Marqel's eyes flew open in shock. She stared up at him in that instant before the light fled from her eyes, a moment of uncomprehending terror, a fleeting look of wounded betrayal as she understood what he had done. Her body jerked in the throes of death, but he held her tightly as her blood gushed over his hands and chest and pooled on the bed beneath them. It was probably only a minute or two but it seemed like an agonizing lifetime before she relaxed in his arms and was still.

And then, in the distance, he heard trumpets sounding, and knew Eryk had delivered his message to Dirk.

Kirsh gently kissed Marqel's forehead and laid her back against the pillows. He rose from the bed feeling strangely light-headed and dressed himself carefully, although he made no attempt to clean the blood from his hands. He pulled the diamond-bladed dagger from her body and sheathed it in his belt before crossing her hands on her breast and covering her with the blood-soaked sheet. He wished Marqel looked more peaceful in death, but she seemed to be accusing him. Turning away, Kirsh picked up his sword and left the tent.

Sergey and Rees were waiting for him. If they noticed the blood on his hands, they gave no sign. But their expressions were grim.

"You remember what I ordered?"

"Yes," Sergey replied, clearly unhappy.

"As soon as it's over, Sergey," he reminded him. "There's no point in carrying on the fight once I'm dead."

"This is suicide, Kirsh," Rees pointed out angrily. Kirsh wondered who the Duke of Elcast was concerned for most, his prince or himself?

"Yes," Kirsh agreed calmly. "I suppose it is."

"I'm coming with you," the Duke of Elcast suddenly declared.

Kirsh didn't blame him. It was going to be awkward for Rees after this. He'd chosen the wrong side in this fight and would be at the mercy of both the Lion of Senet and the Lord of the Suns-the brother he had so foolishly spurned this morning-and more than likely the Queen of Dhevyn, once the battlefield was cleared.

"It's your choice, Rees," he said as he swung into the saddle of the mount Sergey had waiting for him.

"That's right," he agreed. "It is. And I choose the same path my father chose."

"Your father followed the Lion of Senet to war," Kirsh reminded him. "That's Misha, not me.""My father followed the man who believed in the G.o.ddess," Rees corrected. "I intend to do the same."

There was no arguing with him, and no point. If Rees wanted to throw his life away, that was his choice. Kirsh was not in a position to pa.s.s judgment on him.

"As you wish," he shrugged. The calm was still on him, the feeling of being somehow detached from the world around him. He turned to the rest of the troop waiting for him and gave the order to move out.

Kirsh rode out of the ruins with only a small force. Enough to look like a serious attack, but not enough that any more lives would be needlessly wasted. Kirsh wondered if Dirk would be waiting for him on the battlefield. Perhaps not. Dirk wasn't a soldier and didn't pretend to be. He'd do the smart thing, as he always did, and leave the battle to the men who knew what they were doing.

Rees caught up with him as he neared the edge of the ruins. Kirsh smiled when he saw the forces arrayed against them. Dirk hadn't let him down. He drew his sword and raised it high, letting out a yell as he kicked his horse into a gallop. He spared Marqel a fleeting thought as they thundered toward the line archers blocking the road, wondering if she would ever forgive him.

He hadn't wanted to kill her, but it was the only thing to do. She couldn't be captured now, couldn't be tortured or humiliated or be made to publicly reveal how she had played both him and Antonov for a fool. Played the whole world for a fool. Kirsh could live with her killing Belagren. He may have even forgiven her someday for sleeping with his father and Dirk and Eryk and the G.o.ddess knows how many others...

But there was one thing he could not forgive. She had killed the Lion of Senet.

In her own way, Marqel might have even done it for him. But that simply made him complicit in the crime. Kirshov Latanya couldn't kill his own father, even indirectly, and live with the knowledge.

He wasn't Dirk Provin.

It was the last thought he had before the archers let fly. Miraculously, every one of the arrows missed, as if the G.o.ddess were shielding him from harm. He let out a wordless yell and spurred his horse on.

Another flight of arrows. Another escape. Rees Provin rode at his side, his face a mask of mindless rage. Kirsh had time to wonder why Rees was so angry before the cavalry rode out to meet the charge.

He slashed his way through them, fighting as if there was no tomorrow. It seemed appropriate. For Kirshov Latanya, there was no tomorrow. Only now. Only one glorious moment to be a hero. One instant in time where he was more than a younger brother of a king, the second son of a legend.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rees fall. It distracted him. He turned back too late to counter the strike of the man who had ridden up on his blind side.

Kirsh didn't even know the face of the man who cut him down.

Chapter 89.

Dirk strode through the battle debris, stepping over bodies of the defeated guard, past fallen statuary and the ruined buildings, trying to recall Omaxin as he had seen it the last time he walked these ruins.

This was necessary, he reminded himself. Unavoidable. It was small comfort.

"My lord!"Dirk stopped and turned to the officer who hailed him. "We found the High Priestess, my lord," the soldier informed him.

"Is she alive?"

"No, my lord."

"I gave orders for the High Priestess to be taken alive."

"It wasn't us, my lord. You'd best see for yourself..."

Dirk followed the officer back through the ruins for some way to the larger tents belonging to n.o.bility who had been camped here in Omaxin. The officer led him to the largest tent, pushed back the tent flap.

"It's a bit... strange," he warned.

Dirk hesitated on the threshold. For no apparent reason, his comment reminded Dirk of something else that needed to be taken care of, even before he confronted whatever waited for him in the tent.

"I want a guard posted on the entrance to the cavern. And separate the Shadowdancers from the rest of the prisoners."

"What did you want to do with the troops who surrendered, my lord?"

"I'll speak to them," he said.

"Just speak to them, my lord?" the man asked warily.

"There's no point in seeking retribution. They were following the Lion of Senet's orders and the orders of his son. You can't condemn them for that."

The Senetian officer bowed, his relief obvious.

Dirk smiled thinly. "What did you think I was going to do, Captain? Order you to put them to the sword?"

"They did support Prince Kirshov against Prince Misha, my lord."

"They supported the High Priestess against the Lord of the Suns," Dirk corrected. "The former is treason; the latter is simply a matter of poor theological judgment. So that will be the end of it. Anyway, most of them are here out of a simple geographic accident. If you'd been stationed in Bollow when Antonov ordered the troops north, you'd be surrendering today, Captain."

The captain nodded and smiled cautiously. "Your mercy is appreciated, my lord."

And rather unexpected from the Butcher of Elcast, I'll wager. That's what the man really thought. Dirk understood the captain's fears. Had Antonov been here to put down a rebellion, it was unlikely any man who dared take up arms against him would have seen the next sunrise.

But Antonov wasn't the Lion of Senet now. Misha was.

"See to it, Captain. And then find Rudi Kalenkov for me."

"Sir!" the man replied smartly and hurried off to carry out his orders.

Dirk looked about him, trying to delay the moment when he must step into the tent and confront the consequences of his actions. And he was to blame. He was the one who had set Marqel on this path.

Kirsh was right. What gave me the right to decide the path the whole world should take?

He hesitated again, and then remembered something his foster father had often said.

Never run from anything, Wallin Provin had taught him. Always face up to your fears; that way they can't sneak up on you from behind.

He braced himself and stepped into the tent. The scene that greeted him was better than heexpected. The interior seemed untouched by the battle. The pavilion was large, its walls paneled with hand-painted red-and-gold silk. The High Priestess lay on the bed, her naked body covered by a blood-soaked sheet, laid out as if the morticians had already prepared her for the funeral pyre. Had Kirsh done that? Probably.

The scene depressed Dirk, as if some residual trace of Kirsh's pain and anger still lingered in the tent like mist. What had it cost him? Dirk wondered. What had finally convinced him Marqel must die?

Whatever it was, even Kirsh had not been able to deny the truth in the end.

The tent flap billowed out in an errant gust of wind. Marqel was not beautiful in death. Not as she had been in life. And she had been beautiful. So beautiful that she had split Senet and almost brought the nation to its knees.

Not so superior and self-righteous now, are we? he asked her silently, the same words Marqel had taunted him with that night so long ago in Avacas when she'd spiked his wine with the Milk of the G.o.ddess and then accused him of rape.

With a shake of his head, Dirk looked away, a little disturbed that Marqel's death relieved him so much. And it wasn't even his doing. It was Kirsh who had destroyed Marqel in the end. And then he'd destroyed himself.

Dirk hadn't tried to lead the battle, if you could call the short, brutal engagement a battle. Rather, like a good general, he watched helplessly from a rise overlooking the field of engagement as Kirsh threw his life away.

He hadn't even tried to defend himself. Kirsh wanted to die in battle. He always had. Rees's reasons for joining Kirsh on his suicidal charge were more complicated, Dirk knew. But Kirsh had known he was riding to his death. Rees probably believed Kirsh would win.

Dirk managed to keep his grief at bay, but he couldn't help feeling responsible. He knew Kirsh well enough to know once he accepted the truth there was nothing left to him. Is that how Kirsh defined honor? Was it better to die gloriously in battle defending something, no matter how fallacious, than admit you were wrong? Kirsh's honor-that strange, indefinable sense Dirk had always found so irritating-apparently allowed no other course of action.

Was there something else he could have said to Kirsh or Rees that could have ended this differently?

If he'd been less impatient, less defensive of his own actions? Kirsh's words haunted Dirk. Who set you up as the moral guardian of Ranadon?

"Has anything been touched?"

The officer who stood on guard just inside the pavilion entrance shook his head. "We thought you should see it first, my lord. It's a pity really."

"Why?"

"Would've been better for everyone if she'd been hanged, my lord. Would've put an end to things much quicker."

"Perhaps," Dirk conceded. "But there'll be no civil war now, Captain. No further resistance. That's what we came here for."

And the end justifies the means, he heard Kirsh say.

And then another thought occurred to him. Perhaps Kirsh had not killed Marqel to spare her the hangman's noose.

Perhaps he had killed her because he knew he was going to die and even in the afterlife, he could not bear to be without her.It was sometime later that Dirk entered the tunnel, walking through the torchlit darkness to the cavern beyond. It was empty when he arrived and for a fleeting moment, that same feeling of awe that had overwhelmed Dirk the first time he stepped into the hall came back to him. But there was no lingering darkness here now. No shadows concealing the truth. The cavern was brightly lit, the eye reflecting the torchlight with an accusing, unblinking stare.

"Come to read the prophecies, my lord?"

Dirk turned to find Rudi Kalenkov entering the cavern behind him.

"I wish I could read them."

Rudi stopped a few paces from him and eyed him quizzically. "You can't read them, my lord?"

"You know d.a.m.n well I can't, Rudi. No more than Belagren heard the voice of the G.o.ddess in here.

No more than Marqel could translate these walls."

"Prince Antonov and Prince Kirshov believed she could," he pointed out cautiously.

"One was mad, the other was in love. Neither of them was thinking clearly."

"And what about you, my lord? What is your position? Is this place to be sealed again, to hide the truth?"

Dirk shook his head. "Far from it. I want to know everything this place can tell us. And not just this cavern. There must be other buildings here in Omaxin that can shed some light on who these people were. And this time we'll do it properly. Systematically. We'll bring people in from the universities in Avacas and Nova to study the ruins."

Rudi was shocked. "You'd open the ruins to scholars, my lord?"

"What's a lion, Rudi?" Dirk asked, instead of answering his question.

"It's a cat," the Shadowdancer replied, rather puzzled by the odd question. "A very large cat. It's the emblem of the Latanya house."

"Have you ever seen one?"

"Of course not. It's a mythical creature, like a dragon or a fairy."

"How do you know that?"

Rudi shrugged. "It's...just one of those things everyone knows, my lord."

"That's what I said to Neris when he asked me the same question."

Rudi stared at him doubtfully. "For a man sworn to guide the people of Ranadon to the G.o.ddess, you have a strange att.i.tude, Dirk Provin. You talk like a scholar, not a cleric."

"I want to know, Rudi. Better yet, I want everyone to know the truth, not just a few people who can use the truth to manipulate the ignorant."

"Are you accusing me of something, my lord?" he asked, sounding a little worried.

"I probably should have you burned at the stake, actually," Dirk scolded. "I'm sure if I thought about it, I could come up with something plausible."