They left Cailan two weeks before Greenseed, the festival of first planting. It was early for travel, but the two young Blessed were eager to begin their annovair, and Asharre, once she'd made the decision to go, was eager to leave her unwanted memories behind.

The ride gave her time to take the measure of her companions. Evenna was a soft-spoken beauty who carried herself with a solemnity far beyond her seventeen years. The young Blessed had blue-black hair that she plaited and looped around her head in a healer's halo, a style among the Illuminers that dated back to Alyeta the Redeemer. Oralia had worn her hair the same way. She had moved with the same quiet grace, too, and her clothes carried the same fragrance of wormwood and wintermint, anise and aloe. Healer's herbs. The perfume of ghosts.

Asharre tended to avoid her. It was no fault of Evenna's, but it was too easy to catch the girl in the corner of her eye and forget, for an instant, that it was not Oralia riding beside her.

Falcien's company was easier to bear. The other Illuminer had the small, wiry build of an Ardasi knife fighter. His coloring was southern as well: olive skin, eyes and hair of a rich, mutable color between brown and black. His accent was pure Cailan, though, and he laughed easily with the others about things that had happened in the city when they were young. He had never been an outsider. Not like her.

Her companions gave her space. Sometimes Asharre caught them looking at her scarred face, or at the two-handed caractan she wore across her back, but they kept their questions to themselves. The caractan was thicker and heavier than the longswords favored by the Knights of the Sun. Though it had an edge and Asharre kept hers sharp, it was a weapon made to crush rather than cut. It seldom saw use outside the White Seas clans, for none but Ingvall's children had the strength or stature to wield it effectively. Still, strange as it must have been to them, neither the Blessed nor Heradion asked about her sword.

She was content to let them wonder. The ride settled her spirits, allowing her a tranquility she hadn't felt since Oralia's death. It wasn't until Heaven's Needle dwindled to a sparkling mote on the horizon that Asharre realized how much Cailan had been her sister's city. There was hardly a handspan at the Dome of the Sun that did not carry a freight of memory. Away from it, at last, she could see the world with her own eyes.

It was more beautiful than she remembered. Asharre had never been on the road without a certain wariness, if not outright fear. Her first journey had been away from their homeland, guarding her sister through hostile territory, toward the unknown. She knew when they left that they would never return. Afterward she had traveled only as Oralia's protector, and while they had seldom been in real danger after that first year, she had never let down her guard.

Now she did, a little, and looked at the world unfolding.

They rode past untilled fields blanketed by yellow straw and wrinkled, frost-kissed leaves. Ancient stone walls and dark green hedgerows separated one farmer's land from the next; gnarled apple trees and pollarded willows dotted the hills between. Mastiffs barked at them from farmhouse yards, while small, timid deer darted through the trees.

The land grew rockier and the hills steeper as they continued. Village walls changed from simple boundaries to solid fortifications of mounded earth and stakes. Then those, too, receded in the distance as the earth became too stony to support farmers. Two weeks north of Cailan, all Asharre could find to mark human habitation were thin brown goats cropping at weeds between the rocks.

The last town worthy of the name was Balnamoine. It marked the informal boundary of Calantyr; though the villages and mining towns to the north belonged to the realm on maps, in truth the king's rule ended at Balnamoine. The mountain people kept to their own ways.

That might, Asharre reflected, be why the High Solaros had sent two of his Blessed to serve their annovair in Carden Vale. Their presence would be a light touch of civilization, a gentler means of bringing the mountain villages into the fold than sending a company of the king's soldiers to force their allegiance.

Perhaps. The politics of northern Calantyr weren't her concern. Her only duty was seeing the Celestians safely to Carden Vale. Ahead, the Irontooths solidified from a misty band across the horizon to a towering wall. The mountains' slopes were rough and gray as battle-scarred steel, their peaks so white they vanished into the clouds.

Evenna drew them aside as they came to the gates of Balnamoine. "I have an old friend here," she told them. "An old patient, really. Nessore Bassinos. He's a merchant who does some trade with the mountain villages. I thought it might be helpful to talk to someone who knew the lay of the land, so I sent him a letter before we left Cailan. We have a standing invitation to dinner."

"How's his cook?" Falcien asked.

"Better than you," Heradion said. "If he offered us boiled boot leather and fried mud, I'd consider it a welcome respite from what you've been serving up."

Asharre shook her head, amused despite herself. "Where is his house?"

Evenna showed them. It was a large dwelling, and Nessore Bassinos had not stinted on its ornaments. Both the balustrades flanking the great doors and the doors themselves were marked with the Celestian sunburst and looked like new additions. The earth around the house was rutted by builders' wagons and trampled by their boots. Come summer, the house's gardens would cover the damage, but for now it was still raw.

A servant greeted them as they rode up. An old woman with a snow white scarf tied over her hair in a fashion that had gone out of date in Cailan generations ago, she fussed over Evenna like a mother embracing a wayward child. Asharre was glad to hand her horse's reins to the stablehand who came for them, and gladder when the old woman offered them the use of Bassinos' baths.

The merchant had not one bathhouse but two, one for the men and one for the women, that faced each other across a portico of yellow sandstone. Tiny windows near the ceiling pierced their curved walls. A garden lay behind them, and a chapel past that.

The chapel wasn't new, but several of its windows were. Their stained glass sparkled against mastic as pristine as fresh snow. Other windows were boarded over, their old glass not yet replaced. The holy sunburst in the largest of the new windows had an unusual design; its eight wavy rays were all of a size, instead of being longer at the cardinal points and shorter between, and the tip of each one was rounded like an onion's bulb. For some reason they made Asharre think of open palms reaching for something. Enlightenment, perhaps? One of the Blessed might know. She brushed the thought aside and went in for her bath.

The bathhouse was extraordinary in its luxury. It held basins of hot and cold water, three kinds of scented soap, a goldenwood brush with boar's-hair bristles, and decorative trinkets whose uses baffled her. Evenna came in as she was examining a sculpture of a dancing woman holding a bowl. Putting the tool aside, Asharre filled a bucket from the steaming basin.

As she sluiced water over her head, she caught Evenna looking sidelong at the scars that striped her ribs. That, too, was something Asharre had taught herself to ignore, but something in the younger woman's face made her pause.

Their eyes met. Evenna had the grace to blush. Asharre did not think it was because they were unclothed; a healer would be used to that, just as she was. Modesty died quickly on the battlefield.

The first words out of the girl's mouth confirmed her suspicions. "I'm sorry," Evenna said, still blushing. "It's just a I've never seen so many scars on a woman."

Asharre grunted. She supposed her stripes and welts, earned across a decade and a half spent fighting one thing or another, might be startling to a stranger. Over the years, her skin had become a tapestry of old hurts. "Lucky for them."

"Are they a did you a those aren't from Oralia's annovair, are they?"

Asharre shook her head, understanding the girl's trepidation at last. This was the first time Evenna would have been so far from home or temple, and the tales of the mountain people could be frightening to someone who did not know the truth.

"No," Asharre said. "Most of them a the first man who taught me how to hold a sword was Surag One-Eye. He had to teach me, had to respect my oath as sigrir. You understand? It was his obligation as a warrior of Frosthold. But he did not have to like it, and he didn't have to be gentle about it. Most of them weren't. For a woman to become sigrir to negotiate her sisters' marriages is not so strange, even today. For her to take up arms is a an old custom. Very old, and very rare. Even before the sun worshippers came to the north it was not a common thing. Most often, women took that oath when all the clan's warriors had been killed raiding and warring and the only men left were graybeards and boys. So for me to learn the sword a it was not the same as saying that Frosthold's warriors were feeble or childish, but it was not far from that, and most of the men were not pleased by it.

"Surag was different. To him it was a source of pride, not an insult, that I wanted to learn the ways of war. He was a tradition was very important to him, and a sigrir who hewed to the old ways was, in his mind, a credit to our clan's honor and fierceness. He was proud to teach me.

"He was the one who found us when Oralia and I left Frosthold." Asharre closed her eyes. More than fifteen years ago, that was, but the memory still grieved her. "When we disappeared, he tracked us. No one else did. We were not much loved in the clan. There had been rumors all winter about my sister's afflictions. Most of them a most of them would have been content to let us go, and would have counted themselves well rid of her strangeness. Not Surag."

"What happened?" Evenna whispered. Her bare shoulders were so white they glowed in the thin gray light; her face was almost as pale.

"He tried to stop us. Surag One-Eye was, as I said, a man to whom tradition mattered. For us to go south, to join the Blessed, was a betrayal of the clan's beliefs. He would not let us pass. I fought him. Surag was much more experienced, and still strong a but he was old, and blind on one side, and the cold did him no favors." Asharre had never been more frightened in her life than she was on that winter morning, her teacher's face become a stranger's and a blade bare in his hand. Terror, and desperation, had lent her ferocity. "I did not want to kill him. But whenever I flinched, he cut me again, and finally it was clear there was no choice. So: that is where I got most of these scars. He taught me one last lesson as sigrir that morning."

Asharre finished washinga"the water had grown colda"and toweled herself dry. Evenna followed suit more slowly, looking thoughtful.

As Asharre was buckling the strap of her caractan back over her gray-green cloak, Evenna touched her forearm.

"I'm sorry for your scars," the young Blessed said.

"Don't be. Vanity is nothing. Scars mark what you have done."

"Yes, I suppose that's true," Evenna said uncertainly. She rallied behind a smile. "I'm grateful to have such a formidable guardian. We all are."

"You should have no need of me. You are only going to serve your annovair. Thia"the High Solaros would not have sent you into danger." Or me, she added silently. Thierras d'Amalthier knew when his tools were too brittle for a task.

They rejoined the others for dinner. It was a small meal, served only to the merchant's family and his guests, but a lavish one. Asharre sat between Heradion and Bassinos' eldest daughter, Melora, a plain-faced girl who seldom lifted her eyes from her plate. After her halting attempts to draw Asharre into conversation were met with grunts, Melora sank into a timid silence that lasted until Falcien, sitting on her left, distracted her with gossip about courtiers in Cailan. Asharre paid little heed; the pratfalls of the pompous held no interest for her. Instead she turned her attention to the food.

There was plenty of it, served on dishes inlaid with bright lines of gold and copper. The drinking glasses bore the same design: eight-rayed sunbursts, Celestia's holy sign, rendered in the same curious fashion as the ones on the chapel windows.

Asharre was not the only one who noticed them. "I don't remember you being so pious," Evenna teased, holding up her glass. She drank cold whitebriar tea, as Falcien did, and it sparkled in the candlelight. "When did you turn your house into a chapel?"

Bassinos shrugged, smiling. He was in his late middle years, broad shouldered and blunt featured, and had the easy confidence of a man who had built a good life using his own hands and wits. Though his beard was more silver than brown, his eyes kept a boyish twinkle. "Piety is profitable these days. The mountain folk are all mad for prayers and sunbursts, especially the Open-Handed Sun. Some of them won't deal with a man who doesn't pray under it. I don't mind. One chapel window looks the same as another to me, and whatever I spend on glassblowers and builders, I'll recoup three times over by this time next year. I've already snatched a dozen contracts for coal and furs from Wyssic, and the passes are still frozen. I'll have twice as many when they open."

"Why's that?" Heradion asked.

"Wyssic likes his feather bed. I can't fault him for it, at his age, but he misses too many dawn prayers. Best time to negotiate with these Vale men is right after services. Meet them at the chapel, bring them back for breakfast, and the deal's good as sworn once they see their new sun on my plates and windows." Bassinos chuckled, refilling his glass with cold whitebriar tea. In deference to the Blessed at his table, he hadn't served ale, although Balnamoine was said to have several good local brews. Asharre regretted his courtesy; she would have liked a mug to go with the chestnut-sauced quail.

"New sun?" Falcien sounded casual, but he leaned in, putting an elbow on the table. "Do you mean these sunbursts with the rounded rays?"

"Aye. You noticed? Well, of course you would. That's your business, after all." Bassinos covered a burp politely and reached for another helping of baked turnips. "The Vale traders insist on it. Past the point of decency, if you ask me. One of them smashed our town chapel's window for its *impious' design. Do you have any idea how much that damned window cost? That red glass came from Aluvair! And the gildinga"aaah, but no matter. It's done. Anyway, that one was a fool and a fanatic, but they're all a sight more comfortable under their new suns. Don't seem to care much for our old ones."

"A heresy?" Evenna asked. A thin line appeared between her eyebrows.

"The High Solaros never mentioned one," Heradion said. "I doubt he'd have sent us if he had any such suspicions. Most likely it's just some local fashiona"maybe a bit of folklore they've woven into their prayers. Every village seems to have a few of those. Farther you get from Cailan, the more there are. But they're harmless, really, and good business for the glaziers."

"Good business for anyone who'll pray with 'em," Bassinos said. "Crass to use my faith like that, I expect, and worse to admit it to the Bright Lady's own Blessed, but I've always been honest about my sins. They're not such awful sins, are they?"

"I've heard worse," Evenna said. "As long as you aren't cheating on your tithesa""

"Never that," Bassinos said, mock aghast.

"a"then I suppose we'll have to forgive you. But when did the mountain towns rediscover their faith? Was there some disaster up there? Men aren't usually swept by a sudden love for prayer unless there's been war, plague, famine a"

"No, nothing. I haven't been north myself in some time, but I would have heard the stories. There's been nothing like that. Well, bandits, but there've been bandits on the iron road and pirates on the Windhurst since there was a road and a river." Bassinos paused, momentarily reflective. "Not many of those either, lately, come to think of it. Usually I lose a shipment or two every season, but this past year a it's been quiet. Completely. Even Gerros Tulliven hasn't been raided, and he manages to hire a few highwaymen disguised as guards every year."

"There are stories," Melora said, lifting her head. Her fingers danced over the tines of her fork. "The mad wind."

"Melora, dearheart," her father said gently, "those are just stories. Our guests are worried about threats on their way to Carden Vale. The mad winds aren't likely to give them any trouble."

"Oh," the girl said, flushing pink. She dropped her head again, and Asharre thought with astonishment that she might be hiding tears.

Falcien cleared his throat. "I'd be interested in hearing about these winds. There's often a grain of truth in those old folktalesa"and even if there isn't, I love a good story."

Bassinos nodded, a flicker of appreciation crossing his blunt face at the Celestian's courtesy. "I suppose there's no harm in the telling. It's an old tale, but it seems to have picked up new life this past season. The way the story goes, the ghosts of Duradh Mal ride the night winds in the Irontooths. They're cursed, either for what they did in life or by how they died, depending on the teller. They can't cross the Last Bridge until they've confessed all their sins, and there's no one like a Baozite for sinning. So they roam the mountain peaks looking for travelers who'll hear their confessions a but the sins they've committed are so ghastly, and the suffering they endure as ghosts so awful, that anyone who listens to them goes mad. Men strip naked and wade into the snow, letting themselves freeze to death, after listening to the mad wind. Women leap from the peaks or throw themselves into the rivers. Their deaths add to the spirits' litany of sins, and so they wander on, seeking new listeners forever."

"It's a ghost story?" Asharre said, disbelieving.

"This is a land for ghosts, my lady. We've nothing else to do but tell stories to fill the winters. Anything can spawn a tale, and that's likely how this one started. Someone heard a wind that sounded like screaming and invented some meaning to fit it. Someone else found a poor frozen soul who wandered out at night and got lost. Put one with the other, and that's your story. Oddities and accidents, with a dash of ghost lore thrown in for spice. To hear it told now, the wind freezes plants in summer, turns winter snow red as blood, and drives people mad all year round. Sometimes the ghosts who ride it are said to come from Duradh Mal, sometimes from Shadefell. Whatever the teller thinks sounds best."

"Shadefell?"

Bassinos only shrugged. He scooped more turnips onto his plate, seeming faintly embarrassed. Heradion took up the tale. "That one's a ghost story too. King Aersival gave the first Lord Rosewayn the land around Duradh Mal as his fief. He'd earned it, fighting in two hard campaigns and clearing out the Long Knives from the Smokewood, but some said that the king gave the valley to Rosewayn because he wanted the man as far from the capital as possible. Rosewayn had an ugly reputation. Some of the things he did to make captured Long Knives betray their brothers a there were rumors that he was a secret Kliastan. It was that bad. Many historians claim King Aersival felt it would be easier to turn a blind eye to Rosewayn's excesses if the lord was in Carden Vale.

"The Celestians sealed the lower reaches of Duradh Mal and some of its high towers, but they didn't seal the central fortress, perhaps because some lord at the time wanted to lay claim to the castle. I don't know. Be that as it may, Lord Rosewayn certainly wanted it. The locals told him the place was cursed, that the Doom would claim him, too, but the old lord wouldn't hear of it. Said it was the best strategic hold in the Irontooths, which was likely true. Say what you will about Baozites, but those bastards know war.

"The Baozites couldn't keep Ang'duradh, though, and Lord Rosewayn's luck was no better. He drained his fortune trying. Few craftsmen would travel that far, or brave the curse of Duradh Mal, and those who did met bad ends. Walls collapsed, beams broke, keystones cracked over the builders' heads. Some of them wandered into the empty halls and were never seen again. Other men swore they could hear the lost ones' voices calling from the dark, crying out for help.

"When the old lord died, his sons were glad to end the folly. They left Ang'duradh to its ghosts and built a new hold in the mountains. Shadefell, they called it. From there the Rosewayns ruled for a time, no better and no worse than any other lords. But over the years, the stories started to change.

"People vanished from the roads around Carden Vale. Mostly children and virgins, according to the stories. Travelers too. Entire parties disappeared, only to be discovered as chewed bones when the snows melted. Finally word came back to the Dome. Armed with Aurandane, the Sword of the Dawn, some Knights of the Sun ventured up to Shadefell to end it. The Rosewayns greeted them as honored guests, then tried to eat them as they slept. When their hosts revealed their true faces, the Knights saw that they were monsters. They fought a desperate battle through Shadefell's halls, half the house burned down, and when the smoke cleared, they found all sorts of atrocities in the ashes. Human bones in the pantry, torture pits in the cellars, tubs of rendered corpse fat that Lady Rosewayn smoothed into her skin for eternal youtha"any horror that a bard might embroider onto the tale has been claimed at one point or another."

"And these voices, too, whisper on the mad wind?" Asharre asked.

"So they say." Bassinos refilled his glass with cider. "It's only a story."

Melora was still blushing and fidgeting with her fork. Asharre was not surprised to hear Falcien take his turn at distracting her. These Blessed were gracious to a fault.

"As you've been kind enough to give us a story, and Heradion has as well, I suppose I should take my turn," he said, and told them about the Winter Lake, a few weeks' ride east of Cailan, where the water was near freezing even in midsummer. Fishermen saw ice glistening over its heart, no matter how hot the sun shone, and heard the voices of women singing over its waves at dusk. Those who listened to the songs said that they were beautiful but unsettling; those who listened too often pushed their boats to the lake's center, where they leaped eagerly into the water and drowned.

By the time he had finished, Melora was listening raptly, her timidity forgotten. "Is it true?" she breathed, eager as a child listening at her nursemaid's knee.

"It's true that the water is cold," Asharre told her. "I've been there. It's cold enough to kill a man, but I've never seen ice or heard songs. I stayed with a woman who swore her husband had been called to his death by a fairy lure a but gossips in the village told me he was a drunk, and just as likely to fall out of his boat as come home every day. It's a cold lake, nothing more. By the White Seas we have springs that come up scalding. If rivers run hot under the snow, why should they not run cold in the summerlands?"

"Why not, indeed," Melora agreed. She did not seem disappointed by the explanation; if anything, her dark eyes shone brighter. "Do you have any stories?"

Asharre would have preferred to keep her silence, but she saw no way to decline gracefully. She'd never felt comfortable retelling folktalesa"she didn't have the gift to make them come alivea"so instead she told them about the travels she'd had with Oralia: the cities they'd seen, the people they'd met, the odd dishes her sister always insisted that she try. Her sister seldom took so much as a nibble herself, pleading her restrictions as a Blessed, but Asharre had long suspected that Oralia just used that excuse to make her eat sheep-gut sausages and honey-baked crickets because, as she said every time, "one of us has to pay respect to the local delicacies, and I can't. Enjoy!"

It was the first time she'd spoken about Oralia since reporting her death to the High Solaros. Somehow, sitting around this table in the company of friends, it didn't hurt. The memories were good ones, and as she spoke, Asharre felt the weight of her grief lighten to something almost bearable.

Evenna followed her with a story about Mesandroth Fiendlorn, the sorcerer who burned the Belled Stag. On moonless nights, the story went, a ghostly inn appeared on the ashes of the sorcerer's crime, and the dead gambled with the living for their souls.

After her telling, a quiet descended on their table. Then Melora laughed, and Heradion clapped, and the mood was broken. Bassinos poured himself a last glass of tea. The servants came to clear the dishes, and Melora showed them to their rooms.

Asharre lay awake long after. Heavy curtains covered the windows for warmth. It was black as pitch inside her room. Somewhere down the hall, a man was snoring. A dog barked at passing shadows outside.

Restlessly she got to her feet and pushed the curtain aside. The moon painted the world in silver and sparkled on the chapel's frosted roof. High above, the vaulted sky seemed a reflection of that jeweled lace. If the Belled Stag only appeared on starless nights, its ghostly gamblers would be idle tonight.

Evenna's story of the cursed inn lingered in her thoughts. It was only a story, she knew, with no more substance than the fairy songs on the Winter Lake. The shades of the dead did not dice with the living. If they came back at all, it was as a bloodmage's thralls.

Still a if it were true, what would she give to gamble with ghosts? What would she risk for that? To give them a message, if she won, and hope that they might carry it back across the Last Bridge when they disappeared. To say I'm sorry and ask Why?

Was that worth the chance of never coming back?

Asharre stood by the window awhile longer, gazing at the silent chapel, and then went back to bed.

7.

"Someone's coming up the slope."

"Hunters?" Malentir asked.

Bitharn shaded her eyes against the sunlight. The morning was new and cold, but the sere hills shimmered with heat, making it difficult to tell if anything moved among them. She shook her head. "Maybe. They're gone now."

They were a day north of Carden Vale, at the bottom reaches of the bleak, scarred hills that the maps called Duradhar and the locals called Devils' Ridge. Once these slopes had been rich and green, fertile enough to feed the Baozite host that held the fortress above. Then Ang'duradh fell, and the same curse that killed its soldiers blighted the land around it. Wheat fields and orchards burned from their roots up, leaving barren rocks and steaming rifts where they'd stood. Six hundred years later, the earth still smoldered all through Devils' Ridge. Wraiths of pale blue smoke drifted down the hillsides, and the earth was ash gray underneath.

For centuries, Devils' Ridge had been abandoned to its smoky ghosts. That desolation was one of the reasons Malentir had chosen to come to Devils' Ridge rather than travel directly to Carden Vale. Anyone who saw him would know him for a Thorn, and in town that would end badly. Out here, there were fewer eyes to find him, and a greater chance that anyone who did could be quietly subdued. It was likely, if that happened, that he'd want to kill the witness and wear the dead man's face for a disguise. Bitharn hadn't decided what she would do about that. She hoped she'd never have to.

She looked down again. Near the last fringe of green in the valley, metal glinted amidst the budding trees. Bitharn crouched, watched, and waited. After a long moment she saw another flash, and a pair of waxwings startled into the sky.

Malentir had seen them too. "No hunter in these hills will be looking for game," he said.

"They won't be looking for us either."

"No?"

Irritably Bitharn brushed a loose strand of hair from her eyes. "How could they? No one knows we're here. Wea"the Blessed, I meana"can't talk to the dead the way you can. Parnas couldn't have told anyone where we went, and he's the only one who knew. Even if they did somehow learn we're here, the Blessed can't walk through shadows. It's impossible for them to have gotten to Carden Vale so quickly. Whoever's down there can't have anything to do with us. It might not even be a person. Likely it's just a stray pack mule."