With Marianne S. Jablon

Wings of Fire

Watchdog, you childlike innocent, if you’re going to secure your personal effects with a curse, don’t attach a warning preface. It makes it even easier to enact countermeasures, and they were no particular impediment in the first place if you take my meaning. Furthermore, the poverty of your observational faculty continues to astound. You wrote that my beard was ‘LIKE the sculpture of a river and its tributaries,’ failing to note that it was in fact a PRECISE and proportional model of the Voraslo Delta, with my face considered as the sea. Posterity awaits your amendments. Also, you might think of a more expensive grade of paper when you buy your next journal. I’ve pushed my quill through this stuff three times already. —R

ZOK KNEELED AT the edge of the greygrass with Hai Hai, only thirty yards from the house.

The two-storey house was made of green-glazed brick, and had a flat, crenelated roof. Stables, a small barn, and a shed stood off to the side. Not a sound came from any of the buildings. No light from lamps, no smoke from fires. No animals about, either, other than the odd sparrow or squirrel.

The front door of the green house was a slab of etchwood covered in images of animals. Zok knew right away that it was genuine, and his pulse raced at the size and complexity of the nature-wrought scenes. Etchwood was prized for the naturally occurring images it held, but usually one found a single flower or a sun. A slab this size, with this many little pictures... Zok smiled, despite his unease. One part of the story was true, at least—there was great wealth here.

Beside him, Hai Hai sniffed once, and her ears stiffened. She gave him the someone’s here hand gesture. Zok’s muscles tensed. He looked before him, behind him. Nothing.

Something struck him hard from above. The quiet afternoon exploded with shouts.

A man had dropped onto him from the rooftop. Even as he crumpled to the ground, Zok shoved his attacker away. The man—no more than a blur of colorful robes to Zok’s eyes—was on top of him again in an instant. Where is Hai Hai? Zok couldn’t see his partner. Worse, he couldn’t reach his sword.

Zok wrestled with his attacker. The man smelled of cloves, and his mustache was long and braided. An Eastlander? What in the Three Hells is he doing here, besides trying to kill me? Somewhere behind him he heard a woman shouting and Hai Hai cursing.

Menace’s hilt dug into his ribs.Zok tried to gouge the man’s eyes, tried to get space for a good head-butt. But despite being much smaller, the Eastlander was nearly as strong as Zok. Few enough men could say that.

Zok felt the battle-madness rise in him. Enough of this. He twisted and bit the Eastlander, tasting blood.

It worked. The man screamed and looked at Zok as if he had just become a giant viper. Zok seized on the Eastlander’s surprise. He managed to flip the man onto his back, then sat astride him, pinning his wrists. A dozen yards away, Hai Hai was facing off against a small, dark-haired woman also wearing vibrant robes. The rabbitwoman had lost one of her sabers. The Eastlander woman wasn’t armed, but a strange glow surrounded her hands, and they danced like weapons.

Zok looked back to his attacker. Now that he’d been pinned, the man didn’t struggle. He just lay there, staring at Zok as if at a mad dog.

Only then did Zok notice the man’s necklace. Around his neck was an incredibly thin band of what looked like... amethyst. The stone of the Empire.

Zok could still hear Hai Hai and the Eastlander woman, but he could no longer see them.

Do they work for the Amethyst Empress? Why in the Three Hells would Easterners be working for the Empire? Who are these people? They were good, whoever they were. That rooftop blow would have knocked most men cold.

But Zok was not most men.

“Stand down, woman, or I’ll kill your friend here!” he shouted. It was a bluff—as soon as Zok released the man’s hands he’d have a fighting opponent again—but it was worth a try.

“Zok, don’t—” Hai Hai’s shout came from somewhere behind him before it was cut short. Zok turned, trying to keep hold of his captive. He saw Hai Hai sprawled at the robed woman’s feet.

Then the Eastlander twisted away hard, breaking free of Zok’s grip. Something—some sort of pink light—blazed forth from the man’s hand, catching Zok full in the face. It burned his eyes, and he had trouble breathing. In an instant, he felt the magical light clouding his mind as well.

“Bind them,” he heard the Eastlander say from far away. Only then did he realize he was lying on the ground. It was all Zok could do to keep his eyes open. After another moment, he couldn’t even do that.

LOOKING DOWN FROM the ridge, Reny felt the breath catch in his throat. Wavy, sinuous lines of trampled whetta ran between the forest and the farmhouse. A lot of people had passed this way. The sort of people who did not care if they ruined a crop. This could be evidence of their arriving or leaving. They could be gone or still in the farmhouse. Reny’s anger at this careless destruction was overtaken by dread.

Then he was at the house. He tried to shout but could not make a sound. I don’t need to see this again. Though he knew what he would find, he started searching. I’m dreaming; I must wake myself up. There was nobody in the kitchen where he knew he should find his wife… doomed to die after agonising days of pain and fever from infection within.

Better they had killed her than left her like this. The rooms upstairs were also empty. He ought to be grateful to not see, yet again, what they had done to his daughter and youngest son, but instead their absence left him fraught and hollow.

They’re gone. Where have they gone?

In the distance he heard the sound of horns—

He jolted awake.

And remembered.

His homeland had been invaded by the Henelan. The Laxen, his own people, had offered their empty throne to a sorcerer mercenary, Dael, if he would defeat their enemy. Within a year the Henelan, to the last child, no longer existed. A secret agreement was discovered between other neighbouring lands, who had planned to carve up Laxen among themselves once they defeated the Henelan. So a greater war started, until someone came up with the idea that lands united were lands free of warfare. And so, the Conquest began.

A retired soldier and former strategy adviser to the King of Laxen, Reny had offered his services to Dael at the beginning. When he had told Kala this, she had asked how long ago it had been, and he could not tell her the exact number of years with confidence. More than ten. Not as many as twenty.

The horns in his dreams rang out again, but his time he knew them to be real: the signal that the army was to pack up and be ready to march. Reny cursed and got to his feet. The woman looked up at him, a question in her eyes.

“Packing time,” he told her.

She got up and started moving about, opening the trunks that held his belongings and putting what had been removed back inside them. He moved to the tent opening and looked out, then sighed heavily and turned back to see her watching him, her smooth brow wrinkling in mute enquiry.

“I should have been told about this,” he answered. “Vorl is still punishing me for disobeying him.”

She nodded and started folding the bedding, but her frown did not fade.

“It was something that happened before we… before I invited you to my tent,” he explained.

The look she gave him was accepting, as if she didn’t expect him to tell her anything more, but he thought he saw a glint of curiosity in her eyes.

He took a deep breath. “Vorl had just been promoted to General. He wanted to test his authority. In the wrong situation, that can make a man do needlessly cruel things. Or order others to do so. I refused.”

She grimaced in sympathy and understanding. “Do you regret it?” she asked in her lilting voice. Her strange accent had been annoying at first, but now that he’d grown familiar enough to understand her he found it appealing.

He considered her question, looking away as he remembered the incident. “No. Besides, I don’t think I could have managed it anyway. Perhaps Vorl guessed that and wanted me humiliated.” He turned back to find her looking bemused, and smiled grimly in apology. “Sorry, that won’t make much sense to you. Dael sent Vorl to attack a place in the mountains. Though it was not directly in the path of the army, there was a risk people there could attack our rear if we didn’t deal with them first. It turned out to be a temple run by women. Priestesses. No threat at all.”

Kala went still, her face hardening as she comprehended the fate of the priestesses.

“And you refused to take part?”

Her voice was deeper and stronger than he had heard it before. It also had a tone of demand. Another man in his position might have punished her for that, he realised.

“Yes.” He shuddered. To watch what had been done to his wife and daughter being done to others… He pushed the memory away and set his mind on packing. Kala, accepting his silence, said nothing more for some time; then, as the last tent rope loosened and the oilcloth collapsed on the ground, she glanced sideways at him.

“Dael hasn’t got rid of you yet. You must still be valuable to him,” she said quietly.

He shrugged, too astonished by her insight to be angry at her presumption. “Until Vorl convinces him otherwise.”

“Vorl is a weapon, to be used and discarded when blunted. Advisers are like scrolls or books, to be consulted over and over. You don’t hit your enemy with a book, then go consult your sword, do you?”

He stared at her in amazement, but she was walking away, stooping to take up one side of the tent and start folding it ready for travel.

A BRIEF DIGRESSION concerning dragons.

There’s no such thing. However, there’s the White Drake (its larger cousin, the Blue Drake, is now almost certainly extinct). According to Hrabanus’ Imperfect Bestiary, the White Drake is a native of the large and entirely unexpected belt of marshes you stumble into after you’ve crossed the desert, going from Crac Boamond to the sea. Hrabanus thinks it’s a very large bat, but conscientiously cites Priscian, who holds that it’s a featherless bird, and Saloninus, who maintains that it’s a winged lizard. The White Drake can get to be five feet long—that’s nose to tip-of-tail; three feet of that is tail, but it can still give you a nasty nip. They launch themselves out of trees, which can be horribly alarming (I speak from personal experience). White Drakes live almost exclusively on carrion and rotting fruit, rarely attack unless provoked and absolutely definitely don’t breathe fire.

White Drakes aren’t found outside Outremer. Except, some idiot of a nobleman brought back five breeding pairs about a century ago, to decorate the grounds of his castle. Why people do these things, I don’t know. My father tried to keep peacocks once. As soon as we opened the cage they were off like arrows from the bowstring; next heard of six miles away, and could we please come and do something about them, because they were pecking the thatch out in handfuls. My father rode over that way, happening to take his bow with him. No more was ever said about peacocks.

Dragons, by contrast, are nine to ten feet long excluding the tail; they attack on sight, and breathe fire. At any rate, this one did.

THE COOL AUTUMN night air did not bite, but summer was irrevocably gone. Because it had rained the day before the leaves slipped instead of crackled underfoot, making it a quiet passage. With a clear sky and the moon’s merciful light a bounty laid over the world, they did not bother with a lantern. Both she and young Uwe knew the nearby animal trails well enough that the full moon gave them all the light they needed to follow familiar ground. She kept her eye open for night-blooming woundheal, at its strongest here at the end of the year and especially under a full moon, but saw none of its pale blossoms.

Uwe slipped in and out of shadow ahead of her. The young man was light on his feet and very shy. He glanced back now and again to make sure she was on the right track, for there were places in the wood where a person might fall into harm’s way and never know until it was too late to climb out.

That was the way of the world: usually the worst was already on you before you knew your throat had been opened and you were bleeding out. So her husband’s death had come, its end determined before she had even known he was injured.

Ahead, Uwe halted, a hand raised in warning. Anna stopped, careful with her feet as she felt a branch bend beneath her shoe, shifting carefully so as to make no noise.

Men’s voices shattered the silence with shouts and a ringing clash of weapons. Sound carried oddly at night, seeming both near at hand and yet impossibly distant. Uwe merely shrugged and began walking again. This trail swung away from the main road and around the back of Witch’s Hill to the back pastures of West Hall’s cultivated lands. No one liked to go this way. As they neared the haunted clearing that sheltered Dead Man’s Oak, Anna listened for the hooves of the Hanging Woman. All she heard were the last dying shrieks of a skirmish away north, then nothing at all except for the wind rattling branches and the chirp of a night-sparrow in a nearby tree.

Maybe the Hanging Woman walked elsewhere this night.

As they entered the big clearing with the oak, Uwe slowed his steps until he was walking beside her, keeping her between him and the ancient tree. An old reddened scar like a ring around his neck marked him as one of the few who had survived an encounter with the Hanging Woman. The meeting had changed him, for no one could meet the Hanging Woman and not be changed.

Uwe grabbed Anna’s arm, fingers a vice of fear.

A body lay propped against the oak’s gnarled trunk.

Uwe shrank back into the brush, but Anna knew better. You never retreated from what could not be changed. What was the point? If the Hanging Woman came, you could not hide from her.

Anyway, a sword rested on the ground at the body’s feet, and the Hanging Woman always took weapons for she was a scavenger of lives. As Anna moved into the clearing, she crumbled a bit of dried lavender in her outstretched hand, letting its dust sweeten her steps, taking no more than three steps at a time, pausing between to whisper the old prayer that the old woman of the wood had taught her. “Moonlight make a shade of me, daylight make me whole.”

So she came to the oak untouched. Its trunk was as wide as her cottage, and its bark wrinkled and knobby. The huge branches of the oak draped like arms waiting to crush her if she did one wrong thing.

The body was that of a soldier. He was alive, unconscious and bleeding, and at first glance, seeing an officer’s sash bunched up across his chest, she thought he was a wounded Forlanger. She hefted her walking stick to bash in his head before he woke.

But then the light changed, shifting through the branches to illuminate his face clearly: an older man, dark hair sifted with white. A face she knew and would never forget, although she had only seen him once in her life, on the day ten years ago when the market hall had been dedicated and given over to the village.

She would never forget the crookedly healed nose taken during one of his first victories, the scar on his cheek, the metal brace he wore on his left leg. She knelt cautiously and eased the bloody glove off his left hand: yes, his left little finger was missing, as it said in the song—He was last to get on the boat and yet all the Forlanger wolf got of him was his smallest finger.

The wounded soldier was General Olivar.

Struck down and somehow abandoned or lost by his own men.

She was so stunned that she sat with a grunt and pressed both hands to her belly, panting softly as she tried to gather her scattering thoughts. Ten years had aged him, as it had aged her: ten years ago her eldest child Mari had been a mischievous girl always singing some silly song, her eldest son had still been alive for that was before the shivering sickness had taken the boy, and her two youngest not yet even born.

A hoof fall sounded, gentle as mist, and then another.

So the Hanging Woman announced her coming.

She looked up. At the edge of the clearing Uwe cowered under an evergreen bitterberry shrub, crouching with arms wrapped around knees. All she could see of him was his face like a frightened baby moon. Moonlight collected in the open space as magic into a bowl.

The hoof-falls touched as lightly as the light itself.

Shadows tangled, stretching and winding, coming into life.

The Hanging Woman’s noose took shape as a rope of darkness coiling across the grass.

The old oak had a cleft, and in its hollow many years ago an old cunning woman well versed in herbcraft and mystery had lived for several winters. That was the old woman of the wood, the witch for whom the hill was named, although there had been another cunning woman before her according to the stories told to Anna by her grandmother when she was a child.

Anna glanced once more toward Uwe. He had not moved, trusting to the bitterberry’s prickly scent to shield him. Rising, she grasped General Olivar by the armpits and dragged his limp weight halfway around the tree, whispering the chant of protection she had learned from the old woman: “Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let me be like them, what the eye sees but does not notice.”

Just in time she hauled him in through the cleft, into the dusty dry shelter of the tree’s heart. The smell of smoke still lingered. He gasped softly, and his eyes opened.

“My sword,” he said in a hoarse whisper, as if he already knew what she was about.

She had to risk it. The sword would betray their presence. The narrow cleft had been barely wide enough to admit the general’s shoulders. She squeezed back through it now and to her horror heard the creaks of men shifting on saddles and the thump of many ordinary horses rather than the eight-legged steed ridden by the Hanging Woman. Pulling her bridal shawl up over her head gave her cover, of a sort, as she glided around the base of the tree. Four riders emerged into the clearing from the path that led, through thickets, to West Hall. They were too far away yet to see the ground clearly but if she moved again they would see her, so she did not run but instead placed herself to stand squarely over the fallen sword, letting her skirt cover it.

Their pale tunics and dark sashes marked them as Forlangers, a fine lord and three of his retainers to look at them all agleam in their pride. But the moonlight showed their hidden faces: a wolf and his gaunt and ugly brethren, hard of heart and bitter of blood.

Night and the ill-omened tree made them nervous. Battle had strung them taut. She had no trouble hearing their too loud voices.

“...said they saw someone running in this direction, my lord.”

“I want him dead,” said the lord in a high coarse voice. “This is all for naught if he is not dead.”

“My lord, we came the wrong way,” said a second retainer, his tone brittle with nerves. “This is the witch’s tree, the hanging tree. It has an angry and hateful spirit.”

The Hanging Woman was already here. Her shadows swelled with the rope of fear. The horses shifted nervously, ears flaring. In the sky above, clouds crept toward the moon.

Why not? What weapon had she, except her wits?

She raised her arms to make the shawl flutter like dark wings.

“Here are you come, so which is it who will offer himself to my rope?” she said in voice that carried across the clearing lit with a gauzy glamor. “I take one for my noose.”

The moon slid beneath the cloud. A gust of wind shook through the vast branches. An owl hooted from the verge, and there came out of the forest the sound of a clop of horse’s hooves, slow and steady as the approach of death.

The Hanging Woman was coming.

Night, and the oak’s mighty shadow, did the rest.

The Forlangers turned tail and rode back the way they had come, toward the fields and buildings of West Hall. Brush rattled around them, marking their passage, and one man shouted as he lost control of his horse.

The cloud passed, and the moon re-emerged. The shadows untangled, and Uwe rose with wide eyes from the bitterberry where he had been hiding and dashed across the clearing to fetch up beside her.

She hoisted the heavy sword. “Was that you, with the owl call? I reckon I have heard you test that other times.”

He grinned, then popped his tongue in his mouth to make the clop-clap hoofbeat sound.

She laughed, then frowned, for it was dangerous to insult the Hanging Woman. “They will come back,” she said. “If not at night, then at dawn. You must help me carry him to the rose bower.”

Uwe did not want to enter the cleft. Into that cleft one night several years ago the Hanging Woman had dragged the person Uwe had been before, and he had emerged changed, become what he was now.

Anna grasped his elbow and shook him. “The wounded soldier is General Olivar himself. The Forlangers mean to kill him. If they do, there will be nothing but theft and indignity for us and all our kin. You see that, do you not?”

He nodded. They all knew it was true.

The general had fallen unconscious again although he was still breathing. They dragged him as gently as possible out of the cleft. In the moonlight, Anna unclasped his coat of plate armor and cut away padding and undertunic to lay bare the wound. It was just above his hip, in the meat and muscle of the torso. She bent to sniff at it, and while the scent of blood was strong, it seemed the blade had missed his gut for there was no fetid sewage breath from the cut.

That meant he might live.

If they worked quickly and covered their tracks.

They got his coat of plates off him, which woke him up, but he was a soldier who did not complain or panic. He just watched, eyes fluttering with pain, as she bound the wound with strips cut from his tunic.

Because he was awake, it was easiest to drape him over Uwe and let the slight man walk with the general’s weight on him. Anna followed with the sword and the coat of plates. They halted beyond the clearing so she could go back with a branch and confuse the ground so no one would guess they had been there.

“Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let them see but see nothing.”

The old cunning woman had lived for six years in the wood, wintering in the oak and living the other seasons in a hidden refuge. During the time she had bided at Witch’s Hill, the Hanging Woman had never once ridden out.

There is more than one kind of power in the world.

They made their way into the trees, following trails in the dim light all the way to a rocky spine of land where boulders made a great jumble of the forest floor. A stream burbled through the undergrowth, running low at this time of year.

In the other three seasons, the old woman had lived deep in the forest in this rocky dell, hidden by an astounding growth of sprawling evergreen rose-trees that were more shrub than tree. Sticks woven into the arched branches made a house of remarkable grandeur, one so artfully concealed that you could not see it unless you knew it was there.

Anna had herself lived here off and on for five years as a girl, because the old woman had demanded an apprentice from the village, someone to fetch and carry for her, and Anna had been the only girl bold enough to volunteer. She had been paid with learning, for the old woman had instructed her in herbcraft and many other cunning skills, although Anna had not passed some subtle test and so had never been taught any deeper secrets. Most of all, she had been given the gift of freedom, able to speak her mind, to ask any question she had regardless of whether the old woman answered it, and to run where she willed on summer nights. She had met her husband in the forest, for he was a woodsman’s son and became a woodsman himself in time. So they had set up house together after she got pregnant. By then the old woman had vanished, never to be seen again.

“Uwe,” she said. “Go back and make sure no trace remains of our trail.”

He left his heavy pack behind with its store of grain, for they had known they would have to depend on feeding themselves if the stores in West Hall were burned or looted.

Anna visited the rose bower several times a year to sort out its store of firewood, rake the ground, lay in grass, clear out any animal nests. The old woman had taught her that a fire must always be laid, ready to light. She was glad of that teaching now, for even in darkness she could start a fire on the old hearth. By its golden light she shifted the general onto a layer of grass.

His eyes were open but he did not speak. By the reckoning of his cold glare, she suspected he was in so much pain he dared not speak. Perhaps he was barely conscious, half sunk into the blinding haze that separates life from death.

She opened her bag and got to work. After peeling back the temporary bandage and his bloody clothing and giving him a leather strap to bite on, she cleansed the gash with a tonic of dog rose and whitethorn. Afterward she sewed it up with catgut as neatly as a torn sleeve. A poultice of mashed feverbane leaves she bound over the wound with linen strips. That he did not pass out again during all this surprised her, but it took men like that sometimes: the heart would race and keep them wakeful despite the pain. She therefore lifted up his head and helped him drink an infusion of willowbark and courage-flower. She then fortified herself with the cider and bread she had brought for herself, since the old woman had also taught her that no one could keep their wits about them if they were starving or thirsty, especially not those who were needed to care for the ill and injured. He watched her from the pallet of grass. Being evidently a polite man, he did not speak until she finished eating.

“Where am I and how did you come to find me?” he asked in a voice made harsh with weakness and pain.

“You are in the forest between West Hall and Woodpasture, my lord general.”

“You know me?”

“I live in Woodpasture, my lord. We have a market in our fine market hall every week.”

“Woodpasture?” He murmured the word, seeking through his memory. “Ah. Bayisal.”

“That is the name they call it in the king’s court, I think,” she said kindly. “But it is not our name. How came you to fall under the Forlanger sword, my lord?”

He breathed in silence for a time, measuring the pain in his hip or perhaps simply fishing back through the last few days. “Treachery. They and I are ever at odds in court. Lord Hargrim is ready to steal my command and my lands. I must get back to court. Have you men in your village who can convey me?”

“We have men, my lord. My husband died in your service, and my brother lost his leg.”

He slanted a look at her, shifting a moment later to notice that she had placed the sword near his side, where he could reach it.

“I blame the Forlangers. Not you, my lord. In case you are wondering.”

His smile had a force that cracked the distance between them. “Generously spoken, Mistress. May I know your name?”

“Anna, my lord.”

“And the other one. There was another woman, was there not? The one who was supporting me as we walked?”

“No other woman. A man.”

“I was sure, by the feel of her, for my arm was wrapped around her, though I meant no offense by it...” He rubbed a calloused hand over his eyes. “I suppose I was delirious. Perhaps I am roaming not on earth but in the shadows cast by the gods.”

“No, my lord. You lie on earth. If men from the village convey you to the King’s City, my lord, what is to stop the Forlangers from killing you all?”

“They could hide me in a wagon...” He shook his head at the same time she did. “They’ll be watching the roads. They will not rest until Hargrim can throw my corpse before the king and claim me as a traitor.”

“How will he claim you as a traitor when all know you serve the king loyally?”

“Men lie, Mistress Anna. They tell stories that are false.”

“So they do, my lord. All but my husband. He was a good man and never lied to me, except for the time he had to come tell me that my son was dead.”

“I hope your son did not die in my service too. I would hate to think I had repaid you for this by having measured so much grief into your life.”

“No, my lord. He was a boy and died of a sickness, as children do.”

“Sad tidings for a mother. What of you, Mistress Anna, do you lie?” He paused, a hand probing the linen bandage. “Can you heal me?”

“I have some knowledge of herbcraft and have done what I know how to do. I have a tea that should help with the pain and any fever. It is a bad wound, and you may yet die of it, but you may live. It is not for me to say. That is the choice of the Hanging Woman.”

“Who is the Hanging Woman? Some country name for death?”

“Death is death, my lord, not a person. Do they not know that at court? The Hanging Woman has a rope and will hang you in it if she chooses to capture you. Those who are hanged are changed. Maybe that change will be life into death or maybe it will be something else, something you never expected.”

He gave a rough cough, then winced. “This is not the work of your Hanging Woman, then, for I have been expecting an attack for months now. Ever since the poison has reached the king’s ear, a rumor that I plan to raise my army against him and place myself on the throne.”

“Do you, my lord?”

All at once the pain and exhaustion and blood loss overwhelmed him, or perhaps the infusion finally took hold. He looked so tired, as if the fight had dragged on too long and he wondered if he had the will to keep struggling. “No. Never. But it may be too late. The rot of that story may have already have tainted the king’s heart.”

“Can you rest, my lord?”

He twisted and turned as well as he could, restless and aggrieved. Lines of pain wrinkled his forehead. His lips were pale, and his eyes shadowed by the effort of speaking. “If only... if I could get to the king and not be murdered on the way. I was on my way to court now, and you see what has happened. Lord Hargrim’s people control the roads. I will never get through.”

“Have you no allies in court?”

“The king’s sister has the king’s ear. He trusts her. And I trust her.” He paused and looked at her. A yellow-beak’s whistle chirred twice from out among the leaves. “We were not lovers. It is nothing to do with that.”

“I did not think it was,” she said, surprised at how quickly he had hastened to deny an unasked question. “It is no business of mine.”

“She was married to Lord Hargrim’s brother back once. She knows what they are.”

“Wolves,” said Anna, for they had returned to a subject she cared about. “Winter wolves, on the hunt.”

A smile tightened his mouth. “That’s right. They are wolves. They want to kill me so they can eat the herd at their leisure once I am no longer there to protect those the king has given me to guard.”

He looked up, seeing Uwe duck into view, but since Anna had heard the bird call she did not turn.

“This is Uwe. He is my friend, the one who carried you,” she said.

The general stared for a long, uncomfortable while at Uwe’s beardless face and the loose layers of clothing that hid his slender body.

Anna rolled up a blanket against the general’s side. “Rest a little,” she said. “You can go nowhere tonight or tomorrow or any day soon.”

“Do me this one favor,” he said, touching his throat.

There was a humble iron chain there, well made but nothing fancy. When he fumbled at the chain, she realized he had not the strength or dexterity to pull it out, so she hooked fingers around the links and eased it from under his tunic.

A hammered tin medallion in the shape of a swan hung from the end of the chain, odd to see around the neck of the general because it was a cheap trinket, the kind of thing peddlers sold when they came through the village with their carts in the summer and autumn. She turned it over. On the back were scratched markings.

“Do you see what it says?” he asked.

Uwe stretched forward to look and, like Anna, shook his head.

“I cannot read, my lord,” Anna said. “I thought a lord like you would wear gold, not tin.”

A smile brushed his lips. His gaze seemed to track back into memory, or else he was about to pass out.

“It says ‘one foot in the river.’” His voice was hoarser now, fading as the infusion dulled the pain. “Elland Fort is where I saved the kingdom, even though people say my great victory was at Toyant Bridge. But the ones who I trust know the truth of it. They know I wear this to remind me.”

“Who are those, my lord?”

“My young wife. My brother. My three captains, of whom one is now dead. My two aunts. The king’s sister.”

“And where are these people, my lord? Can they not rescue you?”

“The king’s sister is at the palace, close to the king. The others are far from here, for we heard a rumor that the Forlangers were going to strike. My wife is pregnant, so I sent her to my aunts’ stronghold in the south. I was riding to the palace with proof of the Forlangers’ treachery. That is why they cut me down even so close to the court. Once the king knows, they will be ruined.”

Anna pressed another swallow of the tincture down him. His breathing was getting a ragged edge as his body fought him down into the rest he needed if he wished to heal.

“They will lie about me, about what I did here, how I died here. They will lie about my disloyalty to the king. But whatever else, this is my token. Do not let it fall into the hands of the Forlangers. Better you should have it, if it cannot be returned to my wife.”

She tucked the tin swan into his hand. His fingers closed over the medallion.

His eyes fluttered closed, as if the swan comforted him.

For a moment she thought he would finally sleep, but he struggled awake again as a man struggles to climb a slippery hillside. He glanced around the space but because of the darkness beyond the glow of the hearthfire he could see nothing except a glimmer of smoke pooling against the leaves as it sought a way heavenward.

“No one will find this place,” she said. “And we will keep a watch over you. You can trust Uwe as you can trust me. The Forlangers killed my husband. I will not turn you over to them. I give you my oath by the water of the gods. Let that content you, my lord. You must rest if you are to have a hope of healing.”

It did content him, or else blood loss and the herbs pulled him down.

Slowly, the sun came up although it remained dim beneath the leaves. The heavy cover of branches would disperse the smoke by so many diverse channels that it would be hard to see it, but a good nose might smell it and it was not yet cold. So she let the fire burn down and smothered its scent with crumbled leaves of lavender and fennel while Uwe fetched water from the nearby stream to fill the two covered jars she always left here.

She tidied herself and considered the situation.

“So here we are, Uwe,” she said. “He will die here, or he will live. If he dies, then he is dead. If he lives, though, what then?”

Uwe rarely spoke for he preferred the forest and solitude, where he could live within the patience of the trapper and hunter and not have to trouble himself with the difficult passages that a changed man must negotiate among people. His voice had a lightness that made it hard to hear, but Anna knew how to listen. “My sister’s husband can take him to the King’s City in a wagon under guard of a company of men.”

Anna shook her head. “No. They will be stopped and the general killed.”

“They can carry him through the forest. I can show the way.”

“The forest does not grow all the way to the gates of the King’s City. They will still catch you.”

“Then we can carry him to the other place he spoke of. In the south.” Uwe bit a finger, sorting through thoughts. Anna had rarely seen him so animated. “The lord can write. We could fetch a bit of paper from the priest and have him write a message.”

“One written word is like another,” said Anna. “How can anyone trust that the message truly came from him and is no trick of the Forlangers? Ten men may write the same word and it will look the same, but each man speaks in a different voice.”

The general’s hand had relaxed in sleep and the tin swan slipped from his fingers, dangling just above the dirt where the chain caught and tangled through his lax fingers. His hands were calloused and scarred as by the lash of a whip. From far away, chased to their ears by the mystery of how the forest weaves sound, they heard a horn call, soldiers about their pursuit.

She fished the tin swan out of General Olivar’s hand. “I will go.”

Uwe blinked at her, then pressed a hand to his slender throat as if he wished to cry out that she could not, dared not, must not, but knew the words would be spoken in vain.

“Yes, I will go,” she said more firmly, for she saw it was the only choice. “It is three days walk. I have food enough if I take all the bread and cheese. You know enough of herbcraft to stay with him.”

Uwe nodded, silent, acquiescing because he had been her pupil once, learning the herbcraft handed down from woman to woman. That was before the troubled and despairing girl he had once been had tried to hang herself from the oak tree, but the Hanging Woman had chosen life over death and had changed him instead into a man. So Anna felt assured he could care for the patient while she was gone. She thoroughly described the regimen necessary to keep the wound from rotting, and advised Uwe to brew up a stout broth from whatever grouse he could catch and boil up barley to thicken the general’s blood.

“But only cook at night. Douse the fire in the day. Stay away from the village until you are out of food. If I am not back in seven days, then go to my brother Joen.”

She did not like to think about Mari and her other children. She hoped they were well, hidden in the warren of caves where the villagers of Woodpasture had for generations taken refuge in times of strife. She hoped they would not worry on her behalf, but if the general died, then the steady depredations of the Forlangers would make life worse for everyone. West Hall would just be the beginning. Better they suffer a few days’ anxiety now than a lifetime of misery after.

She took her humble bag and set off, skirting along the edge of West Hall’s fields. No smoke rose, a better sign than she could have hoped for because it meant no houses were being burned. No doubt the Forlangers hoped to be given this grant of land once the general was disgraced and dead; only a fool burned the grain that would feed him. How many had died or been injured she could not know, but she hoped her relatives had been spared. The Forlangers knew that if they caused too much trouble the king would notice that strife troubled the isolated corners of his peaceful realm, so they prowled lightly and struck only for the necessary kill.

She knew the forest well and made good time on woodsmen’s paths that wound through the trees and heavy undergrowth. Twice, on hearing men’s shouts and horses, she found concealment and waited until all sound of soldiers’ presence died away. Once she heard the ring of an axe, and she paused in a copse of trembling aspen. All the woodsmen in this region were some form of relation to her dead husband, sworn to aid each other. But the sound and presence of an axe might bring down the notice of the soldiers, so she walked on.

West Hall and Woodpasture lay on quiet tracks well off the King’s Road, which led from the large town of Cloth Market direct to the King’s City. Just after midday she came down out of the woods as if she had briefly retired there to relieve herself and was now simply resuming her journey. The traffic on the road was intermittent but steady for all that, no long stretches between a wagon drawn by oxen or a group of travelers striding along. She fell in behind a group of mixed journeyers, kinfolk by the look of them.

One of the women at the back of the group smiled tentatively at her, for Anna looked neat and tidy, no sores or sickness apparent on her skin.

“Good day to you, Mistress,” said the other woman in a merry voice.

“It is a fine day,” Anna agreed. “What a busy group there are of you, out in all your cheer.”

“We are off to a wedding, my cousin’s son.” The other woman spoke with the clipped ‘d’ of the villages closer to Cloth Market, so the word sounded like ‘wetting’. She glanced past Anna and saw no one walking behind her. “What of you, Mistress? Walk you alone?”

Anna gauged her interest and that of the other women, young and old, who turned to listen, for she was something new and interesting to pass the time. The men in the party saw her worn bridal shawl and drawn face and went back to their own conversations at the front of the group.

“I am recently widowed,” she said in a low voice, and their murmured commiserations gave her the time she needed to settle on which story might be most convincing for such a company. “I am going to the King’s City to get work as a spinner. My cousin said there are workshops there that will take a respectable woman like me.”

They had opinions about that! They came from a village that lay athwart the King’s Road near to Cloth Market and had heard many a sad story about girls and women from the villages being promised decent work and then finding themselves in far worse conditions, forced to work day and night for a harsh master who took all the profits for herself or, so one heard, sometimes even trapped into indecent work and abused by men. Yet other women did well for themselves! You had to be cautious, prudent, and hard-headed.

“But come walk along with us as far as Ash Hill,” they said.

So she did, and heard about all the family gossip, and spent the night in comfort with some of the girls in the hay mow of the cousin’s farm just outside the village of Ash Hill. Late that night a party of Forlangers clattered up to the farmstead, but after they spoke to the farmer and to all the men in the party, they rode away again.

Soon after dawn she took her leave and set out, pleased that the weather was fine. No friendly party of relatives appeared. She was careful to always walk close to or alongside other groups of people. For the entire afternoon she shadowed a suspicious group of carters pushing along baskets of apples who allowed her to walk close behind them after she explained that she was going in to the city to live with her sister who was a laundress. That night she slept rough, but it did not rain and it was not cold and she knew how to make a pleasant haven with a cushioned bed of old needles and grass under the evergreen branches of a thick spruce, although she badly missed her husband who would once have shared such a quiet bower with her.

In the morning she tidied herself as neatly as she could, braided her hair freshly back, and perfumed herself with a bit of lavender to hide the smell of forest. The road was quieter today, and she found herself a place to walk about a stone’s throw behind a trio of wagons bearing threshed grain bound for the king’s granaries. When the wagoners halted to take their midday break on a long spur of grass alongside the bank at the confluence of the Wheel River and the chalky colored White, she sat down away from them, far enough away that they would not walk over to question her but close enough that she was not alone on the wide road.

The last rind of cheese made a tough meal, and she was out of bread, but she hoped to make the King’s Gate by nightfall. The sky remained clear and the air cool but not chilly, so hearing a roll as of distant thunder made her frown. Worse yet came the sudden appearance of outriders wearing the dark sash of the Forlangers. The wagoners quickly leaped up and raced to get their oxen unhobbled and their wagons moving, but it was too late. A company of Forlangers marched swiftly into view.

The outriders caught up with the wagoners before they could get out of sight down the road. A dozen soldiers searched the wagon beds, but most of the infantrymen swarmed the bank to take a drink of water and sit down to rest their feet and eat a bite from their stores. They were mostly young men, respectful in their way and quite uninterested in a careworn woman old enough to be their mother, but because there was only so much nice grassy space, a half-dozen seated themselves near to her and opened their kit to get out dried fish and round flatbread suitable for the march.

“A good morning to you, Mother,” they said in the way of lads, politely offering her a quarter of bread. “Where are you off to?”

“The King’s City to make my fortune as a herbwoman making love potions for the heartsick,” she answered. “And where are you off to?”

They liked her cheeky reply.

One said, “Have you advice for me, Mother? For there’s a girl who has said no to me three times. Is there any hope?”

She considered the youth’s merry smile and dashing eyes. “Is she the only girl, or just the only one wise enough to refuse you when she sees you are quick to find solace from her hard heart elsewhere?”

His comrades laughed uproariously at that, and soon they were all telling her their troubles and asking her advice in the way of chance-met travelers who will confide to strangers what they would never tell their own kin, for it was sure she would never have opportunity to repeat the tales to anyone they knew. Despite their northern accents, she could understand them well enough. In truth, she wondered at them, for they were decent lads for all that they were Forlangers. Maybe it was their lord who made them wicked, not any of their doing.

A new party rode up at a canter, from the direction of West Hall.

Her heart froze, and her mouth turned as dry as the stubble of a mowed field in summer’s heat. The lord she had seen in the clearing of Dead Man’s Oak arrived with all his anger riding as a mantle draping him. He was accompanied by ten mounted soldiers. The infantry leaped to their feet, hastening to pack away their flasks and bread.

“Why do you loiter here?” he demanded. “We have reports of a remnant of General Olivar’s company that escaped us and is even now making its way cross country to reach the court. Get up! Get up!”

He reined up by the flustered lads dusting off their backsides and shouldering their packs. His eye lit on her, sitting at peace among them.

“Who is this?” he asked them in a tone that snapped.

“My lord,” said the merry one hastily. “Just an herbwife who chanced to be resting her feet here when we halted.”

“Get on the march,” commanded the lord.

As they hastened away, that stare came to rest on her. He had the eyes of a fish, moist and deadened, and thin lips that might, she hoped, never waken desire in a lover so that he would never know what it is to share true affection.

“What are you about on the road, herbwife?” he demanded.

Kindness would make no shift with a man like him. He could only see what he expected.

“I am but a poor widow,” she said, pitching her voice to whine like her youngest would do in a tone both grating and harsh, “for my husband is dead of drink and my daughter married. The wicked girl promised I could live with her, though she didn’t mean a word of it even though she took my marriage bed, so what am I to do when her ungrateful brute of a husband said he wanted nothing to do with me and him a drinker, too, I’ll have you know. But mayhap you have a coin to spare for a sad widow.”

“Which I daresay you will spend on ale the moment you reach an alehouse, you old shrew,” he replied with a sneer. But he tossed her a copper penny and rode away. That quickly they were all gone, riding at speed away toward the city while she sat shaking.

Finally, when she could breathe calmly again, she picked up the copper for all that it had the taste of his evil hand on it. Old shrew! Not that old, surely, but then she looked at her work-chapped hands and she supposed her sun-weathered face appeared little different. There was certainly gray in her hair, for her comb told her that, although still plenty of the auburn that Olef had said was the fire washed through her that made his heart warm. Not just his heart.

She pressed a hand to her breast, feeling the tin swan tucked within her bodice.

A league more brought her to a small river whose name she did not know. She had only traveled to the King’s City twice in the whole of her life, and while there were landmarks she recognized from her other trips, she did not know what they were called.

The road wound through coppiced trees. Ahead of her, she heard the harried voices and the grind of wheels just in time to step off the road. A shout chased along the wind. A half-dozen men trotted into view, pushing carts laden with sheepskins. They cast frightened looks back over their shoulders.

“Here, Mistress,” called the eldest, seeing her. “Trouble at the bridge. Best you hurry back the way you came.”

“What manner of trouble?” she asked, but then she heard thumping and screaming, and she knew.

“A fight on the bridge,” said the oldest man, slowing to a walk as the rest kept moving. “Don’t go down there.”

“But I must get to the King’s City.”

He gestured in the direction of the carters as the last vanished around a curve in the road.

“Did you see the big ash tree with the blaze on its north-facing trunk? There’s a trail there that carries on upstream to Three Willows village. They keep a small bridge, though they charge a penny for a crossing, so we don’t like to go that way. But better a penny than dead.”

He hurried on after the others, but Anna crept forward, careful to stay concealed in the undergrowth. She had to see.

The bridge in quieter times had a watchman and a gate flanked by two posts, each with a carved hawk on top whose talons held lanterns at night.

The watchman was dead, and dead and wounded men sprawled on the bridge’s span, caught while crossing. A body bobbed in the sluggish water, dark hair trailing along the current. Several saddled but riderless horses had broken away and now sidestepped skittishly through uncut grass, not sure whether to bolt or to await their lost riders.

The skirmish had swirled onto the other bank, a few last desperate men trying to break away from the Forlangers, but they were outnumbered. Anna stared in horror at the melee.

The outnumbered soldiers were the general’s men by their colors: pine green and white. There were only six left, and two of those were badly wounded. A horse stumbled and went down with a spear in its belly. Lord Hargrim himself directed his men as they moved to encircle the last survivors.

At once, five of the general’s soldiers charged with shrieks and shouts while the sixth drove his horse into the water and flung himself into the current to swim. It took a while for the Forlanger archers to loose arrows because the last of the general’s soldiers had spread out, killing themselves by disrupting the Forlanger line for just long enough that the swimming man could get out of range.

Shouting curses down on their enemy, they too fell to lie bleeding at the feet of the Forlangers. The riderless horse made it across the river and stumbled up the bank, then headed straight for the other horses as for home.

“Follow him!” shouted the lord. “He must not get away.”

A half-dozen Forlanger men were left behind to pick through the survivors, kill any who still breathed, and drag away their own wounded.

She turned her back on the slaughter and walked as quickly as she could, shaking, afraid at every sound, sure they would come galloping up behind her and lop off her head. But the ash tree with its half hidden blaze was still standing, and she cut into the forest and was well into the trees when she heard horses pass on the road. Her heart pounded so hard that she walked without tiring until at length she caught up with the carters.

The older man nodded to acknowledge her.

She said, “Your pardon, but might I walk with you the rest of the way? Seeing that blood-soaked bridge has taken ten years off my life.”

“I pay no mind to the fights the king’s men have among themselves,” he said, “and nor should you. Not as long as they do not bother us. Why your haste to reach the King’s City? You should just go home.”

“I’m off to visit my daughter in the city, for she is to have her lie-in soon. Her first child. And while I do not like to speak ill of any woman, I must say that her husband’s mother does not treat her in a generous way. Rather she lets my daughter do all the work while she sits in a chair and gives orders.”

He was a chatty man, happy to talk about his own wife’s mother and how she had been a scold unlike his own dear mother, both now long passed. He was just friendly enough that she did not mention she was a widow, and his younger kinsmen were polite but preoccupied at having seen slaughter done right before their eyes.

The path led upriver for about a league to a small bridge she would never have known existed but for the carters. A watchman at the bridge demanded the penny toll, and she handed over the coin the lord had thrown at her.

There was a party of Forlangers guarding the bridge on the far bank, but after they searched the carts for smuggled men, they let the wagoners pass and her with them, for no one paid her any mind in her worn shawl and with her worn face.

So she came to the city gates just as dusk was coming down, later than she had hoped. She knew well how to make a dry nest in the forest whatever the weather, but how to find a place to sleep in the city seemed a fearful mystery. The place was so crowded and so stony and so loud, and it stank.

She made her way to the river bank’s stony shore. There, the last laundresses were heaping their baskets with damp cloth to haul back to their households.

“My pardon, good dames, but I’m wondering if you know where I can find my cousin’s sister. She is laundress to the king’s sister, so they tell me. I walked here from the village to let her know that her brother is gravely ill.”

They laughed at her country accent and her ignorance.

“The king’s sister’s laundry is done indoors in great vats with boiling water, not out on these cold rocks,” said the youngest of them, who was almost as pregnant as Mari. “Those women don’t talk to us. You have to go round to the Dowager House beside the King’s Palace. The king’s mother has been dead these five years, so the sister has set up housekeeping there. And a good thing, too.”

“Shhh,” said the other women, and many of them hurried away.

“Why do you say so?” asked Anna, watching the others vanish into the twilight. Smoke made the air hazy. Everything tasted of ash and rubbish and shit.

“My pardon, I didn’t mean to say it,” said the girl. “It’s dangerous to speak of the troubles in the court. You know how it is.”

“I am up from the country. We hear no gossip there.”

“Better if I say nothing,” said the girl as she shifted the basket awkwardly around her huge belly.

“Let me help you,” said Anna, taking the girl’s basket. “It is a shame for you to carry such a heavy load so near your time.”

The girl smiled gratefully and started walking. “The work must be done. Where are you from, Mistress?”

“Just a small village, no place you’ll have ever heard of. By the forest.”

“Isn’t the forest full of wolves?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Aren’t you scared all the time that they’ll come and eat you?”

“Wolves are no different than men. They hunt the weak. But maybe in one way they are kinder. They only kill what they eat.”

The girl had a wan face, and hearing these words she looked more tired than ever.

“Here now,” said Anna, regarding her sadly, for it seemed a terrible burden to be so young and look so weary. “If you’ll tell me how to find the Dowager’s House, then I will teach you some bird calls. Like this.”

She trilled like a lark, and the girl laughed, so entirely delighted that she looked like a child on festival morning waiting for a treat of honey.

“If you’ll carry the basket I’ll walk you there. It’s not so far from where I work and live.”

“Do you wash all this laundry for a family?”

“That I do, Mistress. I’m lucky to have the work with a respectable tailor and his household. The lady of the house has said she will let me keep my baby in the kitchen during the day as long as I keep up my work.” She named a name that she clearly thought would impress Anna, but Anna had to admit she had no knowledge of this well-known tailor and how he had once made a coat for the king’s sister’s chatelaine’s brother. Anna’s ignorance made the girl laugh even more. Anna was glad to see her cheerful.

So they walked along cobblestone streets as Anna taught her the capped owl’s hoot and the periwinkle’s chitter and the nightlark’s sad mournful whistling ‘sweet! sweet!’ until some man shouted from a closed house “Shut that noise!” They giggled, and in good charity with each other reached a wide square on which rose the Dowager House, with stone columns making a monumental porch along the front and a walled garden with trees in the back.

The girl checked Anna with an elbow, keeping her to the shadows. “There are soldiers on guard,” she said, bitterness staining her tone to make it dark and angry. “Those are not the king’s men. They belong to the Forlanger lord. He has people watching the Dowager House. He licks the king’s boots, so I wonder what he fears from the king’s sister.”

Anna knew what he feared, but she said nothing.

The girl took her hand, anger loosening her tongue. “My man soldiers with General Olivar’s company, a foot soldier. That is why I do not like the Forlangers. I thought they were to be back by now. He and I are to be wed next month.”

The words took Anna like a blow to the heart, reminding her of Olef’s last day, of his last words, of his last breath. Of how the Forlangers had been responsible, of how they took their war against General Olivar to the back roads and the isolated places where their actions would remain hidden from the king.

She thought of the market hall, and how folk from all around came there on market day. Now that he could no longer push a plough, her brother Joen had been able to set up a stall selling garden produce that his wife and children tended, together with rope he braided from hemp. What went on in the king’s court she did not know, but if the general trusted the king’s sister, then the king’s sister it must be.

But she could say nothing of this to the young laundress. She could only pray to the gods that the man who had escaped down the river might be her man.

A single guard wearing the mark of a white swan stood guard at the service door, around by the alley. When she touched the tin swan in her bodice, she knew she had to brave this last leg of the journey.

“Go on, child, go home, then, and my thanks to you.” She handed over the heavy basket. “May the Hanging Woman loosen your womb and let your child come easily.”

“My thanks, Mistress.”

Anna watched the girl’s waddling progress into the dusky streets and hoped she would get home without mishap, but the King’s City was a peaceful place on the whole. Folk were still about, so she was able to cross the square by tagging along behind a pair of young apprentices hauling a butchered pig between them. The Forlanger soldiers glanced at the pig and made crude comments about what the lads were like to do with the sow, but their gaze skipped right over her. They took no notice of her at all, right up to the moment she cut sideways and strode up to the side gate and its single swan-marked guardsman.

“I pray you,” she said in a low voice, not hiding her distress as a pair of Forlanger soldiers broke off to trot toward the gate, “if your lady wishes to save the life of General Olivar, then let me inside before they catch me. And tell them this tale, that I am ... “

Fear made her words fail and her thoughts sluggish. The guard was staring at her as the footfalls of the Forlangers closed in. The poor young man looked as stupefied as she felt. A breath of wind brushed her neck, like the stroke of a sword.

So she got mad, for she had not trudged all this way just to have her corpse tossed into a rubbish heap and the general left for dead in the forest.

“Stupid boy, let me in! Tell the soldiers I am your poor mother come to beg a loaf of bread in the kitchen and that I will scold you if you don’t let me in. I will see that the lady knows you helped me. But General Olivar will die if you do not act now.”

He was so surprised by her harsh tone that he opened the gate and, as soon as she slipped through, slammed it behind her.

The Forlangers ran up as she hurried across a courtyard to the servants’ door. “You! Who was that?” they demanded.

The youth’s voice was shaking, but it could as well have been from annoyance as fear.

“My mum, as if it’s anything to you. Cursed woman keeps coming to beg bread off the kitchen. I’m that ashamed of it, but if I don’t let her in she stands outside and scolds me. And she’s drunk as usual. Best day of my life when I walked out of her cursed filthy hovel.”

Their argument faded as she reached the door. She whispered thanks to the gods when the big latch pushed down easily, not locked. The door opened onto an entryway bigger than her cottage. She closed the door and stood there gaping at a high ceiling and wood paneling illuminated by oil lamps, the richest ornamentation she had ever seen, such fine carving as put the headman’s house in the village to shame. The heat and smell of the oil in the lamps drenched her; the fierce light after the dark streets made her blink. A riot was happening somewhere down the hall, a clattering like a battle and many voices talking over each other.

Something about a roast.

A girl in a neat skirt and blouse covered by a linen apron dashed down a length of stairs with a tray in her hands. Seeing Anna, she stopped.

“Where is that careless girl?” bellowed a voice from the room where a mob was evidently destroying every piece of furnishing.

The girl ran into that other room. Anna tried desperately to get her bearings, but the long corridor, the many doors, the stairs, and the echoing sound confused her more than forest, road, or city streets had.

The girl appeared again, stared at her again, and ran down the corridor to vanish into another room. She reappeared with a radiantly handsome woman behind her who might have been Anna’s age and was wearing the most fashionable clothing Anna had ever seen, a gold gown that shone like sunlight and a finely embroidered bridal shawl draped over her shoulders. Anna stood stunned, not knowing how to show honor to a great lady, the king’s own sister!

The woman approached her with a stern gaze. “Who are you, Mistress? How have you gotten through the gates this night? I am surprised that Roderd allowed you in, for he knows better. On the new moon, the lady gives out alms. You must come back then.”

“You are not the king’s sister?” Anna asked.

Those lustrous eyes opened wide, and the woman smiled. “I am her downstairs chatelaine, the keeper of the kitchen and lower hall. Where are you from? For you have a country accent and a country look about you.”

Anna looked toward the girl, a little thing no taller than her second daughter but lively and as smartly-dressed as the headman’s three proud daughters who liked to traipse around the village showing off their expensive garb.

“Go along,” said the chatelaine with a gesture. The girl scurried off into what Anna at long last realized must be a kitchen so large that the headman’s house would fit inside it. That explained the echoing clamor of many cooks and servants at their work, making ready for some manner of feast.

“Do not make me call a guard to throw you out, Mistress,” said the chatelaine more kindly, as if suspecting Anna was slow of wit and perhaps drunk besides.

“I beg pardon for my manner,” said Anna, recovering her tongue at last, “but I have never seen such a fine house as this one.”

The chatelaine sighed.

She went on hastily, seeing the woman’s patience wane. “I pray you do not throw me out. I am come many days’ walk from a distant village with news I can only trust the king’s sister to hear.”

“You must imagine such a tale will fall coldly on my ears.”

Anna did not know what to do. What if the Forlanger soldiers pushed past the lone guard and rushed into the house? She had to trust that the mark of the king’s sister being a swan and the general’s mention of her meant that the lady’s servants were also loyal to the man. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “News of General Olivar.”

The chatelaine’s eyes opened wide. From the courtyard, shouting broke out.

Anna reached into her bodice and pulled out the tin swan.

The chatelaine gasped. “Hide it!” she said, then grasped Anna’s wrist and tugged her along up the stairs in such haste that Anna stumbled twice before they reached the top. There, a pair of bored young men wearing swan-embroidered tabards straightened up as if caught doing what they were not allowed.

“Get down to the door and by no means allow any outsiders farther than the entry until I return,” the chatelaine snapped. “Send Captain Bellwin to me at once in the library.”

The young men grinned, like hounds eager to the scent, and pounded down the stairs just as some manner of altercation erupted at another door. But Anna had scarcely time to think, for the dazzling corridor down which they hurried was like a palace of the gods, all studded with gold and silver and color. There were people walking and standing and hunting and dancing along the walls too, so like to people that she wanted to reach out and touch them, only she knew they were paintings like the one in the market hall that depicted the king being anointed and crowned.

The chatelaine pulled her into a room so filled with books that it smelled different than any room Anna had ever been in. She did not know there were so many books. Even the priest at the temple, who bragged of his treasure-house of six books, would lose his ability to speak could he have seen the shelves and shelves of them. Who made so many books? What was their purpose?

What was going to happen now?

The chatelaine released her wrist and glowered at her until a neatly-clad servant girl peeped in. “Get me water to wash,” she ordered.

They waited a bit longer. The girl returned with a bowl and pitcher and towel, and poured and rinsed the chatelaine’s hand where she had touched Anna, then took everything away. As the servant went out, a soldier dressed in a swan tabard strode in.

“There is trouble at the gate. I did not know Roderd’s mother is a drunk beggar.” His gaze fell on Anna. A glint of humor in the slant of his lips gave her hope. “Is this the dame?”

“I am not the lad’s mother,” she said. “It was a lie so that the Forlangers did not take me.”

“She says she has news of General Olivar.” The chatelaine turned on Anna, and her fierce stare was the most frightening thing Anna had seen on her entire journey, for she could not tell if it promised or threatened.

It was only now that she realized it might all be for naught. She might have walked into a trap, and her life forfeit. Yet then she would join Olef on the other side. Mari and Hansi had the wit and strength to take care of the little ones. So be it.

She fished the tin swan out of her bodice and displayed it.

The chatelaine and the captain exchanged a foreboding glance.

“How come you by this token?” asked the captain. “What is your name, and where are you from?”

“I am called Anna, my lord. I have taken this token from the general. If you wish to save his life, then you must rescue him from the place where he is hidden.”

“Word came last night that he is dead,” said the captain in a flat voice.

“He is not dead. He lives, but is wounded and hidden. I brought this to show the king’s sister, for he said that she would be able and willing to aid him. The Forlangers mean to kill him.”

“They have already struck,” said the captain to the chatelaine. “I thought it must be Lord Hargrim’s doing, but we cannot establish he is the one behind the attack.”

“General Olivar is proof,” Anna insisted. “But the Forlangers control the roads.”

The two servants conferred in low voices, and then the chatelaine left. Anna knew perfectly well the captain remained as a guard to make sure she did not escape. What surprised her was that he did not attempt to take the tin swan out of her hand. Nor did he speak. He went over to the desk and, still standing, opened a book and looked at the scratchings just as a priest could. Anna watched him but he did not move his lips as the priest did when he read; only his eyes moved, tracing left to right and then skipping back to the left and so on, a pattern as steady as that of a woman knitting.

The door opened to admit the chatelaine escorting two women. One was a magnificent noble beauty dressed in a gown of such splendor that she might as well have been dressed in threads spun of gold and silver. Her small, ordinary companion wore simpler garb sewn out of a midnight blue cloth so tightly woven it shone. They studied Anna, who did her best to stand respectfully, for she was not sure how to properly greet a king’s sister.

The small, ordinary woman spoke to her, her speech so colored by odd pronunciations and words Anna did not recognize that she could make no sense of it. The king’s grandparents had come from a distant place to establish their court here; that no doubt accounted for their strange way of speaking.

The chatelaine translated. “Her Serenity addresses you, Mistress. She wishes to see the token you hold.”

Anna held out the swan. The tin badge was such a cheap thing, a trinket any girl could buy at a summer fair as a remembrance of her journeying there. Yet both ladies gasped, and the ordinary one stepped forward, took the swan out of Anna’s hand, and turned it over. Her cheeks flushed when she saw the scratchings. Her gaze fixed on Anna in a fearsome way that made Anna see that she had mistaken the beautiful woman for the king’s sister when it fact it was this unremarkable one who had the power and majesty.

Her snapped question had no word in it Anna understood, but she comprehended what the lady wished to know.

“The Forlangers attacked the village of West Hall, my lady. I went at night to give what aid to any wounded that I might, for I have some herbcraft. We found the general lying beneath the Dead Man’s Oak. I recognized him for he came once to our village to dedicate a market hall. Woodpasture, that is, but he called it Bayisal. Our people have always lent our support to the general. Our men fight when they are called. We have lost men in his service, killed by the Forlangers. My own husband...”

She faltered, choked by grief as she rested a hand on her belly.

The king’s sister passed the tin swan to the beautiful woman, who perused it and handed it back, nodding.

The king’s sister spoke and the chatelaine repeated it.

“How are we to know you did not find this token on a corpse and are come at the behest of the Forlangers to trick us into some rash action?”

“One foot in the river are the words he told me with his own lips. At Elland Fort he saved the kingdom, not Toyant Bridge. So he told me. He was wounded, and he may yet not live, but I did what I could to ease his wound and if the rot does not take him, then I think it likely he will live. I know where he is, and I can take you to him.”

Even the silent captain looked around at that, first startled and then, as his wrinkled brow cleared, brightened by hope. The king’s sister caught in a sob, grasped the beauty’s hand, and shut her eyes. When she opened her eyes, the four of them fell into an intense discussion filled with many exclamations and objections and finally a forceful declaration by the king’s sister that ended the argument.

She and the beauty left. The captain and chatelaine remained, looking as impatient as if Anna was the last chore that had to be done before a girl could run off to the festival night and the promises of a lover. Brisk footfalls sounded in the hall and a soldier appeared.

“The cursed Forlangers are still hammering on the front gate, Captain,” said the man. Like the laundress he was a little difficult to understand with his quick rhythm and city accent, but he spoke the language she knew. “They demand to be admitted to speak to Her Serenity.”

The captain nodded. “I will come in a moment and send them off with my boot in their ass.” The soldier left. “She must be guarded without making it obvious we are guarding her. Make all ready. You heard what Her Serenity commanded. We leave at dawn. Lord Hargrim and his faction must be given no reason for suspicion.”

The chatelaine said, “I will hide her among the servants.”

So she did, giving Anna the finest clothes she had ever worn and feeding her the finest meal she had ever eaten, so rich with thick gravy that it made her stomach queasy. The meal ended with a sweet flour cake that was indescribably delicious, like nothing she had ever before eaten. She was given a pallet to sleep on among the other kitchen women, a decent bed but this at least was not as comfortable as the marriage bed she had shared with Olef.

She slept soundly but woke at once when the chatelaine rousted her. An impressive cavalcade of outriders, carriages, and wagons assembled outside. Anna was tucked in among the gaggle of women servants in one of the wagons, all wearing the same swan-marked midnight blue livery with their hair tucked away beneath cloth caps. With a great blaring of horns, the company rolled down the widest avenue in the city and out the main gate. The wagon with its padded seats was at first jarringly uncomfortable; Anna would rather have walked. But after a time she got the rhythm of it. The women around her gossiped and laughed for all the world as if this were a delightful excursion, and it did seem from their talk—those of them she could understand—they all believed their lady had suddenly taken a longing to visit the cloth markets of Ticantal, which name Anna eventually understood to be the same town she called Cloth Market.

But abruptly the whole long procession lurched to a halt. When she craned her neck to see, she realized they had reached the bridge where the last of the general’s company had died. Soldiers blocked the bridge, and to her horror, Lord Hargrim himself could be seen in his sash and his brilliance speaking to the king’s sister. The lady was riding a horse; he was standing, at a disadvantage because of the horse’s bulk. The king’s sister waved a hand, indicating her procession. Anna’s hands tightened to fists as the lord walked down the length of the cavalcade, ordering his soldiers to peer into the closed carriage, to poke among the wagons carrying luggage. He ordered the wagon full of women servants to disembark, and Anna climbed down not ten strides from the man who had contemptuously tossed her a copper penny and called her an old shrew, but he looked right at her and did not recognize her. His soldiers looked under the benches and checked under the wagon, and yet when their rude inspection was over, even a lord as powerful as Lord Hargrim had to allow the king’s own sister to pass for she was powerful in her own right.

Thus they came after two more days travel to the turning for West Hall and Woodpasture. Anna herself led the king’s sister and Captain Bellwin and a few stout soldiers past the outer pastures of West Hall and down the overgrown trail to Witch’s Hill and the Dead Man’s Oak. The clearing lay quiet in the midday sun.

Now, after all this, the secret nest which she had cherished all these years would be betrayed, but it was in a good cause, surely. She hoped the old woman would forgive her the trespass.

Off her horse the king’s sister strode along as well as any of the men as they pushed on into the forest. When they approached the rocky tumble and its dense watershed of thick rose-tree, Anna whistled the bird song she and Uwe had set for a signal.

There Uwe came, one moment hidden and the next appearing as out of nowhere, startling the captain so badly that the man drew his sword.

“He is a friend, the general’s guardian,” Anna said, anxious as Uwe shrank away, for the fear in his face might be fear of reprisal. Yet if the general were dead, why would Uwe still be here?

“Lives he still?” she asked.

“He lives,” said Uwe.

She showed them the way in and allowed them their reunion in private, for it was what she would have wished, were it her own self.

They gave her coin, as such folk did, and although she and her family had never had much coin before, she was glad of it, for her brother Joen could use it to expand his rope-making and Mari had long wished for a new loom, her being clever with her hands and mind in that way, and now they could pay the carpenter to make one.

The general himself thanked her.

“I have thought much about our conversation,” he said to her. “I cannot return your husband to you. Not even the gods can do that. But I have a thought that there is something else I can give you that may repay the debt I owe you.”

Then they were gone.

After this the people of Woodpasture came out of the caves where they had hidden and life went on with the late season slaughtering and all the many chores that needed doing to get ready for winter. Mari had her baby, a healthy little girl, and they made a feast for the mother and child.

Over the next few weeks peddlers came through the village on their last pass through the area, selling needles, delicate thread much finer than what the village women spun for themselves, lamps, knives, and wool and linen cloth from Cloth Market, everything necessary for the kind of work women could do across the long closed-in days of winter. The traveling men had stories, too; stories made peddlers more friends than the goods they had to sell.

General Olivar, the hero of the country, had been treacherously attacked by the northern traitor, Lord Hargrim. Although wounded, the general had escaped by swimming down the river and had been rescued by his loyal captain Bellwin. The king had exiled Lord Hargrim for disturbing the king’s peace and sent the Forlangers back home to the north.

It was a good story. Everyone told it over and over again.

One night a scratching on the door woke Anna out of a sound sleep. She checked to make sure the children still slumbered, then swung her feet to the floor and lit the fine oil lamp she had purchased. The shutter was closed against the cold but the lamp’s warm light lit her steps to the door.

“Who is there?” she whispered.

“It is me, Uwe,” said Uwe.

She set down the bar and opened the door. A full moon spilled its light over the porch. Uwe had on his familiar and well-worn wool cloak and a new sheepskin hat pulled down over his ears. The frosty chill made his beardless cheeks gleam.

“Can you come?” he asked, his forehead knit in a frown and his lips paled by cold.

It was such an odd request that she merely nodded and dressed in silence, waking no one. They walked the forest path, their path lit by the splendid lamp of the moon. An early snow had come and gone, leaving the northern lee of trees spotted with patches of white. Branches glittered, as beautiful as any painting on a wall. Dry leaves crackled under their feet, and in the distance an owl hooted.

She soon knew where they were going. When they came to the clearing, she saw that a man was hanging from the tree, naked, cold, and dead. It was Lord Hargrim. No sign of battle marred his skin, no wounds, no bruising, no broken bones. He was just dead, except for the crude mark of a swan carved on his back.

Uwe stamped his feet against the chill. Shadows tangled across the grass. Anna rested her hand on her round belly.

“Well, then, there comes an end to him,” she said. “They’ll make a good story of it. Now we have hope of peace.”

She turned and, less cold than she had been before, set back for home.

THE MANDOLIN HAD fallen silent. Majka swept into the kitchen, already shouting at her son, “You go find that splitting axe! I’ve told you fifty times, never leave things—”

She broke off. Her son and mother-in-law were staring at the open front door. A tall man, a stranger, stood on the threshold, one hand raised as if to knock.

“Forgive me,” he said, “the door opened at a touch.”

It was true that the latch was failing; for some weeks they had relied on a sliding bolt to keep the door closed in windstorms. The stranger removed his hat. Then he bowed and pressed fingertips to forehead: an old and very humble gesture of greeting, rarely seen in those hills. He was middle-aged but very strongly built. And his skin: so pale. The villagers had skin like dark olives; this man was clotted cream.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Majka demanded.

The stranger turned his eyes in her direction: ice-blue eyes, unblinking.

“I’ve walked all day,” he said simply.

The thing to do was to invite him in. The only thing. He bore no weapon, unless a knife were stashed somewhere in that coat of tattered wool. He looked prepared to stand there forever, icicle-straight, the fierce wind gusting about his ankles. Majka couldn’t breathe. The other two might as well have been stone.

“Why are you standing there?” she cried at last. “Come in, sit down. Udi, God’s love, why don’t you bolt that door?”

The man stepped into the parlor—that was what they called it, the parlor, although it was the only room on the first floor beside the kitchen. It had a table, three wretched chairs, a woodstove shaped like a fat man sitting cross-legged, a coat rack, a butter churn rendered useless when the last cow was sold.

The room seemed to shrink around the newcomer. Majka’s son moved towards him sidelong, on unwilling feet. At last he darted around the man and shot the bolt home.

Majka felt ashamed of their behavior. “Pour him some wine, tata,” she shouted at her mother-in-law. “Udi, bring logs, if you’ve split any that is.” To the stranger, Majka said, “We’ll build a fire in no time. You’ll be wanting some bread and soup. They didn’t feed you in Shyram, then? Of course not, they don’t help anyone; if Saint Jal herself came and asked for a sip of water—”

She was babbling. She stopped. With a lurch she dragged a chair to face the lifeless woodstove. “Come and sit.” Brisk now; what had she been thinking? She’d be dead before she turn a man away into a storm.

But he was too pale. Majka had seen his like only three or four times in her life. He was from the capital, or some distant country. No one ever came from such lands to the village, this place of wind and nothing, this clutch of sixty houses strung out along a gorge.

Unless they came for the ruins. The thought made Majka break a precious match.

The man crossed the room slowly. He held his hat against his chest like a peasant in the house of a lord, but there was nothing of the peasant in his bearing. He lowered himself into the chair.

“Don’t go to any trouble,” he said.

Majka was crouched almost at his knees, trying to light the tinder at the back of the stove. The man smelled of earth and moss and wind-dried sweat; there were small brown burrs on his trousers. From the corner of her eye she saw the hand he rested on his knee: a powerful hand, tough and sinewy, a harness-leather hand.

He moved his chair to give her room. There was nothing wrong with him. She was losing her dignity, and without it everything else would slip through her fingers.

The tinder caught. Majka blew gently, added twigs as though feeding a baby. The blue eyes studied her. She closed the iron door and stood.

“This is Chamsarat Spire?” asked the newcomer.

“Chamsarat Village,” said Majka. “The Spire’s just a heap of rubble, further up the hill. There’s nothing but ruins here. The fortress was destroyed four hundred years ago they say. The tower survived, but twenty years ago it collapsed as well—”

“There was an earthquake,” cried her son from where he stood by the cellar door, so excited he was all but dancing in place. His grandmother, suddenly restored to life, turned on him and shouted “Logs!”

“It’s true,” said Majka, as Udi fled. “There’s nothing left here but stones. I hope you didn’t come all this way to see the tower.”

She put the soup kettle on the stove: it would have to stretch to four tonight, and this man looked as though he could empty the kettle at a draught. Once more, accidentally no doubt, she found herself meeting his gaze.

“I didn’t come for the tower,” he said.

“That’s good.” Majka considered laughing at her own remark, but what if her mother-in-law joined in, with her raven’s cackle? The man was still looking at her; Majka felt her composure about to dissolve.

“You’re welcome to ride out this storm with us,” she said, astonishing herself. “We’ve a spare bolster. You can sleep here right here by the stove.”

Her mother-in-law was gaping. The man looked down at the hat on his knee. After a long pause, he said, “I might just. You’re very kind. It’s a long road I’m on.”

Majka stared hard at her mother-in-law, who bethought herself and fetched the wine. Majka poured him a generous measure. “Where are you bound, then?” she asked.

“Where God wills.”

And mind your own business, woman. She was about to turn away when the man glanced at her sidelong.

“God, or the Proconsul, whoever remembers us first. Isn’t that what they say in these hills?”

This time Majka didn’t meet his eye. They did indeed have such a saying. Neither the Prince of Heaven nor the leader of the Republic was much loved in Chamsarat.

But why had he mentioned the Proconsul? They were six hundred miles from the capital. The village stood in a distant corner of a neglected province on a road like a long bad dream. Even the local ministers rarely bothered with the climb.

“We say the same as everyone,” she answered lamely. “A republic is a fine and fragile thing.”

“Yes,” said the stranger, lifting the wine to his lips.

“We have the vote here,” said her mother-in-law, as though confessing some shame.

The man turned in his chair to look at her. Majka tried to smile and achieved a grimace.

“The vote. She means that every few years they send a soldier and a mule, and an iron box with a padlock. He shows up unannounced and sets the box on a chair in the tavern.”

And drinks all day. And notes the color of the ballot slip in every hand. And bears the box away in the morning with a smirk, and a coin or two for the girl whose favors he’s enjoyed.

“And you vote your conscience.”

It was not a question, or an order, or even a jibe. It was merely a statement. The man spoke as though saddened by his own remark. And for some reason his words sparked a terrible idea in Majka’s mind: that she stank. The room was close and the man could smell her unwashed skin, smell the barn and the broken egg, smell Pankolo.

She excused herself, reddening. She snatched up the wash pail and a cake of soap and fled through the back door again.

Crouched by the rain barrel, she scrubbed to her elbows. The cold was agony, but also a relief, like putting her head back to scream. Udi, laden with firewood, staggered out of the barn.

“I can’t find the axe, mama.”

“Well what in the Nine Pits did you do with it?”

“Nothing, I think.”

“Nothing you think! Take the wood inside. Then go back with a lamp and search properly. And wear your coat, you little fool! If you catch a chill I’ll slap you.”

Udi looked at her in horror.

“Oh stop that, boy. I wouldn’t really.”

“I don’t want him to be here, mama.”

“Saints above! What’s the matter with us all? Can’t we be decent to a soul in need? What in the Pits are you afraid of? I’ve told you about white men.”

“In the capital. Is he from the capital?”

“Maybe. They come from other places, too.”

“What’s he here for?”

The soap leaped like a fish from Majka’s hands. “That’s his business,” she snapped. “Yours is to be gracious. Only peasants lose their heads at the sight of a foreigner. We’re not peasants, Udi.”

He blinked at her over his armful of logs.

THE WHITEWASHED ROOM of the outbuilding behind the inn was small and extremely tidy, two walls lined with shelves of jars and bottles containing powders and tinctures of a hundred hues and consistencies, all neatly labeled. A wide table ran the full length of a third wall. At one end stood a row of brown crocks filled with a pale opalescent substance. At the other, next to a stack of leather-bound books, paper flags sticking out from a dozen pages, a chemist’s apparatus consisting of flame and stand and beaker bubbled with a smell faintly reminiscent of a Sunday roast.

Standing at the center of the table a trim, bespectacled young woman in a linen smock, her dark hair pulled back into a tail, took up a knife and a thick block of suet and minced the brittle beef fat into a small pile. She weighed the shreds, made a notation in a lined journal, and added the mass to the beaker, stirring it with a glass rod. She was reaching for a jar marked ‘Potash’ when a knock came at the door.

“Anna?”

“Who’s there?” she called.

“Just me, Sponda.”

“Oh. Come in, come in.”

A red-haired girl entered the room.

“This is a nice surprise,” the chemist said, kissing her on the cheek. “I didn’t think I’d see you until supper.”

“I wanted to bring this back, before it got mixed up with my kitchen spices.” She set down a jar marked ‘Dried Rosehips’. “It worked like a charm. That so-called tax-collector only stayed one night.”

“A bed full of itching powder will do that.” Anna replaced the jar on its proper shelf.

“Do you really think he was here to steal your—?” She glanced at the row of crocks.

“The emperor is offering a thousand crowns as a prize, Sponda. That’s temptation enough.”

“I suppose. How’s it coming?”

“I made a new batch this morning, and added both lime and potash. That helped the texture. It’s creamy as butter, and spreads as smooth.”

“But—?”

“But the flavor still isn’t right. Nor the color. Too white. This morning I boiled some carrots. Once the paste dries, I’ll grind it into powder. A pinch should make the spread yellow enough for a proper presentation.”

Sponda stuck a finger into one of the crocks and licked off a bit of the creamy substance. “It doesn’t taste bad,” she said. “Makes me think of a farm, wholesome and fresh. But I don’t think I’d care for it on my morning toast.”

“I know. And it’s that last bit of caring that’s going to get us the prize, if I can figure it out before anyone else does.” She smiled. “The first man-made, edible fat. Cheap, plentiful, and will last for weeks without going rancid. Imagine what that will mean for the poor, not to mention the navy, which I think is the emperor’s first concern.”

Sponda licked her finger again. “It does need a little something.”

“I know, and I’ve got a few ideas. We’re getting close.” Anna smiled. “But it won’t get done if I stand here talking.”

“I’ll leave you to your experiments.” Sponda went to the door, stopped, and blew a kiss. “Supper’s at six. Raisin clootie for dessert.”

THE GREENS AND grays around and below me had become perilously hypnotic. Then a buccaneer deer fly snagged a big-ass bite just west of my Adam’s apple.

I let go the rope to take a swipe. Naturally, I missed the agile little buzzard.

Better lucky than smart, sometimes. My lifeline caught me. I stood on my head on a hundred feet of air while the guys up top lowered away. The dickheads on the stone shelf below grinned but tucked the needle in the trick bag for later.

I lack the born-again haughteur of a cat. No way could I manage a pretense of deliberate intent.

“Hold still.” One-Eye smeared something stinky on the bug bite. “That will kill any eggs.”

“Admirable caution,” I grumbled. We had yet to see the botfly horror in these parts, but the people hunting us would deploy them gleefully if they had some and could get them to bite Black Company guys exclusively.

Eight men crowded the ledge. More would follow me down. At the narrow end Rusty told Robin, “I ain’t carrying that dumbass crab catcher out’n here, he gets hisself hurt.”

Rusty was a FNG, with us only six months. He had no hope of becoming a Fucking Old Guy. He was an asshole and a bully. His type never prospers with us.

First aid complete, One-Eye faced the view.

“Sure is something. So much green.” The Rip. To the left it was a thousand feet more to the bottom. To the right, cliff collapses had choked the canyon partially, so long ago that heavy forest cloaked the fill.

One-Eye gave his filthy black hat a quarter turn, ‘To confuse the enemy,’ and said, “Something ain’t right, Croaker. I smell something gone off.”

His wizard’s sniffer was why Elmo had brought him along.

THE GAGE MADE his way through the Temple District, where great prayer-houses consecrated to the four major Messaline deities dominated handfuls of lesser places of worship: those of less successful sects, or of alien gods. Only the temple to the Uthman Scholar-God, fluted pillars twined about with sacred verses rendered in lapis lazuli and pyrite, competed with those four chief temples for splendor.

Even at dusk, these streets teemed. Foot traffic, litter bearers, and the occasional rider and mount—mostly horses, a few camels, a mule, one terror-bird—bustled through the lanes between the torch bearers. There were soldiers and merchants, priests and scholars, a nobleman or woman in a curtained sedan chair with guards crying out “Make way!” The temples were arranged around a series of squares, and the squares were occupied by row upon row of market stalls from which rose the aromas of turmeric, coriander, roses, sandalwood, dates, meat sizzling, bread baking, and musty old attics—among other things. The sweet scent of stitched leather and wood-pulp-and-rag paper identified a bookseller as surely as did the banner that drifted above his pavilion.

The faceless man passed them all—and more than half of the people he passed either turned to stare or hurried quickly along their way, eyes fixed on the ground by their shoes. The Gage knew better than to assign any quality of guilt or innocence to these reactions.

He did not stay in the Temple District long. A left-hand street bent around the temple of Kaalha, the goddess of death and mercy—who also wore a mirrored mask, though hers was silver and divided down the center line. The temple had multiple doorways, and seemed formed in the shape of a star. Over the nearest one was inscribed: In my house there is an end to pain.

Some distance behind the temple, the stone arch loomed.

At first he walked by stucco houses built cheek to cheek, stained in every shade of orange, red, vermilion. The arches between their entryways spanned the road. But soon the street grew crooked and dark; there were no torch-bearers here. A rat or two was in evidence, scurrying over stones—but rodents went quickly and fearfully here. Once, longer legs and ears flickered like scissors as a slender shadow detached itself from one darkness and glided across the open space to the next: one of the jackals from which Messaline took its epithet. From the darkness where it finished, a crunch and a squeak told of one scurrying at least that ended badly for the scurrier.

In these gutters, garbage reeked, though not too much of it; things that were still useful would be put to use. The people passing along these streets were patch-clothed, dirty-cheeked, lank of unwashed hair. Many wore long knives; a few bore flintlocks. The only unescorted women were those plying a trade, and a few men who loitered in dark doorways or alleys drew back into their lairs as the Gage passed, each footstep ringing dully off the cobbles. He was reminded of tunnel-spiders, and kept walking.

As he drew closer to one base of the Blue Stone, though, he noticed an increase in people walking quickly in the direction opposite his. Though the night sweltered, stored heat radiating back from the stones, they hunched as if cold: heads down and shoulders raised protectively.

Still no-one troubled the faceless man. Messaline knew about Wizards.

Others were not so lucky, or so unmolested.

The Gage came out into the small square that surrounded one foot of the Blue Stone. It rose above him in an interlaced, fractal series of helixes a hundred times the height of a tall man, vanishing into the darkness that drank its color and translucency. The Gage had been walking for long enough that stars now showed through the gaps in the arch’s sinuous strands.

The base of the monument separated into a half-dozen pillars where it plunged to earth. Rather than resting upon a plinth or footing, though, it seemed as if each pillar had thrust up through the street like a tree seeking the light—or possibly as if the cobbles of the road had just been paved around them.

Among the shadows between those pillars, a man wearing a skirted coat and wielding a narrow, curved sword fought silently—desperately—valiantly—for his life.

THE HERO HAD started small, the third son of a highborn family in a country far to the north, which he has never cared to name. In that country’s tradition, the third son is the steward of the land, but the Hero did not care to be a steward. His personality was charmingly amoral, and his inclinations were towards flamboyant actions. But those qualities were reserved for the first son, with maybe a bit left over for the second. The third son was to be sober and attentive to the family’s extensive holdings, from which derived most of the family’s income and influence. He saw no heroics in pumpkins or wheat, so he left, leaving behind his family name, taking with him only his ambitions.

He went south, joined the Elector’s army as a private, and rose through the ranks to captain. He fought in her name as she expanded her territories, and in this fighting he made his own name as one who was reckless and bold, who was fair in battle, would honor the terms of a surrender, and who led from in front, not from behind. Then, bored with discipline and taking orders, he resigned his commission, and put together a small hand-picked crew of toughs and renegades, men who would fight to the death for the right price. Together, they embarked upon a glittering career as mercenaries, and with each campaign their fame grew.

But now, almost thirty years later, the Hero is ready to put his sword down. The knee he broke when a wyvern fell on it aches when it rains. The lung-full of dragon smoke he sucked in fifteen years ago still makes him wheeze. He has lost a toe to a shark-shifter, broken his nose in a battle with a catoblepas, and still has nightmares about being trapped for a week in a troll’s nest. His horse seems taller and the ground harder and field rations harder to digest. Wedding a sweet young princess and settling down to rule a small but rich kingdom sounds to him like an excellent retirement plan.

And so the next day finds him waiting for the Illyrian envoy in one of the Elector’s lesser receiving rooms. He’s wearing his best doublet, his best trunk hose, his best sleeves. Golden earrings gleam against his dark skin. His black hair is caught in a gold clasp. He doesn’t look at all like a hard-bitten mercenary. He looks like a prince.

“What if she’s an idiot?” Reynard says.

Typically, Reynard has not bothered to dress up. He wears the same tattered rusty red robe when-ever, what-ever. Since it’s never in style, it’s never out of style either. Unlike heroes, jongleurs of his caliber have no reason to try to impress with their clothes. When he sings or tells his tales, most people close their eyes to listen harder. Now, Reynard quits his pacing and perches on the velvet settee, hands clasped in his lap.

“As long as the princess is rich, I don’t care.” The Hero helps himself to a sugar plum. Since he’s in constant fighting trim, he never has to watch his waistline.

“Perhaps they are her best feature.” Reynard waves the dish away; he doesn’t fight. He’s been with the Hero ever since the Hero rescued him from a nasty trap he was caught in up in the Refusian Mountains. Like the Hero, he, too, has no place of origin, not that he’ll admit to. He knows the songs and stories of many lands, and plenty of good riddles, too.

He says: “What if she’s a scold?”

“Let her scold! My hearing is half shot already. Is my buckler on straight?”

“You look perfect and you know it,” Reynard says. “What if she’s an idiot and a scold and ugly besides?”

“Why then,” the Hero says fondly, “I still have you.”

Reynard snuggles up to him, and when the Illyrian envoy enters the room, he sees only a handsome dark man with a fox tucked under his arm. The Hero is feeding it sugarplums.

Jeffrey Ford (jeffford2010.livejournal.com) is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford’s fiction has been translated into over 20 languages and is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.