"It was perplexing, but it could not be an immediate danger. Those who sealed the ruins, after all, had not suffered the same fate. When I was unable to learn anything more from indirect study, I opened the seals. Carefully, of course. Very carefully. I was better prepared than the Baozites who had been caught by surprise centuries ago, but I had no desire to be taken unawares by Duradh Mal."

"What seals?" Bitharn asked.

"Most of Duradh Mal was sealed by Celestia's Blessed soon after its fall," Kelland told her. "The Knights of the Sun and the Illuminers worked in tandem to craft those wards. After centuries of Baozite rule, the fortress was a locus of the ironlords' power. We destroyed what we could and sealed the rest to prevent innocents from stumbling inside a or people like the Thorns from trying to use it."

"You did," Malentir agreed. "To your credit, it was not easy to determine the pattern and unravel the weavings, and there were some moderately challenging traps hidden among them. But they were never meant to guard against us, and any wall can be broken, given time and the right tools."

"If you're so terribly clever, why don't you have Ang'duradh already?" Bitharn interrupted. Kelland was grateful for her retort; he was too unsettled to think of his own. What the Thornlord said was true: they hadn't considered that the Baozites might work in concert with another power to unravel the wards. The Spider had been sitting in her tower for the better part of a decade, weaving webs on Ang'arta's behalf, and they hadn't thought to change the seals on Duradh Mal. He never had, at least, and it seemed that the High Solaros hadn't either.

Who could have foreseen that the Baozites would want to revisit such a disastrous defeat, though? Or that they would find a way to reopen it? They fought wars; they weren't scholars of dead magic.

"I was not the only one interested in the ruins," Malentir said. "There was a fool from the Fourfold House visiting Aluvair at the same time that I was. He, too, was interested in Blessed Erinai's journals. His name was Gethel. A feeble old man, half dead by the looks of him. I considered him of no account. That might have been a mistake.

"Shortly after I unsealed Ang'duradh, something a escaped. I dealt with it, but your comrades came upon me unexpectedly while I did. That distraction resulted in my visit to Heaven's Needle, and I was away longer than I had intended.

"While I was detained, it appears, Gethel came to Carden Vale and blundered into the unsealed fortress." The Thornlord paused. A troubled look flickered across his face, and he folded his arms, pressing his wrists over his elbows. "I believe that he stumbled upon whatever the Gray Brothers used to kill Ang'duradh, and may have loosed it into Carden Vale. I suspect, too, that Gethel might have caused, or encouraged, the distraction that led to my absence. If so, he manipulated your people as well. That is why my mistress said our interests aligned. We share an enemy in this. Whatever it was that Gethel released, we all want to stop it."

"If you hadn't broken the sealsa"" Kelland began.

"If, if." Malentir waved a hand dismissively. Barbed metal glinted in his sleeve. "Useless to wish for what might have been. If your fellows had not delayed me, I would have been able to stop him. But they did, and it is done. What matters is not what has happened, but what will.

"My mistress instructed that you should have time to decide your course. I will leave you to discuss that while I tend to other matters. Upon my return, we will begin our work or part ways, as you choose." He inclined his head, mockingly courteous, and left.

"I'm for leaving," Bitharn said as soon as the Thorn was gone. She leaned forward, frowning. "I don't trust him, I don't like him, and he's said he's after his own interests here. The only reason I dealt with the Thorns was to set you free. That's done. It's time for us to cut ourselves loose of their webs. Let him walk into Duradh Mal on his own."

"I can't." Kelland wanted to reach across the table for her hands. She was so close. A few inches. An arm's reach.

Easier if it had been a thousand leagues. He dropped his own hands into his lap, locking the fingers together. "I can't leave them to suffer, Bitharn. The people of Carden Vale, the children stolen from Cailan a you know my oaths. I realize the Thorns are taking advantage of that, but it doesn't change their need. I would be unworthy of Celestia's blessing if I turned my back on them."

"You wouldn't be turning your back on them. You'd be sending to Cailan for help." She searched his face. Her eyes were wide and luminous and frightened; his heart ached that he couldn't give her the answer she wanted. "We've been dancing to Ang'arta's tune every step of this sorry dance. I want an end to it. I betrayed our temple to have you free. Was that for nothing?"

"No," he said quietly. "But I have to stay. I'm sorry."

"It isn't fair. Your oaths bind you. Theirs don't. They'll always have the advantage." She pulled a hand away and dashed it across her eyes, not quite quickly enough to hide the welling tears. "I only just got you back."

"I know," Kelland said. "I'm grateful for that. I don't know if I will ever be able to say how much."

Bitharn let out a shaky breath. "Then why are you letting them drag you back into their schemes?"

"Because their schemes don't matter. Put them out of your mind. If it were only you and I here, what would the right course be?" He reached out tentatively to touch her wrist, willing her to understand and to forgive him. "The evil in Duradh Mal is clear. I don't want to help the Thorns any more than you do, but I can't leave people to suffer because I'm afraid trying to stop it might give Ang'arta some advantage."

She rubbed her eyes again, scowling. "They matter. They'll betray you again as soon as they have what they want, and what they want is bad enough on its own. If the Baozites had a foothold in these mountainsa""

"Then what? Yes, they'll command the passes. Yes, they'll have the valley locked behind rings of iron, just as they did in Ang'duradh's day. But the world has changed since then. No one lives here, Bitharn, apart from the people in Carden Vale, and we are here to help them escape. Who will the Baozites dominate? The Jenje Plains have been desolate for centuries; the windlords' kingdoms are turned to dust and blown away. We stand to the south. Us, and Calantyr strong behind us. We can keep them safely contained in the mountains."

"You hope," Bitharn muttered.

Kelland smiled. He couldn't help it; her tone was exactly the one he'd heard so often when he'd embarked on some foolish scheme as a child, and, later, whenever he'd followed his heart rather than his head during their travels. It meant that she was resigned to his latest crusade a and would guard his back as he plunged into it. "All plans are founded on hope. The good ones are tempered with caution."

"No wonder I'm not convinced this is a good one."

She seldom was. That, too, made him smile. "Why not?"

"Maybe the Celestians can keep them behind the mountainsa"maybe. At what cost? What if you're wrong, and they fail? What happens to us, long before that's a concern?" Bitharn tucked a loose strand of amber gold hair behind an ear. "I don't like it. You can't trust the Thorns."

"I don't. It's one of the reasons I'm so glad to have you." He hadn't meant to say thata"but, having begun, Kelland plunged onward. "I shouldn't have left you in Tarne Crossing." He'd relived that day a thousand times in the dungeons of Ang'arta. Cold winter light on his shield, the breath brittle as ice in his lungs, the crimson spatter of blood on the snow. The shard of doubt in his soul, more lethal than any blade. All Kelland had to do was close his eyes and the memories were there, vivid as the day he'd lived them.

"Kelland, Ia""

He took her hand, silently cursing his earlier hesitation. Her fingers clasped his, holding on so tightly that he felt a heartbeat pulsing through them. Hers or his, he couldn't tell. "I need to say this. Please. I shouldn't have left you in Tarne Crossing. That morning, the only thing I could think of was the baker we'd found, and what the Thornlady had done to him. How badly he died. I couldn't let that happen to you. I thought, if I went out alone, I might win and I might lose, but either way you would be safe. It was a stupid, I know it was stupid, but I was so afraid.

"I failed because I tried to confront her alone, and because I was weakened by doubt." He drew a breath. "What I am trying to say, clumsily, is that I need you with me. You make me stronger. You guard against the dangers I don't see. I was a fool to forget that. By trying to keep you out of harm's way, I only weakened myself and forced you into dealing with the Thorns. I am sorry. So sorry. And so very grateful to you."

"Thank you," she whispered. Tears were falling freely down her face, but she did not wipe them away.

They sat in silence for a time. Kelland didn't know what she was thinking; he struggled with his own turmoil, trying to find the words to bring some order to the confusion he'd wrestled with since leaving Ang'arta.

"Before she let me go," he said at last, "the Spider told me that Bysshelios was righta"that chastity is not a mandate from our goddess."

Bitharn's nose wrinkled immediately. She pulled away a little, green-flecked eyes narrowing. "Do you believe her?"

"I don't know," Kelland confessed. "But I don't think it matters." He'd spent a long while pondering it, and although he had never found a clear way out of the maze of those thoughts, he'd fumbled toward something like an answer.

Bysshelios, himself an Illuminer, had claimed that the Bright Lady was not as austere as the high priests claimed, and that her Blessed were permitted the joys of coupling. He had demonstrated this himself, publicly and graphically, several times; at the time the episodes had been well documented by scandalized witnesses. If their accounts were to be believed, he'd kept his powers afterward. Several of his adherents were Illuminers who had defected from the faith to join his schism. They, too, broke their oaths of chastitya"and retained their divine gifts. For a time. As the years went by, Bysshelios granted himself ever-greater indulgences and privileges: he claimed that no wedding was sanctified in Celestia's eyes unless he had lain with the bride himself first, and that no healing could be given unless the patient, or someone on the patient's behalf, made a similar tithe to his faith. The tales of his abuses became so numerous and so vile that the Dome of the Sun could no longer overlook them, and finally the heresy had to be stamped out with sword and flame.

But he'd kept his magic to the end.

The histories taught at the Dome of the Sun argued that Bysshelios had not held Celestia's power, but had shifted allegiances to another goda"perhaps Anvhad, whose ambit was treachery and deceptiona"and received magic that mimicked the Bright Lady's in order to mislead the commonfolk and cause a bloody rift in their faith. Despite the Spider's claims, Kelland still believed that was true.

Perhaps it wasn't. Bysshelios might have kept Celestia's magic despite his sins. For Kelland, however, it didn't matter. He had sworn his oath. He was bound by it. The world was ever shifting and uncertain; the reasons he had been given might not be true. But temptation led to heresy, and he was a Knight of the Sun. He would keep his word.

"I cannot be more to you than I have been," he said to Bitharn, still holding her hand. "Not while I serve as a Sun Knight."

"Buta""

"I can only ask you to wait." He searched her eyes, hoping she would understand, could give him even more after all she'd already done. "When my work is done, I'll step down from the order. Thena"then we might have more."

Bitharn looked down, took her hand back, turned her own sun medallion over on its chain. Inhaled, a little unsteadily, trying to hide whatever she felt. "How long?"

"I don't know."

"A number. Give me a number, and I'll decide."

"Five years." He hesitated, shying away from the weight of that request. "It might be less. It won't be more."

"Five years." Bitharn nodded. "Fine. But if you ask for more than that a" She forced a tremulous laugh. "Well, then you had better pray the Thorns drag you back to their dungeons instead of leaving you to my mercy."

"Devoutly." He circled the table, gathering her in his arms so that he could press a kiss to the top of her head. Her hair smelled of pine and new leaves.

"Good," she mumbled. There was a silence. Kelland kept his face buried in her hair, hoping the moment might stretch into eternity. Hoping, against all rational thought, that it might lead to more.

It did not. Bitharn pulled away, gently but insistently. "I thought you'd be angry when you learned what I'd done. I thought you'd be furious. I betrayed our temple, Kelland. I had to. They wouldn't help. The High Solaros was sympathetic a but all he offered me was prayer and tears, and I'd had my fill of those on the ride to Cailan. He wouldn't help."

"He couldn't have." In the dungeons Kelland had had the luxury of infinite time to consider that problem. It was, he had concluded, impossible for the High Solaros, or any figure of authority in the temple, to negotiate for his release. Ransoming him from the Thorns would only have encouraged them to capture other Blessed. The wiser course was to turn their backs on him and show Ang'arta that they would not be manipulated so easily.

At the time, he had believed that meant he would languish in his cell until he died. He hadn't considered how bullheadedly stubborn Bitharn could bea"or how brave.

"I know," she said. "I can't do it again. Please don't make me."

The simplicity of her plea cut him more deeply than anything else could have. She would do it again, if she had to. She would dismantle a mountain with her bare hands for his sake. And, knowing that, he knew with equal certainty that he could never put such a burden on her again.

"I won't," Kelland promised, for himself as much as for her. "Whatever else happens."

"I'd be more confident about that if we had some inkling of what we were facing." She dried her tears and stood, red eyed but resolute. "Something better than *nightmares,' anyway."

That brought back something he'd puzzled over earlier. "What happened to the family in this house?"

"Did Malentir kill them, you mean?" Bitharn shook her head as she walked toward the house's larder. "I'd wondered that too. I don't think he did. The kitchen garden's gone to weeds, but there are a few rows of unpulled carrots and turnips. I found barrels of cider laid up in the cellar, none tapped, and dried apple pulp near the stables, none eaten. To me, that says these people left the house around the end of autumn. Maybe early winter. They didn't use any of their stores. That means they were gone before we left Heaven's Needlea"so Malentir couldn't have killed them, nor could any of the other Thorns, unless their prophecies are a good deal more specific than we've been led to believe. Something else drove them out."

"What?"

"Maybe they noticed their neighbors were turning into monsters and rotting from the inside out." Bitharn raised a tawny eyebrow. "That would get me on the road right quick."

"Fair enough." Kelland followed her to the larder, looking over her shoulder as Bitharn rummaged through sacks of dried beans and barley. She twisted a bulb of garlic off one of the hanging ropes that crowded the ceiling, then dug up a fat yellow onion and a handful of long-whiskered carrots from a burlap-covered box in the corner.

"They left without taking their food," he observed from the doorway.

"Any of it, as far as I can tell. It's peculiar." She brushed past him, emptying her finds onto a table near the kitchen hearth. "This time of year, you'd be lucky to scrape together as much as a dandelion salad by foraging, and only a fool would trust to being able to buy all his meals along the road. So why did they leave all this behind? Let's say they abandon the servants to fend for themselves. That leaves the husband, the wife, and at least three children. Too many to support by scavenging. It's strange, too, that we've seen no sign of the servants. A house this wealthy surely had some. If they didn't go with the family, they should have stayed in the house to keep it safe from bandits."

"Or us," Kelland added.

"Or us." Bitharn picked up a paring knife and scraped off the carrots' whiskers. "If they did go with the household, then it's strange they left the pantry so well stocked, and stranger yet that they didn't take their valuables when they left. Nobody's rich enough to abandon their silver to thieves."

It was clear that Bitharn didn't want to revisit their earlier conversation. Kelland considered trying to help with the cooking, but that tenseness in her shoulders meant she wanted to be alone. "I'll see what I can find."

What he found was precious little. Bitharn was right; whoever had lived here, they'd left all their worldly treasures behind. The family silver lay untouched inside cedarwood drawers. A carafe of cut Amrali glass, worth more than most farmers could hope to earn in two years, stood on a side table between two dust-mantled goblets. The goblets were of hammered silver, edged in gold and set with tourmalines in blue and stormy sea green; they were better suited to a king's table than to this rustic house.

How had a farmer outside Carden Vale come to possess such treasures? Why hadn't he taken them when he fled? One of those cups would buy passage on a riverboat to Cailan. Two would get most captains to journey up the Windhurst to fetch them, even if there was some curse on the town.

Before Kelland could puzzle his way to an answer, he saw an even more perplexing artwork.

On the wall behind the carafe hung a towering painting in an ornate frame of mahogany and brass. The metal had been burnished to a golden sheen. At the top, the wavy rays of a Celestian sunburst formed a gilded crown; near the bottom, the frame's dark wood was carved into curling waves, their tips capped with mother-of-pearl. Cascades of sunbursts ran down either side of the frame. Their rays were flattened, spoonlike, on the ends.

The frame was so ornate that Kelland didn't immediately notice the picture it housed. The painting was surprisingly drab: a night sky rendered in simple sweeps of blue and black, with occasional slashes of silver to represent starlight or clouds. Silver and brass stars, fashioned of sharp-edged metal, had been punched through the painted canvas.

The knight recognized their pattern at once. The metal stars formed the Celestial Chorus. That constellation, the first to rise each night, crossed the sky and greeted the sun each morning. It was a popular pattern among the Knights of the Sun. To them, the Celestial Chorus represented virtuous men and women who kept faith alive through the world's dark hours. Every night the Celestial Chorus' stars burned bright, scattered and tiny though they were, and every morning the sun came to relieve them, restoring light and warmth to the world.

Outside their order, however, the Celestial Chorus was little known. The constellation was not nearly as infamous as the Spire Crown sacred to Kliasta, nor was it as useful as the Wayfinder's Star. It was an obscure symbol of a faith that had nothing else to do with the night, and it was vaguely unsettling to find it adorning a painting outside Carden Vale. The stars were slightly misaligned, their positions wrong in the sky and relative to each other, but if there was any astrologer's significance to the change, it escaped him.

"That's an odd frame," Bitharn said, wiping her hands dry on her shirt as she left the kitchen.

"It's a bit excessive," Kelland agreed.

"Not just that. Look here. There's blood on its edge." She crouched next to him, tracing the edges of three bladelike stars. They hung near the bottom, over the wooden waves. Leaning closer, Kelland saw crusts of old brown blood on the metal a and something else, too, tucked behind the stars.

Bitharn saw it as well. Reaching to the back of the frame, she teased out a small latch and tugged it. One by one the bloodied stars split and parted. A jeweled handle emerged from between them, offering itself to the Celestians.

It was made of some bright white metal, richer than silver. White gold, perhaps, or platinum. Citrines sparkled on the handle like fat drops of sunlight, alternating with rings of moonstones that shone with a ghostly gray luster. A last ring of tiny, near-black rubies twinkled at its base. The metal was scarred and misshapen beneath those stones, as if the jewels had been moved and welded back into place by a clumsy hand.

"I wonder what it does," Bitharn mused. "Maybe there's a compartment hidden behind the painting."

Kelland hesitated. A premonition of dread tickled the back of his neck. He couldn't say why, but he did not want that handle turned. "Let's leave it."

She looked at him quizzically. "Aren't you curious to see what it does?"

"No." He was being foolish, and knew it. There was no reason for his fear. Still, Kelland could not shake the sense that there was some hidden danger in the painting. It was a subtle unease, like the jangling of warning bells from a town on the horizon. No immediate threat, perhaps nothing that needed to concern him at all a and yet only a fool would ignore it. "It's a curiosity, to be sure, but I don't see how it helps us. I'll see what else I can find."

Upstairs he found most of the rooms neat and disused a save one, which had been boarded up at some point in the past and then, more recently, smashed open. The entrance to that room was concealed behind the back wall of a linen closet; Kelland would never have found it if someone else hadn't splintered the wooden paneling and strewn the linens and their sachets all across the hall.

Through the hole smashed into the closet, he saw a tiny, filthy bedroom. Books piled over the bed and slid down in yellow-leafed avalanches; loose papers buried the floor. Open inkwells sat on every flat surface, many with black-gummed quills slanted inside like arrows caught in dry corpses. Here and there metal twinkled: knives, paperweights, forks and knives left lying on plates that mice had long ago picked clean.

Holy signs too. There were dozens of amulets in the room. Sunbursts, nightingales, the Kliastan chain of thorns. Some of them were new; they dangled over the splintered closet entrance like the strands of a beaded curtain, chiming gently as Kelland ducked under them to enter. Inside, more rested atop stacks of paper or hung from nails on the walls. Three small windows overlooked the kitchen gardens on the far side of the room, and every one of their diamond-shaped panes had a sunburst etched crudely upon it by a shaking hand.

Dust lay thick on the bedroom's books and papers. At the center was a vanity that someone had been using as a desk, and the materials there seemed to have been more recently read. The dust was lighter on them.

Kelland brushed aside a leaf of wrinkled parchment to reveal the age-cracked tome beneath. The Flame at Midnight, it read, Being a Study of Magic Without the Gods. The gilt on the letters had peeled away, and there was a gash in one corner that let a few pages peep through.

The knight frowned. The title was vaguely familiar; if he'd paid more attention to his history lessons at the Dome of the Sun, he might have recognized it. At the time, though, those dry lectures about dead cults and competing theologies had been an unwanted interruption in his swordwork.

No use regretting it. He moved to the next book, a thin treatise bound in shabby red leather. Volane on Enchantments. Beside it, a six-legged dragon reared on the silvered cover of Auberand and the Winter Queen, a story he recalled from his childhood. It wasn't a long story, though, and the book that bore its title was hundreds of pages thick.

Kelland lifted the book and flipped it open. The pages were beautifully lettered, with gilt capitals and illuminations after each chapter, but someone had scribbled notations between each line. The scrawled notes were written in a tiny, crabbed hand, slanted sharply to the right as if the writer was in a rush to spill out the words. The book had been a work of art, but whoever had written on it had defaced it as thoroughly as if he'd taken a knife to the pages.

Kelland turned to the beginning, wondering what might have possessed someone to react so vehemently to a children's story. Before he could begin reading, however, a scream sounded from downstairs.

Bitharn.

He dropped the book and flew down the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. As he rounded the common room, he saw Bitharn standing by the kitchen hearth, white faced. Steaming barley and broth made a spattered arc on the floor by her feet. A wooden spoon hovered over the kettle, snared by a tendril of solid shadow.

"It's nothing," Bitharn said hurriedly. "I was startled, that's all. I'm not hurt. There's no danger."

"Untrue." Malentir stepped out of the pantry, seemingly unruffled. Cool air and the scent of smoke clung to him; he had just returned from whatever he'd been doing outside. "You nearly died. You might have thanked me for saving you, but I've learned not to expect gratitude."

"I was just tasting the stew."

"It would have been the last thing you tasted." The Thornlord made a small gesture, hidden within his sleeves, and the spoon clattered to the floor. "Except, perhaps, for blood."

"Explain yourself," Kelland said sharply, a hand on his sword hilt.