Falcien was the best scholar among them. If anyone had a chance of deciphering the solaros' writings and finding the truth of Carden Vale's curse, it was him. Without his knowledge, their chances of learning what had happened here dropped precipitously.

Why did the maelgloth choose that moment to attack? Yes, they were vulnerable as they stumbled out of the smoke and confusion of the temple's trap a but they had been even more vulnerable when they split up to investigate Carden Vale separately. The maelgloth could have picked them off one by one as they wandered the unfamiliar streets. Why hadn't they?

Asharre picked at the question, finding no answer, as she collected two sacks of papers, wrapped a hand around Falcien's shrouded legs, and led the battered survivors back to the Rosy Maiden.

The inn was eerily peaceful. There was not a whisper of sound save the echo of their own footsteps in the empty streets; even the clouds seemed to have stopped moving.

Asharre slowed, then stopped, a stone's throw from the inn. She couldn't see anything amiss. Nor could she smell it, not with the maelgloth's bile clotted on her clothes and her own wounds barely healed. And yet a it was too quiet. They'd left the animals behind. The oxen should be lowing, the horses whisking their tails against the walls.

"Someone's been here," Asharre said. "The animals." She laid the dead man in a doorway, drew her caractan, and went to the Rosy Maiden's stables. Evenna followed, and her lantern showed blood on the straw.

The animals were dead. Only one survived, a gray mare trembling in a patch of sodden straw between two overturned water troughs. The others had been torn open from throat to tail. The horses had kicked the walls and the oxen had rammed their horns against the wood in panicked attempts to break free, leaving bloody dents in their stalls. There was a dead maelgloth among them, a skinny child-size thing with enormous bony claws dragging down its wrists. A horse's kick had crushed its skull.

Evenna went to the mare, soothing the animal with murmurs and gentle gestures. There might have been a touch of magic in her words; Asharre had never seen a terrified horse calm so quickly. Soon the mare's agitated breathing steadied and it let Evenna stroke its nose, whickering into the Illuminer's hand.

"Why was that one spared?" Asharre asked.

The younger woman's lips were pressed to hold back something she didn't want to say. Her big eyes were even darker than usual, filled with a fear? Foreboding? Evenna stretched out a booted foot, shaking away manure and damp straw, and nudged a toe at the spill between the troughs.

It took Asharre a moment to see what she meant. The water had splashed into a peculiar pattern on the muddy floor. It resembled a snowflake a or a sunburst, eight rayed, with puddles at the end of each arm that mimicked the variant she'd seen scrawled on all those windows in the abandoned town. The image was lopsided and stretched to distortion, barely recognizablea"but once she saw it, she could see nothing else.

That pattern couldn't be accidental. Asharre tried to work it out, imagining ways that the troughs could have fallen to create it. If they fell one after the other just so, splashing into each other, their contents diverted by the straw and manure piles on the stable floor, maelgloth and frightened animals tracking water to and fro in their struggles a was it possible that the sunburst had been created by chance?

She didn't think so. Judging by her shock and silence, neither did Evenna.

"But it worked," the sigrir said aloud. "It saved the horse."

"Maybe," Evenna said. She led the horse gingerly around the puddle, keeping her own steps clear of it. "Just as likely they left to attack us instead."

Asharre slid her sword back into its scabbard and followed the Celestian out of the blood-spattered stables. Under other circumstances, she might have tried to salvage some of the animals' meat, but she had no appetite for anything maelgloth had touched.

Inside, Heradion stirred up the fire, but it held little warmth. None of them was in the mood for talking, or eating. Evenna tethered the surviving mare in the common room; she thought the animal would be safer inside.

Asharre was too tired to ask questions. She laid Falcien's body on a pallet by the door, then trudged up the stairs. She kept her caractan at hand and her boots on her feet, and was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

Sunlight roused her out of uneasy dreams. Asharre lay on the bed awhile longer, staring at the maze of cracks in the ceiling plaster. It took her a moment to recognize the weariness she felt. Not battle weariness; not wounds. Evenna had healed the gravest of her injuries, and what remained was no worse than she'd suffered a dozen times before.

It was fear that exhausted her: fear of the cursed town and its cursed inhabitants. Fear of losing Evenna and Heradion as she had lost Oralia and now Falcien. She had pledged to protect thema"but how? This valley lay deep under Maol's shadow. She didn't understand it, and she didn't know how to defeat it. If it could be defeated.

Her own clan revered the spirits of the wild: ancient deities, remote and faceless, though sometimes they took the forms of snow-white beasts or showed their red eyes in storms. The gods of the White Seas could be cruel; they took tribute in blood and blessed their followers with fury. But they were not evil. The evil she'd seen in Carden Vale was something for which she had no answer.

Lying in bed wouldn't help her find one. Asharre threw back the blankets.

Downstairs Evenna was already awake. She'd set a kettle over the fire and sat upon a three-legged stool, gazing into a teacup. It did not seem that she had slept, although she had changed out of her filthy clothes into a tunic and breeches left by some forgetful guest. Her ink-black hair hung loose over her shoulders, trailing almost to the floor.

"Restless night?" Asharre took a knotted rag from its hook near the fire and wrapped it around the kettle's handle to pour herself a cup of tea. It was bitter, boiled down to dregs. Whitebriar tea, brewed to stave off weariness. Evenna had laced it with vigil's friend to intensify the effects. It tasted abysmal, but Asharre drank it anyway.

"No time to sleep," Evenna said. The shadows under the Illuminer's eyes were nearly as dark as her hair, but she managed a wisp of a smile. "Too much to be done."

"We'll need to make a pyre for Falcien. And one of you will have to go back."

"I know," Evenna said.

Asharre set her cup down in surprise. She'd expected an argument. "You do?"

"One of us will have to tell the temple what happened. If the rest of us don't return. There's a good chance of that. Something about this place a I could almost imagine that the town itself conspires against us. First we lose Falcien, then we lose all our animalsa"all but one, so we can send only a single rider back and have to split up again a it's convenient, isn't it? Too convenient. Something's toying with us. And yet, after all we've seen, and all we've lost, I still can't leave the people of Carden Vale."

"You think there are people left in Carden Vale?"

"Not in the town. I don't believe anyone's here anymore. But I think there might be some in Shadefell." Evenna brushed a hand over the papers stacked by her stool. "I spent the night reading the solaros' diaries. Falcien would have been able to glean more from them. He was the one who studied the fell gods. I did what I could, but a well, the last few entries are plain enough. The solaros took the survivors to Shadefell, hoping his scholar friend could protect them and, if he succeeded in his search for Aurandane, help him unlock the sword's magic. He wrote of the man as a wizard."

"Do you believe that?"

Evenna shook her head. "No. Not truly. I don't believe this Gethel was Blessed, so he couldn't have had any true magic a but a scholar might know enough to protect people. And if they did find Aurandane, he might know how to use it. Even if the sword isn't there, the survivors might have escaped Maol's corruption, or at least limited its effects, if they left this place. Maybe they delayed the madness. Maybe they outran it altogether."

"Then they'll be safe."

"For a while. Not forever. They'll need our help."

"Your help," Asharre corrected.

"I can't reach them alone. The maelgloth would tear me apart."

That was true. Oralia had sworn the same oaths when she became a full-fledged Illuminer: to serve the goddess faithfully, to help those in need without regard to pride or payment, and never to kill another person. That last oath probably didn't extend to maelgloth, who were no longer human, but since an Illuminer with a sword was as helpless as a cat in the saddle, that was small consolation.

And yet a "You did something to my sword. While I was blind. I could not see, but I felt it."

"Velaska's Fire."

"How?" Asharre's eyes widened. Velaska's Fire was a healing prayera"one not often used, because it was not often needed, but she had seen Oralia summon its red flame on occasion. Velaska's Fire surrounded a blade with cauterizing heat, enabling it to cut with less pain and helping its wounds heal faster. Incisions made with Velaska's Fire seldom infected; it could cut away flesh that had putrefied too badly to be saved, and what was left would be clean.

But it was not a battle spell.

Evenna's gaze dropped to her hands. She fidgeted with her clothes, plucking at the tunic's drawstrings. "At the Dome of the Sun, they taught us that Velaska's Fire originated with the Knights of the Sun, who used it to turn their swords into brands of holy flame. I'd never used the prayer to bless a sword before a but then I'd never faced maelgloth either. I don't think it broke my oaths. I caused no harma"and if they'd truly been living things, instead of cursed ones, your sword should have hurt them less, not more."

That sounded like sophistry to Asharre, but she wasn't the one who had to abide by Illuminer oaths. She only cared about one thing. "That was what killed the bile spitter?" It hadn't been her work, certainly. She knew her swing was bad when she made it. Her caractan couldn't have hurt it that badly unaided.

"Yes. The fire melted its flesh. Like water on salt."

"Then we have some chance of reaching Shadefell alive."

"A fair chance. Better than fair, if there are not too many maelgloth and the Bright Lady lends us her grace a and a few of my other guesses are correct." Evenna sighed. "I wish Falcien were still with us. I've been wishing that all night. I can't tell you how much knowledge was lost with that man. But be that as it may, we have a chance. Not a good one, I won't lie. One of us must go back. Someone has to tell the High Solaros the truth of Carden Vale."

"Heradion."

Evenna's blue eyes lingered on hers, weighing. "Why?"

"He's a better rider. I'm a better sword. If you're only taking one guardian, you should have the best, and he has a better chance of making it through the passes."

The Illuminer smiled at her hands. The expression was a little sad, Asharre thought. "I'll let you explain it to him, then. You had better reasons."

"Did I?"

"I was going to send him back just for the sake of a girl. One I'm not supposed to know about, at that." Evenna gestured to her sun medallion, letting her fingers fall before they brushed its gold. "Our road can be hard, but I think it's easier than his. You and I have no family, no obligations beyond the oaths we've sworn. It's no accident that so many of Celestia's Blessed come from the cloister children. We don't have any loyalties outside the temple. You've made equal sacrifices to dedicate yourself to your callinga"or greater ones. You gave up a family, a homeland. Most of us never had that choice. Heradion, though a he has a family who loves him, a woman who hopes for his safe return. He tries to hide those ties, maybe so we won't doubt his devotion, but he has them."

"Good," Asharre said after a moment's reflection. "It will give him a reason to want to return to Cailan. Wanting helps, when the way is not easy."

"I get the uncomfortable feeling I'm being talked about." Heradion came down the stairs, rubbing his eyes. He'd washed the old blood from his hair, but new blood had seeped in and crusted overnight, and he continued to treat his left leg gingerly. Nonetheless, he looked alert, almost cheerful.

"You're going back to Cailan," Evenna told him. She stepped away from the stool and began emptying the pouches from her herb bag, counting her supplies and checking their condition with the precision of long practice. Oralia had done the same thing almost nightly on the road. Asharre looked away, remembering.

"Am I now." Heradion peeked into the kettle, then covered it again with a grimace. "No breakfast? That is a sin. Well, while I find something more solid than tea to eat, perhaps you can explain to me why I'd do that."

"Someone has to tell the High Solaros what we've found. That someone is you. You're the best rider among us, so you have the best odds of making it through the passes. Asharre and I will go to Shadefell and look for survivors from Carden Vale."

"If there are any," Heradion said doubtfully. He replaced the kettle of oversteeped tea with fresh water. "I don't mind the ridea"really, there's nothing I'd love better than to bounce up a mountain on horseback while my arse slowly turns to a block of icea"but I must confess I'm not thrilled at the prospect of fighting maelgloth alone. My expertise with the sword awes all the ladies, but these monsters don't seem as easily impressed."

"You won't be fighting them," Evenna said, opening a tiny ceramic bottle and sniffing the tincture it held. "You'll be running. The maelgloth don't leave the town, and they don't come out by day." She exchanged an uneasy glance with Asharre. "They seem to be kept away by that variant sunburst we've been seeing too. Maybe. If they do come, you might try it. Anyway, if you leave soon, you'll be out of the Vale by nightfall."

"Well." Heradion gazed into the hearth, holding his palms toward the flames. "Nothing to hunt, no water but what I carry, monsters at my back, and madness in the mountains. Why, that's hardly any challenge at all. Are you sure you wouldn't like to cripple my horse first? Maybe tie my hands, give me a blindfold? Just to keep me from getting complacent, you understand."

"You'll go?"

"Of course I'll go." He looked up, grinned. "I could never refuse two beautiful ladies."

"I'm glad to hear it," Evenna said crisply. "Best go as soon as you've eaten. No sense wasting daylight."

They saw him off after a breakfast of boiled millet and honey. A night in the inn had calmed the gray mare enough to take a saddle, and the animal seemed glad to leave. Asharre stood in the cold, watching them, until they were out of sight behind greening trees and rocky walls. Then she went to help Evenna build Falcien's pyre.

A dule tree stood outside the crumbling walls north of Carden Vale. Under its rope-scarred branches, the earth was bare and blackened. Most towns had a communal burning ground, and this one was little different from the others Asharre had seen. A bark-roofed wall of firewood, spotted with small white mushrooms, ran alongside the pyre pit. Soot flecked the wood and sat between the logs like little drifts of black snow.

Asharre did most of the work, arranging the firewood in a cross-hatched pyramid. A proper Celestian pyre involved incense and prayers while laying the logs in ceremonial patterns, but Asharre didn't know the prayers or the patterns, and if she made any mistakes in her ignorance, Evenna did not correct them. The Illuminer hardly seemed to notice what was going on; she often fell into fugues or started at sounds Asharre didn't hear. The sigrir wondered how badly her companion was suffering for her sleepless night.

By midday the pyre was ready. They laid Falcien atop the logs, still shrouded in his altar cloth, and Evenna scattered handfuls of herbs and flowers over his body. Dried chamomile, for peaceful sleep. Dandelions, yellow and ubiquitous as sunlight. There were others whose names and significance Asharre did not recognize. After tossing the last sprigs over the logs, Evenna doused them with lamp oil and thrust a torch into the pyre's belly.

The fire was slow to start, but once it caught, it burned with a sudden red fury.

They watched it burn until sunset. Several times the wind turned, stinging Asharre's eyes with smoke and bringing a nauseating wash of decay from afar. The smell of Carden Vale's corruption, she thought. It stank of infected wounds and dead things rotting in mud, of sulfur and old urine and mold. But Evenna showed no reaction to the smell and never stepped back from the smoke, and Asharre's pride would let her do no less. She ignored it, at least outwardly, and refused to blink at the windblown ash.

After the first few times it was easy; by dusk she hardly noticed it at all. Weariness helped make her stoic. At sunset Evenna prayed by the smoldering remains of the pyre. After she finished, the two of them walked back to the Rosy Maiden to wait out the night.

The town closed bleak and empty around them. Even its ghosts seemed to have deserted it; Asharre could not imagine that the loneliest specter would linger inside the houses that leaned over weed-choked gardens and pitted streets. Shadows filled the broken windows, and the wind moaned across the clattering roofs in a haunting echo of the maelgloth's cries. She gritted her teeth and willed herself not to hurry toward the inn.

It was a relief to shut the Rosy Maiden's doors against the dark. Asharre couldn't pretend that the inn was safea"not with Falcien's blood staining the commons and the stench of death seeping in from the stablesa"but it was better than facing the night and the creatures that hunted it.

The sigrir stayed up long past midnight, staring out the windows with a blanket around her shoulders. Sometimes she thought she saw misshapen figures darting through the streets, but they could not reach her and she did not fear them. Not as much as she dreaded the morning.

In the morning they went to Shadefell.

13.

"She wants Ang'duradh," Malentir said. "She intends to reclaim it in her husband's name, for his glory and the triumph of Ang'arta. When our work is done, the Lord Commander will lead his armies here, and the Baozites will regain a foothold in a part of the world they lost six hundred years ago." The Thornlord folded his hands into his sleeves, regarding Bitharn and Kelland in turn. "I tell you this so that there will be no mistake about my goals or interests in this matter.

"My task, before my capture, was to learn the cause of Ang'duradh's fall and find a way to retake the fortress. I'd made substantial progress before events intervened. Thanks to your gracious intercession, I have the opportunity to finish my task and atone for my failure. I am in your debt." There was a hint of sarcasm in that, but only a hint, Kelland thought.

They sat in the common room of a farmer's house outside Carden Vale. Two Celestians and a Thornlord from Ang'arta, seated around a white oak table like old friends. Hard to believe that the moment was real, but there they were.

There was no trace of the farmer or his family. Malentir had sworn that he had not killed them when he brought Kelland and Bitharn to the place. His sparrow spotted the house from afar, he said; its isolation, coupled with its relative proximity to the town, made it ideal for the three of them to use while they investigated Carden Vale.

Kelland couldn't argue with the second part of that, but he wondered about the first. It seemed an improbable stroke of luck that they should stumble upon an empty house precisely when and where it was needed. It was a rich housea"incongruously rich, given the poverty of the towna"and it hadn't been empty for long. Mice had barely touched the larders, and the footpaths leading back to town were in good repair. The farmer and his family might not be dead, but their disappearance certainly seemed convenient.

He'd ask Bitharn about it when they were alone. Her talent for tracking might uncover clues that his own eyes couldn't find. For now, that mystery had to wait. There was another that needed unraveling first.

"The Spider suggested to me that we might share some interest in Carden Vale," Kelland said. "She showed me a woman her servants had captured in Cailan. Her name was Jora." It was important to remind himself, and them, of that. Jora had been an ordinary woman, with a name and people who loved her, before evil blighted her soul. She deserved to be remembered that way.

"Jora was a poisoned," the knight continued. "I felt something in her, corrupting her heart and mind. A touch of evil. Inhuman. Divine." He avoided the word "Maolite"; if that was the enemy they faced, he wanted the Thorn to confirm it without prompting. "It terrified her. She mumbled things about a *nightmare waking' and an *old death,' and she claimed that she, or people she had been helping, were holding it back somehow. She said that they needed children to do it. *Shapers,' she called them.

"The Spider said that Jora had been kidnapping children in Cailan and sending them back to this town. She suggested that our interests might align in Carden Vale. She did not tell me why. Now you say that the Spider's interest lies in reclaiming Duradh Mal. I fail to see how these things are related, or why it would be in my interest, or my temple's, to help you do that."

"It's the same thing, isn't it?" Bitharn turned toward the Thornlord. The morning light shone in her hair, turning it to a river of soft gold and amber. In profile, Kelland could see the faint lines that exhaustion had drawn on her face, but he thought she had never been more beautiful. Those lines were part of the price she'd paid for him. "Whatever took hold of Jora was the same thing that corrupted the boy I saw. It's the same power that prevents you from taking Duradh Mal."

"It is," Malentir said.

"What is it?" Kelland asked.

The Thornlord rose and paced across the room. His steps were soundless on the brightly colored rag rugs that covered the farmer's floor. "The last visitors to Ang'duradh were a band of monks known to history only as the Gray Brothers. The Baozites were never much for record keeping, and after six hundred years, you can imagine how little is left to mark the Brothers' passing. Calantyr was not yet founded, and the local lords were puffed-up bandits perched on piles of rocks. Few of them could read a word. I spent years trying to retrace the monks' steps, hoping to find some indication of who they were and how a handful of wandering pilgrims laid Ang'duradh low. I did not expect to find much.

"And yet, to my surprise, they were remembered. Wherever they'd passed, local folklore was full of dire tales: faceless, gray-cowled wraiths who stole wandering children, babies born as monsters, men and women who became ravening murderers after being bewitched by evil spells. Common stories all, but on the Gray Brothers' path they had unique details that echoed, however faintly, of truth. There was nothing directly useful to me in those stories a but much that corroborated my suspicions."

Bitharn's expression had sharpened, as it did when she was trying to puzzle out a confusing trail. She sat up a little straighter. "If the records held nothing, how could you know where they passed?"

"The records on the road held nothing," Malentir corrected her. "There is one account of the Gray Brothers that survives. Blessed Erinai of the Illuminers accompanied the expedition sent to Duradh Mal when the Celestians realized that the fortress had fallen. It is thanks to her journals that we know anything about the monks. Her writings are kept at the temple in Aluvair. I studied them at length."

"Wearing another face, I imagine," Kelland said.

The Thornlord smirked, but did not slow his pacing. "Several. I was there for some time. One would hardly have lasted long enough. In any case, through Blessed Erinai's writings I was able to trace much of the Gray Brothers' course north from what is now Calantyr into the Irontoothsa"and, ultimately, to Ang'duradh. Erinai believed, as I did, that the monks were corrupted by Maol. But this left a mystery, which neither she nor I was able to solve: how, if they were Maolites, were the Gray Brothers able to overwhelm the fortress?

"Servants of the Mad God seldom have much power. Few worship Maol of their own free will. Only the most degenerate are drawn to him, and fools of that sort make poor vessels for divinity. They destroy themselves before accomplishing anything worthwhile. Most Maolitesa"the unwilling onesa"do not even have that. They are consumed by their god; they stagger about like fever victims, delirious and doomed, and the only danger they present is that they might spread their contagion before they die.

"Given the limited power possessed by most Maolites, it puzzled me that they were able to overwhelm Ang'duradh so completely. It is true that most Baozites have nothing of the god in them, just as the peasants who flock to your chapels are not touched by Celestia, but Maolites die like any other men, and Baozites are very good at killing. Even if the Gray Brothers possessed some real power, Baoz still had priestesses in that age, and they should have been able to deal with Maol's Blessed easily. They did not. They died.