"Better let me help," said Hoartrap, nimbly dancing after him. Maroto couldn't decide which option was more unsettling, if Hoartrap's weirdness was cultivated or genuine. "I already settled accounts with the innkeep and his family, so it may be best if I accompany you."

As soon as the two were gone, the remaining three nobles started in on Maroto.

"Let's make a run for it," said Diggelby, and Prince yapped his agreement, maybe, or maybe he just yapped because he was one yappy fucking spaniel.

"Can we trust him?" asked Din.

"Should I cut his throat if I get the chance?" When Maroto swayed backward at Purna's question, she added, "I've heard the songs. You give me the word, and-"

A shriek came from the back of the tavern, and then Hassan staggered out of the door, paler than any foundation could ever lighten a man of his complexion. No one jumped to his aid, though most didn't have Maroto's excuse of not wanting to risk any sudden moves.

"What?" said Din, but Hassan just shook his head and wobbled over to the table. Maroto may have been the only one to notice that his tassel-toed slippers left dark wet footprints on the carpet of bedrolls.

"Some help you were," said Hoartrap when he returned shortly after, a hogshead floating after him. Most wizards kept their tricks in reserve instead of always showing off, but not Hoartrap. A train of mugs bounced through the air after the barrel, and while Purna and Diggelby stared openmouthed at the sight, Din focused all her attention on shuffling the cards. "What are the stakes, then? I only play for real wagers."

Purna helped Maroto to a drink as Hoartrap blathered at the petrified ponces. The ale was sour as tart cider, but cool on his ragged throat and feverish brow. As Maroto watched the game, Hoartrap pulled out the curved black pipe Zosia had carved for the sorcerer way back when they were all on an endless campaign against King Kaldruut, before she'd stolen his crown with little more than some well-spent silver and a whole lot of angry peasants.

What would a pipe like that be worth, Maroto wondered, hand-carved by the Stricken Queen before she conquered Samoth? Probably a whole devil-load more than he had pawned his for, back when he was suckling on the honeyed stinger-like so much from those days, he couldn't remember how he'd parted with it, only the day where he'd reached for it and found it gone, so he'd reached for another graveworm or scorpion instead. After all these months on her trail, he still harbored a tenderness over not being invited back to the Company, inventing countless scenarios for why she hadn't been able to find him... but all cards being down, it might could be she just knew what an inconstant son of a centipede he was, and thought herself better served by his absence.

"Care for a dip in my pouch?" Hoartrap said, and Maroto realized he'd been staring covetously at the sorcerer's pipe.

"Nah, I'm good." The tambo-stick Hoartrap had shaved into flakes and stuffed into his bowl was putting off a column of harsh dark smoke that smelled more like poison than tubq, and even if he'd had his old briar there was no chance Maroto would have ghosted his bowl with that nastiness. "Looks like the duchess bluffed you, old man. You ought to pay more attention."

"Rare is the game that is made more enjoyable by being played more seriously," said Hoartrap. "A philosophy I have found applicable in literally all aspects of my existence. Ah, a worthy call, Count Hassan, a worthy call!"

Many hands later, somebody tried the door. Diggelby stood, Prince growling softly from his post under the table, but Hoartrap waved him back down without even looking up from his cards. Maroto's heart felt like he'd just provoked a bite out of a thunder wasp as he stared at the door, said aloud what he knew Hoartrap was also thinking: "If it's her, she'll force it."

The door shook again. Wood groaned. Metal began biting into it. The nobles stared along with Maroto, but Hoartrap coaxed Hassan back to the table by raising the already substantial pot three dinars.

Then the door gave. It was bright inside the tavern, Hoartrap having waved the lamps alight when the sun had set beyond the oilcloth-covered windows, but outside it was dark as a stinghouse basement, and the woman who stood before a crowd of heavily armed soldiers was silhouetted in the splintered doorway.

Maroto didn't stand so much as float to his feet, the one thing that could banish the agony in his battered skull at last before him. His vision tightened, his good ear pricked, and every inch of him tingled the way it did in the heat of battle, when all distractions fell away and the fight became everything. Zosia.

She strode into the room, imperious as was her due, and behind her came Fennec, the old crook. His fox helm sparkled, unblemished even after all these years, even after all the action it had seen, but Maroto's eyes passed over this in a twinkling to focus on Zosia's. It stopped his heart. A devil dog, snarling, with the twisted tendrils of a silver crown rising from the steel mask. How many hours had he spent helping her bend those tines back into shape after a battle, how many spikes had he helped replace after a close encounter with sword, ax, or hammer?

Zosia came to him, and Maroto gulped her down like a reformed drunkard tasting soju after a decade of sobriety. This was not the Zosia he remembered, this was Zosia from the portraits she had begrudgingly sat for in the Crimson Throne Room... just before their world had fallen apart.

Midnight blue riding boots came up to her knees, their cuffs banded with silver. Bare, dirtied, and perfect skin followed, her thighs shining with sweat despite the coolness of the night, nothing shielding her from assault or his eyes but a sheer loincloth of polished chainmail. Then her sculpted navel, her solid flanks, and another strip of silver links, her breasts barely constrained by the small outposts of armor. Beyond her helm and this briefest of defenses, so modest as to mock the dangers of combat rather than to offer any actual protection, she wore but a deep red cloak. Onto this burgundy cape spilled cobalt blue hair, the helm designed to let it flow wild-again, the spectacle was everything, her attire a laughing defiance of the suggestion that this woman had anything to fear in all the Star.

This was Zosia as Maroto had envisioned her ten thousand times, Zosia as she lived in his dreams long after all swore she had perished at Diadem. This was Zosia as he had always wanted her, how he had begged her to be.

In other words, whoever this masked, half-naked, blue-haired woman was, she definitely wasn't Zosia. He had let himself pretend for the last blessed months that his beloved was alive, but now, truly, he knew she was dead. Like so many others, he had been fooled by an impostor, taken in by an impossible dream. Maroto let the floor take him, as he had so many times before.

CHAPTER.

26.

Diadem was built before the Haunted Sea swallowed the Sunken Kingdom and shadows devoured Emeritus. More than just the capital of the province of Samoth, more, even, than serving as seat of the entire Crimson Empire and anchor of the Burnished Chain, Diadem was the last stronghold built before the Age of Wonders ended, a monument to the ingenuity of mortals and the ability of the devils they bound. Even if all the world should plunge into darkness, Diadem's radiance would continue to shine from the crown of the Star, a beacon for mortals from every corner of the Empire, from every Arm and every isle, forever and ever.

So the Chain Canticles said, anyway. Sister Portoles had come to Diadem kicking and hissing, not even an anathema then, simply a young monster in desperate need of salvation. She had received it, Fallen Mother be praised, but even after they made her nearly human, even after she learned to pray for her exterminated family instead of weeping for them, she had never seen much of Diadem beyond the Dens built into the walls of the dead volcano that enveloped the city. Even when she had ridden out to war against or beside the Imperials, she had only ever passed through a tiny section of the city.

Now she had permission to go anywhere, to see everything, and before she left the capital on her mission she decided to get her feet wet closer to home. The expectation of simply wandering Diadem with impunity filled her with as much dread as it did joy, and the prospect of visiting the Office of Answers in particular made her squirm-but that was the only place the queen expressly suggested she investigate before departing.

According to the gatekeeper who gave Portoles directions, the most direct route from the warrenlike confines of the Dens to the smoother, orderly halls of the Office of Answers took one on a tour of the capital's tunnel system, traversing steeply arched bridges over ice-rimed sewer canals and causeways that dipped low through fungal gardens. Upon leaving the Upper Chainhouse, one descended five hundred and one steps, and while crossing the Forest of Eternal Sin replaced no fewer than thirteen of the candles that had invariably burned to nubs on the countless stalactites. Then a climb of precisely five hundred steps to the black rattan gate that separated the Papal territories of Castle Diadem from the Imperial.

Sister Portoles opted to deviate from this course at the first opportunity, offering the necessary salutes and signals for the wardens to let her pass out of the surrounding walls and into the city. This exchange of time-honored gestures was more or less a formality, as the wardens' purpose was to prevent citizens from getting into the citadel, rather than to forestall officers of church or state from leaving it. The outer door opened, and beyond it lay the bursting city of Diadem.

Wide as the caldera stretched, the five-hundred-year-old settlement had quickly spread from its heart to crowd the whole expanse, until there was nowhere left to build but up. Risky business, that, both practically and socially-climb too high too quickly and your better-born neighbors might sabotage your foundations in the night. No wonder even the fickle serfs here in the capital had rallied behind the Stricken Queen, after she'd opened up the dry, spacious caverns of Castle Diadem for public use. That reform had outlived the doomed despot for all of a week, before Queen Indsorith and Pope Shanatu ran them back outside into the gloomy city. According to the older anathemas in the Dens who had lived through those tumultuous times, it had taken months for the stink of false hope and abject poverty to fade from the interior.

Stepping down the black stairs into the black mud of the streets, Portoles smiled up into the black rain that fell onto the black cloth mask her kind wore when interacting with the pureborn. In the capital, anyway; the army put a stop to that practice as soon as they were a dozen miles outside Diadem's walls-allowing masked figures free range of your camp was asking for trouble.

Even after all these hallowed centuries since the first frame was raised, the walls of every tall, teetering building bled black in the rain, the ash of this sacred ground permeating every timber, brick, and shingle. The only color to be seen in the whole place was the steel blue scraps of storm cloud Portoles made out through chinks in the tightly clustered eaves far above her. From down here it was impossible to see the gay garments the upper classes supposedly wore to spite the grey heavens as they traversed their covered catwalks, and down here the hunched citizens thronging the narrow streets she passed through were draped in dark oilcloth robes not dissimilar from her habit. None but Portoles wore the mask of the witchborn, though, and passersby gave her a wide berth in even the tightest alley between listing estates that stretched close to a hundred feet into the air, the structures rocking ever so slightly in the keening wind. It was dimmer here, now, at midday beneath the open sky, than it ever got in the candlelit grottos of the Dens.

Portoles meandered through the ghettos of Raniputri and Usban, ate a flatfish tsire handpie she purchased from a Flintlander's cart, nodded her curt approval to a gaggle of shriven and branded Immaculate converts praying in the muck beside a line of penitents waiting to be admitted to the West Cathedral. Ashy mud plastered her sandaled feet until they resembled boots. At last, stuck to an announcement board on the covered porch of a condemned tavern, she found what she had sought: a bill printed on a drab sheet of rag paper. Two words that made the sister run hot then cold, her eyes flitting all about the dreary backstreet in nervous guilt, as though she had been the one to stick up the flyer.

ZOSIA LIVES!.

There were several bundled figures lying on the porch, and once she was sure they were truly asleep Portoles reached for the bill with shaking fingers, as though it might scald her. It peeled back from the soft, damp board like an almost-ripe scab coming loose under a persistent fingernail. Folding and slipping the bill down her habit so that it was lodged in the binding that held her sweaty left breast, she hurried away. This was the sort of thing the queen had suggested she retrieve from the Office of Answers, but before she braved that dread department she had wanted to see for herself if the revolutionary propaganda was as prevalent in the wild as Her Majesty had suggested... And lo, it had taken only a bit of wandering around until she'd stumbled onto the bill, the search nowhere near so arduous as she'd expected.

Not that Portoles had possessed any cause to disbelieve Queen Indsorith on this matter, or any other, but ever since Kypck the war nun had been unable to stop herself from doubting virtually everything. This pervasive uncertainty was part of why she had agreed to honor the vows she had made to her queen, instead of those she had made to her church-Queen Indsorith alone had agreed with her that it was a sin to have executed those villagers and the disobedient soldiers, no matter who gave the order. Prior to this surprisingly liberating confirmation of Portoles's culpability, every single superior she had confessed to was primarily concerned that one of the Chain's anathemas had let an Imperial colonel die under her watch. Everything was backward, the Queen of Samoth quietly reflecting on spiritual matters while the Pope of the Burnished Chain raged over military failings.

In the end it was her doubt that propelled Portoles into the decisions she had made, decisions that had seemed so easy at the time but now stunned her with their enormity. Did her loyalty to her queen make her a traitor to her church? To the Fallen Mother? It was an unnerving experience, to trust in her intuition, as the queen had urged her, when all her life she had been taught that her impulses were not her own, that they came from the Deceiver to ensnare her soul. Yet here she had taken a first faltering step down that road, beginning her search out in the muddy streets instead of where the queen had suggested, and by giving in to her instinct she now had one less doubt to tax her cluttered skull. Curiosity, it seemed, might have its uses, despite how fervently the Chain derided that sin above all others.

She realized she had become lost, the anonymous streets giving up no hint as to which direction she stomped, and she paused at a mucky intersection. As soon as the panic of not knowing tightened her chest, though, she blew it out like so much bad air-Diadem was a ring, albeit an enormous one, and so long as she plodded forward she would find her way back to the castle in time. As if that wasn't the heaviest symbol ever to be wrought in stained glass, she thought with a smile.

Far in as she'd come, it took some time for her to get back out to the edge of town and reenter the castle. Several times as she passed higher and higher into Diadem's flanks she touched the bill that rested atop her heart; when offering the queen's writ to the guards who frequently barred her way she imagined giving them the flyer instead. She couldn't decide if those two words printed upon it were simply treason, or outright heresy.

When she was at last admitted to the open floor of the Office of Answers' Truth Chamber, the dozens of people undergoing questioning caused her stair-winded breath to catch in her tight chest. Considering there were far more individuals strapped to gurneys and chairs than there were Askers to tend them, the Office must be a bit understaffed at present.

"Raided a cell in Lower Leviathania," supplied the sweaty young clerk charged with chaperoning Portoles. "Usually we don't cram them in like this, but the holding pens are overfull, so we're making do."

Like all in the Office of Answers, he went naked while in the stiflingly warm Truth Chamber. The Askers had nothing to hide from their guests. By the light of the azure-flamed braziers reflecting off the polished floor of volcanic glass, Portoles eyed him for signs of deviltry, though she knew witchborn were forbidden from serving in the Office. That was not the way the state conducted itself. Portoles, on a real roll with thoughts both heretical and treasonous, wondered briefly if the Office would feel the same if those anathemas who could supposedly peek into minds could do so with strangers instead of only those with whom they were already intimate.

Regardless, everyone seemed to be predicting Portoles's thoughts of late, and it was making her paranoid. She jumped when an old woman's scream choked off into a gurgle as her tongue was removed with burnished shears that looked much like those used by the Papal barbers to heal the witchborn. Looking around at the other instruments in use or laid out on tables, and the dark swirling pools flowing into the numerous floor grates, she found much to compare with the operating theater where she had been rendered as pure as the church could make her. Bad memories surged up in her gorge... or maybe it was just the peanuty flatfish she'd eaten.

"They were all caught in the act?" she asked.

"A few ringleaders, and a lot of folk just looking for easy work or a dry bed." The clerk sighed. "It's always like this. Don't worry, sister, most of them will be turned over to your people soon enough."

"And all this was found in their quarters?" Portoles's heart tapped at the bill resting above it as she surveyed the table piled high with identical leaflets and several aged, weatherworn folios. "Propaganda?"

"That's one word for it," said the clerk. "I'm sure you'd call it something else. Was there someone in particular we could help you find? Even if they are not here we could have them to you in hours, I assure you."

Portoles picked up one of the folios, flipped through it, tossed it down, and picked up another. Beneath the mask that limply clung to her sweaty face she could feel her cheeks burn from more than the heat. The name of the Stricken Queen, appearing over and over, on every page... Surely the authors had known their words could land them here, and yet the text spoke to their fearlessness. Fearlessness, or a need to put it down in ink, regardless of the cost. The vellum folio in her hands was only half written, waiting to be completed in the cramped yet precise script-did the author still have her fingers, or were they already in a vise?

"I'm taking this," she said, as much to herself as to the clerk. "Do you need to make note of that before I take my leave?"

"Revered Sister, you can't-" the clerk began, then amended himself when she glanced up from the book. "That is, the Office, under direct orders of the queen, has immediate need of it. I will personally copy its contents for you and-"

"Do I need to show you my writ again, boy?" said Portoles, flushing anew with the overconfident words.

"No, Revered Sister," said the clerk, looking at his bare feet.

This was the extent of the power her queen had granted Portoles. It was staggering. She might die on the morrow, but for today she, an anathema, had authority unrivaled by any save the Crimson Queen or the Black Pope. By any means necessary meant by any means she wished, and pity the pureborn who questioned her will. Out of habit she tried to choke down her smile, but then reminded herself she was entitled to grin from ear to ear.

"I also wish to speak with the author. Someone here wrote it, yes?"

"We won't know that unless we are permitted to use it in our questioning, will we?" said the clerk with a bit more attitude than Portoles expected. It was a fair point, though.

"I did," called a teenage youth strapped to a nearby gurney. He had the ferret-eyed, rawboned look of a natural born thief to him. He leered at her. "You like my tract, witch-nun? It's all the Fallen Mom's honest truth, every blessed word of it, and-"

"That's quite enough of that," said the Asker who had been quietly talking with the woman in the next chair over. He was a scrawny man whose shaven genitals were blurred by bright red tattoos of Cascadian script, and he jabbed at the gurneyed man with his dripping three-pronged prompter. "I already have quite a few queries for you; no sense in raising more questions before we've even started."

"Believe!" said the boy. "Take off those blinders they force your kind to wear, witch-nun, read the truth and decide for yourself!"

"I'm very sorry, we'll have to continue this later," the Asker quietly told the semiconscious woman he'd been interrogating. "As for you, young man-"

"What harm would it be were it false?" cried the boy, his eyes still locked on the slits in Portoles's mask. "When's a lie ever called down such consequences, answer me that!"

Portoles had no more expected profundity in the Office of Answers than she had subtlety, but she found herself deeply moved by the boy's appeal. In this roomful of tortured dissidents and Askers employed by the Crown, only she knew that what the flyer said was true: Zosia lived, and what was more, Portoles had probably met her face-to-face in Kypck. In twenty years of rule, Queen Indsorith had told no one of the deception that had fooled the world, and only confided in Portoles because she believed that doing so could prevent another war. These rebels couldn't actually believe Zosia had survived her two-thousand-foot fall from the Crimson Throne Room and was biding her time until she launched a second Cobalt War. Their slogan of Zosia Lives! was just that, an anthem designed to fill their fellows with hope and their enemies with hatred... But like the boy said, if the Empire knew their rabble-rousing came from baseless beliefs, why suppress it so viciously? The queen knew there was more than a kernel of truth in their message, and this was how she dealt with it-the same way the Burnished Chain dealt with anathemas. Doubt blossomed anew in Portoles's heart as she realized that her new master could be every bit as brutal as her old one, when she felt threatened. Queen Indsorith had claimed that the mission she entrusted to Portoles would save countless lives across the Star, but even if that proved true, Portoles couldn't save the poor, naive sinners in this room.

"You seem to be confused on the etiquette of polite discourse," the Asker told the outspoken prisoner, looming over his gurney and softly applying the points of his prompter to the ball of the youth's throat. "I ask, you answer, not the other way around. But since you're so eager to converse, why don't we just dive right in?"

For all his bluster, the young man closed his eyes and let out a whimper. He would be making a lot more noise before long. Portoles had screamed and screamed when the barbers had carved the sin out of her, screamed until they had seized her forked tongue and stitched it together, blood gurgling in the back of her throat. This heretic was going to scream, too, but with no physical signs of corruption, how would the Asker know when his work was complete? As the steel prompter reflected the brazier light, Portoles felt a flashback of fear, and just as soon a pulse of relief that it was someone else who was going to be cut instead of her. Back in the Kutumban mountains, she had executed men and women who refused to massacre peasants, and then she had overseen the purge of Kypck, and then she had watched as an Imperial colonel burned alive, but she was going to turn around and walk out of here, and this boy who had only written a political treatise probably wouldn't. Perhaps the Crimson Queen's justice wasn't so different from the Black Pope's.

"Sister?" said the clerk, reaching out for Portoles's elbow but thinking better of actually touching her.

"Mmmm," said Portoles, picturing Brother Wan strapped down where the heretic was, imagining the sounds he must have made when they removed his half-formed beak. Just like that, it happened, the anticipation of a new sin warming her chest.

"It would be best if we left Asker Vexovoid to do the queen's work. I can escort you out."

"Certainly." Portoles nodded, savoring the sensation of delay until it became unbearable. "As soon as you unstrap that heretic. He's coming with me."

Of all of them, the heretic seemed the most surprised. Asker Vexovoid ground his jaw so loudly that Portoles could hear him, but sheathed his prompter and began loosening the boy. The clerk just scowled at her. As the shock wore off, the heretic giggled nervously.

"It's no laughing matter," the Asker told him. "You'll be wishing you'd kept your mouth shut before the end. Our Mother Church has a very different methodology for gathering intelligence than this office."

"I'm not going to strip before I torture you, is what he means," said Portoles, pleased to see Asker Vexovoid's sour expression now matching that of the clerk. Already she doubted her snap decision, as she always did when she had crested the trespass and was left with nothing but the promise of penance. "I'm in a hurry, so let's get a move on."

"Would you like him like this, or is there something more the Office can do for you, sister?" asked the clerk as the heretic clambered down from the gurney and Asker Vexovoid turned away without a polite farewell.

"I would like some pants, if it's not too much trouble," said the heretic, cupping his shaking hands over his groin.

"Manacles on his wrists and ankles, connected to each other, and to a collar. Three extra locks. The same key for all of them. A long chain tether fixed to his collar. A gag in his gob and a blindfold under his hood. Plain robe," said Portoles, and then decided to be charitable. They were going to be riding for some time. "Undergarments, I suppose."

The heretic might be useful. Even if he'd been lying about writing the tract and just taken the credit to get her attention, if he'd been brought to the Office of Answers he surely knew more of the cultish veneration of the Stricken Queen than Portoles did. Any knowledge he possessed might prove valuable as she embarked on her quest to track down the woman who had escaped Kypck, the woman Queen Indsorith believed to be Cobalt Zosia. Besides, Portoles could always kill the man if he turned out to be of no use to her. She could kill him for no reason at all, if she wanted-that was the power of the authority the Crimson Queen had given her.

So she told herself, but these thoughts only took form after she had saved him from the Office of Answers.

It was after sunset and still raining when Diadem's southern gate opened for them several hours later. There was something sublimely absurd in the hundred-foot-tall, ten-foot-thick iron-banded gate rolling back just for two riders and a pack mule. The thousand soldiers who worked the winches doubtless agreed-not for nothing was the southern gate normally opened but once a day, to admit travelers during the noon hour.

The heretic had to ride sidesaddle since Portoles refused to unlock his ankle chains, but any protest he might have leveled failed to clear the gag. Their way was lit by sputtering sapphire flames of burning gas that rose from the mountain via tubes of carven obsidian flanking the wide road, torches that had never gone out since first lit at the dawn of Diadem, even in blizzard or hurricane.

Midnight found them at the last torch, and Portoles hitched their animals at the way temple beside the final beacon. It was a humble yet large one-room chamber carved into the dead rock. Only the clergy were permitted to use the refuges that spotted the Imperial highways, but based on the bashed-in door and heaps of excrement on the broken penitence bench, others had sought shelter here. Tonight, however, they had the place to themselves, and intending to keep it that way, Portoles used the ruined bench to bar the door.

"I could've died!" the youth said as soon as the gag was out, shaking his manacled hands at her. "Can't breathe good through my nose normal-like, say fuck the devils with a wet hood over my face!"

"Say fuck the devils again and I'll put it back in," said Portoles, pulling her own damp mask off and tossing it carelessly on their heaped provisions. She returned to the fire she'd kindled in the potbellied stove before tending to her prisoner. The wood let off the strong odor of urine as it burned. "My name is Sister Portoles. You will address me at all times with the respect my station commands."

"Sure, sister, the respect of your station," said the heretic, scooting on his butt over toward the fire, the chains around his ankles and wrists jingling. "Not that you asked, but my name is-"

"I will call you Heretic," said Portoles, deeply unhappy with herself for the mad compulsion that had led her to take him along. "Count yourself blessed I can call you anything other than the memory of a doomed man I left behind in the Office of Answers."

"Whatever you say," said Heretic, warming his hands. "You're the boss, I'm the heretic. Got it."

Heretic had the sense to stay quiet while Portoles boiled water to soak seaweed and beancurd in, and then they ate in silence, slurping from plain wooden bowls. Camping like this reminded her of being out in the field on campaign, first against the Imperials and then alongside them. The marked difference was that it was just her and a single other soul settling in for the night, instead of a whole regiment, and she felt an unexpected tremor of lonesomeness-she was often alone in her cell, of course, but she could never remember a time when there weren't legions of other people within shouting distance, either in Diadem or on campaign. Now it was just her and a proven criminal for miles and miles.

After they'd eaten, she looped Heretic's chain leash around the base of the stove, back through his manacles, and then secured it with one of the spare locks. He wouldn't be comfortable, bent up like that, but he would be warm.

"This isn't necessary," said Heretic. "Really!"

"The sooner you stop hoping I'm a fool the sooner you will find peace in your fate," said Portoles, stretching out to her full length on the other side of the stove. Well, he might think her a fool, given her decision to take him into her custody. When Queen Indsorith had given the war nun permission to enlist anyone she felt would help her find Zosia, so long as she kept the nature of her mission a secret, Portoles rather doubted Her Majesty could have foreseen this ill-advised conscript. This was the exact sort of thing that had always landed her the worst penance, snatching at forbidden fruit just to see what it tasted like. Mother Kylesa and Abbotess Cradofil and even Brother Wan had always warned her there would come a day when she fell too far to climb up again.

She pulled out the heretic's book to distract her from the relentless guilt that constricted her throat. No matter how convinced she was at the time that her actions were correct, within in a few hours she always arrived at this place, craving confession even worse than she had craved whatever temptation she had succumbed to. Except now she no longer even had the prospect of confession to assuage her fears-Queen Indsorith had convinced her that once she left Diadem, it would be incredibly dangerous for her to meet with any other clergy, lest word of her location reach the Black Pope and arouse her suspicions.

"This isn't what I expected," said Heretic. "You hear a lot of stories, sure, but I never... I mean, where are you taking me? Can I know that? Are you gonna publicly execute me in some dismal corner of the Empire? As an example, like?"

"Hmmm," said Portoles, opting to put another log on before settling in with the folio.

"No, that don't make sense," Heretic decided. "Maybe-"

"Heretic," said Portoles, sitting back on her bedroll and glaring at the scruffy embodiment of all her questionable decisions.

"Yes, Sister Portoles?"

"If you say another word without being spoken to I'll put your gag back in, and leave it there all night."