"Tadeuz Vral?"

"Joscelin." Micah ben Ximon smiled, a real smile. "Single-minded and stubborn as hell." His smile turned wistful, and for the first time I could see the fierce, idealistic young man he must have been. "He taught me a great deal. I always hoped he would be proud of me if he knew what I'd done with it."

"I know the feeling," I murmured.

"And now I hope I may be proud of it." He rose. "The men who were killed, the Albans ...my men challenged them, and they fought. I'm sorry. Were they companions of yours?"

"Yes." I relayed his words to Urist, who gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. I daresay the news made the same sick lump in his belly that it did in mine, but neither of us were in a position to do aught about it. "They took their chances."

"As will you." Ben Ximon tilted his head. "Is it worth the price?"

"We chose this freely," I said. "My wife didn't."

He sighed. "I wish you luck."

The meeting left me restless and impatient. My course was set. I knew where I was bound; the village of Kargad, along the Ulsk River, a tributary of the Volkov. That was where Adelmar had told me the pilgrims with whom Berlik was travelling were headed. I would find them and lie to them. Tell them I was sent by his kinswoman, Morwen. That, too, was true enough in its own way. It was her meddling that had set this long nightmare in motion.

And then I would find him, and kill him.

So long as he didn't kill me first.

Urist and I sorted through our baggage. I picked out the warmest and sturdiest of the clothing Tadeuz Vral's servants had brought. My sword-belt and blades, my flint striker. The better of the two hunting bows, and four steel-tipped arrows Urist had hoarded. My vambraces. The croonie-stone for remembrance. A blanket. A waterskin. Hugues' wooden flute. An assortment of D'Angeline and Vralian coinage.

"And this." Urist rummaged in his packs and handed me a leather drawstring bag, stiff with dried saltwater. "Here."

I eyed it. "What's this?"

"To carry his head," he said. "It was full of lime powder, but it dissolved in the shipwreck. I saved the bag."

I stowed it in my pack. "My thanks."

"Boil it down to the bone," Urist said. "Otherwise it will stink. It's all right, the skull will be enough. The lime would have done as much."

"Good to know," I said.

"So who do you think was killed?" he asked.

"I wish I knew," I said softly.

"So do I." Amid the bounty the palace servants had provided us, there was a small stoppered jug of somewhat they called starka, a rye spirit flavored with fruits and spices. Urist found a pair of cups and poured for us. "They were men of honor," he said. "May their spirits rest easily. May all the gods and goddesses of Alba welcome them home."

We drank.

Urist set down his cup. "I don't like this," he said somberly. "Any of it. A zealous prince with a head full of odd beliefs, with no care for our honor. A strange place, a hostile place, and you all alone. That was never meant to be."

You were all alone, kneeling in a snowstorm, beneath a barren tree...

"I'm not so sure of that," I said.

"Still." Urist balled one hand into a fist and thumped the outside of his stiff, braced leg. "I would that I were going with you."

"So do I." I took another swig of starka. It burned. "Believe me, I do. Urist, if I get caught, promise me you'll do the same as Micah ben Ximon. Promise me you'll disavow all knowledge of my purpose here."

He grunted. "I'm done with making promises."

I refilled our cups. "Please?"

Urist gave me a long, dour look. "Just get the bastard's head, my prince."

Chapter Fifty-Two.

Before I departed Vralgrad, I had an audience with the Grand Prince Tadeuz Vral.I rather liked him.

I hadn't expected that.

The summons came in the morning. It was a hasty affair-he was, as Micah ben Ximon had indicated, primarily concerned with his brother's escape. But he had heard the news and made time to meet with me in his chambers while he broke his fast.

"Sit," he said when I was ushered into his presence. "Eat."

I sat.

Tadeuz Vral studied me curiously. I studied him back. He was clean-shaven, with the same rugged bones I'd come to associate with Vralians, the skin stretched taut over the cheeks. Brown hair, lively brown eyes. No older than Micah. He grinned at me. Strong, white teeth. "Terre d'Ange, eh?"

I nodded. "Yes, my lord."

He said somewhat in a rapid spate of Rus. I shook my head, perplexed. Prince Tadeuz Vral reached across the table and took my chin in his hand, slapping my cheek lightly with easy familiarity. I was so startled, I didn't have time to take offense at it. "Your people are born long ago from angels, eh? So Micah says. Very nice. You make believers."

"In Terre d'Ange?" I asked, bewildered.

"Here. Yeshua's blood, yes? The Rebbes say angels walk the earth and talk to chosen people. Very beautiful like you. Maybe God sent you, too. I pray it is so." He beckoned to an attendant, who stepped forward and opened a sizable purse. Vral took a careless handful of coins from it and bestowed them on me, then made a shooing gesture with both hands. "Go, go! Go explore. Is a bad time, with my brother. Come back. We talk."

I went.

I didn't know what to make of Tadeuz Vral. There had been a warmth there; somewhat human. I'd thought to find him more like the Mahrkagir. He'd had a head full of odd prophecies, all right. And they'd damn near come true. If it weren't for Phedre, they would have. Angra Mainyu, and ten thousand years of darkness. This felt very different.

I took my leave of the palace and made my way to the wharf, my battered saddlebags slung over my shoulder, the hunting bow and four arrows lashed to the strap.

I was alone.

I was well and truly alone, for the first time ...well, since Daranga, really. There had been isolated moments in Tiberium, but they were only moments. It felt strange.

There was a small market at the wharf. I bought strips of salted beef, hard biscuits, and dried fruit for the journey; staples that wouldn't spoil. There was a vendor selling luck-charms; pendants with flared crosses. I noticed a number of sailors wearing them. I purchased one, an inexpensive affair of painted wood and cheap gilt. With a twinge of guilt, I strung it around my neck. The vendor nodded in approval. I glanced toward the city, where the spires of the temple were visible.

"Forgive me, Yeshua," I murmured. "I mean no blasphemy."

There was no reply, no sense of presence. I wondered what Yeshua ben Yosef, the Habiru prince who had been the One God's son incarnate on Earth, would have made of these new followers of his.

I found passage to the southeast with a handful of taciturn fur-traders led by a fellow named Jergens. It was a small ship, smaller than the one that had brought us to Vralgrad, but when I pointed and asked, "Kargad?" they beckoned me aboard. They had room, having sold their goods in the city, and I reckoned the rivers wouldn't be as dangerous as the sea.

We were three days on the Volkov before we reached the Ulsk tributary. When we first cleared the wharf, Jergens surreptitiously tossed somewhat over the side of the railing, muttering under his breath. He caught me watching him and glared.

"You not tell," he said, pointing to my cross pendant.

"Tell what?" I asked.

It took a while before he could make himself understood, and Jergens wasn't a talkative man, but there wasn't much else to do on a small ship. It had been an offering to the vodyanoi, the water-spirit of the Volkov; a piece of superstition banned by Tadeuz Vral. People were not punished for keeping the old faiths, at least not overtly, but it was discouraged. If it became known that Jergens and his fellows did, merchants in Vralgrad would be reluctant to buy their next shipment of furs.

I thought about that on our journey. Thought about the speed with which Vralia was changing, and the way Vralia was changing the face of Yeshuite faith. About Alba and the Maghuin Dhonn, and how they had feared the old ways would be lost. About the vision of my son, Dorelei's and my son, who would have brought about that very thing.

And I wondered for the first time...if I were Berlik, if I had seen that future stumbling toward inevitability, what would I have done?

It was a chilling notion.

Still, I thought, change is not always bad. Of a surety, Terre d'Ange had changed when Elua and his Companions made it their home. In a few short generations' time, they had set their stamp on us, permanently and irrevocably. On our hearts, our minds, in our very blood. We were D'Angeline.

But it hadn't happened at the point of a sword.

What I'd said to Sidonie-the words she had quoted back to me, my mother's words-was true. Blessed Elua cared naught for thrones or crowns. Those were mortal ambitions. Nor did he care for glory or power or the fulfillment of mysterious prophecies or, insofar as I knew, aught but love, desire, and the myriad pleasures with which life was filled. I understood that in a way I never had before.

I thought about Yeshua ben Yosef, too. I wished I knew more about him. I'd never read the books of his life, the Brit Khadasha. But I'd heard Eleazar ben Enokh speak of him. I didn't think that the Yeshua he worshipped, a god of forgiveness and compassion, wished to carve out a kingdom with steel and blood. Still, after a lifetime of study, even Eleazar could not say for certain what this passage or that passage had meant.

That was the problem, Urist had said, with trusting to the written word. There was a truth to his claim; but I wasn't sure trusting to the spoken word and the chain of memory, as the Cruithne did, was any more reliable. When it came to the Maghuin Dhonn, the truth was Drustan had told me was not the truth the harpist Ferghus had sung for us. We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends.

And in so doing, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.

Now that was a thought made me shudder to the bone. I wondered if it were true, and if it were, what would happen when some deity bent out of true by mortal ambition returned to set the record straight.

I wished there was someone with whom I could discuss such matters-who knows, mayhap Jergens would have taken a surprising interest-but my Rus was too poor for such heady conversation. So I sat with my thoughts in silence, huddling in my thick woolen coat when the wind blew, gnawing on salt beef, stale biscuits, and dried figs, taking a turn at the oars when we were becalmed, until we reached Kargad.

It was a pleasant little village, situated on the bank of the Ulsk. Men in fishing boats trawling for eel or trout glanced curiously at us as we headed for the narrow wharf. Habiru faces, for the most part. This was a settlement, not a trading post.

My arrival was unceremonious. Jergens didn't even bother to secure the ship, merely drew abreast of the dock, hovering long enough that I could toss my pack ashore and leap across the gap. He gave me a brief wave of farewell, and that was that. For the fur-traders it was out oars and back to the river, eager to set their traps before the snow fell. When all was said and done, I supposed I was lucky to be travelling with such an incurious crew.

I shouldered my bags and set about finding Berlik's pilgrims.

It was, in truth, a good deal easier than I'd feared. Thanks to Adelmar of the Frisii, I knew I was looking for the families of Ethan of Ommsmeer and his wife. There were several women haggling with fishermen over buckets of eels along the wharf. I took the simplest approach, and asked one of them, speaking in Habiru. I picked the prettiest of the lot, a young woman who'd been stealing glances at me since I arrived, a small toddler clinging to her skirts.

"Your pardon, my lady," I said politely. "Do you know the house of Ethan of Ommsmeer?"

She blushed. "I do."

I stooped, balancing my pack, and picked up her bucket. "Will you show me?" I asked. "I'll carry your ..." I didn't know the Habiru word for "eels." "...your long fish."

Her blush deepened. "I will."

Elua knows what she thought of me. I'd not given much consideration to Tadeuz Vral's words; that my face, my heritage as a scion of Elua and Kushiel, would lend credence to the mythos of Yeshua. In Terre d'Ange, as in other civilized nations, our presence is taken for granted. I imagined most Yeshuite pilgrims would know this, coming as they did from other lands. We are, as Eamonn always teased me, a pretty folk. But by the way my guide looked at me, uncertain and daring, I guessed she was unsure of my origins.

She couldn't have been any older than Ravi. I wondered if she'd been born in Vralia. She led me through a narrow maze of streets, carrying the toddler.

"Here," she said outside a wooden stoop. "Ethan's home."

"My thanks." I inclined my head and hoisted the bucket. "And yours ...?"

"No, no!" She shifted her child, snatching the bucket. "It is not needed."

Well, and so. I watched her hurry away down the streets of Kargad, carrying her child and her bucket, then raised my fist and knocked on the wooden door.

The woman who answered my knock didn't look surprised to see me. A Habiru woman, although by virtue of her rounded cheeks and the stray locks of reddish-blonde hair escaping her kerchief, I daresay there was some Flatlander blood there, too. She stood silently in the doorway, regarding me.

"I'm looking for Berlik of Alba," I said humbly. "I bear a message for him."

"Ja." She studied me for a moment without saying anything further, then opened the door wider. "We have been expecting you. Come in."

It wasn't a response I'd been anticipating, but I kept my mouth shut on that fact and entered. The house was a tiny one-room affair, divided by a hearth in the center that was the sole source of heat and, at the moment, light. There were beds built into niches in the walls. A young boy sat on the upper bunk, swinging his legs and staring at me with wide, dark eyes.

"Go fetch your father, my heart," his mother said gently to him. "You know where he is? Working on the cow-byre with Uncle Nisi?" The boy nodded vigorously and scrambled down the ladder on short, sturdy legs, leaving the door ajar in his haste. His mother smiled after him, closing the door in his wake.

"A good-looking boy," I ventured.

"He takes after his father," she said. "But it was Berlik saved his life."

"Oh?" I kept my tone neutral.

"Ja." She pointed to the area beyond the hearth, where a table and chairs stood. "Please, sit. Ethan will be here soon. There is pottage if you are hungry, or I can make griddle-cakes."

The thought of hot food made my mouth water. "No thank you, my lady." I set down my pack and took a seat. "How did Berlik come to save your son's life?"

"You should eat. You have come a long way." She withdrew a bowl from a neat little cupboard and ladled a serving of pottage into it, setting it before me. "We were crossing a bridge over the Voorwijk when the harness broke. The cart tipped. A great deal happened at once, and we did not see that Adam had fallen into the river." She placed a tin spoon beside the bowl. "Berlik was travelling the road behind us. He saw. He plunged into the river and rescued him."

I took a bite of pottage. "That must have been terrifying."

"It was." She sat opposite me and offered nothing further. I ate in silence. The sound of my spoon scraping the bowl seemed loud.

"Thank you, my lady," I said, finishing. "How shall I call you?"

"Galia," she said briefly.

"Galia." I nodded. "I am Imriel."

"Im-ri-el." She said it slowly. "The eloquence of God."

There was a noise at the door; her husband entered, stooping low to cross the threshold, his son on his shoulders. A whiff of cow-dung entered with them. He swung the boy down and set him on his feet. I rose in acknowledgment. "So you have come," Ethan of Ommsmeer said gravely. "As Berlik said you would."