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Chapter Text

As luck would have it, we spent less than twenty-four hours in Ezho before embarking in the company of a timely caravan train. Scarcely enough time to deposit Thara’s parcel of letters at the post office, and certainly not long enough to pay a visit to my mother or sisters, although that would not keep them from being very righteously angry with me if they should learn I had passed through the city.

Spring had arrived, but as the skies above Ezho could not read a calendar, tiny pinpoint snowflakes drifted down upon us as we made our way across Cemreian’s Shoulders toward the Confluence. Before we descended from the heights of the hill, I pointed out to Thara the difference in the rivers’ colors: the clear blue waters of the Evresartha, tumbling freshly down from the mountains, mixing and giving way to the muddy brown of the Istandaärtha. “The Evresartha is colder, so the water sinks, and we see more of the Istandaärtha,” I said, feeling immensely tedious as soon as I did. Twenty years on the Evressai Steppes, and I became an insufferable Ezheise as soon as I was within sight of a barge again.

If Thara noticed, he was too polite to complain of it. “Didst live on this side of the rivers?”

“No, no. In the middle, there.” I pointed to the hill that rose above the crooked peninsula between the waters. “Its name is Cendar’zho, but everyone calls it the Hill That Works. Most of the city’s silk shops are there, and the canneries too.” Both my sisters still had jobs in those silk shops. It had been a few years since my mother had left her loom behind, once her sight had grown too poor for her to be able to tell one thread in her heddle from the next, and since then she had been wholly preoccupied with the care of her flock of grandchildren. But of course Thara did not need to have the Olgarezh family tree drawn out for him. I moved my hand and pointed instead to the city’s other great hill, on the far bank of the Istandaärtha. “And that is Volgeth’zho, which we call the Hill That Prays. As many shrines to Csaivo and Osreian as thou couldst imagine.”

Thara gazed intently out to the north, where the mountains could be seen through the morning fog, putting the city’s proud hills to shame. “It is a shame that we cannot stay longer,” he said. “And a necessity, I know. But I would have liked to try the pilgrimage of stairs.”

“Perhaps thou wilt visit Ezho again someday,” I said, and ushered him toward the open door of Saru’s Table. Unlike the teahouses of Amalo, the tea in an Ezheise cendartheian was a sad afterthought, but we would have to make do without decent tea on the road soon enough in any case. We needed hearty food that would fill our bellies for the day’s travel more than we needed good tea, and Saru’s Table offered dual advantages: whatever was cooking in the eponymous Saru’s kitchen smelled divine, and it was already open for bargemen coming from overnight work at the dock and cendarinsoloi emerging from their dormitories for the day’s first shifts. At the counter, I ordered an ankrosolis for each of us—one with creamed pike, one with creamed pork—and made Thara try them both when they arrived at the table.

“But they are both the same,” he protested, and when I denied it, he said the fault could be assigned to the heavy white sauce, which overwhelmed the flavors of the dumpling anyway.

“Thou shalt have to learn to appreciate a good ankrosolis if thou intendest to return to make the pilgrimage of stairs,” I told him, and took the rest of the pike ankrosolis for myself without guilt.

After we ate, we put Cemreian’s Shoulders behind us entirely, which deprived us of a decent view of the city, but which brought us to the environs of the Old Port. Barges slid into slips as we walked along the bank. Dockworkers shouted to each other across the short stretches of open water, cranes groaned under their lade weight of barrels and boxes and crates. I did not like the chaos of the scene, even if the worst that was likely to happen was that a hungover bargeman might barrel unseeingly into Thara and send him for an unpleasant but brief swim in the Istandaärtha. Like Amalo, Ezho had its newspapers, and like everywhere in the Ethuveraz, Ezho had men who would commit the worst acts of depravity in the hopes of Clenverada coin. It was unlikely but not impossible that someone would recognize Thara here, and so I wanted to make good time across the dock plain to the caravan muster grounds on the city’s outskirts.

My wishes did not prevent Thara from stopping beside a plastered-up handbill and lingering long enough to read the thing. “I had not thought there were many doctors in Ezho,” he remarked.

“There aren’t. Or rather I should say that there weren’t.” Many things might change in twenty years, and though I’d been home occasionally in that time, I had not spent those visits determining my course of action if I were to imminently take ill. I spared a corner of my attention to the handbill. It advertised a call for ‘willing subjects’ who would attest that they had never suffered from borlaän; subjects under the age of ten were preferred. For the illiterate, a series of simple drawings had been appended: a figure with the proportions of a child, a ten-zashan coin, and a styled reneimar leaf with its two distinctive lobes, which some doctors had begun to use as a sort of calling card of their profession, as it was a plant associated with healing but not with Csaivo herself. (It did them no good to invite open war with the clerics, after all, although staking out a shingle in Ezho came close to doing so.)

The last picture I did not recognize, and Thara explained that it was the symbol that had once been painted or stamped onto the doors of households where borlaän had taken hold, in order to maintain quarantine. “During the plague years of Varenechibal I’s reign, things had gotten so dire that many clerics would refuse to enter the homes of the infected.”

“How awful.” My older brother had only survived borlaän thanks to the intercession of a cleric of Csaivo. The handbill troubled me, seemed almost insidious in its few words and simplified, cartoonish appeal. Or perhaps in its preferences for young subjects. I did not know whether I harbored a certain northern suspicion of doctors, or whether another, more useful instinct spoke to me. I thought about tearing away the lowest part of the handbill, where a crude map had been printed, and decided against it. I could not make everything that happened in Ezho my business (that was my sister Veseleän’s calling), and someone might need that ten-zashan coin more than I needed to follow my inclination to begrudge a doctor his calling, such as it was. “But unless thy desirest to volunteer as a subject, we should make our way to the muster-grounds.”

I had not yet cut off my topknot—the washbasin of a hotel room seemed like a poor choice of venue for such an effort—and the delay proved auspicious. The caravan’s overseer, Mer Kolethena, with whom we had reached an agreement the afternoon before, delivered us to one of his junior caravan masters. Mer Uluzhed, a blue-eyed young man with pale gray skin, was ready to argue at being obliged to mind two extra travelers, but he stopped up his mouth when he took a second look at me. “A soldier,” he said, and squinted. “Do you plan to use that sword if bandits try to take a bite out of this caravan, Mer...?”

“Captain Olgarezh,” I said pleasantly. Thara and I agreed that between his calling and my inability to maintain a story, it would serve us poorly to try to assume a false identity on the journey south to Cetho. “Rest assured, Mer Uluzhed. If the need arises, I will serve.” Against bandits or against the Clenverada, it made no difference to me. I was not a man of many and varied skills, but I had this one, and it fit the purpose well.

By nine of the clock, we were on the road. Thara rode in one of the wagons, while I accepted Mer Uluzhed’s offer to ride horseback. The mare was not a particularly handsome one, a gray with odd, patchy markings on her lower legs, but she answered the reins readily enough, and on horseback I had more freedom of movement—and visibility—than I would have had beside Thara in the wagon.

Mer Kolethena rode along the caravan and checked in periodically with all his caravan masters, including Mer Uluzhed. A gregarious man; when he made his morning rounds, he held the reins in one hand and a large flask of strong orchor in the other, from which he occasionally thought to offer me a pour. On the third day of the journey, after I had declined yet again, he explained to me the makings of the flask itself and the airless space between the outer wall and the inner container that kept the tea hot long past its natural limit. He had had it specially made, he told me, and it had cost a princely sum, but at his age he could no longer bear the long days of travel without the comfort of hot tea.

I told Thara that night about Mer Kolethena’s tea flask. “Thou must never come into possession of such a thing. Thou wouldst soon have more orchor than blood in thy veins.”

“Fortunately,” he said, “a prelate takes a vow of poverty, and I think that such a thing could not easily be construed as a necessity.” He smiled, and I felt an easy pride in coaxing that rarest of expressions from him.

At night we slept, as we had on the way to the Tomb of Dragons, back-to-back atop one overcoat and beneath another, beneath the bed of one of the wagons—a much safer proposition when that wagon’s bed did not contain a dragon’s haunted skull, and one which kept off the worst of the spring rains.

As I waited for sleep, my thought strayed to the methods used by the Nazhmorhathveras to hunt the sheleian that ranged on the steppes. No barbarian would have been foolish enough to try to take on a flock; though a sheleis resembled little more than a large stack of poorly cared-for carpets, the adults of a pack would vigorously defend their young. Thick of hide, dense of fur, tusked, and ferocious—the Nazhmorhathveras stalked the steppes in search of a sheleis that had gotten itself separated from its pack. A lone sheleis would flee, in the face of a hunter’s spear, and the Nazhmorhathveras would pursue. Not at the desperate pace set by the sheleis; the beast could leave its hunter’s sight, and still he would track it, at a steady and persistent pace. It might take hours, even a day or more, but eventually the sheleis would collapse from exhaustion, and the hunter would have his spear ready to fall upon the beast when it did.

It was not, I had to concede to myself, an apt analogy except in the central theme of patience. For one thing, I did not intend to ravish Thara the moment he showed signs of weakness to my pursuit. For another, it sometimes seemed to me an act of the sheerest vanity to read the reciprocation of my own interest in the brief touch of his hand upon mine. But then, Corano always said I was a vain one.

His back against mine was ramrod-straight, and I imagined I could feel the chill of his bones through his coat and shirt. I would have gladly played the gallant captain and put my arms around him to share what warmth I had, but I did not. Vain or not, I thought that Thara did harbor an attraction; but I could see, too, that at some point in his past, he must have reached out to touch another man’s hand only to have his fingers slapped away.

No, if I had a role to play here, it would not be that of the barbarian hunter. I was more like the jolly widow in one of Lieutenant Estebezh’s operas, scheming to seduce the pious young prelate who had just arrived in her benefice—except that Thara was not all that much younger than me; I was too busy keeping him alive to scheme with any particular imagination; and we were, very fortunately, not surrounded by a chorus of a half-dozen mischievous children played by grown men clomping around on their knees.

Chapter Text

Some of the caravan drivers were from Cetho, and called Thara ‘Mer Celehar’ when they came to beg for scraps of gossip about the Emperor and his court; others hailed from the smaller towns of the north and east, and they called him ‘Othala’ and went about the thing in a more deferential, roundabout way. Thara told none of them anything that they didn’t already know. For me, as we sat alone beside a small campfire at night, he would occasionally dole out a single, carefully considered morsel. “The page boys compete for his attention,” he would say, “they seem very fond of him.” Or perhaps, “He always looks very tired, each time that I have seen him. I cannot imagine how many matters, and each of them of great import, which he must consider every day.”

In truth, there was nothing that he told me in these moments of great confidence that I did not already know myself, or at least suspect, from what I knew of the role the Emperor had entrusted to Thara in the matter of the Curneisei conspiracy. “Thou dost not simply bend the knee because it is expected of thee. I can see that thy respect for the Emperor is genuine.” And thus, given what I knew of Thara, well-earned.

“He has shown me great honor,” Thara said simply. His ears rotated through a complex series of positions before relaxing somewhat. “And great kindness too.”

I wondered whether, once we reached Cetho, I too would have the honor—and the attendant stress—of meeting the Emperor face-to-face. It would be interesting to gauge for myself the young man in whose name I had served the last few weeks of my time on the steppes. That Thara spoke so highly of him meant a great deal, but one does like to judge for oneself, if the opportunity presents itself, the man upon whose word the empire moves.

On the fifth morning out of Ezho, one of the drivers fell ill. 

The sun had just eased its way over the horizon, and the two-line prayer of morning reverence flitted through my head—a straightforward and parsimonious prayer, which was the sort I felt Anmura most appreciated, although there was perhaps a bland bit of heresy in the act of ascribing one’s own personal preferences to a god—when I noticed a flock of caravan masters accumulating a few wagons ahead. No such morning gathering had happened yet on our travel; everyone knew their business and got about it in a timely fashion to keep the caravan moving, to meet their promised delivery dates and to get paid. In my experience, anything out of the ordinary most likely meant trouble, though I did not know yet what kind. 

Thara joined me as I approached the outside of the circle of caravan masters. “He has to have carried it from Ezho,” Mer Uluzhed was saying. “He must have been hiding it for two or three days now, the fool.”

“Any of us might have caught it from him,” said another driver, a pale-eyed, fair-skinned man with the heavy goblin jaw. He made a warding gesture. “Merciful goddesses, protect us!”

Mer Uluzhed took notice of us standing nearby and said aside to us: “Mer Balara has taken ill. Sessiva, by the looks of it. He has the tell-tale rash.”

“There’s nothing for it,” said Mer Kolthena heavily. He shook his head and shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. “We’re expected in Cetho nine days hence.”

“If we leave him in his wagon alone, he’ll certainly die!” protested Mer Uluzhed.

The other caravan masters looked around, scuffed their boots awkwardly, muttered. Someone coughed. No one wanted to leave the unfortunate Mer Balara, but neither did anyone wish to risk sessiva—nor, indeed, for their bills to go unpaid, their children unfed.

Mer Uluzhed looked defeated, but he spoke firmly. “His family must receive a share of our pay for this job.”

“Of course, of course,” said Mer Kolthena, magnanimous in victory. “But we must get moving, we are half an hour later to start our day already—”

“I will stay with Mer Balara,” said Thara, as I had expected he would. “I had sessiva already, some years ago.”

“Othala, even with your care, he may still die,” said the pale-eyed man kindly, as if he expected Thara to retract his offer at this gentle pushback. 

I had to grant the poor fellow that, if one did not know him at all well, Thara did look the sort to fold at the lightest pressure. He had the bone-china look that sessiva’s survivors often did, as if a stiff wind might shatter him, and fine aristocratic features, without the fine aristocratic weaselliness that so commonly came along. One hardly knew whether to fall at his feet as if he were the romantic hero from one of Anvelichar’s classic tragedies, or to tuck him into his bed for a month with a steady supply of isevren and soup dumplings. And so the unfortunate caravan master was quite unprepared for the thunderclap look that Thara fixed on him, and for the quiet, solemn othala to raise his voice. “I understand that very well, thank you, having had sessiva already some years ago, and being one of those fortunate enough to survive it.”

“Yes, othala,” said the man meekly.

After that, the caravan masters parted ways and hurried off to their own segments of the train. Only Mer Uluzhed lingered a moment, wearing his customary scowl. “The next town is perhaps...eight or ten hours’ travel down the road.” That would be the village of Rocharis, if I did not mistake our passage along the road. “If I can arrange it, I will see that their cleric is sent out to you.” 

“That is kind of you, Mer Uluzhed.”

Uluzhed hesitated, then said hastily, “I would not begin to tell you what to do, Othala Celehar, but I would judge myself badly if I did not remind you that in some rare circumstances, an unlucky soul may come down with sessiva for a second time.”

“Yes,” said Thara wearily. “I thank you, Mer Uluzhed, but I am aware.”

“Almost always fatal, in that case.”

“I am aware of that too.”

“All right.” Mer Uluzhed bowed awkwardly. “I have discharged my duty to my conscience. Thank you, othala, and may Csaivo keep you in her warmest graces.”

Only after Uluzhed too had walked away did Thara look up at me. “I was not aware,” I said simply.

His ears dipped low. “I should have asked thee first.”

“Thou wouldst always have stayed. This saves thee from having to do something very silly, like trying to convince me to follow the caravan train without thee.”

“I would not have asked that of thee!”

I raised my eyebrows.

Now his ears were pink as well as low. “I would not have asked that of thee except as a sop to my own conscience,” he conceded. “Hast suffered sessiva before?”

“No, never. It raged through Ezho the year after I enlisted.” My first nephew, still a babe in arms, had been buried that winter. I had not been granted leave, but my brother had written to me with the date of the funeral, and I had paid my respects from the heights of the Anmur’theileian when the sun sank out of sight that night. I had never met the child, though I had since visited the tiny grave in Ulsarandee.

“Then thou must keep thy distance, Hanu,” Thara said. “I would not gladly risk thy health, to say nothing of thy life.” And I could do nothing but agree.

The rest of the caravan evaporated around us, until only Balara’s wagon remained. One the caravan’s stock wagons slowed down as it passed, and a young man hopped out of the back to shove what proved to be a sack of barley grain and overwintered beets into my hands. “Thank you, Mer Olgarezh,” he said breathlessly, and scurried back up into the wagon again before I could correct him that I was still, until I tendered my official resignation, a captain of the Principiate Guard, and that I personally had done nothing especially worthy of thanks except to stand in Thara Celehar’s vicinity.

Thara had already taken up residence in the back of Balara’s wagon, which, in a small stroke of good fortune, was covered with a stretch of canvas that would hold off the rain and keep the sick man at least a little warmer. I shouted up to warn Thara, and Balara if he was at all sensible of his surroundings, that I would lead the oxen a short way off the road. One of the other drivers had unhitched two of Mer Balara’s oxen, leaving us with a single pair, which made maneuvering both more difficult and less. Both beasts struggled with the knobby, root-choked soil after I urged them off the packed-dirt path, but because we were short a pair, we did not take up so much space. We did not make it as deep into the woods as I desired—only enough distance and shrubbery between us and the road to put off the most shortsighted of bandits and would-be assassins—before we settled into a small clearing. But it was better than nothing. Though it caused me more frustration than I would like to say, I also managed to unyoke the oxen. I had never handled oxen before, only horses, and these responded languidly at best to my attempted commands. Eventually, to my great relief, I had both beasts tied up at nearby trees within the reach of grass for them to graze. Whether or not oxen were inclined to stray, I did not know, but I preferred not to take my chances.

I knew the longer we stayed, the greater the danger would grow. The caravan would move south, and pass through towns such as Rocharis, and eventually someone would say the name Othala Celehar in a place where someone else would hear it. And then the would-be assassins would come looking, either on the direct promise of Clenverada money or simply borne up on the hot air of an imagined reward. I did not sleep well that night, and not only because Thara’s soft footsteps moved back and forth over my head every hour or so.

In the morning, his movements woke me again. When I crawled out from under the wagon, Thara’s overcoat hung over the opening at the back of the canvas covering.

I called up to see if there was any help I could offer from my outside vantage, and Thara emerged in his shirt sleeves. “Thou shouldst stand farther back,” he said sternly. “I do not know how far the miasma of the sickness may spread.”

“And thou shouldst wear thy coat. Now that we have exchanged advice, kindly tell me how I may serve?”

He adjusted the drape of the coat. “Sessiva is less likely to steal Mer Balara’s vision if he recovers in a darkened space.”

“The sessiva will do worse to him if his only caregiver takes ill with a bronchine,” I said frankly, and Thara frowned at me. “And I suppose thy frock coat hangs at the other end.”

Thara folded his arms across his chest, out of stubbornness, or perhaps only the sudden realization that he stood before me in his shirt sleeves. “...Hot water,” he said finally. “If thou wouldst be so good as to boil some large stones, those would serve well to keep Mer Balara warm.”

“I would have to leave thee here alone to go look for water.”

We stared at each other, gauging the cross-purposes to which our respective goals had brought us. I was first to concede: “We’ll need water if we want to eat, too, and every moment that passes is another in which thine enemies have time to learn thy whereabouts. If I must go, it’s best that I go now.”

Thara nodded and retreated within the wagon’s covering, emerging a moment later with an empty iron pot.

For the better part of the morning I wandered through the woods with the pot under my arm and dark imaginings about bandits in my head, until I came at last upon a small clear stream. It emerged from underground and disappeared in that direction again after a few short yards in the open air. Only a foolish man would drink directly of such water, which was likely to carry all manner of disease until the miasma could be boiled out of it. I filled the pot and followed my own trail back to the wagon.

After ensuring that Thara had not been murdered in my absence, and while I related my gratitude over that fact to Anmura, I sat about making a campfire. I was no happier to have a fire set than I had been to go gallivanting about in search of water. And not only because of the horrible wet, green wood. The smoke signaled plainly to anyone in the area that a wagon or two had become separated from a caravan. We would look like easy pickings—worse, we would be. But, as a swift recovery from Mer Balara seemed the safest way to get us on the road again, I did as Thara had requested, and added some beets to the pot as well. When the water boiled, I fished the beets out, and wrapped my overcoat around the handle of the pot to pour out the contents. Once enough of the pink-tinted water had steamed off the stones, I nudged them into my overcoat and rolled them up into a bundle, with a few of the beets. The heat penetrated the wool, but the load was insulated enough that I could handle it tolerably.

After I had deposited my wadded-up overcoat outside the wagon, I stepped back a few paces and called, “Thy hot stones await thee, othala, and some dinner as well.”

The overcoat hanging in the wagon’s opening twitched, and Thara put his head out. “I have never before been thou’d and called by my title in the same breath.”

“Dost appreciate the novelty?”

“I appreciate the pains thou hast taken on Mer Balara’s behalf, and on mine.” He half-smiled, then took a second look at me. “Where is thy overcoat?”

“At the moment, it contains thy river stones. Canst throw it back out to me once thou hast warmed Mer Balara to thy satisfaction.”

“But it may absorb some of the miasma if I bring it within the wagon!” he said, and his ears twitched in frustration. I had preferred the half-smile, all told. “It is already unfair that thou must sleep alone on the cold ground while I have the wagon—thou canst not go without an overcoat.”

I would also have preferred not to have to sleep alone, though I kept that thought to myself. “Dost begrudge thyself a night’s rest in the wagon? Thou’rt so accustomed to denying thyself comfort on principle that thou dost the same reflexively when there is no reason whatsoever.”

“Thou exaggeratest,” Thara said, and turned so pink one might have thought he was in the grips of a fever himself. “I do not deny myself all comfort.”

“Thou ask’st me to ignore the testimony of my own eyes.” I grinned at him, and he rewarded me with the other half of his smile before he disappeared once more within.

Chapter Text

When the sun began to settle into the treetops for the second time, I gathered that no help from Rocharis was forthcoming. If the village did have a cleric of its own, he might be occupied with his own patients already—if the gods were merciful, Mer Balara was part of an isolated outbreak of sessiva; if they were not, the fever could be raging through the villagers even now. Or the cleric might have simply refused to ride out all day in search of a stranger. I risked another trip to the spring for water, and risked further another fire to cook the barley grains, and to heat more stones for the sake of Mer Balara’s well-being.

There was nothing useful to be done about the peril of the situation, so I exercised my foul mood on the oxen. Fortunately they did not seem to mind my telling them they were ugly, filthy-smelling monsters whose care kept me from the duty set upon me by the Prince of Thu-Athamar himself. They ignored me, and grazed the grass around the trees where I had moved them.

I had even worse rest that second night, not letting myself sink past the first and shallowest sleep. Boot sleep, we called it in the Anmur’theileian—the kind of sleep that you could snap out of and have your boots halfway on and laced almost before you realized you were being called up. My ears strained for every sound in the wood, evaluating every night-bird’s call and rustle of branches for threats. When I finally fell asleep, it was to the regular rhythm of Thara’s voice above me, reciting a prayer for hope and grace.

In the morning, I awoke to a prayer of a different texture: that of compassion for the dead. I climbed out from under the wagon and waited until Thara emerged a few minutes later. “He was Ishvaleisei,” he said wearily. “We need not keep a vigil, but his family will wish to have his body cremated.”

“Thou look’st as if thou hast not slept,” I said, and Thara held up his hand before I could step closer.

“Thou shouldst not approach closely. The miasma does not evaporate directly after death. I may carry it upon my person still.” He looked down at his hands, as if he might espy the signs of this miasma there. “I should bathe. And air out my coat. It will not remove all risk, there is no way to know for certain when the miasma has cleared. But…” He trailed off there, looking through me.

“But it will serve.” I gave him directions to the stream I had found, though I did not much like him traipsing through the wood on his own, and plainly on even less sleep than I’d had. If it had been much farther, I would have insisted on going with him most of the way. But I thought he would not want me to transgress the boundaries of this miasma of his, nor indeed those of his personal privacy. He hung his overcoat on a sturdy branch and disappeared into the woods; I sat down with my back against the wagon wheel to wait.

Some minutes later, I looked up at the sound of movement in the brush. Thara emerged, shivering, and with all his hair still hanging about his shoulders. I could not begin to imagine what my ears must have shown, for Thara’s face blazed red, and he looked away from me. “I must apologize,” he said, addressing the peeling bark of a nearby elarin. “It was not my intent to appear in such a state. It is only that the water was so cold—I could not manage the ribbon nor the pins afterward.”

I had imagined, on one or two occasions, what Thara Celehar would look like with his hair loosed from his braid. I put foolish thoughts out of my head, and stood up to shake one arm free of my overcoat. “Thou wouldst freeze to death saying thy sorries, and for nothing. Come here.”

He took a few steps, and I took the rest, folding him inside the empty half of my coat and pulling him against me so that his hair wet the front of my shirt. However often I had entertained the pleasant fantasies where I would have a reason to touch my obstinate prelate, I did not quite know what to do with him now that I had him, and I sought a new course over which to chart a conversation. “It is hard to watch a man die when one intends his death—it is worse, I think, when one has tried to prevent it. How dost thou fare, Thara?”

“Oh,” he said. His shaking had not slowed, and I was not sure the cold was entirely to blame. “I know both prayers for grace and prayers of compassion for a reason.”

“Still, thou hast said before: thou hopest, always.”

He said nothing for several moments, and I thought we had reached a kind of peace. Then he spoke again, all in a rush: “When thou saidst that thou hadst a feeling about me—didst have a feeling? Or was thy feeling only the—the rumor that I too am marnis?”

I had expected to dance around this question for some while yet, and the turn of topic surprised me too much for me to couch a blunt truth in a softer explanation. “But I am not marnis.”

Thara put his hands against my side and pushed, but I was stronger, and caught him, keeping him close a moment longer. “Thara, please. I will let thee go if that is thy wish. But it is not mine.”

He kept his hand on my chest, with his elbow locked so that I could draw him no closer without hurting him. “You didn’t—thou didst not dance with any of the women on Winternight.”

“I take my work as seriously as thou takest thine,” I rebuked him. “I should have had to fall on my sword in front of Prince Orchenis if thou hadst been stabbed by a Clenverada assassin while I danced a merry zhoravel with one of Pel-Thenhior’s pretty cousins.”

“If thou wouldst do me the courtesy of—” Thara’s ears dipped lower than I had ever seen them. “Of pretending I had not humiliated myself—”

“Listen to me.” His fingers on my chest had become claws. I put my free hand over them, and they did not soften. “I do not think of myself as marnis. I’m—there’s not a word for what I am.” No, that was not true, was it? None as clear as marnis, but I had heard plenty of words repeated in the same distasteful tones, words used to hammer marnei as well as men like me. Whore, degenerate, malkin. The most specific was also the one I hated most, and a word I would never use to name myself: thezh; the word used for a bitch in heat, ready to copulate with whatever it saw next. “I have lain with men, I have lain with women. And I have loved both, too.”

“If thou couldst happily love a woman, whyever wouldst thou choose a man?”

“The gods did not see fit to endow us with the capacity to choose whom we desire.” Around his face, curls had sprung up as they dried. I tucked one behind his ear. His brows drew toward each other, and when he closed his eyes briefly, I wanted to cover his mouth with mine, but did not. “Come, I will braid thy hair for thee. I have two sisters and thus some idea of how the thing is done.”

A man’s hair is a personal thing, and although I offered in kindness, I also asked an intimacy I had not yet been granted, an intimacy not much less than that of the kiss I had not stolen. He was not the first man to assume I would forget him the moment a woman crooked her finger at me. I told myself it did not sting anymore, and when that did not work, I ordered myself to believe it. Too much obedience can lead a soldier astray, but I had learned to use it judiciously to my own benefit now and again. And perhaps it was only that I had moved too swiftly—that I had thought too often, over these days on the road surrounded by watchful eyes, of the brush of his fingers on my hand. Perhaps I had been moved to act out of greed rather than the gallantry I had convinced myself of.

“I thank thee,” Thara said, and this time when he stepped back, I let him go. “But I have recovered enough now to manage, I think.” He retrieved his coat and disappeared around the side of the wagon, and when he returned several minutes later, his hair was as neatly pinned and braided as it ever was, which was to say, not particularly neatly at all.

We did not make it as far as Rocharis before it grew dark. That night, I thought Thara might refuse to share sleep as we had done before poor Mer Balara took ill. But he spread his overcoat on the ground, and looked at me, and I said that I would sleep on the left half, which was as far as I could tell the windward side.

By the time we made Rocharis, mid-morning on the next day, Mer Balara’s body had become difficult to accompany. As we were unsure how much of the odor was simple death-rot and how much was sessiva’s festering miasma, Thara drove the wagon, and I walked ahead.

The cleric of Rocharis was brusquely apologetic for her absence, but, as she explained, she had been occupied with a frightened young mother in the birthing bed for the first time. “And from what his colleague told me, there was little I could have done anyway,” she concluded, exculpating herself in the same breath that she directed us to bring the wagon around to the crematory.

While we ate roasted potatoes with glavren sauce in the village’s single inn, we engaged in a brief argument over whether we should wait for Mer Balara’s ashes or simply ask that they be sent on to his family in Cetho with the next caravan. Neither of our hearts were properly in it, but it made for a good distraction from the rather dire pot of tea that accompanied our meal, which the proprietor called a house blend and which seemed to be an ill-considered mish-mash of every sort of leaf imaginable. “Thou see’st Clenverada knives in every hand,” Thara said unhappily.

“I see my duty,” I countered, and poured the last dregs from the pot into his cup. No quantity of honey could salvage the sins that had been perpetrated against this tea. “And when I have delivered thee to the Archprelate, thou shalt be alive to see thine too, and perhaps thank me for it.”

He looked at my hand where it rested on the table, but he did not reach out to touch my fingers, not this time. “Have I not thanked thee?”

“Actions sing and words whisper,” I said, repeating my grandmother’s favorite phrase in her exact tones, which surprised Thara into a smile. From there I refused to re-litigate my case, and we set out on the road south with Mer Balara’s wagon directly as soon as we had finished eating.

That night, as the sun neared the horizon, I asked Thara to humor me. We would leave the wagon on the road, but we would go off the road, deeper into the woods, before we slept.

Thara was dubious, but he followed me when I left the road. “Truly, thou think’st that we are in danger from the people of Rocharis?”

“I think thou art in danger, Othala Celehar, from unthinking greed. Which thou wilt find in homelier places than Rocharis.” I rapped my knuckles on an elarin trunk and found it sound and solid. “Can’st climb a tree?”

“What?” he said, and rounded on me. “Now? Why?”

“I also think we have been followed from Rocharis. No doubt with the intention to attack us by dark of night.” Our pursuers would have seen my sword, and would not face me awake if I gave them the choice. When Thara made no move, I offered him my interlaced fingers as a first step. “If thou placest thyself out of immediate danger, thou makest my job far easier.”

He put one foot in my hands and steadied himself with one hand on my shoulder. I hefted, and he reached for the branches. After his shoes made a few ineffectual scrapes of the elarin’s soft bark, he managed to find purchase and haul himself higher, out of reach. “Stay there,” I ordered. “Unless I am slain, and they have spotted you. Then thou must run.”

“Unless thou art slain?” he repeated, and his broken voice popped like water poured on hot iron. I put my finger to my lips and he withdrew deeper into the leaves.

As quietly as I could, I moved parallel to the road, putting some distance between Thara and myself before I drew my sword and concealed myself behind the white-blossomed branches of an isstevril in early flower.

I was lucky: I counted only two men, one armed with a hand-ax and the other with a billhook the length of my hand; and the first did not see me before I moved. The hand-ax hit the ground a moment before he did, with a gaping red mouth opened in his neck, and the second man stepped back as I angled my sword toward him. “Answer me plainly, and I will let you live. Did someone send you against Othala Celehar, or did you conceive this plan on your own?”

He licked his lips. His eyes flicked from the curve of his billhook to my sword to my face. “How much is he paying you to keep him alive?” he asked. “We could cut you in on the reward—you could have Alaru’s share.”

I heard movement behind me and spun in time to block a second billhook before its wielder could bury it in my back. Both men surged forward to press me; I stepped backward only far enough that I could charge the newcomer. Flailing, he turned my blade, though I managed to nick his off arm. I fell back again before the second man could close in.

If they had been trained fighters, killers, they might have given me some trouble, pinning me between them and forcing me to fight them at the same time. But they were country laborers—and I was a trained fighter and a killer. They did not know how to corner me. The next time I came hard at the first man, my blade clove deep into his shoulder, nearly severing the limb from his chest. By the time I pulled my sword clear, the survivor had turned to run. I took him in the back, below the ribs, and left him to die of the gut wound so that I could make a broad sweep of the area. I did not find any more men, nor any tracks beyond what these three had left, and I went to find Thara where I had hidden him.

He climbed down, shedding soft bits of bark, and ran trembling hands over my coat, my stained shirt-front. Searching for wounds where there were none. The deepening shadows made it hard for me to read his face, though the low cast of his ears was plain enough. “Thou’rt unhurt, Hanu?”

“The blood is not mine.”

“And they are dead?”

“They are.”

“They...had not gotten so far as to try to kill me yet.”

“They had gotten far enough.” I picked a leaf from his lapel and released it to flutter dizzy circles to the ground. “The rest is between me and Anmura.”

Chapter Text

Before we slept, I put the bodies in the wagon. In the morning, the gut wound stank horribly, but Thara prayed over each man, touching their foreheads one by one in turn. When he finished, he had their names and their burial customs, and knew too that they had acted alone, not on any direct order. “I will need to send word to their families after we reach Cetho,” he said tiredly.

The prelate of the municipal cemetery would need to do that anyway, in order to be paid for the burials. And to see whether the families wished to have the cremains. I thought about telling Thara that he need not trouble himself, and remembered who I was talking to. He would do what he felt needful, regardless of practical considerations. “Thou’rt kind, to think of the families of the men who raised weapons against you.”

“It is not kindness,” he muttered, with a faraway look. Already he was composing those unhappy letters in his head. “It is my calling.”

We reached the outskirts of Cetho without further incident. We asked directions to the commissary department, and Thara, knuckles bone-white on the reins, drove the oxen through Cetho’s crowded outer streets. When we arrived, we handed over the wagon and our regrets for Mer Balara’s family. Then we explained about the bodies. The grooms were too astonished to ask many questions, but Thara gave them our written deposition, and made sure to tell them that Cetho’s Praeceptor could contact us in the Untheileneise Court through the offices of the Archprelate if we were needed for further questioning. It had been a point of some contention between Thara and I, but I had told him outright that he would not be prostrating himself before the Vigilant Brotherhood upon our arrival in the city, nor before whatever unfortunate prelate was in charge of the municipal cemetery. If I had anything to say about it—and by Anmura’s hand, I did—he would not be enmeshed in a legal limbo while enemies moved against him. 

In the end, the grooms let us leave entirely unimpeded, which I had not been certain they would do. The recognizance afford to the singular Mer Celehar appeared to be a deciding factor in the matter. After the imperial to-do over the Tomb of Dragons, some people now recognized Thara’s name, for better or for worse. All the more reason to get him inside the walls of the Court as quickly as possible, for whatever protection that would afford, before the city had time to fully awaken to our arrival.

We had by then been on the road for several weeks, with only our brief stopovers in Benisho and Ezho, and the condition of our clothes, to say nothing of our persons, was dismal—certainly Thara’s stint in the crown of an elarin had done no favors to his coat and shoes, and my overcoat bore both faded bloodstains and the marks of a ghoul's teeth. Our disarray might have aided us in strange and subtle ways before we arrived in Cetho; we had passed a few other trains going in the other direction, and if those wagons harbored any man with an intent to earn himself Clenverada blood-money, perhaps our grubby, road-rough appearances had afforded us some measure of disguise.

But our sorry state would do us no favors in the Untheileneise Court. As we approached the gates, Thara fretted extravagantly on whether he could decently approach the Archprelate in his current condition. “And worse still to attempt to present myself to the Emperor,” he said. “Nor indeed do I have a way to reach either of them with a message in any kind of timely fashion.” He concluded resignedly that we would have to try our luck in his kinswoman Csoru Zhasane’s house.

“I’m sure it will be a privilege to meet thy honored kinswoman,” I said.

“It will be a trial,” he countered, his ears dropping. “There is no love lost between my cousin and I. If we’re lucky, we may avoid her entirely.”

I did not much like the sound of that. “Is there anything I should know now about the widow empress, on the chance that we fail to evade her notice?”

“If…” I saw Thara summon a great effort before he could meet my eyes. “If she raises the subject of my disinheritance from the Celehada, thou—it would be a great kindness if thou didst not evince an interest.”

I promised to manifest a disinterest so vast that it could be seen even from the exalted heights of royalty.

If the guards stationed at the palace gates were skeptical of the two apparent madmen who approached, they hid it well under a layer of cool professionalism. Thara introduced himself, and me as his guardsman, sliding into the formal we with an effortlessness that I envied, having fallen farther and farther out of the habit with each day I spent outside of Prince Orchenis’s orbit. When he asked if we might be permitted access to his kinswoman’s household, the guards conferred briefly with each other before turning back to us. “If you will wait, Mer Celehar, we will send word ahead. Because of the wedding, many of the households of the court are already entertaining visitors…”

“We do not wish any more than you do to vex Csoru Zhasane with an unexpected guest,” said Thara with perfect courtly politesse, although I could see new tension in his face. “We shall be happy to wait.”

And wait we did, while the guards sent a goblin page-boy running ahead with our message. I knew the Untheileneise Court was immense, a city unto itself, but I was amazed at how long it took before the boy returned to report that the widow empress had agreed to receive her cousin.

Thara cast a sickly look at me, but what kind of intervention he sought, I could not tell, and after a moment he shrank a little into himself and said that we would be glad to follow the page-boy to Csoru Zhasane’s household directly.

In silence, we navigated the maze of the court’s interior. The halls were busy, busier even than I had expected for a locus of power and intrigue and politicking like the Untheileneise Court, but the page-boy zigged and zagged us up and down corridors until finally he could deliver us to the widow empress’s doorstep. The doorman recognized Thara, and greeted him, and agreed to arrange to have a message sent to the Emperor’s secretary. After a noticeable hesitation, he added that Csoru Zhasane awaited us in the Waterfall Room, and that a servant would accompany us there. 

The Waterfall Room contained no water, but the walls had been hung with satin tapestries dyed in varied—and, I imagined, expensive—shades of blue and turquoise, and embroidered with tiny glass beads and silver threads, the overall effect of which called cascading water unsubtly to mind. The widow empress herself perched on a massive, overwrought armchair that made her look like a doll. The tiers of her black dress, edged with blue and gold embroidery, had clearly been arranged around her for maximum effect after she sat. “Cousin,” she said, with the acid sweetness of an unripe berry, before we had even risen from our bows. “Do we misremember removing you from our household the last time we saw you? You can imagine, then, how surprised we were to hear that you wished to pay us the courtesy of a visit—and looking like the little orphan matchstick boy from the wonder-tales.” Her beautiful face lost its perfect composition for a moment, her nose folding into wrinkles before she smoothed her expression again. “We ignored our father’s orders to disown you. And now you repay that kindness by bringing your...lover into our halls?” She shuddered theatrically to show that ‘lover’ was merely the worst word she dared to speak aloud. “We wonder whether you have altogether lost the capacity to feel shame.”

I had known the widow empress was very young, and I had heard that she was very beautiful. None of the accounts in the newspapers had mentioned that she was also stupid and cruel. A wretchedly dangerous combination in proximity to privilege, as I had learned repeatedly on my way up through the ranks of the army. If I had had the benefit of a noble upbringing, I might have dared to answer her; but I had no idea what I might say to a widow empress that would be merely intemperate instead of utterly ruinous.

But Thara, though his face bleached bone-white, had shed his defeated posture. “You have the right to speak to us as you wish, cousin. But we would entreat you not to disrespect a representative of the Prince of Thu-Athamar in this way.” He gave me a slight, formal bow. “He has saved our life twice over, and we would not wish him—or Prince Orchenis—to think us ungrateful in our subjecting him to such an indignity.”

Csoru Zhasane’s lips parted in mute surprise. She knew as well as I did that her cousin did not lie in the course of his calling. She fixed her gaze on me, as if realizing for the first time that I could present her with a liability and not only a weapon that she could turn against Thara.

“We have indeed been dispatched from the Principiate Guard of Thu-Athamar.” As I had not yet written my letter of resignation, it was, technically, the truth (and it occurred to me then that Prince Orchenis would be arriving soon for the imperial wedding, and I might be able to deliver that letter and my regrets in person). Perhaps it was not appropriate for me to address the widow empress directly, but from the way she stared, I could see that she had been taken aback before she could take offense. “We have strict orders from Prince Orchenis to ensure Mer Celehar’s safety.” 

Csoru Zhasane’s expression shifted to one of unabashed calculation, and I knew she was trying to decide how badly it would hurt her petty ambitions if she were to make an enemy of the Prince of Thu-Athamar. Finally she reached up and tugged a tasseled cord that hung down beside her. “Then you must feel most welcome to stay long enough to take some refreshment in the Waterfall Room,” she said snidely. Plainly she had decided that if she did not openly disdain us, a lone guardsman could hardly complain to Prince Orchenis about the treatment he received in her household. What she offered was the minimum demanded by the rules of hospitality—or perhaps slightly less, for she then made her indifferent excuses and swept out of the room.

I waited several seconds after the door had shut to say, “Are you well?”

“It could have been worse,” said Thara. He settled into a smaller chair of polished wood, made for more ordinary backsides than those of Varenechibel IV’s widow. Against the bombastic blue of the Waterfall Room, his eyes looked pale, nearly colorless. “We rather expected it would be. We are sorry for the disrespect she showed you.”

“I am unharmed,” I said, pitching my voice for his ears only, too quiet for listeners in the hall to overhear. “Though I wish she had not spoken to thee that way. Even if she is the widow empress. Thou’rt her kin.”

“The bonds of kinship are as easily cut as ribbon.” He looked at me sidelong. “If thy family knew thee fully, would they receive thee gladly under their roofs?”

He did not ask as a challenge, or a rebuke; concealed within his candid question was a pearl of hope. I was saved from answering by the arrival of a servant with a laden tea tray. We ate finger sandwiches and drank kolveris in silence, and finger-combed and re-pinned our hair in the polished reflection of a crystal vase on the mantel of the fireplace. By the time we had eaten and restored ourselves to a limited measure of respectability, a runner arrived to inform us that the Emperor’s secretary would see us.

Chapter Text

The Emperor’s secretary, as it turned out, was almost young enough to be my son. He was handsome, round and elegant of face, his perfectly white hair swept up neatly into buns. But his eyes were ringed in red, and two or three strands of hair had escaped to hang loose around his forehead. “Mer Celehar!” he said, and rose from his chair to offer his hand to each of us in turn. “It is good to see you again. Thus we will forgive you for making our life so very difficult!”

I thought that Aisava spoke in jest, but Thara looked immediately like a hunted animal, and I second-guessed my reading of the Emperor’s secretary. “Mer Aisava, we beg your forgiveness for…” Thara trailed off there, plainly having not the slightest idea of what trespass he might have committed.

Mer Aisava beckoned us over to the table where he had been sitting. The working surface had been burdened by a forest’s worth of post and paperwork, and dry inkwells littered Aisava’s vicinity like tiny porcelain tombs. On the adjacent wall, an enormous sheet of paper had been unrolled and tacked up, looking for all the world like a battle map, marked out with squares and rectangles and arrows and writing too small for me to read without moving closer.

“May we offer you a cup of coffee?” Aisava said, and gestured to the oddly-shaped silver teapot that occupied a narrow space between two stacks of envelopes. “It is a new import from Anvernel. Scandalously expensive, but if it gets us through the planning of an imperial wedding, it is worth the cost.”

“We have never heard of tea from Anvernel,” said Thara cautiously.

“Oh, but it is not tea at all! You must try it.” Mer Aisava called for a serving girl, and told her to fetch two more cups like the empty, stained one at his elbow. Then he checked the interior of the coffee samovar and told her to bring a fresh pot as well. “Rather than the leaves of the coffee plant, it is the fruit—the seeds—that are roasted, ground to powder, and steeped.”

“Roasted seeds?”

“We drank what we called ‘barbarian’s tea’ often enough on the steppes,” I said. “It was made from the dried stems of the orthakhal plant, as the Nazhmorhathveras prepare it. It was never our favorite, but it was better than no tea at all, when the supply trains were delayed or intercepted.”

“Twig tea? How dreadful,” said Mer Aisava. “We shall have to find out whether we can carve a small piece from the imperial budget to ensure that the Anmur’theilian can buy sufficient tea for the men stationed there.”

I revised my opinion of Aisava once more, in a decidedly positive direction.

Of course he then wanted a recitation of our recent endeavors to keep Thara alive in spite of Clenverada efforts to the contrary. By the time we had detailed the attack outside of Rocharis, the servant girl returned, set a tray before us, and departed with a curtsy. Along with the coffee, a thoughtful someone in the kitchen had also sent along a basket loaded with warm doughnuts covered in powdery sugar, which Aisava urged us to partake of as he poured three cups of steaming, ebon-black liquid. I accepted mine with interest.

“You said it was terribly expensive?” Thara objected feebly. “We couldn’t possibly...”

I had already taken a sip. The coffee was bitter, but with a complexity I liked, and I tasted faraway flavors of summer berries or dark wine when I swallowed. “It is exquisite,” I said. “You are kind to share it, Mer Aisava, for we fear we would hoard it all to ourself if our positions were reversed.

“Mer Aisava.” Thara wrenched the conversation away from the topic of hot beverages with a concerted effort. “We thank you for your time, which we know is precious, now as ever. We hope you will tell us in what way we have brought new difficulties to your doorstep, and how we may redeem ourself.”

“Oh no, Mer Celehar, you must not listen to us when we have worked ourself into such a state.” Aisava did not look taken aback by Thara’s attempted penance. He gestured expansively at the battle map I had noticed on the wall. “It is only that we had finally worked out a seating arrangement for the wedding dinner that we hoped would please all parties. Now we shall have to make some revisions, if we are to figure out where to put you to minimize the contact you can expect to have with the Celehada—and to keep Csoru Zhasane from, ah, having an excess of opinion, and of course to maintain the original distance between the widow empress and the rest of her—”

“Us?” said Thara, and what color there ever was in his face drained entirely away. A single black drop escaped the rim of his cup and disappeared into the soft pile of the Barizheise rug. “At the imperial wedding?”

“The Emperor considers you a friend,” said Aisava, and took another doughnut out of the basket. “Of course he will want you there.”

“What if you waited to inform him that we were here until after the wedding?” Thara said, with a detached desperation.

“Mer Celehar,” said Aisava, kindly but firmly.

I cleared my throat. “We are hardly the expert in what one may say to or withhold from an emperor. But from what we are privileged to know of him, Edrehasivar Zhas seems a thoughtful and reasonable man. If you were to inform him, Mer Aisava, after two further attempts on Mer Celehar’s life, that we, entrusted with his safety as we are, harbor grave concerns over our ability to protect the good prelate in the crowding and chaos that are sure to surround such a celebration?”

Aisava’s eyebrows lifted even as his ears dropped a notch. “The Untheileneise Guard will be present, as well, of course, as the Emperor’s nohecharei.”

“And they will be preoccupied with the safety of the Emperor,” I said. “As they should be. Mer Celehar’s safety is our responsibility.”

“It would simplify things for us greatly,” Aisava admitted. He looked a little wry as he asked the question that courtesy demanded of him: “We hope you will not be offended not to be in attendance, Mer Celehar?”

“Not at all,” said Thara fervently, and we all startled as the door crashed open to admit a harried-looking woman with an armful of bound ledgers.

The woman was Min Olivin, the secretary of the empress-to-be, and despite Aisava’s eloquent apologies, she did not seem at all dismayed to have wasted her time rushing across the court only to find his problem already solved. She pulled a chair closer to the table for herself, dismissing both my and Mer Aisava’s offers to assist her, and set a pair of brass-framed eyeglasses on her nose. She was handsome and strong-jawed, a few years older than Aisava, and equally as tired-eyed. “While we are here, Mer Aisava, we would appreciate your assistance in the correct wording of a response to the Eisnavada with regard to their...persistence in the matter of the traditional hymn. Would you be so good as to have someone fetch us a cup, and a pot of milk?”

“We can trust Mer Celehar not to carry tales, if that is your worry,” said Aisava cheerfully, after the servant girl had been dispatched.

“They want their youngest son to perform the hymn instrumentally,” said Min Olivin, without further prompting. “On the sackpipe.”

“The sackpipe can be very melodious in the hands of a skilled musician,” I said. Min Olivin adjusted her eyeglasses and gave me a withering look. “And, unfortunately, most disharmonious in the hands of most anyone else.”

“Which by all reports includes the young Osmer Eisnavar.” Min Olivin flourished a pen like I had seen men flourish dueling swords. “How do you find Mer Aisava’s coffee?”

“It is very bitter, is it not?” said Thara. He set his cup aside and took a handkerchief from his inner pocket to dust powdery sugar from his fingers. “As orchor is, though we find it lacks orchor’s complexity.”

“Oh, but you are drinking it plain! Mer Aisava likes it so strong that he practically needs a fork and knife to manage it. We prefer to take the edge off the bitterness with a splash of milk or cream.”

The servant girl returned at this point with Min Olivin’s cup and the requested milk, which Thara and I were then obliged to try. Thara conceded that the addition had improved the coffee’s taste, though I was fairly sure from his expression that he would not have chosen it even over the most mediocre cup of Airman’s Blend .

“We enjoy it with the milk that Min Olivin has recommended, but we enjoy it equally without,” I said. I had already finished my cup, and accepted without reservation Mer Aisava’s offer to pour me a second. “We find it altered, though not necessarily improved. There is a texture to the bitterness that we enjoy.”

“Captain Olgarezh, you are a man after our own heart.” Aisava refilled his own cup and returned the coffee samovar to its place on the table, moving aside a pile of letters that had caved in to do so. “Of course the Emperor will still wish to see you, Mer Celehar, while you are at court.”

“But surely with the wedding, he will be far too busy to see us in person!” Thara protested, and turned a charming shade of pink under the ironic look that Aisava turned on him. He murmured, “We have—we have not even brought a wedding gift.”

“A visit from a friend is always a gift,” said Aisava. “And one that an Emperor too rarely receives.”

“Honestly we must thank you,” Min Olivin said, adding more milk to her coffee. “If we see one more set of bed linens or enameled cutlery or embroidered footstools, we shall run mad and abandon Mer Aisava to see this wedding off on his own.”

“Nonsense,” retorted Aisava, “for if you did go running mad, I expect you will pencil it into a fifteen-minute slot in your appointment book and return before Dach’osmer Ceredin notices you have gone.” He nodded at me. “We wish to broach one more subject while you are here, and we hope we do not seem to disrespect Captain Olgarezh by doing so, for that is not our intention. That being said, we know His Serenity has harbored concerns over Mer Celehar’s well-being. He may wish to install an additional cadre of guards—at imperial expense, we expect, although that may be an object of negotiation with the Prelacy.”

“Oh,” Thara said, and looked at me.

Unlike at the palace gates , I had an idea this time of how I might diplomatically intercede. “We do not feel in the least disrespected for the Emperor’s kind interest in our task. More guards would not necessarily be unwelcome. We do fear that they would also render it more difficult for us to pass below notice. The Clenverada cannot harm Mer Celehar if they do not know where he is.”

A isava nodded, a slight frown creasing his smooth brow. “We see what you mean. We will address your thoughts on the matter with the Emperor.”

“Thank you, Mer Aisava.”

“It is our pleasure to be able to help Mer Celehar when he will allow it.” Aisava sighed. “It is less pleasurable to be forced to give you our regrets that we cannot in good conscience occupy any more of your time. Is there any other way we can be of service to you while you are here?”

Thara said, “We expect there is little you can do about this right now, but as we are currently unwelcome in our kinswoman’s household, we still do not have a place to stay while we are at court.” Min Olivin and Mer Aisava exchanged a pained glance, and Thara hastened to add: “Though we have not yet tried our luck in the city of Cetho.”

“All the imperial apartments are packed with wedding guests,” said Min Olivin apologetically. She dug through the stack of ledgers she had brought with her and pawed through until she found a blank page. “Most everyone has already arrived, but in case of a last-minute illness or travel incident…”

“We understand that it may not be possible,” I said. “But we would preferred the limited accessibility of the court.”

“The Clenverada can still reach us here,” Thara pointed out.

“We did not say they could not. But any cheap band of cut-throats could catch us in the city’s streets, and we would be hard pressed to stop them.”

“We strongly agree with Captain Olgarezh,” said Aisava. “We will see what we can do. In the meantime, we suppose you will also need to speak to the Archprelate. If you like, we will see that you are escorted to the Untheileneise’meire now.” He cocked his head, thinking. “And to save us all some time, we will send you with a note attesting to the veracity of your need to prevail upon his Holiness’s attention two days before an imperial wedding.”

“Yes,” said Thara, and glanced at me. I nodded; it was hardly as if I had other appointments to keep. “We thank you. As always, we appreciate the efforts you take on our behalf, Mer Aisava.”

“It is nothing,” said Aisava, and went to finish his cup of coffee, only it to find it already quite dry.

Chapter Text

To my disappointment, but not my surprise, the page boy led us into a narrow warren of business-minded hallways rather than through the Othasmeire itself, which must have already been decorated in gold and imperial white for the wedding ceremony that was forthcoming. For reasons of practicality as well as preference, I was not disappointed to sit through a marriage of state, but I would have liked to see the chapel in all its glory.

We were passed along through a series of canons, made to stand over an appointments ledger that was more ink than paper, and finally pawned off on a nervous-looking novice while a pair of canons went off—still arguing over Mer Aisava’s note—to speak to the Archprelate in person. The novice clearly could not tell where to file us in her mental hierarchy; we had presented a letter from the Emperor’s secretary, but her direct superiors had also evaluated us as a nuisance. She chose a safe middle ground of ineffectual flitting, occasionally asking if we were quite comfortable, did we want her to send for tea, were the lamps too bright?

Thara sat with hands folded and gave single-word answers. For my own part, I found myself unconscionably prone to squirming, as if I did not know where to put my hands, and I bit my tongue more than once to keep myself from being rude to the poor girl. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone would make an attempt against Thara in the Untheileneise’meire, but I could not shake off the nervous energy that plagued me—I felt like a young man awaiting his first battle on the steppes again, except that my back hurt more than it had twenty years ago.

At last one of the canons returned and said, as if he had a mouthful of rotten fruit, “The Archprelate wishes to invite Mer Celehar to dine with him tonight.”

Thara’s ears twitched in badly suppressed alarm. “Surely he is already otherwise engaged?”

“His Holiness has asked us to send his regrets to Lord Isthanar.” The canon spoke now with the rhythm of recitation: “He fears otherwise that his busy schedule does not allow him the time to hear an accounting of Mer Celehar’s past weeks. We will see to it that a page is dispatched to fetch you before dinner—whence shall we have him sent?”

“Oh,” said Thara, and colored slightly. “Well...”

We spent the next few interminable hours in the company of the same novice, who had now decided that we were indeed guests of some esteem, and who had become no less anxious for it. Her questions, still ineffectual, now probed around the edges of Thara’s relationship to the Archprelate and his business at the court. Thara, oblivious, continued to fob her off with monosyllables. I had never suffered to much for having to stand still, and I entertained an elaborate fantasy of climbing the walls to carve an escape route through the wooden ceiling.

The invitation to dine was not extended to me; nor had I expected it to be. What I had expected was a formal occasion between the head of the Prelacy and one of his many agents in the wider world. Instead, the Archprelate greeted us at his own door, wearing nothing more elaborate than a canon’s frock coat, and exclaimed, “Thara! It is good to see thee, although I wish it were under kinder circumstances.”

“Holiness,” said Thara, while I processed the Archprelate’s friendly informality. I suspected that Thara could as easily have stood on his head as returned the Archprelate’s use of thou. “I am glad to be here.”

To Thara’s further embarrassment, I was permitted to make a brief examination of the Archprelate’s dining salon—small, compared to that belonging to Prince Orchenis, and far less ornately decorated. The table was a simple rectangle of polished wood, with some concessions to elegance made in the curving slope of its legs; a pair of paintings on the walls depicted scenes from history’s holiest moments, neither of which sparked recognition in my less-than-pious heart. Once I had satisfied myself, I took my most formal leave, and went to occupy a watchful position outside one of the dining room’s two entrances; the one closer to the front doors of the Archprelate’s apartments.

Over the tap of cutlery on porcelain, the voices of Thara and the Archprelate reached me, but not their words. I was relieved for that. I had unavoidably eavesdropped on more than one conversation while Thara lived under Prince Orchenis’s roof, and I did not want to repeat the experience. I still had a certain directionless energy, a desire for movement, and while I kept myself from pacing aimless, restless circles, my mind cast for something with which to fidget and found itself back in Amalo, on one of those nights when I had not been able to avoid overhearing intimacies never intended for my ears. The night after our visit to the University of Amalo, I had been sorely relieved when Mer Pel-Thenhior arrived; he could go where I ought not, and say what courtesy forbade me. And then, hearing them speak, Pel-Thenhior’s voice carrying and Thara’s falling almost below the limits of my hearing, I felt a different kind of relief; a more sordid kind that comes wrapped in its own shame. Until that night, I had understood that they were lovers. I felt the claws of jealousy on my shoulder only in the moment that it leapt away.

They’d emerged together after a few minutes, Thara and Pel-Thenhior, and hustled me along to dinner at the tea-house owned by Pel-Thenhior’s mother. It was only some weeks later that I’d found myself alone with Pel-Thenhior, when he left the bedroom with another armful of letters to post. After we had exchanged parting bows, but before Pel-Thenhior could step out of the apartment altogether, I spoke my mind before I could think better of it. “We have been assigned before to those who have been relegated to a solitary sort of exile. We are glad that Othala Celehar has friends to ease his heart.” I could not help adding, “We ourself make for sorry company, with one eye always on the door.”

Pel-Thenhior had paused to evaluate this. He was intense in his friendship, he and Thara had agreed, and I could see that intensity now as he considered my words. “What was it that made you agree to this duty, Captain? It cannot be much less solitary for you than it is for him.”

I’d tried to consider my answer with equal care. “We had met Othala Celehar before, in passing. He struck us then, and still does, as a man who sees himself solely in how he may be of service to others.”

“And who does not think about how little ‘service’ he would provide as a corpse,” Pel-Thenhior had agreed dryly. “A challenging sort of man to guard, we suspect.”

“Your intuition is sound. Fortunately, we are very good at what we do, and we do not mind rising to meet a challenge.”

That had won me a slow smile from Pel-Thenhior. “No,” he’d said. “That we suspected as well.”

One of the Untheileneise’meire’s kitchen girls approached to offer me something to eat: a mug of onion soup, and a soft roll filled with minced meat. As I ate, the voices behind me ebbed and flowed: pleasantries, business, I could not tell. I thought back to something Mer Aisava had said, and was struck by wonder: to think that I stood alongside an opera director, an Archprelate, and an Emperor to call Thara friend!

Then I wondered if the reverse were true—whether Thara would have called me a friend—and scraped up the last of the soup with the last of the roll to finish both at once.

When Thara and the Archprelate came to collect me, Thara looked as bewildered as he customarily did when someone had treated him well. “The Archprelate has been generous enough to secure rooms for us.”

“Not generous at all on our part,” said the Archprelate genially. I had never been much for formal religious gatherings myself, but I could understand why people would gladly sit and listen to a man with a voice like his. “But perhaps on the part of the two canons whom we have requested to share quarters for the time being.”

Sensing I was expected to participate in the conversation, I bowed. “Then we appreciate their generosity, Holiness, and your kindness.”

He smiled. “We have you to thank in turn, we think, for Mer Celehar’s life.”

“And we have him to thank for ours.” The Archprelate cocked his head, and I explained. “In a village called Benisho, he stilled a ghoul that had gotten a taste of our blood.”

“Ah,” said the Archprelate, with the certainty of revelation, and stunned me by continuing: “‘The circle of radiance, unbroken’.”

Thara looked between us, his ears tilting with curiosity, and the Archprelate left it to me to clarify, for he could not possibly know how he had flayed me to the core with one simple phrase. I did not care for shrines and chapels; there was one holy place in my heart, and the Archprelate had touched it. “It is an aspect of Anmura,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Rather an uncommon one. In fact we have never heard referenced by any man outside the Anmur’theileian.”

“The life you save may save another, and in this way the circle is sustained, a radiance without end.” The Archprelate nodded to me. I told myself I should not have been surprised; he was the Archprelate, and thus a student of all gods, in all guises. “In this case, fortuitously, your own, Captain Olgarezh.”

“Our own continued existence is not why we seek to follow the circle of radiance.” And because my heart had been opened, because of the Archprelate’s easy presence, I could not help but add: “But we are nonetheless grateful for it.”

“As are we.” The Archprelate lowered his head fractionally, the sort of bow that a man of his stature could give to a man of mine without it seeming a mockery. “Now. If you will be so good as to excuse us, we have, unfortunately, any number of other matters pressing for our attention. Mer Celehar has direction from us on the subject of the next assignment where we could use his particular gifts, and if you are amenable to accompanying him, Captain Olgarezh, we will see to it that our representatives write up a contract for your continued services.”

Chapter Text

We spoke little as a novice—thankfully a different and less anxious one—guided us a short distance away and showed us inside a suite in a narrower hall. Members of the Prelacy took a vow of poverty, but while the rooms of the junior canon whom we had displaced were far from luxurious, they were much more comfortable than anywhere we had slept since leaving Benisho. “ I hope that thou harbor’st no reservation about my accepting the Archprelate’s offer ,” I said, as Thara took a seat at the canon’s small table. Alone as we were, I gave in to my desire to pace. “Thou must confess, I continue to find myself in direly interesting circumstances while I am in thy orbit.”

Thara looked at me with a glimmer of amusement. “Thou dost not even yet know where he wants to send me next. I wonder if thou wilt not revise thy expectations when thou hear e st. Wilt not sit?”

I did, opposite him, and immediately set my heel to drumming. “Mer Aisava’s coffee has done this to me,” I realized aloud. “I feel as if I have drunk four pots of orchor one after the other.”

“Ah, thou see’st now? I knew it was an evil concoction.”

“It is a delicious concoction that makes me feel as if I could climb the mooring mast and fly from the top of it.” It was a feeble joke, but he laughed, and I felt even more convinced of my own powers of flight. “Tell me more about the work the Archprelate has set before thee.”

He did, explaining the crux of the problem: a number of recently-deceased bodies going missing from certain chapterhouses of the Vigilant Brotherhood where they had been carried after their discovery, or from ulimeires where they had been laid out for burial or burning. “The Vigilant Brotherhood cannot, or will not, spend more resources locating bodies that are already dead, from suicides and murders that have already been resolved, and the ability of the prelacy to investigate is limited by their other obligations.”

“And for want of a Witness for the Dead, I imagine.”

“It is difficult to speak to a body that has already gone missing,” Thara said wryly. Then he folded his hands on the table and spoke more seriously. “These disappearances have been happening in Ezho. How dost thou feel about returning there so soon?”

I felt my ears lift. “Ezho! I will be obliged to see my family this time; if they find out I’ve been there twice this spring without seeing them, they will hunt me down and string me up by my thumbs and then thou wilt be entirely on thy own with the Clenverada.”

“A fate I do not desire in the least,” Thara agreed. “Thou must visit thy family.”

“Only the ones I like, with any luck,” I said. “And thou canst make thy pilgrimage sooner than thou hadst hoped.”

“Yes, I do look forward to it. Wilt thou climb with me?”

“Gladly; though I have already done it once before,” I confessed. “My mother all but frog-marched me to the foot of the stair, before I went off to war. My heart was not in it, if I’m honest. But I think Csetheio must have heard my mother’s prayers echoed in my footsteps, for here I still stand.”

“Then thou must thank thy mother on my behalf.”

“Am I thy errand-boy now as well as thy guard?” I laughed. “Thou canst tell her thyself, when thou meet’st her.”

A terrible stillness settled over us—the beleaguered sheleis gathering its strength for one more flight. But I had lost my patience with the hunt, or rather with the incompetence of the hunters who had trod den these steppes before me. “ If ever I meet the man who has caused thee to so fear a nother’s regard ,” I said, my voice low and my ears dropping to match, “I will not have thanks for him, I tell thee plainly.”

H is hand went to his neck, grasping at his shirt through his frock coat, and he shoved his chair back from the table with a screech that set my teeth on edge. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Thara—”

“No, I’m sorry, I am overcome with…” He shook his head and settled on: “Weariness.”

And he disappeared into the junior canon’s bedroom, shutting the door almost silently behind him. I sat at the table for a few more minutes, hoping he might emerge, damning my own bullheadedness and Mer Aisava’s coffee in equal measure, unfair though it was to the drink. It was some petty consolation to me that Aisava would probably not have the blessing of sleep that night, either.

Finally I rose to move the long wooden bench that the canon must have used to entertain company, and Thara still did not show himself when I dragged it noisily across the floor to set against the apartment’s entrance. It was not much of an extra measure of safety, but it improved my humor ever so slightly, at least as much for the physical movement it allowed me as for the chance to ward off unwanted visitors.

The comforts of a junior canon’s life did not, apparently, extend to extra blankets or pillows, and I was not about to knock on the bedroom door to demand a share of the bedding. I still had no nightshirt, so I undressed to my shirt and stockings, sadly stained and laddered though the latter were. My frock coat covered the greater part of the bench, and I rolled up my trousers to place under my head. Once I lay down, I threw my overcoat over myself. The bench was not quite long enough for my height, and trousers did not make a very good pillow. I folded myself into the most comfortable position I could and lay there staring dry-eyed at the ceiling.

When the bedroom door opened a few hours later, I did not rise, or lift my head, until a new weight displaced my feet at the far end of the bench. “How canst thou sleep like this?” Thara asked.

“Truthfully, I cannot.” I pushed myself to a sit, the backs of my legs resisting where they stuck to the warmed wood. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that Thara was still dressed, and his hair no more mussed than usual; I doubted he had made any attempt to find sleep at all. “And I don’t think Mer Aisava’s ‘evil concoction’ should bear all blame for that. Thara, I am sorry I spoke out of turn.”

“Thou didst mean well,” he said. His hand was still at his throat, and I saw he held the locket that Lenet Athmaza had made for him. “But no man has ever hurt me in the way thou thoughtst. I—his name was Evru, and thou wilt not meet him in this life. An thou couldst, he would not deserve thy ire.”

He laid out the bones of the story for me—the man he had loved, the terrible crime which had required the testimony that only a Witness for the Dead could provide , the inevitable execution. “As shy as a deer,” Thara said more than once, wandering up and down the halls of memory, and privately I marvele d that either of them had ever taken the first step toward the other. Or maybe Evru’s ghost was not the only one haunting this conversation—what version of himself had Thara bur ied , before ever he came to Amalo?

“Blessed goddesses,” I said, when he had sewn the story up into the shroud of its ending. I wanted to say more, and did not know what. I did not know the prayers of compassion for the dead by rote; nor did compassion alone seem enough to offer. “What a terrible thing.”

His hand left the locket and settled at his side. “ He was left with little choice.”

“And thou hadst none—thy calling being what it is. Thou being who thou art. If he knew thee, he should have known that.” Again my thoughts had run ahead of my good judgment, and Thara was struck silent. This time, I could not sit with the stillness, and I wrenched more words out of my mouth. “I am sorry for thy grief, and for summoning it to the front of thy thoughts. Thou wearest thy scars more privately than I. It was not my right to remark upon them so freely.”

“My grief does not lie on thy shoulders. Thou needst make no apology for that.”

“It lies on thy shoulders,” I said. I leaned toward him, and my overcoat slid to the floor, but I was not cold in the least. “I would lighten it, if I could.”

Thara glanced aside at me, then away again. “It will not be lightened.”

“Counterbalanced, then. I would not deny thee thy grief. Only—” And it was my turn to risk the briefest brush of my fingers along the back of his wrist. He turned his hand at my touch, but I had already withdrawn. “Only let me offer thee some small joy as well.”

For a moment he sat without moving. Then he pushed to his feet. I swallowed his name unspoken. I would not call him back or beg him for what he could not gladly give. I had taught myself long ago to pull the fangs from my longings and lusts before they could poison me; or worse yet, their object.

But Thara did not remove himself to the bedroom . He stood over me—me in only my shirt, and him still fully clothed —and desire ignited in me like a fever I would never seek to quench. He put his hand s behind my head, where I could not see them, but I felt my hairpins drop away, one by one, and the ribbon that held my topknot loosened until all my hair slid free to brush my shoulders. It was an intimacy that I did nothing to stop, but when he let go , I caught him by both wrists and held his hands to my face, my neck.

“It is like trying to strike a match in the hearth after escaping a house fire,” he said. His breath came faster, and mine too, both of us nearing the end of the chase now. His thumb followed the line of the mark on my face: over the bridge of my nose, across my cheekbone, to the corner of my lip. “I know that, without it, a long cold winter lies ahead. But I still fear what else will burn.”

“Then it is fortunate thou hast someone to whom thy safety has been entrusted,” I said, and pressed my lips to his palm. He drew a short, sharp breath, but I did not know what feeling it betokened; in the dark, pleasure and fear sound the same. “Thou needst only ask me to stop, and I will.”

“And if I ask thee to continue?”

“I will do that, too,” I said.

This way to the filth (explicit missing scene)

I managed to sleep a short spell on the bench; my time in the Anmur’theileian had taught me well enough both the necessity of resting when one could and the skills to do so, although in the morning, my back reminded me that most of my most ambitious achievements in the realm of sleep had been accomplished when I was a much younger man. At nine of the clock, a novice brought us tea and brown rolls with kippered herrings to break our fast. Before he left, he also told us how to find the baths reserved for the use of the canonry, and where to leave our frock coats so that they might be laundered during our stay in the Untheileneise’meire—a mercy to us and to the absent junior canon alike.

While we ate, I watched Thara closely for the marks of regret. He was quiet, but it seemed to me that his distance was a thoughtful one rather than self-recriminatory, for now and then he asked me questions about Ezho, which I answered to the best of my memory. Afterward, we left our frock coats outside the door, where the novice had indicated, and went down to the baths.

We bathed one at a time, neither of us lingering in the water—me because my duty demanded it, and Thara, presumably, because a pleasant bath would have violated some ascetic vow or another. There was one other man present—prelate or canon, I did not know; without their coats of office all men had the same rank—but he departed shortly after we arrived. While I bathed, and then while he did, Thara and I pretended to ignore one another. Or, at least, I pretended; I could not speak on Thara’s behalf, but I could not abide to watch him pull the pins from his hair and be forbidden to intervene.

But after he had finished, and we had returned to the canon’s rooms, he approached me with a thin veneer of boldness over his customary reserve, and asked if I would be so kind as to help him re-braid his hair. He took the pins out himself, while I pillaged the junior canon’s toilette for a comb, and laid them out in a neat row on the table. I was fighting a losing battle against his curls when he spoke again. “It was thy eyes, from the first, that moved me. The color. They are…striking.”

It moved me, too, to hear him say so aloud, for I knew it must have cost a premium in the currency of courage. The comb’s teeth caught on a snarl, and we both winced. “For me, it was thy passion.”

Thara laughed, hearing jest in the words I had most sincerely spoken. “Few would accuse me of being a passionate man.”

“Only those who have not seen thee in pursuit of thy calling.” I tugged at the comb again. “And if I am honest, I was also quite taken with thy curls. Though I did not know then how stubborn they could be.” And indeed, to my frustration, the finished braid was only a little neater than his usual handiwork.

Chapter Text

Later that morning, a page-boy knocked on our door, and announced the Praeceptor of Cetho. Though he leaned on a brass-headed cane, Praeceptor Aithenar was taller than me, a full-blooded elf, with pale gray eyes. I guessed him to be in his late fifties, but my perceptions of a man’s age had been colored by my years on the steppes; without years of sun exposure to carve premature lines, he might as easily have been sixty or more. Two other members of the Vigilant Brotherhood had accompanied him, and these waited, patient and silent, in the hall with me while the Praeceptor questioned Thara alone. Then we were obliged to switch places, Thara taking the wooden chair that had been placed outside the junior canon’s rooms, while I sat inside, at the small table, opposite the Praeceptor.

Aithenar did not preamble. “We are led to understand that this is not the first time you have killed men in the defense of Mer Celehar.”

“We regret to say that you have correctly understood. Mer Celehar was also attacked a few weeks ago by a former colleague among the Principiate Guard who had been suborned, most regrettably, by his own greed.” I for one regretted very much indeed that Ivoranar had been such a morally susceptible cretin.

“And you believed the three decedents to have been similarly suborned?”

“One of them offered us a cut of the blood money they expected to receive for their efforts.”

“Was this before or after you took action against them?”

Having now gathered some idea of the direction in which the Praeceptor wished to lead his questioning, I regarded him coolly across the junior canon’s table. I was intensely aware of my ears and I fought to maintain their posture as impartial and untroubled as I could. I had killed, and not always for reasons I found morally justifiable; that cast enough of a shadow across my thoughts before his implication that we sought out reasons to spill blood. “We intercepted them after they had followed us from the road, but before they could discovered Mer Celehar’s position. We cut one of them quickly down in order to improve our chances of overpowering them before they could use their numbers against us.”

“You feared for your life against three fur trappers armed with hand tools?” The Praeceptor spoke so blandly that he almost managed to frame this as a simple statement rather than the gross insult it was. Men who had never fought blade to blade did not understand that even a good swordsman was not a wonder-tale’s swashbuckling hero who cheerfully faced ten-to-one odds—he might easily be overwhelmed by two or three men who could pin him in, take him from the unguarded back or side.

I did not answer insult with outrage. My father had taught me too well for that. “No. But we had a professional obligation to fear for Mer Celehar’s life.”

“Of course we do not wish to call your professionalism into question.” Praeceptor Aithenar moved his cane from hand to hand. “The transition from army to civilian life is a difficult one for many men. Taking a position as a guardsman, we are sure, has helped to ease the way. Do you enjoy the work?”

It took a moment before I could muster any response beyond cool silence. I did not know whether he felt he could address me thus: because my eyes were not cornflower-blue nor the clear rainy gray of Mer Aisava; or because of the twenty years’ service I had paid. Military men and members of the Brotherhood served Anmura one and all, but the bonds that connected us were those of enmity as often as kinship. To some among the Brotherhood, the army attracted men of a brutish, violent nature: those called to provoke violence rather than prevent and correct it. In this, they were not entirely wrong—although I had met more than one Brother with similar inclinations in my time—and perhaps that was why the Praeceptor’s insinuations rankled all the more. “We are neither a gentleman’s son nor a young man. We have our trade and few opportunities at our age to learn a new one.” And I added, though I should not have, “Though we are happy to entertain any suggestions you have.”

“It is a sensitive thing, matching a man’s career to his temperament.” Aithenar looked impassively down at me; and why should he have been troubled? He had gotten the intemperate remark he wished from me. “Mer Celehar speaks highly of your character, though he has only known you some few weeks. We must hope that the Prince of Thu-Athamar can offer a similar attestation, if he can spare us his precious time while he is at court.”

“Yes, let us hope that indeed,” I said, using the plural instead of the formal, and only a little sarcastically.

The Praeceptor nosed around with a few more questions, searching for holes or contradictions—what kind of tree had I ordered Mer Celehar into? Had that first man been armed with ax or billhook?—but as I spoke truthfully, I had no trouble frustrating his efforts. When he had satisfied himself, as far as that were possible, he departed with terse excuses, and I had only a moment to fix my ears before Thara returned.

“That took longer than I expected,” he said curiously, and I smiled, and told him that naturally two men of Anmura would have plenty to make conversation about.

Though we must wait for the Archprelate to make arrangements for our travels, I did not get the chance I had hoped for to deliver my regrets to Prince Orchenis in person. The prince was a busy man, and I did not begrudge him his time, not least because the note I sent did merit a response, and in his own hand no less. He wrote tersely, but it was a terseness I was accustomed to from long exposure, and one I knew was attributed to his plain manner of thought and speech:

To Captain Hanu Olgarezh, our regards;

We are sorry to lose your service, but it pleases us to know that Othala Celehar remains under your watch. We wish you travels ironically free of any reason to use those skills for which you have been engaged.

It was signed with his name, Orthenis Clunethar, and otherwise naked of salutations.

Two nights later, we sat in the junior prelate’s room playing cards when we heard the first of the music drifting to us from the Othasmeire. Though the hall outside was as silent as a tomb—even the lowly novices and junior canons who were not invited to the ceremony proper would be celebrating privately with friends or nearby kin—we were not alone, not with the voices of the choir to welcome us. The cards were quickly forgotten, and we sat to listen even as the songs waxed and waned over the course of hours.

In its final fading, we lost the music altogether; there would be dancing and merriment in the Untheileian, but it was too far from the halls occupied by the Prelacy for us to have any joy of it. Thara collected the cards and began to deal them out once again, but I stood. “We beg your pardon, Othala Celehar, but dost thou dance?”

If the play of formal informality had begun to grate on him yet, he did not show it in his slight smile. “Not since we were a child, Captain Olgarezh.”

“Oh, that is all very well,” I said dismissively, and offered him my hand, “for we do.”

Not gracefully, of course, but I had made no assertion to the contrary, and I hummed out-of-tune and off-beat while I tried to remember the steps I had so rarely made use of. Soon we were both trying—unsuccessfully—to lead. We laughed like men deep in their cups, or like children who had not yet learned to shy away from their own joy, and when a knock sounded at the door we both startled.

I ordered Thara into the bedroom and picked up my sword where I had left it, still in its scabbard, to rest against the wall. “Who is there?” I called, with my ear against the door.

“Our name is Varanu!” piped a small bright voice. “We have brought you something to eat, Mer Celehar, if you will have it?”

I let the door open a scant inch. In the hall, a goblin girl held up a tray piled with fine food: a carafe of blood-dark wine, good bread and a pot of golden oil, tender lamb on the skewer, custard with candied oranges...The girl was breathing fast, but with impatience and effort, I thought, not subterfuge or fear. “Mer Aisava bid us fetch you a bit of the wedding feast,” she said, taking me for Thara, and bobbed a tardy curtsy. I could do nothing but accept the tray she thrust at me. With my thanks, she sped away again, back to whatever celebration from which she had been dislodged by Aisava’s instructions.

Thara emerged from the bedroom to peer dubiously at a dish of fondant potatoes. “Surely Mer Aisava has more important things to occupy his thoughts right now than our dinner.”

“I think there is very little that does not occupy Mer Aisava’s thoughts at any given moment,” I said, “and I certainly do not envy him that.” But I could see that, although Mer Aisava’s solicitousness formed the substance of Thara’s objection, it had not provided the true animus of his concern. “The serving-girl heard nothing but two men in good spirits over the wedding of their Emperor. She has no tales to carry.”

Thara accepted this, if not without reservation, then at least without argument. We picked the plates clean, though we did not finish the carafe of wine—my duty did not allow for overindulgence, and Thara was too abstemious by far. Duty and dignity did not, of course, prevent us a toast to the health and long happy lives of the Empress and Emperor.

Once we had eaten our fill, I carried the tray out to the hall for the servants to dispose of in the morning (whenever ‘morning’ might arrive, on the morrow). When I returned, I made my courtliest bow. “Hast thou reserved one more dance for us, Othala Celehar?”

He shook his head ruefully. “We fear we have enjoyed Mer Aisava’s largesse too much to be safely jounced around in a zhoravel.”

I held out my hand, which Thara took with only the briefest hesitation. Before he could think better of it, I pressed his knuckles to my lips and pulled him to his feet. This time, there was no out-of-tune humming, no wild back-and-forth reeling. I kept his hand in mine, and settled my other arm about his waist. With my hand on the small of his back, I applied the slightest pressure, urging him close against me without forcing his nearness. His free hand found its place on the back of my arm, and together we drifted in aimless arcs around the junior canon’s rooms. I did not delude myself that I could heal all that had hurt him. As I had told him already, I would never seek to amputate him from his grief—had that same grief not made him into the man that I knew? But it was good to lighten what sorrows I could. Some lesser version of the circle of radiance, perhaps—one that I had managed to handle with the care it deserved, a circle I had not managed to batter and break: the life I brightened might go on to brighten another. And, unburdened by any expectation that that life should be my own, I was free to enjoy what time we might have together.

Chapter Text

We slept away much of the day after the wedding, along with, I presumed, most of the rest of the Court, and received notice in the evening that our passage on an airship to Ezho had been booked for the end of the week. Thara expressed a tepid horror of the expense, but since I had never been on an airship before, I told him he would have to consider it part of the cost of my continued service.

The following morning, we had risen and dressed at a more typical hour, but before a serving-girl appeared with our breakfast, a page-boy knocked at the door instead, and bid us come to the Emperor’s rooms directly.

We spared a moment’s frantic attention to neaten the drape of our coats and the placement of our hairpins before following the boy out into the Court. I let myself have a moment to regret my uniform coat—still in the colors of a Principate Guard to which I no longer belonged, and which had never fit quite exactly, as I had bought it secondhand, and its original owner must have had an inch or two in the shoulders that I lacked—before making myself set such thoughts aside. Emperors had reigned who would summon a man and hold him to account for the circumstances of his appearance that he could not have altered, but I did not think Edrehasivar was such an Emperor.

After we were ushered through the metal grilles of the Alcethmeret, the boy ushered us to a close and comfortable room from which the smell of baked apples unmistakably issued. Inside, four people sat to eat: I recognized Mer Aisava and Min Olivin, both looking much fresher than they had two days ago. I had not expected the Emperor himself to be waiting for us—though of course he was not waiting; he was breaking his fast and speaking with his secretary, not merely sitting around in the expectation of our exalted company—nor had I expected to meet the Empress at all, but who else could the strong-jawed young woman in her white-and-green dressing gown be? She took a sip of tea and gazed at us with as much scrutiny as the Emperor’s nohecherai. Or at least as much scrutiny as the young soldier in his blue coat applied; the maza’s look, behind his round glasses, offered more in the way of polite curiosity than evaluation.

Thara was already bowing deeply, and I imitated him, adding a few degrees of depth to the bend of my back, as I was no special friend of the Emperor. Edrehasivar finished his conversation with Aisava, neither hurrying himself nor purposefully delaying our comfort, and bid us rise. When I straightened, I found myself subjected to the Emperor’s thoughtful, appraising eyes. Thara had warned me that he had told the man about Evru, and I did not know what to read into his look now. He had a quiet, weary dignity despite his youth, and a touch of color that might have been excitement or embarrassment in his cheeks. I found an odd familiarity in the expression, and it took me a moment to match it against the pleased, awkward look that young men of the battalion often wore after their first visits to the brothel. Csetheio Zhasan has made a man of the Emperor, I thought with a twinge of hysteria, and then: merciful goddesses, Hanu, thou canst not laugh.

In my private revelations, I had missed the exchange of greetings between Thara and the Emperor, and the invitation to sit and eat. I hurried to draw out a chair opposite Thara’s, and sat as still as I could while plates and cutlery and cups of tea and pressed juice appeared in front of me, dispensed by the hands of servants who moved like invisible spirits. Before I could fortify myself with a sip of isevren, Edrehasivar turned to me and said with an elegant mix of poise and kindness, “We understand we have you to thank for Mer Celehar’s safety.”

“It is both our duty and our pleasure, Serenity,” I said, trying to thread a needle between stiffness and overfamiliarity, and unsure of my success on either account. “The othala is a good man, and the world would be worse without him in it.”

If that was more than I should have said to an Emperor, I could not tell from the faces of his nohecharei behind him. The tall soldier continued to scowl , and the maza only smiled beatifically.

Mer Aisava turned the conversation then to the matter of the Clenverada, and Thara related an account of the past few weeks while I tried to eat the breakfast that had been settled in front of me without coming across as a barbarian. Fortunately it was a baked porridge with hot apples and walnuts, topped with thick yellow custard, and I had only two spoons—one obviously sized for my teacup—rather than a bewildering array of forks and knives from which to choose. I took small bites and took care not to talk with my mouth full, which was aided by my having very little to say, unless Mer Aisava or the Emperor prompted Thara with a request for additional detail he could not provide.

“We are sorry, in any event, to have brought these unfortunate events to your attention in the middle of your nuptials, Serenity, Csetheio Zhasan,” Thara finished finally, and bobbed his head briefly, the merest suggestion of a bow.

“If there is anything we have learned so far in our reign,” said Edrehasivar, with a small wry smile, “it is that such things will happen without regard to our preferred schedule.”

“And they do always seem to happen all at the same time.” Mer Aisava refilled his cup—from the pot of isevren today, I saw. “Often very inconveniently. We must count ourselves luckily that the only event of any significance at this year’s Winternight celebration was a touch of overindulgence on the part of Dach’osmer Havremar.”

Min Olivin sniffed. “And the resulting fisticuffs with the young gentleman from the Lothezemada.”

“The first blow seemed to come as quite a surprise to Dach’osmer Havremar and Lara Lothezemar alike,” observed the maza mildly. The other nohecharis sighed heavily.

“It gives us the greatest frustration,” the Empress cut in, “that the Clenverada have chosen to address their—grievances—” (this word she pronounced as if it pained her personally) “—through violence, knowing that neither we nor Mer Celehar can offer recourse in kind.” She used the plural, collecting her husband and both secretaries with a sharp gesture.

“We are sorry to disappoint you with the reminder that you have not married a tyrant,” said Edrehasivar, but even I could see that the rebuke was offered as a private joke between the two of them. “It would simplify many things greatly for us if we could simply ask you to point a blade at the right necks.”

“Oh, Serenity, we beg that you do not encourage her,” exclaimed Min Olivin in mock horror, and Mer Aisava and the Empress laughed softly behind their teacups.

A small smile touched the Emperor’s face, too, but his gaze had grown deep and thoughtful. “ We are sorry, in any case, Mer Celehar, that you r devotion continue s to be answered with threats and danger of the gravest kind.”

Thara looked up from where he had made the barest dent in his porridge. “It is our calling, Serenity.”

“Yes,” said Edrehasivar, in the tones of one well rehearsed in ending arguments, “and yet we wish that your calling would be more often met with gratitude than with anger. We have only one voice with which to offer that gratitude, but we do so gladly.” He lifted his teacup, holding it thoughtfully without drinking. “We will think on the matter of the Clenverada.” With a nod to the rest of his company, he shifted to the plural. “We will all think on the matter. Even if we cannot, and would not, answer violence with violence, we hope a just solution presents itself.”

I had not needed much in the way of convincing, but I decided just then that I liked the young Emperor very much—very much indeed.

Despite the pleasures of our brief interviews with Mer Aisava and the Emperor himself, Thara and I were both more than ready to depart the Court with our scheduled airship two days later, after depositing his latest collection of carefully-addressed letters in the hands of a page-boy who would see them to the courier post. “We might have departed already, if the Archbishop had sent us with another wagon train,” Thara said fretfully, as we made turn after turn through the Court’s labyrinthine halls. “And the expense would have been considerably less.”

“We could have departed four days ago and still not arrive in Ezho for four more,” I said cheerfully. “We will get there faster, with fewer opportunities for the Clenverada to arrange for thee to be stabbed or hanged or mauled by bears in the woods. Moreover, this will be my first travel by airship! I think it is very unworthy that thou wouldst seek to deny it to me.”

“As long as thou keep’st one hand on the railing of the mooring mast until we board,” he said wryly, as the guards opened the doors into the great courtyard for us. It was a bright, clear morning, and out beyond the wall, the rooftops of Cetho shone prettily in the night’s rain. “I think that thou hast not partaken of any more coffee, but I would prefer to know for certain that thou dost not intend to make thy own personal attempt at flight.”

“I will content myself to be a passenger,” I assured him, “for it will be much less—”

My body recognized the sound I heard and reacted for me before I could process it on any kind of intellectual level. I seized the back of Thara’s collar and forced him to a crouch in front of me, throwing my arms around him even as I shoved him lower. Crossbow, I thought, my understanding driving home in the same fractured moment that a poorly aimed bolt skipped over the flagstones to our left. “Back inside!” I shouted, and urged him forward within the cover of my arms.

The second bolt caught me mid-stride, a hammer blow to the back of my shoulder. Its impact spun me to the side; desperately I grabbed for Thara and wrenched him to the ground beneath me even as I fell.

“What—” he said, and his eyes flashed wide with sudden fright. His face was very close to mine, cast in deep shadow by my head and the cover from my good arm. “Thou’rt injured!”

Around us, at some great distance, people screamed. Heavy footsteps thundered across the courtyard. The wound was not grave; I could feel the head of the bolt scraping against my shoulder blade when I moved, which meant it had stopped short at the bone and not penetrated deeper into my chest. Blood had begun to ooze down my arm within my sleeve, but from the quantity I was not afraid that the wound had opened an artery. Pain asserted itself, but that could be set aside for now. “I’ll be fine,” I said, unable to take the time or breath to explain any of that to Thara. “Get back inside—the Imperial Guard can protect thee.”

“Hanu, thou’rt bleeding,” he said blankly.

I shouted back into his shocked face: “Thou wilt do worse than bleed if they get a clear shot at thee!” But I could see that he was frightened—not on his own behalf, but on mine, the holy fool. I made one more effort to comfort and motivate him alike. “My wound will mend. Thy cold corpse cannot. Stay with me and I will shelter thee as best I can.”

He nodded gravely and let me pull him to his feet, keeping him always within the curve of my good arm. “Faster, faster,” I chanted, but it was my legs, not his, that stumbled and answered sluggishly, and soon Thara had his arm under my shoulders to take some of my weight onto himself. He must not put himself between me and danger, that was counter to my duty and my every instinct—yet again would I break the circle of radiance with blood that must not be shed. But my tongue was too thick to countermand him, and my head had grown hazy with the pain that refused to be ignored. Another staggering step, and we collided with a wall of blue that dissolved into half a dozen individual guardsmen. I thrust my bloody hand out—only a small stain, surely it was not so severe as to incapacitate me as swiftly as this?—and seized a stranger by the front of his uniform. “Who will keep Mer Celehar safe?” I cried. “Who will keep Mer Celehar safe?” But unconsciousness claimed me before any man could give me the satisfaction of an answer.

Chapter Text

“Poison,” said the goddess Csaivo, who was dressed all in blue instead of the customary green of her order. My head throbbed, my body was a knot twisted around itself with fever. I could not close my eyes, which burned for want of moisture. When I reached for the white-hot point of pain that seemed to come from outside my own body, my hand barely moved; the goddess seized it and pressed it firmly back down to a resting place on my waist. “As if someone smuggling crossbows into Cetho weren’t enough to worry about. Stop, Mer Olgarezh; you must rest.”

Who was I to countermand a goddess? She lay a cool wet cloth over my eyes and put a golden vial to my lips. I could not swallow, but something trickled down the back of my throat, and at last I slept.

Ceraso Petasharan paced back and forth the length of the small bedroom above her brewery. “You have never told us your funerary traditions,” she said, and her voice was lower and rougher than I remembered it, and not nearly as boisterous; the jolly widow of many a comic opera, most vociferously sprung to life. She had remarried, hadn’t she, some time after our affair had ended? She would be Ceraso Vitheshezh now, properly speaking, and though I had never met Mer Vitheshezh, I did not like to think he might have been the one to weigh her down with such unhappiness. And wherever had she learned to speak with such courtly formality? “Certainly we would prefer you stay alive, but you cannot—blessed goddesses, you cannot simply die without even telling us how to decently bury you.”

“Ceraso,” I tried to say, my voice coming out a hideous croak through my clenched teeth. “Has thy new man treated thee ill? I will put the question to him, see if I do not.” But I could not find my sword at my side—and no wonder, for I lay on my back in her bed, with my whole body drawn up like a bow: my back stiffly arched, my legs stretched to their longest extent with my heels driving into the mattress. “Surely I have not lain with thee again since thou remarried’st?” I asked, aghast, but when I groped for my clothes I found my chest bare, and glowing embers of pain flared to tall flames in my shoulder and side.

Someone I had not seen laughed nervously, and a woman too old to be Ceraso said, “Oh, for mercy’s sake! If you are going to upset him, we must insist you find somewhere else to do your worrying.”

“We are sorry,” said Ceraso lowly, and I felt sorry, too, for troubling her.

My skin was too small for my body. It would rip apart, and flesh and bone would force their way through, my skull would burst from my crown, and the carrion crows would tear me to pieces like a broken scarecrow while I yet lived. Worse yet, my mother had invited Edrehasivar Zhas for dinner and not warned me beforehand, which was not at all like her to do—she ought to at least have told me to wear my best coat, and I did not seem to have put on any coat at all. “Your pardon, Serenity,” I said, each time he addressed me, which I did think was very many times at all; surely he must have tired quickly of such limited conversation. My mouth was dry, and my body ached as if I had been on the march for weeks and weeks. Over and over again, I licked my lips, though they never felt any wetter. “We did not know you were an acquaintance of our mother. Please, a thousand pardons.”

Eventually I must have bored him altogether, for he departed, and I apologized to my poor mother for being unsuitable company for an Emperor, and asked her if she ever meant to pour the tea, for my thirst was a terrible thing.

“On the whole,” she said, “we preferred it when you took us for a goddess. Now be still a moment; we would look at those stitches once more tonight.”

“Yes, mother,” I said, but her table dissolved into a searing, spangled void the moment her fingers found me.

The next time I drifted awake, I recognized the fever-bright shimmer of my world for what it was. Neither goddesses nor Emperors had visited my sick-room, and I had to imagine that jolly Cesaro gave her husband more grief than she got from him. My muscles were leaden, but blessedly slack. My head was still too heavy to lift from my pillow, but when I rolled it to the side, Thara sat in a chair pulled up beside my bed with his hands steepled under his chin. “Stay with me,” he said unhappily, and I could not tell if he knew I had woken to echo my own words back to me, “and I will shelter thee as best I can.”

It might not have been the shelter he wanted, but he lived and was well, and I would not apologize for that. But my response did not come, the words shredding at my clumsy grasp when I groped for them, and the weight of my own body dragged me back under the surface of sleep; if indeed I had ever been fully awake at all.

I only knew the fever had broken when I found myself squinting sidelong up at two faces which I did not recognize at all—which was to say, two faces that I had not unconsciously converted into more familiar and interesting ones. They spoke over me in low voices, and I felt an unseen pair of hands moving firmly over my back. “We are very glad of your assistance, Kiru Athmaza,” said the one; a man, I thought, some years older than I. “We are inclined to doubt we could have done enough on our own.”

“You have done more than you credit yourself for, doctor; it was your own ingenuity that prevented him starving before the spasms subsided.”

“Look here, the skin color is much restored in the region; surely that is a sign that the herbs which you prescribed have increased the blood flow in the—

“Ah! See there, he is stirring. Mer Oligarezh, can you hear me?”

I granted that I could, and, acting on a suspicion that approached certainty, apologized for mistaking the blue-robed maza for both a goddess and my own mother. She accepted this with good humor, while the doctor peeled back the bandages that bound my arm and shoulder. “We did not think clerics and doctors often worked in concert,” I said, to distract myself from the pain as much as from any honest curiosity.

“Well, we don’t,” said Kiru Athmaza, who was not at all old enough to be my mother; indeed, I suspected I might have two or three years on her. “Not often, that is. But you arrived in circumstances both unusual and rather dire, Mer Oligarezh, and we must thank you for both providing a useful case study in collaboration—and for surviving to tell of it.” I assured her that, considering the alternative, it was my most sincere pleasure.

“We are certainly glad to name you the first survivor of visveren poisoning that we have seen,” said the doctor, who had been muttering half to himself and half to Kiru Athmaza about exudate and serous drainage while he re-wrapped the bandages. “But we fear you will be left with quite a vicious scar. Aside from the other effects, the visveren stanched blood flow to the area, which kept the wound from healing in a timely fashion. The stitches insisted on suppurating!”

“Fortunately we have no one we need to impress with our beauty,” I said, and essayed a laugh. It caught in my throat, where the tension of the spasms still lingered. “Is Mer Celehar safe while we recuperate?”

“We think that you have met our fellow nohecharis Lieutenant Beshelar,” said Kiru Athmaza, and misread my startled expression, for I had not realized that she served the Emperor in such a close capacity. “No, no, of course Beshelar himself is with the Emperor! But he has hand-picked four men he considers most trustworthy and skillful with a sword. They have taken it in turns to keep an eye on Mer Celehar until you are ready to resume your service.” She pulled the bedcovers up to my chin and folded them securely around me. “We imagine Mer Celehar will be gratified to know for certain that you have not managed to get yourself killed on his behalf. We will send a page at once to tell him you are awake.” She smiled a little. “Awake, and in full enough of command of your faculties to know a maza from a mother.”

A young votive came along while I waited, and patiently tipped a bowl of broth into my mouth. I must have dozed again after that, for when I opened my eyes, Thara sat in a chair that someone had arranged beside my sick-bed. Behind him, a tall guard dressed all in blue stood imposingly in the doorway—a much younger man than I, with an archipelago of pimples on his jaw.

“You know that we always hope,” Thara said feelingly, when he saw that the movement of my eyes was not the mere restlessness of dreams. “But we wish you would not feel the need to provide us with such a challenge, Captain Olgarezh.”

“We are merely Mer Olgarezh now, we think.” My voice sounded more like Thara’s than my own, scraped raw and rough. Words came more easily than they had, but my throat and indeed all the muscles in my face still ached, and I sought to change the subject with brevity. “Are you not bound for Ezho?”

“The Archprelate feels that the task is not so urgent as to require our presence so imminently. He has instructed me to wait until you are well enough; Kiru Athmaza hopes that another week will see you through the worst. He says that good help is difficult to find, and Captain Orthema is not willing to spare the men guarding me on any more permanent basis. Not with crossbows and poisoned bolts in Cetho, right outside the gates of the Court.” Thara shook his head hard, which did nothing to erase the deep furrows carved into his brow, and steered the conversation directly back onto its original path. “How can you dare to call us self-sacrificing?”

I summoned all the gravity and grandness I could muster (which, considering my circumstances, worked out to be rather more of the former than the latter): “It is our calling.” A wordless, outraged noise escaped him, and I laughed a little. “Now you see how annoying that is to hear.”

“It was very frightening,” he said, not softening in the least at the joke, “to see you suffering all these long days. It was two days before Kiru Athmaza could even tell us that she believed you would live.”

Quietly he explained to me the days I had skipped through without even the madness of my dreams: the hours I had screamed through clenched teeth, the way my own muscles had locked together to trap me inside the prison of my body. My survival was attributed, Thara said, to the doctor’s inventiveness in forcing an eelskin-and-whalebone tube into my throat; through it, I had been fed thin porridge and watery aspics, enough to sustain me until I could eat more normally again. “The doctor had to extract a tooth,” Thara added wearily, and at once I probed with my tongue at the small sharp ache that clarified itself from the greater mass, where a molar had once been. “Whether it cracked when the tube was placed, or from the degree of stress you exerted on it during the worst of the spasms, the doctor cannot say, and indeed it hardly matters.”

“Thou shouldst—” Thara’s ears dropped, and I glanced past him at the blank-faced soldier-boy at the door. “You should not have taxed yourself so with worry on our part. We certainly do not seek out death, but we accept it as the possible cost of our choices.” My lips pulled into a lopsided smile. “The difference between you and ourself, Mer Celehar, is that we make that calculation knowingly, and with great difficulty, with the understanding that we will be missed and mourned by many that we leave behind.”

He stared at me. “We hardly think that our friends will dance on our grave in the event of our demise!”

“We are not sure we believe,” I said frankly, “that you think at all about what will happen after your death, except in the purest theological terms.”

He sat with that in unhappy silence. I closed my eyes—for a moment or an hour, I could not have said—and when I opened them again, he said, “We are very glad in any case to hear your voice again, Mer Olgarezh.” He pressed my good shoulder firmly; a gesture that announced nothing more than friendly reassurance, to the eyes of the young guard in the door, but which spoke privately to me of a greater relief than could be voiced in company. “Take what rest you can. We are certain we will speak again soon.”

Chapter Text

The next day, I was well enough to sit up in bed and feed myself, after a manner; pulling pieces off a chunk of bread that had been soaked in broth. Chewing and swallowing cost little effort, and I accepted what small satisfaction could be found in this small act of self-sufficiency.

Whatever victories I had achieved were soon swept away when a votive came to help me bathe. He asked for my permission before washing my hair, and, as I could be of little service myself, I granted it. There was nothing intimate in his attentions, only an impersonal, vaguely parental care, though he must have been easily twenty years my junior. I closed my eyes and pretended myself elsewhere.

As he was finishing, there came a knock at the door of my sick-room, and I bade my visitor enter. It was Thara, looking characteristically haunted, and he hesitated in the doorway when he saw the votive hovering over me, and my still-wet hair hanging uncombed past my shoulders. “We beg your pardon,” he said, and glanced at the door, where his blue-coated shadow stood. A different guard had accompanied him this time, an older man with deep lines on his face instead of pimples. “We did not mean to disturb you.”

“It is no disturbance. We can do little for ourself right now; an audience of two for our toilette is no more intrusive than one.” The votive approached with a comb, and I took it from him. My hair was straight, and did not resist the comb’s teeth as Thara’s would have done, but I did not trouble myself to work through every snag and snarl. It was enough to arrange all the hair to drape together down my neck, and I nodded to the votive when he held up the ribbon. “Only a tail, if you please. And leave it loose, it need not be suitable for a Court appearance.” Once he had complied—politely unquestioning—with these instructions, I asked him one more favor. “Would you be so kind as to bring us a pair of shears?”

He hurried off, and returned imminently with a pair of short-bladed scissors, which he offered uncertainly up. Medical shears, I supposed, intended to cut through bloodied clothing and pus-infested bandages. At least they were clean, though my vanity reared up its head at the last moment to object to having my hair mangled in a series of short, blunt snips. I had told the doctor already, had I not, that I had no one to impress with my beauty? And hair would grow out in time. “Well, it will serve.” I glanced at Thara. “If you would—”

“Mer Olgarezh, if we may?” That was the soldier in the doorway, who entered at my invitation and made a short bow, which I returned as best I could from my seat. He put his hand on the hilt of his sword. “We would be honored to assist, if you will permit it.”

I had not harbored any plans to make any proper rite of it; indeed, I would have sooner had it over and done at once without any fuss. But it would have been the height of rudeness to refuse the earnest offer from another man sworn to the service. “...Thank you. Yes.”

The custom was to kneel, and I managed to get down to the floor without any assistance beyond the support of the bed frame (though I was not sanguine on my chances of regaining my feet without additional measures). The guard drew his sword—carefully, in the confined space—and lifted the tail off my neck as he recited the few most commonly used lines from the prayer of a career honorably ended. “We will pull now,” he warned, and I resisted the tug as he drew my hair taut. In the corner of my eye, I saw the blade move. He knew what he was about; the sword was properly sharp. There was a queer slackening sensation at the back of my scalp, and the loose ends of my hair swung down in my face.

The soldier sheathed his sword again, and took my good elbow to help me rise the rest of the way to my feet. “Thank you for your service, Mer Olgarezh,” he said, and offered me the severed tail still tied with its length of ribbon. I set it aside for the votive to dispose of after the guard had accompanied Thara elsewhere—I had enough souvenirs already from my service, and hardly needed another—and thanked him in turn before he returned to his post at the door.

The votive stepped in with the shears and did his best to even up the quick cut, until both sides hung more or less to my jawline. (Slightly more, I suspected, on the right.) He helped me back into my shirt, then gathered up the clippings and departed with a promise to pray for my continued recovery. I appreciated the prayer more than the uneven trim; he was certainly better qualified to provide the one than the other.

Thara settled into the seat beside the bed. “How do you feel?”

I pushed loose hair behind my ears, where it did not stay. That would take some getting used to. “Lighter.”

He tilted his head. “We were not referring to your hair.”

“Neither were we.” I pushed myself upright, and he hurried to follow. I was inclined to doubt he would be able to offer much in the way of assistance, if I did fall face-first onto the floor, but I appreciated the sentiment. “We have been confined to this bed long enough. If it will not embarrass you too much to be seen in the infirmary with us in our shirt-sleeves, we would like to stretch our legs.”

“Is that wise?” Thara objected.

Perhaps not, but it was necessary. His duties in Ezho might wait for now, but certainly not forever, and I wanted to recover what strength I could before it fled me for good—the same wounds that would barely stagger a young man could end a career at my age. Instead of answering, I said, “We would be glad of your company, if you would join us.” And he did, of course, albeit with an annoyed crease between his brows, and we made a few leisurely circuits of the infirmary before I let myself be persuaded back to bed.

Thara was my most regular, but he was not the only one. Two days later, I was surprised to receive Mer Aisava. “We are glad to see you looking well,” he said on the rising side of a bow, so cheerfully that I could not help but take the words at face value rather than as an empty pleasantry. Even if it was only rote courtesy, Mer Aisava offered it too artfully to set it aside. “The Emperor and Empress send their well-wishes, too.”

“That is very kind of them, and of you.” I tried not to feel middle-aged and haggard with my loose hair, still too short to be tied back, next to Mer Aisava’s radiant youth, and mostly succeeded. “We dreamed, once or twice, that the Emperor had come to see us in our sickbed; before or after we dreamed that Csaivo herself was here.”

“Oh,” said Mer Aisava. “The Emperor did indeed insist on coming to the infirmary during your convalescence.” He nodded knowingly at my wordless surprise. “He did not stay long, in any case; you were apparently very distressed by his presence.” He added, with more grace than I deserved: “As far as we know, the goddess has not been here.”

“We thought he had come to our mother’s house for dinner,” I said in horror, and wondered if there was any chance I might still die from the visveren.

Mer Aisava hid his smile politely behind his hand. “We assure you that the Emperor was much more concerned with what disquiet he had caused you than with the quality of the reception he received! He regrets that Court business keeps him from returning, but he thought—as did we—that you would benefit from the visit of a friendly acquaintance, rather than merely sending this along in a courier’s hands.”

Only then did I realize he carried something under his arm. “We cannot accept a gift from the Emperor! We came to the Court during his wedding empty-handed—”

“You have been in Mer Celehar’s company too long,” said Mer Aisava in a cheerfully scolding tone, “you begin to sound like him. No, Mer Olgarezh, surely the only thing more unthinkable than accepting a gift from the Emperor would be to refuse one.”

In the end, I did not have much joy from my first airship travel. The climb up the mooring mast robbed me of much of the vigor which I felt I had restored to myself, and the realization that the week and a half of recovery had been less than I needed—that sapped something more abstract. I had a job to do, and I could not very well do it as an invalid. Fortunately, my current condition had been obscured, to outside eyes, by the Emperor’s gift. By all appearances, it was an ordinary frock coat, brushed wool, in a dark shade of red. But the stiff fabric disguised the padded and reinforced left sleeve that held my injured arm in place without the need for a sling.

But perhaps the Emperor’s tailors should have reinforced the collar of the coat as well. Even before the airship left the mast, I caught my head dropping toward my chest. I pinched my thigh for the moment’s alertness the pain provided, and adjusted my posture. “I pray thou wilt talk with me,” I said, abandoning the formality of the Court the moment it was no longer required of me. “The emptiest conversation is enough, if that is what thou canst summon. Otherwise I fear I will snore the whole way to Ezho.”

“Thou shouldst rest if thou need'st to,” he countered, and when I glared at him, his ears folded back an inch, and he sighed. “What art thou most looking forward to, when thou seest Ezho again?”

That was a subject upon which I could expound at length. There was the food, and the folk operas. And my family—my sister Corano, in particular. “And thy pilgrimage,” I added. “I think I will certainly have to make a point to accompany thee, and soon. It would not do for Csetheio to think me ungrateful, after all.”

His eyes flicked to my wounded arm and away again, and I could see he was casting around for a change of subject. “Tell me about the Circle of Radiance. I had never heard of it, before the Archprelate raised the subject.”

The reinforced sleeve hid my wince. I had asked for conversation, and I had no one to blame but myself for this turn of it. “It is—it is something done, in general. Not something spoken of.”

That brought his attention back to me, and searchingly this time, not a glancing blow. “I would never ask thee to be so crass as to praise thyself with tales of great deeds in battle,” he said, and offered a small smile. “It is only curiosity.”

Whatever I had done on the field of battle, I would not call those things great deeds. I spoke haltingly around the edges of the matter, trying to walk the sword’s edge between the honesty he deserved and the burdens he did not. “The circle of radiance...it is a guide, a mantra. It is the principle that we act with intention, and not only in the drawing of our swords, though certainly in that as well, and above all other things—to contemplate how our lives, our actions, are part of a chain. That we would not stand in the line with our brothers, unless others had acted, perhaps even without our knowing, to shelter and protect us: raising a shield, disarming an enemy, mending a wound. Even small acts matter, as with the cooks who prepared our food safely, and the quartermaster who ensured our boots fit. To be a part of the circle unbroken is a beautiful thing—to know that even if one has had to take lives, one has done so only because it preserves more.”

He sat with that in contemplative silence. My head began to grow heavy again, but I sat up ramrod-straight when Thara asked, at length, “Then dost thou not feel that thou are a part of the circle?”

I might have expected he would notice my shift from the plural second person to the nonspecific third. “My judgment matters little. That is for Anmura to weigh.”

It was a blatant non-answer. I was not much better a dodging a question than I was at outright lying. Thara sighed heavily, and his ears sank a fraction lower still. “What will the summer weather be like in Ezho?” he asked, and I embarked gladly on a long-winded description of the clouds of gnats we would soon be inhaling with our every breath.

Chapter Text

Ezho’s mooring mast stood near the tip of the peninsula of the Confluence, close enough that we could see where the crook where the waters tumbled together before we made our descent. The weather made a liar of me at once; the sun had buried itself in the clouds, and the cold northerly wind chased away whatever gnats might have made their early-season debut. We raised our collars against the chill and hurried out into the city’s streets, past the sprawling complex of the Ezh’theileian, with its handsome white stone facade and blue slate roofs. The Archprelate had instructed Thara to make his own judgment about how long he expected it might take to address the mystery of Ezho’s missing bodies, and the letter of credit he had issued would certainly allow us to hire an apartment if need be; but in the interim we would need whatever short-term rooms we could find in an inn or hotel.

While there were lodgings to be had in the heart of the peninsula, they would cost more than Thara would ever be willing to pay, and I doubted in any case that either of us would feel entirely at home in the finery of the city’s most fashionable district. Instead, we took the first bridge across the Istandaärtha into the Shoulders. There, the more modest buildings crowded irregularly together beneath their clay tile roofs. A few proud edifices had been built from cut stone, but the greater number were brick or concrete clad in lime plaster. I pointed out the various hues that distinguished one façade from another: those with warm ocher tones had taken the sand for their plaster from the banks of the Evresartha; the paler pink came from crushed granite, removed from the Istandaärtha where it tumbled out of the mountains.

“I am not particularly concerned with the color of the place,” Thara said, scrutinizing the row of shingles hung out in front of the buildings on a likely-looking street. “As long as it is clean, and has two rooms available.”

“Two rooms?” I tutted. “As long as thou only intendest that the one should be used.”

“Hanu…”

“If thou’rt slain because thou insisted on having two doors stand chastely between us, I shall not forgive thee, however pretty a corpse thou leavest behind,” I said archly. “Rumor has rarely proved fatal, but swords and smotherings do, often enough.” I did not wait for his response before I took the two steps up into a hotel called Talvanee, which looked in good enough repair, and which was, more importantly, conveniently placed nearly directly opposite an appealing cendartheian with a plump, steaming ankrosolis painted onto its shingle.

The clerk at the desk inside Talvanee was a plump, pale-eyed elf. He looked carefully through his books and informed us that he did indeed have two rooms available, and did we know how long we would be staying?

Thara eyed the man slightly askance. “Let us have the week,” he said, after a pause just long enough to grow awkward.

The clerk, who must certainly have been accustomed to dealing with stranger patrons than us, accepted Thara’s money gladly enough, and began to write out a tidy receipt. “ In whose name shall I write it?” he asked, lifting his pen to glance back and forth between us.

“You may use mine,” said Thara, who, despite all the other cautions upon which he had insisted, steadfastly refused to pursue his calling under a false identity. “Thara Celehar.”

“Oh!” said the clerk, inspecting Thara more closely now, and he waved Thara off when he attempted to spell his name aloud. I supposed we had the local newspapers to thank for that; Ezho was every bit as infested with them as Amalo. “Very good, Othala Celehar. Is your luggage outside, merrai? I will send the boy to retrieve it.”

“No, that will not be necessary,” said Thara. “Thank you.” He took the receipt and the keys that the clerk handed over, and passed one to me as we followed the directions we had been given, up the stairs behind the desk. The clerk watched us go with undisguised curiosity.

I was curious myself, for the conversation had been unusually stilted, even for Thara; unlike the clerk, however, I had been brought up better than to stare at the object of my interest. But o nce we had made it up the first two flights, Thara leaned closer to me and said, “ Di dst notice? That clerk wore not a single earring, not even brass or iron .”

“Oh?” I paused for breath at the top of the flight, checking my memory. In all honesty, I could not reconstruct any meaningful image of the man’s appearance, but I trusted Thara’s observation to hold true. “That is not altogether extraordinary here. There is a small...sect, I suppose you would call it? They name themselves othocirisei—‘the immaculate’.” The names other folks tended to assign to them were unkind, and did not bear repeating. “They do not pierce their ears nor cut their hair; nor do the women use maquillage of any kind. To them, a body is sacred, and it is the greatest offense to the gods to alter the state in which it was originally given.”

“Othocirisei,” said Thara thoughtfully, and led us up the last flight of stairs to the third floor, where our rooms waited. “I did notice that he kept his hair unusually long. Do they wear eyeglasses, if their vision fails? Or allow the cleric to stitch up their wounds, if they suffer a grievous injury?”

I could produce only a lopsided shrug, my good shoulder jerking up and down. “I’m afraid know little more about them than I have already said! Perhaps thou shouldst ask the clerk the next time thou see’st him.”

“I am not known for my elegant manner,” he said dryly, arriving on the last landing. “But I think even I know better than to speak as directly as that.” The third floor was smaller than those below, and we had two of the four rooms. Thara checked the two doors behind, before unlocking the left-hand room and ushering me inside.

The hotel room being precisely as had been described —one bed, a writing desk and chair, and a tiny chest of drawers, with a water closet available on the floor below—w e embarked on a quest for suitable clothing in the secondhand shops on the nearby streets. Of the pieces that appeared to be in a reasonable state of repair, we found two shirts that would fit me and one for Thara , three pairs of spare hose, and a pair of trousers apiece, although Thara’s were too long by an inch and a half, and would need hemming. The shop owner employed a seamstress who could see to that in short order. On our way out, I managed to scandalize Thara by pointing out that he had a letter of credit from the Archprelate, and could certainly have ordered trousers tailored to fit from hem to inseam. “I have taken a vow of poverty,” he reminded me, which certainly did not stop him from visiting a stationer’s shop to acquire paper, ink, and a fountain pen.

Afterward, we took an early dinner at the nearby cendartheian, Anzharo’s Kitchen, where the real ankrosolei proved just as delicious as the one painted on the shingle had advertised they should. The proprietress, Merrem Anzharo Chorvened, was a sturdy woman, of full- or mostly-goblin extraction, of some fifty or sixty years. And, I noted, a widow; she wore her iron oath ring on her left hand instead of her right. A bit too old to feature as a character in one of Lieutenant Estebazh’s operas, jolly though she was. I liked her at once when she refused to serve me black orchor, telling me she had better sense than to pour black tea for a man who looked as badly in need of his bed as I did—instead she brought out her own house blend of aikanaro and golden orchor, which was so nicely balanced that even Thara could not work up a critique of it. Later, when she set out our plates, an extra dumpling lay wallowing in the cream sauce in front of him. “Othala, you are too thin,” she informed him briskly. “If your own aunts cannot or will not say so to you, I will do so on their behalf before you blow away in the first summer storm.” When she came back out to clear the plates, I promised her we would be back for breakfast, and Thara gave me a disbelieving look from behind her back, as if I had not heard his pleased exclamations over the tea.

Shortly thereafter, we retreated to our rented room to make an early night of it. Thara perched behind the writing desk and lit the gaslamp to catch up on his correspondence; a pair of letters from Amalo had caught up to him in the Untheileneise Court, but he had not yet, he said, found the time to respond. While his pen scratched across the cheap paper, I unbuckled my sword and let it lean against the wall beside the bed. The mattress was softer than I was used to—wool or cotton flock, I suspected, rather than the horsehair I had always slept on in Amalo, and far softer still than the ground where we had so recently spent many nights. I found myself sinking into it when I leaned back against the unadorned headboard. “ I hope thou wilt not let the lamp burn too late. It is sure to give thee myopia, staring too long in bad light at ink on paper.”

“If that is the cause of myopia, I have already doomed myself.” The pen scratched along; I closed my eyes. “I will not be long, only I must tell Iäna that we are well. Everyone in Amalo will have had whatever exaggerated accounts the newspapers have published of—of the incident in Cetho. By now he must be half wild with wondering, to say nothing of Anora and Tomasaran.”

“As long as thou tell’st him how nobly I suffer on thy behalf,” I said, and that was the last thing I remembered before I woke in the pitch dark, still propped up against the headboard. In his shirtsleeves, Thara lay with his back to me, facing the wall. Whether he slept already or lay still awake, as he so often did, I could not say; I could see only his braid and the pale line of his jaw. Temptation urged me to lie alongside him, to frame him in the circle of my arms, and desire added its voice, which I had not heard since before my injury. I silenced the inviting duet; it was not worth the risk of waking him, if he had indeed managed to find some solace in sleep. He had in any case left space between our bodies, and I did not imagine he had left that to accident. Perhaps his own desire had put itself to sleep, past the point of rousing. He had seen me brought very low. In my experience, a missed visit from death ignited some men into lustful fits, and extinguished others entirely. If that were so, if he wished to restore a measure of reserve to our friendship, I would hold no anger in my heart. He had already watched one lover die; it would be cruel to demand that he risk the same for another. I did not account myself free of moral failings, but cruelty was not among those.

Though it cost me some discomfort, I could turn my bad arm until my hand came within reach of the back of his head. The backs of my knuckles stroked the weave of his braid where it lay upon the pillow; one of the loose curls that had come unbound wrapped itself around my fingertip. I left it there until sleep returned to claim me for another dance .

We took breakfast at Anzharo’s Kitchen: calves’ kidneys and fried mushrooms, a heavy meal for us, but perfectly substantial for the three young cendarinsoloi seated opposite us, who appeared to have just ended a night shift at their looms. “I cannot imagine eating my supper at nine of the morning every day,” said Thara, who made little inroads on his plate beyond cutting the kidneys into progressively smaller fractions. For my own part, I ate my own portion and part of his, and was only surprised there were not more cendarinsoloi at Merrem Chorvened’s tables, for the hour was right and the food was inexpensive and filling.

From there, we crossed back into the Peninsula, and thence across a second bridge to Volgeth’zho, the Hill That Prays. Our path carried us along the river as it bent north, toward the highest part of the hill, where the Ulistheileian stood on the slopes looking over on the Evresartha. Across the river, I could see the silk shops that crowned the heights of Cendar’zho. I wondered if my sisters were at work already, or if they too had come off the night shift.

I made it to the top of the stairs leading to the Ulistheileian without stopping to rest, although perhaps not without needing to stop to rest. The structure was smaller than its equivalent in Amalo, and much newer besides; Ezho was not an old city by any measure. Behind a broad stone courtyard, the building sprawled broadly to either side and down the slope beyond; as if the stones themselves had decided they did not aspire to great heights of their own, but were satisfied with what had already been provided by their hilltop perch. The one concession to architectural vanity over practicality was the attractive stone entrance to the building, a pale granite arch carved in bas relief with a stylized depiction of the Dream of the Martyrs of Puzhvarno (or so Thara informed me, being rather more familiar with the iconography than I.)

Once inside, we were soon approached by a baby-faced junior cleric, who bowed, asking us what errand brought us to the Ulistheileian and whether she might help us to accomplish it. She startled at Thara’s voice when he spoke, introducing himself and me.

“Oh!” she said, and bobbed a deeper bow than her first. “Then you have come about the missing bodies?”

Thara looked around the open antechamber; a few of the other visitors coming and going had thrown curious glances in our direction at the cleric’s thoughtless words. “Perhaps that would be better addressed with the Ulisothala,” he said quietly. The cleric, taking this as admonishment rather than practicality—which it might have been; Thara’s flat tones left much to the imagination—and retreated with a speed bordering on rudeness to tell her superior of our arrival.

Only a few minutes later, the Ulisothala himself came hurrying into the antechamber to greet us and personally escort us to his offices. Dach’othala Olmarzar was a small man, not much older than me , with an unfortunate hairline that he had not troubled to hide beneath a wig. “Othala Celehar! We have read of your—ah, that is to say, there have been some very alarming rumors flying about.” He dabbed sweat from his expansive forehead with a handkerchief, which he tucked away again immediately inside his coat. “We are much relieved to see you well and safely arrived in Ezho.”

Newspapers again: a young plague for a young city. “We are glad to be here,” Thara said. “And we hope we may be of some service.”

“Yes, as do we, and dearly so,” Olmarzar said, changing from the formal to the plural, and showed us into a long, windowless room, well lit with lamps. Inside, five men and women in black prelates’ coats stood waiting for us around a table. “Pray let us introduce our staff.”

None of the names he recited for us stuck in my mind; as appropriate, I murmured othala or othalo , and nodded, until everyone had been named. I stationed myself beside the door as the others took their seats . A half-goblin novice arrived with a large pot of aik a naro and poured, staring goggle-eyed around at his betters as he did so, and then stood back in one corner until one of the prelates shooed him firmly away to his other duties.

The Ulisothala’s staff had anticipated our eventual arrival in Ezho, and prepared accordingly. They rolled out maps of the city, with the affected ulimeires marked out in blue ink; they had a roster of the missing deceased, annotated with their ages, their causes of death if known, and any surviving family members that had been identified by their attendance at the funeral or from public records. Thus far, in the past eighteen months, eleven bodies had vanished from mortuary slabs or unburied coffins—few enough not to make a dramatic splash in the newspapers, but a regular enough occurrence for the prelates here to begin to worry.

“We hardly expect a plague of ghouls to descend upon the city,” said one of the prelates—a younger woman, speaking with youth’s impatience. She sat at Olmarzar’s right hand; his chief of staff, perhaps. Her prelate’s braid was very long and very thin. “But it is a grievous hurt for those in our communities, to be deprived of their loved ones’ final resting places, or their ashes.”

“And even if Othalo Velasin does not anticipate an army of ghouls in the streets of Ezho,” said Dach’othala Olmarzar a little wryly, “those families quite correctly dread the idea that the departed might be denied a quiet rest. It is quite a horrifying thing, to imagine not only a ghoul outside one’s door, but to imagine it wearing the face of one’s own father.” The prelate—Othalo Velasin—bowed her head, acknowledging the point. “Thus we are very glad indeed that you are here, Othala Celehar. We lack all of us your specific gifts, as well as the time to do such an investigation justice.” He smiled crookedly and tugged at one of his earrings, a dangling pearl. “We did not realize, when praying to Ulis as an aspiring novice, that there would be quite so much paperwork involved.”

A few of the prelates on his staff laughed quietly. To my ears, their reactions sounded unforced. I had heard no shortage of overdone chuckling in answer to a commanding officer’s weak jokes; for that matter, I had participated in plenty of the same. Thara glanced around, perhaps making a similar assessment, then addressed Olmarzar again directly. “We must remind you, Dath’othala, that our calling offers insight only into the last few minutes of the decedent’s life—into the most potent impressions that have marked them before the moment of their passing. They cannot tell us what happens to their body after their death.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Especially when there is no body present to be spoken to!”

“We are not asking you for a miracle,” said Velasin earnestly.

“No, indeed; we would not presume so far upon Ulis’s grace.” Olmarzar released his earring and folded both hands before him on the table. “If we may offer you the honesty you deserve, Othala Celehar? The missing bodies are another reason we asked the Archprelate to send you specifically. Even had we a Witness in Ezho whom we wished to petition directly, in a more conventional manner, we could not.”

“Because there is no body on whose behalf you would petition,” said Thara, with reluctant understanding. “Just as one cannot petition for a murder investigation without a murder victim—you cannot petition a Witness for the Dead if there is no dead on hand to be witnessed for.”

“That seems rather a flaw in the system,” I said, and two of the prelates looked at me, as if I had surprised them by still being present.

“You are not wrong, Mer Olgarezh.” A prelate seated beside Thara, closer to my age, with goblin-gray hair, nodded. “Normally this would fall under the purview of the Brotherhood—the matter amounts, more or less, to a theft! But the local chapter claims that since there is no victim who suffers harm—”

“Because apparently spiritual harm does not count,” interrupted Velasin, with heat rising in her face as well as her voice. “Because moral injury can be ignored, as long as there is no equivalent damage done to body or pocketbook!”

A look from Olmarzar quieted her. “So that is the situation as it stands. Whatever you can uncover, Othala Celehar, we will be grateful for it, and we will do our best to render whatever assistance you ask of us—whatever additional information we could provide.” Around the table, heads bobbed in agreement.

“We will do our best,” said Thara, and stood. Immediately the prelates reached out to begin rolling up the maps and folding up the ledgers of names, which they placed into a valise for convenient transport. “You have our assurance.”

Thara waited until we were clear of the Ulistheileian to issue an immense sigh. “Give me the valise, if it is as heavy as that,” I told him. “There is nothing wrong with my right arm, and I can drop it easily enough if someone decides to try running thee through with a pitchfork.”

“No, leave off,” he said sharply, when I reached for the handle, and put the valise on his other side, away from me. I withdrew, hands raised, feeling a new empathy for the rebuked junior cleric in the antechamber. Thara sighed again, less dramatically this time. “It is not that. I am surprised, that is all—the Ulistheileian here is very little like the one in Amalo.”

“That would be the Ulistheileian that subjected thee to a trial by ordeal?” I said, and he laughed bitterly. “It is a pleasant surprise, then, I imagine.”

“Of course I have only my first impressions, but I did not feel at all as if I had fallen into the viper’s nest as I always did in Amalo. Olmarzar and his staff seemed aware of what each of the others was doing, without any of their feeling the need to tread over the boundaries of another’s duties.” He rubbed his forehead. “There is presumably a reason that I have never heard of a cemetery in Ezho ceasing to bury bodies for fifty straight years.”

We came to the bottom of the stairs leading down from the Ulistheileian, where Thara paused before we wad ed into the dense foot traffic of the path along the river shore. “ Art well enough to continue?”

“Oh, thou wilt not go fussing over me. I have a mother very nearly within shouting distance already, I do not need a second.” The trip downhill had treated me more kindly than the earlier trip up, and I was scarcely short of breath. Thara frowned, but did not argue with me. “It is early for lunch. Where wouldst liefst go now?”

“One of the affected ulimeires is not far from here, if I am not mistaken.” He cocked his head, consulting his memory. “Insharanee. Pray let us go there and speak to its prelate.”

Chapter Text

Insharanee lay farther north and west, where the slopes of Volgeth’zho settled somewhat lower. We followed the river to a crooked cross street that jogged back and forth up the hill. We had left behind the small district that was mainly occupied by clerics and prelates of various gods, and the lay laborers who worked alongside them in their temples and offices and hospitals; the people here were more commonly bargemen, dockworkers, soap-makers, and street cleaners—and unlicensed prostitutes, although these last were not out seeking work at that ungainly hour, when men had already been off the night shift for hours and long before the evening crowds of mill workers and weavers came down into the streets.

For all that, Insharanee appeared to be neatly enough kept. The graves were neat, the headstones well maintained, and the buildings had a clean, even look—not that of great wealth, but that of hard work and a good supply of whitewash. Even so, Thara opined, as we waited for a novice to fetch Insharanee’s prelate, the cemetery did not look deprived, in spite of the populace it served. “The Ulisothala must see that some funds are redistributed among the benefices of the city.”

That did not surprise me. “Thou wilt soon see, if thou hast not already, that we are a city shockingly full of syndicalists and solidarists.”

He glanced sidelong at me. A long, looping curl had worked itself free of his braid and hung down behind his ear; I did not tuck it back into place. “Curneisei?”

“No, they never found much of a foothold here. When the gold mines dried up, these hills had flooded with farmers and herders from Thu-Evresar and Thu-Istandaär. They came here hoping to become rich, not to become gods; and when that failed, they hoped instead that their children would become rich.”

“I am sorry that many of them hoped in vain,” Thara said unhappily, looking over his shoulder out of Insharanee and into the blighted streets beyond its gate.

A junior prelate who identified himself by the name of Ostremar came out first to greet us. He was younger than I, but he peered at us through pince-nez glasses, his shoulders hunched and his neck thrust forward: the symptoms of too many hours spent at study. His rheumy, glass-pale eyes widened when Thara explained our purpose, and his immediate solicitous bearing put itself at cross-purposes with a certain clumsiness; he walked into the door jamb while ushering us in, and tripped over his own shoes when he hurried off to find the prelate herself. “I fear he’s too old already to have a hope of growing into his feet,” I said, once he was out of earshot. Thara told me to be kind, and put his hand over his mouth to smother his expression before it could become a smile.

We waited in silence for ten or fifteen minutes—Thara patiently, and I less so—before the prelate approached. Both her junior prelates shadowed her, Ostremar and a man whose goblin blood could only be observed in the charcoal gray of his hair. She introduced herself to us, Othalo Elshorëan Chovarin, as if the name itself were a challenge, but I would not have picked up the glove she had thrown at our feet even if I understood the shape of it. “In what way can we be of assistance, othala?”

Thara thanked her for her time and asked her for what she could tell us of the deceased, beyond the bare data in which their lives and deaths had been expressed in the official records provided by the Ulisothala’s staff. “Whatever you can tell us may help,” he explained, “anything you may recall, whether you see their purpose or not. Whether we yet do. Sometimes an answer reveals itself with the most surprising detail, a lens that clarifies the rest of the image.”

“We are not sure what you hope for from us, othala,” she said, polite but distant. She was younger than either of us; scarcely older than her junior prelates, by my best judgment, though perhaps it was only that she carried her years lightly, and had not bent herself to her studies with as much single-mindedness as had the unfortunate Ostremar. “We were not bosom friends with our flock.”

Thara consulted the documents he had carried out of the Ulisothala’s offices. “Osmerrem Anglaran died of a brain storm,” he continued doggedly. “That is straightforward enough, considering her age; of Mer Pakharazad, we see only that he died of a workplace accident. Can you tell us any more about the circumstances?”

She studied him for a moment, but if she was looking for a way to avoid answering, she did not find it. “He worked as a bargeman aboard the Hollyhock. They were bringing the mast down to navigate the Belvesena XI Bridge, north of the city proper. But the mate lost control of the windlass, and Mer Pakharazad went overboard.”

“Then it was—a head injury that proved fatal? Or a broken neck?”

Chovarin’s blue eyes shifted, as if she wished to check my expression against Thara’s and find some hidden meaning in the difference. “No. The mast only knocked him aside. He drowned in the river.”

“Dreadful,” murmured the part-goblin junior prelate, and tucked his chin penitently at Chovarin’s silencing glance.

Thara shuffled through the papers again, and I could see that for all his pretended re-organization, the same sheet remained at the top of his stack. “And the last was a suicide. Another drowning, we suppose?”

“Yes,” Chovarin said. “A young woman who had gone to make the pilgrimage of stairs, though we know not whether or not she did so. It gives her family some small comfort to imagine that finding herself in Csetheio’s sight would have moved her to a different choice. Her lover nearly threw himself in the river as well afterward, but his family managed to stop him.” An unhappy expression passed over her face like a cloud, leaving only shadowless formality when it was gone. “It seems he had gotten her with child and did not intend to wed her.”

“He will be lucky if her ghost does not haunt him,” I said, “and the babe’s as well.” Ostremar winced.

“They were very young,” said Chovarin, cool and impassive as the face of Ulis himself. There were never any female prelates in the barracks operas, but I thought Chovarin would have made quite a good stock character: the stony-faced othalo, fiercely protective of her position, even when she knew not what she guarded it against. Well, someone always had to put on a wig and sing falsetto for any number of roles already, why not add a female prelate to round out the cast? “Now she always will be, and he has had to grow up very quickly.”

“Tell us, othalo,” Thara said, drawing her attention back around. “We find ourselves wondering whether there is any Tahareise presence in your flock, or at least in the wider circles of the friends and families?”

Where Chovarin had been cool, she went cold. “We do not know where you are from, Othala Celehar, but the prelacy of Ezho does not gladly invite in heresy.”

“No, of course not,” Thara said blandly. “We would never have expected you to tolerate such unusual modes of practice.”

A sharp enough knife could slip painlessly into flesh, and Chovarin, looking mollified, had indeed noticed the blade Thara had quietly skewered her with; but the part-goblin junior prelate’s cheeks went pink and he pressed his lips tightly together. “We can provide you with the names of some surviving kin,” she said. “And a neighbor of Osmerrem Anglaran, for she was the last of her family, and had no children that survived to adulthood.”

“We would be very grateful,” Thara said, bowing, and Othalo Chovarin excused herself to see to it, while we spoke further to the junior prelates. Ostremar had been present for the vigil of two of the victims—Osmerrem Anglaran and Mer Pakharazad—and the part-goblin, Veldrinezh, for Min Volmerin, the suicide.

“It happened when we got up to relieve ourself,” confessed Veldrinezh, in possession of a straightforward embarrassment rather than shame. “One of Min Volmerin’s family members should have come to take our watch, but they were delayed by the raising of the Midcity Bridge, and we are sorry to say we could not wait any longer.”

“There is no reason to blame yourself for having a living body with all that entails,” said Thara, without looking up from his notes.

“We drank too much tea that morning,” said Veldrinezh stubbornly, and Thara did not push him further to forgive himself.

Neither Osmerrem Anglaran and Mer Pakaharazad had belonged to traditions that demanded a vigil, but Othalo Chovarin had instituted a policy of maintaining a presence beside every body to be interred, after the disappearance of poor young Min Volmerin and another more recent body removed from another nearby cemetery. “We were called out of Insharanee to help prevent a suicide when we were supposed to be keeping vigil with Mer Pakharazad,” said Ostremar nervously, as if he expected Thara to criticize this choice, but Thara only expressed his fervent hope that Ostremar had been successful. “Yes—yes, we are relieved to say so. But by the time we returned, it was too late.” In the case of Osmerrem Anglaran, he had heard a crash in the prelate’s offices, and run to investigate, or to stop a potential thief from making off with the petty cash from the prelate’s drawer.

“And what did you find when you got there?” said Thara, his pen hovering in mid-air as he awaited Ostremar’s elaboration with concerned interest.

“Irdu said you would know if we lied,” Ostremar said, and hiccuped. Veldrinezh rolled his eyes and sighed as Ostremar amended the story the second time around: he had heard a crash in the offices, and had hidden himself in the cemetery proper, behind the gravestones, because he was afraid of the thieves. No, he had not peeked. No, he had not gotten a glimpse of any of those who had entered Insharanee. Yes, he thought there had been five or six of them at least, by the number of footsteps and voices; all of them men, he believed.

When Thara finished, he thanked them for their time, and put his pencil and notebook into his coat’s inside pocket. “We are grateful for your help,” he said, and I was not sure whether he wanted to convince them of that, or only himself.

We crossed back into Cendar’zho and headed north to visit the weir on the Evresartha where both bodies had been found, and Thara investigated at length: feeling along the front of the cement cap that followed the weir at river level, inspecting the landing where we stood a storey below street level ; hoping, I supposed, for a telltale wisp of hair or fabric . When he reached out to test the temperature of the water with his fingers, I grabbed the back of his coat. “I can swim,” I told him, “but not downstream of a weir. Nor canst thou, I am certain.”

He allowed himself to be urged back from the edge, but I did not let go his coat quite yet. “I was surprised to learn that Mer Pakaharazad could not swim ,” he said, looking out over the water that churned over the lip of the weir. “F or he w ould not have fallen directly into the weir himself.”

“No. The Belvesena XI Bridge, where he fell, is a mile or so from here. That is where carts too big to navigate the city ferries may safely cross.” I looked over his shoulder at the farther shore, the sparsely-developed region north of Volgeth’zho. The lockworks lay on that side, and a barge waited patiently inside to be lowered to the water level of the river as it traversed the city. It was very far away, the men aboard no more than outlines; I could not see the lock operator on the shore at all. I had kissed a young man once, not far from here, but that had been by dark of night, and even so it had not ended well between us. There was wisdom in waiting. “...Truthfully not many people here have the knack of swimming. Many bargemen come from farther inland, and even those that grow up in Ezho rarely have a chance to learn safely. One can swim in the city, but it is a risky proposition, with the weirs, and passing barge traffic, and the current.”

He looked back at me, and I finally released his coat. “But thy mother and father permitted it?”

“Oh, certainly not. I was a dreadfully disobedient child—more likely to do what my parents forbade me than what they allowed.” It made for an awkward opening, but I seized it, knowing I would not be likely to be offered better. “While we are on the Hill That Works, I would not mind taking the opportunity to look in on my family.” At that hour, I anticipated finding only my mother at home, and whichever of my nieces and nephews she supervised: a less overwhelming introduction for Thara than if I tumbled him into the mix of the full clan at suppertime. “As it is, I’m risking being strung up by my ears when they find out I’ve been here for a day twice without looking in on them.”

“Meet thy family,” Thara echoed, and I almost regretted making the suggestion. It had gone over better, at least, than it had the first time.

“I would not inflict them on thee except for necessity’s sake,” I said, hoping I spoke encouragement in a register that he would hear it. “Certainly thou shalt not go wandering in Ezho without a guard behind thee! And I need not do more than send a note, if thou wishest not to have—”

He cut me off there, objecting strenuousl y— of course I must do more than send a note!—and turned back first for the dank stairwell that would lead us back to street level. I caught him after he’d slipped into the shadows but before he got his foot on the first stair, grabbing the back of his coat one more time. I would have to take charge of ironing the wrinkles out of it at this rate. The stairwell was cool and dank, and smelled of mildew and urine; I had much rather have kissed him in the sunlight and the fresh cool breeze from the river. But I had rather have kissed him at all than not, and if his back stiffened , he did not push me away.

“Thou’rt not obliged to accept from me that which thou wouldst not,” I said, without breaking my lips free from his. Thara had softened into my touch, but I did not know whether to thank desire or surrender for that. The man he had formed an understanding with had been stronger, healthier; his hair had been pinned up neatly instead of swinging loose past his ears; the scar that he had let show could be called dashing rather than gruesome. “There is no debt between us, nothing owed. Say the word and I will be thy bodyguard, nothing more.”

His gasp stole the breath from my open mouth. “Dost think me so cold?”

“No,” I said, for in truth I did not want to think at all, wanted only to feel, and all the better if what I felt was warm and wanted.

Chapter Text

I led Thara through the streets where I had run wild as a child, to a slightly newer neighborhood that had been built from the bones of the city’s first charity hospital. Newer was a deceptive word: the houses were at least twice as old as I. Cendar’zho was the heart of the city that grew up before the gold rush had fully died off, but, crucially, after the wife of one of those would-be miners discovered that the moris bushes that would feed her silkworms grew with alacrity on the slopes of the Ezheise hills. The previous governor, our local representative of the Prince of Thu-Cethor, had enforced a number of reforms and renovations on the corpus of the old city, and even its ossified heart had come to beat soundly again once it was renewed by running water and sewers that did not flood in the rainy season.

After my father’s passing, my mother had gone to live with my elder sister Veseleän, whose husband was a bargeman, often away from home. Veseleän had then three children still too young for the schoolroom and was at wit’s end—not that that was ever a long journey for her. Now Veseleän’s eldest son was a bargeman himself, and the twins freshly apprenticed to a carpenter. Her two youngest had still not aged out of the schoolroom, but our mother had a fresh crop of children to mind while the older ones sat at their lessons: Erdana’s little daughters, and Corano’s younger two. I related all of this while we walked, and realized only belatedly that I was doing exactly what I had intended not to.

Thara shook his head when I tried to apologize for droning on. “Art nervous?”

“More pleased than nervous, but there is a share of each, I think. I am here so infrequently that the little ones never remember me—and I have yet to meet Corano’s youngest! She is not even a year old yet.” I checked the angle of my own ears. “Why dost thou ask? Do I have a nervous affect?”

“It is the most I have heard thee speak of thyself,” he said, and before I could think to change the subject for one more interesting, he asked me for clarity’s sake to start from the beginning, with how many siblings I had, and how old.

Veseleän’s house shared a courtyard and a wash house with several others, and a few elderly neighbors scrutinized Thara and I as we crossed to the correct door. When I knocked, a child’s voice shrilled with excitement, and heavy footsteps hurried toward us. My mother flung the door open, holding a baby who must be Corano’s youngest, a red-eyed girl with skin the color of the winter sky, and glared up at us. There was more white in Mother’s pale gray hair than I remembered, and deeper lines around her mouth. “Is there something I can do for you, merrai?” she asked, as politely as impatience could allow.

I had known that the long years at her loom had hurt her sight, but until I stood before her without having given warning of my visit, I never realized how badly. Surprise stole my breath, but only for a moment, and before Thara could do more than look at me askance, I said, “Why, I should like to greet my mother, if thou dost not find it too much trouble.”

“Hanu!” she cried, and embraced me at once, squashing Corano’s child into my side. A good-tempered little thing, for she did not object, though she craned her neck to peer suspiciously at me when my mother pulled back to be introduced to Othala Celehar. These proprieties having been seen to, she ushered us inside, where I was ordered to remove my sword and set it somewhere high enough that children could not reach it. “Except for the child thou wert, Hanu,” she said with a weary fondness as she retrieved the tea kettle from its hook. “I doubt there was any hiding place thou wouldst not have turned out if thou thought’st such a thing was in my house.”

The other three children who were not yet old enough for the schoolroom had gathered to stare at us; Mother directed my nephew Evena to check the cupboard for a tin of biscuits. My objections—we had eaten on our way there; I had come to see my mother, not the bottom of a cup of tea—were rejected out of hand. “As if I would let a guest sit hungry in my house!” she said, and turned beseechingly to Thara to seek his confirmation that I was exhibiting truly shocking filial behavior. Thara, not knowing what sort of signal she desired, only pulled an embarrassed face that she could not possibly have registered if she did not recognize her own son by sight. She patted his arm and nudged him gently toward the dining table. “Here, othala, please sit.”

Old habits died hard, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the preparation of the tea. Mother operated by touch and familiarity and dodged my every effort to insert myself in the process. While we bickered comfortably, the older three children had surrounded Thara, asking him questions that ranged from polite conversation from Evena, who offered up a stilted query about how long Thara had been a cleric, to cheerful impertinence from little Annu: “Is it very windy outside, othala? Only your hair is so messy.”

Thara answered this interrogation with good grace, and Mother swooped in as soon as she could to save him with a cup of under-steeped kolveris. I brought out two more cups for Mother and myself, while Evena handed out biscuits with the gravity of one undertaking a solemn duty. “There now,” Mother said, settling at the table opposite Thara and one seat down. “Othala, what an honor it is to have you under our roof! My daughter Corano has read to me the accounts of all that happened in Amalo, and now Cetho—” She hesitated. “That was you, I think?”

I took the seat next to her while Thara issued a cautious affirmation, glancing at me as he spoke. “Yes—yes, that was me. I am not sure how much of an honor it is to have me as a guest, but for myself, I feel very fortunate indeed to be able to sit here with you. And with Mer Olgarezh.”

“Oh, yes. Hanu will make a fine guard for you.” She sipped at her tea and failed utterly to hide the pride that had splashed itself all over her face. It was not the conversation I had expected to have over the task I had undertaken on Thara’s behalf. My ears rose, then dropped again, as I tried to anticipate the oblique approach she had embarked upon, even as she swerved into a grandmotherly aside. “Annu, is that thy brother’s pencil? Take it out of thy mouth at once. Othala, I’m sure you know he served twenty years on the steppes.”

I sighed heavily at that, not wanting the subject of my service belabored, and she took that as the impudence it was. “Thou’rt here rarely enough!” she protested. “May I not sing the briefest verse of thy praises when thou dost finally visit?” She turned back to Thara. “I do hope the other will recover in time.”

“The other,” repeated Thara blankly. When he turned to me for help, my ears had sunk all the way to the top of my collar, and his eyes widened with comprehension. “Oh—Merrem Olgarezh—”

It was not exactly the kind of danger I had enlisted to save him from, but I liked him well enough to do so anyway. “Mother, there is no other. That was me with Othala in Celehar.”

What little color there ever was in her face bled away; she looked as if I had stabbed her, so bloodless were her lips. “Hanu,” she said. She set down her teacup and set her hand feather-light on my arm, as if I were glass, to shatter at her touch. “Blessed goddesses.”

The front door creaked open, and I was both grateful for this small intercession and confused by it. It was too early, surely, for the rest of my mother’s flock to return from the schoolroom, and Thara had scarcely had time to adjust to four children, let alone eight. But it was Corano’s voice that issued from the front of the house. “Evena! Hast been a good help to thy grandmother today?”

“Corano!” my mother called, without taking her eyes off me. “Thy brother is here.”

A large sign preceded my sister through the doorway; it was turned partly away from me, but I managed to read the text painted on the battered cardboard: WE ARE NOT BLIND TO JUSTICE. Corano, emerging from behind it, yelped in surprise at seeing me. “I did not except to see thee at our mother’s table today!” she cried, and dropped the sign to throw her arms around me.

“Oh!” Mother gasped, “Corano, be more careful!” And then I was forced to simultaneously try to allay Mother’s concerns as well as explain them to the rest, and further, to   introduce Corano, and then my sister Veseleän and my younger brother’s wife Mirnu, to Thara.

All three women had brought signs into the house with them. Veseleän set hers aside with Corano’s, the better to throw up her hands in dismay. Mirnu, who I had did not know well, clung to hers, very unlike her little Mareän, who had taken advantage of the confusion to monopolize Thara in order to tell him about her favorite toy, a horse that her father had carved for her, and to tell him sternly he was not allowed to play with it or even to see it.

“My word,” said Corano, when we had fallen into something as close to silence as we were likely to achieve. She embraced me again, as carefully as Mother could have wished for, and kissed the top of my head. “Was thy hair also a casualty of the attack? Thou look’st like the Springtide Fool running mad at the carnival.”

Veseleän looked scandalized. “Corano! He nearly died.”

“And I am glad he has preserved himself long enough to hear his sister’s opinions,” said Corano serenely, and sat at the table beside me. She tugged at the ends of her own hair, chopped very short, above her chin. “It’s not even a proper crop, Hanu, imagine if we’d had to bury thee looking like this!”

“I should get the children home,” said Mirnu, abandoning her sign at last, and hurried out of the room with her little ones in hand after one more minimal exchange of pleasantries. Veseleän, without children of her own on hand to be governed, hastened after her to offer what appeared to be wholly unnecessary assistance.

“It is a welcome surprise to see you both here,” I said, once the room had cleared somewhat. “Are you not normally in the shop at this hour?”

“Oh, thou hast been too long away,” Corano said, and turned a pleading little-girl face toward our poor mother, who could not possibly have seen it. “Ma, is there more tea?”

Mother got up, and Corano told us about the trade union formed by the women who worked the looms, and the action they had been at all through the morning, marching around the Prince Belsanara building where the governor’s offices were housed . “We have gone on strike for better hours and better wages ,” she said, and leaned across the table toward Thara. “You will find no conspiratorial Curneisei here, othala, I promise you. We are only a clowder of stubborn women who are tired of working ourselves to death to make the masters’ pockets heavier.”

“The masters will see that it is their holy duty to care properly for the workers under their care,” said Veseleän primly as she returned to the room. Corano did not trouble to conceal a roll of her eyes. Veseleän did not join us at the table, but began tidying up the chaos that a houseful of children had left in their wake: a doll stuffed inside a cookpot, a broken bit of chalk on the floor, a loop of green string tied around the arm of a chair. “Evil men have made them close their ears to our voices, but we are persistent, by the grace of all the gods, and we will wait until they listen.”

“If they change their minds,” said Corano with venom in her voice, “it will only be because they have realized it costs them more to train a hapless child to work the loom after they’ve blinded another Merrem Olgarezh—or that it wastes time and good thread when a worker makes a mistake after nine hours at her station. I suppose we’ll see if they would rather line their pockets, or step on our necks.” She accepted the cup of tea that Mother offered her and drank deeply. When she set it down again, the lines of tension in her face had softened. “I am sorry to bore you, othala. I must sound like the dreariest kind of bluestocking.”

“Not at all,” said Thara, straightening, and I realized that his gaze had gone dull and distant only in the moment it sharpened again. “I know very little about the silk workers of Ezho, in truth, and I would always choose to listen rather than speak out of turn. But there is nothing dreary about a shared struggle for equity and fair treatment.”

Corano laughed, sending out wisps of steam from the surface of her tea. “You only say that because you have never been to one of our trade union meetings, othala.”

“If we did not govern ourselves by the rules of parliamentary procedures,” said Veseleän, settling at last into the chair on my left, so that I was fenced in by sisters on both sides, “those meetings would be an entirely different sort of disaster. I will gladly take an organized nightmare over an ineffective one.”

“Thou’rt not wrong,” said Corano, and before I could fully absorb the fact that she had agreed with Veseleän about something more complicated than the color of the sky, she pressed on. “What business has brought you to Ezho, othala? I hope we need not watch out for ghouls on our city streets.”

Thara explained what little he could of the investigation that the Archprelate had set before him. Annu, bored, made faces to distract the baby, but my mother and sisters listened with an intense interest. “It does not sound very dangerous?” ventured Mother hopefully, when Thara had come to a natural pause. She had not come back to take a seat at the table; she stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder. “Dreadful, of course, that these poor souls cannot rest peacefully; but it must be too soon for them to rise as ghouls?”

“There are more commonplace dangers to worry about, I think.” Corano cast a critical eye at me. “It was no ghoul that tried to murder Othala Celehar in Cetho.”

I had never made a habit of lying to my family, save for one thing, and never at all to Corano. “No,” I admitted. “The Clenverada want their revenge. They will try again, or others will try on their behalf.”

Mother’s hand squeezed my shoulder through my coat. “The Emperor must do something about it!”

“He has,” Thara said, and nodded at me. “He and the Archprelate have seen that I am well guarded. There is nothing more to be done, I fear.”

“You know more of the Emperor than I, othala,” said Corano, her ears flicking. “But I do not think he is as powerless in the matter as you think him. Politics move slowly, as any force of nature, but the wind still wears down the mountain in time.”

Veseleän, keen to Thara’s discomfort, unsubtly changed the subject, and we filled the air for a long spell after that with empty, easy talk: the weather, tea, how the children were growing, Thara’s opinions of Ezheise food. Before long, the older children spilled through the door from the schoolroom, and I navigated a fresh round of introductions—presenting myself anew to the younger ones as much as I presented Thara. And then it was time to begin making our excuses: I did not intend to give my mother and Veseleän two extra mouths to fill with supper, and moreover weariness had crept up on me while I sat warm and comfortable under my sister’s roof. Veseleän embraced me briefly before I left the kitchen and stayed behind to collect the teacups and saucers in the wash basin. But all the children, my mother, and Corano swirled around us as we made headway toward the door—the elder children asking the questions about ghouls and Cetho and the Emperor that they had not yet had the opportunity to foist on Thara, my mother wanting to know as much as we could tell her about how long we would be in the city and whether we would have the time to visit again. “You will be careful in the city,” she said, as if Thara were one of her own children to be ordered about. “May you be blessed with safe streets and easy choices, othala.”

Corano caught my eye as Mother clasped both Thara’s hands, as if she could wring the answers she wanted from his fingers. My sister flicked a glance at Thara, then raised her eyebrows at me, asking a question in a private language spoken only by the two of us. I longed to share with her what she wished to know—yes, that was my prelate whom I had brought to meet her, not only a colleague, not only a friend—but while I would gladly open my own heart to Corano, I could not fairly reveal to her what lay inside that of another man. Instead, I pretended I had not seen her significant look and adjusted the buttons of my coat. A feeble pretense, and perhaps as clear as an affirmative answer, for Corano took the time to press Thara’s hands, too, before he left. “Othala Celehar, I do not like to impose another duty on you, but may I ask you to encourage my brother to pick up pen and paper now and again? I do not know about your own habits, but he is an unbearably indifferent correspondent.”

Thara promised to intercede with me on Corano’s behalf, and she smiled. “Thank you. He is a good brother and loyal, but inclined to drift away if he is not properly set at anchor.” And with that she released him, and we escaped out into the late afternoon.

As we left the courtyard and turned back down the street that had led us there, I hoped aloud that Thara had not found the experience too overwhelming.

“Only a little overwhelming,” he said wryly, “and not unpleasantly so.”

I waited for more, but there was nothing else forthcoming, and I could see that what he saw before him was something other than the ordinary cobblestones of the Ezheise streets. “Where have thy thoughts carried thee?” I prompted. “For I see that it is nowhere close by.”

He startled, but the line between his brows eased. He said nothing, and our feet carried us out of that street, around a bend, down the hill toward the river. I did not ask again; if he wanted to tell me, he would, and, as we crossed the bridge into Cemreian’s Shoulders, he did. “The town of Sevezho. And the factories there.”

“Oh.” I had never been to Sevezho, but I knew of it, the streets blackened by smokestacks, the children made to crawl through the automatic looms to loosen jammed machinery. “I suppose they need a Corano of their own to lead the way. And a Veseleän to organize her.”

“Their Coranos and Veseleäns would have to survive their own childhoods in the factory first,” said Thara unhappily. I found this statement both true and unnecessarily pessimistic, and said so; he nodded a grudging concession. “Perhaps if the trade union here succeeds, Sevezho will feel the echoes of that change. Perhaps.”

“The Emperor is not the only one who is less powerless than thou thinkest,” I said, and that thought carried us to the doors of Anzharo’s Kitchen, where we took an early supper.

Chapter Text

After we ate, we returned to the hotel, where the desk clerk stopped us before we could walk past. Thara’s post had caught up to us, having been forward—to Thara’s dismay—via airship after its arrival in Cetho. Not only a packet of letters, but also two paper-wrapped boxes that I supposed comprised the whole of his worldly possessions. He opened them after we returned to the room, and found them to contain a pair of valises that appeared well-worn but still in good condition, which had not belonged to him until just now. “Iäna has thought of everything,” he said, with mingled relief and embarrassment, and picked through the clothing in the first valise. “I needn’t have bought those trousers after all.”

Privately I thought that nothing in the valise remained in such good condition that an extra pair of trousers made for a terrible extravagance. The second valise held no clothing at all, only a number of paperback novels and a few other oddments, wrapped in stockings or bits of paper. Thara unwrapped most of these to put away in the bureau—a comb, a second set of hairpins, a tooth stick—but one he left unopened, and returned the small package to the valise still in its paper. It was not my place to ask, and I did not.

Some of the correspondence had come wrapped up with the valises, sent at the same time: letters from Pel-Thenhior, Othalo Tomasaran, Othala Chanavar. But there was also a second packet that had been sent later; and apparently with more urgency, if it had caught up to the rest. Thara sorted through these, and his eyebrows went up as he separated two from the pile. “Thou hast received thy pay, but this is addressed to thee too,” he said, and held both out to me. “From Iäna.”

My eyebrows rose, but I took both envelopes, and retreated to the bed I had once again made up by the door to read it. Pel-Thenhior wrote with an extravagant script; the letter was not long, but took up most of a page regardless.

To Mer Olgarezh,

I hope you will forgive me for insinuating a level of familiarity that I have not fully earned; it is perhaps too strange coming from a man with whom you do not know at all well, but it is stranger still—as far as I am concerned—to carry on with the formal second when addressing myself to one who has done a great deal to endear himself to me, though I know of course that it is not my goodwill you seek, nor indeed that of another; what you have done, you have done in the name of duty as much as for any other reason. Well, whether or not you have desired my goodwill, you have it, and my thanks. I have few enough friends that I cannot afford to stint with my gratitude when someone undertakes to preserve the life of one of those, and I would be inclined to count you, too, among that paltry number if doing so would not offer up the offense of over-familiarity.

I become tedious in effusiveness! I write also to ask after your health and to extend all my hopes of an easy return to wellness. I pray you will not let Celehar’s inclination to put himself into the worst kinds of predicaments interfere with your recovery, for he will certainly do so without outside intervention, though I will also beseech him on your behalf.

I looked up from the page. “Mer Pel-Thenhior instructs thee to let me recover without jeopardizing thyself or me.”

“He plays upon the same themes here,” said Thara, without looking up from his own stack of correspondence. “Pray do not mention to him that thou felt’st the need to hold onto my coat as if I were a silly child for fear I should fall into the river.”

...It may be that a mutual friend and a shared fascination in opera is little to build upon, but I think I have tried starting from shakier foundations than those, if not always successfully.

With warm regard,

Iäna Pel-Thenhior

P.S. With regard to that shared interest: if you have the opportunity to visit the Bluewater Opera during your time in Ezho, I have heard that the lead soprano possesses a rare talent. (Do not waste your time at the Ezh’opera; the current director will maintain his hold on it until he dies, and you cannot expect to see or hear a single glimmer of interest from that stage until he does so.)

A second reading of the letter still failed to illuminate for me any deeper meaning hidden between the lines; I tried to be reassured that I could accept at face value what had been written, with a mixed success. I returned the slip of paper to its envelope, beneath the broken seal, and lay back on my makeshift bed. Thara glanced over at me. “I have been very recently instructed to remind thee not to be an indifferent correspondent.”

“Remind me again tomorrow,” I countered. He smiled with half his mouth, and his pen scratched again at the paper.

For a spell, I watched him at his work: the long fingers perched so lightly on the pen, the curl that escaped its pins even as he wrote. After a while, though, I could not keep my head turned toward him without the muscles in my bad shoulder pulling tight. I had let the coat that the Emperor had gifted me do its work, and neglected in turn some of the exercises Kiru Athmaza had assigned to me to aid me in my recovery. I sat up and braced my back, and set my bad arm at a right angle to the floor, with elbow and knuckles touching the wall. Rotating through the shoulder, I could bring my palm to the wall instead, although this required me to exert myself more strenuously than I should have preferred; and I repeated this movement until the effort began to cost more than I held in reserve.

Thara was still busy at his letters, so I unwound my own neckcloth and unbuttoned my shirt to the waist. If I reached across my body, I could feel the lower boundary of the scar; the tissue around it remained stiff and sore, but my fingers found no raised edges or moisture. Tomorrow when I shifted my shirt for a fresh one I would have to check for drainage, but I thought the wound was healing well enough. Kiru Athmaza had given me a small pot of oil with which to loosen the scar tissue where it sought to adhere to the skin; I retrieved it from my belongings and wet my fingertips with it. If I reached alternately over my shoulder and under my arm, I could reach very nearly the full length of the wound.

“Hanu.” Thara had set his pen aside, and his face furrowed with some obscure emotion when I looked up at him. “Wilt not ask for help when thou needest it?”

“Thou wert busy at thy work. And I am not altogether incapable.”

“No one who had met thee would suggest otherwise,” he said, and held out a hand. The tips of his first two fingers and his thumb were stained black with ink. “Wilt thou let me?”

I would, and gave him the instructions as I remembered them from Kiru Athmaza. He moved the chair far enough back from the writing desk that I could sit between his legs, and bade me take off my shirt so that it would not be marked with the oil. His touch on my back was firm and sure, and his hands, as cold as ever at the onset, soon warmed with the work. After he had seen to the scar, his fingers kept moving, softening first the tight lines on either side of my neck, and then the tender knot beside my spine that always asserted itself at the end of a day on my feet.

I willed his hands further, but I could not command him in thought any more than I would do so aloud. Only one small luxury did I grant myself, in letting my head come to rest against his thigh. He did not affect a tense, brittle posture beneath my cheek—not as he had in the stairwell by the weir. I could thank the relative privacy of the hotel room for that, or I could thank the sizable difference between giving needed care and accepting an unwanted advance. Or else I could thank whichever god or goddess had blessed me with a close companionship, without striving for more than had been willingly granted. I thought of Iäna Pel-Thenhior’s letter, and told myself that the friendship of one good man, let alone two, was a great gift in this world. I might even have believed myself, if not for the hands I so desired moving over my body, warmly and steadily and, as far as I could tell, without the least suggestion of passion.

In the morning, we took breakfast at Anzharo’s Kitchen, as had quickly become our habit: herbed cream cheese on a half-loaf of crusty, still-warm bread. This time, Merrem Chorvened paused beside our table after setting a pot of black orchor on our table. “Are you that prelate from the newspapers?” she asked. “The one who went to the Tomb of Dragons, and all the rest?”

Thara put his knife and fork down. “Yes,” he said stiffly. “That was me.”

Merrem Chorvened nodded with satisfaction. “I thought so, especially with this one always trailing around keeping one hand on his sword. Othala, you should be in hiding!”

“Perhaps you will be the one to finally win him over on that front, merrem,” I said around a mouthful of cheese, “but you certainly won’t be the first to try.”

She clucked her tongue before bustling off, and a few minutes later, a little dish of butter biscuits we had not ordered appeared on our table beside the half-full pot of orchor.

Like Insharanee, Ulsarendee was a municipal cemetery. Although the silk-shop masters and a few of the city’s other wealthiest residents could afford private burials, Ezho was new enough that the local bourgeoisie had only managed to establish a single collective cemetery—most of the city went under their tombstones in a municipal cemetery. Also like Insharanee, Ulsarandee lay at the top of a hill, where the interred bodies would not have their eternal rest disturbed by the rising of the rivers in a rainy winter. It had been built at the farthest northern stretch of Cendar’zho, and it took us an hour to walk even after we saved ourselves half an hour of the journey by taking advantage of the city’s single tram line. While we walked, Thara reviewed the information we had about the missing deceased: Theder Orneved, Khoru Emenara, and Garelo Bashenin. Merrem Orneved had died of the charcosa at a respectably advanced age; Mer Emenara, a middle-aged elf, had been stabbed over the gambling table; and Min Bashenin, poor young creature, was another suicide. “Hast detected any kind of pattern or meaning in those taken?” I asked.

“No,” said Thara unhappily, “though it is still early.”

The junior prelate who hurried out to meet us inside the gates of the cemetery asked us at once whether we had come for the funeral. “Are you friends of the deceased?” he asked, with misplaced if tender kindness. When Thara explained our purpose, his eyes widened, and he led us once to the office of his senior.

We found the man sitting before a small private shrine with his head bent in devotion. When Thara meditated or prayed, he generally did so kneeling; I did not whether the rites prescribed a specific posture, but if so, it was one no longer quite accessible to a man of the prelate’s age. He was murmuring to himself, the words below the threshold of hearing but doled out with the cadence of prayer. Upon our entrance, he glanced up at us and visibly startled. “Adrevar, what is this?”

“Othala Perlenar.” Adrevar bobbed a nervous bow. “The Ulisothala has asked Othala Celehar to investigate the disappearance of the bodies from our ulimeire.”

“And from the others,” said Thara, bowing. “Excuse us for the interruption, othala. We did not know you would be holding a funeral service today.”

“The people of this benefice are not, on the whole, young.” With an effort, Perlenar stood; he was not young, either, and had the meager, frail look of those men who lose their appetite for food and drink and perhaps all worldly things as their age carried them closer to death’s threshold. I could not quite contrive to imagine myself as one of those men, but of course all things change in time. “It is not so infrequent an occasion as one might hope, we are sorry to say. Is there some manner in which we may be of service to you now? It is early yet, and the late Mer Danverezh had set aside some money, that he might be laid to rest close to dusk.”

“We are grieved to hear he felt he must attend to his own preparations,” Thara said. “Though perhaps this was meant as a kindness to those he left behind?”

“He does not have much surviving family, othala,” said the junior prelate—Adrevar, the prelate had called him—eagerly, anxious to help. “His grandfather had a stake in the last of the Ezheise gold mines to continue producing. Having known Mer Danverezh, we suppose he was a parsimonious enough man that he preferred to ensure his final farewells were well seen to, rather than what common comforts money can buy.”

“We need not speculate on the motives of the deceased.” Perlenar spoke mildly, but Adrevar ducked his head as if rebuked. “Othala Celehar. We can certainly arrange to give you the addresses of some surviving kin, and we can also direct you to the silk shop where Min Bashenin worked, although that may not be helpful right now, as the weavers have of late taken to the streets, as you have probably heard if you have been in Ezho for any length of time already.” He raised one thin hand, and Adrevar bowed and hurried off. “Do you wish also to inspect the scene? It has been some time—two months? Three?—since Min Bashenin was taken, and she was the last.”

“If that would not be unduly intrusive,” Thara said. “We understand that you have preparations underway for another funeral, and we would not wish to do anything that would distress what family or friends will be present today. How did Mer Danverezh pass, if we may ask?”

Perlenar tilted his head, like a curious bird. He was full elven, unless advanced age had frosted his hair to its winter white, and his eyes were a very bright green from which age had not managed to leach the color. “Why, he was a construction worker. We are sorry to say he was lost building the Emperor’s bridge—the Wisdom Bridge, that is to be the name, I think?”

“We see,” Thara said. “We are sorry for the loss, but we are glad, too, that his body could be recovered and brought home.”

The two prelates regarded each other for a few moments’ polite silence. Perlenar did not, I realized, particularly want to show us down to where the unfortunate Danverezh lay in repose—I would have been surprised if Perlenar had much enthusiasm for walking any distance greater than that between the shrine and his desk. “Have you been in Ezho long?” asked Perlenar, at length. “We expect you will wish to visit Insharanee, and the collective cemetery, as well as the one northwest of the city—it is the source of the largest number of disappearances, if we recall correctly.”

Thara consulted his notes. “The quarrymen’s cemetery, yes .”

“That is its common name,” I interjected, “but of course the caravan drivers and the miners—tin, these days, not gold—and the fishermen, and all of their families, they tend to live outside of the city proper.”

“Ah!” said Perlenar. “You are Ezheise, then? It is good that you have a local guide, othala, that will save you time and steps.”

“We are fortunate to be able to put our trust in Mer Olgarezh,” agreed Thara seriously, as Adrevar reappeared, still writing hasty notes on a piece of paper. “Perhaps Adrevar could show us the scene of the crime? That way we need not continue to distract you from your duties, othala.”

“Adrevar has his own duties,” said Perlenar, with less enthusiasm than I had expected. It might be that he did not like Thara appropriating his underling, however briefly; Ezho was not the hornet’s nest of territorial, waspish prelates that Thara had described finding in Amalo, but that did not preclude its members from drawing small petty lines in the sand. “But yes, Celehar, we are certain that he can spare a few minutes to accompany you.” And with that, we were dismissed to the junior prelate’s care.

Chapter Text

The mortician had done his work on Danverezh with care; the man’s fall from the abutment of what would one day be the Wisdom Bridge had left him with little visible harm beyond the obvious. And i n death, they had contrived to have him appear more at rest than Thara seemed likely ever to achieve in life. He was a part-goblin man of around my age or a little more, with pale gray skin and hair to match; whatever color his eyes had been in life would remain, to us, a mystery.

While Thara looked around the ulimeire, I made myself unobtrusive by the door, whereby my efforts were aided greatly by young Adrevar’s uncomplicated disinterest in me. He stayed at Thara’s elbow all the while, eager to help and generally unable to do so; if Thara noticed the constant hovering proximity of this pale new shadow, he did not comment. I wondered what suspicions he was confirming or creating, whether he was learning anything of interest from this quiet investigation, but my curiosity would have to wait until we were rather less haunted.

Once Thara had walked the perimeter of the room, he paused and asked Adrevar whether it would be permitted for him to speak briefly with the deceased. “Oh,” said Adrevar, looking both intrigued and a bit queasy at the prospect. “It can hardly disturb him if you do so, we are sure. Please, if you think it will help you.” He bobbed a little bow and stepped back, leaving Thara to the open casket.

Closing his eyes, Thara laid one hand briefly atop Danverezh’s. His brow creased, but he stepped back shortly and looked at me. “It is only what may be expected,” he said. “It was raining. His foot slipped—the fall. His harness caught him too low, and he could not pull himself above the current. After that, it was only panic.”

“Poor Mer Danverezh,” said Adrevar unhappily. “We do not think he would much desire our pity, but he has it nonetheless.”

Thara invited Adrevar to join him in prayer, and the young man acceded with glad relief. Adrevar had a fine clear voice, which he used to recite the words of the prayer by rote; not carelessly or without feeling, but plainly taking a great care not to err. If I angled my head just so, I could pick out Thara’s lower voice beneath Adrevar’s. Where Adrevar recited by rote, Thara recited by heart. a difference I had never constructed for myself, until I heard it in such great contrast.

When they finished, Thara rejoined me at the door. “ Art finished here ?” I asked, while Adrevar drifted piously at the far end of the room. “ Perhaps we can find someplace close by for lunch.”

“I would like to stay,” Thara said, looking at at the rows of empty benches. “If he has no family to come, then he will not be so alone. And if someone does come, it may prove—interesting—to meet them.”

I told him that I had been glad once of his tendency to happen into interesting circumstances, but that I also found much interest in the keeping of regular mealtimes. If there were to be no lunch for us that day, there would indeed be dinner at Anzharo’s Kitchen, and moreover I would tell Merrem Chorvened that duty had forced us to skip the midday meal. He smiled, which was just as well, as I had not yet decided whether I was making a joke.

After a few hours of lonely vigil-keeping, funeral guests began to trickle in. Perlenar remained in his inner office, saving his strength, Adrevar said, a little sadly, for the ceremony proper. Adrevar himself took up a post just outside to greet these arrivals. Earlier he had said that little in the way of family remained to Danverezh, but some kindly god must have taken pity to grant him a wealth in friendship that repaid his lack of kin. Most of these were goblin-blooded, full or mixed; only one appeared to be either a full-blooded elf or close enough to pass for one. They cast curious glances at us as they arrived, but did not seek our conversation, keeping to their own close clusters. W hen Thara did approach a married couple, to offer condolences, they gave short, reticent answers. “Thou hast too much of the outsider about thee,” I told him after. “However kindly thy good wishes are offered.”

A woman alone was one of the last to arrive: dark grey in face and hair, but unusually tall for a goblin, and her eyes were a striking blue. She stopped in the entrance to the ulimeire to look us over curiously before crossing to where Danverezh lay. “Perhaps I will approach her,” Thara murmured. “She is alone; it may be that she will receive my questions more willingly than the rest.” I agreed that it was worth the effort, and he said he would do so shortly; it would be rude to deprive her immediately of her time with Danverezh.

But a moment was all she was to get. At that moment, Adrevar, frowning, hurried into the ulimeire, his ears low. He paused when he saw Thara and I, and said for our ears only, “We do not wish to cause alarm, but—do you also smell smoke?”

Thara’s ears lowered, and he drew a deep breath; I nudged Adrevar aside and leaned past him into the outer ring of the ulimeire, where I not only smelled smoke but saw the first hazy suggestion of it on the air, around the bend of the inner wall.

I had enough experience of fire to know what must follow. Once, in the dry season on the steppes, a flash of heat lightning had struck the arid grass. With the rest of the encampment, I had thrown everything I could carry on my back and raced just ahead of the fire’s advancing borders, knowing that if it did not burn out quickly, I would. “Get everyone out,” I ordered Adrevar. “We must hope it proves to be nothing, but it cannot be risked.”

He obeyed as readily as any young soldier, raising that fine clear voice of his to urge all those gathered to exit immediately. I did not wait to see if they were as obedient as Adrevar; I seized Thara by the arm and hauled him bodily along, through the ulimeire’s outer ring, and several feet out into the grounds. The first of the funeral guests were not far behind us, and already I could see palpable fingers of smoke had also followed us outside. I found a young teenager among the guests, and put my hand on his shoulder so that he could not hope I was addressing another. “Run and get the fire brigade.”

“Go!” his mother added, and if my word was not enough for him, hers was. He took off at a dead run, with the speed of youth.

Before I saw him reach the gates, someone gripped my sleeve. Adrevar stood beside me, ghastly pale. “Please,” he said. “Has anyone seen Othala Perlenar?”

I looked quickly around. Among all the black- and grey-haired heads around me, I saw only three white: Thara, Adrevar, and the lone elven guest. The elderly prelate had not been among us; he would still be in his office, which lay in the direction from which the smoke had issued. “We will find him,” I said.

“We will accompany—” Thara began to say.

I interrupted him, rounding instead on the unfortunate Adrevar. “You will keep Othala Celehar from doing anything that would endanger himself and his assignment from the Archprelate.” It should have been enough to motivate such a pliable young man, but I added, unable to help myself: “If he should come to harm, and we survive, you will answer to us for that.”

“Oh,” said Adrevar, in a way that sounded agreeably like yes, sir. I disengaged his fingers from my sleeve and ran back inside the building.

The air inside held no noticeable heat, which was good. I had also, on the steppes, seen fire turned against one side or the other in the course of battle or ambush. The heat rising off open, uncontrolled flames was almost a living thing itself, an indifferent eldritch being, speaking in the screams of burning wood and dying men, one which killed not out of hate, but only because the life or death of its victims was of no consequence to itself whatsoever.

The air inside had dark ened, though, and I loosened my neckcloth to cover my face as best I could, crouching as low as I could easily manage to follow the thickening smoke to its origin. The heat did rise as I neared Perlenar’s office, and the smoke thickened, billowing from the open door. I called out the prelate’s name, but heard no answer.

Waiting did neither him nor I any favors. I lowered myself to hands and knees and forced myself forward into the heat. Even with my face muffled, the smoke threatened to choke me, and I could not shout again. My eyes watered, and the smoke billowed out of the rearmost part of the office in ugly gray gouts, but I could make out the shape of a man’s body, the pale fingers of one outstretched arm livid against the dark carpet. The heat and the smoke worked together to deny me, but I closed my eyes and crawled forward until my hand found Perlenar’s arm. I seized his sleeve and pulled as hard as I could, without regard for his years—a broken wrist was better than a wasted moment in the conflagratio n. He was heavier than I had expected from our earlier meeting, and I drag ged him rough ly over the carpet.

Only when I bashed my shins on the raised threshold did I realize we had reached the comparative safety of the corridor. I let go of the prelate to pull myself upright against the jamb, then lifted him in my arms like an oversized child. A few stumbling steps forward, and a perfect disorientation made me doubt the direction in which safety lay. Then voices reached me, and through the haze I saw shapes moving my way: three men who, behind the sopping-wet cloths that draped their faces, could have been fully elf or goblin or anywhere in the middle.

“This way!” shouted one, as the other two ran past, and seized my arm. “Mind the hose!”

There was nothing to do but follow him. My heart hammered in my throat, demanding fresh air that I could not give, and it seemed several long minutes before we tripped outside into smoke-softened afternoon light. Someone—I could not see who—relieved me of Othala Perlenar, and other hands guided me farther from the ulimeire, loosed the cloth from my face, and held my hair away from my face while I gagged and retched on the flagstones just inside the gates.

“Don’t try to gulp down the air you have missed all at once,” said a voice I neither recognized nor expected. I looked up through streaming eyes and found an indistinct dark face over mine. The tall goblin woman, I thought, judging mostly from her height. “The air will be there when you need it. Only go easy.” She paused. “That was bravely done, mer.”

“No,” I said, scarcely recognizing my own voice, and she did not ask for an explanation I had no intention of making. “My companion. Is he—”

“He is well. The fire captain has taken him and Adrevar aside. The fire threw up a great deal of smoke, but it had not spread outside the prelate’s office; the fire brigade has already contained it.” Her head lifted, turned. “Are you well? I am called elsewhere.”

I waved her off, and she vanished quickly in the burning blur of my vision. She had said Thara was with the fire captain, which was one of the safer places he could be, but I did not want to rely on her word too long, before he had a chance to fall into the nearest canal—or the nearest Clenverada assassin. I had sworn to an Archprelate and an Emperor that I would do my best to keep him safe, and I could hardly do so when I could not even see him. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and cleared my vision enough to make out the hulking shape of the fire wagon, the thick dark tubes of vulcanized rubber snaking away into the ulimeire. There: a single pale head among the brass helmets. With as deep a breath as I could contrive to draw, I hauled myself up from my knees and made my way toward him.

By the time I got there, Perlenar had also come around to consciousness. He sat with his back resting against the wheel of the fire wagon, padded by the frock coats of a few men who now stood around in their shirtsleeves. His eyes widened when I approached close enough for him to see me, and his voice, when he thanked me, was as rough as Thara’s. “I—we took the registers, before we were overcome by the smoke.” He reached feebly for a leather bag that rested beside him on the ground and patted it as if for reassurance, as well he might: the names of all the dead who had ever been buried in Ulsarendee. “The fire brigade say there is little lasting damage otherwise; nothing that matters, certainly. Some ruined books and tapestries. And the paint. Who could care about that, if the structure remains sound and no one has been injured? Oh, all gods be blessed.”

The fire captain interceded, to save poor old Perlenar from having to recite his story again. The fire seemed to have started, he said, at a shelf of prayer books in the outer office, while Perlenar meditated in the inner room. There was no lamp near the bookshelf, and Perlenar, unsurprisingly considering his age, had heard nothing. Nor had Adrevar espied any unexpected person in the corridor. “ We will look through the building again,” the captain said, on his own behalf this time, before he bowed to take his leave, “but like as not, any further investigation will have to come from the Vigilant Brotherhood.”

“Celehar,” said Perlenar, once the fire captain had moved off. His face was drawn, and he did not look up at us. His fingers plucked nervously at the ash stains on his sleeves. “We do not wish to...oh, we do not have a decent way to ask this without the risk of sounding unkind or ungrateful, which is not our wish. Did this happen because someone suspected we had spoken to you about the disappearances?”

“We do not know,” said Thara, plainly taken aback. “We dearly hope not.”

Adrevar intervened then to insist that Perlenar be taken to the nearest cleric. A number of the funeral guests immediately moved to assist him; rather more of them, unfortunately, than were actually convenient, and Thara and I were swiftly nudged aside by their ill-planned attempts at coordination. At least they got Perlenar off the ground and did not drop him in their maneuvering. The tall woman was not with them. I did not see her anywhere on the grounds, although what I could or could not see did not mean very much just then, especially with the bulk of the fire wagon behind me. Since it was there, I leaned against it to rest my legs. “Thou’rt shaking,” Thara said; unhelpfully, I thought, as there was little to be done about that now.

I could almost hear him frowning. “A fine observation from the man whose idea it was to miss lunch,” I said, as lightly as my smoke-rough voice would allow.

“Shouldst thou also see the cleric?”

“No, I am well enough.” I stifled another bout of coughing. “Though I feel closer right now to Othala Perlenar’s years than I can quite prefer.”

He touched my arm, very lightly, as if I might crumble to ash inside my coat. “We will hire a cab for the trip back to the Shoulders.”

“Canst abide a trip to the bathhouse before the cendartheian?” I asked. “I would do nearly anything for one of Merrem Chorvened’s chicken liver cakes just now; the very least kindness I could do for her should be to bathe first.”

The fire captain caught up to us on the street. “There’s one more thing, othala,” he said, bowing as if to apologize for the necessary interruption. “The man who was to be laid to rest at sundown.”

“Oh,” said Thara wearily, a prophet receiving too-late revelation, “of course. He has been taken, like the rest.”

Chapter Text

Thara was serious about hiring a cab, and we managed to flag down a driver on the main street outside Ulsanaree. Despite the clatter of the carriage’s wheels over the stone streets, I very nearly fell asleep, and only accidentally roused myself with another fit of coughing. “Pray let us get down and walk the rest of the way,” I said. “I am of no use to thee snoring.”

“Thy usefulness is not my concern,” he said, and countered with an argument that no one could possibly see him, let alone try to murder him, through the cab’s curtained windows. I had not the breath to argue, and soon enough the cab deposited us outside Talvanee, where we retrieved clean clothes before setting out for the baths on Last Street.

Unlike the baths we had used at court, which were reserved for the use of the canonry, the municipal bathing hall was loud and crowded; it was after sundown, and plenty of the shift workers had had the same idea we did of refreshing themselves before the evening’s meal. I did not bother to insist that we should bathe one at a time, for there would be an inconvenient number of witnesses for any would-be murderer in such a public facility, and, if I knew the Ezheise working-man at all, any number of bystanders who would gladly and violently intervene against the attempted assassin who disturbed the peace of an evening’s bath.

The court baths had also been rather finer than what I was accustomed to, but the Last Street bathhouse matched my expectations neatly: rough-cut blocks of yellow soap wallowing in the trough along the water’s edge, their bottom edges soft and pliable; a lingering layer of grit on the tiles at the bottom; the soothing background noise of a few dozen voices. At the far end, three young men—scarcely more than boys—roughhoused and yelled, quieting intermittently when their fathers yelled back at them. Two elderly men sat in a shallower corner, scrubbing one another’s backs in turn, where their own aging arms would no longer allow them to reach. It felt very familiar and reassuringly homely. I found a place on one of the ledges that jutted out under the water, where I took up a piece of soap and scrubbed until the water around me was clouded with grey.

“Thought you was a whole goblin till you got in the water,” jested an older man, and I gave him a half-hearted smile as he waded past me.

This time, I did not need to work to keep my eyes and my thoughts off Thara. Scrubbing the soot off my face and out of my hair took all my attention, and when I was done, all I wanted to do was soak. I startled awake some time later when someone took a firm grasp of my shoulder. “Thou wert indeed snoring,” Thara said. His face was so close to mine that the water running off his hair dripped on to my chest. “I worried thou wouldst slip under the water, and that is the last thing thou need’st right now.”

He had not let get go of my shoulder, and he did not look around to see how much attention we had drawn. I remembered the monklike intensity with which he had withheld his gaze from me in the baths at court, and how forcefully he had pushed away from our Winternight dance when the servant had knocked on the door. I could think of no more telling sign that his deeper affections had ebbed than this lack of concern for how we might be perceived by those around us: the nearness, the touch, the informality with which he addressed me. I summoned the other half of my heart still left from the smile I had shown the elderly bather. “The first thing I need is dinner. Pray let us dress and go.”

“Art weary of dining here?” I asked, as we hurried toward the open, waiting doors of Anzharo’s Kitchen. The breeze from the river was forceful and brisk, and my hair wet and too short still to be coaxed into a braid or bun. “It is only its proximity, which keeps us from being in the street overlong after dark; and I know the faces of Merrem Chorvened and her assistant cook, and the girl who sometimes brings out the plates. And there is only the one extra exit at the rear of the kitchen—”

“It is a perfectly agreeable place to eat,” Thara promised, and followed me inside.

Merrem Chorvened stood near the front, but not to greet us; instead she was squared off with a younger woman in a prelate’s black frock coat. “Oh, you will not ,” she said crossly.

But the stranger had already turned to us and extended her hand to Thara. “We are very sorry to interrupt your supper,” she said apologetically, even as he cautiously accepted her handshake. Merrem Chorvened shook out her apron and walked off, muttering, toward her kitchen. “But we had heard from the Ulisothala that you were in Ezho, and that you were staying nearby. We were not sure how else to make your acquaintance.”

“We are not entirely sure that you have done that,” said Thara.

The kindly-meant reminder initiated a round of introductions. The woman was Othalo Hedaran, and her benefice was Ezho’s lone collective cemetery; she bobbed a proper, if abbreviated, curtsy my way after Thara gave her my name, and then turned immediately back to him. “We would not ask if we had any better idea of how to proceed, but, othala, we seek your help in solving a murder.”

I suppressed a sigh, albeit a small one. Thara attracting attention from only one more extra murderer could hardly matter at that point. He glanced at me before asking Hedaran, “You are petitioning us, then?”

“Oh! where is our head? Yes, if we need not be a direct relation in order to do so. He was of our benefice.” One of her hands worked nervously at a loose thread on her cuff, and she pressed on with determination. “We did not much like him, nor did he, we think, like us. But we still feel responsible for him, though we lack your specific—gift.”

“He has no surviving kin?”

“A wife and a son: a young man of ninteen years.” Her ears dipped briefly before resuming a politely neutral posture. “They have not had a warm reception in Ezho, although we would not have expected it to extend to the extent of murder...Her late husband was a doctor,” Hedaran supplied, into Thara’s curious silence. “Thus it does not surprise us that Merrem Ardocharan wishes to avoid further, ah…”

“Newspaper headlines,” I supplied, and she gave me an agonized look.

“We accept your petition,” Thara interceded, and she came to sit with us in the cendartheian, telling us what she knew of the case around bites of the meal that Merrem Chorvened served us. The Vigilant Brotherhood had lived up to their name in pursuit of the murderer, but had found the trail cold and devoid of clues. Doctor Ardochar had been killed bent over his books in his downstairs clinic-laboratory, during one of the regular hours he held open to patients in the evenings. His son had been in Ashedro, where, this winter past, he had enrolled in the university. His wife, suffering from headache, had been sleeping upstairs thanks to a sleeping draft he had himself prepared, the ingredients and their precise proportions noted carefully in the logbook that had been resting by his elbow when he had been found. “She thought nothing of the fact that he had never come to bed,” said Hedaran unhappily. “He often fell asleep at his desk, halfway between one thought and the next. Only when she came to bring him a cup of tea at nine of the morning did she discover him.” He had been stabbed neatly in the back, between the third and fourth rib. The blade must have been long enough to reach his heart—must have been, Hadaran said, for it was never found. “Nor did anyone see a bloodstained assassin running around the streets.”

“We will speak to his widow,” Thara promised. “Perhaps she will let us speak to his remains. But we cannot promise we will learn much from the effort; if he died quickly, he may not have seen the one who did this.”

Hedaran leaned forward earnestly, knocking her fork into her lap. “We are sure that anything you can discover will be helpful!”

“We appreciate your certainty,” Thara said, so kindly that I doubted Hedaran knew it was a dead lie. “And it is convenient that you have come to find us tonight; in doing so, you have saved us a trip to the collective cemetery.”

This time when Hedaran’s ears dropped, they remained low. “The missing body.”

“Yes.” Thara consulted his memory. “Buru Ormachara. He died of a bad heart, we are told. Can you tell us anything more of him?”

Hedaran could, and did, at length. Or machara, a goblin greengrocer, had lived to an unlikely four-and-eighty years despite his manifold bad habits. He had been a longtime member of her congregation, generous, well liked by his neighbors and customers, equally ready with a joke and with his coin where either were most needed. “He hardly ate meat, though he certainly could have afforded it, and he was forever going out in the worst weather without his greatcoat.” She shook her head, smiling. “At his age. Can you imagine?”

“We are sorry for the loss of Mer Ormachara,” said Thara feelingly. He hesitated, taking extra time to set his teacup aside and turning it once in his saucer. “Where did he die, if we may ask? Near the river, or—?”

“At home, in bed.” A shaky sigh from Hedaran, and she nudged the last of her dumplings through the sauce on her plate. “In his sleep, the cleric thought, and we very much hope so.”

After dinner, we walked Hedaran to the nearest tram stop, then made our way back to Talvanee. “A murdered doctor,” I said, as I laid out the bedding beside the door. “Wilt need an alibi from every cleric in the city?”

“I will certainly need to speak to some clerics,” said Thara. I expected him to sit down at the little desk for another spate of letter-writing, but he closed the lamps, leaving only the sliver of moonlight that slipped between the curtains. “Come, it is late, and we have had a long enough day already. I can see that thou’rt weary.”

Not so weary that I could not imagine other ways I would rather pass the time; but I closed my eyes and accepted Lady Sleep as my dance partner for the night.

In the morning, before we broke our fast, we set out early to knock upon the doors of the kin of the missing deceased. “I do not expect to be happily received,” Thara warned me, “though thou shouldst expect a cold answer rather than cold steel.”

And indeed, we were not invited past the threshold of any apartment or house, and what responses Thara did receive to his polite inquiries were always brief and usually impatient. “ It is not personal,” I offered, as we retreated from another of these to buy hand-rolls stuffed with creamed meat of dubious provenance from a vendor on the street. I had eaten worse often enough, but it did not at all rate when compared with what I had gotten accustomed to in the cendartheian. “The most impactful recent experience most of these people have of the prelacy is trying to scrape together enough money for an auspicious burial for their loved one.”

“I promise thee, I am not offended.” Not offended by the cool reception he had gotten from the bereaved, I thought, but, judging by the tilt of his ears, perhaps somewhat offended by the case itself, and its unwillingness to surrender the slightest lead. He handed me his half-eaten roll, freeing his hands to page through his notebook. “We are not far from the Ardochar residence. Let us pay a visit to the widow Ardocharan while we are nearby, and hope we are better received there.”

M errem Ardocharan did indeed show us inside, to her parlor. She was a tall, handsome elven woman of perhaps fifty years, elegant in mourning, from her black wool gown to the black glass-chip beads that hung from her silver earrings. No jolly widows to be found here; Ardocharan represented a model of character from another class of opera altogether. She offered us tea, which we were either too polite or too greedy to refuse, and prepared it herself. She might have had to dismiss a servant girl after her husband’s death, or it might be that a doctor in the north could not keep a servant and a cook, as such a household in the south might easily have done.

When Thara asked about her husband’s remains, she nodded reluctantly toward a stout brass urn that stood on a side table. “The newspapers have a great deal to say about your unusual gift, othala.” Her dignified expression wavered, admitting a glimmer of skepticism through her composure. “Of course you are welcome to—question him?—if that will help advance the investigation.”

“I cannot promise that it will,” Thara said, already apologetic. “But we can always hope.”

She retrieved the urn and carefully removed the lid before placing it on the table in front of Thara. As careful with his hands as with the words of the prayer he spoke, he reached inside and let his fingers sink just below the surface of the ashes. Behind his lowered lids, his eyes moved as if he were dreaming. Ulis was the god of dreams, too, was he not?

After a moment he exhaled loudly, and withdrew his hand to sit back on his chair. “He never saw his killer,” he said. “Even knowing he was dying, he was preoccupied with preserving his notes—with preventing his own blood from spilling upon them.”

Ardocharan briefly closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “That sounds very much like Indevis.”

Thara gave her a moment to recover, then spoke again, moving very lightly, I thought, around the very edges of something that troubled him . “I saw something of his work—the information he was looking over.”

“Yes?” Ardocharan said expectantly. “Oh; do you mean you would like to see his logbooks yourself?”

“I am not sure that will be necessary...Merrem Ardocharan, your husband was injecting the infectious agent of borläan beneath the skin of the healthy?”

Now it was my turn to grab for the broken threads of my composure. The purposeful spread of borläan was unthinkable, monstrous. Any number of people might have wanted to murder Doctor Ardochar for that; I might have considered it myself, if he hadn’t been already in his funerary urn by the time I learned of it.

But Ardocharan was shaking her head. “Othala, you see the facts, but not their meaning. Pray let me try to explain.”

Indevis Ardochar, she explained, had extracted blood from borläan patients and found it capable of stimulating the disease in river rats. But, she went on, if he first exposed these blood samples to an intensity of heat, the rats did not take ill: not upon this initial exposure, and indeed, not when given a second dose of fresh blood, nor even a third. “Borläan is such a scourge here in the summer season,” she said, and looked down at the handkerchief she was twisting in her hands. “In the winter he began to offer this process—spiculation, he called it—to willing volunteers. There were so few ill effects in the test population; he had already begun to spiculate the city’s children, as they suffer the worst from the disease. But he had not gotten very far, and summer is coming …”

“You are very learned on the subject, merrem,” said Thara; I too was impressed, insofar as I had managed to follow the more technical aspects of her elaboration. “Did you also train as a doctor?”

She leaned forward as she laughed, as if the question had struck her hard in the belly. “I? No. I helped my husband to keep his notes in order, and I tried to read his papers and books when I had the time, to keep my mind sharp.” She smiled a little wryly. “A nd to be able to have something to talk to him about at the dinner table. His life’s work was very important to him.”

“And no wonder, even if it was to the exclusion of smaller pleasures. I wonder, did he—?”

Thara’s thought was interrupted by the opening of the front door. “Mother!” called a young man’s voice from the foyer. “Art not at home?”

“In here,” Ardocharan called back, and added, as he strolled into the room, “and thou might’st look once around before shouting for the neighbors to hear, Lasha.” She turned back to Thara, proud and embarrassed all at once. “This is our son—our only. Lasha, this is Othala Celehar. He has some questions about thy father.”

“Othala.” Lasha Ardochar bowed with impeccable politeness. In looks he favored his mother, though I did not think he was as tall as her. He had two perfect braids that fell to either side of his face, as yet unribboned; he would not have had time to earn a scholar’s rank yet if he had only been a few months at the university, and his course of study interrupted by this unexpected death, too. “I am at your service.”

“That is kindly offered,” Thara said, returning the bow. “I understand you are enrolled at the University of Ashedro?”

“Yes,” said Ardochar, proud and a little embarrassed of his pride; he was one who understood he was still a boy while striving to fill out the role of a man grown. He reminded me of my younger brother, the only one of the three boys who had still lived at home when our father had passed. “I hope one day to call myself a doctor, as my father did.”

“I am more fortunate than many bereaved women,” said Ardocharan gravely, and her son patted her shoulder. “Lasha is my husband’s heir, and he is a good son. I will not starve or be turned out into the street.”

The younger Ardochar’s arrival precipitated a brief round of polite conversation: were his studies going well, how did he like Ashedro, how did Othala Celehar find Ezho? As soon as could be considered decent, Thara steered the conversation back onto its main heading. “I hope you will not find this an untoward question, and I’m sure you have already spoken to the Vigilant Brotherhood about it. But did Doctor Ardochar have any enemies that you knew of?”

Mother and son exchanged a silent glance. “ I don’t wish to invent trouble for people who have done nothing wrong,” Ardocharan said, looking away first. “I’m sure you understand.”

“I am a Witness for the Dead,” Thara reminded her gently. “My calling is to seek truth. Not to punish the innocent.”

“The Subpraeceptor may not feel the same way,” she replied, equally gently. In her hands, the handkerchief had worked itself into a thick knot. “So I ask only that you tread carefully.”

Thara nodded. “The othocirisei,” he suggested.

Ardochar looked down at his shoes. “They tore down his handbills and pushed letters under our door,” he said. “Beseeching him to stop what they called his desecration of the body. Once they painted on the side of our house—”

“Only the one word,” said Ardocharan. “‘Mutilator.’”

“—and a few times they put old fish down our chimney,” he finished in a rush. “But none of them ever threatened him, that I know of, nor committed any lesser act of bodily harm. I could say the same of the clerics here. Father was known to get himself into shouting matches now and again with a few of the Csaiveise. They were always happy to be interviewed, too, when a reporter wanted to write a story for the papers about the perils of unchecked modernity.” He did not quite manage to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “But certainly they have never followed him home, nor threatened violence.”

“There are also the comparison groups,” said Ardocharan unhappily, before we could meaningfully ingest what her son had already said. “He wanted to know how effective the spiculation was, compared to those who did not receive the treatment, so that he could justify with data what he already supposed was true. Half of his volunteers were told they were receiving the spiculation, but in truth, they had only an injection of simple salts. Useless, harmless.”

“But that is cruel!” I exclaimed, and both of them looked at me as if a table had learned to speak.

“He felt that scholars and other doctors would not believe him unless he had clear evidence,” said the younger Ardochar, his gaze flicking between me and Thara, unsure of who he ought to explain his father’s work to. “It...it would be hard to convince the university masters to pay attention, without the objectivity of numbers to stand behind his work.”

“Those who received only a salt solution should not have known the difference,” said Ardocharan. “Certainly the tools and the spiculated solutions were identical across the groups. All his notes are still here, and undisturbed as far as I have seen. But…” She held out her hands beseechingly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“It offers the possibility of an explanatory motive,” said Thara. His long-empty teacup clicked into its saucer, and he rose. “Thank you, Merrem Ardocharan, Mer Ardochar. You have given me much to think about.”

Chapter Text

Thara was quiet as we walked back toward the Shoulders after leaving the Ardochar house. As with his primary investigation, the doctor’s murder had presented him with an extravagance of possibilities; I could see the tension in his face as he rooted through all the information he had been given—here in Ezho, certainly; perhaps all he’d ever learned in his life—in the hopes that a stray clue might fall out of the deepest pockets of his thoughts, if only he shook them thoroughly enough. We were practically alone in the street, so late in the morning; I said, for his ears only, “A kiss for thy thoughts?”

“What?” he said blankly, and looked around. “I’m sorry—I am altogether distracted. I’m sure I have thee to thank, that I have not walked straight out into the river.”

Even if he did not want to discuss his work, I was glad to have gotten him talking, and not only because I did not, indeed, want to have to fish him out of the river. We walked out onto the bridge that would carry us back onto the heart of the Peninsula, and Thara pointed toward the blue roofs of the Ezh’theileian. “Look,” he said. “The silk workers must be on the march again.”

A small but densely packed crowd, some two or three hundred in number, had amassed on the steps of the Ezh’theileian and in the open public square before it. Mostly women, though a few men were mixed in among them, and a good number of children ran at the margins of the gathering or skipped up and down the steps. At our distance, I could see that many people carried signs, though I could not read any of them; meanwhile a female voice addressed the crowd at an impressive volume. When we drew closer, I could make out the woman at the top of the steps who held a speaking trumpet. “...and that is why we cry out for him to hear us!” she was saying. “A prince cannot be deaf to the call for justice! A prince cannot turn his face aside from the need of his subjects!”

“Dost wish to seek out thy sisters?” Thara said, nearly shouting into my ear to make himself heard.

I looked around. I had half expected Corano to be the one behind the speaking trumpet. “I would not be averse,” I said. “What is a brother for, if not to stand behind his sister when others would deny her righteous cause? Only stay close in the crowd.”

He promised he would, and we pressed forward between the sturdy young women—spinners and weavers, dyers and brushers. Some cast doubtful looks at us, two men, and strangers at that, cutting across the gathered crowd. But no one wanted to invite the Vigilant Brotherhood into their midst to have us hauled away, as that would have likely ended up with any number of the protesters being hauled off alongside us. There were plenty among the Brotherhood who needed only an excuse, not a reason, and these women knew that as well as I did.

Fortunately Corano, from a high vantage point atop a piece of the square’s statuary, spotted us and flagged us down directly. By the time we reached her, her feet were back on the ground. “I expected to find thee shouting from the steps!” I said, once I pulled back from her embrace. “I suppose clinging to Prince Ezhorema’s marble neck is dramatic enough for you.”

Corano pinched my good arm through my jacket. “And hello to thee, too, dear brother.”

“She wrote most of the words that Laru is saying,” muttered Veseleän, bending to straighten Corano’s skirt where it had hiked rather indecently up at her calf. “I hope Laru is unselfish enough to give what credit is due.”

“Laru is as yet unwed,” said Corano, meeting my eyes to make sure I took her meaning, “and she has no children of her own.”

Veseleän tutted and shook out her own skirts upon straightening. “Nothing as bad as thou fearest is going to happen. We stand on the side of justice; the governor cannot condemn us for that.”

I had been out of Ezho too long to know what kind of things its current governor might condemn or condone, but I had known enough men who were only too happy to use what power they held to condemn anything that might threaten it. I held my tongue anyway, not desiring a squabble with Veseleän, least of all in front of Thara and in a public square.

“You are seeking a Witness for the Silk Workers?” Thara said, forestalling my need to set the conversation on a new track unblocked by the obstacles of waiting arguments.

Corano grinned at him. “Seeking, demanding. It’s all semantics, othala.”

“I hope it will not come to that,” said Veseleän. “The owners can still settle this here. But if the governor and the Prince agree to set us an advocate, surely that one will take the clearest possible measure of the situation, and present those findings with the holiest clarity.”

“I do not know the Ezheise governor, nor the Prince of Thu-Cethor.” Thara addressed this to Corano, over Veseleän’s head. “Is it likely they will hear your case fairly?”

Corano’s face betrayed her weariness, only for a moment. “The shop owners’ wealth has enriched the prince’s family for a century. The governor’s wife is from one of the owners’ families! Any concessions they makes—even an agreement to formally hear the case—will be seen as a betrayal. We will need a solid, sensible Witness on our side.” Her expression lightened. “Are you free to advocate on our behalf, othala? You do seem sensible, if not entirely solid. Hanu must get you to a cendartheian for some good Ezheise food.”

“Othala Celehar is busy enough already chasing down thieves and murderers,” I interceded, answering Corano a little more sharply than I intended, “and I expect it will take more than three days’ worth of ankrosolei before he is as dense as any born Ezheise. Canst not grow an orchard in an hour, as mother likes to say.”

“Oh, very well. But do put in a good word with your fellow Witnesses, othala, if you can. Make sure we get a good one.” Her smile dimpled her round cheeks. “Do you mean to stay the rest of the afternoon, Hanu?”

“No, we are only passing through. We have much to do, and so too must you.” I nodded to her and Veseleän.

“Yes, though most of it is shouting and walking in circles. Hanu, thou must look in on Mama again soon. She has missed the terribly; she so rarely gets to see any of her sons.”

“I will,” I promised, before I could think better of it, and because I had said it, I would have to mean it. “Poor Mother. She should have had more daughters instead.”

Corano scoffed. “Oh, she would never have survived a third, with the way Veseleän and I were at each other’s throats as children—at least the three of you kept mostly to your own devices.” She kissed me on the cheek and pressed Thara’s hand once more before letting us go. “What a vicious creature thou art, to wish that upon her!”

We followed the Istandaärtha a short way south before turning east to cross out of the Peninsula and into Cemreian’s Shoulders. The bridge we took was an older one, one of the city’s first, and the Princes and governors who had held Ezho’s purse strings over the years had not wasted coin on converting the strong, coarse stone into something that would imitate the elegant masonry that might be seen in Cetho or Cairado. At the midpoint, we stopped to look toward the point of the Confluence. From there, we could not see the Evresartha, but we could see the broad stretch of water where the rivers had already merged into one.

“It is too bad the rivers themselves cannot tell thee what is afoot,” I opined, leaning my elbows on the railing for a moment’s rest. It was a safe enough opening, offering him a chance to discuss the investigation with me if he so desired, without requiring him to deny a direct question. “They see so much, and it is hard to imagine thy culprits escaping Ezho without crossing the water somewhere or other.”

“A very canny culprit might find a way to conceal himself.” I could hear the smile in Thara’s voice. “Even from a very canny river.” We watched the water go by under the bridge for a spell before he ventured, “Corano knows that thou’rt…?”

I glanced around and found we were quite alone at our viewpoint over the water. There was no neat way to ask about what neither he nor I had a name for, and I answered before he could struggle into a way that was not so neat. “Yes, she knows. She caught me kissing another boy when I was...sixteen?” I felt my face redden with twenty-five-year-old embarrassment, and laughed a little at myself. “She would have been thirteen, then, I think, but she vowed to carry no tales.”

“The others do not know?”

“My father did.” I lifted a hand and pointed at the next bridge down. “That same boy’s father found us out, too—down there, between the retaining wall and the abutment. He sent his own son scurrying home, and dragged me to my father’s workshop. It was all my doing, to hear him tell it, a corrupter of the worst kind. Of course dear perfect Beshelis would never have set a toe out of line unless someone else had tempted him to it. He kissed me first, the little prick.” I snorted a laugh. “I don’t think it mattered much to my father what was true and what wasn’t; the important thing was what people would think, what they would say. I’d had worse from his hand before, but he made me swear, too, that he would never again hear I’d been up to such a thing. And that my mother should never find out, for it would surely kill her to hear it.”

The wind lifted, stirring my hair and raising little white rills on the surface of the water. “Hanu,” said Thara, frowning at me as if I’d said that the moon were really only a barbarian god’s gallstone. His ears dipped. “That is—blessed goddesses, that is awful.”

It had seemed so then, but I had the benefit of a great many years to insulate me from it. I stood and dusted off my frock coat, which I had smudged on the bird-stained parapet. “There are worse things,” I said, “and it seems most of them have managed to happen to thee, on one occasion or another.”

At that his ears flattened further, pulling close to his head. “Thou invent’st comparison, even competition, where there is none.”

“An there were, thou wouldst certainly win,” I countered, spiting what little wisdom I could claim to possess. “But only if thou wert not disqualified by thy hypocrisy—behaving as though a scolding were worse than the various attempts against thy own life!”

We stared at one another, and I knew my own ears were as flat as Thara’s. I ceded my ground first, not wishing to prolong whatever I had inadvertently started. “Pray let us dine early tonight. We are both footsore and weary, with little enough to show for it.”

“Yes,” said Thara, and the sharp angle of his ears softened a few degrees. He turned to follow me as I moved off, and though I tried to walk a little more slowly, to let him lead by a step or two, he altered his pace to stay at my side. “Yes, that is sensible.”

Our bleak moods cast an unmistakable miasma around us, and we had no good-natured teasing from Merrem Chorvened during our dinner. Afterward, in the hotel room, Thara took to his correspondence while I paced behind him and stretched my bad arm and mulled over my words. When he set one page aside for the ink to dry, I pressed the opportunity. “If thou wouldst be better pleased by sending to the Archprelate,” I said, “for a guard with whom thou feelest not the burden of a previous attachment...” I caught myself before I could say that I would not be wounded by it; I was not, after all, a very good liar. “...I would not hold it against thee.”

Thara went very still. After an interminable moment, still holding the fountain pen tightly, he turned in his chair toward me. His face had surpassed its usual pale color, blanched livid, almost bloodless, but there were no lines in his brow beyond those that had carved themselves a permanent place. “A previous attachment,” he repeated.

My own face heated, overcompensating for the lack of color in his. “Wouldst name it something else? Thou dost not reach for me except in solicitude; thou canst scarcely manage to look at me except with pity.” I forced my voice to a quieter pitch, before volume could carry our sordid tale to the other rooms on this storey; I already regretted having spoken, and no good would come of speaking so loudly that others too would have to hear my foolishness. “Pray carry on with thy letters. We will go on as if I have said nothing.” An easy enough prospect, as I had certainly said nothing of value.

“We are not children, that games of pretense should come so easily to us.” Thara shook his head. “I would not imagine thy words away.”

“Then pray forgive my bluntness,” I tried again. “I do not mean to demand that affection should grow where there is no life in the soil. Two men may come together and then part in friendship, that is no evil thing! I wish only to know the shape of the space assigned to me, that I should not exceed its bounds.”

Thara twisted the fountain pen round and round in his hands. I watched his fingers restlessly move, so that I did not have to look at his face. “But it is not thy preference to be dismissed?”

“I go where I am sent,” I said: a soldier’s timeless creed, obedience over opinion. 

Thara set the pen aside, arranging it carefully on a square of felt so that it did not roll away. “Then come here. Please.”

It had the shape of a question and a command all at once. How strange a thing, to be ordered to follow the compass of one’s own desire; to be asked by another whether I could have what I longed for. I crossed the room and knelt beside him, my face still hot, my heart now warming to match. “I have wronged thee, speaking out of turn,” I said, as he swept the hair away from my face. He drove his fingers deeper into my hair and left them there, twisting loosely into the long uneven fall behind my ear. “Pray forgive me.”

“Thinkest me blind to the effort that an ordinary day costs thee?” he asked quietly. “Or dull to the ultimate cause of thy suffering? I would not hurt thee by asking still more of thee.”

I turned my face into the curve of his hand, my lips against his palm. In the privacy of the room he had taken off his frock coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt; I gripped his bare wrist to keep him close, and felt the delicate veins and tendons slide beneath my fingers. “Thy desire cannot hurt me.”

“It hurts me,” he said, more sharply this time, and when he raised his voice, I felt his heartbeat stutter beneath my fingertips. “I am half mad with wanting, and not only thy—thy flesh—but someone must reckon the cost, whilst thou dost not trouble to account it on thy own behalf!”

“The cost is not so great as thou supposest.” I kissed his half-curled palm, the point of his wrist, the soft skin inside his forearm. “An were it, still I would pay it gladly.”

“These things always collect their interest,” he said softly, but the metaphor had already begun to fray, and could not bear the weight of refusal any longer; when he pulled his hand away, it was to undo the knot of my neckcloth.

Chapter Text

We lay together, limbs tangled, for longer than was quite prudent. When at last I made myself disengage, to make what seemed an impossibly long journey to the water closet on the floor below, the loose ends of my hair caught in one of Thara’s earrings, and had to be carefully unwound before I could stand. “What a nuisance,” I said, trying to help him and enjoying very little success. “Bad enough I look half a barbarian. Perhaps I should just cut it down to the scalp and be done with it.”

“Pray do not.” Thara finally freed me by removing the earring in question. He looked away as he fumbled to replace the hoop in his ear. “It becomes thee.”

“Oh? Thinkest me half a barbarian, then?” I took the earring away from him and turned his head to the side to give me better light, so that I could slip the post back into its place. “Perhaps more than merely half.”

“If it is barbaric to do what thou thinkest good and right,’’ he said, “and to pay little heed to those who would think ill of thee for it...then perhaps we all ought to strive for more barbarism.”

Once we had each returned from our pilgrimages to the water closet, I reluctantly made up my pallet by the door. No would-be murderers had found us at the hotel yet, but I preferred to needlessly sleep on the floor than to risk Thara’s life for a very comfortable reason indeed. “Good night,” he said softly, from across the room, and I mumbled my response.

Quickly as I fell asleep, I woke even more suddenly, with a jolt to my shoulder. For a moment I was disoriented—I realized that the door had opened into me only when a brief flash washed the room in pale light. I had never witnessed a maz being performed, but I knew that one maza, the Emperor’s own nohecharis, had once been suborned. I did not know what I could do in the face of such workings, I did not even know if Thara had survived whatever had been carried on that light. But I knew my sword lay at my side, and I knew how to use it. I rolled over and seized the scabbard, and shouldered the door aside even as I drew the blade.

Someone in the dark hallway cursed and fled; a second pale shape stumbled back and crashed into the wall opposite. “Have you run mad?” he cried. Against his chest, he clutched a dark irregular shape. A weapon, or a source of power for a maz he could not perform on his own? He raised one arm, as if that would shield him from my sword. “Put that away!”

Had I run mad? I was willing to entertain the possibility—I thought I preferred madness to whatever I might find when I turned back to the bedroom behind me. My sword angled down, not touching his throat, but it would take only a flick of my wrist to strike the fatal blow if he tried to escape, or to work a new maz. “Who sent you?”

“Th-the Examiner-Sentinel,” he gasped. I realized with a shock that the dark shape he held was a camera; the light I had seen had come from its flash bulb. “I haven’t done anything wrong! You have no right to threaten me!”

A door down the hall opened, and a dark head peered out. Another door at the opposite end cracked a few inches, too. I became instantly and acutely aware of my appearance: wild-haired, barefoot and bare-legged, wielding a sword and towering over a terrified man. “And you have no right to breach my ward’s privacy,” I said, and kicked the camera out of his hands. A sharp crack sounded, and the man winced. I was ignorant of its inner workings, and I had no idea whether breaking the camera would also destroy the images it had captured, but I took a small vicious pleasure in destroying the thing. “Go! Get out of here.”

He lurched up and grabbed at the fallen camera as soon as I withdrew my sword. He glanced back once, at the top of the staircase; then thought better of whatever he had wanted to say to me, and made his escape.

One of the gawkers had already quietly shut his door on the scene; the other lingered to gape at me. “Good night,” I said severely, and checked our own door on the way in. A key stood in the lock: our trespassers had probably had the assistance of the hotel’s clerk. Many men might have been tempted to betray both his low-paying job and the trust of his guests, when offered a cut of the fee the photographer could demand for a lurid photograph of the famed Thara Celehar with his lover.

Instead, the photographer had gotten a broken camera for his troubles, and, perhaps, a blurry shot of the prelate sleeping alone with a guard chastely stationed at the door. But he had come closer to scandal than he could have known, and my stomach churned unhappily even before I shut the door behind me and turned to Thara, who was sitting up straight in bed with the covers clenched in his fists. “We cannot stay here,” he said.

“We can stay the night.” I showed him the key I had removed from the lock; the brass fob was marked with the words DO NOT REMOVE FROM DESK. It was the hotel’s original, and without it, no one else would be entering except by applying extreme force. “We have nothing to be ashamed of—they will not chase us from our beds. In the morning, we will seek new accommodations.” If they would let in a photographer from the worst rag in the city, they might just as gladly let in a murderer. “Wilt sleep any more tonight?”

“No.”

I believed him; I had only asked out of the shallowest hope. “Then I will sit with thee,” I said, and his shock was so severe that he did not argue.

When we descended in the morning, valises in hand, the clerk did not meet our eyes when I handed him the keys—the one he had given us, and the original left in the lock last night. “Good day,” he said, through tight lips, and scraped together the decency, at least, not to ask if we had enjoyed our stay.

We carried our belongings across the street to break our fast one last time at Anzharo’s Kitchen. I already regretted the loss; in the equation of keeping Thara alive, the cendartheian presented a known value that I would have to calculate anew elsewhere. And besides, I would miss the ankrosolei, and the chicken liver cakes, and for that matter Merrem Chorvened herself, who had come to be a reliable fixture of our mornings and evenings.

She appeared as we settled ourselves at a table near the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. “Leaving Ezho so soon, merrai? I am sorry to see it.”

“Not Ezho,” I clarified. “Rather we find ourselves in need of lodging of a less...inquisitorial nature.”

“Oh, my.” Her hand darted to her mouth, and she glanced at Thara, who frowned dismally at his own hands where they rested on the table. “I am very sorry to hear it.”

“We are too, but we will drown as much sorrow as we can in a pot of tea.” We asked for a pot of her aikanaro-golden orchor blend, and fried mushrooms, soft cheese, and bread to break our fast, and she bustled off to see to it. “Wouldst rather have had black orchor?” I asked Thara, after she had gone. “Thou hadst so little sleep last night.”

“The house blend will be fine,” Thara promised, and managed the very smallest smile. “I owe sleep a debt that not even Mer Aisava’s horrid coffee could repay.”

The kitchen girl brought out the pot of tea in short order, and we had finished it before we saw Merrem Chorvened emerge from the kitchen again. My stomach had begun to protest the delay in increasingly noticeable and thus increasingly embarrassing terms; Thara glanced at me askance in the wake of a particularly loud rumble, just as Chorvened herself set plates in front of us. Instead of wishing us a pleasant meal, though, she only stood back and put her hands on her hips. “This is very forward of me,” she said, “and I hope you will forgive an old woman her audacity. In my house there is an extra room, which I have let in the past to various cendarinsoloi in their ones and twos and threes. I would not be sorry for a bit of help with the rent again, and I dare say I will ask a good deal less of your money than another hotel stay would cost.”

Thara turned blankly to me, and I put down the butter knife which I had already picked up in anticipation. “Well, now,” I said, thinking out loud, and trying to do so with my brain and not my stomach. “It is kind of you to offer, in any case. We would need to look it over first, before we can agree to anything.” Entrances and exits, nearby rooftops, alleyways. A private house would offer advantages of privacy over a hotel, but privacy could be a disadvantage, too.

“Yes, of course. My friend Min Helzhin will be there this morning if you would like to stop by.” She gave the address—a street not far from the cendartheian, higher up in the Shoulders—and hurried off to take care of the group of cendarinsoloi who had just arrived.

We decided to go straight to Merrem Chorvened’s house; as Thara pragmatically pointed out, if we found it to our liking, we would not have to haul our things around all day. I watched him, when I could, out of the corner of my eye as we walked. Sleeplessness had left its marks, but I was looking for injury of a deeper kind. If he bore those wounds, he hid them well, and I hoped that the initial shock had been the worst of it.

The house proved to be a small maisonette, its door crowded in beside the ground floor entrance of the building’s lower storey. There was no bell-pull, but I knocked firmly, and a woman’s voice cried from above: “I’ll be down in a moment!” Her conception of a moment differed substantially from mine, but eventually, we did hear footsteps on the stairs, and the door opened on a middle-aged woman a few years younger than Chorvened. While Chorvened was fully goblin, the rainy-day gray of Min Helzhin’s complexion suggested goblin and elf in roughly equal parts. She was also plainly near-sighted, and she squinted up at us. Her eyes lingered briefly on the prelate’s coat Thara wore, then sought his face instead. “Can I help you, merrai?”

“We are here on the hopes of renting Merrem Chorvened’s spare room,” said Thara, and bowed a little. It was a far cry from courtly introductions, but under the circumstances, it would do. “She said we would find you here—Min Helzhin?”

“Oh, Anzharo sent you,” she said, sounding fully at ease now, and also a bit out of sorts. “Yes, please come in and have a look around, and pray do ignore the pile of mending on the table, I am much tidier when I know to expect visitors.”

She led us up the narrow staircase and into a snug sitting room: a round table and three mismatched chairs, a wide bench loaded with overstuffed cushions, and a sewing basket that looked like it had exploded over all of those. There was a fireplace on one side, with a few pots and pans and a battered kettle hung beside it, and a cabinet with wicker doors through which various teacups and caddies could be glimpsed. “Well, this is most of it,” said Min Helzhin, and waved her arm. “The main bedroom is through this door here, and the second room is above, behind that door there.” She indicated a narrow door that could barely be opened thanks to the amount of space the bench took up. “I won’t follow you up; it’ll be close quarters enough with two in there, and Merrem Harenezh’s dress won’t hem itself.”

The floor of the upstairs room was larger than the sitting room had been, but the roof sloped sharply overhread, and we could only stand upright at the far end of the room, flanking the double bed. The piecework quilt suggested itself to be of Min Helzhin’s making: very fine in terms of craftsmanship and rather hideous in the color combinations that had resulted from using a kaleidoscope of scrap fabrics. A painted bureau had been crammed into one corner, and there was a small window fixture oriented—I thought—to the southern view. I stepped closer to it and had a clear view of the rooftops outside: we were high enough that it would hinder attempts to climb in, but the elevation was not so great as to rule out an escape through the window.

“Thou thinkest that we are in a swashbuckler novel,” Thara said, trying to brew amusement from his own evident dismay, once I had laid out my thoughts on the matter. “I can imagine thee diving through a second-storey window, but not myself.”

“Canst imagine thyself living in a two-bedroom house with two old women?” I asked frankly. “Because I expect that is what will we be doing, if we accept Merrem Chorvened’s offer.”

He was tired, and his thoughts elsewhere; otherwise he would have already made the connection himself. As it was, he looked blankly at me for a moment, before his eyes widened and his face flushed scarlet. “Merrem Chorvened and Min Helzhin are—did she think that we are—?”

“Well—we are.” I pressed my hand into the mattress, testing it. It had a soft tick, and the bed frame did not protest my weight. One never knew, when the previous occupants had been young cendarinsoloi. “So she may very well have thought so.”

The color had not faded from his face; his ears shifted up and down as he processed the extent of his current discomfort. If we had not already stood in opposite corners, I think he would have installed himself at the farther end of the room from me. “But she...I did not think we advertised it so broadly as that!”

It was a great deal to ask of him, this, on top of last night’s interruption. I did not want him to flee from all of it, nor from me, but I did not want to conceal my own heart. I offered it to him as best I could, in the trappings of teasing. “It is entirely my fault,” I said gravely. “I cannot contrive to pretend indifference to thee.”

“Oh, pray stop,” he said, but his ears lifted fractionally.

Min Helzhin set aside the half-mended dress to negotiate with us on Merrem Chorvened’s behalf (or to negotiate with me, at least, while Thara sat stoically between us at the little table. We agreed on a weekly rent scheme and a few basic rules for the house. “It will be much nicer to let the room to a pair of proper adults,” Helzhin muttered, as she wrote out matching documents, one for us and one for Chorvened. Properly speaking, we would have to take it to a notary to make the agreement legally binding, but neither she nor I were very concerned with the legal proprieties: we would have a roof and a bed, and the ladies would have an extra few zashans for their rent. “I have had enough of giggling girls for a lifetime! And I don’t expect the two of you will be trying to sneak young men in behind my back.”

Thara’s face twitched, but he clung to what composure he had managed to recollect before we returned downstairs. “Indeed not,” I said, and looked over the piece of paper she had passed me. “It has been some several years since anyone last accused me of giggling.”

“Min Helzhin,” Thara said, as I scribbled my signature and passed the pen to him to collect his, “I notice that you do not wear any earrings.”

Now it was my turn to have missed the obvious. Indeed, her ears were unpierced, not even the telltale pockmarks where old holes might have closed up. “I am an othociro, if that is what you are asking, othala,” she said crisply. “If that troubles you, it is good you have brought it up before you set your name down in ink.”

“It does not trouble me,” Thara clarified hastily. “Pray forgive my curiosity; I had never heard of the custom before coming to Ezho.”

“And do you often exercise your curiosity on your prospective landlady?”

“Min Helzhin,” I said, “you would shudder to know the range of circumstances in which Othala Celehar has previously given his curiosity free reign.”

That wrung a reluctant laugh out of her. “I dare not imagine. We have read about you in the newspapers, you know.”

“I know,” said Thara, brushing that minor unhappiness aside to chase his next question. “I suppose you have heard Doctor Ardochar?”

“The one who was putting needles into children?” She made a warding sign. “I hope he finds peace in his rest, but—what madness! My sister nearly died from a splinter in her foot, when she was six or seven years old. Imagine jabbing foreign objects into a healthy child! I cannot understand it.”

“I expect many in your community feel the same.”

“Mostly, although there are some who indulge in the same variety of curiosity you seem to favor, othala.” She waved a hand dismissively. “They say, if it leaves no permanent mark, and if it does protect against borlaän—that is quite a substantial if!—and anyway the matter is moot now.” Her brow furrowed into deep, well-used ruts. “What a dreadful death; I pray the widow Ardocharan finds some peace.”

“Is it so dreadful, if the city’s children are safe from his ministrations?” Thara asked mildly.

Min Helzhin stared at him as if he had suggested inviting Doctor Ardochar’s corpse to supper. “Othala Celehar, I do not mark my own body with earrings or needles or ink. I hold in far deeper contempt the practice of piercing or otherwise marking infants and children and all those who cannot or who are not permitted to choose the boundaries of their own body for themselves. What do you suppose my stance is, when it comes to the most grievous and permanent alteration of a living body?”

“I suppose it would align very neatly with my own,” said Thara. “Thank you, Min Helzhin.”

“If this is the kind of conversation we are to have while drawing up a contract,” I said, “just imagine what will come up over a cup of tea.”

“I shall contrive to develop a list of the most intrusive questions I can imagine regarding the prelacy, the Clenverada, and the Emperor himself,” Min Helzhin said, but she smiled wryly, and took the paper with Thara’s freshly inked signature upon it.

Chapter Text

It was a relief to go back down the stairs having exchanged the weight of our worldly belongings for that of a single key. I reminded Thara as he locked the door behind us that, however upstanding of a citizen Min Helzhin presented herself as, other othocirisei might feel differently about the relative merits of a knife in one man’s back compared to needles pricked into scores of children.

“I am little in need of an explanation that people can twist their morals into whatever knot justifies the results they most desire,” Thara reminded me as we melted into the flow of traffic on the street. “Indeed, I have done so on occasion myself.”

“Oh, not I,” I said cheerfully. “If one has loose enough morals, they need not be twisted.”

“Thou’rt bold, to lie so artlessly.”

“And to a prelate’s face, no less! If I had stricter morals, I should be ashamed of myself.”

Our path that morning brought us back to Ulsarendee. We checked Othala Perlenar’s office first; he was not there, but the efforts to restore the space to a usable state were well underway; a paint-speckled novice directed us to find the gentleman in question in a different suite of rooms, normally set aside for grieving families but temporarily converted to Perlenar’s use.

While I had awoken the day after the fire scarcely coughing at all anymore, Perlenar had not enjoyed such a swift recovery. Periodically he covered his mouth with a handkerchief, hacking and spitting; at one point Adrevar surreptitiously passed him a clean handkerchief and took away the old one, stained with sooty black sputum. Despite his condition, he assured us that he felt no serious ill effects from the incident, and that he felt sure he would soon be restored to full health. “The ulimeire has seen no further attempts at vandalism or injury,” he told us, having invited us to sit for a spell; a different novice, with less paint on her face than the other, brought us a pot of tea and three cups. “We are fortunate.”

The novice poured; Thara accepted the cup she offered him. “We hope that our returning does not brew fresh trouble for you.”

“Yes, we hope the same.” The cup trembled on its saucer when Perlenar took it from the novice’s hands. “Now, what has brought you out this way, Celehar? We pray you have not done so only to inquire after our health, kind as that would be, and we do not mean to press you into service repainting the walls.”

“There was a guest at the funeral who came to Mer Olgarezh’s assistance after the fire; we are most grateful to her.” Thara made careful brushstrokes with the truth and hoped Perlenar would see only a convenient fiction in the image created. In all honesty, he would have rather given a long list of questions than his thanks alone. “A tall woman, part goblin, with very blue eyes. Do you by chance know a woman of that description?”

“None that we could name. It is not uncommon for a curious member of the community to make themselves present at a funeral.” Perlenar’s unhappy expression deepened the creases on his forehead. “For some it is a somber occasion, a small kindness to mourn for a stranger. Others are merely seeking a speck of gossip.”

“We see,” said Thara mildly. “How unfortunate.”

The rest of the conversation meandered blandly through the usual subjects: the weather (fair), the condition of the city’s streets (middling to poor), and family. As Perlenar had never married, and as he further appeared to be aware enough of Thara’s situation to avoid directly addressing him with a question, this left Adrenar and me to furnish anecdotes about nieces and nephews and, in his case, younger siblings. When we had run out of tea and shallow topics, Adrenar provided us with the address of the late Mer Danverezh’s surviving cousin who still lived in Ezho, and we made our way back out into the day.

“Perhaps the cousin will know the woman we are looking for,” I suggested hopefully, but Thara shook his head.

“I am inclined to be doubtful about that.” His ears lifted. “But I do hope he may know some of Danverezh’s other acquaintances. There were too many people at that funeral; one elderly cousin cannot possibly account for them all.”

I vaguely remembered Danverezh’s cousin from the funeral; a small, slim man with rheumy eyes. As Thara had expected, the man could not assign a name to the woman we described. But when Thara pressed him further for details about the others present, he muttered for a while and finally came up with one name. “Brugara,” he said. “Played together as boys, the two of them; ran into each other again in the last—oh, ten, fifteen years—”

He diverged from this tack for some while, sharing his overpowering opinions about loyalty to family over friends, including loyalty of an occasionally financial nature, with an additional vaguely-worded aside regarding what sort of personal associations cast the family name in an ill-light. He did not say as much openly, but it was quite clear that, as far as he was concerned, those associations ought not to have family names that ended in the unfortunate -ara. Personally I found that a person’s surname mattered far less to me than his inclination to invite two guests inside but not to offer them a seat. Finally, though, while Thara stood with endless patience, he meandered back onto his original line of thought, and provided us with helpful directions, which he followed with a far less necessary description. “Short, stout, ugly, gray. One of your typical hobgoblins from tip to toe.”

Thara paused, then tilted his head to look at the old man with frowning curiosity. “I beg your pardon?”

“I—” He glanced at me as if for approval and received instead the realization that he was not in pureblooded elvish company as he must have assumed. “Well! That is to say, I—you have the address, in any case.”

“Indeed we do,” said Thara gravely, and bowed. “Thank you for your time, of which we will occupy no more.”

When we stepped outside, Thara paused expectantly. “I must rely on thee for direction,” he said. “I do not know the street.”

“This way.” I led him out of the alley where the cousin’s front door let out and into a broader avenue. As we merged in among the other pedestrians, I said, “I wish thou wouldst not feel thou must correct a single wretched old man on my behalf—ill-mannered as that man might be.”

Thara’s head tilted, so that he looked at me out of the side of one eye. “Thinkest thyself the only part-goblin to hold my respect? Azhanhard, Chanavar—the emperor I have been blessed to serve is half goblin.” Duly chastened, I walked alongside him in silence, until he added, “But I would gladly correct him still, an it were only on thy behalf I spoke.”

Brugara was indeed short, stout, and gray, but I would call no man ugly who offered me a seat in his parlor. He recognized us from the funeral, as we recognized him, which was to say, poorly and in passing. “Terrible business, terrible,” he said, wringing his hands, as Thara offered his condolences for Danverezh’s sudden death. “Too old to be building bridges, if you asked me, which he did not. Too young to be gone.”

Either because he misunderstood the purpose of our visit, or because he lacked another outlet, he related to us several stories of his and Danverezh’s escapades as young men, and several more about their escapades as older ones, many of which revolved around consuming prodigious quantities of metheglin. Thara interjected at intervals with sincerely sympathetic comments, and, when Brugara wound down a story that had ended with a pair of his trousers being run up the flagpole of the Ezh’theilian in place of the city’s colors, he pressed his purpose. “I expect that you and Mer Danverezh’s had several acquaintances in common. Do you by chance know a tall goblin woman with blue eyes?”

“Grizhaö?” asked Brugara, then looked startled, at the question, his own instinctive response, or both. “Oh—well, she passed a few years ago, old dear, and she wasn’t as tall as she’d used to be by then. Is that who you meant, then?” he asked, and addressed me hopefully. “Someone you knew from the city some time ago?”

“No,” said Thara, before I could clap together an ill-made lie. “Thank you, Mer Brugara, for your hospitality.”

This time on the street, Thara moved with purpose; we had been in Ezho long enough that, having been led to Brugara’s address, he could navigate without further assistance from me. “A blundering lie tells me more than I had hoped,” he said, “and yet it does not afford me much in the way of meaningful information. I can hardly go door to door throughout the whole city asking for a Grizhaö; certainly not without alerting her that I am looking for her.”

I hurried to match his pace, and he slowed to match mine, and we met somewhere in the middle, step for step. His frustration was plain, but he did not elaborate on his intentions. I waited until we had crossed into a larger street, scanning for anyone who looked at us with unusual interest or intent, before prompting him: “But thou seem’st to have a direction in mind?”

“Yes, but one drawn on a different map, I’m afraid.” His frown deepened. “Perhaps I can make progress on another problem instead. I want to talk to some of Doctor Ardochar’s patients.”

We were not far from the Old Port where we had seen one of Ardochara’s handbills during our first stop in Ezho. After a few questions, and a few small coins passed between hands, Thara found a dock worker who admitted that he had allowed his children to be spiculated. “Still healthy as heathens,” he said, and crossed his arms across his barrel chest. “You can see ‘em yourself, othala, they’re at home with the missus.”

Naturally Thara accepted this rather surly invitation, and soon we were knocking on a door in the lowest part of Cemreian’s Shoulders. A tired-eyed goblin woman opened the door, and startled into an awkward curtsy when she found a prelate on her front stoop. “Othala! How can I—I didn’t—are you looking for someone?”

When she realized that we were indeed looking for her, and her children, she ushered us inside and offered us seats on a hard wooden bench—the only seating in the living space besides the hearthstones in front of the unlit fireplace—before hurrying off to gather the little ones. In a moment, she was back, with the two littlest in her arms and a third, not quite of an age for the schoolroom; if indeed the schoolroom was in his future. Both of the little ones frowned furiously, and one rubbed at her eyes with her knuckles; the eldest looked tired, but bright-eyed and alert enough. “See, othala, they’re well enough,” she said, thrusting the littlest girl toward Thara. “Almost perfectly well, really! She said they might feel a little under the weather for a day or two, but it’s not the high season for borlaän yet, and they’ll be good and safe when it does go tearing through.”

Thara nodded, as if he had inspected the small child and given her an approved bill of health, though his attention remained fixed on the mother all the while. “I beg your pardon. Who said that they might feel poorly, and when?”

“Why, Merrem Ardocharan. She came to see us yesterday. Isn’t that why you’re here? Said there was some kind of mix-up with the...the spiculation.” She did not struggle with the strange word, once it rose to her memory. “The children got empty spicules by accident the first time. Just water, or some such?”

I glanced at Thara, whose expression was politely set. Beneath it, I knew he also remembered Ardocharan’s description of her late husband’s experiment: children secretly administered with empty vials that neither hurt nor helped, not by oversight but by design. If it cheered him, as it did me, to know that these children might be afforded a measure of safety from the ravages of borlaän, he did not show it. Perhaps whatever relief he too felt was counterbalanced by the knowledge that Ardocharan had lied, or at least misled, to keep her husband’s legacy from tarnishing.

“But she came back to see it done right, bless her,” the woman went on. “We wouldn’t have known at all they weren’t protected if she hadn’t taken up with us herself, and her a new widow too!” She clucked a little to one of her girls, who had had enough of these strangers in her house, and who had put her face into the front of her mother’s dress. “She missed her calling, if you ask me. Not at all a cold fish like her husband was.” Her eyes widened, and she added hastily: “Rest his soul, of course, othala.”

Chapter Text

For the next two days, we trotted in dizzy circles around the city (or dizzy quadrangles, anyway, as most of the city had been constructed to a grid). We heard much the same story from the other former patients of Doctor Ardochar with whom Thara spoke, and, when we spoke to other acquaintances of the late Mer Danverezh, either genuine ignorance of the name Grizhaö, or at least a better-practiced version than what we had seen from Danverezh’s cousin.

The only visit that was at all out of the ordinary was the one we paid to the chapterhouse of the Vigilant Brotherhood. The memory of Praeceptor Aithenar’s arch questioning still rankled, and I let Thara address the local subpraeceptor—a wiry half-goblin, around my age if not a few years older—without interjecting, lest an intemperate remark from my mouth hamper his attempts to build the same kind of bridge that he had benefited from with Azhanharad in Amalo.

But even without intemperance on my part to set the process awry, the subpraeceptor was not interested in entertaining Thara’s conversation. Someone leaving dead bodies lying around, he said, scarcely looking up from his paperwork, would have been his business, but he could hardly see how the opposite situation warranted the attention of the Vigilant Brotherhood. They argued in circles for a spell—or perhaps in quadrangles again, with the rigidity of the posture they both developed—until finally the subpraeceptor set his pen aside. “We hardly see how this is a matter to concern the prelacy in the first place; let alone so profoundly that the Archprelate is moved to send a highborn outsider to look over our shoulder!”

Temperance would have to wait for another day. I leaned into my Ezheise accent as far as I could and said, “Would it sit easier with you, subpraeceptor, if we were to look over your shoulder instead?”

The man’s face flushed darker with embarrassment or annoyance. “Mer Olgarezh—”

“Either of us could show you the marks we have taken from those who climbed out of untended graves. Have you a family, subpraeceptor? Have you children? If these missing dead rise, some unfortunate man’s love ones will be the first to come to harm; would you willingly risk that it should be yours?”

The subpraeceptor stood. Behind us, two more Brothers flanked the door to his office. “We thank you for the interview,” he said tersely. “We think, however, we shall call the matter concluded. Gentlemen.”

Unsatisfied, we allowed ourselves to be shown down to the street. I attempted to apologize for having thrown oil on the flames, but Thara brushed my efforts off. “No, he had no interest in collaboration,” he said. “An thou had offered him thy most well-polished manners, he would only have complained of the shine.”

It was late enough in the day that he dismissed the idea of further perambulations, and we collected Min Helzhin on our way to the cendar’theileian, where Merrem Chorvened sat down to an early supper with us. The evening’s offering was a goblin recipe not commonly seen on Ezheise tables: spiced ground sausage stuffed inside of bean fritters, and I indulged more than I should have, while Min Helzhin and Thara discovered a mutual interest in novels. The swashbucklers were well and good, Helzhin said, but she taken an especial interest in a Barizheise novelist, a young woman, in fact, who despite her age had already produced two of the most fantastical stories imaginable. The first, which Helzhin went on about at length, dealt with an engineer who had built a walking, talking mechanical man to be a sort of happy slave for himself, only to find that his creation had no interest beyond the study of philosophy, so that he could determine whether, in constructing him, the maker had imbued him with a soul in any meaningful way.

“But one could never really create an artificial person,” Thara objected. “It is nonsensical.”

Helzhin snorted, forestalling the arsenal of theological arguments that Thara was certainly marshalling. “It is fiction, Celehar, and, I think, not a great deal less likely than one of your swashbuckling heroes swinging from the chandeliers while brandishing a saber.”

“Has Olgarezh never swung from the chandeliers, then?” said Chorvened, around a mouthful of fritter. “How very disappointing.”

“Of course I have,” I said, “although the chandelier in question was made of a barrel hoop and a few candle stubs, and I dared not swing very far, for fear I would tear the end of the rope from Sergeant Karanghad’s hands.”

Then I was obliged to explain, in brief, the Anmur’theileneise opera to Helzhin and Chorvened, while Thara eyed me from across the table. “I don’t think I realized you participated in the tradition,” he said, when I had finished. “Do you sing?”

“I sing well enough to get through one of Lieutenant Estebezh’s librettos! Which is to say, I could remember all my lines and sing them loudly enough that the men in the back could understand me.”

“Varasu used to sing in the street opera, the one the neighborhood put on every autumn for the Silk Festival,” said Chorvened wistfully, and drained her cup of tea. “She has a wonderful soprano.”

“Had,” corrected Helzhin, with a wry smile.

“Hmph. There hasn’t been an opera at the festival for twenty years now, in any case; they couldn’t find someone new to run it after old Molasezh died. But who has the time?” She shook her head and stood, stacking and collecting our empty dishes. “Well! I’ve been idling long enough. I’ll see you this evening at the house.”

“Oh, Anzharo, for goodness’ sake, leave the cleanup to Ikhanezh tonight.”

But Chorvened was already hustling off with a towering stack of plates and teacups. “Soon, soon,” she called over her shoulder. “She needs more time to get used to the job, Varasu.”

“That woman,” said Helzhin, in tones of fond complaint, as Chorvened disappeared into the back. “Every year or two she has a new assistant; and equally as often, she promises that she’ll give the poor thing more hours, more responsibilities, let her learn how to manage a kitchen on her own. And she never does, and then of course sooner or later these women always find a job in another cendar’theileian, and we are back at the beginning again.”

“I imagine some of them manage to scrape together enough experience to open a dining-room their own,” I suggested.

“If they have the money, perhaps. Not all of us are widows with a tidy inheritance from our dear departed husbands.” She shrugged and nodded at the kitchen, from which we could hear Chorvened’s voice. “One of these days I expect someone will come running to tell me she has gone and keeled over at the sink or the stove, and I can only hope she hasn’t too recently chased off an assistant, for you know I haven’t the head for running this place.”

We walked back together, Thara courteously offering Helzhin his arm, and arrived back at the maisonette at the same time that the sun slipped below the rooftops. In our room, Thara leaned over the bureau with his notes, in order to have a solid enough surface to write upon, and a stable place to set the little oil lamp; I sat on the bed and paged idly through one of the novels that had come with his belongings from Amalo, one which he and Helzhin had brought up over supper. Based on what I read, the writer had not had much, if any, training in swordsmanship, but if I politely ignored that failing, it was the same sort of easy fun as Estebezh’s operas, and it did not occupy so much of my attention that I could not also keep one ear on our surroundings. No one had yet come storming through Merrem Chorvened’s upstairs window, but I did not intend to be surprised if someone worked up the gall.

What eventually drew me up out of the adventure-story was the sound of a notebook page, crushed in Thara’s fist. “I’m sorry,” he said, when I looked up. “Pray don’t let me disturb thy reading.”

“Plainly thou’rt disturbed enough for the both of us already.” I set the book aside. “What troubles thee?”

He frowned down at the crumpled page as he attempted to smooth it out again. “In Amalo, when I had investigated my way into a corner, I had Tomasaran, Iäna, Anora, Azharanharad...it’s not fair to burden thee with what it once took four to bear.”

“It wouldn’t be fair at all,” I agreed, “if it were a burden. But it is not.” An it were, still I would take up as much of it as I could. “If it is a dead end at which thou hast arrived, the Archprelate will hardly punish thee for having done thy best.”

“I don’t fear censure,” Thara said shortly. “Hanu, this case does not require the use of my—particular gift—in any way. And without that to draw upon, I am useless, I am chasing ashes in the wind on a moonless night.” He spread his hands, smeared with ink from the ruined page. “I am but one candle in a great darkness, and one day, what light I have been granted will gutter and go out. And then—”

“Thara, we will all of us burn out one day,” I said, breaking off his defeatist self-recriminations with a hammer-blow of blunt honesty rather than any sharper, more precise tool. “I’m not a young man; thinkest thou I have more than five or six years at the very most before I’ll be too slow to keep a sword from thy neck?”

“It is doubtful my neck will be worth the Archprelate’s protection that long,” he said morosely.

“Oh, for pity’s sake.” I rolled off the bed and stooped to collect the small oil lamp that had illuminated his work. When I drew its shutters, only a small beam of light emerged. I drew my sword from its scabbard and caught the light on the blade, reflecting it into Thara’s startled face. “Every man’s candle will go out one day; however long the gods see fit to grant us. But the light travels farther than we can see, and in directions we cannot always guess.”

“I take thy meaning.” Thara’s shoulders slumped. “Put away thy sword.”

I did so, and opened the lamp’s shutters again. He returned to his work, and I to the novel, until the hour grew late and the oil in the lamp grew low. We cleaned our teeth, filled and then directly emptied the chamber pot, and Thara re-braided his hair for sleep; mine was still too short to bother with. When I went to spread the coverlet on the floor beside the door as I had done the past few nights, he lifted his head from the under-stuffed pillow. “Thinkest it necessary, truly?” he asked hesitantly. “With three doors between us and the street?”

Did I think it truly necessary? No, but it was all part of the barricade that ought to be built, between all that I did think necessary, and what was unnecessary but which I desired nonetheless. It did me no good to break down those barriers, and it might do Thara far less. “I should—” I began, and watched the hope fade from his face. He asked for what he wanted rarely enough, even what I would so gladly give. “I should not be able to hold thee through the night. I will need my sword arm free, in the unlikely circumstance that a particularly willful assassin should come crashing in.”

He moved over, making room for me on the window side of the bed; I extinguished the lamp and lay alongside him. At once he rolled toward me, and put his hand up inside my nightshirt, dragging the hem up with his wrist and leaving my legs bare beneath the coverlet. His palm stopped on the left side of my breast, over my heart. “...Does this arrest thy movement, if an attack should come?”

“No, my arms are free.”

“Art not too cold?”

“No,” I said, answering truthfully, for his touch had brought all my blood warmly to the surface. In the moonlight that bled through the curtains, I watched his face, and wished it could be as quickly read for meaning as the novels he so favored. When he closed his eyes, they moved restively beneath the lids; a feeble pretense at serenity, for I knew sleep would not come for him so swiftly, if indeed it came for him tonight at all. “Thara…” I lifted the arm that lay between us and brushed his cheek with the backs of my knuckles. He opened his eyes, a vivid sapphire blue even by the moon’s wan light. “Let us make thy pilgrimage.”

Chapter Text

Arrangements demanded to be made before we could undertake the pilgrimage of stairs, and we took a day to do so: Thara sent a note to the Ulisothala to let him know we would be briefly outside of the city. On our way out of the house to the market square, where we would buy a bit of food that we could carry with us, we informed Helzhin that she and Chorvened ought not to expect us for dinner the next day, as we would only make it back on the last or second-to-last riverboat of the night.

“I made the pilgrimage once,” she said with a sigh, after we had explained our intended whereabouts. “As a young woman. It clears the head.”

“Did you find the gift of clear sight at the top?” I asked.

She tutted at me. “Now that is between me and the goddess.”

Thara had time to speak to a few more of Doctor Ardochar’s former patients, none of which could tell him anything new, and all of whom had been working the night shift, in a tavern with a few of their friends, or at home with their families on the night of the man’s death. “Thou wilt soon return with fresh eyes,” I promised, in between these visits, and Thara nodded vaguely.

On the morrow, we rose early, carrying no more luggage than a single satchel with flasks of water, the rolls and cheese and apples we’d bought, and a fresh pair of stockings apiece. “Bad enough that thou’rt not properly shod for climbing,” I told him, critically eyeing his thin-soled shoes, better suited to walking city streets than uneven rocky steps. “If thy stockings wear out with all the walking, thou wilt be glad of a new pair.”

We paid for passage on the morning’s first barge upriver, alongside a number of rough-dressed men, many with families in tow: new hires bound for the tin mines outside the city proper, by the look of them. A few disembarked at the dock near the foot of Mount Varlazhin, and, later in the morning, more got off alongside us in the town of Cinavo, which served as base of operations for one of the larger mines in the inner workings of Mount Kezrinin, and where a caravan post also stood. We were the only two, however, who left the town behind to follow the small, shallow footpath up and around Kezrinin’s lopsided shoulder. A small, hand-carved sign at the base of the path read ROZHANO – PILGR. OF STAIRS – ½ MILE. “A prelude to thy pilgrimage,” I said, as he stared upward, searching for the narrow thread of stairs that wound farther and farther out of sight. “Thy eyes cannot shorten the trip; only thy feet can do that.” And up we went.

Rozhano had not changed from my memory—it was still not a true village in anything but name. The flattened, sheltered space notched into the slope was barely enough to fit a small hostel, which offered shelter to weary pilgrims before they made the journey, or after; a shrine; and four small houses. Three of these were occupied by hermits, and one by a cleric of Cstheio Caireizhasan, who emerged hastily as we walked up. He was not the same cleric as the one I’d met when I made my own pilgrimage. No great surprise, as that man had seemed impossibly old to my twenty-year-old eyes; in reality, he must have been only a little older than I had gotten to be. Too old to live alone in a shabby cottage a half-mile’s travel around the side of a mountain, in any case.

The new cleric, a part-goblin man in his thirties, greeted us cheerfully—we were the first pilgrims he had seen in more than a fortnight, he said, and offered to augur the day’s weather for us, which we accepted with gratitude. “Cool until midday, and perhaps a bit slippery on the lower stairs. The sun should slip out of those clouds by mid-afternoon, though, and I expect you will find it quite warm. You have about nine hours until sunset, and it is best if you are back in Rozhano shortly thereafter, or before, if you can manage. Four hours up, and four back, which I think you will find manageable! The stairs are dangerous after dark.”

We thanked him, and promised to make every effort to return in time. He clasped our hands, each in turn, and bade us a safe voyage beneath the goddess’s watchful eyes. And then we were alone together at the base of the long, long way up.

For the first while, we filled the minutes with empty chatter. What Chorvened’s kitchen would be serving just then for lunch; the pleasant breeze, and the birds that sailed past; my sisters’ efforts in the name of better pay and working conditions. Anything, everything, other than Thara’s investigation and the frustrations it had levied against him. Before long, though, the stairs narrowed enough that we could no longer walk side by side, and the wind lifted so that it carried away the voice of whichever of us walked in front. The man walking behind could deliver a monologue to the other’s back, but responding required the one in front to pause long enough to speak over his shoulder. The conversation thus dampened, I flung a few idle thoughts up at Thara, especially to point out the pale yellowish mountain roses, no bigger than the tip of my thumb, that crabbed out in all directions from the point of their rooting on the mountain’s craggy face. There was an old myth about the origin of the mountain rose, something about a rampaging ogre and a maiden’s tears, but I lost the thread of the thing—if ever I’d had it in the first place—and trailed off somewhere after I’d stranded the maiden in the mines; I decided that I would do better to save my breath.

After an hour, we emerged from the mountain’s shaded side into full sun. We quickly shucked our frock coats, and I unwound my neckcloth and rolled up my sleeves too; there was no one here for whom I needed to perform propriety. At a point where the path evened out for a span of three paces or so, we ate some of our provisions and drank from the flasks we’d brought. When I had finished, but while Thara was still eating, I closed my eyes to lean back against the mountain’s cool shoulder.

I heard Thara close the flask and pack everything back into the satchel, then a moment’s silent before he asked, “Art well?”

“Soldier’s habit,” I told him. “I always snatch a moment’s rest where I can find it.”

And it did feel like only a moment, though it was at least ten minutes; but of course we had promised the cleric that would we undertake to return to Rozhano at nightfall if not sooner. I might as well not have rested at all for how badly my legs and back burned, on that second stretch of the climb. Even if I had wanted to tell a meandering tale of local legend, I hadn’t the breath for it, and the swooping, darting birds that had provided a pleasant distraction in the morning now offered only irritation—I felt irrationally taunted by their effortless passage. Thara gained several stairs’ distance on me, which I did not especially like, but there was no one else out here, and I had already observed that he was navigating the stairs with care. He only ever pursued his more self-destructive tendencies in the name of his calling, which would certainly not be served by going head-over-arse off the side of a mountain.

I nearly ran into him before I realized he had stopped to let me catch up. “And if I ask thee again if thou’rt well?” he said, and when I hadn’t the breath to answer right away, he frowned. “We should turn back.”

“No,” I said—a syllable which cost very little breath. “No, only let us sit a moment, and I will take some more water.”

We sat side by side without speaking, cross-legged on the stone steps. The breeze picked at Thara’s loose cuffs and flyaway hair, but mine stuck fast to my skin with sweat. I drained the first flask and tried not to think of how far we had yet to go with only the second to supply us.

But when I proposed we continue, Thara refused flatly. “Thy face is as pale as bleached bone, and thou’rt trembling all over. Don’t be foolish; no pilgrimage is worth thy health.”

Customarily the privilege of accusations of foolishness had been reserved to me; it was not nearly as satisfying to receive this indictment as to hand it out, and I was struck momentarily dumb. Thara took the opportunity of my silence to fish a spare ribbon out of his pocket. My hair was still too short to braid, but he tugged through it with his fingers, combing it away from my temples, until he could pull together a small tail at the back of my head; enough to keep some of its weight from clinging to my face. When he finished, I caught his hand, and kissed the inside of his wrist. “Thou shouldst go on without me.”

Doubt wrote itself in large script on his face. “Hanu—”

“It is perhaps another ninety minutes to the end of the stair; I can rest here for the next hours, and be ready to join thee again when thou return’st; thou wilt have to pay some mind to the sun, to ensure that thou reachest the end of the trip in time. But I don’t sleep so soundly that I’m likely to go somersaulting head-first down the stairs. There is no one else on the mountain ahead of us, and no one can have anticipated this pilgrimage to set up an ambush. And if anyone did try to follow thee up, I would be here to stop them.”

He stroked the backs of my fingers, his gaze very distant. “Thou’rt persuasive.”

I told him I’d likely missed my true calling in public speaking, which earned me a wry half-smile. He sat with me a few minutes more, until he had satisfied himself that I was unlikely to spontaneously die; then he divided up the remaining supplies, returning half to the satchel, and leaving the rest for me. “I will be back soon,” he promised.

“Give the goddess my greetings,” I told him, and he turned to make his way up the mountain. For twenty-odd minutes, I watched him grow smaller and smaller with distance. When he disappeared around the curve and out of my sight, half of me wanted to stand and rush after him. And in fact I did stand, though only to stretch; I could not have rushed if I had wanted to, for my legs felt like overcooked beef: dry and rubbery, no pliancy left in them whatsoever. Stretching them was a divine mercy and an abject misery all in one, and I took my time, for time was something I now had in unwanted excess. Fortunately, boredom was another longtime habit of soldiers. I tore up the rolls Thara had left me and broke the cheese until I had three small sandwiches of roughly equal size before wrapping them back in a handkerchief to keep the ants away; I could eat one of those, and the apple (which refused to be apportioned into smaller pieces, unless I drew my sword, which hardly seemed a worthy purpose for the blade) every half-hour or so to help count the time, and to help pass it.

A few ants emerged from a crack in the step to investigate the crumbs I’d left behind. “What do you eat when pilgrims aren’t making a mess on your doorstep?” I asked, but they carried off my leavings without lingering for further investigation. A few minutes later, a bird swept past in a flutter of wings—a gnatcatcher, I thought, but that was an uncertain thing, and I certainly could not narrow down (or even name) any of the distinct subtypes of gnatcatchers native to Ezho.

I sang what I could remember of the last opera I’d performed with my company in the Anmur’theileian, but I’d forgotten long stretches of Lieutenant Estebezh’s lyrics, and had to resort to nonsensical doggerel-verse substitutions, and then to wordless humming when I could not think of a good rhyme for mother-in-law, and then finally to an apathetic silence. Perhaps opera was not an appropriate pastime for a pilgrimage, even an aborted one. “I don’t flatter myself that the Lady of Stars should pay special mind to one who couldn’t even make it up her staircase,” I said aloud. The words came slowly, awkwardly; on the rare occasions when I managed to pray, it was not to Cstheio Caireizhasan. “But I pray she would hear and see and know the one who seeks her still. The gift of sight would ease his mind greatly, and if she knows him, then she knows how much easing his mind always needs.”

I let that sit in the air for spell—for long enough, I hoped, that it would not be unseemly to redirect my prayers to another aspect of the Five-Fold Harmony. “Anmura, lord of dawn and dusk, prince of wolves. I beg that you will not make a liar of me.” Five or six years, I had told Thara, until I was too slow with a sword to be of any use. When I’d taken a blade to the face as a young man, I’d been back out on patrol the next day. This failed pilgrimage had been a stern reminder that I was not a young man anymore, and could not expect to bounce effortlessly back from a wound—especially not a wound laced with visveren. “You know that I still have debts to repay. Only lend me your strength, and the time to build back the circle that I’ve broken.” The lives of elves and goblins were short, but in Anmura, a man could find a radiance without end. And he could offer the same back to the god in turn, if he chose wisely, took decisions judiciously. If he listened to the god and not some more proximate font of authority.

If the gods ever spoke to men like me, they did not do so in a voice I recognized. I heard nothing, saw no vision, felt nothing more than the well-polished armor of my own resolve.

A half-hour must have passed by then. I took out a sandwich and ate it, and left a tiny morsel of cheese for the ants that came to inspect and to carry directly away again.