 
Bliss

Sarah Remy

Copyright 2013 Sarah Remy

Smashwords Addition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material herein is prohibited.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people.

The persons, places, and things mentioned in this novel are figments of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional.

# One

The first time I dropped a ball Ross simply plucked it from the grass and returned it to my hand.

The second time I dropped a ball, he knocked me across the brow.

The third time he awarded me a clap in the jaw. And after the fourth slipped ball, he took his belt to me.

His beatings proved a point and I never dropped a single colored ball again. The spheres became a part of me, as integral as the fingers on my hand and yet as unimportant as the freckles across my chest.

"Eat with them, wash with them, dream with them." Ross reminded me every night before candle snuff. "Treat them as King or whore. But never let them out of your sight."

He sewed for me a juggler's pouch from a clutch of velvet I'd stolen in the King's Market, and used horse hair as thread and dirty ribbons from his travel case to tie it about my waist. The pouch chafed at first, but soon my flesh became used to the scrape and eventually I began to feel naked without it.

"The balls are your foundation and your luck, Bliss," Ross repeated in my ear, a mantra. "They will always keep you fed."

Well. Perhaps not always. Ross was, deep down, a scoundrel who enjoyed the sound of his voice. But I never forgot his lessons.

When Shaara dropped his first ball, I retrieved it from the straw and placed it back on his palm. When he dropped his second, I cuffed him across the face. The third drop earned him a knock into horse muck. And the fourth, a whupping to rival even Ross's strength.

Shaara will not drop a fifth.

*****

"She'll be drunk by sunset," the boy complained, frowning over his cider. "She'll break something. And we'll have to sleep in the stables."

"She won't break anything." Maurice forked up a bite of thick stew and smiled. "She'll remember the last time."

"She won't. She never remembers."

"She'll remember." The stew tasted strongly of Southern salt. Maurice wondered how the tiny inn had managed to beg, borrow or steal even a handful of the precious stuff. Last he'd heard the King's whores were going for less than a teaspoon of Southern spice.

"Ten hands!" Bliss crowed from across a herd of plank tables, directly on cue as always. "Ten hands, and we're out! That, my young gentleman, will loose you your purse Hand it over, beautiful."

The 'young gentleman' gave a shout of disbelief. Shaara's thin shoulders slumped. Maurice swallowed another bite of stew and met the innkeeper's concerned gaze.

"Bliss," Maurice warned without turning around. "The rooms are bought and paid for."

"And isn't that a wonderful thing. Hand over the purse, child, and we'll go another round."

"I've no coins left!"

"Your word is as good as the King's." To Maurice's biased ear, Bliss sounded like temple bells when she laughed. "One more round before supper!"

"Supper's nearly gone, Bliss," Shaara ventured. "Better come before Maurice cleans out the bowl."

"Shut your mouth, boy." Maurice picked up his own cracked mug and washed the salt from his tongue.

"Shaara!" Bliss blinked as though she had just now recalled her apprentice's existence. "Come and entertain us. And bring me the last of the stew."

Maurice watched as the boy rolled his shoulders and shoved back from the table. Even balancing a heavy bowl of stew and his mug of half finished cider Shaara had grace If only the lad could discover confidence as well.

Maurice glanced the innkeeper's way again. The wiry man appeared not to notice the gathering trouble, but Maurice knew better. Likely the missus was already in the back room totting up possible losses. Four nights spent in Auberg Town and Bliss was already a legend.

"Another cider," Bliss called from her perch before the fire. "And another jug of ale for my pretty friend. Shaara, sit there. And for Trout's sake, don't step on the jumpers."

Maurice tilted his head and watched Shaara through wreathes of stale smoke. The boy stepped gingerly around the gaming ribbons and set the stew bowl in Bliss's lap. She snatched it up and bent, using long fingers to dig mutton free, while dirty curls fell over her face. The avid look in her eye had Maurice coughing back a sigh. Apparently it would not be drink tonight after all, but a gamblers' fight.

She'd picked the perfect stage. The Inn of the Star was packed from bar to window, patrons slowly crushing shoulder to shoulder as more weary souls abandoned the dusk in favor of heat and warmth and entertainment. The somber missus returned from the back room, installing herself before the keg, pulling ale with practiced ease and taking coin with a greed that mirrored Bliss's own.

In a far corner, safely away from the roaring fire, a clutch of young wealth played a loud game of Catch and Drop. They wore the elaborate finery of the lucky, all feathers and satin, and they gleamed with easy coin. Closer to the warmth of wood and flame those with less to call their own played simple cards on wooden bench and table. Farm folk and King's men, free of servitude until dawn.

Just beyond the planks Bliss sat high on a stool, deep on the hearth, nearly in the fire itself. A handful of admirers crouched at her feet, pretending interest in the game. Maurice noted the expressions on their young faces and marveled that they could find any beauty behind Bliss's coat of grime.

Jumpers milled about in a box clamped between the knees of Bliss's young gentleman. He was a gentleman in truth, Maurice realized with some surprise. Despite a dusting of grit his hose were plainly silk and he wore rings on his fingers. His soft hands fluttered, one tenting the box in an attempt to keep the crickets from escaping, the other cradling the jug of ale Bliss had cajoled from the innkeeper's tight fist.

Shaara settled himself behind Bliss, back to the flames. Four tasseled spheres rolled from his threadworm sleeves. A flick of one wrist and he sent the balls leaping into the air. Beads on the tassels clicked and hummed, persistent even beneath the mutter of the crowded tavern.

"The brown one, this time," Bliss said, licking mutton juice from one finger. "He looks a veritable Granda. Let's see what the old man can do."

The lordling wet his lips and teased an insect from the box. One of his companions straightened the ribbons on the hearth.

"For or against?"

Bliss snorted. "And what did I just say? For. Fifty says he'll make twenty hands."

"There isn't room," the lordling protested. "Twenty hands will land him in the fire."

"Jump him the other way," Bliss said. Above her head Shaara's spheres spun and twittered. "Take the bet?"

A chorus of ayes and nays rose above the popping fire. Three more crickets were added to the line up. Maurice watched as coins changed hands. The lordling slipped an amethyst from his finger and set it at the foot of Bliss's stool. The jewel, if sound, was surely worth more than the rest of the pot combined.

Maurice briefly shut his eyes. They would be sleeping not in the stables but in the young gentleman's scullery, there indentured until winter.

"Odds up?" Bliss grinned, unperturbed.

"Aye!" A farmer's lad laughed back, smoothing the ribbons straight. "Give 'em up!"

The jumpers did not much like being set legs to fire. Maurice wondered if Bliss hoped the heat would make her champion jump all the farther. She slithered bonelessly from the stool and crouched with the others, fingers arched loosely around the paralyzed bug.

"For King, for country," the lordling chanted, voice gone high. "Jump!"

The crickets, set suddenly free, buzzed and sprang. They were mute souls jerking in instinctive fear, flashes of shadow against the brighter fire light.

A shout went up. Bliss climbed the lordling's shoulders, lithe and laughing. Throat dry, Maurice set down his mug and stood up to better see.

"Granda! Granda!" Bliss whooped. "Legs of iron! Twenty hands at least! Where's the chalk? Mark it!" She squirmed, dropped free of the young gentleman and pushed forward. "Mark –"

Shaara loosed a ball.

Free of Shaara's hands, the tasseled orb had little speed. But it had weight and direction. Maurice had to give the boy a nod for aim.

The ball clocked Bliss between the shoulders. The woman was strong but she was near drunk, and distracted. She stumbled, grunting, and whacked the surprised lordling with one sharp elbow. The young gentleman hissed and sidestepped, and the resulting crunch of bug bone beneath foot was audible even beneath calls for more drink.

The group before the fire froze and then Bliss's scream of rage split the smoke.

"Idiot! Wretch! Twice cursed son of a – "

Maurice took three quick steps, forded an already overturned bench, and grabbed Bliss before she could send Shaara tumbling after the furniture.

"Fate," Maurice warned, a low murmur into one grubby ear. "Let it go."

Bliss twitched beneath his hand. "He dropped it! Horrid's tits, he dropped it! Did you see –"

Maurice flexed fingers against her shoulder blade and she paused. Before the fire the lordling picked crushed grey insect from the bottom of his boot.

"Mine," Bliss groaned. "Did you see? Twenty hands if it was two."

"Let it go," Maurice said again as he righted the overturned bench with elaborate care. Shaara and his errant ball had wisely disappeared.

"Game forfeit," the lordling drawled. "We cannot possibly take the measure now."

"Because Granda's smeared all over your boot, you clumsy arse!" Bliss clenched her fists. "Twas a clear win! You saw it! You all saw it."

The indentured, the nobility and the King's men all held silent. The tavern waited with obvious expectation. The young gentleman smiled and reached across the planks for his purse. Bliss cursed and snapped dirty fingers about his pale wrist.

"Hands off. That's mine. Won fair and square last round."

"Entire game's forfeit," the lordling replied, limpid with satisfaction. "S'written in the logs. 'In event of unfortunate accident –'"

Maurice grabbed and missed. Bliss's knuckles burst the young man's pedigreed nose and her knee found his groin. The unfortunate creature went down, screaming, doubling halfway into the flames. Velvet and lace flared up. The crowd released bated breath in a roar.

"Fox take us." Maurice lunged past cheering gamblers and tackled the young fool, snuffing angry flames with hands and chest. Out of the corner of his eye another bug twitched and smoked. Past the lordling's panicked huffing he could hear the missus' angry shouts and Bliss's rising vulgarities. "And hang us all."

"You needn't scowl so." Bliss picked bits of straw from her curls. "It might have been worse."

"I'm not sure how. You missed his purse."

"I didn't miss it." Bliss said, "I left it. After a shock like that the little lordling might have forgotten his teeth but never his purse. It was a decoy."

"For?" Maurice frowned as he spread his cloak at the foot of the bale. The wool was charred and blackened in patches: punishment for a good deed done. The night air blew ice cold and one pasture over cows grumbled at the coming winter.

"That," Bliss said, pointing one long finger.

Maurice turned. Shaara, settled with his head on his pack, held a gleam of purple up to the moon's faint light. The boy's eyes were very round.

"You didn't."

"I did," Shaara answered, full of wonder. "It's bigger than my thumb."

"A family signet." Maurice stretched lengthwise on his bedding and wrapped tight against the chill. "We'll never pawn it."

"Not here." Bliss tilted her chin and appeared to study the moon. "Next town over. Maybe two."

"Not as easy as coins."

"Worth more," Shaara opinioned, suddenly wiser than his clutch of years. "Perhaps we can pry the stone free."

"Perhaps." Bliss tucked her own cape around worn moccasins and sighed.

"What is it?" Maurice asked, knowing the answer already. She had no trouble burning the landed on a tavern hearth, but her heart had its own moods.

"The crickets," Bliss said to the stars. "I regret the jumpers. Did you see that poor Granda leap? Like a stag in the King's woods. Tomorrow he'll be scraped up with the offal, just so much grease on the bricks."

Shaara snorted. "You're no philosopher-priest, Bliss."

"No." Bliss rolled over and closed her eyes. "I'm much, so much more."

# Two

My mother was called Rose, after the rare flower in the garden her papa spent most of his small life tending.

Granda Jorge is a scrawny, gnarled man with no proper sense of humor. Sold into service at the age of ten,he showed an uncanny ability to keep green things alive, first in her ladyship's solarium, later in the herb plot, and finally as groundskeeper of the household's treasured and extensive ornamental gardens.

He still talks incessantly of the land that wasn't his. He can describe every seedling he tended in thirty years of servitude but he cannot remember the family he lost to the King.

Could be this is not an elderly failing. Could be it's a calculated adaptation. I shouldn't resent his choice. But I do.

Rose was a pretty child and an even prettier maid. She had absolutely no interest in either Granda's botanical passion or her own place in a landed household. Rose had eyes only for the bright young conscripts who marched past in endless clots, season after season, away south on the dusty road that bypassed her ladyship's stables and curved away over the horizon.

To my young mother these untried soldiers must have represented mystery and adventure. Certainly, as she grew older, they became objects of desire and then pleasure.

I do not know how many men she rolled behind the boxwood hedge in her ladyship's lavender garden, but I do know I was the unsurprising end result.

She named me not after a flower, or shrub, or herb, but after the apparently impressive stead her last conquest rode. Blisstide Run, the nag was called, and I got the entire mouthful, thankfully shortened to Bliss in my very early years.

I am endlessly grateful that horse was not christened Knottytail Leap or Muskrat Jump.

My mother, a kind soul, had not a lick of sense and in the end that was her downfall.

*****

After more than fifteen years in the Northern kingdom, Maurice was still not accustomed to the bitter, bone-chilling cold. He'd become used to the drifts of ice-blue snow, drifts that on the side of the King's road grew as high as a man's shoulder. He he'd become used to the spears of ice that dripped from gabled roofs, beautiful sculptures Maurice imagined could easily pierce flesh and bone if ever dislodged.

He'd even become used to the endless grit of sand that lodged in the boots, and in shirt cuffs, and in the neck and ears, and even between the teeth. Urchins and old men spread the sand over the King's Road in small, regimented armies, feeding hungry families with the coins they earned. The sand itself, Bliss claimed, was hauled from the fallow fields in a strip of Trout-cursed border towns.

Maurice swallowed grit with his cider every night, and regularly mused over the fallow fields that must now be bottomless trenches. And if the dirt in those fields had been laid low by black spells, was not the King tempting fate by sprinkling the same earth over his icy roads?

The clogging sand made Maurice nervous, but the cold greyed his very spirits and made long days seem without hope or purpose. The wind snuck under his cloak and between skin and woolens, conjuring blains on bits of his body that had never even seen the sun.

Fifteen years, and he should be used to the winter sorrows. He'd heard tales of whole villages, years and years past, before the King had come, who'd burnt their very children in god offering, hoping only to chase the cold away.

"Nonsense," Bliss scoffed when Maurice repeated such stories. "The North has always been cold and Northerners have always been strong. We do not try to change anything we cannot. Besides, no sane Northern family would send a child to the gods; a terrible waste of an extra pair of hands, that would be, come summer and harvest."

Bliss kept the ragtag remainder of her small company fed and did her best to keep them warm, but even she could not turn winter to summer. In the right town displays of circus magic provided food and shelter, and in the wrong town Bliss's gambling and Shaara's quick fingers kept the company from famine.

Maurice refused to learn the role of thief. He he'd signed on with Ross as an honest man: an honest man looking for clean livelihood. Even after so much had changed, some principles could not be broken.

He would not lower himself to steal. But neither would he leave Bliss to her self determined fate.

"Maurice." Juggling finished, battered hat jingling with a few burnished coins, Shaara settled in the rushes at his feet. "Bliss wants to move on again tomorrow."

"I know it." Maurice had foregone drink and food this night. The tavern Bliss had chosen seemed especially dirty, the men slumped over the tables especially taciturn. More importantly, even the obvious regulars appeared to be avoiding the fare.

It made one wonder, it did, how exactly the tavern master kept his little industry afloat.

"She's taking us south, again." Shaara pulled a dried turnip from his pocket and, munching delicately, began to sort the coins from his hat. "Two more days at this pace and we'll hit the border."

"I've eyes, boy."

"She swore she'd never set foot over the border again, not if the entire Northern coast came after her with fish hooks and whores' tongues." Shaara's solemn face brightened some. Despite a multitude of worries, no boy of fifteen summers could resist Bliss's particular imagery.

"It'll be warmer south, a few days across the border." Maurice's stomach growled. He wanted food. And more yet, he wanted drink. Even so, he was too wise to risk his gut on an unclean hearth. He'd learned Northern hygiene the hard way.

To distract himself from Shaara's mostly devoured turnip, Maurice lifted his gaze and studied Bliss.

For lack of stool or chair she had settled herself on the bar, knees tucked under chin, compact and still but for the elaborate twining of her hands and the spark in her eye.

He was too far away to hear just what tale she was whispering so solemnly to her captive audience, but captive they were, and that was what mattered most. She had gained a mug of cider and half a loaf of bread. Northern grime and Northern cleanliness never dared bother Bliss.

"She's telling the one 'bout Amy and the Seat's lions," Shaara said with elaborate unconcern. "They're a blood hungry group, tonight. Do you really think she'll take us across?"

"Three years and she hasn't yet." Maurice studied Bliss's mobile face. The dirt had grown so thick across her cheeks she appeared bruised in the faint light. "Some day she will have to."

"Pride?"

"Passion." Maurice accepted the remnants of turnip from the lad's hand and bit deep.

Bliss took a soldier to her bed that night, thus proving to Maurice that his suspicion about the tavern's true product was indeed correct. He did not begrudge her the pleasure, nor the coin spent on companionship, but he did wonder, briefly, what she would do for breakfast the next morning if she spent all her coins on bed. A hungry Bliss was not an exceptionally likable Bliss.

Apparently breakfast came with the deal, or else Bliss had stolen from the local baker, because when she roused Maurice and Shaara from their shared pallet, she had fresh bread and a pot of butter. The butter looked rancid but Maurice found he could no longer resist the bread, Northern hygiene be damned.

"Snowing out," Bliss said, attacking the butter with relish. She smelt foully of smoke and sweat and sex but she looked more rested than she had in a fortnight.

"We are surprised?" Maurice glanced about the attic loft. Most of the other pallets, full to bursting in the night, were now empty.

"I let you sleep in," Bliss said, reading his expression. "Tis after midday. You needed the rest. Besides, we're in no hurry today."

"We're not?" Bread eaten, Shaara squirmed free of borrowed bedding. "We're always in a hurry."

"Not today. Today we're playing with a lord's good will. And tonight we're performing for his mistress's pleasure."

Shaara's mouth dropped open, showing bread between his teeth. Maurice closed the boy's gape with a gentle fist and eyed Bliss.

"Where did you find a lord willing to hire a green lad, an old man, and a soldier's unwashed toy?"

Bliss's eyes snapped but her smile was well satisfied. "Last night's sturdy soldier is not a soldier in truth. No longer. He guards Lord Tamner's stables, has for the past handful of years."

"He must guard Lord Tamner's ears and balls if he can arrange the man's entertainment," Shaara marveled. Maurice finished his breakfast silently, all the while watching Bliss pretend not to squirm.

"Lord Tamner was also a soldier," Bliss said. "In the south. Before he earned his title and his land. In the battle of Green Kirk."

Maurice stilled. "That's it, then. He's heard of us."

"Most of those who survived Green Kirk have." Bliss waved one long hand. "Last night's bed companion wasn't convinced until he'd wormed his way under my shirt. And this morning he ran tattling to Tamner."

"Resourceful man," Maurice said, bland. He brushed crumbs from his cloak and began to set the bedding right. "Especially if he convinced Tamner to take the bits of us that are left."

"Tamner offered three hundred gold," Bliss said.

Shaara gasped. Maurice set down his half fastened pack and stared. "To entertain his mistress? The lord's surely mad."

"The mistress is inconsequential." Bliss hopped up, restless. "Tamner's apparently a loyalist. It's a coupe, feeding Ross's Troop at his boards. Even the 'bits of us that are left.'"

"A coupe," Maurice sighed. "Or trouble."

"Trouble we can handle." Bliss paused in her pacing to stare through the attic's crusted window. Whatever she glimpsed beyond hardened her features. "Myself, I'm more worried about Tamner's boards. It's been a very long time since we've walked landed halls."

"For three hundred gold, I'll walk Trout's watery Road." Shaara's face suffused with sudden joy. "Think of it. Supper every night from winter to winter."

Maurice shouldered his pack and hauled Shaara to his feet. "Supper every night it is, then. When are we expected?"

"Sundown," Bliss murmured to the window. "They call it the House on the Hill. We're to knock at the servants' entrance."

"Ah." Maurice nearly laughed aloud. "The heroes of Green Kirk we may be, but it's still the servant's entrance for Ross's Troop."

"And so it will always be." Bliss whirled from the dirty glass. "Come. I've found us hot water."

Bliss's hot water was steaming in an old whiskey barrel in a crooked stable behind the local blacksmith's shop. The blacksmith, charmed either by Bliss's smile or the promise of future payment, had erected a privy curtain contrived of dusty horse blankets pinned across worn rope.

Maurice could not remember the last time he'd enjoyed the small luxury of privacy. As for hot water, surely it had been since spring.

"You're going last, o dirt monger," he told Bliss, then ducked behind the horse blankets. "You'll turn water to mud with the dip of one toe."

"Oh, yes." Bliss ducked after, ignoring Maurice's glare. "And you'd prefer I was pillaged every second stop."

"If you mean rape," resigned, Maurice shed his clothes and slid into the whiskey barrel with an audible sigh, "you're fooling yourself. You're man enough to stave off a posse of lust-crazed bears, even if you hadn't Shaara and myself as shadows every step of the last year."

"You think I'm wearing dirt because I like the itch?" Bliss snapped. She walked once around the barrel and then settled on a rusted anvil.

Maurice shrugged. "You were clean enough at the height of our season. Cleaner than most. I seem to remember screaming tantrums if the hot water wasn't quick enough." Maurice dipped up a rag the blacksmith had kindly left over the barrel edge and began a single minded scouring. "I think you're hiding."

"Hiding?"

"From men like Tamner. Men with long memories," Maurice agreed. "Truth told, you've been hiding long enough I suspected you'd forgotten the game. What changed your mind, Sacrifice?"

Bliss growled, whether at the title or the impertinence, Maurice did not dare guess. "We need the money. The boy's gone thin as a worm-ridden goat."

"Speaking of the boy," Maurice squeezed the rag over the crown of his head and sighed again as water dripped into his eyes. "Where've you sent him?"

"Shaara is running an errand. I've a seamstress cobbling together a few rags."

Maurice paused. "You've been mighty free with forthcoming coin, Bliss. Lord Tamner had better be an honest man, or we'll be chased over hill and dale with pitchfork."

Bliss rolled bony shoulders. "Luckily you're still spry, old man. Finish up. I didn't hire the water for your entire pleasure."

Maurice rose from the barrel, shedding rivers of water. "And what am I supposed to do until sundown?"

Bliss met his eye as she tugged at her tunic. "Practice."

The House on the Hill was reached by way of a winding, recently sanded and well maintained path. The cobblestones beneath the layer of sand were sturdy and unbroken, if slippery. The sun had disappeared long before sunset, overcome by an ornery bank of grey clouds.

Snow fell as the remnants of Ross's troop trudged uphill through pine and forest scrub. Lord Tamner was a favored; leather pennants rose from hills of snow, promising a hangman's noose for any who dared poach on the consigned property.

"Surely his lordship wouldna miss a grouse or four," Shaara muttered, glancing thoughtfully at iced-over branches. "Or a fat turkey. I can smell the bloody birds, the spoor is so thick."

"Touch not a feather," Maurice warned although he, too, could sense the birds sheltering above. "I've no desire to cut your body free from a hangman's knot. Leave the birds to our king."

"And pick your finery from the mud," Bliss growled. "Or the hangman'll have no use for you once I'm done."

Shaara sighed and hoisted his velvet cape over one shoulder. Bliss's seamstress had been unusually quick. The garb was most certainly second hand and from the profusion of lace and fur several seasons out of style, but the opulence suited the profession and the seamstress had been skilled enough with the needle where it mattered. Maurice's cloak was altered in several important places and Shaara's sleeves slit and edged until they were a drape of lace over elbows, baring delicate wrists and leaving quick fingers unhindered.

"You remembered the oil?"

Maurice swallowed a snort. "Three years out has not turned this old hand into an idiot, Bliss."

"You were one from the beginning." Bliss paused beneath a rustling fir. The torch she held in one hand brightened the old trunk and sent the snow in the branches directly above to hissing. "We can't foul this up, Maurice."

Maurice rolled a shoulder. Bliss had never been one for jitters. In fact, she'd always been the coolest of the lot. Cooler, in the end, even than Ross.

"Something you want to tell us, Bliss?" Soft, because if he knew Bliss, she was bracing for a fight.

"Nothing. I want my year of hot dinners, just like the boy. And maybe a bed without nits once every full moon. I'm tired of living off the dregs."

Snow sighed above the trees as Shaara shifted and muttered. Maurice ignored the lad. Bliss ignored Maurice.

In the drip of the snow and the flicker of the torch she looked almost as young as she had a clutch of years ago, fresh and full of triumph, clothed in riches and honor and Southern perfume. Before she'd finally broken and fled home.

The seamstress had cut most of the lace away from Bliss's tunic, then made up for its loss with a fluff of white fox and coon. The velvet trousers tucked into freshly blackened boots were almost the same color as the purple stone Bliss wore on her thumb.

She glowed, within and without. It was determination, Maurice realized, and then wondered what had finally woken Ross's protégé from her self-induced hibernation.

He meant to choose suspicion, but instead he found himself smiling at the defiance in the set of her shoulders.

His smile faded as the wind in the trees sharpened to rustles, the crackle of purposeful steps, and as Bliss wheeled, the mutter of audible voices.

"Not one feather, I said!" Maurice growled at Shaara, groping at his belt for a knife he'd sold for supper more than twelve moons earlier.

"I didn't!" Shaara protested. The boy snapped a branch from a drooping sapling and held it over his head as though he intended to club the King's men into submission.

Little good that would do, Maurice thought, grim, and bent to unearth a bent log from the snow. Even so, the lad had the right idea. No man wanted to die an empty-handed coward.

"Maurice," Bliss cautioned. "Stop. He didn't. I didn't. They're not –"

"No?" Maurice interrupted, counting spearheads and bearded grins. Five. Five men, and they had not troubled to be silent, because they did not need to. They carried far more steel than any gamekeeper could innocently excuse. "Then what?"

"They're here for us." Bliss lifted her torch. Rich gold thread gleamed on red breasts; a half moon rising. No royal mark, that. Not the King's indentured souls, then, but Tamner's men.

"Come," ordered the tallest of the group. There was grey in his beard and amusement in his tone. "Milord is waiting. Dinner will be growing cold."

The fellow took the flame from Bliss's hand and set off into the icing night. Bliss, without so much as a twitch of protest, followed after.

Maurice hesitated. Three pairs of black eyes watched impassively. Maurice dropped his makeshift weapon. At his nod, Shaara did the same. Tamner's men, jingling carelessly in the wind, closed behind, herd dogs in lordly finery.

# Three

I spent most of my childhood tromping about in her ladyship's flourishing orchards. In the summer season the oranges were sweet and

plentiful and the latticed, leafy roof provided relief from the otherwise nearly intolerable heat.

A deep spring ran through the orchards, and Granda quickly shaped the waterway to his satisfaction, digging and damming until it irrigated every thirsty root. By the time I was four, most of the essential troughs were beginning to age and crumble. I toiled away afternoons in the spring, chill currents rushing past my knees, as Granda demonstrated the perfect mix of straw and clay used to pat the trough sides back into place.

In my young mind I was heroic, saving water-starved trees and oranges and maybe even her ladyship's life in one muddy swoop.

My mother never minded when I trundled home soaking wet and plastered with straw. Nor did she seem to notice my innocent joy when, after many months of labor, the troughs began to run clean again.

The winter season brought drifts of snow, great piles that climbed the trunks of the orange trees, making the orchard seem suddenly short and dense. The bees disappeared and the spring froze solid. I learned how to climb bare branches despite their slick skin of ice, how to carve castles in the snow, and even more importantly, how to trap the small rabbits and marmots that flounder through the drifts in search of surviving greenery.

Her ladyship ran an organic garden and so, while most groundskeepers spent icy fortnights mixing and perfecting bug blight, root grow or other essential chemical doses, Granda used the time to care for his tools and architect the next year's plantings. His endless dreams did not always match her ladyship's pocket book but I still remember the beauty of the perfect blueprints he drew with pen and ink as he sat cross-legged on the floor of the largest greenhouse.

And I remember he was sketching when, in my seventh year, the King came for us. I remember the hushed crack of many hooves on ice and the doleful singing of sleigh bells. I remember Granda's sudden start and the spill of his ink as he rose too hastily and hurried to the greenhouse door. I pushed past him, wanting to see what had so thoroughly caught his attention, but he thrust me back and quickly, quietly locking the expensive glass portal.

We huddled low, beneath the fronds of a Southern palm and he kept one soiled, loamy hand clapped over my mouth.

By forcing me to share his cowardice as the world disintegrated around our green shelter, I have always believed he took from me the luxury of fear.

*****

Lord Tamner's mistress was a big woman with a wide mouth and Southern manners. She had no real personal interest in the evening's entertainment, other than to see that the hired players were properly dressed and knew exactly which bits of ribald humor were acceptable and which snippets of royal innuendo were not.

Bliss stood unruffled in the middle of a worn carpet while slaves and servants hurried back and forth, putting her ladyship to order. When asked to recite a cant Bliss did so, in cold clear tones appropriate to the lay. When asked to spring a step or two in demonstration of the latest trotting fad, Bliss complied, stone faced and light of foot about the bustle of stays and fabric.

When asked to incorporate the mistress's small lap-cat into the self same dance, Bliss balked.

"Children, gimps, swords and flame," Bliss said, steady under the flare of Southern temper. "But no animals."

"Tamner said you would surely do as I wished." Her ladyship sat on a curving settee, straight as an arrow, as three maids fussed over thin curls and another two hemmed her skirt.

If fur and velvet had been in vogue two seasons ago, Maurice thought, eyeing swathes of opaque netting, then surely this season the fashion was strategically bared flesh.

"And it is the latest thing," Tamner's mistress continued, eyes rolling over one motionless shoulder in dignified annoyance. "Straight from the Begnian swamps. A cat striped like a deep-forest parrot and smaller than a tree dog."

"No," said Bliss.

"She will dance on her hind quarters if you but dangle a fish from your fingers -"

"No. No animals. No forest parrots, no tree dogs, and no dancing cats."

The woman's mouth set and Maurice saw coin slipping away. He took one step forward, intending to argue, but Bliss hissed in annoyance and clear warning.

"Lord Tamner knows very well what my troop will and will not do. And as milord is the one who both sought me out and promised payment, I suggest you take up the argument with him." Bliss shrugged. "It is perhaps not too late to find another group of players yet willing to work with...cats."

"Although it is dark outside," Shaara spoke for the first time, pulling guileless eyes from a fluttering maid. "And icing over. And I have heard no word of another troop in town. Maurice?"

"No." It was an old game and Maurice played his part without effort. "Although I've heard tell there is a cyclist but one town over."

"A cyclist," Shaara scoffed. "Nothing but muddy fidget artists on wheels." The maids tittered appreciatively.

Milady looked less than pleased. Silence fell and then grew long. Bliss, still standing in the center of the room, waited. She would caper and sing to win her meal, but she would not bend principles, even when confronted with the sudden growl of Shaara's stomach.

"Very well," Tamner's mistress decided. A quick clap of her hands summoned a footman. "Take them to the hall. Show them where they must stand. Do not feed them yet. And then tell milord I am waiting upon his convenience."

Bliss bowed low and turned on her heel. Maurice and Shaara followed, soldiers caught in their commander's wake and whim.

The footman, stiff and sternly silent, bowed Bliss into a dark corridor and then marched forward. Bliss slowed to a molasses' pace, pretending to admire the rows and rows of gilded oval mirrors that hung, regimented, on every wall.

Maurice supposed she was deviling the servant for his mistress's sake, until he looked more carefully at the beveled glass.

"Southern work." He was not exactly surprised, but he was beginning to wonder how Lord Tamner managed to remain in the King's good will. Loyal men had been shot or hung for smaller displays of Southern sympathy.

"His wife's collection, I suppose." Bliss watched the impatient servant beneath lowered lashes. "She's too arrogant or stupid to know better."

"We did work with animals, once." Considering a particularly large mirror, Maurice clasped hands behind his back and rocked gently on his heels.

"A boy in a donkey suit does not an animal make," Bliss argued quietly.

"I had in mind the Reidwhich goat." He enjoyed deviling Bliss as much as Bliss enjoyed deviling the footman.

"That was a sacrifice," Bliss replied, calm. "And you're lucky it was the goat's throat and not your own I slit." She turned from the decorated walls and allowed the footman to finish his duty.

"Come, Shaara," Maurice said, hiding his smile. "Let's get you fed."

The boy lengthened his stride. "Bad luck."

"Ah?"

"The mirrors," Shaara explained, glancing back once. "Hung across from each other. Bad luck. Any Southern infant knows that."

"Arrogant or stupid," Maurice agreed, repeating Bliss's judgment to ease the sudden twitch in his gut. "Or perhaps wily as her swamp cat."

Milady's swamp cat was in fact far from wily. Tamner's woman, whose name Maurice quickly learned was Alyce, got her way in the end, if judiciously. The stripy beast made an appearance early on in the celebration, just as Tamner's trumpeter began to announce titled guests.

Two slaves with marked brows hoisted the animal's golden cage onto a banquet table across the cavernous room from Bliss's troop. Lady Alyce, glittering and fierce, set herself up at the head of the cage, apparently awaiting courtiers full of eager questions. The cat, a tiny thing with slitted eyes, curled itself into a nest of felt and immediately went to sleep.

If Alyce hoped her exotic pet would become the evening's entertainment, she must have been sorely disappointed. As far as Maurice could tell, Tamner's guests preferred the drink first, the victuals second and Bliss's quick tongue a close third. The Begnian swamp cat was mostly ignored. So much so that Lady Alyce was eventually forced to give up her station and join her own party.

Maurice, in between gulps of blue fire and the running patter that came automatically to his tongue, found himself watching the cat. He told himself that it was the gold had caught his interest. He had seen plenty of caged animals. Birds in miniature bamboo palaces, wolf cubs behind steel and wire, even an elegant fish in a glass bowl, but he'd never before seen such riches wasted so obviously. Gold, while no longer scarce, was still hoarded by most of the landed nobility. It was said the King himself had taken, years past, to wearing only silver in his own particular expression of caution.

The Northern King kept his treasures locked away out of sight, but here in on the Hill livery was picked in bullion and the household pet slept behind the gleam of gold.

"Does it hurt?"

Maurice let the flames lick about his fingers before he quenched the torch between his teeth. "No."

"Is it witchery?"

That gave Maurice pause. He sent the baton spinning as he considered the small boy at the edge of his circle. "No such thing as witchery, lad. Only quick fingers and a leathery tongue."

"Is your tongue made of leather?" Doubtful, the child took one step forward.

"Bliss says so." Maurice smiled and relighted his torch with a puff of hidden fire. "A tongue of leather and a head of stone, she says."

"Bliss is the storyteller?" The boy reached into a pocket and pulled forth a fistful of paper money. "She makes her hands into dragons and can stand on her head."

"Yes." Bliss was hidden in the growing crowd but Maurice had yet to meet a lad she could not charm.

"If there isn't witchery, is there dragons?" The boy squatted to drop his offering into the small brass bowl Maurice kept on the edge of his invisible theatre.

"I've never seen one." Maurice nodded his thanks and pulled a large twig of wintered fir from thin air. His circle of admirers clapped gently. "But I hear there's a major in Corkeslea keeps the head of one nailed to his library wall."

"Corkeslea is over the border." The lad grew thoughtful. "My Da says only soldiers and turncoats go over the border."

"And circus folk." Maurice handed the twig, now magically festooned with tiny paper birds, into the child's greedy hands. "Put it under your pillow tonight, lad, and you'll dream of dragons."

Face bright, the boy bowed once, clicking immaculate boot heels together, and then darted away, trophy held high.

In the near distance trumpets sounded again and Maurice's audience began to quickly thin. Supper, he supposed, and bent to collect his brass bowl. Coins scraped amongst the muffle of paper money. For the first time in a very long while, good fortune seemed to be smiling. Maurice swirled the brass container thrice, a player's superstition, and then paused in mild surprise.

The weight of good linen paper settled amongst the lighter bills. Maurice snagged the bit free of coin, only to find it was in fact a neat wad, folded precisely in thirds.

A biting snake might have been more welcome. Maurice frowned briefly into the pot, and then, quickly collecting his pack, went in search of Bliss.

"Perhaps it's a lover's note." Shaara licked grease from his fingers and reached for bread. His juggler's pouch hung at his belt, distended with orbs and coin. "Open it."

"No." Maurice paused to gather up bread and meat and then pulled Shaara from the supper benches. "Where's Bliss?"

"Near by the drink, most like." Shaara sounded cheerful. "Or on the couches with another restless lordling. She don't even bother wait for an invitation -"

"Not on a job." Maurice fought back a small lick of uncalled for and unexpected rage. It was not the boy's fault time obscured memory. "Not on a real job. Step to, lad. Tamner'll want us back on the floor as soon as our bellies are filled."

Shaara whistled a dancing tune under his breath. "Have you met him, yet? His lordship, I mean."

"No." Maurice searched the hungry crowd. He saw waves upon waves of white gauze and bare flesh but no sign of Bliss.

"Why not open it yourself?"

Maurice took a deep breath and paused to listen. Surely, if she were performing, there would be a ripple here or there. "Tain't for me, lad." And if she were not performing...

"How do you know?" Shaara patted absently at his spheres and then bent low to smile at a young creature with bleached bird bones strung about her neck on a silver chain.

"I don't get love notes. Nor notes of any other kind." Maurice said, disapproving. And then: "There. Over there."

Shaara made a smug noise. Maurice bristled but kept his temper in check.

Bliss had indeed found a couch and drink, red wine floating gently in a goblet of pocked glass. She glanced up as they approached, met Maurice's gimlet eye, and set her looming companion free with a tilted smile and a nod.

The gentleman melted gracefully away but not before Maurice had glimpsed the signet on the fellow's thumb. He was not sure if the resulting gripe in his gut was relief or unease.

"Tamner?" Disdaining the couch, Maurice crouched on his heels at Bliss's feet, back set carefully to the thronging hall.

"We were discussing overtime." Bliss sipped at her wine and then passed the goblet to Maurice. "He'd like a private performance after dawn."

Shaara made another small noise. Bliss ignored her lad and instead examined the folded bit of linen Maurice had traded for the wine. "What's this?"

"The boy thinks maids have been passing old Maurice love poems. I told him I've far too many wrinkles to catch a jaundiced eye. Open it."

Bliss did so in quick, practiced movements, all the while appearing only to sway in time with the faint strains of harp and troubadour. The heavy paper unfolded on her palm to reveal rough black ink on expensive stationary.

"Why," Bliss purred. "Imagine that. She's missing us already."

Maurice shifted forward and squinted at the scrawl between Bliss's thin fingers. "Lady Alyce."

"Yes." Bliss took her wine back from Maurice's hand. Obedient, he made the crushed missive disappear. "She'd like to break her fast. With us. At sunrise."

Maurice kept his face still. Bliss glanced sideways, finished her wine, and rose. "Fine work, lads. Apparently we've become popular as sweets before even moonrise. We'll be back on the circuit in no time."

"And not enough of us to go around at dawn."

"No." Bliss smoothed the ruff at her neck. Maurice watched, patient, and knew the instant she made her decision.

"Tamner will have to wait. Tomorrow morning, we see the lady of the hour."

By the time the sun rose, spreading a sickly light through the great hall's narrow windows, Maurice was sweat-soaked, rumpled, and feeling age to the very marrow of his bones. He was also, thank the small gods, far richer than he had been in many seasons and nearly full to choking with sweet meats.

He stood blowing colored smoke rings for a drunken and elderly matron when Bliss came to collect.

"Hungry?"

"Far from it." Maurice felt the sweets in his gut turn over. "I'd forgotten the tendency of the landed to treat the entertainment as children." The matron's eyes had rolled shut and she was beginning to snore, yet Maurice was careful to bow a proper farewell.

"Sing or starve," Bliss replied, quoting Ross. "As for me, I prefer to sing."

"No doubt. You've gone hoarse as a hog." Maurice left his small cigarette burning. He puffed more rings as they picked their way across the hall, stepping gingerly over the guests lying slumped across flagstone. Hounds, snuffling beneath the benches, stopped in their foraging to watch Maurice's creations burst against the low ceiling.

"Where's Shaara?"

"Running an errand."

Maurice closed his eyes for a brief moment and let peppermint fumes roll about his tongue before he blew through his nose. "Another errand? Let me guess, an ensemble of gauze and bird bone to go with the velvet and feathers."

"He's my apprentice." Even past a bruised throat, Bliss's irritation was clear. "Keep your nose out of it."

"He's you're apprentice, yes. But what exactly are you teaching him, Sacrifice?"

"I said, keep your beak out of it."

Maurice sucked on his cigarette and wondered when he had gone from silent partner to whipping boy. Sometime in the last three years Bliss had forgotten to be gracious and he had not paid much attention until now. He'd let her grieve because he thought it best. Perhaps he had let her grieve too long.

"Wrong hallway."

Bliss shot a burning look over her shoulder. "What?"

"No mirrors. Wrong hallway."

"Milady," Bliss said, cold and clear, "wishes to dine in the kitchens."

"Nobility lurking in the kitchens." Maurice finished his cigarette and ground the papery remnants to nothing between his back teeth. "And you're warning me to keep my nose clean."

Bliss only walked more quickly.

The kitchens must have been a very early addition to the manor house, if not entirely original to the sprawling structure. The corridors narrowed and the ceilings dropped and Maurice thought he could feel damp through the walls. Lintels sagged until he had to duck his head and then he could smell wood fire and grease.

The kitchen itself was built of brick and clay and skinned log and was a great deal smaller than the grand hall they had just vacated. A lone slave stood at the hearth, tending a small family of cook pots. He did not look up as they entered.

Lady Alyce sat waiting at a high, battered table. Her curls had fallen down and her gown was no longer pristine. There were poached eggs in a trencher between her elbows and she set a dinged tankard beside them as Bliss approached.

"You did well, I assume?" The lady's brows drew together. Maurice saw no sign of the little swamp cat or its gilded cage.

"Well enough." Bliss sat herself at the table without waiting to be asked. Maurice, more circumspect, remained standing. "We owe milord our thanks."

"You owe me your thanks." Lady Alyce picked up a clump of egg and consumed it neatly. "Roger had little to do with it. Although, admittedly, he needed slim convincing. He recognized your name, you see."

Alyce reached into the folds of her skirts and produced a leather satchel.

"Your three hundred in gold," she said, setting the bag on the table boards. "Count it if you like."

"You're very predictable," Bliss said. She did not deign to touch the money. "Are the mirrors your own?"

Milady blinked and then allowed herself a slow smile. "They are, now. The collection once belonged to a Viscount with very little wisdom. The King had him executed for sedition. I arranged to purchase the mirrors. I find their glass faces lovely."

"And was that wise? Milady fears not a noose about her own neck?"

Alyce scooped up more egg and lifted her trencher. "The King allows Tamner some leeway. And Tamner's lady much more."

"Tamner's lady," Bliss said slowly and even from two steps behind Maurice could see the twitch of her lips.

"Well. The title is honorary, yes?" With an elegant shrug, Tamner's mistress slid the trencher of eggs in Bliss's direction. "One can hardly go about in polite company as Roger's whore."

Bliss picked through the eggs and ate. Yolk dripped over her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her wrist. Alyce sat calmly, waiting. Maurice allowed his eyes to drift across to slave at the hearth.

"Alan is mute," Alyce said, smiling small. "And, unfortunately for Cook, also deaf. But he has a fine hand on the ladle and a light touch with the spices."

"You're a spy." Bliss said, mouth full of eggs. "Or something worse."

"My father is a trusted advisor under the Seat's shadow. My mother presses perfume for the Low Temple. My family is highly valued."

"Does Roger know you fuck him for the south?"

Maurice flinched. Lady Alyce appeared only amused.

"You mistake me," she said. "I adore Roger. And I am a royalist. I work only for the north."

Maurice felt Bliss's start, although he doubted Tamner's mistress noticed.

"You misliked the heat?" Bliss asked, dry.

"I misliked the gods," Lady Alyce replied in kind.

Bliss pushed the empty trencher back across the table. "The bit with the swamp cat was well done."

Alyce arched one fine brow. "You mistake me again."

"I think not." Lazy, Bliss shifted on the bench, pulling knees under chin and rolling her shoulders, a child's restlessness. "What do you want?"

Alyce rose and took the trencher and tankard to a keg of water kept warm near the hearth. She dropped the dishes into the water, tapped the slave lightly on his shoulder, and sent him away with a gesture.

"He is not blind, after all," she said by way of explanation, when the room was empty but for the three. "And I'd hate to lose such a valuable creature."

Bliss drummed her fingers on her knee, quietly mocking. Milady shrugged and reached again under her skirts, this time producing a thick bundle of fringe. Spread across the table with a flick of the hand, the fringe unrolled to become a shawl of crudely felted wool, trimmed with coil upon coil of curling fringe.

Maurice could not help himself. He left his position at Bliss's back and sat down on the bench by her side, elbows on the table. At Alyce's nod, he reached for the fringe and let it slide over his thumb.

"You recognize it, then." Tamner's lady nodded.

"A temple shawl," Maurice said because Bliss, suddenly stiff, refused to speak.

"The red and purple fringe," Alyce said. "Means Low Temple. My mother sent this out, several fortnights ago, along with a small bundle of silk and muslin and the latest report on the Seat's movements. This," she tapped the wool, "I did not see fit to pass onto the King."

"Why?"

"Turn it over."

Maurice took the white wool in careful hands and flipped it. Leaves patterned the far side, muted yellow and green embroidery in a precise, practiced hand, repeating in gentle rows until art met tassel.

Maurice dropped the shawl and shoved smarting fingertips into his armpits.

Bliss launched herself over shawl and plank and seized Lady Alyce about the throat.

# Four

Granda went close to mad after my mother was taken. He refused to abandon his precious gardens and continued to tend the herbs and orchard as though the estate had not over night become both crypt and charnel house, as though the snow drifts, at mid winter, were not now up around our ears.

We were safe enough, I suppose. The people in the surrounding villages left the land alone, fearing either haunts or the taint of the King's disapproval.

In the spring there would be grapes and onions from her ladyship's gardens. But that first winter we grew hungry very quickly. The chickens in the small coop kept our bellies full for a hand's count of weeks, but they diminished steadily. I was still very young and Granda was in a state of black shock or fierce denial; he did not think to remind me not to slaughter the hens and soon we were out of eggs as well as meat.

We slept in the greenhouse beneath looming fronds, watched over by odd specimens of orchid and rose. The great house waited in silence, uninhabitable, mostly burned and become a morgue for those few the King's hands had not forcibly enlisted.

Eventually our hunger became so great that I braved the building, searching for small treasures to steal and sell. It was a mostly futile task. Very little of any worth had been left behind. Snow snuck in through broken windows and unhinged doors, soaking furniture and ruining the high damask curtains.

I dragged the ornate rugs through the front door and spread them as best I could about the green house, hoping they would dry clean.

In the scullery I found food in the form of yams and potatoes, smoked meat and canned beets. I also found her ladyship's ancient footman, sprawled face down on the packed dirt floor, arms spread like a bird in failed flight. There was no blood; his neck had been neatly broken. The cold kept the pests away, mostly. But his eyes had begun to run and his mouth gaped wide, blue and purple tongue thick and extended.

I sat on my heels and watched him for a long time. I do not remember feeling sick or frightened. I do remember wondering if I would find my mother in a similar position, perhaps in an upstairs sewing room. For what use would the King put a delicate, flighty thing like our Rose?

I rifled the footman's pouch and discovered one or two missed coin. After another pause I stripped him of his coat and shoes, knowing they would bring a price at a cobbler's, so long as I was circumspect about their origins.

I took the shoes and the coin and as much food as I could bundle into the footman's coat, then left the house. I would not go back, after that, no matter how my Granda insisted. I did not want to find my mother, bones broken, mouth open to the world.

I sold the rugs to a gypsy three towns over, at a short price for their blackened edges. Even so, we inevitably grew hungry again and spring seemed very far away. Granda began to lose his teeth and my hair started to fall free in clumps.

Halfway through winter, the scent of smoke and fear still lingering in my nostrils, I went down the hill to the village called Derby and dug up employ.

*****

Shaara bent over the sotted squire and carefully relieved him of his coin purse. The squire snorted and sighed, and rolled over, but did not bother to wake up and defend his belongings.

Unhurried, Bliss's apprentice leaned against the wall between looming mirrors and carefully counted his treasure. Four silver pennies and one slip of paper money. Not a bad find, all in all. And, as the squire was Shaara's fifth tag, the riches were pleasantly piling up.

Shaara pocketed the money, dropped the purse back onto the lad's chest, and walked on. He remembered similar parties from long ago. He remembered the scent of sugar and drink and wine and sex and vomit. In the south, they tried to cover the whole mess with pungent sandalwood incense. In the south, they were very sensitive about their noses, and always terrified of offending their gods.

Shaara grinned. He did not believe in gods, not he. But if he did, he doubted the almighty spirits would have much interest in the reek of a good mortal party gone badly.

Dawn had come and the entire house appeared sodden and asleep, easy pickings. Shaara was mostly sure the celebrations across the border had ended in much the same way. He was also mostly sure Bliss would have never sent him off to steal from a Southern host and his guests.

Then again, Shaara thought, pausing to adjust a dangerously crooked mirror, he had been a youngster then, before even the battle at Green Kirk, and maybe he just did not remember rightly.

The door to Lady Alyce's dressing rooms was tightly locked. Shaara pulled a hammered copper wire from his belt and sprung the latch. He held his breath, said a small prayer to the gods he did not believe in, and stepped over the threshold.

The room was, happily, empty.

He supposed her ladyship's maids had long gone to bed and, if luck was smiling, Bliss would keep Lady Alyce herself well entertained.

Shaara stood in the center of the rug, exactly where Bliss had stood hours earlier, and turned slowly in place. The wall space was overly populated with chests and hooks and the occasional dress dummy. Fabric hung in swathes from the hooks and over the chests and pooled on the floor.

Shaara supposed it was a typical landed woman's fitting room. He eyed the tangle of jewels tossed across the back of Lady Alyce's chair but left them. Bliss had been very specific: take only what would not be missed.

A spindled writing desk sat under a narrow window. Shaara crouched in the thin dawning light and dug through top drawers. Nothing found but carefully flattened sheaves of vellum: correspondence, all personal and in a lady's hand, if Shaara was any judge.

He hesitated and then set them aside.

Beneath the letters he found a small map of the Southern coast, nicely drawn, beautiful in pen and ink and vibrant color. Shaara set the map aside as well. Pretty it was, but no merchant would pay good coin for possible treason, and Maurice knew the lands across the border better than any other creature living.

"Assuming Bliss doesn't cow out at the last minute," Shaara muttered to the room at large. He ignored the small voice in the back of his head as it whispered that perhaps it would be that much better if she did refuse to cross.

The last door of the writing desk rattled as Shaara tugged it free. The drawer was deep and narrow, and so full of shadow that at first Shaara could not quite make out the details of its contents. He dipped his hand into the depths and discovered that the rattle belonged to a collection of small, smooth, rounded pieces of -

"Shell?" Shaara wondered aloud. He lifted a handful into the light.

Oyster shells, or mollusks. Buffed seamless and then painted over with small, carefully detailed portraits.

Baffled, Shaara let the first batch slide to the floor and reached into the drawer for more. Surely there were a hundred of the delicate things, maybe twice one hundred. In groups Shaara pulled them free and laid them out. Female faces, all of them, young and ranging from ugly as a mule to groin stirring beauty.

Shaara sat on his shins and spread his hands above the collection, hesitating. He had never seen the like before and he would bet all six of his spheres the lovely little things were worth a good chunk of cheese.

"Take them, man. For Horrid's sake, take them away."

Shaara jumped and whirled. The fellow standing in the doorway only shook his head.

"How many are there? More than you have time to count. More than I have heart to count. More than one life is worth."

Shaara wished he'd convinced Bliss to let him bring his knife after all. But a peasant caught with steel on a landed estate was a dead man and the man in the doorway swayed where he stood and then belched lightly. So perhaps Shaara was not about to lose a hand for thievery right this moment.

"What are they?"

"Dashed hopes, all of them." The man loped awkwardly into the room and bent to finger a piece of patterned cloth. "Desperation. The hook that bloodies my gills."

The fellow did look a trifle fish-faced. Shaara wondered if he would puke on her ladyship's rug. Then he decided he would rather not wait to find out and began edging toward the door.

"Take them, I said." The fellow dropped the cloth he had been examining and pierced Shaara with a bright and relatively sober eye. "It's time he let me go, time he let her go. Take them and good riddance."

Shaara put on his best boyish smile and pretended confusion. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, milord. My mistress -"

"Bliss," the man corrected. "Needs to see them for her self. And so she would have, if she'd bothered to show her guileful face about this morning as I'd requested."

Shaara darted a glance at the man's ringed hand and swallowed. "Lord Tamner."

"Since the day my father left his blood all over the Kirk sward. For king and title." Tamner sounded pleasant but the sudden appearance of a pistol in his right hand belied his mild expression.

"Wrap them in your cloak and take them to Bliss. Do not let Lady Alyce see you've found her treasure. And get out of my house, the lot of you, heroes of Green Kirk be damned."

Shaara unfastened his cloak and began scraping shell onto it with shaking hands. He kept his head down, not daring to peek back over his shoulder, but he could hear Tamner's harsh breathing and imagined he could feel the eye of the pistol smack between his shoulder blades. A peasant caught with steel on a landed estate was a dead man but a titled lord had near right to murder any soul he wished under his own roof.

For all their apparent delicacy, not a single portrait cracked or chipped as Shaara wrestled them onto velvet and then tied his cloak shut. He turned, slowly.

Tamner's eyelids were drooping but his hand remained steady.

"Go," his lordship said.

Bliss had not raised her apprentice to be a fool. Shaara ran.

"You might have killed her." Maurice shoved at the stable door with one foot. Apparently Tamner kept the hinges less than well oiled. The door swung smoothly, but not without a groan of protest.

"I might have," Bliss replied. "If I thought she'd aught to do with it."

A lad appeared along the row of stalls, torch flaring.

"Where's your master?" Maurice asked, genial. "I've a horse needs readying."

"Up at the big house," the boy said, eyes wide. "But I -"

Bliss knocked the child under the chin with more force than Maurice thought necessary.

"Bollocks, Bliss. You've broken his tooth." Maurice knelt to staunch the flow of blood.

"He'll live to brag." Bliss stomped out the dropped torch before fire could spread. "Hurry up. Pick your nag. A shindig this large and the stable boys will be thick as nits." She melted away and Maurice could hear the creak of leather above the music of restless and sleeping animals.

Maurice propped the unconscious lad against mounded hay and felt his way along the stalls. "What made you decide she'd naught to do with it?"

A horse whickered, soft, and then Bliss sighed. "Milady knew she had me by the tits, but she didn't know why. She didn't know so much as she pretended. She never said her name."

Maurice had not needed to tack up a mount in near pitch dark since his days as a youthful conscript. His hands remembered what to do. He silently thanked whichever lad had so neatly arranged the horse's tack on a bale outside the stall, stable-master correct and perfectly cared for.

The horse herself, for she stank pungently of mare and molasses, appeared unconcerned. She rolled one eye as he cinched the saddle blanket but took the bit without any fuss.

By the time Bliss reappeared, leading a shaggy pony and nursing a bitten wrist, Maurice had two nicely turned out mounts on his arm.

"Animals," she said, succinct and disgusted. "Shaara's late."

"We'll wait." Maurice shushed his grumbling mare and glanced beyond the stable door at the clearing sky. The sun was beginning to burn through the clouds and soon the stable would be up and wanting breakfast.

They could not afford to wait.

"We move on. The boy will find us," Bliss said, reading his mind. She led her pony forward, tossing a scatter of gold coins across the chest of the unconscious stable boy as she went.

A puny offering, Maurice thought as he followed after. Not nearly enough to make up for the stolen livestock. The lad would be lucky if he managed to hold onto his job, never mind escape a whipping.

Even so, as he urged the mare and the second horse, an excitable, farting bay, under the eves of the building, Maurice dropped his own rain of guilt money in the mud.

They rode steadily, but not quickly. Shaara caught up half way down the hill. Blue and shivering and soaked to the waist, still he smiled as he flung himself into the bay's saddle.

"Raided the kitchen," he said as he shared out winter sausage and ripe pears.

The lad looked far too pleased with himself. Maurice bit into fruit and considered. "No hounds set on your heals?"

"Won't be." Shaara leaned across withers and passed Bliss the sodden remnants of his fine cloak. "A gift from milord."

Bliss arched dark brows but showed no interest in the dripping bundle. "Pleased to see us go, is he?"

"Very." Shaara fastened his juggler's pouch to a stirrup and relaxed into the saddle, arms crossed. He yawned. "Horses. Planning to travel a fair bit, are we, Bliss?"

Bliss regarded her apprentice. The boy refused to look up but his satisfaction was near palpable. Maurice held his breath.

Bliss turned away. Snow cracked under the pony's hooves, ice turning to slush as the sun rose higher.

"Yes," she admitted at last. "We're planning to travel a fair bit."

# Five

Derby grew rich, as some villages do. A cousin of our king, one of many bastard by- blows, headed the ruling council and as such carefully retained royal favor. Derby, as it happened, was also blessed with low, sandy hills easily adapted to the King's new favorite crop; opium seed.

During the short summer the villagers of Derby farmed. During the long cold months seeds were pressed and every hand became slick with oil. The product was shipped north and east in tiny stone bottles. As the King's approval grew, so did Derby.

Any village can be quickly judged by the number of good taverns along the main cobbled walk. Derby had six. I found work in the oldest of the clutch, a sagging two story known as the Cat and Hammer.

The Cat belonged to a middle aged ex-conscript whose given name was Rickson, but who preferred to be called Garve. He was not and never had been a slave but had purchased, at the age of three and thirty, the marks tattooed across his face. No one, not even I, ever dared ask the man about this foolishness.

Garve ruled his workplace fair and proper. The cook kept his hands washed, the barmaids took their own private customers to bed only after tavern close, and the servers drank the absinthe Garve left out in the back room, never the good ale behind the bar.

I started work as a server, and despite the addling affects of absinthe, quickly mastered the skill and moved on to the duties of the bar. I'd learned the battle of coin versus hunger very well and was rather naïvely determined to make Granda rich as the King. I had no real qualms about taking good paying customers to bed, so long as they were free of the rot, but with little more than fifteen years in my skin I was not quite sure how to begin.

Rorik, a barkeep with freckles across his nose and perhaps too much experience in the way of after hours commerce, came to my rescue.

"Go and watch old Jessica's puppet show on Broad Street. Pay attention. Come back after moon's up and I'll show you the rest."

Jessica's anatomically correct puppets were explicit. I think I blushed. But the crowd about the small brick and stone theatre grew heated and the boil of the blood was contagious. I remember that a landed harlot with garish ruby on her cheeks wrapped herself about my arm and stole a kiss. I remember the warmth of her tongue and the prick of her long finger nails against my flesh and the sudden flush of understanding.

It was not only about coin, after all. This was hunger again, in a different guise.

Rorik was a good mentor. He deftly taught my young self the ins and outs and principles of village whoring. When he died of the rot five springs later he left me what little coin he had not spent on cosmetics and wormwood.

*****

Bliss unwrapped Shaara's bundle in a decrepit barn half a day's ride north of the border. Maurice managed to kindle a small cook fire in a mound of straw and stick, and the thin smoke rose straight through the pockets in the roof. The snow had turned to rain. By the time they crossed the border, he hoped, winter would begin to feel dry.

Shaara found sleep in the relative warmth of the hay loft. He snored contentedly. The horses, equally weary, stood tethered out in the wet, lazily lipping up muddy weed.

"These fields used to be rich with flax." Maurice picked a shriveled seed from the sole of his boot and flicked it into the fire. "Now they're near barren."

"Flax went out of style two life-times ago." Bliss folded back stiffened velvet and bent closer to the fire light. "Opium seed is cursed. And so are the fields it was farmed on."

"Only because the seed is used in perfume. Villages starved to dust on a king's whim."

"May He Reign Forever," Bliss quoted absently. Whatever she had found in Shaara's cloak rattled beneath her hands.

Maurice grunted and rummaged about in his pouch. His cigarettes were running low. He needed to save them for the next performance. But the damp made his bones ache, and thoughts of the next day made his spine itch, and he wanted a smoke now.

He shrugged his shoulders, lit one tiny cigarette, and inhaled gratefully.

"What is it?" he asked at last, as Bliss did not seem inclined to reveal Tamner's gift.

"Art." She glanced up, puzzled. "Portraits."

Maurice stood, creaking, and limped around the fire to crouch at her side. Bliss had spread the velvet out, a puddle of color over packed mud. Sorting in rows onto the fabric, as she might have dealt cards before a merry hearth, she laid out armies of broken shell.

Maurice had to lean forward to see that they were not, after all, broken but filed into near perfect ovals, and then embellished with what appeared to be milk paint.

"Coastal style." He rocked a little on his heels. "Old Andrew carried one very like, do you remember?"

"Of his two sons, yes." Bliss took the cigarette from his hand and sucked thoughtfully. "These are all women. Young women." She handed the cigarette back, then began rearranging the bits of shell, this way and that. Maurice could make out no pattern to her shuffling.

"What do you suppose happened to them?"

"Andrew's sons?"

"No." Maurice sent pastel spirals drifting after the camp smoke. "The villagers. The rivers and rivers of villagers who could no longer farm banned land."

"Went the way of the rest of us, I suppose." Bliss tapped fingers on her thigh. "Conscripted, if they were lucky. Moved on, if they were not."

"Moved on where?"

"How should I know?" Bliss speared him with an irritated glance. "I've learned better than to go about asking stupid questions. So've you."

Maurice finished his smoke and sighed. "The stars make me want to ask questions."

Bliss glanced up through the torn roof and made a rude sound. "Leastways the rain has stopped. Look at these, O seeker of answers."

She stabbed a finger, demanding his attention. "Why would Lady Alyce need one hundred and fifty two painted faces?"

"Perhaps milord enjoys the female form."

"No. They were Alyce's. Shaara said he found them in her sitting room, yes? In her writing desk. Milady's desk would not be Tamner's province."

Maurice shrugged. "Well, then. Perhaps milady enjoys the female form."

Bliss stared, flat faced.

Maurice sighed again. "Perhaps she collects them. Coastal portraits. She collects mirrors, she collects miniatures."

"Why hide them, then?" Bliss held a bright shell to the firelight. "Shove them away in a drawer. Why not display them, like the mirrors, and the little cat?"

On the timbered ledge above, Shaara rolled and mumbled in his sleep.

"There's nothing to connect them but their sex," Bliss continued after a moment. "And, roughly, their age. Look, here. This one's obviously of good blood, Northern. And here's a Southern priestess. This pretty slave looks as though she's spent every hour of her every day on your barren farm, Maurice. And here's another with jewels through her hair."

"They've eyes in common."

"Ah?"

"Eyes," Maurice said, leaning over Bliss's hunched shoulders. "They're all green. Green eyes."

Bliss frowned. "Trout and Fox, but you're right. You've still got your wits, old man, and hawk's gaze to match. Eyes. They've all got green eyes."

Maurice straightened, stretched, and grabbed his pack. "Come up into the loft. Roof's better there. Sleep warm tonight, Sacrifice."

"In a moment," Bliss replied, absently reshuffling the miniatures.

Maurice started to haul himself over the edge of the hay loft, then paused. "The artist, too. They're all done in the same hand. Fair, but not terribly talented."

He waited for a properly mocking retort, but Bliss remained silent. He pulled himself into the hay alongside Shaara and waited several hear beats longer. Then, vaguely alarmed, he stuck his head back into thin air.

"Bliss?"

He could not see her form past the camp flames, but he could hear the sudden understanding in a breath exhaled.

"Same age, eye color, sex," Bliss said. "Same artist, one hundred and fifty two times over. It's a map, a log book. She's looking for someone, Maurice. She's got some idiot with some skill and a box of milk paints sending her samples. And so far she's had at least one hundred and fifty one misses."

Maurice always found the River Ann mildly baffling. The clear water was not very deep, nor dangerously wide. Nor was the bed softened with curves or joints. Ann ran straight as a pin she ran, never deviating from her chosen path, even during flood season.

It was exactly as if the land, prescient, had cut a swath of wet precisely across the center of the kingdom and said: Here is north, here is south, and never shall they cleave or bend together.

Maurice said as much to his companions as they sat their horses beneath a clump of alder trees and watched the river race.

"Foolishness," Bliss mocked. She had shed her gaudy finery and gone back to the threadbare tunic and trousers she favored. Maurice suspected she had also rubbed grit through her hair and across her face.

"My gaffer used to float stick rafts across the river," Shaara added, sliding from the saddle with a relieved sigh. "Mama used to tell stories of the children he'd meet, fielders from the other side. One family had twelve biddies, all red hair. They grew grapes." Shaara sounded properly amazed. "And they sent good wine home to my gaffer's ma, every Summerfest."

Bliss ran her fingers through her pony's mane. The pony bobbed and snorted, unnerved or enticed by the river's faintly sighing rush.

"Your Great Granda must have been one of those first to see the border closed," she said. "And the twelve biddies across the way. Did they mourn long, I wonder?"

Maurice shifted in the saddle. He knew very well that any river homesteads had long ago been razed, on both the Northern bank and the Southern. Even so, he felt oddly as though he was trespassing.

"Do we cross here, or on the bridge?" He pressed his horse forward, eager to move on.

Bliss's pony clopped after. Maurice could hear the slap of leather on boot as she considered.

"The bridge," she decided after a small hesitation. "Takes longer, but I'd rather not run the horses out before nightfall."

Only one bridge spanned the River Ann. If the structure had ever had a name, it was long forgotten. Built of hewn granite and rare limestone, the bridge grew from the earth in a perfect half circle, arching much more abruptly than Ann's shallows required.

The loam at the foot of the bridge on the Northern bank was clean, burned clear of weed or sapling every new moon. On the Southern bank, stalks of lavender bobbed about purple kale.

Ten strides up the Northern curve the King had ordered a gate built of speared silver and barbed wire. The Seat, apparently, had no need for such ostentatious display.

Two guards dozed against silver in the light rain. One straightened as Maurice dismounted and led his mare onto the bridge. The other did not so much as twitch beneath his crested helm.

"Nobody crosses but rank and file and supply. Go back."

The guard was petite and cocksure, and obviously bored and uncomfortable in her heavy leathers. A pistol hung at her belt and she wore a thin sword across her back.

"Go back," she said again, and when Maurice did not move, she spat on damp limestone. "And if you ford downstream we'll shoot you dead, sure as you stand. The weather's miserable and I ain't going out in it so as to rope up three runners and send 'em home. We'll shoot."

"Where are the others?" Bliss tossed her reins to Shaara and squeezed past the mare. She looked the guards up and down with distinct, elaborate disgust. "There are supposed to be four. Where are the other two?"

The first guard stiffened. The other, warned by Bliss's tone, decided to wake.

"Supply wagon got caught in the mud over the ridge," the guard jerked her chin at the grove of alders. "Needed a push."

"One goes, three stay." Bliss pulled a sheaf of dirtied paper from her pack and slapped it across the woman's palm. "Every newborn con knows bridge rules. Or did you never learn your numbers, bit?"

Maurice coughed. Shaara sneezed. The pony nibbled at the bay's tale and nearly earned a kick for the insult. The first guard unrolled Bliss's papers as the second, now bright eyed and wide awake, tried to save face.

"Ben couldna handle a mired supply wagon hisself. He ain't got the strength of a tadpole. Ryan went along to lend a hand, see. And me and Myra, we stayed behind as we're -"

"The best hands with a pistol." The petite conscript returned Bliss's papers, rigid with disgust. "Open the gate, Pat. They're rank. Just barely."

Pat unlocked the Northern King's gate, silver key glinting in the rain. He stood, attentive, as first Maurice and then Bliss and her apprentice filed through. Myra spat again.

"Bit, is it?" she growled as the gate snicked to. "Leastways I ain't no camp grubber, too afraid to pick up a knife in the lines."

Shaara made an ugly face, and then laughed as the bay farted in affront. Maurice swallowed his own amusement.

Bliss led her pony off the bridge, and into Southern lavender. She snapped a sprig of purple and stuck the flower behind one ear.

"How things change," she said, singsong. "Four springs ago and they would have thrown tomatoes, at the very least. Lazy young conscripts. Have they no passion to speak of? I fear for the future."

Bliss rolled her eyes at Maurice, lavender bouncing in awkward display, and the tight, cold pinch he had been carrying at the base of his spine melted away.

Shaara caught a hare in the fields. Maurice set it to stew for supper on a hummock just out of sight of the river. Bliss, with a grunt and a roll of one shoulder, dropped her pack and set the pony free to graze in the high grass.

"I'm going down the road," she said. "Put the last of Shaara's yams in that. I'll be back with bread afore it boils off."

Maurice nodded and rummaged in Shaara's bag for the roots. The boy had taken a bit of scrub weed to Bliss's pony and was singing as he worked the tangles from her tail.

Bliss stepped off the grass onto the wide Southern highway and slouched away, whistling low accompaniment to Shaara's tune. Maurice watched her until she disappeared over a dip on the horizon. There would be village and temple just over the next hill. It was the way of the Seat and the shadow.

"She took it well," Shaara said from beneath the pony's matted belly.

"Took what well?" Although, of course, he knew. Maurice began to dice the two remaining yams with his belt knife. They smelled of sugar and the earth.

"I thought she'd balk at the gate," Shaara said. "Or break into weeping over the lavender."

Maurice glanced up, wry. "Have you ever seen her weep?"

"No." Shaara paused in his ministrations. "Not even when we buried Ross."

"I thought she'd want to ford wet," Maurice admitted after a moment. He dumped pieces of root into the pot after the rabbit, wincing as hot water splashed.

"Chased by gunshot?" Shaara laughed. "No turning back or lead in your thigh."

"Yes." The lad was growing up, Maurice realized. Bliss's apprentice had always seen clearly but the boy was gaining wit to go with that vision. Maurice wondered, with a pang, how long yet they would manage to keep him.

Bliss had taken Shaara on out of sympathy and duty, and because Ross had insisted. They had raised him best they knew how. And the lad was a fair hand at the trickery and the show.

But they would never be a full troop again, and Shaara deserved better than hand to mouth. He was growing up and soon, gods willing, he would find a way out.

And then Ross's troop would be only two. Which was right and proper, Maurice supposed, as they had always been the heart of it.

"Have you?" Shaara asked, turning from the pony to his bay.

Maurice started. The stew was beginning to bubble. "Have I what?"

"Ever seen her weep?"

"Oh," said Maurice. He had lost his good spoon seasons ago and so made do with a flat stick. "Yes. Yes. Once. Just the once."

# Six

I met Ross in the Cat and Hammer on a hot summer's evening not long after Rorik had gone to the worms in the paupers' graveyard. Such rare hot weather brought every soul with a penny to his name in from the fields for a drink and a game of chance on the boards and, if one was feeling especially rich or lonely, another roll of the dice on an upstairs ticked mattress or in the alley behind.

Ross was one of those who appeared to be feeling both lonely and flush. He sat on a keg at the front of the tavern, near an open window, swigging tankard after tankard of Garve's best brew, and ogling the maids with obvious intent.

I think I expected him to take Shel. Blonde and big-arsed and more than a bit addle-headed, Shel always appealed to the ones who had waited too long. And it was obvious Ross had been without for a spell. The way he sat his keg, it was a wonder his trousers did not spring forth on their own.

We laughed about him, Shel and I. She had already lined up an assignation with an elderly slave who had managed to keep his sevenday donation from drink. The slave had sprung for a mattress and also a meal before the hearth. Shel and I figured she could do the seam-faced fellow in the alley and be back long before her tattooed customer finished his bread.

I tossed tankards from hand to hand, whirling to keep up with shouted demands, and yet managed to keep an amused eye on Ross. Shel approached him once and then once again, deft and finally crude in her interest. Ross shook his head, twice. I wondered if the man could not afford her or if perhaps he was looking for a boy. If so, he was out of luck. Rorik had been our only lad, and Garve had not yet gotten around to finding a replacement.

"He wants you, Bliss," Shel said, returning several rounds later with a platter of empty trenchers, lips pursed. "He says he prefers 'em dark. Like hisself."

I rumbled Shel's trenchers off the platter and onto the bar, then glanced back over my shoulder. The man on the keg lifted his drink in a silent toast yet did not bother to crack a smile. He was a bit old for my tastes but tastes are malleable in the face of need.

"He still got coin?"

Shel shrugged one shoulder and rushed off. Her slave was calling for more ale. I finished unloading the trenchers, made up my mind, and marched purposefully across the Cat.

"You still got coin?"

Instead of answering he dug under his belt, freeing a money pouch, and tossed it onto the floor. The pouch landed on the dirt with a fine clank.

I quirked a brow. Any fool could load leather with pebbles and a few pennies. It was an old trick and one Rorick had warned me of early on.

"Take a look," he invited. His voice sounded rusty. I wondered if his throat had been scarred along with his swarthy face.

He wanted a show. I decided to give him one and bent in the boneless, supple way guaranteed to make a even the wizened spring up and take notice. He grunted deep and wordless approval. I palmed the pouch and straightened.

He still had coin, he did. Gold and silver and copper and large, fiery jewels the size of my thumb nestled against the metal.

"Opals" he said, noting my interest. "Southern. Worth more than a lord's fine horse, each."

"I only take coin." The jewels were pretty things. They reminded me of the stars through green house glass.

"What's your name?" he asked, finishing his drink and standing up.

"Bliss." Arrogant, I took my choice of coin from his pouch, then tossed the purse back.

He only smiled, amused. The smile made his creased face even uglier.

"Bliss," he said. "They call me Ross. And I don't waist good coin on mattress."

It would have been rape, if it had not been my profession. He liked it good and hard, and bloody. After, as I wiped the warm damp from my split lip and retied my trousers, he squatted in the mud and muttered a few phrases in garbled, musical tones.

"What's that?" I asked, wondering if the man had gone suddenly mad, wondering if my right eye, inconveniently elbowed, would swell.

He finished his song, touched his brow, and stood up.

"A prayer," he replied absently, dismissive now that his needs had been met. "A prayer for both our souls."

*****

Bliss would not step foot inside kirk or temple. She never had, so far as Shaara knew. Not that it mattered. He was not a terribly religious man himself, except for when it mattered. Say, when food had been scarce for so long he had forgotten the taste of meat, or on the rare occasion he had met trouble he couldn't handle on his own.

Then he would say a prayer, sure. To any god or goddess he thought might listen. Trout, or Fox. Even to Horrid, if the sun had set.

Bliss put no weight in the gods, not at all. She told him so when he was five, after she'd snatched him from service simply because she had approved of the way he sang the marching cant.

"Like Bell on a snowy day," she'd said, as they rode ripe for dash straight away from pursuit. "Your voice will change, sure, but by then I'll have taught you the orbs."

Later, as she fed him yellow bread and bean curd by the warmth of an applewood fire, the boy asked Bliss if she thought Bell had sent her to save him that day.

"To save you?" Bliss exchanged a quick glance with Ross and laughed. "Gods don't work that way, boy. They have better things to do than meddle with the likes of you and me."

"The King's Cardinal says if you speak loud enough and leave your kirk tithe every fifth-day, then you've always got Fox's ear. And if you always toss the bones of his kind back into the rivers, Trout'll see you fed. And Mouse -"

"The King's Cardinal hasn't spoken a word of truth since the day his mam left him on the King's doorstep," Bliss interrupted. "You'll learn, as you grow. I do best to stay away from the kirks, boy, and you'll do best to follow suit."

Shaara had not thought about it much after that. He'd been too busy trying to learn the ways of Ross's troop and find his place around sometimes jealous entertainers. And Bliss was right. As he grew, he'd come to realize there was not much room for religion in a jongleur's life. The gods' names became no more than cuss words and he had nearly forgotten the sound of his mother's voice canting the fifth day prayers.

There were gods in the south, too. Different gods. Different names. Different needs, different wisdom, different worship. Shaara found them interesting, at first, and the temples with their low ceilings and perfumed fog and bright colors alluring.

Bliss warned the boy away. And he soon learned, again, that she was right. The gods that had no interest in a jongleurs life, surely had no mercy on the battlefield.

*****

"Go and visit the village temple," Bliss ordered after they finished Maurice's rabbit stew. "It's Weaving Day. The village was teaming and the temple will be full. Go inside. Earn a few coins. And listen."

Shaara shrugged, willing enough. Southerners treated traveling players a far sight better than their Northern cousins ever did. A man of the south would keep a good performer on in his hall as a mark of status. A man of the north would sooner feed a sow at his breakfast boards.

"What am I listening for?" He'd not dared ask straight out, earlier. He'd been happy Bliss had finally braved the border, and he didn't want to brew more trouble.

Maurice studiously fed the campfire pine needles. Bliss scowled, then sighed.

"Anything interesting. We don't know what the Seat his been up to in the last few years, yes? As far as we know, his shadow has shrunk."

"Unlikely," Maurice muttered, still bent over the fire.

Bliss ignored him. "Lady Alyce believes they're building up the Low Temple. Find out why."

"Temple whispers, then."

"Yes," Bliss agreed. "Temple whispers."

Shaara kept his face straight and squelched a laugh. He had not dared to ask questions but he was never one to hide from answers. He also knew his mistress. He'd dug into Bliss's pack, three nights earlier, as she'd slept. He had wanted to look at the miniatures, again. And he'd found the temple shawl.

He could not read Southern runes. He'd never bothered to learn. But he recognized the seven edged leaf and he had many guesses as to what it might mean.

The village temple was not large, not as village temples were wont to be. Nor was the building new. Cracks ran through the twelve stone steps from earth to threshold and moss grew in swirls about the entrance columns. Shaara supposed that any structure set so close to the River Ann would suffer the effects of a near Northern winter. He also knew the Southern priests were wont to let the temple façades go as their gods intended.

In the south worth was measured from inside out.

Shaara stopped between the columns and took a breath. A priest in mud-colored robes stood on the threshold between daylight and inner shade, welcoming all who passed with a pleasant smile. He wore his hair in the braids and beads Shaara remembered; too many beads to be a novice, too few to be a fellow of any consequence.

The priest returned Shaara's careful bow. His eyes lit up when Shaara displayed his juggler's pouch.

"Oh, yes," the man said in the precise, clipped tones that Shaara still occasionally dreamed of. "We've not been blessed with skill, yet, today. Go in, please. Take your place before the altar. The weavers will be more than pleased by this treat."

Shaara bowed again and stepped out of the afternoon.

He had forgotten the weight of the perfume. Even here in a small temple, in an outlying village of no real consequence, the reek of the scented oil hit a man like lung fever.

Shaara coughed and tried to breathe through his mouth. He could taste the oil even on his tongue: spicy and floral and a watery musk. His head spun and for three breaths he had to lean against the cool temple wall.

By the time his lungs agreed to work again and his nose had stopped its alarming complaint, Shaara's eyes had found the faint light filtering through heavy shutters and black resolved into color and form.

Bliss was right. Weaving Day appeared well begun. Shaara, standing to one side in the perfectly square room, could not count high enough to determine the number of men and women and children squatting on the inlaid floor.

They looked like industrious beetles. Swathed in ochre and red, bent nearly double, ruffled mounds anchoring the rugs they tended. They made no sound but for the gentle rush of air as they inhaled and exhaled, inhaled and exhaled.

Shaara shook his head, trying to focus. He walked carefully up one side of the square, taking care to watch the breadth of his feet. Bliss would kill him if on their very first day back he trod upon blessed silk and ruined their welcome.

The weavers glanced up as Shaara approached the altar. First one interested face and then another, and another, and then smiling groups. Their pleasure was obvious. If the villagers marked him for a Northerner, they did not care.

Shaara flung himself on the floor at the idol's hewn four-toed feet. He lay prostrate, counting through the appropriate six heartbeats. He imagined he could feel the black eyes of the bird-faced statue between his shoulder blades, and he wondered if this was why Bliss would never step foot on religious ground. Bliss bothered bow down to no creature, living or otherwise.

When Shaara rose, the idol released his imagination and was again only a badly sculpted man with an egret's head and lion's feet. Garlands of flowers hung about the statue's stubby neck, red and yellow and white and one of black ravens' feathers. Wide shallow bowls of perfume balanced on the palms of his stone hands and some especially attentive villager had smeared wax across the tip of his grey beak. An adulteress, Shaara supposed, or a man with the rot in his gut; wax was an expensive offering.

But he had come to listen, not to gawk, and if he came back with nothing, Bliss would have his head. Shaara coughed one last time, then turned his back completely to the statue.

The weavers were all waiting, colorful skeins briefly abandoned, every single face lifted in eager expectation.

Shaara smiled back, clicked his tongue, and began.

He juggled and sang and told Bliss's tales until the small light in the temple windows turned to stars and the weavers lit forests of candles to save their eyes. Then they fed him the tasteless banana pudding reserved for honored guests. Shaara dipped into the bowl with his fingers, eating cross-legged on the floor, as the weavers murmured back and forth over their creations and the braided priest came to squat at his side.

"How is it," the man asked, "across the River?"

"Cold," Shaara answered lightly. "Cold enough to freeze piss."

The man only smiled wide, showing a gap where his front teeth had once lived. "Even your king's piss?"

"The King pisses in silver buckets," Shaara returned, like for like. "And not in the iced, slippery streets like the rest of us."

The priest rocked on his heels, considering the idol over Shaara's shoulder. "Your people do not mind the cold, I suppose."

"We're used to it."

"They say your winter is three times longer than your summer and that you have no spring at all."

"We have spring," Shaara said, and set aside his empty bowl. "Sometimes." He paused to watch the weavers shuffle and bend. "Where are the rugs going?"

"When they are finished they will be taken by cart and mule and boat to Emman."

"What's in Emman?" Shaara asked, although he knew well enough. "A fine lord with rooms to furnish?"

"Our Low Temple." The priest straightened in puffed-up pride. "The Seat is building up, closer to the heavens and the kingdom within. The rugs will be this village's gift, unrolled beneath the feet of young initiates the very day the Low Temple's blessing is renewed."

Shaara remembered the initiates. Southern temples were always hungry. Priests wore out quickly, sacrificing their life for their beliefs. And there were always young lads and lasses, ready to step forward, ready to grow or cease as the Seat commanded.

"Are you sending anyone?"

"From here?" The priest shook his head and beads rattled. "We have no one to offer. This time around, the Seat is calling for those of clean blood."

Nobles, that meant. Milords and miladies or maybe an especially wealthy trader's daughter. No village hopefuls or stable lads with dreams of perfume and temple rite.

Shaara shivered despite the stuffiness of the crowded room. The priest's grin creased.

"Perhaps you recall," he said. "The last time the Seat demanded purity?"

Shaara met warm brown eyes. The priest shrugged.

"We remember the stories," he explained. "Did she think we would forget? They are written rune and rune on linen, rolled in the library of the Highest Temple. We know them word for word, but no one dares speak them.

"Tell the Sacrifice to come," the man continued, "and we shall cook meat in her honor."

Bliss would have none of it.

"We ride on," she said, after Shaara had delivered his report. "I've no time to play the oddity just so the man can scratch his curiosity and I will not break bread with a priest."

"You live your life playing the oddity," Maurice pointed out, calmly.

The old man had decided to shave his beard. Shaara watched him, enthralled. In the dark of night, without even a bit of mirror to ease the way, Maurice scraped curls into smooth flesh.

"I entertain where I see fit," Bliss returned. "And I have no intention of telling war stories to a blood-thirsty eunuch."

"You send me instead," Shaara said, easily. He stretched out on the grass at Maurice's side.

Bliss scowled. "No wonder they knew you. I'm sure I taught you discretion, boy."

Shaara shrugged and closed his eyes. The rasp of Maurice's razor slowed.

"They were the only Southern stories I knew," Shaara explained. "And they have no use for Northern songs. I remember Ross's lessons, even if you pretend not to."

"Hush, lad," Maurice said, mild. And then: "They're none of them eunuchs."

Shaara could hear Bliss huffing about beneath the stars. Now that his eyes were closed, he wanted to sleep, but he suspected Bliss would have them up and on horseback just as soon as he began to snore. She was restless. He supposed it was a delayed reaction to Southern air. Or could be she was beginning to realize just what might lie ahead.

He had thought about it, himself. He liked a happy ending to a story, well enough. Who did not? But he was not so sure Bliss would get hers.

"Do you think she sent it? The shawl, I mean," he ventured after a moment.

Maurice's razor quieted completely. Bliss took a long breath and then let it out in a grunt.

"You're not supposed to be going through my pack, Shaara. I should whip you."

"You can't." He was glad his voice sounded light because his palms were growing wet on the grass. "I'm too old, now, Bliss. Old enough you should be treating me same as you treat Maurice."

"Maurice doesn't dig through my things." She thumped heavily across the grass. He could feel the heat of her anger as she loomed. He didn't dare open his eyes for fear of a kick in the ribs.

"He doesn't need to." Stubborn as she was, she had taught him the way of it too. "You tell him what he needs to know. You treat him like an equal. Like you should be treating me. I ain't a boy sciffing off your take any more, Bliss. I sing for my supper an' I earn it."

"The lad's right, Bliss." Maurice had resumed work. The strop of his razor against leather meant his face was clean.

Shaara sat up and opened his eyes. "Even you, Maurice. I ain't a lad. I'm a man, or haven't you noticed?"

Bliss sat on her knees in the grass, a darker lump against the grey hummock. "You aren't grown until you've had a woman and killed a man."

"I've killed plenty," Shaara said, soft. He swallowed the lump that sprung up in his throat. "You know it. You were there, blood to your own elbows. And if you think it takes a woman, well. I'll go down the road tomorrow morn and buy an hour or two."

Maurice laughed. Shaara stiffened. Bliss spat a pretty handful of filthy curses into the campfire and then grunted again.

"She didn't send it," she said, harsh in her surrender. "She wouldn't. She'd not want me to know."

"Could be it's a mistake," Maurice said, rolling razor and leather strop back into his belt. "Could be it's a game."

"The King doesn't play games," Bliss answered, but Shaara could hear reluctant suspicion in her tone. "He decides and he takes. He never tests."

"The Seat, I meant. Could be the shadow's playing a game with us."

"With us?" Bliss laughed, harsh. "I misdoubt the Seat even remembers Green Kirk, Maurice. The war carries on and battles are forgotten, yes?"

"You were Sacrifice. Your stories are archived in the High Temple," Maurice returned, wry, and Bliss stopped laughing.

Shaara could smell dawn in the air. Man or lad, he knew his duty. Staggering upright, he found his scattered bedding and whistled for the bay.

He had another question but he was not quite brave enough to speak it.

Maurice only hesitated until the ashes were covered over.

"What will you do, Bliss? If it is no mistake?"

"Knock her over the head." Bliss didn't hesitate. " Then bring her home."

# Seven

Ross came back to the Cat and Hammer five days running. He spent until his coin ran out and he had nothing left but the pretty stones. On the fifth day he traded one stone for an entire afternoon in the attic.

"Opal," he said again. "They're all I've got left, love. And they're worth more metal than you'll see in one day."

I still did not believe him, but I took the last stone anyway. It felt warm in my hand and smooth.

Ross made me pile all eight mattresses in one corner of the attic. Then he took me on the floor, despite the splinter sand the damp. He was less enthusiastic, this time. Perhaps the frenzy of lust was finally wearing away.

Nevertheless, when he had taken his fill, he wanted me to stand in the center of the drafty room and turn about on my toes.

I humored him, but only because I could see he had something other than his prick in mind.

"You're small," he said. "You won't grow much more. How old are you?"

"I don't remember," I said and it was true. Granda had sung for my birthday in the winter but we had mostly stopped counting days after Rose was gone.

"Not yet ten and eight, surely," Ross propped himself on one elbow. His brow creased over the scars on his face. I wondered what he was thinking. And then I decided it did not matter. The draft prickled my flesh, and I had had enough of his avid stare.

"You've got long fingers," he said, watching as I squirmed back into shift and trousers. The smell of him lingered on my hands. "And you're quick."

"Quick?" I looked up, suddenly uneasy. It was much safer, at the Cat, to be remembered as stolid and loyal.

He stood and stretched. "I've watched you. You're careful. You pay attention. And you don't intend to stay here long, do you, Bliss?"

"Ah. No." I showed him elaborate unconcern. "I guess I'll move on, eventually."

"Got some wage put away for travel? You don't send it all to your grandfather, do you?"

So he'd been asking questions. I felt a knife edge of fear and masked it with annoyance. I wondered who had spoken so freely about my life. If it was Shel, I would have to break her perfect nose.

I must have taken a step backwards because he laughed.

"I'm not in the slave trade, Bliss. I'm looking for a juggler."

"A juggler?"

He nodded, and collected his strewn clothing, separating boots from tunic. "I own a circus troop, Bliss. Performers, yes?"

When he saw that I understood, he nodded once. "We're about to head south for summer's end. And I've just lost my juggler. To a skirted widow and her passel of brats, Fox save me."

"I don't juggle." And I did not intend to start. Circus folk were trouble. And also thieves, more often than not. That very last thing I needed was a right hand lost to the King.

"I'll teach you," Ross replied. "Like I said, you're quick. By the time we reach the border, you'll juggle in your sleep."

"I'm happy here."

"You don't belong here." He pulled his tunic over his head, then tossed me a lumpy bag. "It's time for a change."

I could feel the juggler's props through the felt. "I'm not going."

"You'll stay here and die of the rot?" Ross scoffed. "Or perhaps you had ideas of joining the King's court. They'll never take you, Bliss. You're a peasant and you look it."

I had not thought of the court, not exactly. Still, I shivered.

"Come south with me, for two seasons. We'll be back in the spring. By the time the buttercups blossom, you'll be again in Derby and rich as a lordling."

He saw my face and smiled. "Southerners love our kind, Bliss. You'll be fed to bursting, clothed in silk and weighted with jewels. Opals are just the beginning, love. Wait until you earn a Southern sapphire."

I cannot remember if I believed him, truly. But the pretty stone was in my hand again, glinting as I rolled it between thumb and forefinger.

"Come," Ross said, and he must have known he'd won me so cheaply. "Let me show you."

I told myself I would be back in the spring, with enough coin and riches to set Granda up nicely. But I think I knew, even then, that there would never be any home waiting for my return.

*****

It was six days' ride from the River Ann to the center of Emman. Bliss would have taken it all in one lump with hardly a stop in between if Maurice hadn't put his foot down and insisted on wisdom.

"You are blind and you are bullheaded," he said. "And you are not doing any of us any good."

She listened, for once. Which might have frightened Maurice if he were not so grateful. His body no longer took to the saddle as it once had. He wobbled in the mornings and fell, numb, to his bedding each sunset.

Shaara had more energy. The boy went into the nearest village every evening, returning at moonset with any bits and pieces of interest he could glean.

Which, in truth, was not very much.

After the very first temple the boy kept himself unrecognized. Or so he said. There were no more offers of cooked meat for the prodigal heroes.

In the snatches of sleep between dismount and dawn, Maurice dreamed. He dreamed of tiny pastel faces painted on smooth shell, and of the Southern perfume he could smell on Shaara at the end of the day.

In his dreams the miniatures spoke in urgent, blurred tones. Maurice strained in his sleep to understand and woke thick-headed.

As they gained on the Lower Temple he began to dream of the past, of the dead broken in the mud and of the sound of pistols and cannons. Once grapeshot throbbed in his shoulder, nightmare grapeshot burning in his flesh. He could smell char as Moire, grey-haired and dream-wavering, bent to tend his wound. In his sleeping mind her hair had grown long and her eyes were bright and dilated, opiate touched, and when she spoke it was in the miniatures' unearthly tones.

"She hadn't a head for healing," Bliss said, unaffected, when he relayed the dream. "And she would never let her hair grow long. Too dangerous."

"It was beaded," Maurice said, slowly, remembering. "And knotted."

This unwelcome news silenced Bliss, but only for a moment. "Was she wearing a shawl?"

"No."

"Good." Bliss waved a hand, dismissive. But the rest of that day she rode the pony at an unfair speed, as if she felt Horrid on her heels.

Emman City thrived on the very edge of shadow. Another six day's journey south and the weary traveler would be before the High Temple, under the watchful eye of the Seat himself. But a man was not quite as careful on the streets of Emman, was not quite so afraid that he did not dare mutter about the price of ale, or the constriction of evening call.

The city was surrounded entirely by a smooth, white wall, made of crushed sea shell and blood plaster. Maurice knew very well how carefully that wall was tended. Not so very long ago he had spent the light hours of every fourth day mashing shell and massaging plaster into a paste used to patch any hole or crack the city watch might report.

Bliss's small troop paused before the city gates, waiting in the usual line, waiting to be passed through.

"We'll go the barracks first," she said, standing high in her stirrups, trying to see over the milling crowd.

Maurice grunted. Three years was a long time in the short life of Southern rank and file. He doubted there would be many left who would remember their faces.

But by the stiffness in Bliss's stance, there was no point in arguing. She knew the futility as well as he did. And he supposed if one were searching for a lauded Major the barracks would still be the best place to start.

"Look," Shaara said. "They've the red up, yet."

Bliss on her slow, squat pony, cursed and abandoned stirrups for the saddle. Even standing lightly on the animal's spine, she was too short.

"I can't see it."

"It's there." Maurice could just make out the crimson banner hung high above Emman's gate. "You'll glimpse it soon enough."

The red had been hanging the very first time they had entered the city and still up on the day they left it. A call sent out to the young, a search for both Initiate and soldier, the banner graced the white walls only during time of war. Maurice had supposed the draft long over. He wondered uneasily whether the red had come down at all during Bliss's self-exile.

"Who are they warring with?" Shaara wondered. "If not us?"

Maurice shook his head. Bliss ignored them both.

The sun rose high in the sky, then dipped again before they faced the white gate. Ten soldiers here, and obviously far better trained then their cousins on the bridge. Their captain, a grizzled ex-slave, looked Bliss and her companions over from head to toe. He knew they were Northerners. He passed them through anyway. The Seat had no fear of spies.

The red banner flapped and snapped above their heads as they entered the city.

Beyond the gate a circle of hotels, brothels and three-penny restaurants waited for the casual visitor and off duty soldier. A square courtyard between the buildings bustled. Here and there hawkers pushed through the crowd, singing their wares in the peculiar clipped accent that, to Maurice's ear, was ineffably Southern.

They stabled their mounts in a wide building built for exactly that purpose; the Seat did not allow horse or cart into the center of his cities. The scrawny woman who walked the animals to their paddock and took Bliss's coin smelled heavily of opiate gum. She would not meet their eyes.

"Nothing's changed," Maurice said, resigned.

"Of course not." Bliss threw him a look of mocking enquiry. "Did you really think things would have? In the shadow," she continued, quoting a temple chant, ''time is as nothing.'"

Emman's narrow cobbled streets were quiet beneath the mid-afternoon sun. On either side white-washed plaster walls rose into the sky, slit here and there with thin windows, brightened once or thrice by a revealing flash of indigo curtain. Here were the city flats, housing multiple families. The pristine façades reflected sunlight, doubling warmth. Maurice shed his cloak and loosened his tunic.

"Winter," Shaara marveled, following suit. "And it's warm. I'd forgotten."

"I hadn't," Maurice replied, and sent a small prayer of thanks Trout's way.

Emman's barracks clustered in gentle humps at the very center of the city: a fallen beehive at the foot of a single, slender white tower. The tower belonged solely to the Seat. Most often the stained glass windows remained dark and the rooms beyond empty

Bliss paused and looked up, considering the spire with expressionless interest.

"Do you suppose he's been here since Green Kirk?" Shaara mused. Maurice saw the lad shiver and wondered if he remembered enough to be afraid.

"No doubt," Bliss said, then shrugged. She made as if to duck into the first barracks, but paused.

"We should have gone to the temple first," she said. Maurice heard her teeth click together.

"You'd climb the steps and cross the threshold?" Maurice let deliberate doubt ring. He didn't like the sudden uncertainty he read in her eyes and he wanted to shake her. "Is even Moire worth such sacrifice?"

"I'd send you in," Bliss spat. "And wait in the clean air."

She stalked through a doorway so low even she had to slouch. Maurice bent after and gestured at Shaara. The boy looked reluctantly away from the Seat's spire and followed.

"Major Moire Kler," Bliss repeated for the third time, elbows on the limestone desk, nearly nose to nose with the staring officer. "Is she here or not, man?"

"She is not." The officer, a corporal by Maurice's best guest, took visible hold of his courage. The first time Bliss spat her question, the fellow had been too irritated to reply. The second time, understanding began to dawn and he had gone mute with shock or fear.

But the officer was a man in the Seat's barracks and as such no doubt used to both fear and sudden horror. He rallied quickly enough, and he was not going to let Bliss pass so easily.

"The Major is not available," he said, stiff. "If you would be so kind as to leave your name, I might send a messenger -"

"Don't be daft, man." Impossibly, Bliss inched her compact bones further across limestone. "I can see by your milk-white face you know who we are. In fact, I'd bet Horrid's first you've been expecting us."

Maurice had decided the same and he did not like the implication.

"Let us through, soldier." He set his hand on the desk and leaned with Bliss. "Or at least tell us where to find her."

The officer, supposition confirmed, seemed unable to take his eyes from Bliss's scowl. "She will not be back before nightfall, Sacrifice." He swallowed but continued gamely on. "And I am not to let you pass."

"She still sleeps here, then, does she? In the Major's chamber?"

"Yes."

"Alone?"

Maurice saw sweat bead on the officer's brow. "I'm sure I do not know, ma'am." He took a breath. "She left something, in case you...If you came."

Bliss snatched the square of linen paper and unfolded it with steady hands. Love notes, Maurice thought, wry, remembering Shaara's tease. But Bliss's mouth set and she tore the paper into neat scraps, linen threads scattering.

"We'll wait." She rolled her shoulders and paced once before the desk.

The officer released a relieved sigh. "If I can bring anything? Cooked meat, or tea or temple birds for the evensong?"

Maurice winced. Bliss's chin came up.

"Inside," she continued. "We'll wait inside."

She brushed the corporal aside. The officer quivered, hands flexing. Before the man could decide to leap, Maurice planted himself in the way.

"She doesn't fight fair," he said, pleasantly. "And neither do we. Best just to go and fetch the Major."

The corridor beyond the limestone desk was cold and, for the most part, silent. Muffled voices and the faint boom of training drums slipped through thick walls. The beehive remained a place of shelter and secrets and quiet lives given entirely to the Seat. Maurice felt the old sense of peace descend and found himself relaxing in welcome.

He could have found his way to the Major's quarters in the dark, and often had.

The heavy wooden door waited at the end of the old hall. Maurice could not help but lay his palm against the rough planks. The scars were the same: the cluster of burns where he had snuffed endless cigarettes, the crack Will's axe had cut in the lintel, and the slivered dent Bliss had left a finger span beneath the bronze latch on the night they had run.

That dent Bliss touched, lightly, a slender thumb against splinters.

"It'll be locked," she said. "Shaara?"

For once, Bliss's apprentice blanched at the challenge. "You're sure?"

"Yes."

Shaara shrugged and took his copper pins to the wide key hole. The latch resisted. The lad bit his lip and muttered. Maurice wondered if Shaara was imagining Moire's imminent ire. He set his hand on the boy's shoulder. Shaara twitched and shrugged him off, and the latch gave and the lock snicked free.

Maurice expected darkness. Instead, a single wick burned in Southern scented oil beneath an amber-colored shade. The cell was as small as Maurice recalled, and cold. The lonely cot on the floor continued to reside against the same eastern wall but Moire had added color in the form of vibrant, dyed wool pillows and a woven blanket. An earthenware bowl waited on a wooden stool, and Moire's leather-wrapped dress-sword rested against the wall in the farthest corner.

Shaara slipped his pins back up his sleeve and dropped cross-legged to the bare floor, resignation in the slump of his shoulders. Bliss padded carefully into the room, silent. She touched the earthenware first, regarded the lamp beneath lowered lids, then paused to finger the pillows on the cot.

"Color," she muttered, bemused.

Maurice found himself drawn to the weapon in the corner. He touched the wrapped scabbard and then drew a finger back in surprise. Dust. Yet when he drew the blade free the metal gleamed, well oiled. That, at least, had not changed.

When he turned around Bliss had settled on the cot among the pillows, elbows on knees, eyes on the open door.

They did not wait long.

They heard her before they saw her. Boot heels on rang cobblestone, which was entirely on purpose, as Moire could be quiet and wily as Fox when the mood took her. Shaara rustled and stiffened. Maurice took a breath and pulled his shoulders back, wishing suddenly for the protection of a dress uniform. Bliss did not move but Maurice imagined he could hear her heart beating from across the room.

The clatter of Moire's haste stopped just outside the cell. A tick of silence, an unheard inhale, and their Major stepped through the door, the affronted corporal three strides behind.

Shaara jumped up, a puppet yanked by invisible strings. Maurice, unable to help himself, stepped from the edge of the room to the lad's side, rank and file awaiting new orders, the old habit far too deeply engrained to shake.

At the corner of Maurice's eye, Bliss moved. She did not stand, as friendship or etiquette might require. Instead she took her elbows from her knees, crossed her arms about her chest and slumped more deeply into the nest of cushions. Without uttering a single word, she spoke eloquently of insolence.

And so Bliss certainly would, Maurice realized, between one slow heartbeat and the next, for his dream had spoken true.

Somehow in their absence Moire had given up her soldier's leathers for the dun priestly raiment of the Lower Temple.

# Eight

Ross kept nearly a score of performers in his troop. Most of the players were human as I. Seven were not: two dogs, three cats, one parrot and a hog. The mule who pulled the circus cart was not officially counted as one of the troop, nor was the old stallion Will rode at the very height of his axe toss.

The Troop Menagerie, as Ross often billed his trained creatures, needed a good deal of attention. Their care always fell to the newest member of Ross's family. Therefore that particular summer their care fell to me.

Rose once had a kitten when I was a child. An owl took it one night. I think I wept into my mother's skirts at the loss. I think she wept with me. I do know she never replaced the cat and that although she enjoyed the canaries in her ladyship's solarium, she later turned away the stray mutt my older self wheedled home from the fields.

My mother, addled as she was, had no patience for grief.

So the performing animals in Ross's Menagerie were my first attempt at a nurturing instinct. I found I enjoyed the two little dogs and their dancing tricks. The one-eyed tom who road a miniature bicycle had never been sand trained and preferred to shit in the cart. It was my job to keep him from his choice of latrine. He and I soon became mortal enemies although the tom would sometimes deign to warm my feet on especially cold nights.

The other cat, a small female who could strum a guitar with her front paws, wanted the parrot. The parrot wanted to live and so spent any uncaged moment on my shoulder, thinking to hide behind the scant protection of my right ear.

As for the hog, when he was not playing 'dead' on Ross's shouted command, he ate. And ate. But I was rather fond of the hog. He had big blue eyes, and he muttered deprecations in the language of his kind whenever I brought him one of his many daily suppers.

"No good circus troop is complete without animals," Ross explained one evening as I cussed and whined, and angrily scooped cat shit from the depths of the cart. The parrot on my shoulder echoed my curses with enthusiastic panache.

"The marks come to see jugglers and flame," Ross continued, smoking one of Maurice's small cigarettes as he watched me toil. "But they won't go home happy until they've seen at least one four-footed creature dance."

And he was right. I soon learned that the pig had her own following and that the guitar-strumming queen was a legend in the back country. The parrot, who sang the King's Lay in high, spine shivering tones, often brought in more coin than any other.

And so when the bird unexpectedly flew free one afternoon in the middle of a particularly well attended show, I expected a beating. It was after all my responsibility to see that the wing feathers were clipped close and thusly made useless.

Ross struck me once, gruff. And then he sent me away.

"You'll not come back unless you bring my bird," he said. "Maurice will care for the rest of the Menagerie until you return. We're heading east in five days. Don't tarry."

At first I did not understand. The surrounding countryside was fenny and wet and plagued with willow trees, a parrot's perfect small kingdom. I searched for the rest of that long day and when I returned to the circus empty handed, wet, and starving, they pelted me with stone and stick until I was forced away again.

Four days passed before I finally found the bird hunched in the branches of a drooping willow. He was nearly as miserable and starved as I; we were both covered with mud and grit.

Elated, I set him on my shoulder and rushed back to camp. I daresay he recognized his home and regretted his flight. He began to sing as soon as he heard Ross's voice.

Ross fed me and Maurice dug up clean clothes. I washed and ate my fill and, as I sat tending my blistered feet on the edge of the wagon, looked up, startled, into Ross's seamed face.

"You've learnt your lesson, Bliss," he said as I paused, ointment stinging my toes. "But so's you don't forget it." He bent forward and dropped the parrot's limp body onto my lap. The bird's spine had been broken. The small body was still warm.

"We all have our own parts to play," he said as I stared, mute, at the ruffle of blue and green feathers. "And there's no excuse for shirking."

*****

For three fortnights after the shawl was stolen, Moire Kler had known they would come. That knowledge frightened with its powerful grip. Joy and fear and hunger and grief mixed to form a knot beneath her breastbone. She beat the pain back with work and with prayer and, as the ache grew larger rather than smaller, with fasting and penance.

Every morning of those three fortnights she opened her eyes on expectation and every evening, when she returned home to find the cell barren and empty still, she went into sleep carrying regret.

When they came, she told herself behind the shelter of tightly closed lids, she would be ready.

But time passed and they did not come after all. Winter ripened and the rains came to ease some of the heat. Moire knew there would be snow above the River Ann and roads dangerous with ice. She began to relax. Perhaps the thievery had not been what she thought. Perhaps she had no reason for anxiety or suspicion.

She relaxed. Oh, yes, she relaxed and forgot to listen for Bliss's strident tones. Initiation was approaching and Moire found herself very busy, sometimes worn to the edge of exhaustion. She dismissed the lost shawl and she stopped endlessly waiting.

And now, a scant seven days before the ceremony, here they were.

She felt calm and poise shattering as she strode down the hall, Corporal Aansi and irritation riding her wake. She felt dizzy, for a moment, and lost, and she could not find a solid breath. She wanted to run, and she nearly had.

But of course she did not. Moire Kler had never run from anything in her entire life. She had risen from soldier's whelp to captain to field major and on to become one of the Seat's twelve right hands. She was honored and would soon be glorified. Old matters of the heart held little consequence in the now.

She did have to pause for a moment outside her quarters. But when she finally stepped through the door she was calm and brimming with genuine pleasure.

Because she'd learned long ago that pleasure was always easier than regret.

"Captain," she said, holding out her hands in welcome. "You bastard. You haven't aged a day."

Maurice smiled. It was the old, shy smile she remembered and missed. He did not take her hands, of course. But he did not fall back on the formality of salute, either. He bowed, in the way of the north, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Major," he said, and fumbled in his belt for a cigarette. The familiar nervous habit made Moire's throat dry. "How goes the war?"

"Bloody but true," Moire answered, the required response, and met faded blue eyes with mutual understanding.

When she turned, Shaara blushed in the amber light.

"Ma'am," her old corporal stood rod straight. "The door -"

"I understand." She spoke gently to hide the sudden surge of fond regret. Shaara was grown. Somehow he'd filled out, and stretched nearly as tall as Maurice. Moire had never been able to ruffle his hair, not this child who had done murder on the battlefield at her command. But he was no longer the lad she had snuck sweets to beneath a General's disapproving eye.

Moire had forgotten the desk corporal until he shifted at her back and coughed.

"Ma'am," he said, unconsciously echoing Shaara. "Perhaps you might remind your honored guests that smoking has never been allowed on barracks."

Maurice regarded the little man calmly through wreathing pastel smoke. Moire laughed and turned to the corporal, because it gave her one more excuse to ignore the living disapproval lurking on her cot.

"Let it be, Aansi," she said, easing the soldier with a light touch. "The captain's an old carnie, you'll never be able to break him of the habit." And then, more firmly, "Back to your desk. We're well enough here."

"If you're sure." But Aansi saluted and departed eagerly enough, no doubt relieved to be free of this new and peculiar burden.

Moire shut the cell door on his retreat. When she turned around Bliss had moved from the cot to the floor, soundlessly, and stood so close Moire could feel the heat of rage radiating from the other woman's flesh.

"You've let your hair grow," Bliss said, sharp as a pike. "It's a bird's nest. And it's gone grey."

Moire pressed her lips together. "And you look as though you've been grubbing in the mud. Has work become so very hard to get above the River that you've taken to performing in the Northern sewers?"

Maurice made a sound that might have been a laugh. The perfume of his smoke, so different from that of the Temple, made Moire feel suddenly light and free.

"No matter," she continued as Bliss glowered, "we'll find you a bath. We'll find you all baths. And proper clothes and a room. Two. And something to eat. Surely you're hungry? You look near to crow bait, Major."

"The pickins have been slim, lately," Maurice admitted quietly. "But we'll do." He lapsed and Moire felt a prickle of anticipation.

Surprisingly, it was Shaara who ventured the obvious, dangerous question.

"Major," he said, "you're dressed like a priest. And we've found a shawl. A temple shawl. Embroidered with your mark."

Anticipation turned to fear. It had not been an accident, then. And it had not been innocent, certainly.

Moire pushed fear away and crossed the room, deliberately avoiding Bliss as she did so. To steal time she lifted the shade from her lamp and carefully checked the oil in the basin. The wick burned true and clean. She would not have to replace to the oil until morning.

"And that," Bliss said from directly behind. "Is a temple lamp."

"So it is," Moire replied, mild. She could feel the woman's breath on the back of her neck and for a brief, secret moment she allowed herself longing. "Although I'm surprised you would know that. As you've never set foot in a temple your entire short life."

"And I'm all the better for it." Bliss tangled long fingers in the sleeve of Moire's day robe and yanked. Because it was Bliss, and because it had been three long years, Moire allowed herself to be pivoted.

"What are you doing?" Bliss hissed, suddenly and impossibly nose to nose. The young woman must be standing on her tiptoes, Moire thought from somewhere very far away, for surely she would not have grown as well. "What have you done?"

"Use your eyes, Bliss," Maurice said, calm. "And stop being stubborn. Our Major's joined the order, obviously. The robes are a nice touch, ma'am. They suit you."

"They do not!" Bliss returned, breathing hard. "She looks like a corpse. My granny's corpse. Four days old."

Inexplicably, the words hurt. As they were meant to. And because they did, Moire plucked Bliss's cold hand from her sleeve and dropped it.

"Three years is a long time, Bliss. Some of us have changed."

"What?" Bliss spat, fierce. "Horrid, woman. You couldn't live without me in your bed, so you took the vows?"

Shaara twitched audibly, a small, snuffling sound. Maurice finished his smoke and straightened.

"I think the lad and I'll go in search of that bath you promised, Major," he said. "And maybe a bite to eat. Steam room hasn't moved, hain't it?"

"No." Moire found a smile. "Come back when you've finished and I'll see about quarters."

"Coward!" Bliss snarled. "Run and hide because you don't want to look at your commander in a priest's dress."

"You are my commander, Sacrifice," Maurice replied. He took Shaara by the elbow and before the corporal could form a protest, walked the young man firmly from the cell.

Moire found herself studying the anger on Bliss's thin face with a detachment that belied the sickness in her gut. If they had been on the field Moire would have slapped down such insolence without hesitation. If they had been in bed she would have found it amusing and burnt it away with a touch.

"You didn't send for us," Bliss said through clenched teeth. "I thought you had. That perhaps you were in trouble or..." She turned away and paced the room twice. "You didn't send it, did you?"

"No." Moire watched Bliss move with clinical interest. That, at least, had not changed, that inborn restlessness. "It was stolen. Nearly a season ago. Do you have it?"

"Yes." Bliss tossed her chin at a battered pack decorating Moire's cot but made no move to retrieve the shawl. "Are you going to tell me why?"

Moire shook her head. "Not every question has an answer. It has happened because it is right."

"Were you called?"

"By the Seat?" Because she was too off balance to sit, Moire made herself drop neatly onto the edge of her cot. The pillows smelled of Bliss. Mud and sweat and smoke and below that, something much more intangible.

"No, not by the Seat." She folded her hands in her lap. The scrape of the rough dun wool she had chosen over leather still startled. "But by the gods? Yes." And that, too, still surprised.

Bliss hovered again, eye to eye, as though determined to take over space and air. "No. You've done this to punish me. Because I left you."

The laugh bubbled free, a trifle too shrill. "Listen to yourself. You sound like the spoiled, self-centered child I dug from the village gaol, Bliss. What has become of the hero of Green Kirk?" Moire lifted her chin. Bemusement felt safe. "Have you forgotten everything I taught you so easily?"

Slowly, Bliss drooped to her knees. For a frightened, hopeful moment Moire thought Bliss would lay her head in Moire's lap, as she had done that last night. But she did not. And seeing that she would not, Moire could breath again.

"I am not sorry I left," Bliss said. "I'm not sorry I left. But I am sorry I didn't take you with me."

Moire had waited so very long for that particular apology. So very long. And yet, hearing the words, she almost did not recognize them.

"What?" She said, amused. "You would have thrown me over Maurice's shoulder and stolen into the night? The Seat's Sacrifice thieving away his best commander? It would never have been allowed." She grinned. "And if it had, I would have killed you first chance I found."

"You never," Bliss said, hoarse, "forgave me for being a peasant."

"No." And to Moire's shame it was she who reached out, spreading steady fingers to touch one dusty, mud-caked cheek. "Bliss, I never forgave you for being Northern."

Bliss leapt as if stung and whirled with an acrobat's practiced grace until she stood with her back against the cell door.

"Moire," she said, "you still haven't told me why."

"As I said. The gods called."

Bliss seemed to swell and for a brief moment Moire saw the unbendable will that had so impossibly won for the Seat his victory.

"Horrid take you, woman," Bliss said in a whisper. "If you won't tell me the why of it, I'll find someone who will."

The door groaned and slammed and she was gone. Moire stared for a long while at the scatter of mud left behind on the cell floor.

Moire swept the tiles clean because she found the simple, menial work soothing. She worked the broom until the plain squares shone and then she swept on. The broom felt right in hands that missed a sword and the rhythmic scratch of twig and bristle brought Moire's thumping heart to calm.

When the floor was clean and more than clean Moire set the broom aside, and dipped her hands in the tepid water she kept in an earthenware bowl near her cot. She scrubbed her palms together, then massaged her eyes and cheeks with damp fingers. While she dried her hands on the hem of her robe, Moire bent over the flickering amber lamp and slowly inhaled. The warm cloud of perfume brought the world back to center and the knot she had been carrying since Bliss's reappearance relaxed.

The floor quivered, a nearly imperceptible thrum, the subterranean echo of the Evening Call above. The giant bells lodged in the Seat's white spire were singing, and on the grounds of the Low Temple priests and Initiates would be prostrate and proper, spread across the floor in worship, glorifying the gods.

Moire need not fall on her face away from the temple arches. Vows were not so stringent, at least not yet. Nevertheless, she dropped to her knees on the newly swept floor and bowed her head.

It could not hurt to remind herself of the choices she had made.

# Nine

Ross's Troop crossed the River Ann with more fanfare that my younger self could quite grasp. The King's soldiers spat and threw clods of mud as we pushed the cart over that limestone span but once we were past the arch and through the gate, I had to duck to avoid a different barrage of flowers and coin and, somewhat shockingly, wads of raw bread dough.

"Spice cookies," Ross laughed, bowing and bowing to the gathered crowd. "To honor the gods' troubadours. They taste of salt but their innards are thick with rush wine. Eat."

Gingerly, I rescued a damp cookie from the old mule's path, brushed away grass and grit, and took a bite. The salt made me grimace and nearly gag but the sudden burst of warm liquor slid down my throat like honey. The sky seemed to brighten and the cheers of our eager audience grew to a roar.

Will, the tattooed mummer, glanced across mule's muzzle and laughed.

"Be wary, Bliss. One cookie will warm your heart, two will knock you flat."

But I noticed he'd gathered a number of the doughy balls himself.

I spent my first four days across the border drunk on spice cookies. At Ross's command I ran endless displays of wit and skill from dawn to dusk, then fell into the role of musician and storyteller from sunset to moonset. We all ate well and slept well, either in the jongleur's cell every Southern inn kept free for just such an occasion, or in the very home of any particularly ambitious small time politician looking for goodwill.

It soon became clear that I had fallen into good luck, indeed. Ross was known and loved in the south, and the members of his troop were treated with a lavish respect reserved in the north for royalty or influential landed.

I felt as though I had obtained divinity, that first foray across the River, and long after the spice cookies had gone stale I remained dizzy and drunk on that intoxicating taste of glory.

Most of Ross's adopted family had been across the river more times than I had years. Seasoned players, they knew what to expect and how to keep from trouble.

One young lass, Trout keep her, took the same heady sip of life I was savoring and let it drown her sense. I do not recall her true name or even if she had one. Ross called her Whelp, for the frolicking and bawdy dance she did with with our costumed dogs. Maurice called her Lilah and took her often to his bed.

I named her Red, not for the color of her hair but for the webs of pink sleeplessness opiate gum left in her eyes.

Our Red was lovely enough, so it was no surprise when, during a long stop over at a large village bordering Emman city, she was taken up by an ordained temple priest. I don't know if she loved him. I suspect it was his sumptuous gifts and the thin reek of power that snagged her heart.

It came time for Ross's Troop to bow a last farewell and Red refused to leave her priest. Ross might have let her be but Southern tongues wag and her priest had not been particularly subtle about his new attachment. The Seat is a jealous lord and his gods have not a single finger bone of mercy.

A small group of soldiers from the local barracks came for Red our last evening in town as we worked a private performance in a barrister's manse. They swept in amongst the guests, an inexorable tide of leather and sword point and pistol, and they took Red from her dancing dogs before most of us noticed her absence.

The barrister appeared apologetic but resigned. Ross was, I think, entirely unsurprised. He delayed our departure one more day and he and I rode the mule into Emman. We sat on the white hot temple steps and waited silently until Evening Call and then an acolyte brought us a rough wool bag neatly packed with Red's blouse and hose and boots and a few pieces of jewelry she had chosen from a Southern silver merchant the day we crossed Ann.

*****

Maurice did not often think of regret. A man could not live his life forward if he was always looking back. He had killed his fair share of men, and even women, and he had stolen when there was need.

But he'd never raped a lass or filched knowingly from another worse off than himself, and he took no real pleasure in violence. He did what a man must to survive and he tried his best, day by day, to please both himself and his gods. And, of course, to please Bliss.

He did regret Lilah. He had loved her in his own way. He had loved the way her red curls tangled in his fists, and the way she saw him fed the choicest bits of supper before the others descended on the communal cook pot, and the low songs she had sung to him, late at night, as they lay together beneath the stars.

But he'd found her temper annoying, and her arrogance, and her disdain of his little cigarettes. So he'd snapped at her when she was late with his dinner, or when she sang off tune, or misstepped during performance. Which made it his fault she had at last one night tossed stew in his face and seized her bedroll away and, the very next day, taken up with a scrawny, Low Temple priest.

Lilah he regretted.

And so he was not surprised to find his wandering feet led him eventually away from the barracks and the shadow of the Seat's white spire, along the curving busy roads to Emman's center, and up the one hundred steps of the Low Temple.

The red was unfurled here, too. Crimson flags flew from thin pinnacles, and wide red silk wrapped in bold swathes about the Temple pillars. Maurice climbed the steps slowly, each boot heel placed carefully upon planed limestone so as not to slip. He had seen penitents fall while climbing the steps, from grief or fear or weariness. He had seen them slip and slide and tumble on the sharp ivory edges, and he'd heard their bones crack.

The steps were full of pilgrims, jostling as they climbed. Maurice ignored them. Under the Seat's shadow god worship was more than a man's choice. The Temple's blessing was as essential as bread and water for survival. A Southern lord would give up his single heir to an unnamed god without so much as a shudder, or slit his mother's throat upon a gilded alter at the Seat's whispered suggestion.

Maurice had no interest in such mindless avidity. He knew far better. A Northern man, landed or peasant, loved his god as best as possible but sacrificed blooded kin for no less than the King himself.

The gods watched as a man made his own destiny, and no amount of time spent in the glare of whitewashed walls or endless heat would ever convince Maurice otherwise.

The priests at the Temple doors blessed Maurice with a scattering of perfumed water. He made the proper knee bend as they murmured at him in tones no less sweet than Lilah's own.

He thought about pausing, about asking the question he had not dared voice nine summers ago, but Ross's old warnings still echoed between his ears. Safe and better not to disturb the unknown. Make your sale, collect your coin, and smile all the way.

Maurice found that smile as he shoved his way into the crowded Temple, aware always that no pilgrim went unnoticed and that the score or so of solicitous and grave priests about the front altar were as watchful as hounds.

Imagined or not, he felt their eyes on him as he dropped his last silver pennies into the elaborately carved receiving box just inside the wide doors. The skin at the back of his neck prickled and for an instant he knew Bliss's fear for all things godly.

Maurice scrubbed a hand over his face, callusing emotion away.

"Fox's balls, man," he scolded himself quietly, desperately wanting a cigarette. "And haven't you been through these very doors more times than your king would like to know?"

A woman robed in grey glanced up from her obeisance, surprised or irritated. She wore her hair long, in the way of the priesthood, but the braids and curls were still free of beads. An Initiate, Maurice guessed. Praying for acceptance or mourning lost freedom. He shrugged his apology and hurried on.

The Low Temple had more tiers than a baker's butter cake. The main floor for the penitent, and above that, a floor for private worship. Another two for the entombment of the blessed or wealthy, and yet another three lined with cot after cot; the ordained were allowed little in the way of privacy. The topmost floor sheltered the Temple Role: shelf upon shelf of books as regimented and ordered as the beds on the floor beneath.

Maurice had seen that endless army of volumes once in his life. He was not eager to do so again.

"Pilgrim." A skeletal hand reached from the throngs and grasped Maurice by the shoulder. "Are you lost?"

"No." The hand belonged to a thin arm and the arm was attached to a bony priest wearing a welcoming smile. The multitude of sapphire beads in the fellow's hair seemed to catch fire in the temple white.

Maurice slipped from beneath the priest's hand. "No," he repeated. "Not lost, Holiness. Only meaning to light a candle for one I miss."

"Ah." The perfect smile became, if possible, even wider. "You'll find we have candles set in all three alcoves this day. So many people! The city simply buzzes with celebrants eager to pay their respects before Ordination."

"Ordination." Maurice paused in mid flight and eyed the smaller man. The priest was growing bald between his carefully detailed beads. "Not just Initiation?"

"Oh, no." The skeletal hand came back and patted Maurice's arm gently. "This year we are lucky enough to have a few pure enough of heart and intention to rise straight through the ranks. Nearly unheard of, I know! Why, the last time such a thing happened I was barely an Initiate myself."

"The year the Seat was born." Maurice knew the tale. He'd heard it over and over to numbness on the muddy Southern war fields.

The priest nodded, suddenly slack with joy and memory. "The year the Seat was born and the very first Sacrifice led his troops to god-recognized victory."

Maurice found a thin wedge of space in the second alcove and knelt before a village of bright candles. The woman to his left was weeping over her match, and the boy to his right stiff-lipped and fighting grief. Maurice drew his own small fire from his sleeve and lit a glass cupped white candle. He felt no grief and the regret was faded and mostly painless, but he bowed his head in respect and whispered Lilah's name.

"Dead or damned," he murmured over the flickering candle, "may you find a parcel of peace."

When he looked up the boy and the old woman were gone. It was not until Maurice found his feet and steadied his bones that he missed the faltered, crowded breathing that had, until a moment ago, been the music of his surroundings.

He turned slowly and found the alcove cleared but for the elderly priest and his new escort of blank faced barrack's guards.

"Captain," the priest said, still gentle. "Have you spoken your remembrances to the lost?"

"Yes." Maurice clenched his fist to keep the fire quenched, and wished fervently that he had been brazen enough to wear a knife.

"Then, come with us, if you please."

The priest gripped Maurice's arm, inexorable, and the guards closed in.

They took him down instead of up, down a long straight staircase as slippery and dangerous as the one hundred outside, although far less busy with life and movement. The guards did not let him slip. The held him fast, shoulder to shoulder and breast to back. The thin priest proved surprisingly nimble. He led the way, robes pulled up about his knees to bare naked calves. He paused only occasionally to turn and see that his hostage still followed.

For hostage he was, if wrapped only in the silken chains of the priest's polite smile. By the time Maurice decided that he was willing to risk fire for escape the chance had long passed. He could feel the weight of the earth and the Low Temple above his head and in the heavy air, and he did not think he would find his way free even if he murdered every one of the six soldiers.

He wondered, stupidly, if this was the way they had taken Lilah. And then he wondered, more uneasily, what Bliss would do once she understood his disappearance.

"Captain."

The climb ended abruptly. An unlatched door grew out of the very foot of the staircase. The priest pushed the door open and gestured Maurice through.

He might have hesitated. He wanted to. But if no one else knew he died a coward, still he would know. And Maurice did not want his last racing thoughts to be grey and shame filled.

He stepped past the priest into darkness, and then, because he heard the sudden scrape of sword on scabbard and could not help himself, he lit the room with a burst of flame and smoke. The priest protested in shrill tones, and one of the guards brought Maurice down with a heavy blow to the back of the head.

The world tilted and Maurice's flame went out but the room remained bright. Maurice blinked hard. The world steadied just enough so that beyond the throbbing in his cracked head he could recognize a small round table set with fruit and bread and ale.

From beyond the table stepped a young lad with an oddly familiar face. He cocked the silver pistol in his hand and leveled it, taking careful, precise and steady aim at Maurice's head.

"And yet you told me, did you not," the lad said in mild, far from youthful tones, "that there was no such thing as witchery."

# Ten

By the time summer rolled to an end we were rich as newly made lordlings. I had gold in my pockets and in my pack and jewels on my fingers and fine, well-cut fabrics to keep me in the highest fashion. Ross's Troop had more invitations to perform than we knew what to do with. We made a game out of it, selecting a date to play in the muddiest town or the farthest reaches of the shadow or for the ugliest politician or the smallest priest.

As summer ended we began to count the days until Ross decided it was time to trudge back over the Ann into our own country, to familiar places and faces and food. I cannot say I was reluctant to leave Southern oddities behind, but I also cannot say I was eager to return to a life of poverty. I determined I would guard carefully whatever wealth I did not first give to Granda.

Ross had, in fact, begun to make noises about packing up for season's end when we received the most unexpected and frightening invitation of all.

The embossed piece of linen paper was delivered by courier on a cooling afternoon to the tavern we had been frequenting most often in our last days. The courier, a dusty and weathered lass with the Seat's emblem emblazoned on her leather jerkin, seemed to have no trouble picking Ross from the tangle of loud patrons.

She marched straight across the brick floor to our table and set the linen paper beside Ross's fat goblet of red wine. Then she stood carefully to one side, at attention, waiting.

I remember noting that she had pierced her lower ear and upper lip with gold wire and wondering if that was the way of the Seat's army. She had a pistol at her belt and I thought she looked as though she would not hesitate to use it.

"Imagine that," Ross murmured, fingering the embossed paper. I could not make out the runes scrawled along the edges, but I recall thinking the deep purple ink was unusual. "Horrid swiv me and Fox take the remains, in all my years I've never..." And then he paused and shot the waiting soldier a hooded look.

Will, who had been passing the time playing kanoodles under the table with my bare feet, reached a tattooed hand across the boards and snatched the paper free.

"What is it?" Amy, the new dog girl, a tiny Southern bit, pressed against Will's other side, trying to see.

"An invitation to play at the Capitol," Will marveled in a near whisper. "During a festival at High Temple."

"High Temple," Amy, devout to annoyance, touched her brow in quick respect. "It must be for Gallows Day. Tis only a se'enight away."

I had no real interest in Southern celebrations but for our place as entertainment, but I did find Ross's face a curiosity in itself. He looked amazingly as though he had swallowed a hunk of sour cheese.

"They say the Seat attends Gallows Day," Amy continued. She seized the invitation Will had dropped back onto the boards, running a finger along the inked runes. "They say he sometimes pronounces blessing on those about to find sacrifice."

"Don't be foolish, girl." Ross snatched the invitation back and handed it to a silent Maurice. Maurice, without so much as a glance at the runes, made the piece of paper disappear. "Even us Northern mud grubbers know your Seat doesn't mingle with the common folk."

"Gallows Day is different," Amy argued, breathless and avid. "Why, my uncle would have given his last leg for an invitation to Gallows, and gods know he was a master at the craft."

"He was a small time tumbler," Ross snapped."Why do you think he sold you to me?"

He finished his wine in one gulp and glared with muzzy fury at the messenger.

"No," Ross said. "We're busy."

Amy gasped. The grizzled soldier, apparently uneffected, bowed her understanding and departed without a sound.

"Ross," Amy complained. "It would surely bring us honor -"

"Honor is a better man's concept," Ross interrupted and, grabbing Amy's thin arm, hauled her up from the benches. He was recently insatiable where the sprightly girl was concerned, as he was whenever a new lass joined our family.

Amy did not seem to mind his lust. Whatever further protest she might have made was smothered by Ross's mocking laugh. The two climbed the tavern stairs and then I could hear their staggering footsteps clunking across the floor overhead.

Will wrapped a heavy arm about my shoulders. Maurice lit one of his eve- present cigarettes. One of the dancing dogs, curled beneath the table at my feet, sighed in his sleep.

The next evening a second invitation arrived and this time around the wording was more precise. Ross turned an odd shade of yellow as he examined the purple ink, then nodded sharply at the courier. That day she had a ruby in her nose and a sapphire in her ear.

The next morning we packed quickly, rented five horses to join our mule and stallion, and, striking west, turned their noses to the Capitol and the honor of Gallows Day.

*****

Shaara followed Bliss for an entire morning. He did not usually tempt fate so readily, especially where his master was concerned. Bliss could be a heavy hand and she had no patience with her people, and as a mere apprentice he was worth less than nothing. Or he might have been, if their troop had not slowly dwindled down to a paltry three.

He'd followed her once before, years past, as a near babe three days under her protection. He'd wanted to see where this fierce woman spent her days, and he'd wanted to glimpse some indication that he could trust her.

That particular day she had spent the entirety of the morning and afternoon drinking in a smoky tavern, and then wasted a night sitting in the cold beneath a faded alder tree, singing drunken Northern love songs to the moon. He had not seen any strong indication that she was worthy of his fragile trust until she fed the majority of her untouched supper to the cobbler's cat. That small kindness convinced Shaara that Bliss was worth a try, and the next morning he had stayed on, instead of running off with the back alley urchins as he'd planned.

He was grown now and he knew beyond a doubt that Bliss would protect him with her life, even if that life was battered almost beyond repair and hardly worth more than the dirty clothes on her back. But lately Shaara had thought about running, again. And it was not a babe's dream of romance in the streets but a man's dream of tending his own world.

He rather thought that Emman City was as good a place to make a new life as any. Shaara had no interest in returning north. Like as not he would end up a con in the King's service, digging trenches and fighting an endless war. He would rather take his chances in warmer weather. And in Emman, Shaara knew, he would have a friend, for it was obvious Moire remembered her corporal fondly. Mayhap she could even find him a job that did not involve singing for his supper.

Not that he regretted his training, as such. But what man did not want a brighter future? And maybe a girl on his arm who understood his potential. A juggler was good with his hands and the bits knew it, and he had no lack of partners, but none of those enjoyable adventures looked to see him again after sunrise.

Life with Bliss was ever-changing and of late Shaara wanted to put down roots.

He followed her through the white streets because he intended to take her aside and tell her his plans, firmly and kindly, but he could not quite find the courage to approach so close.

She was in the grips of a frothing temper, he knew, and had been since they'd discovered Moire turned priest. He supposed he understood it. Bliss would most like rather sleep with a snake than a religious sort. Still, they all knew it was Bliss who had run and she could hardly have expected an open-armed welcome. They were lucky Moire had not decided to toss them in the brig for breaking and entering. But she'd always been a fair commander, just so long as she could see the sense in a thing.

Bliss didn't head straight for the bars, as Shaara expected. She seemed to be trailing the streets aimlessly. He thought maybe she was looking for trouble and she did indeed pick a fight with a particularly belligerent tulip merchant. Bliss did not quite fist the man in the eye, but she did knock the dirty veil from his grizzled head before she stomped on.

Shaara paused to pick the scarf up, dust it off, and return it to its red-faced owner.

"They say the Sacrifice is a whirlwind," the man huffed, looking after Bliss. "We should expect bad days. Still, it is lucky you guard her."

Shaara smiled and hurried on. He wondered if every eye in the city knew Bliss's face. It seemed unlikely, but then, she had hardly been invisible when Emman had been her home.

In the south, nothing ever changed. But at least a man always knew exactly where he stood.

Shaara paused to admire a dark-headed lass swathed in white veils and nearly lost his master in doing so. He found her again at the neck of a walled off alley, eyeing the sugary treats through the window of a confectionaire's shop. Shaara had not expected the dead end. Bliss, apparently, had.

"Stop sulking about like cuckolded lordling," Bliss growled without turning from the window. "You're no sneak thief, boy."

"You've Fox's own ears," Shaara returned, disgruntled, crossing cobblestones to his master's side. "Hungry?" The elaborate pastries on display reminded Shaara of the temple at the center of the city; too white, too delicate, too sugary and yet still promising satisfaction.

"No," replied Bliss, absently, but at that moment the proprietor stuck his head around the door with cries of welcome.

"Come in, come in," the man caroled. "For you I have my very own special, sweet enough to make the Seat weep - Rhubarb and custard!"

Bliss shook her head and opened her mouth on a curse, but Shaara was abruptly ravenous and he pushed past Bliss and the proprietor and into the small shop. Three heartbeats later he found himself perched on a spindly white stool, Bliss scowling at him across a lacy iron table, fruit and cream towering in the shopkeeper's very best bowl.

"Eat," Shaara urged Bliss, feeling suddenly years older than his mentor. He scooped up the confection. "You can't starve yourself to death just because Moire doesn't want you back in her bed."

Bliss's scowl creased to rage. "Who said she didn't?"

"She knows how you feel about the robes. Would she wear them if she wanted you back?" Shaar guessed he was treading on thin Northern ice. Yet he could not keep his mouth from flapping.

"It's not that simple." Bliss turned her frown to the pile of rhubarb and custard. Shaara was mildly surprised the tower did not whither beneath her displeasure. Just in case, he took a hasty bite. "It can't be that simple."

"Well," Shaara allowed through a mouthful of delight. "She did send you the shawl. So perhaps it's not all bad. Maybe...ah..." Shaara wrinkled his brow and thought of the pretty girl in her white veils. "...Southern flowers or...ah...pastries?"

Bliss's look of disgust could have turned the cream to curd in Shaara's mouth.

Defensive, Shaara shrugged. "Well. You always said it was the presentation caught the marks, yeah?"

"She didn't send the shawl."

"What?" Surprised, Shaara glanced up from his treat and saw that Bliss's lips had gone pinched and white.

"She didn't send it."

Shaara scrambled for some bit of wisdom that might save his skin. He wished he'd decided to go with Maurice to the Low Temple instead. Today, he decided, was surely not the day to seek Bliss's understanding.

His master's stern glare focused and Shaara was suddenly certain she knew exactly what he was about. He opened his mouth to fend off her rage and found unlikely rescue in the shop's proprietor.

"Sacrifice." The man smelled of bitter chocolate and Shaara saw sweat glisten on his thick upper lip. "There are visitors."

Bliss's black brows went up. She turned her head slightly. Shaara shoved another mouthful of rhubarb into his mouth, then swiveled on his stool, curious. In his surprise he swallowed too hastily and nearly choked.

Northerners were not rare on the edge of the Seat's shadow, but they were unusual. Merchants and traders found ways across the River, as did a riffraff of mercenaries and arms runners. The King's rank and file had, for many long years, passed in an endless stream across the bridge until that uneasy truce had been purchased at Green Kirk and the bridge gates locked tight.

So it was rarer than rare to catch glimpse of royal soldiers in a Southern city. They were no longer murdered upon sight, not now, but they were about as welcome as old fish.

The clutch of men standing in the confectionaire's doorway wore the King's insignia openly. Two of the five wore the short, close-cut beards so impractical on a con but elegant on a noble chin.

They were all a strong, overly-muscled sort, and for an instant Shaara thought they would get caught in the doorway like cattle in a herder's funnel. Then they shifted and twisted and popped free into the shop, bringing with them the stink of sweat and leather. Shaara noted the mud drying on their leathers and along the edges of their capes, and guessed that they were very new to the city, only hours in.

"Welcome," the shop keeper said, resorting to the smooth smile of his kind. "Can I be of service? Chocolates, perhaps, or strawberries dipped in molasses....?"

"No." The foremost of the group had not adopted an officer's bristling chin. He was clean shaven and young but the delicately fashioned silver chrysanthemum on his collar spoke of the King's favor. "Thank you. We're here to speak to your clients."

Shaara knew the proprietor had sensed trouble from the very beginning but the man was a Southerner and therefore gifted with more pride than Trout.

"They are in the middle of a meal," he said, stiffening. "A very fine meal. Perhaps you would like to sit and wait -"

Shaara did not see the officer move but some signal must have passed because one of the bearded fellows grabbed the shopkeeper about the throat and dragged the man without ceremony back into the sunlit alley. The two wavered behind the window, a tableau of weakening struggles past the displays of fruit and pastry, and then the soldier hauled the limp confectionaire out of sight.

"You won't kill him, I hope," Bliss said, entirely without expression. "His desserts are excellent. And the Seat prefers his subjects alive."

"So long as they are obedient, yes." Chrysanthemum stripped off his soiled gloves, tucking them into his belt. He hooked one booted foot about the leg of an empty stool and scraped it across the floor to Shaara's side. Then he sat with a sigh, audibly weary or disgusted.

"Unlike the Seat, we don't require mindless servitude. Jorge won't kill the man, no. But there's no reason to tempt a fellow. Even a prosperous shopkeeper will sell gossip to the temple. What I have to say is for Northern ears only."

Shaara set down his spoon, no longer hungry. Chrysanthemum snagged the abandoned treat and tucked in, obviously starving. His men arranged themselves about the room. Shaara wondered where their companion had taken the dessert cook.

"What do you want?" Bliss asked, displaying elaborate disgust as she eyed the officer's simpleminded greed.

Chrysanthemum looked up from the rapidly diminishing cream, narrowed his eyes, and laughed. "Don't look so offended. It's an eight day ride from Court to Emman. We killed two horses. Lived on jerky and warm ale. Besides, I haven't had rhubarb since I was a lad. You're right," he added, scrubbing a hand across his mouth, "the man's a genius with a dessert."

"What do you want?" Bliss repeated, cold. Shaara caught her quick, nearly invisible glance about the room and knew she was tatting up odds.

"Tamner's dead. Hung from the gates two days ago, on the King's order."

Shaara started. Whatever he had expected, it was not this. Bliss, however, appeared unsurprised.

"Pity." She rocked her stool backward and forward, easily balancing on two legs, a tumbler's trick. "His wife?"

"Tripped over her little cat and fell down the scullery stairs a day after." Chrysanthemum scraped the bowl clean and slouched comfortably. "Broke her neck. Still alive when we left, she was, but in a bad way."

"Imagine," Bliss replied. "What has it to do with us?"

"I hear tell your troop performed for his lordship, a se'enight past."

"We're not a troop," Bliss corrected, calm. "We're but three and we did our job and left without fuss." She paused. "Why was Tamner executed?"

Chrysanthemum shrugged. "Not for the likes of me to wonder. But if you ask Jorge, he'll tell you any man keeps a Southern wife is asking for trouble. The place was ripe with Southern fripperies and temple perfume."

"Stank worse than a sow's arse," Bliss agreed. "I repeat; what has it to do with us?"

It was Chrysanthemum's turn to consider. And then he shrugged. "Cut to the chase then, aye? When you left, tumbler, you left with more than a fat purse of gold coin."

Shaara's gut flipped and he swallowed down rising cream. He'd known, from the very start, that Tamner's odd tastes would bring trouble. And if trouble had come across the River Ann it had turned to danger.

# Eleven

The Capitol is surrounded by endless fields of giant orange flowers. They are said to be the favored flower of the gods, and the Seat guards them jealously. In the north we no longer grow the flower, just as we no longer plant opium seed. It has been disallowed.

Some Northerners even claim the orange flowers are cursed. Eat of the seeds and one will quickly die of the bloat. Touch the sunny petals and ware the resulting hives. Look too long upon the spiny stem and go mad.

The dried, crushed roots are smuggled over the border as a poison, but I have never yet heard tell of a soul properly murdered in such a way.

Even so, the ride across those rippling fields made my young self shake. I had no real horror of standing before the Seat; I knew no better. But, as we traveled the thin dusty path between rows and rows of thriving flowers, I felt strangely as though the end of my world waited among the forest of bright blossoms.

Ross, riding alongside Amy and slightly to my front, dug something from beneath his belt. The size of a lump of coal, it glittered in his palm before he clutched it tight.

"What is it?" I wondered aloud, and then thought better of speech. The flowers seemed to loom closer and my words lingered in the musty air.

"Chrysanthemum blossom." Reluctant, Ross opened his fingers and past Amy's mount I could see the weathered silver brooch in his hand. "Wards off bad luck."

"I've never heard so." I lowered my voice a notch. "Granda grew them. It's just a flower."

"The King seeps the petals in spring water and drinks the liquid as tea," Maurice said from behind me. When I glanced back in disbelief, he smiled and shrugged.

"'And so Trout plucked the chrysanthemum and made the petals into mash and ate them with his bread and in doing so brought health and honor to the land and to his sons.'"

I scoffed, trying to ignore the whisper of wind through the dancing sunflowers. "What is that? Poetry?"

"Legend," Maurice replied. "Have you no learning at all, Bliss?"

Amy laughed, a titter that made my teeth clench. Lately I had begun to wish Ross would tire of the lass and send her back to sleep with the dogs.

"I need no learning," I said, glaring at Ross's back. "I have wit."

Still, as we continued down the path, watched by nodding orange flowers, I considered Maurice's learning and thought seriously of stealing Ross's silver brooch away. Better such protection in my pouch than in his.

*****

"I don't have them," Bliss said. "Are you deaf? How many times must I tell you so?"

Chrysanthemum shifted irritably on his stool. "You expect me to believe you sold them in some back water Southern village?"

"We were hungry," Shaara said, indignant. "A man's got a right to eat. And what good's a bag of painted shells when you're stomach's grumbling? They weren't even pretty painted shells."

Chrysanthemum shot Shaara a hard look. Shaara kept his face still and rolled his shoulders. Chrysanthemum scowled at Bliss. Bliss echoed Shaara's shrug.

"We got a fair price," she said. "Enough for a sup and a good room."

As Shaara tried not to stare, a crimson flush rose up Chrysanthemum's throat and across his jowls. "A fair price? A fair price! Have you any idea -"

"No," replied Bliss. "I haven't. What is a bag of painted miniatures to you? And why have you come all this way to retrieve Tamner's goods?"

Chrysanthemum swallowed a long breath. "They belonged not to Lord Tamner, but to the King."

Shaara glanced at Bliss. She met his eye in perfect understanding and shifted almost imperceptibly on her stool. "What was the King's property doing in Lady Alyce's sewing drawer?"

"Trout give her peace," Chrysanthemum touched his brow in automatic reverence. "Milady made a mistake."

"A mistake?" Shaara repeated before he could help himself. Beneath the table, Bliss kicked him in the shin, a sharp warning.

Chrysanthemum swiveled and considered Shaara carefully. "You've grown, corporal, since that day in the rain on the field."

"You were there?"

"Yes, lad. I was there. Most of us who matter to the King were. Many who waited in the mud that day were lost. You, corporal, were a lucky lad."

"It wasn't luck." Bliss picked the spoon from the empty bowl and tapped it on the iron table. Trying to distract, Shaara knew.

Chrysanthemum shook his head. "Enough."

He held out one brown, calloused hand. "I know you have the miniatures. I'd not have come into this stark city without some certainty. I want them now." Shaara felt the three men ranged among delicate pastries tense. He did not dare glance over his shoulder.

"I don't have them," Bliss drawled. "Nor am I interested in the King's lost property. Obviously, the man should keep a better hand on his jewels."

"Watch your mouth, Sacrifice!" Chrysanthemum hissed. "You come dangerously close to treason." His extended hand dipped as he reached for Bliss's ever-present pack.

Bliss flipped the spoon. The utensil flew in an elegant, perfect arc and caught the closest soldier across the cheek bone. The soldier grunted. Chrysanthemum, startled, paused just long enough. Bliss buried her belt knife in his forearm, loudly cracking bone.

Blood burst across the table. Chrysanthemum screamed in pain and rage. Bliss slid from her stool, pack in hand.

"Run," she ordered Shaara, and wheeled.

Since the kick in the shin Shaara had known a brawl was blossoming. Even so, Bliss did not usually brawl with her knife. The sight of rolling blood and bone through sleeve held Shaara rooted on his stool.

"Shaara!" Bliss shouted, barreling as she did so head first into a looming soldier. "Run, you mud grubber."

Shaara ran. The stool toppled as he jumped to avoid Chrysanthemum's wobbling lunge. His knife was in his hand of its own accord and his hand remembered what to do.

There was a trick to it, a simple dance to distract, a duck and a lunge and a quick twist of the knife in the armpit or neckline, where a soldier's leathers were most vulnerable. Northerner or Southerner, they all wore soft flesh beneath. They all bled the same, bright red gushes, across a table or in floods along Green Kirk grass. Men screamed as they died, or fell without a sound, exhaling thick fluid with their lives.

"Shaara." Bliss's hand was on the scruff of his neck. He nearly drew his knife across the pulsing blue vein in her throat.

"Enough," she said, his master on the field. "Drop it."

Her other hand squeezed his left wrist until his fingers began to go numb. The belt knife, blunted from bread and cheese and now wet with blood, fell from his hand to the floor with a hollow clunk.

"Leave it," Bliss said. "Leave them." It took an effort, but Shaara found focus. He blinked at the three dead men sprawled beneath the tables in a sludge of gore and sugar. Chrysanthemum stood leaning on his stool, white and gasping in shock.

"Leave him," Bliss said and pulled Shaara from the shop. Outside the bright sun bounced across white buildings and made his eyes water.

"We split up," she hissed, brow briefly against his own. There was another knife in his hand, now, an ivory-handled knife, an officer's knife, Chyrsanthemum's knife. Bliss had always been efficient.

"And Horrid's tits, don't go back to Moire. They'll be looking there." Her breath whispered across his lips. "The bolt hole, remember?"

"Yes."

"Good. Go. I'll find Maurice." She clenched the back of his neck, then she was gone, the stark walls rising up in her absence. Shaara heard Chrysanthemum begin to bellow.

Gripping the knife, Shaara turned back up the alley and fled.

Moire was washing her new prayer shawl in the barrack's spring when Bliss found her.

"You're predictable," Bliss said, lingering beneath the shade of an old drooping willow. "Although it used to be saddle blanket and sweat cloth."

"It still is, occasionally." Moire's back ached from scrubbing but the cool water felt good against the insides of her wrists. "One can be a soldier and a priest."

"Not often or easily." Bliss set one hand against the willow's thick trunk. "So far as I've seen. Rank and file are too afraid of a priest to take her orders on the field. In fact, some say its bad luck."

"You've always been far too superstitious, Bliss. Ross ruined you with that." Moire rose to her feet and rung out her shawl. The wool, even clean and wet, was beginning to look a trifle worse for the wear. "Worn too often." She sighed. "Have you come to return my other?"

"No," Bliss replied, unconcerned. "I'm keeping it. To remind me."

"Of?" Moire prompted, although she knew better.

"Betrayal."

"Bliss." Moire laughed in spite of her herself. She spread the dripping shawl over a round, warm boulder and stepped up the grass. She felt calm again, cool and in control, determined.

They would smooth things out, here in the sunshine. Bliss would be sullen but resigned, as Bliss was wont to be, and Moire would send her on her way home with a chaste kiss and wishes of goodwill. Moire would miss them all but the world would right itself again.

Then the shade of the willow reached to embrace and Moire's contented musings fled. "You're bleeding."

"Not mine." Bliss grinned, bearing teeth. A gash across her nose split open, giving lie to her words. "Trouble."

Moire reached under her robe and, grasping the hem of her light cotton shift, ripped. She had made bandages for much worse from much less.

"Come here," she ordered. "Into the light." Another quick tear and she had a bandage.

"If it's all the same to you," Bliss said, bland. "The tree is a better cover than your eye of a sun."

"It's the same sun." Moire ran practiced fingers up and down Bliss's limbs, searching. Bliss winced once or twice, but the majority of the splashed red was, it seemed, some other's. "The north has the inconvenience of clouds. What's happened?"

"Our clouds have bred king's soldiers and they've come hunting in the Southern heat."

"For you?" Moire prodded Bliss's ribs. Bliss grunted but did not flinch. "What have you done?"

"What have I done?" Bliss's black brows plunged. "What have I done? Why do you always assume the fault is mine?"

"Because you're a thief and a scoundrel when you're not a hero and because it usually is." Satisfied that the score across Bliss's nose was the worst of it, Moire dug free the small jar of honey she kept in her pouch, and used the sweet ointment to seal the split.

"What do they want?"

Bliss squared her shoulders and then sighed. "Something I have, something Shaara found."

"Where is Shaara?" Alarmed, Moire glanced into the willow's shadowed depths, but Bliss remained alone. "He said he was off to find you, that he had something to discuss with you."

Bliss shrugged and would not meet Moire's eye. "He's in the bolt hole, if he's lucky. We had a nice game of cat and mouse and then a passable dessert on Roth street. Pleasant, really, until we were interrupted by a bad tempered officer willing to play the King's errand boy."

Moire recapped her honey jar and secreted it away. "Shaara stole something that belonged to your king? Careless, that."

"Of both the King and the lad." Bliss glanced off at the spring, seeing something that Moire did not. "I tried to run down Maurice, but he's not in the barracks and the bit at the front desk hasn't seen him all day and then I ran into another clutch of the King's men behind the Spire. He's sent more than a squad, Moire."

"He means business, then." Moire kept her tone light, but she knew a sudden waking of fear. "What is it you have, Bliss? What is it worth?"

Bliss's lips set and then she shrugged. "I don't know."

"You won't tell me." Moire felt the sharp, bright sting of injury. She slapped it away, stern. The gods knew Bliss had never given anything away willingly.

"I don't know." Bliss strode away, leaving the tree behind. She bent above the spring, cupped water, scrubbed blood from her hands, cupped again and took a quick drink. "Find Maurice for me, Moire. Send him to the old spot."

"Where are you going?" Moire kept her hands straight at her side, in that empty space where her sword and pistol had once lived.

"I don't know that, either," Bliss said and before Moire could voice protest the shadows once again swallowed Bliss up.

# Twelve

We were a circus, yes, but never before had we plied our talents beneath the shelter of a proper tent. Ross claimed he hated the structures and that the fabric walls and the disappearance of the sky gave him vertigo. I think he simply did not want to split with the coin necessary to procure such a lavish prop.

When we saw the jeweled beauty staked beneath the Capitol's white spire I think we all began to dream of endless, cheering crowds and previously unseen acclaim. I know I drew my shoulders back and lifted my chin. The summer in the south had taught me that we were more than mud grubbers. Now I think I began to realize that we could be near royalty.

"It's sewn with sapphires," Will marveled, tattoos flexing as he stretched to stroke the gleaming fabric.

"I imagine they can be snipped free," Maurice replied, wry. He tossed Ross a speculative look.

"No," Ross replied, sharp. "Let them be. Don't take anything isn't ours. There's danger in that."

Because I caught Amy's nod and frightened genuflect, I made a rude noise. Ross turned his glare my direction. "I mean it, Bliss. Don't tempt fate." Absently he patted the chrysanthemum now stuck through the leather of his belt.

The tent was larger than some Southern inns we'd slept in. Beyond the door-flap a footman waited. He bowed so low his chin nearly touched the grass floor and motioned us to the center of the ring.

We were without our mule and stallion as no hoofed animals were allowed beyond the first circle of the city. Instead, apparently at the Seat's request, we had been temporarily gifted with a pair of lions.

I thought fanged animals were a far road more dangerous than hoofed but Ross appeared unfazed. He'd worked with large cats in his youth, leopards and striped mountain cats, and we'd been promised that these two shaggy beasts were well trained by the Seat's own personal jester.

"They sit at her feet," the footman said, reaching through thick wooden bars to rough a tawny coat. The lion began to purr, a deep, rumbling growl. "Or do summersaults while she plays a pipe. Gentle as lambs, these two."

I doubted it, but when the footman released the animals in order to demonstrate their talents, the creatures were indeed better mannered than our one-eyed tom. Will soon had their cues down, and Ross was fairly bristling with excitement.

"Beloved by the people." The footman nodded and preened subtly as one of the big cats rolled about across Maurice's boots. "We truly cannot have a performance without them."

"We'll work them in," Maurice thrummed. "My troop is nothing if not creative."

Creative assuredly. Our Fat Lady had deft hands with a tailor's needle and also a pack rat's addiction to odd rags and bits of fine fabrics. With very little encouragement she went to work piecing together elaborate, ruffled skirts of feathers and damask. The skirts had lion-sized waistlines and matching paste crowns: an example of the Fat Lady's odd sense of humor.

The lions were meant to dance with the dogs in the center ring while Ross's tabby queen strummed her guitar and the one-eyed tom howled vulgar accompaniment. Amy would preside over them all. In this the dog girl reached the highest pinnacle of her career, I am sure.

It all ran surprisingly well. Our dogs and cats did not, as I expected, turn tail and run the moment the lions were introduced. I suppose Ross's menagerie feared his hand above the lions' hunger.

The elegantly coiffed, perfumed audience roared and clapped at all the appropriate pauses. The shadowed pavilion at the far end of the tent remained opaque but the Seat's courtiers, arranged at the foot of his throne, nodded with pleasure. Ross, I know, took this as a favorable sign. That, and the showers of coin raining at our feet from above.

Amy must have taken the adulation to heart. Spinning in the far ring, I did not see her leap to the lion's back, but I heard the increasing roar of the crowd. I might have continued on oblivious if the Fat Lady had not screamed.

As it was, I looked over just in time to see the affronted animal turn its shaggy head and casually rip Amy's thigh to clots of meat and bone.

Maurice quenched his billowing flame and jumped to the dog girl's aid. The Fat Lady continued to scream. The frenzied cries from the audience split my ears. And at the foot of the Seat's pavilion, his courtiers clapped and bobbed in genteel approval.

*****

The boy was dressed as he had been at Tamner's party, a proper pampered lordling head to toe. The white silk of his stockings had none of the stains one expected in a lad and his velvet doublet was entirely unwrinkled. He stank heavily of Southern perfume. Only the child's ruffled mane remained untamed; burnished curls of hair fell over narrowed brown eyes and into the collar of his tunic.

He held the pistol steady, miniature hand loose and practiced, and shook his head.

"A simple question such as I asked demands a simple truth, Captain." He spoke in the fluting tones of a lad whose balls had not yet dropped. He pursed his lips in dramatic regret. "But you lied. I thought so then. I know so now."

The silver pistol looked as though it had been fashioned to fit that particular small hand, but Maurice did not doubt the delicate thing could put a hole in his skull. He found himself clenching his teeth and forced his jaw to relax.

"I've no wit what you're speaking of, little man."

"Witchery." The boy pronounced the word as though it tasted sweet on his tongue and then used his free hand to gesture at the blackened walls. "Or do you expect me to believe that conflagration was the result of an oil-soaked rag and carefully timed distraction?"

He laughed as though he found himself terribly amusing. From somewhere behind Maurice the thin priest cackled a nervous echo. That sound, far more than the pistol, made Maurice begin to sweat.

The boy must have seen something on his face because he shook his head carefully from side to side. "Don't try it, Captain. Burning me won't do you a bit of good and I'll still put a silver stone through your eye. Besides," the weapon remained still and steady as the lad crouched at Maurice's shoulder, "surely you've murdered enough for one day." He leveled a meaningful look past Maurice.

For the first time Maurice noticed the rank, charred gristle stink rising about the room: blackened bone and hair. He knew the taste of ash well.

"I didn't kill them." Because he knew he had not. Most had been still in the hall and the man closest behind had been firm enough to send him to the floor.

"No?" The boy's thin brows climbed. "That isn't supper I smell, nor dinner I see."

Maurice managed to knock the pistol from the lad's hand, but only, he thought, because the little monster allowed it. He did not quite make it to his knees before the muzzle buried itself again in his rib cage.

"Look your fill," the boy said. "And tell me that isn't murder."

The guards lay where they had fallen, inside the door and beyond, across the foot of the stairs. The leather of their uniforms had turned brittle, their boots steamed. Their hands were gone to blackened bone and what remained of their faces made a sour taste rise in the back of Maurice's throat.

The elderly priest stood untouched, leaning hard against one blackened wall. His weathered mien was set in a rictus of adoration and fright. And it was not, Maurice slowly realized, the fire the old man feared.

"I didn't do that," Maurice argued quietly. Because he had always had far more control on the battlefield and he would not think that disuse had eroded his grip. "Who are you?"

The pistol jumped against his flesh as the boy exhaled a thoughtful sigh.

"He," the child said at last, "and his like do not deign to name me. You. Well. Often enough, your kind call me Fox."

The boy bound Maurice hand and foot with fine silver linked chain he produced from a small chest on the table and, pistol adamant, sent him to stand against the far wall. Then he made the withered little priest clear the room of the ruined bodies. It was a grisly, horrifying task even from twelve strides away, but the man did not complain.

When he was finished he bowed, shaking, bloodied hands clutched to his robes, leaving vivid smears.

"Stand outside," the monstrous lad said. "Shut the door. I will call you when I want you."

The priest bowed again and shut the door. The soft, faint sounds of temple life above muffled to non-existence.

The boy set his pistol on the table, and parceled fruit and bread onto a small china plate. This he set before Maurice as one would feed a dog.

"Eat," he ordered. "I arranged it especially for you. You'll be hungry after fighting the crowds above."

Maurice was not, but he slid down the rough wall until he sat on his heels and freed a grape with manacled hands.

"Northern grapes," he said. The small purple fruit was cold and firm between thumb and fore fingers. "Fresh."

The boy plucked a grape from the platter on the table and burst it between bared teeth. "They are my favorite." He scraped juice from red lips with his tongue and then smiled. "You don't believe me, Captain?"

Maurice rolled the grape between his hands, but did not lift it to his mouth. "I never question a man's tastes, lad. Not unless he fancies myself between his sheets."

The boy's delighted laugh rolled, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

"No," he said, cold. "About the other. You don't believe I'm your Fox."

"My Fox is a god." And a wise man never ate a god's offering. "And he runs in a beast's form, when he runs at all." Maurice tilted his chin at the abandoned pistol. "A god has no need of a man's weapons."

"There is ease in the mechanical." The boy sat on the floor a man's length away from Maurice. He pulled his knees up under his chin. Despite the ash in the room, the lad's white stockings were still dustless. "And Fox is clever."

Maurice released the grape. It bounced on the china, rolled, and dropped to the floor. He regarded the boy silently, hoping he looked a good bit more indifferent than he felt.

"Do you plan to make me prisoner?"

The boy appeared to give this idea great thought. "We've enough food to last a day or three. If the grapes do not sour. How I abhor soured grapes. But this room gets cold. And we cannot expect his Holiness to stand out there forever. The man's joints are bad and he's not got but a small family of days left to him."

"It would be," the lad continued, "easier on us all if you just explain."

"Explain what?" Maurice was beginning to get hungry, now, but he did not dare taste the bread.

"The witchery!" The boy displayed a child's petulance beautifully, even sitting still. "You are right. It doesn't exist, it shouldn't exist, I've mad sure of it. And yet there you were, Captain, at Tamner's petty celebration, displaying that unnatural flame for all to see." His ivory skin grew flushed and mottled. "It does not exist, and yet you have it in spades. Where did it come from? How did you get it? Tell me!"

"You're mad as a fish wife."

The boy chewed his lip and muttered to himself. Then, quick as the child's jack Maurice had once seen on display through a toymaker's window, he hopped to standing and spread his arms wide.

"How old am I?" he challenged.

Foolishness, Maurice thought. But, stubborn: "Ten summers, no more."

"And how old are you, Captain?"

"Thirty and seven."

"The day you were born, old man," the lad bent like a hinge at his waist, scowling into Maurice's glower, just out of reach, "your mum slaughtered her best goose and your father caught its arterial blood in a silver cup and left the whole on the cornerstone of my cottagers' church."

Maurice opened his mouth on a curse and then closed it again. The horrible little boy continued on.

"On the day you turned five your father picked an entire tree's crop of apples, and your mother bundled them into a freshly woven basket and left the whole on the cornerstone of my cottagers' church. To bring you luck. Your mother," he straightened up again, seeing something Maurice could not, "had a bit of the rot in her left foot. You stole an apple from the basket. Your mum lost that foot a se'enight later and you've never been rich in luck."

"Enough," Maurice said, despite himself, remembering his mother's gulping cry as the cottager's surgeon took off her putrid foot. She had not been quite the same after.

"And do you remember," the lad said, spearing Maurice with a charming smile, "when you turned ten and five?"

Maurice did not, at first, and then, reluctantly, he did. He felt color rise again, this time along his own neck.

"Your mum in her grave and your father not long from his," the boy said. "You convinced the Matron Clark to lie with you, in the scrub alongside my church. And after, you left your offering wet upon my cornerstone, all because young Horace Redding told you, Captain, that such a hedonistic ritual would bring you Fox's wisdom."

Maurice could not speak. The boy took bread from the table and broke it casually into two.

"You've never had my wisdom, man. And you've never had my luck. And only because of the blood in your mum's silver cup do you have my favor. So, best speak now." He bit into the bread, sighed easily, and spoke through a brimming mouth. "The witchery. How did you come by it? Who gave it to you? Speak!

Was it that old meddler, that stolid fool, Trout?"

Moire could not find Maurice. Her captain had not been seen in the barracks since sunrise. The cell he'd adopted was cold and empty of life. The room felt as though it had not been occupied for longer than half a day. He'd left his knife behind and the pack that contained his circus tricks.

Sometime since his arrival Maurice had picked up a cake of soldier's hard soap. It sat on the end of his neatly folded bedding along with a battered washing ewer. The man had always been compulsive.

And Moire did not feel much compunction searching his quarters, because Maurice had never, in the time she had known him, locked a door. And because she was and always would be his commanding officer, and so had long ago earned the right. And because if Bliss had revealed her troubles to anyone, it would have been Maurice.

But there was nothing of Bliss or of trouble or, for that matter, was there an indication of a struggle in that neat as a pin room. If the Northern King's soldiers had come for Maurice, they had not come for him here.

Moire stepped from the cell and shut the heavy door at her back. She stood for a moment in the subterranean corridor, thinking.

She remembered the old bolt-hole. A small, nasty, jealous part of her heart wanted to shed her robes and responsibilities and flee to that place and there shake Bliss until whatever secrets the she held spilled out, filling a gulf far better ignored but painful in its breadth and depth.

Once, that right might also have been Moire's. But no longer.

Now, she belonged to the gods. And as if those self same gods heard her traitorous heart, they sent her a gentle reminder, in the form of officious Corporal Aansi.

The man had, lately, somehow become her conscious.

"Major." Aansi appeared wholly relieved. "Thank the highest. I've been looking for you since MidSun Bells. They said you were doing your wash."

"I was." Moire folded her hands into the sleeves of her robe. The fabric made her itch. "Something came up."

The corporal eyed the door at Moire's back, obviously well cognizant of the cell's owner. Aansi could not quite keep his disapproval hidden.

"You're wanted, Major," he said. "At the Temple."

"Of course I am," Moire replied and walked on.

The Obeisance appealed to Moire's warrior self. It was, after all, only another form of waiting, not so much different from days and nights spent in formation, waiting for the enemy to make his move. The Low Temple floor was nearly as cold as a camp tent in winter and far more uncomfortable than a day spent in the saddle.

And just as it had been in the Seat's rank and file, during Obeisance Moire was never alone. To her right and to her left the other Initiates spread in near motionless rows, felt but not seen, because during worship one kept brow to the floor and eyes closed.

Even so, Moire could hear her companions breathing, when she was not distracted by the beating of her own heart. Sometimes, often, she became lost in the inhale and exhale until that ocean of life lifted her heart and she grew light and full of certainty. Traitorous questions melted and fell away and nothing remained but the companions at her side and the promise of her new future.

This worship, this Obeisance, Moire could not focus. The rhythmic breath of the men and woman sprawled about her became a distraction, an irritation. Time seemed to creep. Her forehead grew numb against the stone floor and her hands and knees grew frigid.

She wanted to open her eyes and roll her head and look up at the towering altar. She needed to seek answers to new questions in its glittering, all seeing eye. She waited for that light, that certainty.

It did not come.

Outside, she knew, midday grew into evensong. Soon the bells would ring again and free the Initiates from their exercise. Moire wondered if Maurice had returned safely to his cell.

A hand fell on the curve of Moire's spine. She did not jump, exactly, but she did forget not to look up.

The priest smiled gently, her expression kind.

"Initiate," she said. "You are wanted in the library."

Surprised, Moire glanced side to side at the motionless, scarce breathing bumps that were her brothers and sisters. The priest shook her head and lifted one finger to her lips.

"Take the fore stairs," she said. "You are awaited."

# Thirteen

We were sent home with gold and Southern sapphires and a lion's skin, the prized animal proudly made sacrifice to match Amy's own. We none of us came before the Seat but Ross was invited to sup with the Southern court in a tent more elaborate than our own. When he came back he was drunk as Trout and sicked up most of his dinner. He spent the night in the Fat Lady's arms, and we all heard him weep for what was lost.

Adulation followed us home. Every temple in every village knew we had pleased the Seat. Gifts of honey and cake perfume and woven linen appeared overnight in our hotel cells. Maurice grew surly and wild and made us sleep out under the Southern stars, but the gifts continued to materialize just outside the glow of our camp fires.

Will, who had earlier made noises about staying for life below the River Ann now called for haste. The Fat Lady lost weight and Ross took to wearing the lion's skin about his shoulders, even in the midday heat. The dogs whined for Amy and the one-eyed tom took to shitting in my bedding.

Of our entire family only Maurice seemed unaffected and when more than once I woke from a nightmare vision of Amy's corpse in the lion's maw, he was there to hold my head as I retched beneath the moon.

When I had finished, he lit one of his small cigarettes and passed it to me, nodding his head in invitation.

"Almost home. Two more days, I imagine."

Maurice's smoke tasted pastel and peppermint, and eased both nightmares and stomach cramps.

"So soon?" I had lost time. "And what will we do then?"

Maurice sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette and regarded the moon. "I don't know."

"We're rich as Trout, but it's turned to blood money. I don't think I can keep it." I nearly swallowed the words. Until then, I had not admitted my fear even to myself.

"It's not cursed, Bliss. It's only coin and well earned at that." He puffed a chain of purple rings, then turned to study me with wise, sad eyes. "You'll get over Amy quickly enough. And then you'll be glad to have it."

Maurice was right. Not long after we passed back into Northern territory, the nightmares stopped and Amy became another unfortunate mud grubber lost to sheer stupidity.

I took two days away from the troop and traveled through knee deep snow to Derby. The climb up the hill to Granda's was iced over and impossible. I left a well-wrapped package with Grave to deliver to the ruined estate at spring thaw. If Garve was curious enough to strip back the stained fabrics and find the fifteen sapphires I had buried inside I cannot blame him. We all do what we can to survive.

By the time I slogged back three villages over to the inn Maurice had commandeered for our family, Ross was so far gone in his cups he could not remember his own name, the Fat Lady had run off with the innkeep's prized cook and Will had lost most of his Southern take to a game of chance.

*****

Fox - for that was how Maurice had begun to think of the boy - pulled a walnut's worth of opiate gum from his satin purse and slipped the sticky stuff casually between pursed lips. It was his third such indulgence since Evening Call had rung faintly through the walls. Any other man would be out flat on his back but the boy, although his pupils had gone to pinpricks, seemed mostly unaffected.

He did not offer his hostage any of the drug. For that, Maurice was glad. Opiate was a danger every wise soldier recognized, and Maurice had long ago given up the habit for his little cigarettes, but if a man was to slip back the circumstances were clearly ripe for it.

All but one of Fox's three candles had burned out long ago. The last was down to an inch of white wax. The looming dark did not seem to bother the boy but to Maurice, scrunched up against the cold wall, hungry and breathing in the scent of charred flesh, it seemed as though the room were slowly turning to his tomb.

And perhaps it was. Fox did not seem inclined to let him go. Maurice supposed it was likely he would die here, in delicate silver shackles, untouched grapes rotting to nothing at his feet.

"Don't be so dramatic," Fox said, then coughed a little as the gum reacted to saliva.

Maurice glanced up, alarmed. "You can read my thoughts?"

"No." The boy laughed his odd laugh, skirling up and then suddenly gone. "If I could, what need of this?" His small hand swept the room. "No. It is your face Fox can read, Captain." His cheeks puffed as he rolled the gum on his tongue. "You're starting to sweat. No worries. I do not plan to kill you here."

"Wonderful," Maurice muttered. On the table by the empty platter the last candle began to gutter.

"I imagine you don't like the dark much, Captain."

Maurice looked away from the candle, but the boy was too busy studying the gleam of his boots to meet Maurice's incredulous eye.

"That I got from an old companion of yours," Fox explained, wagging the tips of his shoes back and forth. "Amazing the things a man will tell his bed companion once that foolish little carnal act has petered out." He snickered. "She said you'd make her get up in the cold and light tapers if the moon was black."

"Lilah," Maurice said, resigned. He felt as though the gods had conspired, pulling threads in the skein of his life, just to trap him in the miserable little room. And maybe, he thought, eyeing Fox sourly, they had.

"Was that her name?" Fox picked up the smoking candle and balanced it on the palm of one hand. "I'm afraid I didn't bother to ask the girl." He lifted his finegers a few inches and the flame grew smoky. "You came to light a remembrance candle for her, eh? A good thing. She's been dead a very long time, her bones gone out with the temple rubbish."

Maurice grunted and launched himself from the wall. The boy slid from his seat, at ease. "Really, Captain. Will you force me to pick up my pretty pistol again? Or shall I simply..." As Maurice fought the drag of his shackled ankles, the boy pinched wick between thumb and finger and the room went black as charred bone.

"...snuff the candle?" The unnatural child laughed as Maurice staggered and fell flat, jarring bound wrists. "This fox, my man, can see in the dark."

Maurice lay still, breathing heavily. He could hear the boy moving about, but only, he knew, because Fox did not care to hide.

"The dark is older than the light," the boy's high, piping voice hushed to a whisper. "Did you know? Before the sun bloomed in the sky, the land was long cloaked in black. Chill, but not empty. Things came out of the dark, born of shadows and the night. Can you see them?"

Maurice, eyes wide, thought he could. Flitting forms of blacker on black, ghosting in the abyss, just out of reach.

"We came out of the dark," Fox hissed. "Pulling our essence from the ebon soil, patching form and consciousness from the bones of night. Horrid first, because she was made impulsive, and then Trout and Bell and quiet Never and her ever-shifting brother who has become less than immortal. And Fox last, because I have always been wary of change and wiser for it."

Maurice could not tell whether his eyes were open or clenched. The roiling shadows had taken on form, in the flat empty space or against his lids: the forms his mother had taught him, weaving tales of the gods on winter nights while she patched his father's clothes and Maurice, enraptured child, tended the hearth. Horrid, with her poisonous, sagging breasts and Trout who preferred to drown his enemies and Bell who sang warning. Pretty, weeping Never and her twin who could not hold form long enough to free himself from the night.

They reached for Maurice, ravenous, and he could feel their hands plucking at his flesh.

"Oh, yes," Fox agreed. "We were hungry. And what was there in the night to eat, but dirt and rock and rootless souls? We were hungry, like to starve, until Never, desperate, called the light to flower on our horizon and lost herself to borning stars and we learned, then, that warmth is always worth the sacrifice."

Horrid's shadow stood over Maurice and bared her fanged black teeth. Her inky fingernails scraped his cheek and he could feel blood flow. He strained to open his eyes and then knew that they were already open. Horrid's mouth gaped wide and Maurice felt himself being sucked into that black maw.

"Warmth is always worth the sacrifice," Fox said from beyond Trout's towering disapproval. "Light the room, Maurice. Show me how it's done."

Maurice's heart had gone cold and cowardly, and even if he had fooled himself into voicing protest, the formed pool of night that was Horrid would only eat it away. Eat him away. To nothing but mist and shadow and endless, endless dark. Maurice thought he could hear Never sorrowing aloud.

He was barely conscious of the twitched nerve that sent live flame spiraling forth. The table crackled and then went up, a small bonfire, warm enough to make the room daylight and chase the shadows back into nightmare. All but one.

"Thank you, Captain." Fox flickered with the burning furniture, from grinning boy to sleek, bushy-tailed namesake and then back again. "You've returned to me what I needed to remember." The fox licked its red muzzle, a predator well satisfied. "And I shall not forget again. Holiness!"

The old priest opened the door. Maurice, prone in the warmth of the blaze, saw that the blood on the fellow's robes had dried brown.

"Do with him what you will, Holiness" the boy said, smiling to himself as he stretched a hand and coaxed flame into his hand. "But make sure his bones go out with the morning chamber toss."

The flame ran up the child's arm and about his neck and into his eyes. The fox danced once and snapped at the air and then was through the door and away. The thin priest looked down at Maurice, rheumy eyes wide, and sighed.

Shaara arrived late to the bolt hole because although the white streets were as he remembered, buildings had reared up in new places. He had to double back four times before he found the first marker. After that it was easier, but not so simple that he did not have to crouch in two doorways, and duck behind one open door to avoid the King's men. Overnight Emman had grown thick with soldiers.

Emman's white-robed citizens, waking to this new casual invasion, did not seem pleased. Tempers were short, and Shaara was laid into by more than one disgruntled merchant as he dodged through their customers or risked over turning their livelihood.

He was not frightened, exactly. But he was well relieved when he found the old cobblestone pavilion empty of soldiers. He crossed quickly, ducking beneath stretching sycamores and climbed the winding staircase up past the baker's shop and the old scribe's quarters to the attic apartment above.

The door was locked, as it should be, and the steel key was surely still behind the loose wall board. Shaara used his copper wires instead, because they were quicker, and because he had a reputation to keep.

The door swung open on a gust of cold air. Shaara stepped through, shivering. He hoped there was wood, still, for a fire.

"Lock the door behind you," Bliss said from where she sat cross-legged on the slatted floor. The narrow room was empty of every luxury but for a rough, badly woven rug which Shaara's master wore wrapped about her shoulders, presumably for warmth.

The pile of corded wood waited, untouched, next to the equally ignored square fire box.

"Not today," Bliss said without looking up. "New smoke in the morning sky will provoke unwanted questions. Lock the door and wrap yourself up."

Shivering, Shaara retripped the latch. The Seat's architects had made his buildings thick walled to keep the heat out. Shaara had never understood before just how well the trick worked.

"Open a window?" he suggested. "To let the sun in?"

"No. Open window's as bad as new smoke."

Shaara sighed and let go his pack. He snaked out his bedding and wound it about his shoulders and, crossing the creaky wooden floor, dropped at Bliss's side, cuddling closer for warmth. Bliss did not seem to notice. Shaara's young body did, and he heated quickly and blushed, ducking his head to hide it.

Bliss had new cuts and bruises above the grime on her face. Blood lurked under her fingernails and from somewhere she had adopted a pike and a pistol. They lay on the floor near her right hand, forgotten for the moment. Spread between the pike and Bliss's knees, in an entire disorderly and random fashion, were Tamner's miniatures.

The King's miniatures, Shaara corrected himself, and leaned forward to get a better look.

"Do you think they really are? His, I mean?"

"Yes," Bliss replied. "Have you seen the swarm of Northern soldiers about in the streets?"

"A blind beggarman wouldn't miss them." Shaara picked up one of the pieces of shell. The painter had a good eye but a rough hand. The girl on the shell smiled as if she knew a secret. Her eyes were green as the miller's pond in which Shaara had once spent a whole day splashing about, and her hair was coiled about her ears in the style cultivated by Southern pure bloods.

"Who is she?"

"I've no idea." Bliss glanced at the woman in Shaara's hand and then away. "I've no idea who any of them are. Probably nobody."

Shaara traded the smiling girl for another with a dour expression but a seductress's wicked eyes.

"They resemble each other, do you see?" Bliss said. "Eye color, age. Even, if one allows for the artist's vagaries, in complexion. Fair, most. Maurice pointed it out, yes?"

"Where is Maurice?" Shaara replaced Lady Dour Face and shoved his fists into his armpits for warmth. Outside the single window he could see the white rooftops begin to boil.

"Not here." Bliss did not sound overly concerned. "Moire will bring him, once he's found."

"Found? He's gone missing?"

"Moire will find him." Bliss gathered the shells into a loose pile and shuffled them. She dealt the miniatures out with a gamer's skill, reordering the group.

"If our soldiers don't find him first. Shouldn't we - " Shaara reached very casually for the pistol.

"No." Bliss slapped his hand away. "We'll wait. At least until dark. Think with your head, boy, not your balls. If we charge out into the white streets now -" She stopped. Drew a breath and let it out slowly. Her hand, balanced over Shaara's, came to rest gently, palm down, on one miniature.

"Horrid's sister and son." She picked the shell up and held the painting to the cold light.

"What is it?" Shaara stretched his neck, trying to see. The woman on the bit of oyster seemed entirely usual. Her eyes were small and green, her cheeks prominent, and her long hair more grey than golden. She wore no smile. In fact, Shaara thought, she wore no true expression at all.

"I know this one." Bliss turned the miniature over, forward and backward and then forward again. "Trout take me, I know her. From where? From where? From long ago. Southern. She's Southern. She was weeping. Expressionless, just like this. But tears on her cheeks. She's..." Bliss frowned in concentration and then her scowl deepened in baffled recognition.

"The Seat's jester. She was the Seat's jester. The day Amy fell to the lions."

# Fourteen

Ross took me back to his bed, but for nothing more than warmth. I did not mind so much. Winter in the north is a terrible thing, and a wise person will do anything to keep warm, even if that anything is a pretense at attraction.

Ross did not bother to even to pretend. Since we had crossed back over the border he'd dwindled in form and spirit. He looked old. He ate little and drank like a man Trout possessed. At night he whimpered and twisted in his sleep, sometimes clocking me a glancing blow here or there.

If the others noticed my black and blue decoration, they said nothing. I suppose they thought he had taken to beating me again.

I started caring for the animals once more, out of boredom and necessity rather than any sympathy for Ross's plight. The dogs were lonely. I sat with them in the small barn behind our tavern and rehearsed tales and cants. The hounds were a good audience. Better than the mule and the stallion who tended to interrupt my narrative with inappropriate sounds and stinks.

Maurice sometimes came to keep us company. His little cigarettes seemed to warm the small building considerable, although sometimes I feared he would set the straw on fire.

"What's the matter with the man?" he asked one mid winter morning, watching as I fed the dogs meat pilfered from the new cook's cubby. "Tain't like he hasn't seen death before. He lost his own son to the rot not ten summer's past."

I shrugged, and watched the dogs snap and fight for their breakfast. "He never mentions his son."

"What does he mention?" Maurice leaned against the mule's stall and crossed his arms over his chest. "If he's talking to you, Bliss, that's more than the rest of us can claim."

"He's not talking. Much." I was oddly reluctant to admit it. "He drinks and he dreams and he...rambles..."

The mule stuck his head over the stall door and lipped at Maurice's hair. Maurice patted the animal and chewed his cigarette. "Rambles? What's that mean?"

I shrugged again, annoyed. "About her. About Amy. About promises he made her. And about how..." I swallowed. "He wanted to bring her body back."

Maurice's jaw slacked. "Horrid's tits. I'm glad the man changed his mind. What a journey that would have been, Amy's corpse stinking up the wagon."

"That's just it." I stuck a finger in my mouth and chewed the nail. "Ross didn't change his mind, Maurice. They wouldn't let him have her."

Maurice stood silent, considering. And then he sighed. "Well, there wasn't much of her to take. Best, truly."

"Perhaps." I chewed harder. "Ross says the jester wanted her bones."

"The jester? The pinch faced lass looked like she'd been eating bad lemons?"

"That's the one." I remembered her green eyes but the shock of Amy's end had mostly bleached the jester's face from my mind. "Ross said she wanted the bones for a spell. Witchery."

"Ain't no such thing as witchery, Bliss."

"I know it." And I did. "It's only Ross's nonsense."

"He's been talking a lot of nonsense, lately, Bliss." Even without his cigarette, Maurice's breath smoked on the cold air. "And he hasn't been doing much about getting us business."

"We don't need much, do we? Not with Southern gold in our pockets."

"Some of us have spent our pockets to let." He meant Will. "Circus folk have never given much thought to the future, Bliss. Never been ones to pinch a penny for a rainy day."

"No." I thought of my own growing wealth, secreted behind a lose pipe in the latrine.

"You need to get us work, Bliss."

That took a heartbeat to sink in. And then I started and stared, looking away from the snarling dogs and then back again. After a moment I waded between the dogs to stop the fight, and got a hand bit for the trouble. "Me? Why me?"

"You're his apprentice."

"Ross goes through his apprentices like green apples in a bad gut."

Maurice laughed, but his mouth did not lighten. "You're his choice of the moment."

"Again." I told myself it did not rankle.

"Again. You're in his bed. It's your responsibility."

"I don't see how."

"I do." Maurice shoved himself from the stall and made for the stable door. "The Fat Lady's gone. We have no dog girl. Will's threatening to split. And the tumblers are being courted by the local footpads. We're all bored, Bliss, and Ross's mood isn't helping much."

"Isn't or ain't, Maurice?" For a moment I felt anger. The fire juggler had been with Ross longer than any, was a better actor than most, and still he avoided the shackles of life with the ease of one of Trout's scaly fish.

Maurice laughed as he slipped into the afternoon. "Whichever you like, Bliss. Just find us a job, soon. Before our family falls apart."

*****

The priest stood for a long moment over Maurice. Then he knelt and fumbled at the silver chain with blood-encrusted hands.

"There's no key, Holiness," Maurice said patiently. "If ever there was, it's gone." He jerked his chin at the bonfire at the center of the room.

"There is no lock, either." The priest felt carefully along the chain that bound Maurice's wrists, twisted fingers searching. "But that one has ever been full of tricks. Ah!" He smiled, baring teeth oddly perfect in the old face, and pressed a single link against his palm. The link popped audibly and disintegrated in the priest's hand. The rest of the chain fell to the floor where it lay glinting in the firelight.

Maurice eyed the old man doubtfully. "I mean no disrespect, Holiness. But you might have found me easier to execute with the binding."

"I do not plan to kill you." The old man shifted on his knees and felt about the second chain.

Maurice looked down on the balding head. "No?"

"No." The priest popped a link and pulled the remaining silver from around Maurice's boots. "I have not lived three generations on foolish choices, Captain. This is my temple. I run it. And I do not waste opportunities."

In spite of himself Maurice laughed. "And the gods have naught to do with it?"

"He is not the only deity worshipped inside Low Temple walls." The priest staggered up from his knees, tottering some. Maurice held out a hand to steady the man's arm and found that the manacles had left his own legs numb and wobbly. "And I might argue he is far from the most deserving." The priest's gaze strayed to the smears of grease on the floor, smears that had once been men.

"He killed good men," Maurice agreed.

"You killed those men," the priest looked up into Maurice's face. "Do not fool yourself, Captain. That was your work." He sighed slightly and turned his frown to the leaping flames above broken furniture. "It will burn itself out, I suppose. But I fear he has pulled your fangs."

Maurice shook his head. He could not help but wonder if the strain of the last several candle marks had driven the old man mad, or somewhere close to it.

"Come, Holiness." He urged the priest away. "The room will soon be smoke thick. Best hurry before the entire temple comes down."

The old man cackled but allowed Maurice to lead him in a wavering dance to the door. "They will not let that one ruin their place of worship with his foolishness. And you, Captain, are needed upstairs."

Maurice shut the door on the burning room. The slatted wooden planks would not keep the conflagration back for long. And he was not so sure that the same gods who had sprung from shadow wanting his flesh would bother to save their supper from the cook fire.

"Come outside for a bit, Holiness," he coaxed, half leading and half carrying the old man up the steep staircase. "At least until Evening Call, surely."

The priest slipped a bit on the edge of a step and then laughed. "You've lost time with Fox, Captain. It is deep night outside the temple doors. Evening Call belled long ago."

He took a deep, rattling breath and then the wrinkled lips curled knowingly. "And did I not say you are needed?" Halfway up the staircase they paused, and the priest pulled something from his dirty sleeve and offered it to Maurice.

It was a Major's badge. Moire's badge, engraved with her own rank and file. Maurice knew the piece of pounded silver well enough. The badge was as deeply a part of his bottled memories as the war itself.

"She sent for you, Captain, while Fox busied time with his games. She is waiting for you, at the very top of the Low Temple."

Maurice stared, blank of heart and mind. The priest cackled again.

"The gods are, in some ways, little different than their lesser counterparts," the priest explained. "They do not work in accord, rarely so. There are quarrels in that family, and duplicities, and a mortal man does his best to balance against the wind. The very unlucky," he paused and shot Maurice a pointed smile, "are caught on the edge of the storm."

Maurice felt the cold fingers of dread creep along his spine. He clenched Moire's badge against his palm and resumed his climb .

"Save your energy," the old priest called after. "It is a very long climb to the top."

Moire eyed the man who sat slumped on the old library chaise, his back against thick glass, a mere finger's breadth from the edge of the world.

"Milord," she said gently, because although by principle she would not give him military rank, she supposed he deserved his landed title. "How are you feeling?"

He was white from lack of blood but the fresh bandages wrapping about his arm appeared clean and unbloodied. His left eye swelled, blue and purple, but Moire knew her own guards had done that. Bliss, it seemed, had not paused to do more than butcher his limb.

"I'm thirsty," he said at last. "Is that whiskey?" He glanced at the crystal carafe which lived always on the library's writing console.

"Water." She poured him a glass and passed it between the two barrack's men who flanked the chaise. They would not let him so much as lift a finger in her direction, Moire knew. She rather doubted he had the strength.

The man had spent more than a full day drifting in a puddle of his own blood on the shopkeeper's floor, his men sprawled, a gutted honor guard about his gory bed. That had been Shaara's work: Moire recognized the lad's old skill and madness.

The city guard had eventually discovered the mess. They had not expected to find a survivor but the man was obviously the stubborn kind and Bliss's knife, while breaking bone, had not severed the life vein. So the guard had done as they were expected and hauled their prisoner to the Seat's nearest representative.

And now the man was her prisoner. Not because he may have murdered an innocent citizen, the missing pataisserie, but because the Seat did not approve of the sudden rash of Northern soldiers, thick as fleas, on the streets of his city. And because there was obviously more going on than a brawl among sugar cakes.

"Do you have a title, lord?" Moire asked, tucking new, soft red robes about her throat. It was cold at the top of the world. To keep the log books free of mold, or to remind the Ordained that they were and always would be mortal. "How are you called in the north?"

The soldier considered Moire expressionlessly, then shrugged, a limping roll of his shoulders.

"John Michael Sevenson," he answered. "Lord Shill."

Moire perched behind the gigantic console, and poured herself a glass of water. "And what errand have you in Emman, Lord Shill?"

"I have been seeking a thief," Shill replied. He lifted his own glass to his mouth with his good hand, gulped, and then swallowed convulsively. "I tracked her over the border. I believe I'd cornered the guilty bit in your city."

"And had you?"

"Yes." Some color was beginning to return to the man's face. Anger? Moire wondered, or embarrassment? "We had her. She slipped away."

"Killing quite a few as she did so." Moire sighed. "And yet those few were only a fraction of your entire hunt. Does it take twenty good men to capture one part time thief, my Lord Shill?"

Shill had very blue eyes. They narrowed in disgust. "No ordinary thief, Moire Kler. Oh, yes. I know who you are, Major. Just as you know who I'm after."

"Our Sacrifice."

"Yes." Shill huffed and then winced. "The hero of Greenkirk, fallen so low she must resort to small time thievery. An embarrassment, truly. Or it would be so. But she made one mistake, Holiness. She pinched from the King."

Moire kept her face still. "I wasn't aware Bliss has lately been to Northern Court."

"Not lately." Shill coughed a little and shifted. "Not ever. The Northern Court is not for mud grubbers."

"Does the King leave his treasures lying about in the mud, then, my lord?"

Shill refused to take offense. "The land belongs to the King. As does every living thing upon it. And objects of such variation cannot all, each one, be kept under lock and key."

"Your king takes what he wants," Moire clarified. She glanced sideways at the stern faces of Shill's guards, wondering if they disapproved. She could not read their stoic expressions. They were good men. She had trained them well.

"Yes," replied Shill, unruffled. "And this day, he wants that which your Sacrifice has decided to keep."

"Rather pointedly," Moire agreed, nodding at the man's bound arm.

Shill did not smile. Moire had not expected him to. Still, she wished the man did not look so resigned. Somehow his resolute acceptance was dismaying.

Moire rose from her chair, restless, determined to end the interview. "Your men have been detained. All of them." She added, and saw him start. "Until such time as we are ready to return them to your king."

"You?" Some of Shill's detachment started to melt. "You, Holiness?"

"Yes," Moire agreed, because she had no choice in the matter. "We will see that both the King's men and the King's property are returned to his side."

"Why?"

"Because," and Moire looked out past the man's head and through the glass at the warm blue sky. "Because it is required of us." The sky unfocused and Moire could see her reflection in the glass, bright and detailed as any painter's canvas. The myriad of beads in her braided hair sparkled, too many to count. She had not tried to count them, as the beads were made hers, and as the beads had made her divine.

She knew it was Maurice's hand on the library latch before the door banged open, rattling their perch. Shill was dozing between his guards. He jumped at the noise and came immediately to attention. Sweat popped across his brow as damaged muscles pulled.

Moire felt some little sympathy for the wounded man. She felt a good deal more for her old Captain. She watched his face as he skirted the edge of slanting bookshelves and came to stand before the console.

"I hate this place," he said. "I always have. Lists of the damned."

"The logs of the blessed," Moire corrected quietly, then rose to her feet so that he might fully absorb her change. She saw the moment he did; something shifted behind his eyes, light going out or an emotion kindling.

"What have you done to yourself?"

"Only what the gods have asked of me." She spread her arms, allowing red folds to fly wide, the wings of honor. "I am Ordained."

"Ordained?" Maurice's mouth set in disbelief. "You are not even full Initiate. The ceremony is another three days yet away."

"There was need for expediency. The guardian of this temple, Jorogan, is grown weak and feeble in his elder years."

"I've met your guardian," Maurice said slowly. "He appears to have his wits about him still."

"A mind cannot rule when betrayed by the body. You know that as well as any, Maurice." Moire set her palms on the console, pressing fingers into the smooth wood. "We saw it on the battlefield, among the wounded elite. This, this was Jorogan's decision, Jorogan's orders, from the gods' mouth to his own ear."

"And what had you to say about it, Major?"

Moire met her Captain's derision across the table and gave him the honesty he deserved. "Nothing. None of this was my idea, my wish. They came to me in a waking dream, not long after you left. They told me to set down the sword and take up the robes. They told me I was needed."

Maurice said nothing.

"I have always served the Seat, Captain." She let chill seep into her tone. "Since I was a child I have been his, in any form he so desires."

"The Seat called you to this?"

"The gods called me to this," Moire answered, as she had Bliss.

"Your gods are meddlers."

"My gods are your gods also, Maurice. And they have made me more than I was, so that I may serve them better."

Maurice stood for a moment, silent. And then he dealt with the uncomfortable as he always had, by turning away.

"Who's this fancy fellow?"

Lord Shill was drooping again. Moire wondered if he was become fevered. She hoped not. She did not, truly, have time to waste on a temple healing.

"John Sevenson Shill," the lord answered through lowered lids. "Lord of the Yellow Wood and third to the King's fifth son."

"The King has too many sons." Maurice said, "What are you doing so far from Court, Sevenson?"

"Hunting Bliss," Moire said. "And badly, if I may say so. We never let one go so easily, did we, Captain?"

"No."

"And we're not about to break our record." Moire walked around the console and laid her hand on Maurice's shoulder. "I need what Bliss has, Maurice. Whatever it is she's hiding. I need it. And I want you to help me get it."

# Fifteen

After a few long days spent engrossed in self pity, I decided to take Maurice's warning to heart. It was not so much that I feared he was correct in his assumptions but that I, like much of the rest of our family, had at last grown bored. Even the old mule seemed sunk in a dangerous lassitude.

Ross's role was not so terribly difficult to fill. I knew his connections as well as I knew the feel of juggler's orbs in my hands. I knew which innkeep paid well for a hearthside troubadour, which tavern master would book the full circus for a winter's night of juggled flame in his courtyard, and which unctuous lordling would hire us for three nights and pay for only two.

We took to traveling again, short hops to the east and west and then longer forays farther north. Each time we left Ross behind to keep our rooms and, when needed, mind the menagerie. I am not sure he did much more than fill tankard after tankard with the inn's thin yellow ale. I do know that the longer we stayed away the less often he rose from his bed. I also know that one deep winter's morning Ross decided the one-eyed tom was cursed and tried to drown the animal in the tavern's frozen well.

The innkeep heard the tom's howls and Ross's screams, and rescued the cat before too much harm was done. Ross nursed bleeding scars on his hands for a fortnight afterwards and the tom was never quite the same. The animal did not rejoin our company but stayed at the inn as a mouser long after we were a memory. I suspect that he did well for himself.

During one of our longer journeys north, while performing overnight in the manse of a retired and extravagantly wealthy lordling, Maurice discovered for us Amy's replacement.

Maurice found my young self breaking fast in the lordlings's cavernous dining room. He tossed a welter of matted hair and putrid stink at my feet and crossed his arms over his breast.

"That," he pronounced in disgusted tones. "Was waiting for me in the garderobe."

The filth and tangle was attached to a small lad. The boy, apparently unaware of his predicament, stood upright and pilfered the remains of my breakfast, stuffing handfuls of egg and bread into his mouth.

"Disgusting," I agreed. There is nothing worse than an unwashed peasant. "But what makes you think he was waiting for you in particular?"

Maurice watched the boy eat. "He wasn't, so to speak. Any unfortunate soul might have done."

"Mam said to whack 'em in the sausage," the boy volunteered helpfully through stuffed cheeks. "Hit 'em where it hurts and take their purse and run fast as ye can."

Beneath the grime the boy had a small bowed mouth, soft eyes the color of a snowing sky, and long fingered performer's hands.

I looked at Maurice and then back at the boy. "Where's your Mam? Hiding in milord's chamber pot?"

The boy seemed to find this very funny. He could not have been more than ten summers old but he laughed in deep, belling thrums that should have belonged to a fat farmer.

"No," he said when mirth was once again under control. "They took her to be a slave in the court, to pay her duty debt, last time the moon was full. They wouldn't take me, on account I was too small."

"Where's your Da?" Maurice asked.

"Don't have one." My breakfast plate had been wiped clean. The boy took up my tankard and drank his fill. "Just me is all."

"And how's the garderobe working out for you, lad?" I could feel Maurice's gaze on the top of my head but this time I refused to meet it.

"Not so well," the lad admitted. He reached up and scratched his matted forelock. "Yesterday some cockeyed bit knocked me back into the shit." He made an appropriate face. I took my tankard back before he could empty it.

"What's your name?"

"Mam called me Shaara. After the ice mountains."

"Shaara it is, then." I nodded at Maurice, answering his unspoken question. "Can you sing, lad?"

*****

Shaara thought he was dreaming. He could hear the steady thump of booted feet and the clank of armor and beyond that the vague hiss of the Seat's cannon charges. And so it must be a dream; the cannons were always rolled to the front, else rank and file be damaged by the carelessness of their own brothers.

Once a cannon had gone off badly and early, too fast in the middle of a priming, and Shaara had watched one of his own tent mates crushed to red spatters and shattered bone.

Shaara did not want to relive that particular horror, so he forced the dream away and opened eyes to dim grey light. His neck hurt from sleeping on the cold floor and Bliss's booted feet were in his face, nudging at his cheek.

"Get up," she said. "We've company."

The disjointed sounds of an army on the march had not disappeared with sleep. The wood beneath Shaara's ear echoed with it, the faint boom of heavy feet and the ghosts of distant voices. The light in the bolthole shifted from grey to black and back again, carved by distant flickering flame.

Bliss nudged him again. Shaara rolled to his feet and followed his master silently to the narrow window.

"Who are they?" Shaara blinked hard, clearing sleep from gummed lashes, and peered down into the courtyard. The flames were not so very distant after all, but instead blocked here and there by the sycamore's thick branches. He counted fifteen torches and beyond those, for or five shadowy, unlit forms.

"I cannot tell from here." Bliss sounded annoyed rather than frightened. "Maybe Chrysanthemum's men."

"The roof?" Shaara suggested. They had only used that particular exit once before but he knew it was the entire reason Maurice had chosen this particular room. A rat always knew two ways from his lair, just in case the cat came to call.

"Most like," Bliss agreed. She pressed her nose against the thick glass, squinting to see beyond the bubbles in the pane. Then she made a rough, disgruntled noise and, grabbing the sash lift, yanked the window up.

The heat of the Southern night rushed in, bringing with it the oily stink of torches and a low murmur of voices. This was not an angry mob, Shaara decided, bending to see over Bliss's shoulder. This was something else.

"Bliss!" A clear, familiar voice rose over the rest. "Grown lonely, yet?"

"Sit down," Bliss hissed at Shaara. "Out of sight." Then she lifted her own voice. "Maurice, you old bastard, what game is this?"

Shaara lay low on the floor beneath the window sill and studied Bliss's boots once again. The leather toes were wearing thin. Surely she could afford a new pair. He had never met another who disliked change as much as Bliss.

"No game," Maurice called. The room grew gently lighter. Shaara supposed more torches were being passed about; by the stars he could see past the lip of the window dawn was still very far away.

"Do you expect me to believe you've planned this little surprise party all on a pleasant whim?" Bliss's fingertips rattled on the lowered glass and Shaara, eyeing the set of her chin, knew she was growing angry.

"Bliss. Come down." Moire. Shaara almost sat up to see but Bliss stamped firmly on his shoulder, ordering stillness.

"You're wearing red, Moire," Bliss said without expression. "So perhaps we've a celebration after all?"

"We're not going to hurt you, Bliss." Shaara thought Moire sounded somewhat less calm than his master. "We just want to talk."

"So you bring an audience of soldiers armed to the whites of their pretty eyes?" Bliss laughed without mirth. "Moire, my love, you never used to be so desirous of attention. Performance was my game."

"Lord Shill has taken your Captain into the King's custody," Moire continued steadily. "Until you return to him what was...mistakenly lost."

"I don't know any Shill," Bliss replied. Then Shaara saw her mouth curl into a dry smile as the torchlight beyond the windowsill danced once more. "Ah. Chrysanthemum. How's the arm?"

Whatever reply Chrysanthemum made, if any, Shaara could not catch. He allowed his hand to inch slowly over the floor, toward the stolen pike and pistol, but Bliss gave a slight grunt of negation.

"And have you got my apprentice also in your net, Holiness?" Bliss let the title ring with mockery as she leaned over the sill as though searching for a familiar face.

"No," Moire said.

"Chrysanthemum has lost interest in my sweet fingered lad?"

"No charges will be brought against the little thief." Now Shaara could hear their Chrysanthemum. The man did not sound particularly hale. Bliss's knife must have cut the strength from his bones. Shaara rather childishly hoped he would rot.

"A trade," the King's officer continued in thready tones. "One for one. Your man for the King's property."

"Maurice for a bag of badly painted miniature portraits," Bliss mulled aloud. "Hardly seems a fair trade, that. How do I know you won't take the both and leave me with a bullet behind the ear?"

"You have my assurance," Moire called. "Come down."

"No," replied Bliss, after only the briefest of hesitations. "You come up. You and Maurice, Holiness. Bring Chrysanthemum, if you must, if he can make the climb without a faint. But leave your army behind. Not enough room for the lot, yes?"

Torchlight moved again. Bliss turned from the window, and bent without appearing to, briefly pressing something small and hard against Shaara's hand.

"Take it," she ordered, soft as the warm air through the open window. "And up into the flue with you, boy."

"But -" Shaara rose to his hands and knees.

"Go!" Bliss snapped as she shoved the filched pistol into his belt loop. The cold comfort made Shaara shiver. "They don't know you're here and it's better that way. Go." She slapped him once on the thigh as she might have one of the old circus dogs.

And because he was as well trained as a dumb animal Shaara found himself across the slatted floor and over the hearth before he registered the impulse. A dog to the bone, he thought wryly, as he wedged himself spider wise up into the square, dirty chimney. He would never be more than what she had made him.

By the time Shaara had found a less than comfortable perch half way up the flue, Bliss was no longer alone.

"Fox's balls, it's dark as a ditch in here. And cold as Horrid's tits." That was Chrysanthemum, his annoyance sounding faintly foolish through the chimney brick. "You couldn't light the hearth?"

Shaara bit his lip to keep back an hysterical laugh. Bliss, however, sounded only further annoyed.

"No wood stocked in," she growled the lie. "We haven't the King's luxuries in our hidey holes, milord."

"The King," Chrysanthemum answered, sounding to Shaara's eager ears stiff and pained and out of breath, "has no need to hide."

"Bliss," Moire said, a Major on the battlefield. "The miniatures?"

"Here." Shaara could just make out the rattle of shells. "You well, Maurice?"

"Yes."

"Take them, then. And welcome to it." She must have tossed the bag. Shaara heard a thump and Chrysanthemum's grunt. Had she thrown them at his chest, knocking the wounded arm, or lobbed them onto the floor so the man would have to bend and reach?

"Thank you," Moire said, relief obvious. Shaara grinned against bricks. "Now, come down, Bliss. Lord Shill is correct, it is cold as the depths in here. Come and eat and we will send you on your way."

"On my way?"

"Home," Moire replied, gently.

"I'm not going anywhere." Bliss's disgust seemed to find its way up the chimney and burn even Shaara's ears. "Not until you explain, Moire, whatever it is that's stolen away your sense."

"Now is not the time, Bliss." Moire's chill was nearly drowned by Maurice's rising growl. Then Chrysanthemum silenced them both.

"Nevertheless," Lord Shill said, smooth as summer molasses and sticky with it, too. "I'm afraid the mud grubber has spoken true. She's to stay here, in this hole. As are the rest of you."

In the quick silence Shaara heard Moire draw a harsh, affronted breath. Then there was the pounding of an army on the run and the crack and snap of wood. Maurice's growl became a roar. Shaara let go of the bricks and dropped, landing in the fire box, crouched awkwardly, just in time to see torches and Northern soldiers turn the tiny bolt hole into intended slaughter.

Moire fell first, clocked expertly from behind, a shining pistol bruising her crown. She went down to her knees, choking on rage or pain, long hair painted suddenly red and wet in the flame light.

Bliss yelled and jumped to her Major's defense, but Chrysanthemum, even sorely injured, moved like a snake. The man had been waiting, Shaara realized, for his moment to come. He lifted his good hand, steady, pistol balanced and seeking, and then fired.

Shaara, frozen in his sooty firebox, stifled a cry, reaching for the weapon at his own belt. And then he could not move because Bliss, felled so easily, collapsed in a disjointed pile on the dusty hearth.

"Sacrifice." Shaara heard Shill's cough of amusement as a faint echo, as if the man spoke beneath the roar of cannon and across a blood field. "Nothing but a whore in costume."

Bliss, cheeked pressed against flagstone, watched Shaara. Her eyes were wide and dark and full of something Shaara refused to recognize. While those eyes pinned him, he could not move, could not breath, could not feel the beat of his own heart. In the distance Moire's screams rose like cannon smoke.

Blood was pooling on the hearth, mixing with the dust. Shaara could not see exactly where the red stream came from, but he knew it leaked from his master. She grimaced once, a small wrinkle of brow and nose, but did not attempt to speak.

"Take the priest." Lord Shill coughed. "The King will want her alive. And the whore's body, I've plans for that."

The bright, restless light was beginning to fade from Bliss's startled stare. Shaara did not know how dear that warmth had been until it began to slip and fray.

"Leave the old man for the rats. By the time someone smells him, we'll be long gone. Douse the torches."

Light changed. Dawn had crept through the windows while Bliss died. Her empty gaze still clung to Shaara, imploring stillness. Moire had stopped screaming. He could hear her cursing, the faint determined swearing of a soldier who knew her core had taken grievous loss.

Bliss moved. She slid, the skin of her thin face compressing and then loosening as a squat, bareheaded soldier dragged her from the heartd by the boot heels. The dust did not want to let her go. The pool of blood became a small river, a trail attached to his master as she was bumped across the slatted floor.

Shaara made himself smaller in the firebox. He still could not breathe. He wondered if he had died with Bliss. Then he wondered if he was going to puke and reveal himself in a spray of helpless bile.

He closed his eyes and fought his stomach and the lump in his throat. He gripped the stolen pistol in one hand and the sharp piece of shell in his other and tried to remember how to make his heart beat. He did not hear the dissolving of Chrysanthemum's trap, but he did hear the broken door fall to the floor, kicked or closed too roughly by the last man.

After that there was silence. Shaara's horror left his stomach and leaked through his eyes, hot tears that made his nose itch and his mouth burn. He still could not move. The firebox had become his world. For the moment, it was home.

# Sixteen

The boy was meant to care for the menagerie but he proved far better at nursing Ross. Something about the lad appealed to the old man, I do not know what. It was not the promise of an innocent between the sheets. Ross had aged winters in a handful of moon cycles; I do not think he could have tumbled the goddess Never if she'd appeared on Ross's lap and lifted her own skirts for the job.

I think Ross saw his own youth in Shaara's childhood. I suppose the why hardly mattered. It was the result that gave me heart. Ross would take food from the boy when he would not disdain to swallow the stew I proffered. He would sleep when Shaara urged. And although Ross would not give up the drink, he would, at Shaara's insistence, swallow vials of the tavern's cool spring water in between tankards of ale.

When he was not busy nursing our master Shaara learned our family's trade. He took to the juggling quickly enough after a handful of days under my watchful eye. He had an unformed lad's heart-breaking voice, and a mind quick enough to retain the cants. He could recite a tale with great enthusiasm, although the necessities of mimicry seemed to escape him.

He had no great talent for riding and seemed terrified of the mule. When Will complained loudly and pointedly, I locked Shaara in the mule's stall overnight. By morning the long eared animal and the boy were tentative friends, and Shaara did not again shirk his stable duties. Eventually Will managed to work the boy and mule into his own horsy display.

Shaara worshipped Maurice. He followed the man about whenever he found a rare free moment. He seemed fascinated with Maurice's flame. I imagine he wanted to discover the tricks Maurice kept. If Shaara ever managed to discover the secrets of fire eating, I never saw the signs. Maurice did, however, teach the lad to cook. The tumblers taught him to box. And I taught him to use the family pistol. The knife Shaara learned on his own.

I think now that the boy brought us luck. And if I couldn't give him what he needed, those first several nights when Shaara crawled into my bedding and wept for his lost mother, well. I gave him food and warmth and a trade.

There is not much more in this world that a man deserves.

*****

Maurice had never much fancied rats. They stank. They ate a man's own food from beneath his nose and if there was no food about they might nibble a man's own flesh. They carried nits. And on particularly bad days on the battle field, rats could seem more slippery and vicious than the enemy ahead.

He did not intend to become a rat's supper. He did not intend to die on a cold floor in Bliss's bare bolt hole with only the cracked window to breath down warmth and life. He did not intend to die at all, at least in this city, murdered by a Northern landed idiot for a few pieces of shell.

Still, a very young lad had run him through with a sharp pike blade while Maurice had fumbled unsuccessfully for flame. He did not think the green soldier had pierced anything terribly important but the pike had lodged in rib bone and Maurice felt rather more like an offering to Trout than a man with two legs.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and watched warm air meet with cold in a swirl of blue eddy above his face. Outside the window the morning birds were beginning to sing in the sycamore and below he could hear the breathing of the baker's bellows.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and in the triangle of window the sun looked higher in the sky and the birds had stopped singing. The baker's bellows were still groaning but now he could smell bread. His stomach growled. That part of him at least had not yet died.

He also needed to piss, which was an odd thing, because he still could not feel his legs.

A man pissed as he died, Maurice knew that well. The dead man ruined his trousers and his breaks and while the living knew to ignore that indignity, Maurice had a fleeting thought that the perfume of urine might attract those hungry rats.

He supposed he had enough gut left to crawl into a corner and empty his bladder there, pike sticking upright at one end, prick flapping limply at the other.

The image was enough to make even a wounded man laugh. He did, and then gasped at the resulting pain. The pike had to go.

He had survived a war wound or two. He knew that the anticipation was worse than the true agony itself. Yet he might wish for another hand to yank the weapon free, just in case his own faltered and failed.

There was no help for it.

He managed to make the wall by the strength of elbow and forearm, pulling his numb legs behind. He threw up once, for the pain, but did it neatly to the side, damn the rats. He rested once or twice, and then sun climbed even higher. By the time he propped himself to kneeling against the windowsill the yellow orb had begun its way back down the sky to evening.

Slumped against the wall, chin hanging out the open window, Maurice tried one last time for his fire. It would have been easier, so much easier, to simply burn the shaft away. But the flame would not come. The place beneath his skull were the heat had once coiled was now empty and cold and unresponsive, ash in a whirlwind.

Moire was right. Fox had somehow pulled his fangs. Or, Maurice suspected, stolen the fire itself away.

Moire. Maurice took a shallow breath and reached around to grab the pike shaft. Shill was a pig-faced fool if he thought the Seat would let him thieve a priest away to the Northern king. A pig faced fool with a pistol.

Maurice had been refusing to look at the hearth. But it lurked at the back of his mind, that place where Bliss had fallen in an inelegant heap so unlike her living bone, and gone to sleep. He'd seen her last shiver, heard her last sigh. He'd been fighting to reach her when the babe-faced soldier had struck him down.

He looked now at the hearth because he could not help it. He looked backwards, following first the snake of blood that lead from the shattered door across the room to the small lake on the flagstones. That particular puddle was red, bright red, the color of Moire's new robes.

He wanted to taste it, suddenly. An old soldier's reaction. Take into your body the one you have lost.

But his hands were still on the pike, and he needed still to piss and the rats would be coming and the heat from the window seemed to be infecting his flesh and suddenly he was sure he saw the rats in the firebox, making for the blood that was his to drink. His blood, his Bliss, his -

"Away!" He forgot the pike in his ribs and fell, scrabbling forward. "Keep away, you filthy, long tailed scavengers! She's mine!"

He fell on his gut in the blood and his ribs shifted and for a heartbeat the world went dark, dark but for the man sized rodent unfolding from the firebox, edging forward, knife gleaming, to finish him off and gnaw down his toes. He pissed his trousers after all.

"Maurice?" the rat whispered. "Are you alive, man?"

He did not plan to give a predator such an obvious advantage, but his ribs were steadying and the rat reforming into another babe-faced innocent, this one better loved.

"Shaara?" It did not pain Maurice to speak, yet it hurt him to swallow. "Is that you, boy?"

"Yes." The boy was shaking, or perhaps it was Maurice's sight quaking in and out. Shaara's face was white and wet with tears, but his hands were firm when they grasped Maurice's shoulders.

"What were you doing in the firebox, lad?"

"Hiding," Shaara whispered. His hands moved from Maurice's shoulders to the shaft of the pike and then along it. "Bliss told me to hide. And then she wouldn't let me go."

"She's dead."

"I know." Shaara tested the pike shaft. Maurice grunted but his ribs had begun to go as numb as his legs.

"They dragged her across the floor like a butchered pig, they did. And then they took Moire. She was cussing like she did the night they beheaded Will. Remember?"

"Yes." Maurice closed his eyes. "What're you waiting for, Corporal? Now that you've come out of the flue, get it over with, yeah?"

"Yeah," Shaara said and jerked the pike, sideways and up and free, scraping bone as he did so.

Maurice screamed, and the bolt-hole melted away.

He awoke to the splash of ale against his tongue. Shaara was a slim grey figure silvered by moonlight. The ale tasted of Northern winter. His ribs burned and ached, but the feeling was slowly coming back to his toes.

"I've bread, too," Shaara said. "From the baker's. If you can stomach it, Captain."

They were a battalion again, Maurice realized as he took the triangle of rye. Bliss gone the way of Ross and their family broken at last. There was not one person left capable of knotting those strings back together.

Not one person left, he thought, watching Shaara, who did not want to move on.

The bread tasted fine. Maurice chewed carefully, wary of his shocked stomach.

"The wound looked mostly clean," Shaara said. "I bandaged it best I could. But it was getting dark. And I can't figure out what Bliss did with the wood. There was wood here. And then there wasn't."

Maurice looked blankly about the dark room. "Tossed it out the window, I suppose. To make sure you weren't roasted. We thought you'd fled into the temple, Moire and I. Safest place to be."

"Maybe." Shaara sounded doubtful. "If you don't mind the Seat lookin' down your shirt. And the idol watching you with big beaky eyes."

"Yes." Maurice thought of Fox. He pressed his lips against rage.

"Bliss and I were here for too long. Just waiting. Waiting for you."

"It was a trap all along. I'm sorry. Moire set it."

"Moire?" The lad's jaw dropped in disbelief.

"She thought she was doing right, I suppose." Maurice set the bread aside, and swigged down more sweet ale. "Red robes or not, she's born military. Maybe she's forgotten the King sets no store in honor."

"They wanted the shells. He killed Bliss over a bunch of shells."

"He killed Bliss because she shed his own beloved blue blood." Maurice curled his toes and then carefully rotated his ankles. "I saw the revenge in his smile before she did."

"They piked you before you could stop it."

"Yes."

"I didn't see that."

"No."

"I didn't see nothing but Bliss's eyes. She looked right at me. She wouldn't let me move."

"Good." Maurice reached across and gripped the boy's arm. "She kept you safe and you've kept me alive, I think. You're doing fine. Don't puke now, Corporal."

"No." Shaara shook himself a little. "Never did, not even the first time in the field."

"You're a hard man, Shaara."

That silenced the lad and took him from whatever memories he did not want to see. Shaara chewed a knuckle for a moment, then sighed.

"Kindle a fire, Captain, and I'll show you what Bliss saved."

"What Bliss saved?" Lifting a brow, Maurice finished the last of the ale. He set the tankard alongside abandoned bread. "What's this?"

But he knew what it was, small and smooth and sharp at the same time. A miniature. Stolen from the bag and secreted up the chimney with Bliss's apprentice.

"Light a fire," Shaara insisted. "Take a look. Maybe you'll know her."

"I looked at them all, Shaara. They meant nothing to me."

"To Bliss either, not until last night." The boy sounded excited. "Take another look. Prove her right."

"There's no wood."

"You've never needed wood."

"I do now." Maurice moved, gingerly. He made it to his knees before he had to gulp air, and then he bent in the dark over the painted shell, trying to see. "Things have changed."

Shaara hesitated. Maurice could hear the unasked questions floating. Then the lad's shadow shrugged.

"I've one match left," he offered.

"Use it." For Bliss.

Shaara flicked the matchstick against his belt, then held the little flame beneath Maurice's nose.

There was just enough light to illuminate Maurice's calloused palm and the grit under his thumbnail and against his dirty flesh the delicate painted shell. The woman on the smooth face seemed to move with the fragile light. She was pretty enough, in her own way, he supposed, if somewhat too old for the King's rumored tastes. She had coils of silver hair and bright green eyes and the white skin of someone who rarely saw the sun.

"I don't..."

"Look closer," Shaara said. "Bliss knew her. Don't you?"

It was the mouth that finally clicked the memory into place; the wide, straight mouth so carefully expressionless. Surely such bland opacity could only cover a world of sorrow.

"The lions," Maurice murmured, ignoring the pain in his ribs, bending even closer, as though he could read the woman's name through her flat eyes. "The summer of Amy and the lions. This woman."

"Yes," Shaara sighed, relief in the quiver of his fingers. "You see her, too. Bliss knew."

"The Jester. This is the Seat's Jester."

The match smoked and went out, leaving only the moon on Shaara's glistening cheeks.

Maurice handed the miniature back to the lad.

"Keep it," he said. "She gave it to you. Keep it safe."

The boy tucked the shell back into his pack. "What did she want me to do with it? What do I do?"

"Sleep, Corporal." Maurice found the abandoned bread and forced himself to eat. "Rest while I think. When the sun warms the white city I'll have you an answer."

It took three days, in truth. Three days spent easing sore ribs and battling a small wound fever and reaching for flames that would not come. Three days mourning Bliss and living off the baker's bread and watching the blood on the slatted floor dry to brown and began to flake.

Three days and Moire would be already half way to the King's court, if Shill intended to let her live that long.

"He's a nasty one, Chrysanthemum," Shaara said when Maurice asked the lad to recount the mischief at the patisserie. The boy looked at the hearth, then away.

"Hmm." Maurice rumbled. He found Shaara's new listlessness concerning. The boy would be mourning a mother as well as a master, he supposed. Bliss had, after all, raised the boy from youngling to adult. She had, at least, kept him alive and given him reason to stay so.

On the fourth morning, as the hole in his ribs began to scab well and hard, Maurice sent Shaara out into the streets in search of a god.

"A red-headed boy dressed like a prince," Maurice said as Shaara wrinkled his brow, baffled. "Hanging about the temple. Or maybe the spire. Or...a dog." Maurice scratched at his scab. "Small, lean. Big ears. Bushy tail. Tawny, like a -"

"Fox?" Shaara screwed up his face in an expression reminiscent of his dead master. "You want a blooded boy, Maurice, you look for him on his nurse's apron strings. You want a animal, you look in the forest."

"You see any forests about, Shaara?"

"No," the lad allowed. "No forests south of the Anne. Everyone knows that. No true trees but the sycamores and dogpink and the salty scrub around the deep waters."

"Tain't an ordinary animal, nor an ordinary boy, Corporal," Maurice said. "Go and see what you can find."

"What'll you do?"

"Find a nice loud restaurant and an ale and sit in the corner and listen."

Shaara smiled, the first real amusement Maurice had seen on his face in a long while. "Try the Blind Librarian. Everyone here about says it's as wild as the white veils ever get."

Shaara ran the Low Temple halls and learned nothing but theology. Maurice sat on the boards in a sunny, smokeless restaurant and learned even less. The Initiation had passed without incident and, celebration over, most of the people of Emman were thinking ahead to harvest and the slight chill that served as a Southern mid winter. There was no mention of a fire in the bowels of the Temple nor word of a Major gone priest gone missing.

"I asked at the barracks," Shaara reported one sticky afternoon. He fanned himself with a sycamore leaf and shrugged. "They say she's deep in studies, at the top of the Temple."

The King's men had disappeared, hunters melting away once the prey was run to ground.

"The streets are quiet, back to normal," Maurice said, watching the sycamore sway. "Did he get what he came for, I wonder?"

"Chrysanthemum?" Shaara shook his head. "He got Bliss. And he took Moire."

"But not the Jester," Maurice said, thoughtfully turning the dour image over behind his eyelids. "Not the Jester."

As for Fox, Shaara was able to route out no sight nor tale of the creature. Maurice would have thought the unnatural boy a product of the temple perfume, if not for the hole in his head where his fire used to burn.

That, in the end, was what decided him. That chill, empty ache.

"We're going further south," he told Shaara twelve days after Bliss's murder. "To the Capitol. To see the Seat."

Shaara gaped. "No one sees the Seat. Surely not you and I."

"No," Maurice agreed. "But a man as clever as you and I might manage to see the Seat's Jester."

"If she's still there. That was long ago, Captain."

"Yes. A life time ago. But it's all we have to go on, Shaara."

The lad, rolled tight in his bedclothes as far away from the hearth as a body could get, twisted restlessly and squinted through the dawn at Maurice. "What about Moire? You just gonna leave her gone?"

"She'll be the King's by now." Maurice reached under his tunic and picked at the scab that would soon become a scar. The ribs were still healing, more slowly than the flesh, but he thought he could ride again. If their horses still waited inside Emman's gates.

"Bliss would have gone after her."

"Bliss loved her, in her way." Maurice studied Shaara. "But Bliss ain't here. And we're two men against the King's court. Not much use, are we? But." And he jerked a thumb at Shaara's pack. "The Jester may be."

"You think she's who he wanted? The King I mean?"

"I don't know," Maurice admitted. And then repeated, "It's all we got."

# Seventeen
#

Ross spent the entire summer in that tavern just north of the river, drinking his life away on the boards. I began to suppose he loved Amy after all, to mourn himself into death. It was a hard thing to believe. She had been naught but a pretty face with an insipid laugh and a tendency toward god worship. And as far as I knew, Ross had never loved anyone.

But there he was, come first chill, skin and bones in the tavern bar. Yellowed and frail and still shrieking through nightmares in my bed. Sometimes he pissed the sheets he was so frightened. As the days grew shorter, he rose from bed less and less often. He grew wobbly and confused and I had to bathe him myself, once or twice a day, to keep the bedding from going ripe. It was a horrible, stomach turning job, but a man deserves dignity, even if he is an old bastard.

The rest of the circus thrived. Shaara's small skills had turned to true gold. Will found a new spotted cat to replace the tom and the animal, nicknamed 'Poot' by Maurice, never once tried to use the circus cart as its loo.

I repainted the cart with a bit of dye I had traded off a copper gypsy. The wagon looked brighter, wealthier. Even the mule seemed pleased to pull it.

The tumblers, far from being lost to the local thief's guild, picked a new group of acrobats from the sewers to add to their small set; now we had six.

Remarkably we had enough coin to go around. That would change with the coming winter as lords began to close up their manses and move to court. It was, we all knew, time to return south.

"I won't go!" Ross argued when I broached the subject. He spat into the basin of water I had prepared for his bath. "It's a dangerous, horrible place."

"What's this?" I tried cajoling. "You've been crossing the river every winter since your mam weaned you, Ross. You told me so. We cross the Anne poor as the peasants we are and return in the summer, rich as the lords we weren't born."

"Not any more." Ross rocked a little on the wool towel I had spread across the floor next to the basin. "Not any more."

I paused in passing the ebony comb through his lank hair. How I hated nits. And Ross seemed to gather the insects with disturbing ease.

"We have to go, Ross. The others are ready. And hungry for Southern sapphires."

In a rare burst of exertion he knocked the comb from my hand and, bony fingers fisted into a claw, bloodied my chin.

I do not believe I even stopped to consider wisdom. I hit him back, a hard, vicious blow, not unlike the many he had sent my own way. I suppose we learn from what we know.

I am small but sturdy. Ross had gone to sinew and bone. He tumbled across the room and fetched up solidly against a bedpost. I thought I heard bone crack but when I bent in alarm to examine the man, he seemed uninjured, excepting the glaze in his eye. And that, in itself, was hardly unusual. Those days his head was fuzzed more often than not.

I covered him with the wool towel and a blanket from our bed and sat at his feet, waiting for him to speak. He did not, for a very long while. Then he began to mumble and whine about sorrow and old curses and children manacled to trees by the tails of long, silver snakes.

He was near mad and I knew it. The drinking had killed him, and years of hard living, and whatever soft-headedness had allowed him to fall in love with a doomed girl. Perhaps he had been fading even then, growing old, and the pretty dog girl had taken advantage.

I lifted him from the floor to our bed, and brought him a cup of spring water. He dribbled and drooled and drank slowly. And then he looked up at me with a clear eye.

"If you go back," he warned. "You'll die. The lions will eat you, hair and teeth and small white bones."

"I'm not Amy." I wanted to knock the water from his crooked hand, but I did not.

"I know it, Bliss." He sighed and laid his head back upon the pillow I'd stuffed with rags, and in the process he dropped the silver cup, spilling water across blankets and floor. "Oh, I know it."

I cussed loudly at the damp bed, knowing if I left him beneath the wet he would only grow chill and sick.

"We're going south," I said. He smiled vaguely back. "We're going south because we have to, it's what you've taught us. And you're coming with us, Ross."

I crouched and stretched under the ticking, feeling about in search of the cup. The innkeep charged for utensils lost.

"Bliss, my girl." Ross's voice dropped from above as I groped over the dusty floor, blind. "The lions liked the taste of Amy's sweet, sweet flesh. You they'll swallow whole and choke as they do so. You'll sit in their gut and turn them sour and they'll come at us all, looking for ease."

I found the cup and grasped shaking fingers about the handle, nearly bending the metal. "You're mad, old man. You always have been."

We left the next morning, packs newly filled, Ross bundled into the bright painted wagon. It was only most of a day's ride to the river; we expected to be safely welcomed into a Southern village before the sun dipped into night.

It was raining, but not terribly hard. The wet did not bother the dogs, or the tumblers, or Maurice who rode the old mule and smoked his cigarettes. Will, however, hated water, and eventually sought shelter in the wagon with Ross.

Just as we caught sight of the Ann's gentle waters, Ross began to cough. Deep, racking spasms that I'd not heard before. Will tried to soothe the man and then began to yelp.

"Horrid, what a stink. Get back here, Bliss. The man's gone putrid."

We stopped and I clambered up the back of the wagon under Maurice's watchful eye. Ross was more than putrid. True to his performer's dramatic nature, he'd found a messy if peaceful end, body giving out just one hill over from the river he said he would not cross.

*****

The King's soldiers stayed far from the main road, skirting Southern villages, keeping to field and scrub and sandy dune. The small army started at a steady, break-neck pace, horses eager and fresh from two days in Emman's stables, but it soon became evident that Lord Shill was not quite as well rested as his men.

A fever burned in his bones. Moire could see the flush on his face even through the dust stirred up by pounding hooves. The Southern sun did not help. The King's men did their best to keep their commander propped and watered but eventually the march trailed to a walk and finally, just as Shill began to slip from his horse, a careening halt.

Shill's second in command was a ruddy-haired stick remarkable both for his ugly, tangled beard and the quick smile beneath it. He sat his horse for a moment, scanning the lavendar to either side, then glanced at Moire.

"Where are the tenants?"

Moire yanked her gaze from Bliss's slack, white face.

"Not close," she replied, uncaring of the scorn that spilled over and tasted of venom. "The fields roll for miles. There is no one out here but us. For now. I imagine the Seat is but a candlemark behind."

"No," the man replied, watching as three young men gently disentangled Shill from his stirrups. "He is not. We will camp here. Until milord has had a drink and sup. And you will clean his wound."

"No," Moire parroted, harsh. "I will not. Unless first you bring water and bandages for Bliss."

It was the Second's turn to sneer. "Crow's meat, that one."

"Not yet," Moire said. "Not if I can help it. Bring me water, and bandages, and a good supply of your whiskey. After I tend my own, then I will look at your lord."

The battalion waited while Shill's Second considered. Horses snorted and stamped and Lord Shill, now supported ungracefully between his rescuers, cursed and groaned. Moire supposed it was the man's audible pain that hastened the decision.

The Second dropped his reins and dismounted, boots crushing flowers.

"There," he said, nodding at a stunted scrub tree growing a stable length away. "Put up a tent there, for milord. These fields must be irrigated. You, lad, find the trenches and start filling bottles."

Surprisingly, he reached up a gloved hand to help Moire with her burden. She knew better than to turn away the offering, no matter that she wanted to. Bliss was small and light, lighter now, it seemed, than a living creature had any right to be, and Moire had never been anything but strong. Yet, she needed a moment to think, to regain the breath she had lost trying to will Bliss strong.

Nevertheless, she dropped quickly to the ground and kept one hand on the Second's embroidered sleeve as he carried Bliss through bobbing lavendar to the scrub tree.

"There will be some shade," he said, "if we are lucky. Here. Lay her out on my cape. It's relatively clean."

Moire decided she did not hate the man quite as much as she first thought.

"Water?"

"Coming," the Second replied with the assurance of one who knew his needs would be met without question and quickly.

A tent was already going up alongside the tree. The makeshift shelter was small and much squatter than any of the campaign tents Moire had lived amongst. The fabric was worn and weather-stained and waxed against rain. Moire could see Shill tossing restlessly beyond the canvas even as the tent was put up around him.

The man should be dead, she thought and coldly consigned Shill to her gods.

The Second watched Moire carefully as she spread his thick cloak between the roots of the scrub. "He had your blessing."

"He wanted the King's property back." Moire reached for Bliss. "He said nothing of murder or abduction."

The Second shrugged, dismissing questions of diplomacy.

"You're bleeding, Holiness," he said, then turned on his heel, attention diverted by his commander's angry cries.

Moire lifted a hand to her head. She'd forgotten the knot on her skull. Minor, she decided, when her fingers came away more sticky than wet. It would heal.

And so would Bliss, Moire promised herself. But those same sticky fingers shook as she freed her temple knife and used it to cut back the leather at Bliss's shoulder. Tunic and jerkin were thick with drying blood. Bliss, still and slack, did not so much as murmur when Moire ripped fabric from flesh.

"Gods' shame you," Moire made herself speak without concern. "The bullet's gone clean through. It's hardly a hole. Nothing to swoon over."

"She's bled some, Holiness." A lad bearing a string of canteens and an armful of bandages appeared at Moire's elbow. "More than some. Close to the heart, that. Rolph always aims true."

"May he rot for it." Moire took the water from the boy. "Where's the alcohol?"

"Hain't enough to go round, he says. Milord needs it."

"Go find me some. Or I'll leave your lord to rot with Rolph."

The boy's eyes rolled in his head and he nodded. Moire supposed the lad thought she could make her words into truth. Or perhaps it was the way she spat those words that made the squire run.

Moire uncorked a water bottle. Settling on the ground at Bliss's head, she wet a relatively clean edge of her robe and begin coaxing drips between her cracking lips. The water washed dust away and then overflowed again, running slowly over Bliss's chin.

Moire wiped Bliss dry and tried again. Bliss refused to swallow.

The boy came back with half a bottle of whiskey.

"My da's own," he said. "I took it from his saddle bag. He's busy tending Lord Shill."

Moire wondered if this meant she had been let off that particular duty.

"Thank you," she said. "Here. Sit here. Try and get some water down her throat."

The squire hesitated and then sat. His dark hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it away and took the bit of fabric Moire ripped from her robe.

"What will you do?"

"Make sure the bullet's free." Moire kept one eye on the boy as she probbed Bliss's shoulder. "Keep trying."

"She's like to choke," the boy said, regretfully.

"She's too stubborn for that." But when Moire doused the bullet hole with a good slosh of whiskey and Bliss still did not stir, she felt her own heart go cold.

"She's still breathing," the squire said, either in awe or reassurance.

"Yes. Hold still, lad. Let me have a look at her back."

She rolled Bliss onto one side. The scrub tree's scant shade seemed suddenly chill. The fabric ripped away more easily behind Bliss's shoulder blade. The leather was still wet with blood.

"Bullet's there," the boy said, bending close and intent. "See, there? Like a pustule."

"Just like." Moire wet her knife in another spill of whiskey. "Hold her firm, like this."

The boy had steady hands. Moire doused Bliss's shoulder blade, said a quick and angry prayer to the gods she had so recently given her life over to, and sliced flesh.

"You're good," the boy marveled, and this time she was sure it was awe.

"Done this many times." But the bullet, stubborn, slipped and slid away from the tip of her blade.

"You were a Major in the Seat's army."

"Yes." Moire chewed her lip and chased the bit of silver in Bliss's shoulder.

"And she was a hero. My da said so."

"Yes."

"I guess heroes go out just like the rest of us."

"No," Moire felt the tiny grate of metal on metal as her knife found the bullet. She tensed and flexed and the silver popped free in a rush of fresh blood.

The squire whooped.

"Hold her steady," Moire reminded, breathless again. She snatched bandages and the last of the whiskey, and bound Bliss tightly before the last of her life could gush away.

The Second came back for Moire after all, as the sun began to sink behind the scrub tree. Moire met his wordless stare and left Bliss in the care of the eager squire.

"She's still alive," the Second said as though he were discussing a distasteful and unexpected coming storm.

"Yes."

"We've four days more on horseback, at the least. She won't survive our pace."

"Will your commander?" Moire returned, harsh and newly weary.

"Yes. It's just a fever. You'll cure it."

"I?" Moire paused outside the crouching tent. "I'm no healer."

"Holiness," the Second replied, his wide smile spreading. "You're Ordained. Even the men of the north know what that means. Heal him."

Moire almost staggered. She had been acting as Major and soldier, rank and file on the field. Because it was what she knew, what she lived. She had forgotten, almost, the promise behind the red robes she wore. She had given up her former life, yes. But did not her gods promise blessing in return?

"I will try," she said, heady with possibilities. She stepped through the tent, onto a thick wool rug, and crouched alongside Shill's cot.

He turned his head and watched her with dry eyes.

"Your dirty mud grubber has killed me," he complained. "You'll see the King knows it."

"Your king will not care." Moire unrapped the bandaged arm. The wound was festering, clearly. But the tell tale streaks of poisonous red had not yet crept far from the broken bone.

"Horrid keep you to your promise." Shill coughed and quivered beneath her touch.

"I made no promise."

"Make one now," Lord Shill said, sitting half upright as Moire squeezed puss into air. "Make one now. She that my king gets his property."

"All this for a bag full of miniatures." Moire swabbed the wound with rough hands, ignoring Shill's gasps. "I will not."

"You will," he said through clenched teeth. "Or I will have Rolph finish what he started, eh?"

Moire froze. Shill's breath wheezed in and out past his tongue. Over her shoulder, the Second loomed.

"You are Rolph?" she asked.

"Yes," the red-haired man said, and smiled genially.

She might have hesitated longer, but she did not. She had ceased to care, truly, about the bag of pretty painted shells and the Northern King who would send men to kill for them. She wanted only to strangle Shill and his grinning second and return to Bliss and see that she lived.

"Now," Rolph ordered. "Bind it up again and heal him."

Moire nodded and rewrapped Shill's arm. Then she settled on her knees on the rug alongside the cot and, folding her hands on her lap, began to pray. Not for Shill or his King or even for wisdom. She prayed for herself and for forgiveness and for Bliss and for the small, sweet touch of hope.

Moire prayed until the sun finished its drop and the oil seed fields went dark but for the slow flare of campfire. And when she rose, stiff and numb and sick with the new throbbing in her head, she was not at all sure her desperate pleas had been more than mute whispers in her own skull.

