Before anyone could speak, a resounding strike of a gong reverberated from below and traveled up the throat of Stormwatch Tower. As its echoes died away, all gazes turned to the warden. All knew its meaning. Traditionally it was rung only once a year, during a formal ceremony, reminding all of their duty to Myrillia. Otherwise, it was struck for only one reason.
“We’re too late,” Kathryn mumbled to no one and to everyone.
They were under attack.
THIRD
WYR AND WRAITH
Spiderboard for Skulls, played with brass pinches, a contest of luck, wit, and a fair scrape of deception. Better played with enemies than friends. More blood has been spilled over this game than all the wars of Myrillia. Origin: unknown, though attributed to the witchlords of Bly.
10
A NAME SCRIBED IN BLOOD
AS THE LAST OF THE EVENING BELLS RANG THROUGHOUT Tashijan, Dart waited with the others in the castellan’s hermitage. The fire from the hearth had been stoked to a wild flame in a vain attempt to hold back the dark worries in all their hearts. Gathered here, they awaited word from the castellan and the regent.
Back in the adjudicator’s chambers, Tylar had appeared shortly after the messenger, storming inside with claims of daemonic knights. During the ensuing chaos, Dart and the others were sent under guard—both knights and the gray-cloaked Flaggers—up to Kathryn’s chambers.
By the door, Krevan spoke with an ash-faced woman in a gray robe—then closed the door. His Flaggers would guard their privacy from here. His eyes drifted to Dart’s, then away again, almost embarrassed. Perhaps for the falsehoods he had spread to spare her further inquiry. Though untrue, this claimed relationship was an intimacy that had made the pirate suddenly awkward near her.
Or was it something more?
Elsewhere, off by the window, Barrin lay on the floor, head resting on his crossed paws. Kytt stood over him, one hand absently scratching the bullhound’s ear, his face lost in worry. Lorr had been taken into Kathryn’s private room, where a pair of healers were working on his burns with Grace-rich salves. He had yet to fully awaken, only occasionally mumbling in delirium.
Dart had seen Lorr when he’d been hauled inside, half his side a burnt ruin. He had sacrificed himself to save them. She prayed the healers had Grace enough to save him in turn.
At the threshold to the room, Rogger and Gerrod were bowed in quiet conversation. Rogger wore a stern look, so unlike his usual bravado. That worried Dart more than anything.
Closer, Laurelle sat on the chair opposite her, hands folded in her lap as if she were waiting for a servant to bring a platter of sweetwine and finger cakes. Brant had gone to check on his wolfkits when they had climbed past his retinue’s floor. He had mumbled some promise to return, but his eyes had been shadowed and hard to read. Perhaps he was just glad for an excuse to be rid of them all.
Dart couldn’t blame him.
Brant’s vacancy was in turn taken up by Delia, the regent’s Hand of blood. The dark-haired woman stood behind Laurelle’s chair and stared into the flames, one finger resting on her chin as if she were about to say something, but she never did.
Finally a muffled commotion sounded out in the hall, and the door swung open. Tylar and Kathryn entered. Both appeared flushed, angry, moving stiff-legged.
“I should still be down there,” Tylar said.
“Argent has the entire first three floors ablaze with bonfires and torches. All stairs from there are doubled with guards bearing torches. He has ordered barrels of oil to be stationed at landings, ready to be set to flame and rolled down.” Kathryn scowled. “I don’t know which to fear more—dark knights and cursed storms or Argent burning the towers down around our ankles.”
Tylar looked little mollified. He seemed to finally see the others in the room. He brushed his dark hair back behind his ears.
Dart noted he had taken a moment to restore Rivenscryr. When Tylar had first arrived in the adjudicators’ chamber, he had held only a golden hilt. It appeared like a broken sword. Only Dart’s eyes could see the silvery ghost of the blade. It would remain such until the blade was whetted again—whetted in her own blood. Before reaching here, Tylar must have anointed his sword from his stores of her humour, preserved in glass repostilaries. She knew he carried a small vial on a silver chain around his neck.
Dart was glad he had already performed such an act. When she had first seen the ghostly state of the sword, she feared he would ask her to cut herself and freshly bless the blade. She did not know if she had the strength for that this night.
As the two newcomers entered, Krevan, Rogger, and Gerrod gathered closer. Delia hung back with Dart and Laurelle. The woman’s eyes flicked a bit sharply between Kathryn and Tylar as if searching for some extra meaning.
Tylar spoke into the expectant silence. “Kathryn is correct. Argent has acted with a surprising swiftness to lay a fiery swath between the two halves of Tashijan. It should allow us some ground to maneuver.”
“But not farther than our own walls,” Rogger countered. “The storm closes us off from the rest of Myrillia. We’re trapped in these towers.”
Gerrod creaked a step closer. “There may be some reason for hope. Such a siege as this cannot sustain itself. The storm must eventually blow itself out. Even a blizzard whipped by a cadre of gods will eventually succumb to the turn and flow of our world. It is a dam that must eventually burst. If we could wait it out…”
Tylar shook his head. “I refuse to place the fate of Tashijan in the hands of chance and the turn of the world. Gerrod, how long would it take your masters to get the damaged flippercraft flying again?”
“If we had full support and rally of the dockworkers, perhaps as soon as daybreak.”
“Get started on it.”
“But the storm will still drain the Grace from any craft that nears it and—”
Tylar cut him off with a raised hand. “Just get it done.” Then he turned to Kathryn. “See if the healers can revive Lorr enough that we can speak to him. We must know more about what he saw down there.”
She nodded. “And you’re sure it was Perryl you saw below?”
“It was Perryl’s body—I fear there is little left of the man.”
Kathryn’s face clouded with a mix of anger and pain. She headed toward her private rooms.
“I’ll see if I can help,” Delia said. “Lorr was more a father to me than my own.”
The two left the room, though both would not meet the other’s eye.
Once they were gone, Krevan shifted to Tylar. “I would speak a few words with you in private.” He pointed a finger at Rogger. “And you.”
Tylar glanced around the crowded hearthroom. Barrin huffed a bit where he lay, as if offended at being excluded.
Dart stepped forward. “If you seek privacy, my garret is through that door.” She pointed to the low and narrow arch. “There is not much space.”
“It will do,” Krevan said brusquely and strode off.
Rogger met Tylar’s eyes and shrugged.
Dart walked them to her door, pushed it open, and stepped back.
Krevan waved her inside. “Mayhap you should attend this, too.”
Dart took a startled half step back. “Why?”
The pirate’s hard eyes fixed on her. His next words turned her knees to porridge. Tylar caught her with a reassuring squeeze, but even he glanced to Krevan with narrowed eyes as he answered her question.
“Because it concerns your father. Your real father.”
Kathryn approached the sickbed. The stench of burnt flesh, hair, wool, and leather stained the room. To combat this, one of the healers already had a brazier glowing and dribbled oil of gentled mint across the sizzling red iron. A mound of soaked llamphur sprigs warmed atop its grate.
“To help him breathe,” Healer Fennis said quietly, noting her attention. “Will open the lungs.”
The other healer, a slim woman and wife to Fennis, knelt beside Lorr’s sprawled form. She had bathed
away the charred clothes, exposing the rawness beneath.
“There will be scars,” she said. “But the alchemy in the balms was newly concocted, devised by a physic in the deserts of Dry Wash. Using a Grace of loam and air. Who would have thought such a combination could be steadied?”
“Then he will live?” Delia asked. Her voice rang with relief.
“If you let us work in peace,” the woman answered.
Kathryn waved Tylar’s Hand back from the bed. It was an irritated gesture, more brusque than she had intended. She blunted the effect with softer words. “He’s a strong man, even for one late in his years.”
Stepping away, Delia stood with her arms crossed over her chest—not a stern pose, but more like she was hugging herself in a measure of reassurance. Kathryn studied her askance. There was a puffiness to her eyelids. She had been crying. Small lines marred a smooth brow. Still in this moment, Kathryn suddenly recognized the youth behind the worry. She had to remind herself that Delia was a full decade younger. Eternally serious, seldom smiling, she had always struck Kathryn as older in years.
But not now.
The girl shone behind the woman, worn through by grief and worry.
Delia caught Kathryn staring, with a flick of her eyes toward Kathryn, then down to the floor. A fleeting glimpse of Delia’s guilt.
For some reason, this only piqued Kathryn’s irritation again, setting her lips into hard lines. She fought against it, remembering the stolen kiss atop Stormwatch. There was no true blame here. She knew better than to fault the other woman. The man was equally to blame for any broken vows. And besides, what vows remained between Tylar and Kathryn? Whatever had once been sworn and promised had been broken into so many pieces as to be all but unrecognizable.
A groan from the bed returned Kathryn’s attention to the greater threat, reminding her of her responsibility, to Lorr, to everyone in Tashijan. Her face heated slightly, shamed at the momentary lapse into childish resentments. She was not a young girl to moon over lost love. Especially when all of Myrillia was threatened.
Lorr stirred on the sheets. His eyelids fluttered weakly open despite the squint of pain in his face.
“He wakes,” Healer Fennis said.
The woman glanced back at her husband. “We should draught him while we can. Willow bark and nettle wine.” She waved toward a side table.
The other nodded and deftly began working on an elixir.
“Two drops of poppy oil,” she reminded.
“Yes, my dearest.”
Kathryn stepped closer, shadowed by Delia. “Can you revive him enough to speak? We must—”
“I kin hear you,” Lorr croaked out. He lifted his good arm, but it fell back to the bed. “How can a man sleep with all this babbling?”
“Don’t stir,” Delia warned.
Lorr’s eyes finally focused on the two women. “Such a sight would wake any man…” His attempt at levity fell on worried ears.
Kathryn knelt to bring her face even with his. “Lorr, if you’re able, can you tell us what you saw below Tashijan?”
The false cheer drained from the muscles of his face, tightening his features with a pain beyond his burns. He attempted to rise up on an elbow but was scolded back down to the pillows. He lifted a hand, surprised to find an empty palm.
“Tylar found the diadem,” Kathryn said, reading his worry. “Castellan Mirra’s diadem.”
He nodded and sighed. “I went down that dark stair to lure whatever lurked away from the young ones. A stumbling, broken-stone maze it were down there. Almost got myself nabbed up.”
He coughed hard. Healer Fennis approached with his draught, but Lorr waved him away.
“Then I caught a scent. A familiar enough one. I’d been dredging the sewers looking for it long ’nough, so when it caught up in the back of my blessed nose, tasted on the tongue, I knew it right. I went back to look closer. And there she was among that black clot of shadow, whispering to them.”
Kathryn closed her eyes for a breath. So Lorr hadn’t found Castellan Mirra imprisoned or discovered her dead body. He hadn’t returned with the diadem as proof of either. It was much worse.
“These shadowknights—” she began.
“Not knights. Mayhap once. No longer. Ghawls, she called them. Black ghawls. Black-cursed to the bone.”
Kathryn remembered the stern woman who had been counsel to Ser Henri for many decades. Though hard, she had always been evenhanded and of wise sensibility. Kathryn had wished often of late that she could be half the castellan that the old woman was.
“So Mirra was tainted, too,” she said tiredly. “Cursed like the knights.”
Lorr sighed. “That’s just it.” The tracker’s amber eyes found Kathryn’s. “I smelled no corruption from her. She scented as she did when wrapped up here in her hermitage. But those ghawls…they listened to her, lapping about her like beaten dogs. They were hers. Flesh and bone. I drew closer—too close. They fell out of the shadows around me like scraps of darkness. Only escape was fire and light.”
He fell silent a moment, eyes lost in some unimaginable horror. Kathryn only had to look at his blistered flesh to know the cost of that escape.
He closed his eyes, and Kathryn was glad for it. “I fought through them…” he mumbled. “Grabbed for her throat, but they reached through flames and tore me off. All I could do…I fled…”
Healer Fennis again stepped forward with his draught.
Kathryn rose and backed, but her motion was sensed. Lorr opened his eyes and fixed her with a firm stare.
“She was not tainted…of that I am certain.”
Kathryn nodded and stepped back to allow the healer to minister to Lorr. Lorr sank more deeply into his pillows, as if unburdening himself had finally granted him some measure of peace.
Delia crossed to the other side of the bed. “I’ll stay with him.”
She nodded again, too shaken for words, not trusting her voice. Lorr’s words stayed with her as she headed away. She was not tainted. If the tracker’s senses read true, then what did that portend? Had Castellan Mirra been a willing participant, a member of the Cabal? Had she always been the enemy, hiding behind her ermine cloaks and lined face, at the very pinnacle of Tashijan?
Ice numbed her limbs and coursed through her heart. How many nights had she sat with Mirra, entrusted her with secrets? What about Ser Henri? Had he been duped as well?
Suddenly Kathryn had to reach to a wall to hold herself upright. All she had supposed, all she had believed shifted inside her. It was as if she had slipped through a dark mirror. But which side was she on?
The missing knights…the loss of Perryl…so many certainties and suspicions no longer made sense. She pictured again the slain young knight she had discovered last year, sacrificed in some dark rite. She had believed the Fiery Cross to be to blame, painted Warden Fields with the blackest of brushes. And though the warden lusted for power, Kathryn now knew whose hand truly pulled the dark strings of Tashijan.
Not Argent.
It had been Castellan Mirra all along. She must have purposely laid that false trail, instilling rancor and distrust throughout Tashijan, splitting them from within while crafting her own dark plots beneath their very towers.
Kathryn leaned against the wall, sensing a well of tears rising, a mix of frustration and something that bordered on grief.
Had Henri finally discovered Mirra’s secret? Was that why he had been murdered? It hadn’t been a plot by Argent, as Kathryn had always supposed; now she knew the black truth.
He had died because of trust.
And now all of Tashijan…all of Myrillia…faced the same fate.
“I must have the skull,” Krevan said.
Dart had retreated to her bed in the small garret. The hearth was cold, but Rogger had lit the small lamp on her table. The thief now leaned against the closed door. She stared between Krevan and Tylar, both cloaked, both their faces triple-striped, though neither was a true knight any longer.
 
; What was this about a skull? she wondered.
Tylar frowned at the pirate. “I don’t think this is a time to worry about such a cursed talisman.”
“But it is more than mere bone…more than you could imagine.”
“We know about the trace of seersong. Gerrod has been studying it.”
The pirate’s gaze swept to Dart, then back to Tylar. Dart remembered his earlier words. It concerns your father. Your real father.
“You know nothing,” he grumbled.
“Then enlighten us.”
Krevan glowered. “The skull belonged to a rogue god that stumbled out of the hinterland into a realm of the Eighth Land. Such a trespass burnt the flesh. Even the bones should have been consumed, but someone preserved the skull, granted it to the god of Saysh Mal.”
Tylar nodded to the thief. “I gathered as much from Rogger. He stole it during his pilgrimage stop in that god-realm. But I hadn’t heard more of his tale, what with our rough landing and the cursed storm.”
Krevan’s brow darkened as he stared toward Rogger.
“Perhaps we should hear both your stories,” Tylar said.
Rogger shrugged. “My tale is not that rich. I continued with my pilgrimage last year as a way of skirting through the god-realms, looking for any evidence of the Cabal.” He pulled back a sleeve to reveal the scarred brandings. “Such punishment of the flesh was fair trade to hear the rumblings and rumors among the underfolk of the various lands. Tongues wag more easily when the only ears nearby are those of a ragged beggar on a stoop.”
Tylar waved for Rogger to continue. Even Dart knew that the thief’s pilgrimage was more than it had seemed.
“So there I was, running out of blank skin when I stumbled into the jungle realm of the Huntress. And up to then, not a peep nor peck from the Cabal. As soon as I set foot in that realm, it weren’t hard to tell something was amiss. The people of that land went about with their heads tucked low. I saw more brawls in the tavernhouses in one night than in a fortnight elsewhere. Bodies were left in alleys to rot. That is not what I had expected to find. Saysh Mal was not a high place, but it was fairly wrought from all I’d heard. Lived by some code of honorable conduct. No longer. What I saw there more reminded me of ol’ Balger’s Foulsham Dell, corrupted and low of spirit.”