The oldest and wisest of the Twelve locked eyes with hers, and she saw they were red and watery. “These are dark tidings,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I’ve looked to the bodies, and my grandson is among them.”
Her breath went out of her, and she hoped that the sound wasn’t as audible as it had sounded in her own ears. But the worry was irrelevant as others responded in similar manner.
She’d ordered the bodies displayed discreetly in a tent that they might be identified. It was a gross violation of custom, not burying them where they’d fallen to keep body and soul near the place they’d parted company. But extreme circumstances called for extreme measures, and she could not let custom, no matter how sacred, interfere with finding the truth at the center of this Whymer Maze. Still it grieved her that their souls would wander the Above now, never finding their path through the Beneath Places to the home beyond.
She looked around the circle now. “Were they familiar to anyone else?”
Slow nods with downcast eyes. One cleared his voice. “My youngest sister’s son lay among them,” he said.
Others joined in now. One was familiar but not a kinsman. Another was bound-husband to a friend’s granddaughter. Of the half dozen, only two were unknown. But eventually, Winters knew, they would be found out. She turned them now to other matters.
“Had this been simply the attack in the Ninefold Forest Houses it could readily have been the isolated act of a handful,” she said. “But at least a dozen have fallen in nearly as many Houses.” She looked around as the old men nodded. “These were well planned, timed to the moment and careful as a Firstfall Dance on the night of the greenest moon.”
“And under the cover of the Old and Forgotten Ways,” one added.
Forgotten and forbidden, Winters thought. The only blood magick left to them after the Purging had been the voice magicks used for war and coronation. But somehow, those old ways had been restored and employed without the knowledge of council or queen. “I fear discord and division is now sown in our House,” she said. “We must find it and heal it by whatever means necessary. But beyond this, we must also look beyond our borders. We’ve long held our neighbors’ respect through force and fear, but it is not a far leap from sorrow to rage. And Marshers have done these dark deeds-it is not unknown to them; they’ve bodies to show it.”
The oldest spoke up. “How we respond to their rage will speak louder than any War Sermon.”
Winters nodded. “I concur.”
“We should be prepared for war,” another said.
She looked at him. “We are the House of Shadrus. War prepares for us, and ever we meet it as our sorrow commends us to.”
The oldest looked to the other. “To do more than necessary will send a message. Our neighbors, though misguided and affected, may see these attacks as something more than what they are. We would do no less. But that our own Hanric was among the fallen-he they perceived as our king-may soften the edge of their fear.”
But not their wrath, Winters realized. And for all she knew, the assassinations were more than what they were. So shortly on the heels of Windwir, it certainly felt like more.
“What do you propose?” another asked her, and she sighed.
“We find this disease within our body and we eliminate it,” she said. “You are the Twelve, respected and loved by all. Find truth for me among your clans.” She cast her eye to the Wicker Throne. “At dawn, I will lay hold the throne and climb the spire to announce myself. It is earlier than my father wished, but the time for shadows is passed.”
To a man, they nodded.
She nodded as well, and then once more banged the handle of the Firstfall axe against the stone floor to close the council. As the old men stood slowly and filed out, their chief approached her.
“You will be a wise queen,” he told her in a quiet voice, “but I fear for your time upon the throne.”
She took a deep breath, standing. “I fear it, too, Father.”
“I must show you something that I wish to the gods was not so,” he said. “In the tent where my grandson lies.”
He turned and watched the others as they filed out of the hall, up the carved steps and into the narrow corridor that let them into the cold night. When their footfalls were distant, he moved in the same direction and Winters followed.
Without words, they climbed up and into a clouded night that smelled like smoke and imminent snow. The tent stood nearby, guarded by two large men with spears who stood on either side of a guttering lamp. He nodded to them, lifted the lamp and slipped inside. Winters followed.
The six were laid out in banks of snow, their faces hollow and pale, twisted in agony. All were clothed but one-he lay swaddled in oilcloth, stitched into it by Rudolfo’s Physician. Only now, the stitches had been cut away. “My grandson,” he said in a low, mournful whisper.
Winters felt the stab of shame. He’s brought me here because of the cutting of his kin. “It had to be done,” she said, “but I’m sorry for it. They wished to know how he’d died from such superficial wounds.” She vaguely remembered the briefing with Rudolfo’s River Woman and the dark-robed Physician who’d wielded the blade. The others they’d found were also dead-some without a scratch upon them. Their bodies and hearts had simply given out, dropping them dead in midsprint. When they’d asked her permission to cut the others, she’d refused and told them that the findings from one should suffice for all. She remembered that much, but the rest of those early days following Hanric’s death were clouded.
“No,” he said. “Not that.” He stooped and with one liver-spotted hand peeled back the cloth to reveal the naked body of a young tangle-haired man. She watched where the old man pointed and wondered suddenly how she’d not seen this before.
There, upon the chest, slightly smaller than her closed fist, lay a cutting that she did not recognize. She leaned in to see it, the smell of death heavy in her nostrils. “He’s been cut,” she said. The scar was pink and new-healed. And it took a shape that she knew was intentional though she did not recognize it. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
He looked to her, and she saw in the dim light that tears coursed his cheeks, cleansing the mud and ash from them and wetting his gray tangled beard. “Yes,” he said. “It is an abomination.”
He covered the body and went to the next, stooping and pushing the tattered hide vest and filthy wool shirt aside. There, over the heart, the same cut symbol.
Silently, she watched as he did the same with the others, each time careful to replace the clothing. When he finished, he stood and spoke quietly. “Forgotten heritage has found us,” he said, “though few will know it when they see it, for these times are buried in two thousand years of forgetting.” His wet eyes met hers, and she saw something in them that made her stomach lurch. “Few should know it,” he continued. “Better to burn these before someone sees and knows it for what it is.”
He would burn the child of his child to hide this. That he would go to such lengths, so contrary to their custom, confirmed for her what she saw in his eyes.
It was terror there, mingled with his grief, and suddenly she could not hold back her own sorrow. A solitary sob shook her in its fist and released her. She argued back the tears and forced herself to meet his gaze. “What are these markings?” she asked, but at some core part of her she knew. She of all her people was most intimate with the history they’d chosen to forget. Because though her own people no longer wished to know it, the Androfrancines with their digging about in the grave of the Old World had forgotten nothing. And her tutor, the fled scholar Tertius now five years dead, had taught her even that which she had not wished to know. He had no books that he might show her himself, but he’d had the words.
When the old man didn’t answer, Winters asked again. “Tell me,” she said, “what they mean.”
“These,” he said, his voice full of despair, “are the Scars of House Y’Zir, the markings of a servant’s ownership.”
Outside, far and distant, a wolf howled at the rising moon.
Jin Li Tam
Afternoon sunshine slanted through the tall windows of Rudolfo’s study, flooding the room with light and warming the back of Jin Li Tam’s neck where she sat at his desk. She looked up from the papers she’d spent the last four hours reviewing and rubbed her eyes, fighting back the nausea and headaches that took her daily now.
She understood why the River Woman had insisted that she share the work with a wet-nurse and knew Lynnae fared no better. If she’d tried to carry this entire load she had no doubt that the stabbing between her eyes and the roiling storm of her stomach would incapacitate her. Still, neither of them complained to each other. For Jin Li Tam, it was a matter of pride. Already, she hated the notion that another fed her child, that the powders that had brought life to Rudolfo’s loins now threatened death and weakness to the baby boy they had made between them.
These are the consequences of my actions.
Three doors away, the young woman napped with Jakob in the suite of rooms they’d prepared for her. At first, Jin had irrationally insisted that the wet-nurse do her work in Jin Li Tam’s rooms or in the nearby nursery, but very quickly it became obvious that Jakob’s needs did not conform to her desires. He ate frequently, waking up from his lethargy with weak, gurgling cries throughout the day and night. Finally, she’d been forced to relent, and Jakob split his time now largely between Lynnae’s rooms and hers. Still, for the hundredth time since she’d left the two of them there, Jin Li Tam resisted the urge to go and look in. To make certain that he was still breathing. To know when he’d last nursed. To see if the gray pallor of his flesh had somehow miraculously become the pink tone of a healthy infant.
But never, she realized with a start, to know how Lynnae held up beneath the power of the River Woman’s potion. She started to rise from her chair to go and ask just that, then chuckled at herself and sat back down. She needed to let Lynnae do her work.
And I have work of my own, Jin Li Tam thought.
She bent her attention back to the papers and reread Rudolfo’s last message, sent under code by bird from Caldus Bay.
Buried into an imaginary list of supplies available for the library by caravan from the high docks of Caldus Bay was first one message and then another, coded skillfully with each twist and smudge of the pen. P guarded by Gray; attacked, survived and fled, the first said; and as disturbing as that news was, the second message brought her hope. Are you and the boy well?
He is warming to me again.
Her family’s role in the course of Rudolfo’s life, in the murder of everyone he’d cared for-his family, his closest friend-had killed his love for her in its cradle. It was the last betrayal, betrothed suddenly to the forty-second daughter of the man who’d poured suffering and loss into the river of his life, changing its path. Still, her father’s will was woven skillfully into the man he’d shaped both for the world and for his daughter. And when she’d told him about the child she carried, she’d seen in his eyes that her father had used Rudolfo’s greatest strength against him.
Once, she’d asked a Gypsy Scout to tell her about his king, and she heard his reply echoing now these many months later. He always knows the right path and always takes it. Faced with the prospect of an heir, he’d proven himself truly her father’s work.
There was a knock at the door; Jin Li Tam looked up. “Yes?”