Vi opened the door and stared daggers at the girl, who was still lying in a heap against the far wall. The words dried up in Xandra's mouth. Vi slammed the door again, and sat on her bed, picked up the note, tried not to cry-and failed.

38

In all his life, Kylar had never seen the people of the Warrens so happy. Agon's Dogs had stayed with the wagons full of grain and rice to manage the distribution. All the Dogs were members of the Sa'kage, and they had taken it into their minds to make sure that the food was fairly distributed. "We got our bit coming," Kylar heard a Dog tell a scowling Sa'kage basher. "I've heard it from high up. Now make sure those guild rats share!"

The Rabbits joined long queues that moved slowly but steadily forward, and a hard-bitten old coot broke out a tin whistle, sat on his new sack of rice, and began to play. In moments, the Rabbits were dancing. A woman soon had several pots boiling and anyone who dropped a measure of their rice or grain into one pot immediately could take a full, seasoned measure from another. She served bread and rice and soon wine. Someone offered herbs, someone else b.u.t.ter, another meat. In no time, it was a feast. of rice, and began to play. In moments, the Rabbits were dancing. A woman soon had several pots boiling and anyone who dropped a measure of their rice or grain into one pot immediately could take a full, seasoned measure from another. She served bread and rice and soon wine. Someone offered herbs, someone else b.u.t.ter, another meat. In no time, it was a feast.

In a break between songs, one of Agon's Dogs stood up and yelled. "Ya might recognize me. I'm Conner Hook, and I grew up in this neighborhood. I seen ya and I know ya and I'm tellin' ya now, by the High King's b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, if any of ya come tru' the line twice, I'm callin' out yer name, and we're gonna f.o.o.kin' add yer a.s.s to the meat pot, got it?"

A cheer went up-and the line thinned considerably. For the Rabbits, to whom corruption was the unquestioned norm, it was a gift as unexpected as the free food itself. Kylar listened, and heard many a toast to Logan Gyre and many variations of the tale of him slaying an ogre and teary, drunken renditions of his speech establishing the Order of the Garter, and the word "king" muttered a dozen times. He smiled darkly, then froze.

He glimpsed a lean woman with long blonde hair on the far side of the square. In contrast to the Rabbits, she was so clean she was radiant, and he caught a flash of white teeth as she smiled. His heart stopped. "Elene?" he whispered.

The woman disappeared around a corner. Kylar went after her, pushing and dodging his way through the jubilant, dancing crowd. When he got to the corner, she was already fifty paces down the twisting alley, turning onto yet another. He ran after her with the speed of his Talent.

"Elene!" He grabbed her shoulder and she jumped, startled.

"Hi... Kylar, right?" Daydra asked. She had been one of Momma K's girls. Playing the virgin was her specialty. From a distance, she looked like Elene.

Kylar's heart lurched, and he wasn't sure if it was more from disappointment or relief. He didn't want Elene here. He didn't want her in this pit of a city or anywhere nearby when he murdered the queen, but at the same time, he wanted to see her so badly it ached.

She smiled at him awkwardly. "Um, I don't work the sheets anymore, Kylar."

He flushed. "No, I wasn't-I'm sorry. I..." He turned and made his way to the castle.

39

Feir Cousat and Antoninus Wervel emerged from Quorig's Pa.s.s after noon. As they approached Black Barrow, the evergreen forest that carpeted the foothills ended. Feir hunkered down in his coat against the deep autumn chill and climbed a low rise. The sight took his breath away. No one had lived in Black Barrow for seven hundred years. The land should have been long overgrown with gra.s.s, trees, undergrowth. It wasn't. The gra.s.s, at the least, should have been an autumnal brown. It wasn't. Seven centuries ago, the decisive battle of the War of Shadow had been fought in the early summer, and the gra.s.s at Feir's feet was still short and green. He saw the raw depression where a farmer's stone fence had been pulled from the earth, the stones taken into the city so that they might not be used as missiles by the enemy's siege engines. Nothing had grown in the bare depressions that marked where this fence had stood-seemingly only days before. Time had stopped here.

Lifting his eyes, Feir saw more: ruts from the pa.s.sage of wagons, gra.s.s beaten flat by marching feet, holes for the firepits and latrine pits of an abandoned military camp. But no tents or tools. Anything that could be looted had been taken long ago, but everything that remained stayed unchanged.

That didn't only apply to the land. Two hundred paces away, the bodies began. First, a few marking the edge of the battle, and then hundreds, and then thousands, until in the distance the ground lay under a black blanket of the dead. The epicenter of death was a perfectly round dome of black rock the size of a small mountain covering the city and the hill where the castle had once been. At the base of the dome, siege engines on broken wheels, half-consumed by fires, tottered but hadn't fallen despite the centuries.

The dome was surrounded by a larger circle of magic in the land itself, miles across, called the Dead Demesne. Outside the circle, time continued, wind blew, rain fell. Inside the Dead Demesne... they didn't.

Feir rolled his great shoulders, readying himself. He cupped his hands close to his face and conjured a fire with his Talent. Then he stepped across the boundary into the circle of death. Nothing happened. He let the fire die.

"That's odd," he said aloud. Antoninus grunted in a.s.sent. Feir squinted at the air.

The Dead Demesne-like Black Barrow itself-was Emperor Jorsin Alkestes' work. He had made it lethal to use the vir within the circle, but because vir had similarities to the Talent, there was always some dissonance in the circle when anyone tried using the Talent. Little things would be different, like mage fire being red instead of orange. But Alkestes' weave was gone.

Feir rubbed his scruffy beard. It was good for him. He wouldn't have to factor it into the work he'd come here to do. But someone had broken what Jorsin made. That was not good.

Examining the air over the circle in the same way he had examined the circle in Ezra's Wood, Feir studied the magic. He could feel an emptiness in the weaves-the great magics Jorsin had woven didn't break without leaving a trace. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell much except that that the weaves had been broken recently. But to break a spell Jorsin Alkestes had made using Curoch would have required someone incredibly powerful here wielding some artifact, or a couple of hundred magi or Vurdmeisters working together. Feir couldn't imagine anyone with a shred of sense or decency partic.i.p.ating in such a scheme. So that meant Vurdmeisters.

Jorsin's other weaves, the ones sealing the ground and sealing the dead, were perfectly intact. Feir didn't think they would be so easily broken, either. He hoped not.

Feir scanned the distant trees, suddenly queasy that unfriendly eyes might be hiding within them. He walked across the plain quickly, the air curiously odorless even as he approached the first body.

The creature was the black of a bloated corpse and man-shaped but ill-proportioned. Its arms were too long, its face too long, lower jaw jutting forward, ragged hooks of teeth stabbing up into the air from its lower jaw, mismatched black and blue eyes staring. It was ma.s.sively muscled. Its skin was hairy, bordering on fur, and it had neither clothes, nor weapon. It was a krul. The meisters could not make life, but they could mimic and mock it. There were, Dorian had once told Feir, dark mirrors of almost every natural creation.

Feir and Antoninus walked on. It was going to get worse. A lot worse.

Soon, dead krul lay everywhere. Thousands had been killed bloodlessly by Jorsin's magic, but thousands more bore the marks of their deaths. Ugly faces had been crushed by war hammers or flailing hooves. Chests were caved in from being trampled. Throats were cut, torsos disemboweled, eyes hung by optic nerves from broken sockets, and blood glistened freshly in the wounds, never drying, never congealing.

Paths had been cleared through the bodies, and they followed them mutely. It wasn't long before Feir saw a human arm amid the krul, then a leg that appeared to have been half eaten. The bodies were piled knee-deep on either side of them. Then they began pa.s.sing krul who'd been killed by magic. There were great craters in the battlefield empty of all but pulverized sc.r.a.ps of meat. Others had been burned or cut in half or shocked. Some had torn their faces to ribbons with their own claws.

The krul began to vary, too. Pure white krul with spiraling rams' horns led every unit of twelve, and larger ones seven feet tall appeared more rarely still. They walked past an entire platoon of four-legged feline krul the size of horses, with jet-black skin, spa.r.s.e hair like a rat's tail, and exaggerated maws like a wolf. Rarer still were those like bears, easily twelve feet tall and with thick fur the color of new blood. As they trekked through the vast battlefield, it seemed every natural animal had found a dark mockery here. Bats, ravens, eagles, fanged horses, horned horses, even dark, red-eyed elephants carrying archers lay in ignominious death.

"The monsters," Antoninus said quietly. "Was nothing holy to them?"

Feir followed Antoninus's gaze and saw the krul children. They were most beautiful of all the krul, with balanced features, big child's eyes, pale skin close to a human shade, and long claws for fingers. These still wore their human clothes. Even the looters hadn't touched them. Feir almost gagged. They moved on, ever closer to the great black dome.

After a while, Feir felt inured to the horror. There were a thousand thousand permutations of death, krul of every shape and size and sometimes men and often horses, but the magical fixedness of it, the lack of smell, the stillness of the air, lent it a certain unreality, as if the dead were figures carved of wax.

If Jorsin was to be believed, one million one hundred thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine krul lay dead here. Various magi scholars had guessed that between five hundred thousand and a million krul would face them. Against fifty thousand men. The rest of Jorsin's armies had been drawn away by his own treacherous generals.

Then Jorsin had done all this, with Curoch-the very blade Feir had gone into the Wood to retrieve. Of course, he had only retrieved instructions. Curoch was safe in Ezra's Wood forever, and thank the G.o.ds for that.

"Well, here we are," Antoninus said as they finally touched the dome of Black Barrow. "Now we can forge our counterfeit Ceur'caelestos and save Lantano Garuwashi and all his men. Indeed, maybe all the south."

Feir said, "All we have to do is find Ezra's secret entrance to Black Barrow, find Ezra's workshop and his gold tools, find seven broken mistarille swords, rediscover a forging technique every present-day Maker says is a myth, find one giant ruby, and avoid detection by a couple of hundred Vurdmeisters plotting G.o.ds know what." swords, rediscover a forging technique every present-day Maker says is a myth, find one giant ruby, and avoid detection by a couple of hundred Vurdmeisters plotting G.o.ds know what."

"Oh," Antoninus said, waggling his great, single kohled eyebrow, "here I thought it was going to take all winter."

40

A knock sounded on Vi's door hours later. "It's Sister Ariel. May I come in?" knock sounded on Vi's door hours later. "It's Sister Ariel. May I come in?"

"I can't stop you. There's no lock on the door," Vi said.

Sister Ariel came in. She said nothing for a time, staring around the bare room with apparent nostalgia.

"What do you want?" Vi asked.

"A bit nervous about going to the lecture, huh? Or was it your meeting with Elene that's got you acting more like a tyrant than a tyro?" Sister Ariel said.

"I f.u.c.ked up," Vi said, sulking, knowing it, hating it, and sulking anyway. "Now they hate me, like always."

"They're twelve years old. They don't dare hate you."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"I'm not terribly concerned about your feelings, Vi. However, given the difficulties of your case and that I discovered you, and most of all because I couldn't come up with an excuse quickly enough, I've been put in charge of your tutelage."

Vi groaned.

"My feelings exactly. First of all, this room is entirely inappropriate for you."

"I get a better room?"

"You get to share a room. You were given a single in deference to your age. That was a mistake. You're isolated enough as is. As of this afternoon, you'll have a roommate. In case you're curious, the room will be only slightly larger than this one." Vi pitched back onto the bed. "Now, since you are my responsibility, you'll go to lecture. Now. Elene will have to wait until later."

Vi didn't move.

"Do we need to repeat certain lessons we learned on the trail?" Ariel asked.

Vi stood quickly.

"And by the by, lest you being put under my care be seen as a reward, all the punishments that your unfortunate floor monitor imposed will be carried out, as well as a few of my own. Follow." Ariel left, and Vi had no choice but to follow her like a whipped dog.

The Chantry had been constructed with beauty and practicality as its first considerations. Cost had obviously been no object. Even here, in the tyros' area, the arched ceilings were ten feet high, incised with a different pattern in every quarter. The tyros occupied the lowest level of the Chantry, though storerooms, archives, and the like lay beneath the water line. Because it was housed entirely within the giant statue of the Seraph, the interior of the Chantry was arranged in circles: living quarters arrayed along the quadrasecting halls, and lecture halls around the outside to take advantage of the sunlight necessary for magic.

Though white marble predominated, the tyros' floor didn't feel austere. A castle with so much stone would be cold and dark, but here the floors were warmed to welcome bare feet, and the ceiling itself was luminous. The walls were filled with bright, cheery scenes to comfort girls away from home for the first time: rabbits, unicorns, cats, dogs, horses, and animals Vi had never seen played together. They were drawn fancifully, but exquisitely.

Vi touched a painted pink puppy curled in sleep next to an impossibly friendly lion. Its eyes opened and it licked toward her fingers, its pink tongue pressing against the wall as if it were just on the other side of a gla.s.s. Vi yelped and jumped backward, clawing at her belt for a dagger that wasn't there.

"His name's Paet," Sister Ariel said. "He was one of my favorites. He doesn't wake until noon."

"What?"

"It's a timepiece. Watch this," Sister Ariel said, stopping outside one of the cla.s.srooms.

Gently, the ceilings pulsed violet, red, yellow, green, and blue in succession as a bell tolled. Seconds later, several hundred girls between ten and fourteen poured into the halls in a flood of noise and motion. Vi saw more curious glances than frightened ones. Apparently the rumors hadn't spread to the entire school yet. She folded her arms and scowled.

"Cla.s.s starts in five minutes. Can you read and write?"

"Of course," Vi said. Her worthless mother had done that much.

"Good. I'll collect you at noon. Oh, and Vi? If you have a question during cla.s.s, raise your hand. Sister Gizadin is a stickler. When called on, stand with your hands behind your back. If you don't, they'll think you're being disrespectful. Oh, and no magic. And remember everything. Lectures are arranged in triads to help with that."

"Triads?" Vi asked, but Sister Ariel was already gone.

Five minutes later, Vi was seated in a too-small chair at a too-small desk in the front row of a lecture hall. Three walls were unadorned white stone. The east wall, however, was as transparent as gla.s.s. The late morning sun poured down, bathing Lake Vestacchi and the snow-capped mountains beyond in light. The lake was the deepest blue Vi had ever seen, and dozens of fishing boats dotted the surface.

Vi barely noticed when her whispering cla.s.smates suddenly quieted. A squat Sister tut-tutted and the wall shimmered, becoming opaque white like the others in seconds. Without preliminaries, Sister Gizadin began: "There are three reasons glamours should be used sparingly. Anyone?" Not a girl made a move. "First, glamours are unpredictable. Second, glamours are unnatural. Third, glamours are unappreciated.

"Unpredictable. First, a glamour may affect only men or only women or only children. Second, a glamour may affect some people much more strongly than others. Third, a glamour will attract people according to their own predispositions. It may impart, particularly in men, an overwhelming s.e.xual desire for the caster. Or it may impart a slavish servitude, where the person finds in you every good thing they could imagine. Or it may impart a simple attractiveness and persuasiveness. First, a glamour may affect only men or only women or only children. Second, a glamour may affect some people much more strongly than others. Third, a glamour will attract people according to their own predispositions. It may impart, particularly in men, an overwhelming s.e.xual desire for the caster. Or it may impart a slavish servitude, where the person finds in you every good thing they could imagine. Or it may impart a simple attractiveness and persuasiveness.

"Unnatural. First, a glamour can operate by exaggerating a quality you already have. That could be exaggerating your inherent attractiveness, or it could exaggerate people's perception of your courage or honor or strength, or it could exaggerate a bond such as friendship that you share with the glamour's target. Second, a glamour may feign the attractive features of another person. Third and most powerfully, a glamour may tap the subject's mind for what he finds most attractive. One man might say the caster was blonde and blue-eyed whilst the man beside him would swear she was buxom and green-eyed. But this type of glamour is unusual and challenging to use. And obviously, if the two men talk after that maja leaves, they will notice the discrepancy. First, a glamour can operate by exaggerating a quality you already have. That could be exaggerating your inherent attractiveness, or it could exaggerate people's perception of your courage or honor or strength, or it could exaggerate a bond such as friendship that you share with the glamour's target. Second, a glamour may feign the attractive features of another person. Third and most powerfully, a glamour may tap the subject's mind for what he finds most attractive. One man might say the caster was blonde and blue-eyed whilst the man beside him would swear she was buxom and green-eyed. But this type of glamour is unusual and challenging to use. And obviously, if the two men talk after that maja leaves, they will notice the discrepancy.

"That leads us to the third reason glamours should be used sparingly: Glamours are unappreciated. First-" she stopped, irritated. "Viridiana, stop fidgeting. You have a question?"

"What if you can control all that?" Vi asked, standing up and putting her arms behind her back, feeling like a child. "It's not that hard."

All the girls in the cla.s.s looked at Vi as if they couldn't believe she'd dared speak.

"Do you really wish me to believe that you have natural mastery of one of the more difficult relational spells?"

"I didn't say mastery," Vi said defensively. The truth was, she was still off-kilter, the thought of having to go talk to Elene hanging over her like a death sentence-which, she realized, it might actually be.

"Unless you've actually cast this spell, sit and be silent."

Vi paused, then scowled. "I have."

"Oh? Pray tell." Sister Gizadin gave a condescending smirk.

Fine, b.i.t.c.h. "I was f.u.c.king this guy and he was having trouble waking the snake," Vi said. Sister Gizadin's eyes went huge. "So I kicked in a s.e.x glamour. That usually does it in about five seconds. I mean, it's embarra.s.sing. If you use too much, they're done before they get naked. With this one, the glamour did nothing. In your terms, I guess I was exaggerating my natural attractiveness. So I played around with it until I felt something give. His eyes glazed over and he started talking about my boyish figure-while holding two hands full of t.i.t." "I was f.u.c.king this guy and he was having trouble waking the snake," Vi said. Sister Gizadin's eyes went huge. "So I kicked in a s.e.x glamour. That usually does it in about five seconds. I mean, it's embarra.s.sing. If you use too much, they're done before they get naked. With this one, the glamour did nothing. In your terms, I guess I was exaggerating my natural attractiveness. So I played around with it until I felt something give. His eyes glazed over and he started talking about my boyish figure-while holding two hands full of t.i.t."

Sister Gizadin's mouth was open, but no words came out.

"Anyway," Vi said, "it wasn't hard. I mean, I'm most experienced with glamours for s.e.x, but I figured those out with a pointer or two from a courtesan, so with Sisters teaching me, how hard can the other glamours be?"

For a long time, no one said anything. Vi noticed belatedly that everyone was gaping at her. Sister Gizadin's mouth closed. She began to speak, and then stopped. Finally she looked past Vi to a buck-toothed twelve-year-old who raised her hand. "Yes, Hana?" Sister Gizadin asked.

Hana stood with her hands behind her back. "Please, Sister, what kind of mage is a courtesan?"

Vi laughed.

That snapped Sister Gizadin out of it. "Sit, both of you!"

They sat.

"Unappreciated," Sister Gizadin said. "Even if people's perceptions of the caster are not altered, there is still a feeling of wrongness after a glamour. During the spell, they won't notice they're being manipulated, but afterward, especially if they were wildly manipulated, they'll realize that their reactions were out of proportion. The irresponsible use of glamours is one reason why magae have historically been distrusted. No one wants to Sister Gizadin said. "Even if people's perceptions of the caster are not altered, there is still a feeling of wrongness after a glamour. During the spell, they won't notice they're being manipulated, but afterward, especially if they were wildly manipulated, they'll realize that their reactions were out of proportion. The irresponsible use of glamours is one reason why magae have historically been distrusted. No one wants to be manipulated, and in essence, glamours are all about manipulation. That's all. Cla.s.s dismissed." be manipulated, and in essence, glamours are all about manipulation. That's all. Cla.s.s dismissed."