista, irritably, set the tortured scrap of linen aside. Beneath her skirts, safely hidden, one silk-slippered foot took up a nervous—no, furious—drumming.
   A gardener bustled about, watering the flowers in the tubs placed around all the doorways for the Daughter’s Season, just as he had done for years under the direction of the old Provincara. Ista wondered how long it would be before those drilled habits died away—or would they continue forever, as if the old lady’s meticulous ghost still oversaw each task. But no, her soul had truly been taken up, and out of the world of men, there were no new ghosts in the castle, or Ista would have felt them. All the sundered spirits left here were ancient and tired and fading, a mere chill in the walls at night.
   She breathed out through pursed lips, flexing both curtained feet. She had waited several days to spring to her castle warder the proposal that she go on pilgrimage this season, in hopes that he would have forgotten the Widow Caria. A pilgrimage in humility, with only a small company, few attendants, simple gear, no royal train a hundred riders long, as he seemed instantly to think would be the minimum required. Dy Ferrej had thrown up a dozen annoyingly practical objections, and wondered at her sudden piety. He’d dismissed Ista’s hint that she sought penance for her sins, being under the impression that she could have committed none to speak of under his good guard. Which was, she had to admit, certainly the case for such gross sins of the flesh as he imagined; dy Ferrej was not a theologically subtle man. As Ista’s arguments had grown more intense, dy Ferrej had grown more stolid and cautious, till Ista had to bite back a frantic urge to scream at the man. The more fiercely she pleaded, the worse she made her case sound in his ears, she was sure. A galling paradox.
   A page trotted across the garden, favoring Ista with a most peculiar bow in passing, a sort of bending in midbounce. He disappeared into the keep. A few minutes later dy Ferrej appeared with the page at his heels, and trod gravely back across the garden. The castle keys, mark of his wardship, jingled at his belt.
   “Where away, dy Ferrej?” Ista called idly. She forced her feet to stillness.
   He paused and gave her a bow, suitable to her rank and his dignity and girth, and made the page do his over correctly as well. “I am told some riders from Cardegoss have arrived, Royina.” He hesitated briefly. “Your argument that I, by my oath to you and yours, owed you obedience as well as protection has been much on my mind.”
   Ah-ha, so that one had struck home. Good. Ista smiled slightly.
   He smiled slightly back, the openly relieved expression on his features edged with triumph. “As my pleas did not seem to move you, I wrote to court to ask those to whom you will listen to add their voices, and their more august authority, to my own. Old dy Ferrej indeed has no right to thwart you, save for whatever forbearance he may be owed—no, that you may bestow upon him in charity—for his years of service—”
   Ista’s lips thinned at his words. I cry a foul.
   “But Royina Iselle and Royse Bergon are your liege lords now, as well as having concern for your safety as their mother, and I believe Chancellor dy Cazaril is a man whose opinion you do somewhat regard. If I’m not mistaken, some calming advice arrives with these messengers.” He nodded in satisfaction and moved off.
   Ista clenched her teeth. She declined to call down curses on Iselle, Bergon, or Cazaril. Or, in truth, on Old dy Ferrej, as he was pleased to style himself—a disputant’s ploy, he was scarcely more than a decade older than Ista. But the tension in her body seemed almost to constrict her breathing. She half believed that in their urgency to guard her from old madness, her earnest protectors would drive her mad anew.
   The clack of horses’ hooves, voices, and the calls of grooms floated around the curve of the keep. Abruptly, Ista rose and paced after dy Ferrej. Her lady attendant disentangled herself from her embroidery, scrambled to her feet, and pattered after her, making little protesting noises through sheer habit, Ista decided.
   In the cobbled entry court, two riders in the garb of the Daughter’s Order were dismounting under dy Ferrej’s benevolent and welcoming eye. They were certainly not local men from the temple at Valenda—nothing about their clothing or gear was mismatched, crude, or rustic. From their polished boots up through neat blue trousers and tunics, clean embroidered white wool vest cloaks, and the gray hooded cloaks of their order, their clothing shouted of Cardegoss tailoring. Weapons and their housings were clean and meticulously cared for, the brightwork polished and the leather oil-rubbed—but not new. One officer-dedicat was a little above middle height, light and wiry. The shorter fellow was deeply muscled, and the heavy broadsword that hung from his baldric was clearly no courtier’s toy.
   As dy Ferrej finished speaking a welcome and directing the servants, Ista stepped up beside him. She narrowed her eyes. “Gentlemen. Do I not know you?”
   Smiling, they handed off their reins to the cluster of castle grooms and swept her courtly bows. “Royina,” the taller murmured. “A pleasure to see you again.” Not giving her a chance to be discomfited with shaky memory, he added, “Ferda dy Gura; my brother Foix.”
   “Ah, yes. You are those young men who rode with Chancellor dy Cazaril on his great Ibran mission, three years ago. I met you at Bergon’s investiture. The chancellor and Royse Bergon praised you highly.”
   “Kind of ’em,” murmured the stout one, Foix.
   “Honored to serve you, lady.” The elder dy Gura came to a species of attention before her, and recited, “Chancellor dy Cazaril presents us to you with his compliments, to escort you upon your journey, Royina. He begs you will regard us as your right hand. Hands.” Ferda faltered and extemporized, “Or right and left hand, as the case may be.”
   His brother raised an impenitent eyebrow at him, and murmured, “But which is which?”
   Dy Ferrej’s satisfied look gave way to a startled one. “The chancellor approves this, this… venture?”
   Ista wondered what less flattering word he had just swallowed.
   Ferda and Foix looked at each other. Foix shrugged and turned to dig in his saddlebag. “M’lord dy Cazaril gave me this note to give into your hand, lady.” With a cheerful flourish, he presented a paper folded with both a large red chancellery seal and dy Cazaril’s personal stamp, a crow perched on the letters CAZ pressed in blue wax.
   Ista took it with thanks, and considerable mystification. Dy Ferrej craned his neck as she broke it open on the spot, scattering wax on the cobbles. She turned a little away from him to read it.
   It was brief, and written in a fine chancellery script, addressing her with all her full formal titles; the heading was longer than the body of the letter. It read: I give you these two good brothers, Ferda and Foix dy Gura, to attend you as captains and companions upon your road, wherever it may take you. I trust they may serve you as well as they haveserved me. Five gods speed you on your journey. Your most humble and obedient, and a semicircle with trailing scrawl, dy Cazaril’s signature.
   In the same vile handwriting—dy Cazaril’s fingers had more strength than delicacy, Ista recalled—was written a postscript: Iselle and Bergon send a purse, in memory of the jewels pawned for another jaunt, that bought a country. I have entrusted it to Foix. Do not be alarmed by his humor, he is much less simple than he looks.
   Slowly, Ista’s lips curled up. “I think that is very clear.”
   She handed off the letter to the hovering dy Ferrej. His face fell as his eyes sped down the lines. His lips made an O, but were too well trained, perhaps, to complete the expletive. Ista credited the old Provincara for that.
   Dy Ferrej looked up at the brothers. “But—the royina cannot take to the roads with only two outriders, no matter how excellent.”
   “Certainly not, sir.” Ferda gave him a little bow. “We brought our full troop. I left them down in town to batten upon the temple’s larder, except for the two men I dispatched to another task. They should return tomorrow, to complete our numbers.”
   “Other task?” said dy Ferrej.
   “Marshal dy Palliar seized our going this way to add a chore. He sent up a fine Roknari stallion that we captured in the Gotorget campaign last fall, to cover the mares at our order’s breeding farm at Palma.” Ferda’s face grew animated. “Oh, I wish you’d had a chance to see him, Royina! He bounds from the earth and trots on air—the most glorious silver coat—silk merchants would swoon in envy. Hooves that ring like cymbals when they strike the ground, tail like a banner flying, mane like a maiden’s hair, a marvel of nature—”
   His brother cleared his throat.
   “Er,” concluded Ferda, “a very fine horse, withal.”
   “I suppose,” dy Ferrej said, staring into the middle distance with the chancellor’s note still in his hand, “we could write to your brother dy Baocia in Taryoon for a detachment of his provincial cavalry, in addition. And ladies of his household, to wait upon you in full panoply. Your good sister-in-law, perhaps—or some of your nieces may be old enough… ladies of his court, and your own attendants, of course, and all the necessary maids and grooms. And we must send down to the temple for a suitable spiritual conductor. No, better—we should write to Cardegoss and ask Archdivine Mendenal to recommend a divine of high scholarship.”
   “That would take another ten days,” said Ista in alarm. At least. Her thrill at dy Ferrej’s forced reversal sank in dismay. If he had his way, so far from escaping, she would be constrained to crawl over the countryside trailed by a veritable army. “I wish no such delay. The weather and the roads are much improved now,” she threw in a little desperately. “I would prefer to take advantage of the clear skies.”

  “Well, well, we can discuss that,” he said, glancing up at the fair blue day as if allowing her the point, safely minor. “I’ll speak with your ladies and write to your brother.” His mouth turned down in thought. “Iselle and Bergon plainly mean some message by that purse. Perhaps, Royina, they intend for you to pray for a grandson on your pilgrimage? That would indeed be a great blessing to the royacy of Chalion, and a very befitting purpose for your prayers.” The idea clearly held more charm for him than it did for her, as he’d been enormously pleased recently by the birth of his own first grandson. But since it was the first positive remark he’d yet made about her… venture, she forbore to wrest it from him.
   The dy Gura brothers and their horses were led off to the hospitality of the castle and its stables, respectively, and dy Ferrej hurried about his self-imposed tasks. Ista’s woman promptly began gabbling about all the problems of selecting clothing for such an arduous journey, for all the world as if Ista proposed an expedition across the mountains to Darthaca or beyond, instead of a pious amble around Baocia. Ista considered pleading a headache to make her stop her chatter, concluded it would ill serve her purposes, and set her teeth to endure.


* * *

   The woman was still prattling and worrying by late afternoon. Trailed by three maids, she dodged about Ista’s rooms in the old keep, sorting and re-sorting piles of gowns, robes, cloaks, and shoes, trading off the need for colors appropriate for Ista’s high mourning with preparation for every likely or unlikely contingency. Ista sat in a window seat overlooking the entry court, letting the endless words flow over her like a drip from a gutter spout. Her headache was now quite real, she decided.
   A clatter and bustle at the castle gate announced, unusually, another visitor. Ista sat up and peered through the casement. A tall bay horse clopped in through the archway; its rider wore the castle-and-leopard tabard of the chancellery of Chalion over more faded clothing. The rider swung down, bouncing on—oh, her toes; the courier was a fresh-faced young woman with her hair in a black braid down her back. She pulled a bundle from behind her saddle and unrolled it with a snap to reveal a skirt. With decidedly perfunctory modesty, she hitched up her tunic and wrapped the garment around her trousers at her slim waist, shaking out the hem around her booted ankles with a cheerful swing of her hips.
   De Ferrej appeared below; the girl unsealed her chancellery pouch and held it upside down to drop out a single letter. Dy Ferrej read the direction and tore it open then and there, by which Ista deduced it was a personal missive from his beloved daughter Lady Betriz, attendant upon the Royina Iselle at court. Perhaps it contained news of his grandson, for his face softened. Was it time yet for first teeth? If so, Ista would hear of the infant’s achievement in due course. She had to smile a little.
   The girl stretched, restored her pouch, checked her horse’s legs and hooves, and turned the animal over to the castle groom with some string of instructions. Ista became conscious of her own lady-in-waiting peering over her shoulder.
   Ista said impulsively, “I would speak to that courier girl. Fetch her to me.”
   “My lady, she had only the one letter.”
   “Well, then, I’ll have to hear the news of court from her lips.”
   Her woman snorted. “Such a rude girl is not likely to be in the confidence of the court ladies at Cardegoss.”
   “Nonetheless, fetch her.”
   It might have been the sharp tone of voice, in any case, the woman moved off.
   At length, a firm tread and an aroma of horses and leather announced the girl’s arrival in Ista’s sitting room, even before her woman’s dubious, “My lady, here is the courier as you asked.” Ista swung round in the casement seat and stared up, waving her woman out, she departed with a disapproving frown.
   The girl stared back with slightly daunted curiosity. She managed an awkward bob, halfway between a bow and a curtsey. “Royina. How may I serve you?”
   Ista scarcely knew “What’s your name, girl?”
   “Liss, my lady.” After a moment of rather empty silence she offered, “Short for Annaliss.”
   “Where do you come from?”
   “Today? I picked up my dispatch case at the station in—”
   “No—altogether.”
   “Oh. Um. My father had a little estate near the town of Teneret, in the province of Labra. He raised horses for the Brother’s Order, and sheep for the wool market. Still does, as far as I know.”
   A man of substance, she was not escaping some dire poverty, then. “How did you become a courier?”
   “I had not thought about it, till one day my sister and I came to town to deliver some horses to the temple, and I saw a girl gallop in riding courier for the Daughter’s Order.” She smiled as if in some happy memory. “I was on fire from that moment.”
   Perhaps it was the confidence of her calling, or of her youth and strength, the girl, while very polite, was by no means tongue-tied in the royina’s presence, Ista noted with relief. “Aren’t you afraid, out there alone on the roads?”
   She tossed her head, making her braid swing. “I out-ride all danger. So far, anyway.”
   Ista could believe it. The girl was taller than Ista, but still shorter and slighter than the average man, even the wiry fellows favored for couriers. She would sit her horse lightly. “Or… or uncomfortable? You must ride in heat, cold, all weather…”
   “I don’t melt in the rain. And the riding keeps me warm in the snow. If I have to, I can sleep wrapped in my cloak on the ground under a tree. Or up it, if the place seems chancy. It’s true the courier station bunks are warmer and less bumpy.” Her eyes crinkled with humor. “Slightly.”
   Ista sighed in faint awe of such boundless energy. “How long have you been riding for the chancellery?”
   “Three years, now. Since I was fifteen.”
   What had Ista been doing at age fifteen? Training to be a great lord’s wife, she supposed. When Roya Ias’s eye had fallen on her, at about the age this girl was now, the schooling had seemed to succeed beyond her family’s wildest dreams—till the dream had melted into the long nightmare of Ias’s great curse. Now broken, thank the gods and Lord dy Cazaril, now broken these three years gone. The choking fog of it had lifted from her mind that day. The dullness of her life, the stalemate of her soul since then was just long habit.
   “How came your family to let you leave home so young?”
   The girl’s flickering amusement warmed her face like the sun through green leaves. “I believe I forgot to ask, come to think on it.”
   “And the dispatcher allowed you to sign on without your father’s word?”
   “I believe he forgot to ask, too, being in great need of riders just then. It’s amazing how the rules change in a pinch. But with four other daughters to dower, I didn’t expect my father and brothers to run down the road to drag me back.”
   “You went that very day?” asked Ista, startled.
   The white grin widened—she had healthy teeth, too, Ista noted. “Of course. I figured if I had to go home and spin one more skein of yarn, I’d scream and fall down in a fit. Besides, my mother never liked my yarn anyway. She said it was too lumpy.”
   Ista could sympathize with that statement. A reluctant answering smile lifted her lips. “My daughter is a great rider.”
   “So all Chalion has heard, my lady.” Liss’s eyes brightened. “From Valenda to Taryoon in one night, and dodging enemy troops the while—I’ve never had such an adventure. Nor won such a prize at the end of it.”
   “Let us hope the wings of war will not brush Valenda so close again. Where do you go next?”
   Liss shrugged. “Who knows? I’ll ride back to my station to await the next pouch my dispatcher hands to me, and go where it takes me. Swiftly if Ser dy Ferrej writes some reply, or slowly to spare my horse if he does not.”
   “He will not write tonight.” Ista scarcely wanted to let her go, but the girl looked disheveled and dirty from the road. Surely she would wish to wash and take refreshment. “Attend on me again, Liss of Labra. The castle takes dinner in an hour or so. Wait upon me there and dine at my table.”
   The girl’s dark brows rose in brief surprise. She bow-curtseyed again. “At your command, Royina.”

* * *

   The old Provincara’s high table was set exactly as it had been a thousand—ten thousand—times before, on days when no festival brought relief from the monotony. Granted it was comfortable, in the small dining chamber of the newest building within the castle walls, with fireplace and glazed windows. The same small company, too. Lady dy Hueltar, who was Ista’s mother’s aging relative and longtime companion, Ista, her principal lady attendants, solemn dy Ferrej. By tacit agreement, the old Provincara’s chair still stood empty. Ista had not moved to claim the central seat, and perhaps in some misplaced notion of her grief, none had urged her to.
   Dy Ferrej arrived, escorting Ferda and Foix, both looking very courtly. And young. The courier girl entered in their wake and made polite bows. She had faced Royina Ista bravely enough alone, but the atmosphere of staid age here was enough to melt the sinews of strong soldiers. She took her seat stiffly and sat as if trying to make herself smaller, though she eyed the two brothers with interest. The aroma of horses was much fainter now, although Lady dy Hueltar wrinkled her nose. But one more place setting—not the old Provincara’s—still stood empty across from Ista.
   “Do we expect a guest?” Ista inquired of dy Ferrej. One of the elderly people’s elderly friends, perhaps, Ista dared not hope for anything more exotic.
   Dy Ferrej cleared his throat and nodded at old Lady dy Hueltar.
   Her seamed face smiled. “I asked the Temple of Valenda to send us a suitable divine to be your spiritual conductor upon your pilgrimage, Royina. If we are not to send to Cardegoss for a court-trained scholar, I thought we might request Learned Tovia, of the Mother’s Order. She may be a lesser theologian, but she is a most excellent physician, and knows you of old. Such a relief to have someone familiar, should we be taken with any female complaints upon the road, or or if your old troubles should flare up. And none could possibly be more proper to your sex and status.”
   A relief to whom? Divine Tovia had been a bosom friend to the old Provincara and to Lady dy Hueltar; Ista could quite imagine the trio enjoying a gentle jaunt in the spring sunshine together. Five gods, had Lady dy Hueltar assumed she would be going along also? Ista suppressed an unworthy desire to scream, just like Liss in fear of being cocooned in her endless skeins of wool.
   “I knew you would be pleased,” Lady dy Hueltar murmured on. “I thought you might wish to begin discussing your holy itinerary with her over dinner.” She frowned. “It’s not like her to be late.”
   Her frown vanished, as a servant entered and said, “The divine is here, my lady.”
   “Oh, good. Show her in at once.”
   The servant opened his mouth as if to speak, but then bowed and retreated.
   The door swung wide again. A puffing figure of totally unexpected familiarity entered, and stopped, stranded upon a wall of stares. It was the fat young divine of the Bastard that Ista had met upon the road those two weeks or so ago. His white robes were only somewhat cleaner now, being free of loose detritus, but mottled with permanent faint stains about the hem and front.
   His beginning smile grew uncertain. “Good evening, gentle ladies and my lords. I was told to attend here upon a certain Lady dy Hueltar. Something about a divine being wanted for a pilgrimage…?”
   Lady dy Hueltar recovered her voice. “I am she. But I had understood the temple was sending the Mother’s physician, Divine Tovia. Who are you?”
   That had almost come out Who are you? Ista felt, but for Lady dy Hueltar’s grip on good address.
   “Oh…” He bobbed a bow. “Learned Chivar dy Cabon, at your service.”
   He claimed a name of some rank, at least. He eyed Ista and Ser dy Ferrej; the recognition, Ista thought, ran two ways, as did the surprise.
   “Where is Learned Tovia?” asked Lady dy Hueltar blankly.
   “I believe she has ridden out upon a medical call of some special difficulty, at some distance from Valenda.” His smile grew less certain still.
   “Welcome, Learned dy Cabon,” said Ista pointedly.
   Dy Ferrej woke to his duties. “Indeed. I’m the castle warder, dy Ferrej; this is the Dowager Royina Ista…”
   Dy Cabon’s eyes narrowed, and he stared sharply at Ista. “Are you, now…” he breathed.
   Dy Ferrej, ignoring or not hearing this, introduced the dy Gura brothers and the other ladies in order of rank, and lastly, and a bit reluctantly, “Liss, a chancellery courier.”
   Dy Cabon bowed to all with indiscriminate good cheer.
   “This is all wrong—there must be some mistake, Learned dy Cabon,” Lady dy Hueltar went on, with a beseeching sideways glance at Ista. “It is the dowager royina herself who proposes to undertake a pilgrimage this season, in petition of the gods for a grandson. You are not—this is not—we do not know—is a divine of the Bastard’s Order, and a man at that, quite the most appropriate, um, person, um…” She trailed off in mute appeal for someone, anyone, to extract her from this quagmire.
   Somewhere inside, Ista was beginning to smile.
   She said smoothly, “Mistake or no, I feel certain that our dinner is ready to be served. Will you please grace our table this evening with your scholarship, Learned, and lead us in the meal’s invocation to the gods?”
   He brightened vastly. “I should be most honored, Royina.”
   Smiling and blinking, he seated himself in the chair Ista indicated and looked hopeful as the servant passed among them with the basin of lavender-scented water for washing hands. He blessed the impending meal in unexceptionable terms and a good voice; whatever he was, he was no country rustic. He tucked into the courses presented with an enthusiasm that would have warmed the Provincara’s cook’s heart, could he have witnessed it, discouraged as he was by his long thrall to elderly, indifferent appetites. Foix kept pace with him with no apparent effort.
   “Are you of those Cabons related to the present Holy General dy Yarrin of the Daughter’s Order?” Lady dy Hueltar inquired politely.
   “I believe I am some sort of third or fourth cousin to him, lady,” the divine replied after swallowing his bite. “My father was Ser Odlin dy Cabon.”
   Both dy Gura brothers stirred with interest.
   “Oh,” said Ista in surprise. “I believe I met him, years ago, at court in Cardegoss.” Our Fat Cabon, as he was jovially dubbed by the roya; but he’d died as bravely as any thinner gentleman of the roya’s service at the disastrous battle of Dalus. She added after a moment, “You have the look of him.”
   The divine ducked his head in apparent pleasure. “I am not sorry for it.”
   Some impulse of mischief prompted Ista to ask, because it was certain no one else present would, “And are you also a son of Lady dy Cabon?”
   The divine’s eye glinted in response over a forkful of roast. “Alas, no. But my father took some joy in me nonetheless, and settled a dower upon me at the Temple when I came of the age for schooling. For which I—eventually—came to thank him very much. My calling did not come upon me as a lightning bolt, to be sure, but slowly, as a tree grows.” Dy Cabon’s round face and divine’s robes made him look older than he was, Ista decided. He could not be above thirty, perhaps much less.
   For the first time in a long while, the conversation turned not on various people’s illnesses, aches, pains, and digestive failures, but widened to the whole of Chalion-Ibra. The dy Gura brothers had considerable witness to report of last year’s successful campaign by the Marshal dy Palliar to retake the mountain fortress of Gotorget, commanding the border of the hostile Roknari princedoms to the north, and young Royse-Consort Bergon’s seasoning attendance there upon the field of battle.
   Ferda said, “Foix here took a bad knock from a Roknari war hammer during the final assault on the fortress, and was much abed this winter—a mess of broken ribs, with inflammation of the lungs to follow. Chancellor dy Cazaril took him up as a clerk while his bones finished knitting. Our cousin dy Palliar thought a little light riding would help him regain his condition.”
   A faint blush colored Foix’s broad face, and he ducked his head. Liss’s gaze at him sharpened a trifle, though whether imagining him with sword or with pen in hand Ista could not tell.
   Lady dy Hueltar did not fail to register her usual criticism of Royina Iselle for riding to the north to be near her husband and these stirring events, even though—or perhaps that was, because—she had been brought safely to bed of a girl thereafter.
   “I do not think,” said Ista dryly, “that Iselle staying slugabed in Cardegoss would have resulted in a boy, however.”
   Lady dy Hueltar mumbled something; Ista was reminded of her own mother’s sharp critique when she had borne Iselle to Ias, those long years ago. As if anything she might have done would have made it come out any differently. As if, when it had come out differently in her second confinement, it was any better… her brow wrinkled in old pain. She looked up to intersect dy Cabon’s sharp glance.
   The divine swiftly turned the subject to lighter matters. Dy Ferrej had the pleasure of trotting out an old tale or two for a new audience, which Ista could not begrudge him. Dy Cabon told a warm joke, albeit milder than many Ista had heard over the roya’s table; the courier girl laughed aloud, caught a frown from Lady dy Hueltar, and held a hand over her mouth.
   “Please don’t stop,” said Ista to her. “No one has laughed like that in this household for weeks. Months.” Years.
   What might her pilgrimage be like if, instead of dragging a lot of tired guardians out on a road that suited their old bones so ill, she could travel with people who laughed! Young people, not brought low by old sin and loss? People who bounced? People to whom, dare she think it, she was an elder to be respected and not a failed child to be corrected? At your command, Royina, not, Now, Lady Ista, you know you can’t…
   She said abruptly, “Learned dy Cabon, I thank the Temple for taking thought for me, and I shall be pleased to have your spiritual guidance upon my journey.”
   “You honor me, Royina.” Dy Cabon, sitting, bowed as deeply as he could over his belly. “When do we leave?”
   “Tomorrow,” said Ista.
   A chorus of objection rose around the table: lists of persons and support not assembled, ladies-in-waiting, their maids, their grooms, of clothing, gear, of transport animals, of dy Baocia’s small army not yet arrived.
   She almost added weakly, Or as soon as all can be arranged, but then stiffened her resolve. Her eye fell on Liss, chewing and listening with detached fascination.
   “You are all correct,” Ista raised her voice to override the babble, which died in relief. She went on, “I do not have youth, or energy, or courage, or knowledge of how to make my way upon the road. So I shall commandeer some. I shall take the courier, Liss, to be my lady-in-waiting and my groom in one. And none more. That shall save three dozen mules right there.”
   Liss nearly spat out the bite she was chewing.
   “But she’s only a courier!” gasped Lady dy Hueltar.
   “I assure you Chancellor dy Cazaril will not begrudge her to me. Couriers hold themselves ready to ride wherever they are ordered. What say you, Liss?”
   Liss, eyes wide, finished gulping, and managed, “I think I’d make a better groom than waiting lady, Royina, but I will try my best for you.”
   “Good. None could ask more.”
   “You are the dowager royina!” dy Ferrej almost wailed. “You cannot go out on the roads with so little ceremony!”
   “I plan a pilgrimage in humility, dy Ferrej, not a march in pride. Still… suppose I were not a royina? Suppose I were some simple widow of good family. What servants, what reasonable precautions would I take then?”
   “Travel incognito?” Learned dy Cabon caught the idea instantly, while the rest were still gobbling in misdirected resistance. “That would certainly remove many distractions from your spiritual study, Royina. I suppose… such a woman would simply ask the Temple to provide her with escort in the usual way, and they would fill the request from the riders available.”
   “Fine. That has been done for me already. Ferda, can your men ride tomorrow?”
   The cacophony of protest was overridden by dy Gura’s simple, “Certainly. As you command, Royina.”
   The shocked silence that followed was decidedly baffled. And even, possibly, a little thoughtful, if that was not too much to hope.
   Ista sat back, a smile turning her lips.
   “I must take thought for a name,” she said at length. “Neither dy Chalion nor dy Baocia will do, unsimple as they are.” Dy Hueltar? Ista shuddered. No. She ran down a mental list of other minor relatives of the provincars of Baocia. “Dy Ajelo would do.” The Ajelo family had scarcely crossed her view, and never once provided a lady-in-waiting to assist in Ista’s… keeping. She bore them no ill will. “I shall still be Ista, I think. It’s not so uncommon a name as to be remarked.”
   The divine cleared his throat. “We need to confer a little tonight, then. I do not know what route you desire of me. A pilgrimage should have both a spiritual plan and, in necessary support of it, a material one.”
   And hers had neither. And if she did not assert one, one would surely be foisted upon her. She said cautiously, “How have you led the pious before, Learned?”
   “Well, that depends much upon the purposes of the pious.”
   “I have some maps in my saddlebags that might supply some inspiration. I’ll fetch them, if you like,” Ferda offered.
   “Yes,” said the divine gratefully. “That would be most helpful.”

   Ferda hurried out of the chamber. Outside, the day drew toward sunset, and the servants moved quietly about the room, lighting the wall sconces. Foix leaned his elbows comfortably on the table, smiled amiably at Liss, and found room for another slice of honey-nut cake while they waited for his brother’s return.
   Ferda strode back into the dining chamber in a very few minutes, his hands full of folded papers. “Here… no, here is Baocia, and the provinces to the west as far as Ibra.” He spread a stained and travel-worn paper out on the table between the divine and Ista. Dy Ferrej peered anxiously over dy Cabon’s shoulder.
   The divine frowned at the map for a few minutes, then cleared his throat and looked across at Ista. “We are taught that the route of a pilgrimage should serve its spiritual goal. Which may be simple or manifold, but which will partake of at least one of five aims: service, supplication, gratitude, divination, and atonement.”
   Atonement. Apology to the gods. Dy Lutez, she could not help thinking. The chill memory of that dark hour still clouded her heart, on this bright evening. Yet who owed Whom the apology for that disaster? We were all in it together, the gods and dy Lutez and Ias and I. And if abasing herself on the altar of the gods was the cure for that old wound, she had eaten dirt enough already for a dozen dy Lutezes. Yet the scar still bled, in the deep dark, if pressed.
   “I once saw a man pray for mules,” Foix remarked agreeably.
   Dy Cabon blinked. After a moment he asked, “Did he get any?”
   “Yes, excellent ones.”
   “The gods’ ways are… mysterious, sometimes,” murmured dy Cabon, apparently digesting this. “Ahem. Yours—Royina—is a pilgrimage of supplication, for a grandson as I understand it. Is it not?” He paused invitingly.
   It is not. But dy Ferrej and Lady dy Hueltar both made noises of assent, and Ista let it pass.
   Dy Cabon ran his finger over the intricately drawn chart, thick with place names, seamed with little rivers, and decorated with rather more trees than actually stood on Baocia’s high plains. He pointed out this or that shrine devoted to the Mother or the Father within striking distance of Valenda, describing the merits of each. Ista forced herself to look at the map.
   To the far south, beyond the map’s margins, lay Cardegoss, and the great castle and fortress of the Zangre of evil memory. No. To the east lay Taryoon. No. West and north, then. She trailed her finger across the map toward the spine of the Bastard’s Teeth, the high range that marked the long north-south border of Ibra, so recently united with Chalion in her daughter’s marriage bed. North along the mountains’ edge, some easy road. “This way.”
   Dy Cabon’s brow wrinkled as he squinted at the map. “I’m not just sure what…”
   “About a day’s ride west of Palma is a town where the Daughter’s Order has a modest hostel, rather pleasant,” remarked Ferda. “We’ve stayed there before.”
   Dy Cabon licked his lips. “Hm. I know of an inn near Palma that we might reach before nightfall, if we do not tarry on the road. It has a most excellent table. Oh, and a sacred well, very old. A minor holy place, but as Sera Ista dy Ajelo desires a pilgrimage in humility, perhaps a small start will serve her best. And the great shrines tend to be crowded, this time of year.”
   “Then by all means, Learned, let us avoid the crowds and seek humility, and pray at this well. Or table, as the case may be.” Ista’s lips twitched.
   “I see no need to weigh out prayer by the grain, as though it were dubious coin,” replied dy Cabon cheerily, encouraged by her fleeting smile. “Let us do both, and return abundance for abundance.” The divine’s thick fingers made calipers of themselves and stepped from Valenda to Palma to the spot Ferda had tapped. He hesitated, then his hand turned once more. “A day’s ride from there, if we arise early enough, is Casilchas. Sleepy little place, but my order has a school there. Some of my old teachers are still there. And it has a fine library, considering the small size of the place, for many teaching divines who have died have left it their books. I grant a seminary of the Bastard is not exactly… exactly apropos to the purpose of this pilgrimage, but I confess I should like to consult the library.”
   Ista wondered, a little dryly, if the school also had a particularly fine cook. She rested her chin upon her hand and studied the fat young man across from her. Whatever had possessed the Temple of Valenda to send him up to her, anyway? His half-aristocratic ancestry? Hardly. Yet experienced pilgrimage conductors usually had their charges’ spiritual battle plans all drawn out in advance. There were doubtless books of devotional instruction on the topic. Perhaps that was what dy Cabon wanted from the library, a manual that would tell him how to go on. Perhaps he had slept through a few too many of those holy lectures, in Casilchas.
   “Good,” said Ista. “The Daughter’s hospitality for the next two nights, the Bastard’s thereafter.” That would put her at least three full days’ ride from Valenda. A good start.
   Dy Cabon looked extremely relieved. “Excellent, Royina.”
   Foix was mulling over the maps; he’d pulled out one of all Chalion, necessarily less detailed than the one dy Cabon studied. His finger traced the route from Cardegoss north to Gotorget. The fortress guarded the end of a chain of rough, if not especially high, mountains that ran partway along the border between Chalion and the Roknari princedom of Borasnen. Foix’s brows knotted. Ista wondered what memories of pain the name of that fortress evoked in him.
   “You’ll want to avoid that region, I think,” said dy Ferrej, watching Foix’s hand pause at Gotorget.
   “Indeed, my lord. I believe we should steer clear of all north-central Chalion. It is still very unsettled from last year’s campaign, and Royina Iselle and Royse Bergon are already starting to assemble forces there for the fall.”
   Dy Ferrej’s brows climbed with interest. “Do they think to strike for Visping already?”
   Foix shrugged, letting his finger slide up to the north coast and the port city named. “I’m not sure if Visping can be taken in a single campaign, but it were good if it could. Cut the Five Princedoms in two, gain a seaport for Chalion that the Ibran fleet might find refuge in…”
   Dy Cabon leaned over the table, his belly pressing its edge, and peered. “The princedom of Jokona, to the west, would be next after Borasnen, then. Or would we strike toward Brajar? Or both at once?”
   “Two fronts would be foolish, and Brajar is an uncertain ally. Jokona’s new prince is young and untried. First pinch Jokona between Chalion and Ibra—pinch it off. Then turn to the northeast.” Foix’s eyes narrowed, and his pleasant mouth firmed, contemplating this strategy.
   “Will you join the campaign in the fall, Foix?” Ista asked politely.
   He nodded. “Where the Marshal dy Palliar goes, the dy Gura brothers will surely follow. As a master of horse, Ferda will likely be pressed into assembling cavalry mounts by midsummer. And, lest I miss him and start to pine, he’ll find some hot, dirty job for me. Never any lack of those.”
   Ferda snickered. Foix’s returning grin at his brother seemed entirely without resentment.
   Ista thought Foix’s analysis sound, and had no doubt how he’d come by it. Marshal dy Palliar and Royse Bergon and Royina Iselle were none of them fools, and Chancellor dy Cazaril had a deep wit indeed, and not much love for the Roknari coastal lords who had once sold him to slavery on the galleys. Visping was a prize worth playing for.
   “We shall steer west, and away from the excitement, then,” she said. Dy Ferrej nodded approval.
   “Very good, Royina,” said dy Cabon. His sigh was only a little wistful, as he refolded Ferda’s maps and handed them back. Did he fear his father’s martial fate, or envy it? There was no telling.
   The party broke off shortly thereafter. The planning and complicated itinerary-listing and complaints from Ista’s women went on and on. They would never stop arguing, Ista decided; but she could. She would. You can’t solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn’t true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them. When her lamenting ladies at last blew out the candles and left her to her rest, her smile crept back.

Chapter 3

   Ista spend the early morning sorting through her wardrobe with Liss, searching for clothing fit for the road and not merely a royina. Much that was old lingered in Ista’s cupboards and chests, but little that was plain. Any ornate or delicate gown that made Liss wrinkle her nose in doubt went instantly into the discard pile. Ista did manage to assemble a riding costume of leggings, split skirt, tunic, and vest-cloak that showed not a scrap of Mother’s green. Finally, they ruthlessly raided the wardrobes of Ista’s ladies and maids, to the latters’ scandal. This resulted at the last in a neat pile of garments—practical, plain, washable, and, above all, few.
   Liss was clearly happier to be sent off to the stables to select the most suitable riding horse and baggage mule. One baggage mule. By midday Ista’s feverish single-mindedness resulted in both women dressed for the road, the horses saddled, and the mule packed. The dy Gura brothers found them standing in the cobbled courtyard when they rode through the castle gate heading ten mounted men in the garb of the Daughter’s Order, dy Cabon following on his white mule.
   The grooms held the royina’s horse and ushered her to the mounting block. Liss leapt up lightly on her tall bay with no such assistance. In the spring of her life Ista had ridden much; hunted all day and danced till the moon went down, at the roya’s glittering court when she’d first come there. She, too, had been too long abed in this castle of age and grievous memory. A little light duty to regain condition was just what was wanted.
   Learned dy Cabon clambered from his mule long enough to stand up on the mounting block and intone a mercifully brief prayer and blessing upon the enterprise. Ista bowed her head, but did not mouth the responses. I want nothing of the gods I’ve had their gifts before.
   Fourteen people and eighteen animals just to get her on the road. What about those pilgrims who somehow managed this with no more than a staff and a sack?
   Lady dy Hueltar and all of Ista’s ladies and maids trooped down to the courtyard, not to wish her farewell, it transpired, but to weep pointedly at her in one last, decidedly counterproductive, bid to make her change her mind. In the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, Lady dy Hueltar wailed, “Oh, she’s not serious—stop her, for the Mother’s sake, dy Ferrej!” Gritting her teeth, Ista let their cries bounce off her back like arrows glancing from chain mail. Dy Cabon’s white mule led out the archway and down the road at a gentle amble, but even so the voices fell behind at last. The soft spring wind stirred Ista’s hair. She did not look back.


* * *

   They reached the inn at Palma by sunset, barely. It had been a very long time, Ista reflected as she was helped down from her horse, since she had spent a whole day in the saddle, hunting or traveling. Liss, plainly bored with the pilgrimage’s placid pace, jumped down off her animal as though she’d spent the afternoon lounging on a couch. Foix had apparently worked through whatever stiffness lingered from his injuries earlier in the brothers’ journey. Even dy Cabon didn’t waddle as though he hurt. When the divine offered her his arm, Ista took it gratefully.
   Dy Cabon had sent one of the men riding ahead to bespeak beds and a meal for the party, fortunately as it turned out, for the inn was small. Another party, of tinkers, was being turned away as they arrived. The place had once been a narrow fortified farmhouse, now made more sprawling with an added wing. The dy Gura brothers and the divine were given one chamber to share, Ista and Liss another, and the rest of the guardsmen were assigned pallets in the stable loft, although the mild night made this no discomfort.
   The innkeeper and his wife had set up two tables near the sacred spring, in a little grove behind the building, and hung lanterns lavishly in the trees. The thick moss and ferns, the bluebells and the bloodroots with their starry white blooms, the interlaced boughs, and the gentle gurgle of the water running over the smooth stones made a more lovely dining chamber, Ista thought, than she had sat in for many a year. They all washed their hands in springwater brought in a copper basin and blessed by the divine, and needing no other perfume. The innkeeper’s wife was famous for her larder-keeping. A pair of servants kept busy lugging out heavy trays and jugs good bread and cheese, roast ducks, mutton, sausages, dried fruit, new herbs and spring greens, eggs, dark olives and olive oil from the north, apple nut tarts, new ale and cider—simple fare, but very wholesome. Dy Cabon made flattering inroads upon these offerings, and even Ista’s appetite, numbed for months, bestirred itself. When she finally undressed and lay down beside Liss in the clean little bed in the chamber under the eaves, she fell asleep so quickly she barely remembered it next morning.


* * *

   Rising again, as the early light fell through the half-open casement window, proved briefly awkward. Through sheer ingrained habit, Ista stood still for a time and waited to be dressed, like a doll, till she realized her new maidservant would require instruction. At that point it became easier to sort out and draw on her garments herself, though she did ask for help with some of the fastenings. They snagged for a moment upon the problem of Ista’s hair.
   “I don’t know how to dress ladies’ hair,” Liss confessed when Ista handed her the brush and sat on a low bench. She stared doubtfully at Ista’s thick dun mane, hanging to her waist. Ista had, perhaps ill-advisedly, picked out her former attendant’s careful, tight, elaborate braiding before bed. The hair’s own curl had reasserted itself during the night, and it was now beginning to snarl, and perhaps growl and snap.
   “You do your own, presumably. What do you do with it?”
   “Well, I put it in a braid.”
   “What else?”
   “I put it in two braids.”
   Ista thought a moment. “Do you do the horses?”
   “Oh, yes, my lady. Snail braids, and dressed with ribbons, and fringe knots with beads for the Mother’s Day, and for the Son’s Day the fountain knots along the crest, with feathers worked in, and—”
   “For today, put it in one braid.”
   Liss breathed relief. “Yes, my lady.” Her hands were quick and clever; much quicker than Ista’s former attendants. The results, well, they suited modest Sera dy Ajelo becomingly enough.

   The whole party met in the grove for dawn prayers, for this the first full day of Ista’s pilgrimage. Dawn by courtesy, anyway—the sun had been up for some hours before the inn’s guests. The innkeeper, his wife, and all their children and the servants were also turned out for the ceremony, as the visit of a divine of notable scholarship was evidently a rare event. Besides which, Ista thought more cynically, there was the possibility that were he flatteringly enough received, the divine might recommend other pilgrims to this decidedly minor holy attraction.
   As this wellspring was sacred to the Daughter, dy Cabon stood on the bank of the rivulet in the sun-dappled shade and commenced with a short springtime prayer from a small book of occasional devotions he carried in his saddlebag. Exactly why this well was sacred to the Lady of Spring was a little unclear. Ista found the innkeeper’s assertion that it was the true secret location of the miracle of the virgin and the water jar a trifle unconvincing, as she knew of at least three other sites in Chalion alone that claimed that legend. But the beauty of the place was surely excuse enough for its holy reputation.
   Dy Cabon, his stained robes seeming almost white in this pure light, pocketed his book and cleared his throat for the morning lesson. Since the tables behind them stood set and waiting for breakfast to be served when prayers were done, Ista was confident that the sermon would be succinct.
   “As this is the beginning of a spiritual journey, I shall go back to the tale of beginnings we all learned in our childhoods.” The divine closed his eyes briefly, as if marshaling memory. “Here is the story as Ordol writes it in his Letters to the Young Royse dy Brajar. ”
   His eyes opened again, and his voice took up a storyteller’s rhythm. “The world was first and the world was flame, fluid and fearsome. As the flame cooled, matter formed and gained vast strength and endurance, a great globe with fire at its heart. From the fire at the heart of the world slowly grew the World-Soul.
   “But the eye cannot see itself, not even the Eye of the World-Soul. So the World-Soul split in two, that it might so perceive itself; and so the Father and the Mother came into being. And with that sweet perception, for the first time, love became possible in the heart of the World-Soul. Love was the first of the fruits that the realm of the spirit gifted back to the realm of matter that was its fountain and foundation. But not the last, for song was next, then speech.” Dy Cabon, speaking, grinned briefly and drew another long breath.
   “And the Father and the Mother between them began to order the world, that existence might not be instantly consumed again by fire and chaos and roiling destruction. In their first love for each other they bore the Daughter and the Son, and divided the seasons of the world among them, each with its special and particular beauty, each to its own lordship and stewardship. And in the harmony and security of this new composition, the matter of the world grew in boldness and complexity. And from its strivings to create beauty, plants and animals and men arose, for love had come into the fiery heart of the world, and matter sought to return gifts of spirit to the realm of spirit, as lovers exchange tokens.”
   Satisfaction flickered across dy Cabon’s suety features, and he swayed a trifle with his cadences as he became absorbed by his tale. Ista suspected they were getting to his favorite part.
   “But the fire at the heart of the world also held forces of destruction that could not be denied. And from this chaos rose the demons, who broke out and invaded the world and preyed upon the fragile new souls growing there as a mountain wolf preys upon the lambs of the valleys. It was the Season of Great Sorcerers. The order of the world was disrupted, and winter and spring and summer and fall upended one into another. Drought and flood, ice and fires threatened the lives of men, and of all the marvelous plants and artful creatures that matter, infected by love, had offered on the altar of the World-Soul.
   “Then one day a powerful demon lord, wise and wicked by the consumption of many souls of men, came upon a man living alone in a tiny hermitage in a wood. Like a cat who thinks to toy with her prey, he accepted the beggar’s hospitality and waited his chance to leap from the worn-out body he presently possessed to the fresh new one. For the man, though clad in rags, was beautiful: his glance was like a sword thrust and his breath, perfume.
   “But the demon lord was confounded when he accepted a little earthen bowl of wine, and drank it in one gulp, and prepared to pounce; for the saint had divided his own soul, and poured it out into the wine, and given it to the demon of his own free will. And so for the first time, a demon gained a soul, and all the beautiful and bitter gifts of a soul.
   “The demon lord fell to the floor of the woodland cell and howled with all the astonished woe of a child being born, for he was born in that moment, into the world of both matter and spirit. And taking the hermit’s body that was his free gift, and not stolen nor begrudged, he fled through the woods in terror back to his terrible sorcerer’s palace, and hid.
   “For many months he cowered there, trapped in the horror of his self, but slowly the great-souled saint began to teach him the beauties of virtue. The saint was a devotee of the Mother, and called down Her grace to heal the demon of his sin, for with the gift of free will had come the possibility of sin, and the burning shame of it, which tormented the demon as nothing had ever done before. And between the lash of his sin and the lessons of the saint, the demon’s soul began to grow in probity and power. As a great sorcerer-paladin, with the Mother’s favor fluttering upon his mailed sleeve, he began to move in the world of matter, and fight the baleful soulless demons on the gods’ behalf in the places where They could not reach.
   “The great-souled demon became the Mother’s champion and captain, and She loved him without limit for his soul’s incandescent splendor. And so began the great battle to clear the world of demons run rampant and restore the order of the seasons.
   “The other demons feared him, and attempted to combine against him, but could not, for such cooperation was beyond their nature; still their onslaught was terrible, and the great-souled demon, beloved of the Mother, was slain on the final battlefield.
   “And so was born the last god, the Bastard, love child of the goddess and the great-souled demon. Some say He was born on the eve of the last battle, fruit of a union upon Her great couch, some say the grieving Mother gathered up the great-souled demon’s shattered dear remains from the stricken field and mixed them with Her blood, and so made the Bastard by Her great art. However so, their Son, of all the gods, was given agency over both spirit and matter, for He inherited as servants the demons that His father’s great sacrifice had conquered and enslaved and so swept out of the world.
   “What is certainly a lie,” dy Cabon continued in a suddenly more prosaic, not to mention irate, tone of voice, “is the Quadrene heresy that the great-souled demon took the Mother by force and so engendered the Bastard upon Her against Her great will. A scurrilous and senseless and blasphemous lie…” Ista wasn’t sure if he was still paraphrasing Ordol, or if that was his own gloss. He cleared his throat and finished more formally, “Here ends the tale and tally of the advent of the five gods.”
   Ista had heard various versions of the tally of the gods what seemed several hundred times since childhood, but she had to admit, dy Cabon’s delivery of the old story had the eloquence and sincerity to make it seem almost new again. Granted, most versions did not give the complex story of the Bastard more space than the rest of the Holy Family put together, but people had to be allowed their favorites. Despite herself, she was moved.
   Dy Cabon returned to ritual and called down the fivefold benison, asking of each god the proper gifts, leading the respondents in praise in return. Of the Daughter, growth and learning and love; of the Mother, children, health, and healing; of the Son, good comradeship, hunting, and harvest; of the Father, children, justice, and an easy death in its due time.
   “And the Bastard grant us…”—dy Cabon’s voice, fallen into the soothing singsong of ceremony, stumbled for the first time, slowing—“in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain’s peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding.” He blinked, looking startled.
   Ista’s chin snapped up; for an instant, her spine seemed to freeze. No. No. There is nothing here, nothing here, nothing here. Nothing, do you hear me? She forced her breath out slowly.
   It was not the usual wording. Most prayers asked to be spared the fifth god’s attention, the master of all disasters out of season as He was. The divine hastily signed himself, touching forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, hand spread wide upon his chest above his broad paunch, and signed again in the air to call down blessing upon all assembled there. The company, released, stirred and stretched, some breaking into low-voiced talk, some strolling away to their day’s tasks. Dy Cabon came toward Ista, rubbing his hands and smiling anxiously.
   “Thank you, Learned,” Ista said, “for that good beginning.”
   He bowed in relief at her approval. “My very great pleasure, my lady.” He brightened still further as the inn’s servants hurried to bring out what promised to be a very hearty breakfast. Ista, a little shamed by the excellence of his effort to have purloined the divine with false pretenses of a sham pilgrimage, was heartened by the reflection that dy Cabon was clearly enjoying his work.


* * *

   The country west of Palma was flat and barren, with only a few trees clustering in the watercourses that broke up the long dull vistas. Grazing, not crop farming, was the main work of the thinly scattered old fortified farmsteads along the seldom-used road. Boys and dogs tended sheep and cattle, all dozing together in the distant patches of shade. The warming afternoon seemed to hold a long silence that invited sleep, not traveling, but given their late start, Ista’s party pushed on through the soft and somnolent air.
   When the road widened for a time, Ista found herself riding with dy Cabon’s fine sturdy mule on one side and Liss’s rangy bay on the other. As an antidote to dy Cabon’s infectious yawns, Ista inquired of him, “Tell me, Learned, whatever happened to that little demon you were carrying when first we met?”

  Liss, who’d been riding along with her feet out of the stirrups and her reins slack, turned her head to listen.
   “Oh, all went well. I gave it up to the archdivine of Taryoon, and we oversaw its disposition. It is safely out of the world now. I was actually returning to my home from there when I spent the night in Valenda, and, well.” A jerk of his head at the string of riders trailing them indicated his unexpected new duty with the royina.
   “A demon? You had a demon?” said Liss in a tone of wonder.
   “Not I,” corrected the divine fastidiously. “It was trapped in a ferret Fortunately, not a difficult animal to control. Compared to a wolf or a bull.” He grimaced. “Or a man, seeking to plunder the demon’s powers.”
   Her face screwed up. “How do you send a demon out of the world?”
   Dy Cabon sighed. “Give it to someone who’s going.” She frowned at her horse’s ears for a moment, then gave up the riddle. “What?”
   “If the demon is not grown too strong, the simplest way to return it to the gods is to give it into the keeping of a soul who is going to the gods. Who is dying,” he added to her blank look.
   “Oh,” she said Another pause. “So you slew the ferret?”
   “It is, alas, not quite so easy as that. A free demon whose mount is dying simply jumps to another. You see, an elemental escaped into the world of matter cannot exist without a being of matter to lend it intelligence and strength, for by its nature it cannot create such order for itself. It can only steal. In the beginning it is mindless, formless, as innocently destructive as a wild animal, at least until it learns more complicated sins from men. It is constrained in turn by the power of the creature or person upon whom it battens. A dislodged demon will always seek to leap to the strongest soul in its vicinity, creature to larger creature, animal to man, man to greater man, for it becomes what it eats, in a sense. ”Dy Cabon drew breath and seemed to look into some well of memory. “But when a divine of long experience is finally dying in his or her order’s house, the demon can be forced to jump to them. If the demon is weak enough, and the divine strong of heart and mind even in the last extremity, well, the matter solves itself.” He cleared his throat. “Persons great-souled and grown detached from the world, and longing for their god. For a demon can tempt a weaker person to sorcery with promises to extend life.”
   “Rare strength,” said Ista after a moment. Had he just come from such an extraordinary deathbed scene? It seemed so. She did not wonder at his air of daunted humility.
   Dy Cabon gave a wry shrug of acknowledgment. “Yes. I don’t know if I will ever. Fortunately, stray demons are rare. Except that…”
   “Except what?” Liss prodded, when no more of this rarefied theological discourse seemed to be forthcoming.
   Dy Cabon’s lips twisted. “The archdivine was most disturbed. Mine was the third such fugitive that has been captured this year in Baocia alone.”
   “How many do you usually catch?” asked Liss.
   “Not one a year in all of Chalion, or so it has been for many years. The last great outbreak was in Roya Fonsa’s day.”
   Ias’s father, Iselle’s grandfather, dead these fifty years.
   Ista considered dy Cabon’s words. “What if the demon is not weak enough?”
   Dy Cabon said, “Ah. Indeed.” He was silent for a moment, staring at his mule’s limp ears, hanging out to either side of its head like oars. “That is why my order gives much thought and effort to removing them when they are still small.”
   The road narrowed then, curving down to a small stone bridge over a greenish stream, and dy Cabon gave Ista a polite salute and pushed his mule ahead.

Chapter 4

   The next day’s riding began early and ran long, but slowly the barrens of Baocia fell away behind them. The country grew more rolling, better watered, and better wooded, running up toward the mountains just visible on the western horizon. It was still a bony land at heart.
   The town wall of Casilchas hugged a rocky outcrop above a stream running clear and chill with spring runoff from the distant heights. Gray and ochre stone, rough or dressed, formed both walls and buildings, here and there enlivened with plaster dyed pink or pale green, or with painted wooden doors or shutters, rich red or blue or green in the angled light of the late-spring afternoon. One might drink this light like wine and grow intoxicated on color, Ista thought, as their horses clopped down the narrow streets.
   The town’s temple fronted a small plaza paved with irregular slabs of granite fitted together like a puzzle. Opposite it, in what had the look of some local aristocrat’s old mansion bequeathed to the order, Ista’s party found the Bastard’s seminary.
   A smaller hatch in the ironbound slab-planked double doors opened at dy Cabon’s pounding, and the porter came out. He met the divine’s first greetings with discouraging headshaking. Dy Cabon disappeared inside for a few minutes. Then both doors swung wide, and grooms and dedicats scurried to assist the party with horses and baggage. Ista’s horse was led within. Three stories of ornate wooden balconies rose above a cobbled courtyard. A white-gowned acolyte hurried up with a mounting block. A senior divine bowed and offered humble welcome. It was Sera dy Ajelo’s name he spoke, but Ista had no illusions; it was Ista dy Chalion to whom he scraped. Dy Cabon might have been less discreet than she wished, but there was no doubt it won them better rooms, eager servants, and the best care for their tired mounts.
   Wash water was brought almost on their heels to the room where Ista and Liss were guided. No rooms at the seminary were large, Ista suspected, but theirs had space for a bed, a truckle bed, and a table and chairs, with a balcony overlooking the town wall and the stream behind this main building. Meals for both women were brought soon thereafter on trays, with hastily arranged pots of blue and white flowers for the season as well.
   After supper Ista took her handmaiden, with Ferda and Foix for escort, and strolled around the town in the fading light. The two officer-dedicats made a handsome pair, in their blue tunics and gray cloaks, swords carried with circumspection, not swagger; and not a few Casilchas maidens’—and matrons’—heads turned as they passed. Liss’s stride and height nearly matched that of the dy Gura brothers, a display of youth and health to make silks and jewels look like tawdry toys. Ista felt herself as splendidly attended as ever she had been at the roya’s court.
   The temple was of the standard plan, if of small scale: four domed lobes, one for each member of the Holy Family, around an open court where the holy fire burned on its central hearth, with the Bastard’s Tower freestanding behind His Mother’s court. The walls were built of the native gray stone, though the roof arches were finely carved wood, with a small riot of brightly painted demons, saints, holy animals, and plants appropriate to each god cavorting along the beams. For lack of any better entertainment, they all attended the evening services there. Ista was weary of the gods, but she had to admit, the singing was a pleasure, the seminary contributed a white-robed and enthusiastic choir. The pious effect was only slightly spoiled by the choir leader peeking periodically at Ista for her reaction. Ista sighed inwardly and made sure to smile and nod, to assuage the woman’s anxiety.
   Three days of riding had tired both people and animals, tomorrow both would rest here. A little elusive ease seemed to have crept in to Ista’s spirit—whether its source was sunlight, exercise, cheerful young company, or distance from Valenda, she hardly knew, but she was grateful for it. She slid her body under the feather quilt, finding the narrow bed more luxurious than many more ornate but less comfortable ones in royal castles, and fell asleep before Liss stopped rolling over in her truckle.


* * *

   Ista dreamed, and knew she was dreaming.
   She crossed a paved castle courtyard in a late-spring or early-summer noon. A stone-arched walk ran around the court’s edge, the fine alabaster pillars carved with a tracery of vines and flowers in the Roknari style. The sun shone down high and hot, the shadows were black accent marks at her feet. She climbed—no, floated—up the stone stairs at the end, leading up over the arched walk to a wooden gallery, and along it. At the far end, a room she passed softly into it without opening the carved door, which seemed to part and close around her skin like water.
   The room was dim and cool, but a grid of light fell through the shutters onto the woven rugs, making the muted colors briefly blaze. In the room, a bed, on the bed, a form. Ista drifted closer, like a ghost.
   The form was a man, asleep or dead, but very pale and still. His long, lean body was dressed in an undyed linen robe, folded across his chest and bound at the waist with a linen belt. On his left breast, a patch of dark red blood seeped through the cloth.
   Despite the wiry length of his frame the bones of his face were almost delicate brow wide, jaw fine, chin somewhat pointed. His skin was unmarred by scar or blemish, but faint lines pressed across the forehead, framed the lips, fanned from the eyes. His dark, straight hair was brushed back from his forehead, the hairline high, receding, it flowed down over the pillow to his shoulders like a river of night, rippling with tiny gleams of moonlight from the silver threads. His brows were arched, winging, nose straight, lips parted.
   Ista’s ghostly hands unbound the belt, folded back the linen robe. The hair trailing down his chest was sparse, until it thickened at his crotch. The bird that nested there was fine and fair, and Ista smiled. But the wound beneath his left breast gaped like a small, dark mouth. As she watched, blood began to well from it.
   She pressed her hands over the dark slit to staunch the flow, but the red liquid oozed up between her white fingers, a sudden flood, washing across his chest, spreading in a scarlet tide across the sheets. His eyes flew open, he saw her, and he gasped.
   Ista woke, shot up, pressed her knuckles to her mouth to stifle her cry. She expected to taste blood, hot and sticky, and was almost shocked not to. Her body was drenched in sweat. Her heart was hammering, and she was panting as though she had been running.
   The room was dark and cool, but moonlight filtered through the shutter slats. On her truckle, Liss muttered and turned over.
   It had been one of those dreams. The real ones. There was no mistaking them.
   Ista clutched her hair, opened her mouth in a rictus, screamed silently. Breathed, “Curse You Whichever one of You this is, Curse You, one and five. Get out of my head. Get out of my head!”
   Liss made a little cat sound and mumbled sleepily, “Lady? You all right?” She sat up on her elbow, blinking.
   Ista swallowed for control and cleared her tight throat. “Just an odd dream. Go back to sleep, Liss.”
   Liss grunted agreeably and rolled back over.
   Ista lay back, clutching her feather coverlet to her despite her sweat-dampened body.
   Was it starting again?
   No. No. I won’t have it. She gasped and gulped, and barely kept from breaking into sobs. In a few minutes, her breathing steadied.
   Who had that man been? It was no one she had ever seen in her life, she was certain. She would know him instantly if she ever saw him again, though; the fine shape of his face felt burned into her mind like a brand. And… and the rest of him. Was he enemy? Friend? Warning? Chalionese, Ibran, Roknari? Highborn or low? What did the sinister red tide of blood mean? No good thing, of that she was quite certain.