In the depths of his black eyes the warning gleamed like molten iron. This was a dangerous season to be abroad.
“Will your duties permit you sleep tonight, Mardane?”
Amusement lifted the unscarred corner of his mouth. “Matters do not seem promising.”
As he galloped down the steps, I slogged upward again. Sleep…after such a day. My body felt as if the clouds had opened and rained stones on me. Yet how could my mind ever still itself enough to sleep? The prince had not lingered in his hall after his revelation, but assured me that we would talk more in the morning when Stearc and his daughter would join us. If they did not have Jullian and Gildas in safekeeping, we would set out in search of them by midday. The prince…Osriel…Gram.
No mystery now how the cabal had come by the journal of Eodward’s tutor. Or why Stearc offered his secretary such deference and care. Perhaps Elene had been near panic when I inquired about Osriel, not from distressed sensibility at her lord’s depravity, but fear that somehow I had guessed a perilous secret. Eodward’s chosen heir…I had witnessed Gram’s intelligence, reason, judgment, his calm strength that had naught to do with arms. Aye, but therein lay the peril. How could a man with no legions hold a fortress, much less win a kingdom?
I rounded the last spiral of the stair carefully, wishing I carried a torch. Only a faint wash of a rushlight in the upper passage touched the steps, leaving most of them dark as spilt ink. I grabbed the rushlight from its bracket and carried it with me. The coals in my bedchamber hearth were carefully banked, but I let them lie for morning. Instead I threw off my cloak and attacked my legions of buttons, hoping Gram would not require such grandiose attire too often.
Great gods…Gram… Every time I thought I had accepted what had just happened, a wave of excitement washed over me. I’d never felt like this before…a part of something so important, something that felt so right. Of course, not even the most foolhardy gambler would risk his coin on our chance to put Gram on Caedmon’s throne, much less to hold off the plagues and famine that augured the coming years of trial. Even if Bayard kept to this truce of necessity, the prince must confront Sila Diaglou on the winter solstice, some two months hence. A night of magic, perhaps, but even devout Karish folk believed the longest night of the year to be the apex of the Adversary’s strength, when he set in place his schemes to ensnare the innocent, while the angel legions sang in holy chorus and formed up ranks to face him.
The choice of that particular night for Gram’s first step was perhaps the finest irony of this whole tangled story. For I had been born at midnight on the winter solstice, so the family tale had always run—the ill-famed winter’s child of bardic rhymes, the get of gatzi, conceived when Magrog’s demonic servants infiltrated the bawdy rites of spring. And on this birthday would I turn my grandfather’s mysterious eight-and-twenty. My ears itched with his whispering: Thou shalt be the greatest of the Cartamandua line. Thou art of my blood, incomparably strong in magic. I, the least gifted of men. Grinning like a fool, I shed the satin pourpoint, wondering if it was too late to learn a bit of spellworking.
And then, from out of nowhere, an invisible ax shattered my skull. Knives…lacerating…my flesh bathed in fire. Paralyzed with dread…awash in pain…drowning in blood…
Choking, gasping, I dropped to my knees. The weak glimmer of the rushlight seared my eyes with the glare of a thousand suns. Gray, transparent faces, twisted with hate, hovered above me, striking…cutting…I felt my bones shatter. Blade-rent, beaten, my body reported every color of pain, and my mind every nuance of grief, of rage, of regret, of unfounded horror and hatred.
Even as I experienced the agony of such wounding and felt a frigid numbness creep upward from my toes, I knew my limbs whole and unmarked, my palms resting on cold, solid stone. No one stood beside me.
The physical pain ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The emotional tumult dwindled more slowly into a directionless anger. Then that, too, faded until I was empty of all but my own terror. I lay curled on the floor, trembling, my arms wrapped about my knees, afraid to move lest I trigger another assault.
My disease, surely. Yet this was not the familiar ground of doulon perversion. The pain…the searing dread and anger…never in all my years had I experienced such a ravaging, as if my sickness had itself become some live thing inhabiting my body, wreaking purposeful vengeance now I’d sworn I’d no longer service it with nivat seed.
After a time I sat up. Slowly. My blood started flowing again, and reason crept out from hiding, dragging with it a dismal conviction. I had to tell the prince. Tonight, while this pain remained fresh, reminding me of the madness to come. The hopes raised in the past few hours could not overshadow that inevitable result. Nor could they shake my certainty that one more use of nivat would destroy both soul and body. Life’s last great joke. I had found a master I was willing to serve, but my irredeemable folly had ensured my service would be cut short. I could not allow Osriel to imagine he could rely on my help.
I pulled on the heavy cloak I’d worn in the morning and hurried down the stair. One might have thought the world had already ended. The abbey ruins lay burnt and frozen, dark and silent. One faint gleam shone from the kitchen building in the south cloister, where the prince had been summoned to succor his fallen messenger.
The night air frosted my lungs, and I clutched my cloak around me. The world felt askew, as if my body were besotted with mead.
The grimed windows of the kitchen flickered with odd light of purple-streaked scarlet. I shoved open the plank door and stepped into a dark vestibule. Wet heat slapped my face, and with it the sweet, ripe alchemy of human dying—sweat, piss, emptied bowels, and the overwhelming iron taint of blood. A young man in padded leathers stood off to one side, his one arm held tight across his breast, clenched fist at his heart, the planes of his face eroded with grief. Voushanti’s wide hands gripped the young man’s shoulder and pressed him against the bricks of poor Brother Jerome’s beloved hearth. But it was the tableau in the center of the room that turned my blood to sand.
The kitchen worktables had been shoved aside to clear the stone floor. Fire blazed—a broad ring of tall flames, scarlet and purple and the deepest blue of midnight, of storms, of bruises and pain. No fuel fed the flames; no hearth contained them. Within the fiery ring a stocky warrior lay dead, his body hacked and battered, the top of his skull caved in. Far worse than those mortal wounds were the fresh bloody holes that gaped where his eyes had once looked upon the world.
Prince Osriel—the gaunt, dark-haired man I knew as quiet, persuasive Gram—knelt beside the body, his velvet robes stained dark. Gore adorned the prince’s face, not random splatter, but precisely marked patterns of circles and lines on brow, temples, cheeks, and chin. The blood signs burned with a power of their own that thrummed in my head as music—songs of pain and bondage, of striking whips and cries of despair. The prince’s cupped hands, bloody to the wrist, held a calyx of carved stone—a shallow offering vessel as Iero’s worshipers used to carry fragrant oils to his altar. Wisps of gray smoke trailed from the vessel.
“…come weal, come woe, bound to my will and word until world’s end. Perficiimus.” Osriel’s chant rang clean and hard and sure.
As he lowered the bowl, I backed away, cracked open the door, and slipped unseen into the bitter night. A haze of smoke and freezing fog obscured the stars. Somewhere soldiers softly called the watch.
Pressing my back to the stone wall, I tried to erase what I had seen, to silence the truth articulated by that sonorous incantation. Holy gods, how many times had he done this? What use did he have for souls withheld from whatever peace lay beyond this life? The wall of midnight that had smothered the fields of Gillarine remained etched in my memory—behind the fire-breathing horses and monstrous cloud warriors, I had seen gray, transparent faces in the blackness, hungry…lost…angry. And now I understood what I had experienced this hour past.