“I’m sorry, my lord. I can do neither one right now.” I swept my hand in a circle, and an explosion of fire swept through the temple, setting every bell to jangling and tinkling until one might think an earthquake had set up housekeeping inside the place. I ran for the alcove, but Fiona was already ahead of me. We streaked for the back exit, hiding behind a pillar as Aleksander’s soldiers ran to his rescue. While they were still blinded by the brilliance of the light and distracted by the cacophony of the bells, we ran right past them into the night, and we didn’t stop until we were deep in the poorest quarter of the capital city.
“He thinks he still owns you,” said Fiona as we slowed down at last, doing our best to disappear into the crowds of beggars, drunkards, slavers, thieves, and whores who plied the dusty streets.
I could not answer her. My head was reeling from strong enchantment and sick fury—at myself, at Aleksander and his hotheaded pride, at Blaise and his foolish idealism, at a world in which I had failed everyone I loved.
In the sickly light of sputtering torches, gaunt-faced women haggled with each other over diseased goats or bony chickens, while dirty-faced children clung to their skirts. A toothless Frythian beckoned to us to join in an alleyway game of ulyat—the prize a ragged, trembling girl of ten. “For work or pleasure,” he said. “Not hardly touched as yet.” I shoved the pawing man away, scarcely controlling the urge to stick a knife in him.
Fiona pulled me away. “You’re not safe until you get out of this vile city.”
“He won’t hurt me.” I clung to the thread of belief.
“He sounded quite serious about it.”
“I know him better than he knows himself.” But not well enough to expect he would turn against me so absolutely.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Indeed.” A chill wind had risen up off the desert, and Fiona was shivering. She had already stripped off her white robes to make us harder to follow, and was wearing only her breeches and a thin shirt. I rummaged through a pile of old clothes laid out on the street beside a flint-eyed old woman, and found a ragged cloak that smelled vaguely of sheep and a short jacket of purple wool with an ominously dark-stained rip in the back of it. I gave Fiona the jacket while I donned the cloak. Though I could not believe Aleksander would harm me, I had no such illusion about his anger at the Yvor Lukash. “And now you should go home. Hide your face and get as far away from me as quickly as you can manage.” Ezzarians were already at risk of enslavement, and if I had to show my paper to avoid capture, revealing my identity, anyone with me would be judged as aiding the Yvor Lukash. And then she would be dead. Painfully and slowly.
“What of the lady’s promise?”
The dilemma, of course. I needed to find Balthar. Now that I was forbidden to return to Ezzaria, I had no ready alternatives. But I could not risk involving the Princess any further. “I’ll find some other way to get the information. Now, go and don’t stop. If you stay and the Derzhi don’t kill you, I promise you I will.”
But my watchdog would not leave it. “She’ll send a messenger. If I were to meet him, there would be no connection with you or the Yvor Lukash. I am not one of them. The Prince himself knows that.”
“Too risky. I won’t let you.” I started across the miserable lane toward an alehouse, but Fiona shoved me backward until my back was against the wall of the alley.
“Won’t let me? And since when have you become my protector?” Before I could answer, the city watch began to call the midnight hour. “Wait here. I’ll be back before you can close your mouth.”
“But you don’t even know—”
“I know how to find the Gasserva Fountain. As it happens, I once killed someone there.” With that, she disappeared into the crowd.
I shrank into the alleyway and wondered if I would ever see Fiona again. For the first time since I’d met her, I hoped I would.
CHAPTER 18
I left a trail of blood-streaked snow as I dragged myself toward the icebound castle. The sharp edges of the ice sliced through the deadness of my bare hands and feet. Still too far. The darkness would consume me long before I could get inside. As I forced another breath into frosted lungs, the majestic gates swung open and issued forth a host of the shimmering wraiths. In awe I watched them ride, tall and straight and proud, across the luminescent bridge, flickering in and out of the realm of my seeing as they moved through the pelting sleet. Beautiful. Dangerous. A rider at the front of the column led a white horse, decked out in black and silver trappings—a riderless horse, huge, powerful, and spirited. The wraith army wound through the gloom, farther and farther from me, until, at the very limits of my sight, they came upon a figure dressed in black and silver, a man standing alone in the swirling storm. He was the sovereign of that storm, the master of any land he walked. He wore power, strength, and danger with the same magnificence as his garments of silver and black. As the man mounted the riderless horse, I cried out a warning, for I knew the rider was born of the same darkness that was creeping into my frozen soul, and that the cold fire gnawing at my entrails was his work. But no matter how I screamed in pain and desperation, the wraiths could not hear me over the wild wind. And no matter how I tried, I could not see the dark rider’s face.
“When are you going to tell me what’s happening?” The strained voice from behind me dragged me back yet again. “Bad enough you scream in your sleep, now you sit here with your eyes rolled back in your head, looking like you’re going to keel over dead right here in this filthy boat. If you think to leave me drown, why don’t you just push me over the side?”
“Sorry.” I caught my breath and dragged at the oars. The flimsy craft of leather stretched over thin spars had started a slow spin and was almost broadside to the current, the dark green water lapping eagerly over the low sides.
“So what is it?”
“Maybe I’ll explain it when you tell me who you killed at the Gasserva Fountain.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
So I didn’t tell her of the dream that was again creeping into my waking hours. Worse than before. More urgent. More frightening. The black and silver lord who stood waiting in the storm . . . his power and his danger froze my blood.
“I never heard of this place,” she said. “Why ever would anyone live on an island? Makes it nasty difficult for visitors.”
I bent my back to the oars, pushing against the strong current, and wondered yet again if Fiona had been born solely as an instrument for the gods to punish my multitudinous sins. There was not a horse but was a bucking demon to her, not a turn in the road that was anything but crooked, not a day that was not too hot or too cold or too windy or too wet, and certainly not an action that I could take that was not too hasty, too slow, cowardly, or ill considered. Since the night she had returned with the information that Balthar lived alone on an island in the Sajer River, she had not been silent for the span of ten heartbeats in any hour I was awake. For all I knew, her complaining might continue while I slept. Perhaps she talked so much in hopes I would forget what she had said about killing someone by the Gasserva Fountain in her days as a gleaner.
Gleaners were the thieves Talar had sent into the cities during the years of Derzhi rule, to steal the things the Ezzarians hidden in the forest needed for survival, but could neither grow nor make nor find. Gleaning was fraught with danger, the gleaners at constant risk of enslavement. Those who survived became very good at spying and subterfuge. No wonder Fiona was so capable. The strangest part was that Fiona had ever found herself in Zhagad. What would have taken Ezzarian gleaners into the heart of the Empire?
I gave her plenty of opportunities to tell me about the incident at Gasserva, thinking she must have mentioned it for a purpose. But in all the leagues we traveled from Zhagad and all the words that passed through her lips as we rode, I learned nothing more of her past. Now we were about to beard the despicable Balthar in his den, and my watchdog would still not leave off either her watching or her talking. “Do the clouds ever lift from this miserable river? Three days since we turned north at Passile, and we’ve not seen the sun even once.”
“Just row, Fiona. I want to get this over with.” The closer we got to Balthar, the less sense the visit made. Why would such a detestable wretch tell anything of importance? He had shown himself willing to destroy Ezzarians for his revenge, and even if he had found the answer to the demon births in all his searching, he’d not been willing to share it with the rest of us. He’d not come running back to save anyone else’s children.
Fiona and I had traveled west and north from Zhagad, keeping to ourselves, using the last of the wine merchant’s reward to buy supplies and a chastou for the desert crossing. Once into the hilly sheep country north of Basran, we sold the chastou at the market town of Passile, and made inquiries until we learned of a bargeman who had a boat to rent. Unfortunately, we were left with a long day’s row across a lake and a short stretch upstream to Balthar’s island. We could have waited for one of the regular merchant barges that carried cargo across the lake into the western Empire. For a price they would drop us and our little boat near the mouth of the Sajer, but barges were often used by slavers, and eyes were already taking note of Fiona’s Ezzarian features. I dared not let myself be seen in Passile after Fiona heard soldiers talking about the Prince’s new edicts concerning the Yvor Lukash. We wanted to be out of the place before anyone decided that there might be some reward bound up in our skins.
The dream had plagued me during all our traveling, worse every day. As we rowed toward Fallatiel, I could scarcely hold two thoughts together.
Though it was sometime in mid-afternoon, the light was almost gone. Thick gray mist swirled about us, leaving a damp film on skin and clothing, packs and oars. The afternoon was cool, but my limp hair was pasted to my face, and I could not tell whether the droplets that rolled down my neck were rain or sweat. I was steering by sound more than sight, listening for the break in the current where the river curved west and split, skirting the island of Fallatiel.
On the western side of the island, so the bargeman had told us, we would find an inlet and a strip of sand and shingle suitable for landing. Once a year a supply of salt, flour, oil, candles, and other such items was left there, though to his knowledge no one had ever seen the resident of the island. Someone in Zhagad sent payment, but he didn’t know who.
“Ease off a bit,” I said. The plopping and gurgling of water warned us of the rocks, and soon two giant shapes loomed out of the mist. “There are the boulders we were told of. We should be able to steer a little to the right and let the current carry us onto the shore.”
A short time later I was able to wade through the shallows and haul the boat onto the small crescent of sand. A kingfisher sat brooding on an overhanging limb, waiting to plunge into the river to catch his supper. A flock of swallows gibbered at us and fluttered about in the mist, disturbed from their evening’s roosting in the rocks surrounding the landing spot.
“Hello!” I called. The fog muffled my cry, so I wasn’t surprised when no one answered. “Let’s walk up. I’m not going to stand here and wait for him to come down and invite us in.” I brushed the damp sand from my feet and pulled on my boots that I had removed to haul in the boat, while Fiona dragged our vessel well away from the water’s edge and tied it to a clump of willows.
A narrow track led up from the beach between the giant boulders and into a thick forest of hemlock, spruce, and pine. Birds shrieked at us as we passed, and small creatures skittered under the blackberry vines that grew thickly under the trees. “Hello,” I called again.
We wandered for a quarter of an hour, finding no sign of habitation, only more trees, more rocks, and more birds. I began to wonder if we’d been misdirected. But then I sensed movement behind us and touched Fiona’s arm in warning. “It’s only reasonable that he would be shy of strangers from Ezzaria,” I said loud enough to be heard at a distance. “He has no way of knowing we’ve only come for information.”
“I’ve heard he is our only true scholar in these matters,” said Fiona, catching my intent. “It would be a shame to miss . . . oh!” She stopped short at the top of a climb that I thought must surely take us to the high point of the island. But before us on the crest of the next rise stood a ruin—five pairs of tall, graceful columns standing like ghostly couples in the foggy evening, ready to take up a dance suspended for only a moment. The wooden roof had long rotted away, but the elegant curves of the carved stone lintels were still visible, some in place atop the columns, some through the heavy growth of berry thicket and flowering vines where they had fallen.
I had seen a number of the ancient builders’ ruins—all of them lovely and well designed, hinting at a culture of refinement and intellect. Everything my mother had tried to teach me of artistry, of proportion and balance, symmetry, and grace was exemplified in their stonework. But never had I seen one of their structures so complete or of this precise shape. This could be the archetype for every Ezzarian temple, though after seeing both, one would never mistake the small, crude imitations for the glorious original. Someone of my ancestors had seen this place and found in its simple harmonies a model for the work we did—seeking wholeness for human minds—and they had built its replicas all through our own lands. How ironic to discover it just when I had come to believe that we ourselves were broken.
In the tree-flanked hollow between our position and the ruined temple was a rectangular pool, its stonework borders still intact, tendrils of mist rising from the dark, unmoving surface of the water. In eerie unison, Fiona and I walked down the almost invisible path to the pool, bent over, and peered into the water. What we expected, I could not have said, but it was certainly not what we saw in the reflection. For peeking out from between our shoulders was a merry face . . . round cheeks, small mouth, two bright black eyes, slightly angled, and a short fringe of white hair on a bald skull.