Soldier of Dorsa

by Eliza Andrews

AuthorElizaAndrews.com

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Cover credit:

Thank you Jay of Covers by Juan.

Other books by Eliza Andrews:

To Have Loved & Lost:  A new adult lesbian romance

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M7YF05A

Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074L7NJYX

Reverie

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078WCN762

Paradise:  A (short) lesbian romance

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07212Z4GD

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Dedication

Dedicated to my readers,

who have been patient, supportive, and encouraging.

Part I:

The Lengthening Shadows

“How the Shadowlands came to be is a mystery that the Brotherhood, in all its exploration, has never been able to answer.  Did the Shadowlands always exist, as some histories state, or was it, along with its inhabitants, created by mankind?  There is an oft-recited but apocryphal account that states it was created by a particularly powerful Sorceress as a place to safely contain the creatures threatening her tribe.  Modern scholars are more apt to believe that the tale is an example of superstition attempting to explain away the paradox of two worlds that exist side by side and yet remain invisible to one another, and the further paradox of some shadows — and some men — who can exist in both places at once.”

— Brother Remon of Gifford,

A Primer on the Shadowlands and Wielding Its Power for Aspiring Brothers

Prologue

~ THEN ~

“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.

Joslyn did not know.  But she was afraid to admit she did not know.  She stood in the little clearing in front of his hut, a short sword dangling loosely from one hand.

“The art of… fighting,” she said at last.

“Wrong.”

He attacked — a blur of whirring steel that came so quickly she scarcely had time to lift her sword before he disarmed her.  Her short sword clattered to the ground.  The hand that had been holding it vibrated painfully from the shockwave his blade had sent through hers.  She reached for the dagger at her other hip, but the flat of his blade came down on her wrist so hard that she was sure he’d shattered it at first.  Instinctively she pulled her hand back with a sharp breath, and with a fast flick of the tip of his great curved sword, he caught the hilt of the dagger and flung it out of her sheath and ten feet behind him.

Joslyn bent to retrieve her sword from the ground, only to feel the cold edge of the ku-sai’s blade against her throat.  It barely touched her, yet she knew that if she moved even half an inch, it would slice into the artery that pulsed just beneath her skin.

“I have killed you,” said the ku-sai.  “Come back tomorrow when you have the answer.”

He tossed his sword into the air.  It spun end over end, a spinning killing machine glinting in the sun.  Then he snatched it by the hilt midair and sheathed it at his waist.  Without another word, he turned his back on Joslyn and walked away.

Hot tears threatened, but Joslyn wouldn’t let them fall.  She hadn’t come all this way just to cry like a little girl when the ku-sai turned her away.

She didn’t pick up her own rust-spotted sword from the ground until he disappeared into the hut and closed the door behind him.

What is the art of the sword master? she asked herself.  What is the art of the sword master?

Joslyn looked down at her pitiful short sword.  It was completely unlike the ku-sai’s sword:  His was a broad, curved scimitar, polished so well that it shone like a mirror, brilliant as a magic sword from one of the Terintan tall tales told around the evening campfire.

To say her sword was “common” was a compliment it didn’t deserve.  It looked older than the ku-sai himself, with the steel blade notched in places and dotted with circular spots of tarnish.  She’d stolen it off a drunken foot soldier of the Imperial Army that she’d met on her journey north.

As best as Joslyn could figure, she was about fourteen.  It was an age that might still be considered “young” for more privileged girls, but Joslyn’s fourteen years had made her old enough and hard enough that she knew the drunken soldier had intended to rape her as soon as he got the chance.

She’d slipped away from him before a workable plan could blossom in his mind, watched from the shadows of the tavern as he drank more and more with his mates.  Then she followed him into the alleyway and hung back as his speech slurred and his mates disappeared one by one with women they might or might not pay at the end of the night.  Finally, the soldier passed out in the alleyway, a pile of garbage serving as a makeshift pillow, his feet dangling dangerously close to the small gully that carried the neighborhood’s sewage.  Joslyn kicked him lightly to make sure he was really asleep, then stole the sword as a punishment for so much as having the mere thought of asserting himself over her.

She examined what had been the drunken soldier’s short sword as she remembered how she’d acquired it, used a fingernail to scratch at one of the tarnished spots.  The spot came off without too much effort, leaving a smudge of black grime beneath her nail.  Joslyn retrieved the dagger next, the only item she’d managed to take with her from her former master when she ran away.  It, too, was tarnished.  The blade was dull, hardly good enough to slice bread.  Perhaps the ku-sai would show her how to make it sharp again.

If the ku-sai would show her anything at all.

Joslyn sighed heavily.

What is the art of the sword master?

She sat down cross-legged on the ground, opposite the ku-sai’s wooden hut.  She sat far enough from the hut to be respectful, close enough to show she would not leave.  Beyond the hut, the sun had begun to disappear behind the mountains, the last oranges and reds of the day melting into the sky.

Joslyn rested the sword across her lap, and with a tattered corner of her tattered brizat, she started to scrub at the tarnished spots.  When she saw the ku-sai tomorrow — if she saw him — he would see that her sword gleamed as brightly as his own.  Perhaps then he would know that she was serious about learning his craft, the art of the sword master.

She fell asleep a few hours later in the same spot, curled like a comma against the cold earth.  She clutched the short sword to her chest in the same way other girls a little younger than herself might have clung to their dollies.

Joslyn had never had a dolly.  But she had this sword, and that was enough.

It would have to be enough, since she had nothing else.

#

Joslyn woke with the toe of a soft-soled boot nudging her side.  She struggled to open bleary eyes.  The cold had kept her from sleeping most of the night; she’d only finally fallen asleep in the hours just before dawn.  Now she was groggy and stiff as the unwelcome toe prodded her awake.

“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai.

He looked bigger than he really was from her prone position against the earth.  In reality, the ku-sai was a small man, only a few inches taller than Joslyn and almost as skinny.  The rising sun was directly behind him, making his white beard and bald head glow unnaturally.  When she was little, the tinker’s wife used to entertain Joslyn and her older sister with tales of desert angels who would descend from the clouds and grant water to the righteous, and that was what the ku-sai made Joslyn think of now — an angel who had walked out of her dreams and become manifest.

“What is the art of the sword master?” repeated the ku-sai angel.

Joslyn lifted a hand halfway, though she didn’t know what she was reaching for.  “Please…” she said, though she didn’t know what she was pleading for.

He only stared at her, face hard and severe.

“The art of the sword master is…” she said, groping through her bleary mind for something that might satisfy him.  “Defense?”

“No,” he said, and walked away.

Joslyn spent the day foraging around the hut for what little food she could find, since the ku-sai had offered her none.  Behind his hut was a smokehouse that gave off a mouth-watering smell of meat, but she knew better than to enter there, just as she knew better than to disturb the ku-sai’s clucking hens or the fat eggs that probably laid in their hen house.  The ku-sai came out to feed the hens at one point late in the morning, speaking to them in a cooing, soothing voice that contrasted so sharply with the tone he used for her that he seemed a different man.  She couldn’t quite understand what he told the hens; he addressed them in a rough, northern Terintan dialect that she didn’t entirely understand.

In the forest behind the hut, Joslyn found some half-rotten acorns, which she dined on with enthusiasm, squatting beside the small game trail and digging out the acorn meat with her increasingly grimy fingers.  She needed to backtrack today, find the stream she had crossed on the way up the mountain, and refill her water skin.  Maybe she would take a bath while she was there.  If she could smell herself, so could whatever animals roamed the mountainside at night — lions, most like.  Maybe wolves, too.  Certainly foxes, though they probably wouldn’t bother her.  But as long as she was sleeping outside, it would be better not to attract their attention.

Nevertheless, she dreaded the necessary dip into the mountain stream.  It was spring, and the mountain’s daytime temperature was warm enough for her, but once night fell, she was likely to freeze to death if any part of her was still wet.

Best to do it sooner rather than later, then.  While the sun was still strong.

Joslyn sighed and got to her feet, brushing the crumbs of the acorns on her dirty trousers.  Her stomach rumbled, protesting that the business with the acorns was already over.  Maybe she would find more on her walk to the stream.  She adjusted the short sword in its makeshift sheath at her hip and headed down the trail.

What is the art of the sword master? she wondered as she walked.

#

The third day was not unlike the first two:  She woke up cold and stiff, confronted with an empty stomach and the ku-sai’s question.

“What is the art of the sword master?”

“Protecting others,” she said on that third morning.

“No,” he said.

“Disarming the opponent,” she said the fourth day.

“Strength,” she said the fifth day.

“Agility,” she said on the sixth.

“Perseverance,” she said on the seventh.

“Why does it matter?” she asked the ku-sai on the eighth day.  She was cranky and exhausted from lack of sleep, emaciated from lack of food.  At least she was clean, had fresh water, and a polished short sword.  She’d torn off a corner of her brizat and used it now to scrub the sword clean and bright every morning.

But she couldn’t eat the sword.  Nor could she use it well enough to kill anything she could eat.  Joslyn despaired that she would starve to death before the ku-sai ever accepted her as an apprentice.  When he asked his question on the ninth morning, she said simply:

“I don’t know.  Teach me the answer.  Please.”

And finally he said something besides “No” or “Wrong.”

“I will teach you nothing until you answer my question correctly,” he said, and walked back into the hut.

Joslyn sat cross-legged on the ground, finally permitting her tears to fall.

#

Between her own foraging and the local squirrels, all the acorns within a reasonable radius of the hut were gone by the end of the ninth day.  She’d tried eating bark a few days before but found it impossible to get down.  She’d also had the smallest bite of a mushroom, worried that it might be poisonous, and sure enough, she felt immediately light-headed and spent her afternoon nauseated and dry-heaving after she’d emptied her stomach of water.

When the toe came into her ribs the morning of the tenth day, it seemed to take all of her energy simply to open her eyes.

“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.

“I don’t know,” Joslyn whispered.  “I don’t know what the art of the sword master is.”

He walked away.  Joslyn laid her head back onto the earth and fell asleep.

#

She needed a bath again, but couldn’t summon the energy to make it to the stream on the eleventh day.  She needed to go there; there was nothing left in her water skin, and water was the only thing fooling her belly into thinking she had eaten.

I have come all this way only to starve to death on the side of a mountain, she thought bitterly.

The ku-sai had been her last hope, a myth whose thread she had followed north, across deserts and savannas and the foothills of the Zaris Mountains.  She’d stopped in the village at the foot of the ku-sai’s mountain twelve days ago, seeking to barter one of her meager possessions for a little food and a little information.  She’d managed only a crust of moldy bread and the instruction that there was an odd, grumpy old hermit who lived in the saddleback between this mountain and the next.  He might be the one she sought.

Or he might just be an odd, grumpy old hermit.

Not that it mattered, they said.  Finding his hut wouldn’t be hard, but he wouldn’t teach her.  Many who were certainly more worthy than she had tried before, and he had refused each of them.  Some of them were even highborn young men who’d taken their lives into their hands by traveling south or east or west from the Empire in the days when Terinto was even wilder than it was now.

The villagers looked Joslyn up and down, and she knew what they saw:  A girl.  A runt, undernourished and small for her age.  And if she was unlucky, they saw a runaway slave.

Joslyn only spent a day in the village, thanked the tavern owner who’d given her the scrap of bread, and headed up the mountain with only her dull dagger and tarnished sword, angling for the saddleback where the hut was supposed to be.

She would find the ku-sai.  He would train her to be a sword master, like he was.  She would do this, because what else was there left for her to do?  She could not go to any place with people; the slave hunters might find her.  She would die before she would be a slave again.  There had been a light of hope, for a moment, a promise of a very different destiny.  One with laughter and love and security with her Anaís, but Anaís had left her for the stable boy, leaving Joslyn only with a flower by way of apology.

The ku-sai would accept her as a pupil.  Or she would die on his doorstep.

“What is the art of the sword master?”

“I don’t know.”

#

“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai on the twelfth morning.

Joslyn somehow managed to push herself up into a sitting position.  Her eyes had sunken into her skull; the skin around her cheeks clung to the hollows; her lips were thin and chapped and stretched into a perpetual grimace.

Nothing but skin and bones.  People had said that to her before, of her before, but they had always been wrong.  She’d been hungry all her life, but this was actual starvation.  Real starvation.  Her skin and her bones were truly all she had left.

Her heavy head wobbled on her weak neck, but she looked straight into the ku-sai’s golden-brown eyes and croaked out:

“Death.  The art of the sword master is death.”

The ku-sai did not move for a moment.  He said nothing.  Then he walked back into his hut, and Joslyn collapsed onto the ground.

A few minutes later, the ku-sai returned.  He carried a wooden plate of scrambled eggs in one hand, in the other was a thick woolen blanket, its color the same green as the budding trees.  He dropped the blanket next to her and rested the plate of eggs on top of it.

“Eat slowly, young kuna-shi,” he instructed.  “If you eat too fast, you will only throw it all up again.”

Then he walked back inside the hut.

Joslyn didn’t understand what was happening.  Had the old man taken pity on her?  Why had he brought her the eggs?  Was it a trick?  Did the eggs contain a poison that would finally kill her?

Kuna-shi.  Again, there was that Terintan dialect she didn’t quite understand.  “Shi” meant child.  What was kuna?

She sat up again, glancing suspiciously at the eggs.  In the end, she couldn’t fight her hunger.  She picked up the plate and shoveled the eggs into her mouth, slowly at first, then faster and faster.  She’d eaten half of the eggs before her stomach cramped and she remembered the instruction about not eating too fast.

She put the plate on the ground, forced herself to rest for what she guessed was an hour, then ate the rest of the eggs.

Her stomach tried to reject the meal.  She could feel it working, clenching around the eggs as it tried to remember how to perform the task of digestion.  She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t know when she would get a meal again.  She clenched her jaw and managed to keep it down.  When she was sure she wouldn’t lose the eggs, she wrapped the blanket around her and fell back asleep.

Death was the right answer, she thought as she drifted off.  Of course.  What is the art of the sword master?  The art of death.

No wonder the sword master had not taken on a pupil before.  None of them had been willing to stay until the brink of starvation, when the word “death” was the only correct answer to any question asked.

1

~ NOW ~

In faint grey light tinted pink by the rising sun, two women in two different places worked through a series of movements.  Filled with leaps and crouches, the sweeping of arms and legs in great arcs and tight thrusts, sidesteps, dodges, and spins, an outside observer might have taken each woman to be engaged in a kind of unusual, exotic dance.

“What is she doing?” the observer watching from the shadows may have asked himself.  “Is she imitating the mountain men, dancing to bring the rain?”

But no one watched either woman.  Each had made sure of that, because their dance was a secret one.

One woman danced on floorboards so worn that years of footsteps had etched visible pathways into them.  These floorboards rolled and shifted beneath her feet, for she was belowdecks in a merchant carrack sailing from Reit in the East to Paratheen in Terinto.  Trade goods surrounded her, primarily in the form of sheep and cattle, and, although the men who hired her on as a cook thought she did not know, she also knew that a hidden compartment contained two barrels filled with meravin mushrooms — heavily taxed delicacies that were easily worth twice or even three times the cost of all the livestock.

Despite the unstable surface upon which she danced, her movements were fluid and graceful.  The ship bucked and rocked, but she did not.  Any warrior of the Seven Cities, who might have recognized her dance for what it was, would have also called her deadly.

The woman on the ship was known as Joslyn of Terinto.  Only a few weeks earlier, she had been dead.  But she made a bargain to a dark creature in a dark world to gain one more year of life in order to protect the woman she loved.

The second woman danced on an opulent rooftop courtyard.  She had pushed the furniture to the edges of the patio to make room for her dance, and as she moved, she silently recited the names of each part, lips forming the words as she went:

Mountain.  She planted her feet; she changed her breathing.

River.  She dodged left, then right, then forward, then back, never letting her feet leave the ground.

Rising sun.  She crossed imaginary daggers before her — because the movements were meant to be done without one’s weapons — and parried against an invisible foe, moving his weapon above and then behind her.

The woman on the rooftop was an amateur — but a well-trained amateur, if only she would stop mouthing the names of the movements like a child learning to read.

Her name was Natasia of House Dorsa — the Traitor Princess to some, the heir to Emperor Andreth and rightful Empress to others.  Only a few weeks earlier, Tasia had watched the woman she loved die before her eyes.  Tasia, by all rights, should be dead, too, but somehow here she was, a royal in exile, taking refuge with a strange lord in a strange land.

But this strange land was the land where her love had been born.  Being here in Paratheen, Terinto’s largest city, made her feel closer to Joslyn, even as it underscored her absence.

Wind through wheat, Tasia mouthed, leaning backwards with as much flexibility as she could muster, though she knew her version of the movement was hardly even a decent imitation of her dead lover’s version.

Tiger’s fury, Joslyn thought (without thinking) on the ship sailing for Paratheen many hundreds of miles away.  The ship lurched, but Joslyn completed her short charge and tigress-like swipe with her dominant hand effortlessly, even as the Adessian Sea boiled like a cauldron.

Diving falcon, Tasia mouthed on her rooftop, remembering the way Joslyn had made her watch hawks and falcons diving for their prey for nearly an hour before she had consented to teach this move.  Once Tasia had finished the sharp duck, she hesitated, one knee on the ground.

“Gods be damned,” she muttered to herself, because she had forgotten the next move of the dance.  The next several moves, actually.

But Joslyn had not forgotten.  Several hundred miles away, in the belly of the ship, diving falcon morphed into scorpion sting, scorpion sting became light on water, and light on water transformed into heron’s wing.

On the rooftop in Paratheen, Tasia used a shirtsleeve to mop the sweat from her brow, thinking she might as well stop for the morning and break her fast.  A flicker of movement caught her attention.  Tasia spun.  Defensively, she placed her back against the waist-high wall that marked the edge of the roof.  One hand went to a dagger sheathed at her hip.

A hanging plant, its long arms and spiky fat leaves cascading nearly to the ground, swayed gently upon the line.  It swayed, despite the fact that the wind was still this morning — there was no sandy breeze tripping southwards off the dunes, and no cooling salt breeze traveling north from the sea.

Tasia leaned forward, squinting.  Then she smiled, taking her hand from the hilt of the dagger.

“It’s alright,” she said, aiming her comment in the direction of the swaying plant.  “You can come see if you want.”

But the plant stopped swaying on its own without anyone appearing, and Tasia sighed.  She slipped Halia’s leather sandals onto her feet once more and pushed the furniture back into place.

Maybe tomorrow, Tasia thought.  Maybe tomorrow morning, the girl would come again, and this time she would be brave enough to show herself.

Tasia hoped she would.  She’d like to have someone to talk to besides Evrart, Halia, and Lord M’Tongliss.

But after nearly being caught in her voyeurism, Tasia doubted the girl would even come to the rooftop tomorrow morning, let alone reveal herself.  The differences between “slave” and “Empress” were too great, ingrained into the girl’s head since birth.  They had been ingrained into Tasia’s head, too, but Joslyn had changed that.

Joslyn.  Even thinking the name produced a hollow ache in her chest.

Tasia sighed and headed for the stairs.  She might as well break her fast.

#

In the ship’s hold, Joslyn also wiped sweat from her brow.  She put her shabby leather armor on, strapped her sword to her back, checked that her daggers were all hidden where they ought to be, and headed up the stairs towards the faint morning sun.

The deck wasn’t as empty as she’d expected.  The sailors’ work was never done, that was true, but at this early hour, she’d expected to see no more than a skeleton crew on the deck — the remnants of the night crew as they traded places with their morning replacements.

Instead, crewmen ran in every direction, the Captain’s voice echoed across the main deck, and the first mate was handing something out.  Three of the sailors stood on the starboard side near the place where Joslyn had emerged from belowdecks.  They each stood with a hand shading their eyes, staring transfixed at the open sea.  Joslyn followed their gaze and spotted a black smudge on the horizon.

“What’s happening?” she asked the closest sailor.

He glanced over his shoulder at her.  “Pirates is what’s happening,” he grumbled.  “Cap’n should’ve known this would happen.  Hardly any Imperial ships in these waters anymore, what with the war.”

The sailor beside him, who didn’t look as if he could be any older than fifteen summers, let out a plaintive moan.  “Mother Moon spare us all,” he said.  “We’re goin’ t’die.”

“Don’t talk like that,” the first sailor said gruffly.  “We have an Adessian captain.  If anyone will know how to negotiate, he will.”

“We’re goin’ t’die,” the young sailor said, louder this time.  “We’re all goin’ t’die!”

“Shut up,” said the first sailor.

“Why should he?” asked the third.  “It’s death or slavery, since Adessian pirates have a better market for slaves than silks these days.  They’ll kill us or sell us.  We’ll be lucky if they kill us.”

The boy began to whimper.

“Cap’n will handle it,” said the first, but there was doubt in his voice this time.  “If he can’t negotiate, he’ll fight.  He won’t let his ship go — or his men go — without a fight.”

The other sailor scoffed.  “Fight?  With what?  Sheep?  The Cap’n won’t fight.  He’s Adessian, like them.  He’d sell us before he’d die for us.”

Joslyn had heard enough.  She followed the Captain’s voice to the far side of the ship, bracing herself for an argument she knew she had to win.

The first mate saw her approaching first.

“Why aren’t you working?” he growled at Joslyn.  “Go help the men hide what we can while we still have the chance.”

“Hiding won’t help,” Joslyn said.

The Captain whirled to face her, the stars tattooed around his left eye crinkling as he scowled.  “He gave you an order, woman.  Now stop your insolence and go help.”

“We can beat the pirates,” Joslyn said.  “I’m a veteran of the Imperial Army, and — ”  She’d been about to add that she had been a member of the palace guard, but they wouldn’t believe that.  Women weren’t palace guards.  Especially not Terintan women.  “Give me a handful of fighting men to organize, and I promise we will beat them.”

The first mate cocked his head thoughtfully.  But the Captain huffed impatiently.

Joslyn had told them that she was a veteran heading home from the Eastern front to Paratheen when they’d hired her on at Reit.  It had been her intention to sell her services as a guard, but they hadn’t accepted that.  Instead, they’d offered free passage and quarter (in the ship’s hold, it turned out, with the livestock) in exchange for being a “seaman’s assistant.”

“Seaman’s assistant,” apparently, meant that Joslyn was obligated to clear the waste of both livestock and sailors each day, scrub the decks when requested, and join the other “assistants” in pumping out the stinking bilge water.

It was alright.  Joslyn had been a slave before.  She could be a slave again, so long as her internment ended the moment they docked in Paratheen.

“We can beat them,” Joslyn told the ship’s captain for the third time.  Her tone was placid — soothing, even.

“No,” the Captain said.  He turned seaward again, gazing at the rapidly approaching longship.  When he spoke again, it was more to himself than to Joslyn or the first mate.  “I know their type.  If we negotiate, their Rizalt will take what he wants and send us on our way.  If we fight, he will show no mercy.”

“You’re right,” Joslyn said to the Captain’s back, her voice still calm and unhurried.  “The Rizalt will take what he wants.  But what he wants isn’t mushrooms, Captain.  Imperial slaves fetch high prices on the Islands.”  She paused.  “You know this to be true.  You know it better than most of the other men on this ship.”

The first mate, still facing Joslyn beside the Captain, shifted uncomfortably at this.  He was an Empire native, probably a Port Lorsiner, and Joslyn guessed he hadn’t thought about the possibility of the pirates demanding slaves.  The first mate’s eyes darted skeptically from Joslyn, to the Captain, to the crewmen behind them.

A slave raid would leave any Adessians untouched — that was the unwritten rule.  But Empire men?

“Captain?” the first mate said warily.  “Maybe she’s right.  Maybe we’re better off taking our chances in a fight.”

The Captain squinted at the rising sun.  The longship, though still only a smudge on the horizon, had grown noticeably closer, close enough that Joslyn could see the longship’s oars moving up and down in the water.

“Eight men,” Joslyn said.  “Give me eight men who can hold their own in a fight, and I will make sure that this ship retains both its cargo and its crew.  And I will make sure their Rizalt ends this day at the bottom of the sea.”

“Please, Captain,” said the first mate, putting a hand on the Captain’s shoulder.  “I promised me wife I’d come home again.  I don’t want to leave her with a son and baby girl to raise by ’erself.”

The Captain hesitated.  Then he spat over the railing.  “Very well,” he said.  He jabbed a sausage-thick finger in Joslyn’s direction.  “But if we lose, you’re the first one I’m giving to the pirates.”  He looked her up and down.  “I’m sure they’ll enjoy a fresh piece of desert arse.  Especially if you don’t make it easy for them.”

Like an ocean swell, fury rose from deep within Joslyn, and for a moment she thought she might make the ship’s captain the first one to flail like a speared fish on the end of her sword.  But the wave of her anger dissipated, and Joslyn only lifted her chin.

“We won’t lose,” she said.

2

~ THEN ~

“…Nineteen.  Twenty.  Twenty-one.  Ready or not, here I come!” Mylla called.

Beside her big sister, Adela squirmed and pressed a hand to her mouth, suppressing a giggle.  Tasia grabbed the girl’s free hand and squeezed it, put a finger to her lips.  They certainly had a good hiding place, a narrow closet in Adela’s bedchamber hidden by a false panel that Tasia’s new handmaid was unlikely to detect.  The palace was full of secret places like this one — closets that were invisible unless you knew where to look, passageways that wormed their way between bedchambers and beneath kitchens, entire rooms built by long-dead monarchs whose existence even the Wise Men didn’t know about.

But Tasia knew them.  Before Nik died, he and Tasia had drawn up their own maps of the palace and its grounds.  Now Tasia would pass on her knowledge to little Adela, even if the only way the girl, who didn’t share Tasia and Nik’s passion for exploring, could be convinced to learn them was through playing endless rounds of hide-and-find.

Thinking of Nik brought tears to her eyes, and she squeezed her sister’s hand tighter.  Tasia still had Adela.  Her mother was gone.  Nik was gone.  But she still had Adela, and she would not lose her.  No matter what.

“Oww, Tasia,” Adela hissed in the darkness, shaking her hand loose from Tasia’s.  “Too hard.”

Through the narrow crack of the panel Tasia had left open, she saw Mylla cross first this way, then that way.  At the sound of Adela’s whisper, she stopped, rotated in the center of the room.

Tasia cocked her head, watching the handmaid.  She liked being able to watch the girl without her staring being seen.  Two days earlier, on the one-year anniversary of Nik’s death, Mylla had kissed her.  Tasia had been sitting at her vanity, and Mylla had been seated just behind, brushing out her hair.  Tasia’s thoughts turned towards her brother, turned towards the way Father hadn’t even mentioned the anniversary, and silent tears had fallen from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, hung, then fell, from her chin.  Mylla must have seen it all in the mirror, because she set the brush down and began to undress the Princess.  It was a normal enough ritual, for a handmaid to undress her mistress.  But there was something loaded in the careful movements of Mylla’s fingers as they loosened the ties of Tasia’s brassiere.  A few seconds later, to Tasia’s breathless surprise, Mylla had bent to catch one of Tasia’s exposed nipples between her teeth.  After releasing it, the handmaid had taken Tasia’s chin in one hand, turned her face, and kissed her.

They hadn’t spoken about it, afterwards.  But now, watching Mylla through the crack in the hidden closet inside Adela’s room, Tasia’s hand floated to her lips, touching the places where Mylla’s mouth had been two days before.  An unfamiliar, but not entirely unpleasant, feeling warmed Tasia’s insides, centered at a spot a few inches down from her belly button.

On the other side of the sliding panel, Mylla stopped, stepped closer to their hiding place.  Adela squirmed.  Hands reached towards the crack in the wall, and seconds later, the crack widened as Mylla figured out how to open it.

Full of gleeful giggles, Adela erupted from the hidden closet and careened into the handmaid.  “You found us, you found us!” she squealed.

Mylla proved herself to be a good playmate, tickling the young princess and chasing her in a circle around the bed.

Tasia stepped out and slid the false panel closed behind her, glancing back at it once to make sure it was invisible once again.  “Quite the hide-and-find companion you make, Adela.  You do realize the goal is not to be found, don’t you?”

But Adela was too busy laughing and running from Mylla to answer.

Mylla caught Tasia’s gaze.  She smiled, and the heat inside Tasia intensified.

Maybe later tonight, Tasia would ask the girl to brush her hair out again.  Maybe there could be another kiss, and she would come to understand what this feeling deep inside her gut meant.

~ NOW ~

“Well, you’re up early, aren’t you?” Tasia said.

Evrart sat at one of the tall round tables in Lord M’Tongliss’s open-air kitchen, looking even more dour than usual, if such a thing was possible.

Kitchens and dining halls, she’d learned, were odd things here in Terinto.  In the palace — in any stately house in the Capital Lands outside Terinto — the dining hall was at the very heart of the home, usually with the kitchen located a floor beneath it.  But Lord M’Tongliss’s kitchen was outside at the back of the home.  It had an overhanging roof and two adjacent walls where the kitchen connected to the rest of his mansion, but the other two walls were absent.  Where those walls should have been, two huge clay ovens, which to Tasia looked like upside-down funnels, gave off tremendous heat.  This was the reason the kitchen wasn’t inside, where the desert sun often made the heat stifling as it was, and it was also the reason why two of the walls were missing.  In a land where daytime winter temperatures reached levels that could be considered comfortable, and where daytime summers were downright unbearable, a closed-in kitchen with ovens of that size would be hard to even enter, let alone to work in.

Beyond the kitchen was a partition wall, and beyond that was an open-air dining hall, lined with marble pillars and covered only loosely with flapping lengths of silk draped between the pillars.

Tasia had decided she liked the open-air kitchen and dining hall.  The kitchen in particular was a pleasant place to take her meals when she wasn’t being officially entertained by Lord M’Tongliss or one of his two wives, and it was a better place than most within the mansion to disappear for an hour or two when she needed some privacy.  Kitchen slaves came and went here, but almost none of them spoke the common tongue, and they had clearly been trained not to approach the free members of the household.

But she could never manage to hide for long.  Especially not from Evrart.

“We were supposed to meet this morning,” he said.

“I know.  But I wanted to do my training first,” Tasia said, accepting a bowl of freshly cut melon from one of the kitchen slaves with an appreciative smile.

Evrart scratched at the half-formed black beard that was growing in patchily along his cheeks.  The hair on his head was also growing back in patches — he’d shorn off his bowl-like cut on the sea voyage to Paratheen, because the Imperial magistrates searching for them would be looking for a Wise Man, not a scruffy Port Lorsiner who’d washed up in Terinto.  The ratty beard and shaved head were a good start, as were the tunic, trousers, and tattered brizat he’d exchanged for his Wise Man’s robes, but there was something so inescapably officious and prim about the man that Tasia doubted he would ever truly pass for a common sailor or ex-soldier or laborer.

You can take the robes off a Wise Man, she thought, but you can never take the Wise Man off.

Although… now that she knew Evrart had been in the Brotherhood of Culo all the time, had he ever really been a Wise Man?  Or had he been a Brother masquerading as a Wise Man the whole time?

The thought made her shiver.  She was less fond of games of deception than she ever had been.

“I would have thought our meeting would take precedent over your training,” said the former Wise Man.  “After all, it is only the future of the entire Empire that is at stake.”

Tasia was careful to roll her eyes while her back still faced him.  When she turned and approached his table, she extended the small dish of melon chunks towards him with the grace and good manners expected from a royal.  “Have some.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s just the right amount of sweet.”

He held up a hand and shook his head.  She sat down on the stool across from him.

“How is your arm?” she asked, nodding to the arm that had been broken during their escape from the palace three weeks earlier.  It wasn’t in a sling any longer, and based on the way he was moving, it appeared to have healed completely.

“I saw the healer again yesterday,” he said.  “It is as if the break never occurred.”

Tasia raised her eyebrows.  “How exactly does that work again?  The healing?”

“It… would take too long to explain,” he said.  “But I do want to discuss the Brotherhood and how you keep ignoring them.  Along with a number of other important things we need to address.”

“The important things can wait long enough for me to finish my breakfast,” Tasia said, popping another piece of melon into her mouth.

Evrart closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering the strength he needed to be patient.  “Empress,” he said, exhaling the word as if it was a sigh.

“‘Empress,’ what?” Tasia snapped.  She was growing tired of his daily admonishments, his patronizing, his attempts to push her in the direction he thought would be best.  “You use that word so freely, yet you act as if I am the one who should be bowing to you.”

“That is far from the truth.”

“Is it?  You are loyal to your precious Brotherhood, first and foremost.”

He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again.

A Wise Man disloyal to both the House of Dorsa and the House of Wisdom, and who prefers to be called “Brother,” as my senior counselor, Tasia thought to herself, staring down at her dish of melon instead of the severe-looking man across from her.  And a Terintan lord who gained his title and lands by betraying all his comrades during the Terintan War for Independence as my generous host and only noble ally.  Quite the “Empress” I’m making so far.

“Empress,” Evrart said at last, his tone soothing this time.  “I am loyal to the Brotherhood because the Brotherhood is loyal — and has always been loyal — to a single, simple purpose:  the preservation of mankind.  Before the Empire even existed, the Brotherhood was there, keeping the shadows in the Shadowlands and pushing them back whenever they threatened to spill into our world.”  He held up a single finger.  “One injury.  One injury from a shadow-infected will spread the infection further.  We’ve stopped the spread of the shadows before, winning battles over the centuries without ordinary people even knowing there was a battle to be fought.  But this time, the threat is so great that we need the might of the Empire behind us.  As long as you understand that and agree, then you have my loyalty.  And the loyalty of the entire Brotherhood.”

“And if I stop agreeing, what then?” Tasia asked.  “You send another assassin after me?  Such impressive loyalty.”

Evrart bowed his head.  “I have apologized for that already.  Norix deceived me just as he deceived your father.  He told me he would take the threat of the Shadowlands seriously if I agreed to help pressure your father into ending the War in the East.”

“‘Pressuring’ is a rather polite way to describe an assassination.”

“It was a last resort.  We had already tried to convince your father in other ways, but he was a stubborn man.”  Evrart paused.  “The only thing Emperor Andreth truly feared was another rebellion coming from the West.  Our intention was to make your death seem as if it was the opening salvo in a Western uprising.”

“Yet I foiled everyone’s plans by surviving.”

“And then your father named you heir, which none of us expected,” Evrart said.  “If it softens your opinion any, Empress, when Norix initially tried to enlist my help to have you killed and frame the Western lords, I refused him.”

“It doesn’t soften my opinion,” Tasia retorted.  “Had you confessed your crimes and reported Norix’s treachery at that time, perhaps my opinion would be softer.  Instead, you conspired to kill me and then held your tongue when Norix murdered my father.”

“I didn’t hold my tongue.  I didn’t know he’d planned that.”

“You should have stopped him.”

“Norix would have exposed the Brotherhood if I had opposed him,” Evrart said.

Tasia slammed a fist on the table, making the small bowl of melon pieces jump.  “Then you should have let it be exposed!  Look at us.”  She swept her hand out to indicate the open-air kitchen with its two clay ovens, teetering stacks of pots, and slaves.  “My father is dead, Norix is Regent, and my sister is being forced to marry our cousin.  All while you and I cower in Terinto in the home of a merchant-lord who wants Gods-only-know-what in return for his hospitality.  Surely stopping that would have been worth a sacrifice or two from the Brotherhood.”

She spat the last word out, hoping every droplet of her contempt would be audible.

But Evrart only raised his chin defiantly.  “The Brotherhood’s mission is too important to allow it to be compromised, even to protect the House of Dorsa.  Had I known how far Norix planned to go in his machinations against the Emperor, maybe I could have stopped him.  But as it was, I didn’t have enough information to make risking the Brotherhood’s anonymity worthwhile.”

I hope you’re happy with the results of your cowardice was what Tasia had planned on saying, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, Halia, the younger of Lord M’Tongliss’s two wives, rushed into the kitchen, her eyes wide with panic.  She spoke in rapid Terintan to two of the kitchen slaves, who nodded and ran in different directions, then she approached Tasia and Evrart.

“Your Majesty, Brother Evrart,” she said.  “The magistrates are here, searching for you.  We must hide you both immediately.”

Tasia turned to Evrart, a question in her eyes.

“No,” he said, answering her unspoken question with a shake of his head.  “There are none left.  I used the last of my herbs sneaking us through Paratheen.”

Angry as Tasia still was with Evrart, she had to admit that his strange Brotherhood ability to render people and objects temporarily invisible with nothing but a selection of herbs and a few words muttered in the Old Tongue had proven itself to be useful more than once.  An illusionist, he’d called himself when Tasia had asked about it.  The lowest-ranking form of the shadow arts the Brothers trained in.  Tasia had witnessed Evrart make not only her disappear on a few occasions, but once had seen him make their entire ship slip by an Imperial warship unnoticed during their escape to Paratheen.  Which made her wonder what else the Brotherhood was capable of if their illusionists were considered the least powerful of them all.

“Alright,” Tasia said, resigning herself to the fact that they would not be rendered invisible this time.  “Time for a game of hide-and-find.  Where would you have us go?” Tasia asked Halia.

Halia hesitated, her eyes darting from Evrart and Tasia to one of the kitchen slaves, who had returned with a bundle of clothes in his hands.

“It is not so much where we would have you hide, your Majesty,” Halia said, her tone apologetic, “but how.”

3

~ THEN ~

“Again,” said Ku-sai.

Joslyn stood up more slowly this time, brushing dirt from her knees.  She said nothing, though her blood boiled with frustration.  She chanced a glance at her ku-sai’s face, found it inscrutable.  If he was growing impatient with her, he didn’t let it show.  If he thought she was improving, he didn’t let that show, either.

She reset her feet — right slightly before left, toes turned out just so, knees soft.  As he had taught her, she took a long breath in through her nose, then held it, imagining the air and its attendant energy traveling down through her torso, into her legs, out through the soles of her feet, anchoring her to the ground before she let an exhalation escape slowly from her mouth.

Mountain, he’d called it.

Standing was what she called it.

Ku-sai’s foot flicked out, and before Joslyn had even had a chance to register its touch against her ankle, both her feet had lost contact with the ground, and she was crashing into the dirt.

Again.

She wondered if that was what he meant when he said the word “again,” if “again” meant “Fall on your arse at least once more, kuna-shi.”

This time she reached back instinctively with her right hand to brace her fall, only to scrape her palm and feel an uncomfortable twinge in her wrist.

“Again,” he said.  “A mountain is immovable, rooted to the earth.”

She leaned back on both hands, staring at him.  “I am not a mountain.”

“Which is the problem,” he said.  “Again.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “How am I supposed to be rooted to the earth?”

He adopted the mountain stance himself, placing his calloused bare feet as wide apart as his hips, right foot just ahead of the left, toes slightly out, knees soft.

He breathed in, nostrils flaring, chest expanding.  A few seconds later, his lips parted and his chest returned to normal.

“Push,” he commanded.

Joslyn hesitated.  Gave him a tentative shove.

“Push,” he repeated.

She pushed harder this time, planting both hands on his chest and adding some weight to her push.  Ku-sai was bigger than Joslyn by a head, but now that she wasn’t living the underfed life of an abused slave, the fourteen-year-old suspected she would outgrow her teacher within a year or two.

It made her nervous to push him too hard.  Shoving a man with authority over her grated against every survival instinct she had.

But he shouted, “Push, kuna-shi!”, and, startled into a knee-jerk obedience, Joslyn stepped back and shoved as hard as she could.

He might as well have been a stone wall.  Instead of moving, it was Joslyn who stumbled backwards, barely catching her balance before landing on her arse once again.

She looked up at him with wide eyes.

His face was as placid as ever.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“A mountain is rooted to the earth,” he answered.

“But… how?”

He drew in another long inhalation, held it, let it out slowly through his mouth.

Joslyn balled her hands into fists.  That didn’t answer her question.  She wanted to tell him that, too, but she thought better of it.

She mimed his stance. Mimed his breath —

“No,” he said sharply.  He came out of mountain, took a step towards her.  He tapped a big toe against the top of her foot.  “You are trying to form mountain from here, with your feet.  With your legs.”  He reached out a hand, and Joslyn shrunk back automatically before forcing herself to relax.  Gently, he placed the palm of his hand on her sternum.  “Mountain forms from here.”

“From my chest?” Joslyn said, confused.

He shook his head, tapped her chest with a gnarled finger.  “Inside.  From the energy you draw in, the energy all around you.  The energy is what forms mountain.  Not the chest.  Not the feet.”

Joslyn’s brow wrinkled in confusion.  He’d said all of this before, and she’d heard him.  She heard everything her ku-sai said; she hung on each word.  But she was beginning to realize that although she could hear his words, it didn’t mean she understood them.

“Again,” he said.  “Connect to the energy.”

Energy, energy.  He always spoke of connecting to the energy, but Joslyn didn’t feel any “energy.”  She just felt the cool, crisp mountain air as it stirred the leaves on the birch trees that surrounded his hut.  She felt the sun falling and evening approaching.  After evening would come night, and another futile attempt to rest soundly in the nest of blankets that served as her bed on the hard ground outside her ku-sai’s cozy, warm-looking hut.

But frustration didn’t mean Joslyn was anywhere close to giving up.  So she put her right foot in front of her left, turned her toes out, closed her eyes, took a deep breath in…

And felt something.  It was subtle, like the electrical charge in the air before a summer rainstorm, like the heat that radiated off a person’s body after a dip in a stream.

Joslyn’s eyes flew open in astonishment just as Ku-sai swept her feet out from beneath her.  She crashed to the ground.

“Better,” he said.  “Again.”

~ NOW ~

Joslyn assumed the position of mountain as the pirate captain walked up and down the line of the ship’s assembled men.  The rolling ship made it harder for the energy she sent through her body to anchor itself to anything, so she kept her feet stationary but switched her breath back to the more fluid, flexible stance of panther prepares to spring.

The eight fighting men chosen by the Captain all stood in a line to Joslyn’s right.  Normally, she would prefer to be in the center of such a group, with four fighting men on either side of her.  But a woman in the center of a group of sailors would seem odd.  It would stand out.  And standing out was the last thing any of them wanted at the moment.

Which was why Joslyn lowered her gaze and put the tension of anxiety into her face as the pirate captain slowly inspected the ship’s crew.

“You have a sorry lot and a sorry ship,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.

The Captain merely nodded.

“Three pigs, eight sheep, two horses, and a handful of chickens below decks, Rizalt,” a pirate said, hopping down the stairs from the quarterdeck and onto the main deck where the sailors stood assembled.

Rizalt was the Adessian word for captain, and one of the few Adessian words Joslyn knew.  The pirates spoke mainly in the Empire’s common tongue, though, probably in the hopes of intimidating the ship’s crew.

The Rizalt quirked a skeptical eyebrow at the Captain, stroking his short, braided goatee.  The goatee was the only hair on the massive man’s head; everything else had been shaved down to the scalp.  It made the lines of the blue-black star tattoos around his left eye stand out even more.

Joslyn assessed the Rizalt with a sidelong glance as he stood before the Captain.  He was a broad wall of muscle, with more tattoos rippling across his bare, coffee-colored chest and arms to indicate the fights he had won, the lives he had taken.  Joslyn didn’t know enough about Adessian tattoos to read their specifics, but she understood the general drift:  This man was a lethal killer.

But in wearing only loose, ankle-length trousers, bare feet, and with heavy golden rings pulling down each earlobe, Joslyn understood other things about the Rizalt.  He was arrogant, for one.  No warrior would enter a potential battle free of armor and wearing his wealth in his ears.  Such carelessness betrayed overconfidence, confidence that his presence alone would end any resistance from the carrack.  The sword whose curved blade hung casually from one hand was mainly for show; he didn’t plan to use it.

Another pirate emerged from belowdecks.  “Five barrels of meravin mushrooms, Rizalt,” he called cheerfully.  “We found them in a hidden compartment.”

This caught not just the Rizalt’s attention, but the attention of all the other pirates still above decks.  They paused in their respective duties and turned as one body towards the pirate who’d mentioned the mushrooms.  Two of them laughed.  The Rizalt let out a long whistle.

“Hidden meravin mushrooms!” he said to the Captain.  He reached out, pinched the Captain’s cheek as if the man was a favorite nephew.  “So you have a bit of the pirate in you after all, Captain.  And something of value to give me besides your sailors.”  He added something else in Adessian and patted the man’s cheek.

The Captain pressed his lips together, and it pleased Joslyn to see him following her command to say nothing, even though it was clear he itched to respond.  The more the crew appeared to be cowed, the greater the advantage of surprise they would have when they attacked.

The news of the mushrooms, combined with the silence of the Captain, considerably brightened the pirates’ mood.

Joslyn counted them discreetly.  Eight pirates stood at the ready behind the Rizalt; the other seven who had boarded the ship had been sent to inventory their loot.  The last seven of the twenty-two had stayed aboard their longship, watching the slaves and waiting in reserve.

The cargo ship’s crew numbered thirty-six, and Joslyn couldn’t help but feel disdain for the fact that they could outnumber the pirates on board by nearly two-to-one and still be so prepared to surrender.

Joslyn waited for the pirates who had reported in to their Rizalt to move back towards the ladders that would take them below decks to continue their inspection.  When the Rizalt turned to talk to one of the men behind him, she shouted “Now!”

The crew was ready.  The non-fighting men scattered, scampering up the ship’s three masts like monkeys, so fast that most of them were a third of the way up the masts before the unsuspecting pirates even realized what was happening.  The ship’s nine fighting men pulled forth the knives and daggers they’d hidden in their trousers and boots before the pirates had boarded; three of them, including the Captain, grabbed short swords they’d hidden in a barrel lashed to the main mast.

Some of these sailors would die today, Joslyn knew.  But not all of them.  And she took comfort in that.

The art of the sword master is death.

In the single, fluid motion of rising stork, Joslyn snatched the throwing knife from her boot and flung it into the back of the Rizalt.  He jerked, then bellowed in pain and fury.  The dagger wouldn’t be enough to take him down, she knew, but it would cost him blood, and it would weaken and slow him.  More importantly, because his back was turned when she threw it, he wouldn’t guess that it came from her, the crew’s sole woman.  She wanted him to be as arrogant and overconfident as ever when they finally faced off.

Leaping backwards with a mighty reverse frog, Joslyn grabbed the last sword from the barrel — her own.

The pirates were probably better fighters than the sailors, but the element of surprise was on their side.  One pirate had already fallen.  And even as she pulled her sword free from its scabbard, the Captain felled another.

Two down.  Thirteen to go.

She charged past the Rizalt and his line of men, letting the ship’s crew stall them.  Joslyn had a more important target:  the five grappling hooks that connected the carrack to the pirate longship below.  Joslyn felt relatively confident that the fifteen pirates currently on board could be defeated, especially since she would have the help of the ship’s fighters.  But she needed to cut the grappling hooks before the seven pirates still on the longship decided to come to the aid of their companions.

She severed the rope attaching the first grappling hook, spun to parry a dagger from an oncoming pirate with dancer’s grace, then drove her sword into his belly with viper striking.  He moaned and crumpled to the deck.  He wasn’t dead, but Joslyn knew he would be before the battle ended.

Three down.

Joslyn cut free the second grappling, spun again to slit the throats of two more pirates with one arcing swing of her sword, then turned back to the grappling hooks and cut another free.

Five pirates dead or incapacitated.

A cry drew her attention away from the hooks, and in her peripheral vision, she saw the Captain collapse to his knees under the weight of the Rizalt’s hacking sword blows.  The Captain was not a weak man, but the Rizalt was a brute.

The Captain was not going to last much longer against the Rizalt.  Joslyn hesitated for the briefest of moments, doing a quick warrior’s math as she glanced between the pirates in the longship below, the carrack’s sailors atop the masts, and the Captain who’d been driven to his knees.

With a mighty, axe-like chop of her sword, she severed the remaining two grappling hooks, sending the pirates who had started to scramble up them towards the carrack into the sea with yelps of surprise.  Once the last grappling hook had been cut free, the carrack’s sailors, the non-fighters who had scrambled up the masts, freed the ship’s sails.  They unravelled with a whoosh of snapping canvas, and, like a gift from from the sea gods, a puff of wind inflated the sails a second later.  The wind was no mighty gust, but it was enough to make the ship lurch, and the ship’s lurch was enough that the Rizalt’s kill stroke against the Captain faltered.

Thrown off-balance by the unanticipated movement of the ship, the downward arc of the Rizalt’s sword jumped six inches to the left.  Instead of splitting the Captain’s skull in two, the Rizalt’s sword cleaved through his weapon arm, taking the hand off at the wrist.

The Captain’s sword, along with the hand that had been gripping it firmly, both clanged to the deck.

The Captain screamed in pain, the keening sound of it so shrill and panicked that it reminded Joslyn unpleasantly of the pig Cookie had made her slaughter some five days earlier.  The Captain immediately seized his wounded wrist, desperately trying to stem the fountain of blood gushing forth from it.  The Rizalt was merely annoyed that his first blow hadn’t landed, and lifted his sword for another attempt at the kill stroke.

But Joslyn was faster than the Rizalt.  She charged forward, side-stepping one pirate’s blade, dropping to both knees and throwing her torso backwards like a Negustan contortionist when a second blade tried to take off her head.  She sprang back up in the next instant, and with the quick flick of reverse swooping hawk, her sword sliced through the back of the Rizalt’s legs, hamstringing him.

This time, the bellow of pain came from the Rizalt himself.  The arrogant pirate toppled forward, nearly bowling over the Captain as he did.

The sound of their leader’s scream, combined with the sight of him falling incapacitated to the carrack’s deck was too much for the pirates who still fought.  Two of them dropped their weapons and fled at the sight of the Rizalt’s fall, dashing to the starboard railing and leaping over it, splashing into the waves that waited below.  Another pirate hesitated a moment at the sound of the Rizalt’s fall, and the hesitation gave the sailor fighting him the opening he needed to drive his sword into the man’s chest.

Eight down.

With ruthless efficiency, Joslyn plunged her sword into the Rizalt’s throat, freeing her blade from his flesh just in time to slam it into another man’s side who had rushed over to help his leader.

Ten down.  Five more to go.

Joslyn kicked the dying man off her blade, not caring where or how he fell to the deck.  Blade dripping red, the ship’s deck rolling with waves beneath her, she paused long enough to assess the battle’s current condition.  She heard the sound of fighting coming from the quarterdeck, and turned to see two sailors trying to take down a single pirate.  The pirate held his own, but Joslyn knew what a fighter looked like when he was exhausted.  He wouldn’t outlast the assault of his two assailants.

Where were her last four opponents?

A yell and a cry of pain behind her answered the question.  She whirled around in time to see two pirates cutting through a group of sailors like farmers scything through wheat.  Joslyn rushed to their defense, but three sailors fell to the deck before she arrived.  She took off the arm of one pirate near the shoulder (eleven), parried a blow from the second, then spun with dancer’s grace to slice at the third.  But the third pirate was nimble, and Joslyn’s sword refused to cut deeply.  He jabbed out with a counter strike, forcing Joslyn to leap backwards, and then he charged before Joslyn could properly regain her footing.  She threw herself down, barely avoiding his wild swing at her head before regaining her feet behind him with inhuman speed.  At last she downed him, thrusting her sword into his back and through his heart (twelve).  The remaining pirate on the quarterdeck gawked at Joslyn and his downed companions with wide eyes, then promptly hopped to the quarterdeck’s railing and dove into the sea (thirteen).

Two sailors remained with Joslyn on the quarterdeck, panting, blood-spattered.  Their eyes rolled white like panicked horses.

“It’s too late for them,” she said calmly.  “But there are two more pirates somewhere on this ship.  You avenge your friends by finding them and killing them.”

One of the sailors set his jaw and nodded curtly.  The man beside him glanced first at him, then at Joslyn, and swallowed.

“They’re probably belowdecks,” the nervous one said, but he didn’t move towards the ladder.  He probably didn’t enjoy the prospect of fighting a skilled pirate warrior in the dark, cramped quarters of the carrack’s bowels.

“Then let’s go,” she said, and turned to descend the quarterdeck’s ladder.

After a tense search, they found the last two pirates hiding in the ship’s hold.  One was bleeding badly from a gash in his arm, the other appeared uninjured.  Joslyn prepared for a final battle in the dark, dank hold, but the uninjured pirate dropped his sword and lifted his hands in the air.

“We surrender,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.

His bleeding friend hesitated a moment, then dropped his own sword.  He said nothing.  Joslyn and the two sailors walked them back up to the main deck, but still kept their swords at the ready.

“Execute them,” the Captain snarled when she presented the last two pirates to him.  He sat on the ship’s deck with his legs splayed out like a child’s.  Beside him, Cookie and another sailor were bandaging the bleeding stump of his wrist.

Joslyn saw the Captain’s severed hand still curled around his sword a few feet off, and stepped between it and the Captain’s gaze.  All around them, the surviving crew members had begun the grizzly business of heaving the corpses of both pirates and sailors into the hungry mouth of the ocean.

“Wait,” Joslyn said.  The art of the sword master was death, but Joslyn did not abide by executing weaponless men who had surrendered.  “Keep them as prisoners,” she told the Captain.  “Turn them into a magistrate when we arrive in Paratheen.  The Wise Men will want to gain what information they can on the movements of other pirates in the area.”

The Captain squinted at her, thinking.

“The Empire pays well for knowledge of its enemies,” she said.

“Alright.”  To the sailors, the Captain added, “Strip them bare and tie them up to the mast foot.”

The sailors nodded and led their captives away.

The Captain turned back to Joslyn, studying her.  “You fight like a gladiator of Fesul and carry yourself like an Imperial noble.”

Joslyn said nothing.

“Who are you?” the Captain asked.

“I told you,” Joslyn said.  “I am a veteran of the Imperial Army.”

He shook his head.  “No.  I’ve taken on ex-soldiers as guards before.  They fight like regular men.  You… you are something different.”

Joslyn only shrugged.

“Gather your things from the hold,” he commanded.  “For the rest of the voyage, you sleep in the first mate’s quarters.  He can take one of the dead men’s hammocks.”

4

~ THEN ~

“Don’t.  Breathe,” Tasia whispered without turning her face.  In her peripheral vision, she could see Nik’s outstretched hand twitch just slightly.

The sun was setting over the palace gardens, and the two of them had finished their supper in a hurry so that they could run outside while there was still a little bit of light left.  This time of the evening, while there was still some sun remaining, and while the early warmth of summer did not yet carry the stifling weight it would a few months hence, was the best time to see the rabbits.  They liked to come out at this time of day to hop around the edge of the pond to have a meal of clover and grass.

Burke, one of the palace gardeners, hated the rabbits.  He complained that they were little better than rats with long ears, and that they had a habit of nibbling at his favorite flowers, which, in his estimation, made them even worse than rats.  Burke could often be seen tramping about this part of the gardens, cursing the rabbits in a colorful and creative litany, trying to disperse piles of their droppings so that no highborn man or woman would happen to step on one, and spreading poisoned vegetable scraps that he hoped the rabbits would eat.

Tasia and Nik, ages nine and seven, could also be seen tramping around the same part of the gardens, finding Burke’s poisoned vegetables and removing them carefully with a hearth shovel they had “borrowed” from the kitchens.

For the past three weeks, they’d been trying to tame the rabbits, crouching in the short grass with handfuls of (unpoisoned) vegetables, hoping to tempt the animals near enough that they might eventually eat directly from their hands.

Tonight, Tasia feared the thundering of her heart would surely give her away.  With those long, silky ears constantly flitting back and forth, big brown eyes enormous and fearful, the rabbits could probably hear Tasia’s nervous excitement from ten yards away.

But the children had been out in this part of the garden almost every evening since the sun started to last beyond supper time, and the rabbits had apparently grown used to their presence.  One particularly courageous fellow hopped forward a few paces, sniffing at the air between him and Nik while Tasia held her breath for so long that it was a wonder she didn’t pass out.

The one getting closer to Nik flicked its ears, trying to detect anything amiss.  In the breezeless evening air, the drone of insects, the chorus of tree frogs, and the sound of Tasia’s heart were the only things the rabbits could likely hear; all three of them were familiar sounds.  Nik’s lips were pressed together so tightly that it seemed it took every bit of energy he had not to shout,

“Look, Tasia!  This one’s getting closer!  He’s finally going to do it — he’s finally going to eat out from my hand!”

Out of irrepressible excitement, Nik had shouted something just like that last week, terrifying all of the rabbits and sending them diving into the safety of the bushes.  This week, he had learned his lesson.  He did not speak and, like his big sister, looked like he was holding his breath.

So it was not Nik’s voice that crashed through the silence, clanging dissonantly against the frogs and insects and Tasia’s heart.  It was a different, deeper voice, one that made Tasia’s pulse spike even higher than a rabbit eating from her palm could have.

“Children!  What are you doing?” the voice of their father boomed from the other side of the pond.  Like a rabbit, Nik leapt from his crouch straight into the air, spilling bits of celery and broccoli and clover as he did.  The bunnies scattered immediately, racing away from the children and the Emperor’s voice as fast as they could manage.

Tasia dumped her own handful of rabbit treats and stood more slowly, brushing her palms together before looking at Nik, then at her father.

Nik was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and gazing at his father with a guilty expression.

Tasia sighed.  Why did Nik always let himself get so scared of Father like this?  They hadn’t been doing anything wrong.  Earlier in the week, when they’d been caught tossing Burke’s poisoned vegetable scraps into one of the kitchen fires, that had been… well, if not “wrong,” then not exactly “right,” either.  But this?  Just making friends with the rabbits?  Why did Father always have to be so stern about everything?

“Nikhost.  Natasia,” he said from his place on the other side of the pond.  “Come here.”

Nik trotted in Father’s direction obediently.  Tasia walked without hurrying.

“What were you doing?” Father asked again when they were both close enough.

“We were… feeding the rabbits,” Nik said, lowering his gaze.  “Or trying to.”

Tasia nodded her agreement.

“You cannot do that.”

“Why?” Tasia challenged.  “Because Burke doesn’t like them?  Because they eat his flowers and get into the vegetable garden?”

“No,” Father said.  “Not because of that.”

“Then why?”

Tasia desperately wanted to stamp her foot and cross her arms against her chest, but the last time she’d done that in front of father, he’d had one of the chambermaids spank her with a willow switch.

“Because,” Father said, “wild creatures need their fear of mankind.  If you take that away from them, they are defenseless.  You don’t want Burke to kill them, do you?”

Tasia narrowed her eyes, suspecting a trick.

“Well?” Father said.

“No,” Nik said, shaking his head vigorously.  “We tried to tell Burke not to.  We’ve been scooping up his poisoned vegetables with the ash shovel — ”

Tasia shot her younger brother a deadly glance, and his mouth snapped shut.

“If you teach them to trust you,” Father said, “then they will trust all humans, including Burke.  You feed them your kitchen scraps; sooner or later they will start trusting his kitchen scraps, even if they reek of poison.”

“But they know we’re not Burke,” Tasia objected.

“Do they?”

Neither the Prince nor the Princess responded.

“You think you have created friends of those rabbits, but all you’ve done is create victims.”  Father gazed across the pond, studying the bushes where the rabbits had run for cover, and frowned.  “Rabbits are not unlike commoners, children.  They need to know their place, and they need to know that they should fear us, at least a little.  Otherwise, order breaks down, highborn and commoner alike becomes unsafe, and chaos rules all.”

He delivered the whole speech still gazing across the pond, his dark eyes both stormy and distant.

Tasia glanced at Nik.  Was Father still talking about rabbits?  Or something else?

“Now go inside and prepare for bed,” Father said.

“Yes, Father,” Nik said.

“Yes, Father,” Tasia said half a moment later.

She glanced over her shoulder as they neared the entrance to the palace.  Father still stood there, gazing across the pond, even though all the rabbits were gone.

~ NOW ~

“No, ma’am,” the girl said patiently.  “It goes like this.”

Rather than attempt to demonstrate again, the girl reached over and wrapped the trouser’s top around Tasia herself.

It turned out that the slave girl who had been spying on her in the mornings, the same girl who ran meals and messages for Halia, spoke the common tongue.  Not just common tongue, either, but common tongue with an accent so light that it was barely detectable.  She must be one of the only slaves in Lord M’Tongliss’s house to speak the Empire’s primary language fluently.

Tasia studied the girl while she wrapped what looked almost like a cummerbund around Tasia’s waist, holding up the loose, Terintan-style trousers.  Men and women alike in Terinto wore trousers.  In fact, long skirts were more a sign of rank amongst men than they were amongst women.  But Tasia had been wearing the Empire-style gowns provided to her by Lord M’Tongliss.  This was her first time trying to figure out how to put on Terintan trousers.

“What’s your name?” Tasia asked the slave girl.

The girl looked up from her work like a startled bird, black eyes wary.

Mother Moon.  She could be the baby sister of Joslyn, the way she looks, Tasia thought, and at the remembrance of her dead guard and lover, Tasia felt a familiar stab of grief.  Most days, she kept busy enough to avoid the grief, but every now and then, something would remind her of Joslyn — like the girl’s expressive black eyes — and unbidden memories would flood in on Tasia, lingering within her heart until she could find something else to occupy her mind again.

The girl’s resemblance to Joslyn didn’t end with her eyes.  Her hair was also midnight-black, her cheekbones high and broad, her skin the color of tea after milk had been stirred in.

“L’Linna,” the girl said, who Tasia guessed was about thirteen or fourteen summers.  “Most call me Linna.”

“I am pleased to finally know what to call you, Linna,” Tasia said.  “My name is Natasia.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Linna said, standing back to inspect her work on Tasia’s trousers.  “I know.  You are the Empress Natasia of House Dorsa.”

“Or you can just call me Tasia.”

The wary bird eyes darted up to Tasia’s face again, but when she saw Tasia’s smile, she offered up a shy grin of her own.

Voices echoed from outside Tasia’s bedchamber, and Linna snatched the headscarf still lying on Tasia’s canopy bed.

“Put this on, ma’am,” she whispered urgently.  “Make sure it covers all your hair.  And don’t look up.  If they see your hair or your green eyes, they will know you right off.”

Linna inspected the headscarf swiftly, ensuring that not a single strand of red-blonde hair had escaped it.

“We are straightening the bed chamber,” Linna whispered urgently to Tasia.  “And don’t make eye contact with them, no matter what.”  And with the deft speed and nimble agility of a rabbit running for cover, Linna vaulted over the mattress and yanked down the covers just as the door opened.

Tasia bowed her head and fussed with her now unmade bed as the morning sunlight filtered through the high windows and turned the room’s newest members into long shadows.

“What room is this, then?” asked a man behind Tasia in a gruff voice, his accent unmistakably Western.

“This is a guest chamber, my Lord Magistrate,” Halia answered.

“The House of Wisdom has no lords,” said a second man.  “Call us ‘Wise Man’ or ‘Magistrate,’ nothing more.”

“Of course, Magistrate.” Halia said.

Footsteps behind Tasia.  She dared to look up long enough to meet Linna’s eyes on the other side of the bed.  Linna’s gaze flicked down to the cotton blanket, then back up again.

Ah, right.  They were making the bed.  Tasia took the cue, and together they pulled up the sheet.

“Awfully fine guest chamber,” said the first magistrate, his heavy footsteps pacing across the tile floor.  “Who’s been using it?”

“No one at the moment,” Halia said.  “But one of my husband’s brothers, his wife, and their children were here with us only recently.  They used this room for about a week.”

“And when did they leave?” asked the second magistrate.

“Yesterday.”  Halia cleared her throat, then coughed.

Tasia tensed, wondering if the cough was some sort of signal she was supposed to remember or interpret.  They hadn’t discussed a cough meaning anything special, had they?

Fabric tugged loose from her fingers, and she glanced across the bed again.  Linna shot her a stern look.  Behind her, Halia coughed again.

“Tell your girls to come here,” said the magistrate from the West.  “I want to take a look at them.”

“Alright,” Halia said.  She directed a string of unintelligible Terintan towards Linna and Tasia.  Still looking down at the cotton blanket, Tasia glimpsed Linna moving around from the far side of the bed at Halia’s command.

“Say it in the common tongue,” growled the Western magistrate.  “I want to know what you’re saying.”

“I beg your pardon, Magistrate, but only two of our household slaves know any of the common tongue,” Halia said.  “They are almost all from the desert tribes.  These two only speak Terintan.”

Linna stood beside Tasia now, her head bowed like Tasia’s.  Subtly, she nudged Tasia to turn around and face the men.

Tasia turned slowly, keeping her gaze fixed firmly to the floor.  All she could see was the bottom of two grey Wise Men robes and two pairs of feet wearing Terintan-style sandals.  Inside the sandals, one pair of feet was plump and hairy; the other pair was long, bony, and tanned.  Out of the corner of her eye, Tasia could also see Halia’s dainty, manicured feet resting in two jeweled leather sandals.

Panic seized her then:  Tasia was still wearing Halia’s sandals.  They were an older pair that she only wore in the mornings to traipse up to the rooftop courtyard for her training and then down to the kitchen for breakfast, but they were still far finer than the sandals of a common slave.

Tasia’s heart thundrered.  It was so loud that she was sure it would give her away.

Should she find a way to slip the sandals off, and then use a foot to push them beneath the bed?  She looked at Linna’s feet.  She also wore sandals, but hers were distinctly worn, and one of the straps had been sewn back on with thread a different color than the rest of the sandals.

Which was more suspicious:  A slave wearing a noble woman’s sandals, or a bare-footed slave?  Tasia racked her mind, desperate to pull up a memory of seeing even a single slave on Lord M’Tongliss’s estate in bare feet.  She couldn’t remember seeing any of them with bare feet… but then again, she couldn’t remember seeing any of them with sandals, either.  Until a moment earlier, it hadn’t occurred to Tasia to look at the feet of any of the Lord’s slaves.

Fool, fool, fool, Tasia chastised herself.

Observation was always to precede defense.  Had she learned nothing from Joslyn’s patient self-defense lessons?

“No common tongue, eh?” asked the second magistrate, the owner of the long and bony feet.  “Very well.”  He said something in Terintan.  But Linna did not move even an eyelid, so neither did Tasia.

Halia coughed again.  “Excuse me,” she said when she finished.  “It seems my brother-in-law left us with more than a messy room; one of his children had a cough while they were here, and it seems I have picked it up.”

The Western magistrate of the fat feet let out a derisive snort.  “That is nothing but a superstition of the uneducated, Lady Halia.  Coughs cannot be ‘caught’ from another person; their fundamental causes are solely internal, having to do with the humours, the circulation of dirty blood, and — well, no doubt it would be too complex for you to grasp.”

“No doubt, Wise Man,” Halia agreed, and despite the Terintan accent, Tasia thought she detected a wryness to the woman’s tone.

“Your girls did not answer my question,” said the bony-footed Wise Man.

“Yes, Magistrate,” said Halia.  “They are sisters from a tribe just south of the Seven Cities.  Their dialect is rather different from ours.”  She said something else in Terintan.

“L’Linna,” the girl beside Tasia said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Tasia had to commend her acting job.  Had she been a magistrate instead of a co-conspirator, she would have been convinced that Linna was nothing more than a frightened, cowed slave girl offering the magistrates her name.

A finger poked Tasia’s leg.

“Joslyn,” Tasia breathed, saying the first female Terintan name that came to mind.

She cursed herself.  How many Wise Men knew the name of the palace guard hand-picked by Cole of Easthook who had later helped the traitorous Princess Natasia to flee from those who would bring her to justice?

A better question was probably, How many Wise Men did not know the name of Joslyn of Terinto?

“Hmm,” said the bony magistrate.  “L’Linna and Joslyn.”

His grey robes rustled as he stepped in front of Linna.  Leaning down, he put a hand under the girl’s chin, tipping her face upwards.  Tasia’s gaze slid to the side, studying him as best she could through her peripheral vision.  Pock-marked with a hooked nose, his mouth hung halfway open as he inspected Linna.  The scent of onion coming from his breath was nearly overpowering.

“How old is she?” the Wise Man asked Halia.

“Fourteen summers, Magistrate.”  Halia added a cough.

The Wise Man, his fingers still under Linna’s chin, turned her face this way and that.  “This one is a little scrawny for her age,” he said, as dispassionately as if he was inspecting a horse or a hunting dog.  He looked over at Halia.  “You do realize, don’t you, that while the Empire does permit slavery, there are strict laws against their abuse or neglect?”

Halia coughed a few times before answering.  “Yes, Magistrate.”

He gave a satisfied nod and stood up, turning towards Tasia.  She dropped her head even further, placing her chin upon her chest.

“This one, on the other hand — this Joslyn — she looks hale and hardy,” he said.  “How old is she?”

“Twenty summers, Magistrate.”

“Fair-skinned for being a Terintan,” said the first magistrate, the fat Western one.

“She is only half-Terintan, sir,” said Halia.  “Her father was an Imperial soldier of the Northeast.  Her mother was a woman of the night in Hebil.”

“Ah, yes,” said the bony magistrate.  “That explains quite a bit.  But better a slave in Paratheen than a whore in Hebil, eh?”

The bony magistrate reached out.  Tasia felt two fingers upon her chin.  She resisted the tug he gave her, not wanting to lift her face to his.  Then she realized a slave would not resist a magistrate, and she looked up.  But she kept her eyes lightly closed, hiding her distinctive green eyes from him.

“Why won’t this one open her — ”

The magistrate’s question was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing from Halia.  Tasia dropped her chin again and opened her eyes just enough to see what was happening.

Halia was doubled over a few feet away, coughing uncontrollably.  Both Wise Men turned towards her.

“You!” the fat one said, pointing at Linna.  “Fetch help!  This woman needs water!”

But Linna did not move.

“They do not speak the common tongue,” the bony magistrate reminded his friend.  “Come, let’s walk her out of here.  Poor woman.  She requires some fresh air to re-settle her humours.”

Halia let herself be half-lifted by the men, not resisting when they supported her and walked her from Tasia’s guest room.

Linna waited until they had disappeared from sight, then grabbed Tasia’s hand, tugging her towards one of the room’s tall windows.

“This way, ma’am,” she said.  “Quickly, now.”  She threw open the window.  “Do you climb well?”

Tasia thought briefly of her childhood with Nik as they explored every corner of the palace and its grounds, including the high corners.

“Reasonably well,” she answered.

Linna hopped onto the window sill.  “The climb is not too difficult at this corner.  And if you fall, you probably will not die.”

With that lukewarm reassurance, Linna extended a hand and a foot around the outside of the window.  A moment later, she was climbing with a spider’s grace up the side of the building.

Tasia glanced over her shoulder, wondering how long it would take the magistrates to return to this room — or if they would return at all.  Maybe she would be better off taking her chances sneaking out into the hallway and into another part of the house.

Or she would walk outside the room and run directly into them.

“Mother Moon,” she muttered, then headed to the open window.

5

~ THEN ~

Joslyn had never seen a place like Paratheen, and following a few feet behind Master’s cart, she couldn’t stop herself from looking in every direction and gawking.  Low, dust-colored stucco buildings sprawled everywhere, butting up one against the other — and sometimes one atop the other — like cells in a honeycomb.  Many of them were dome-shaped, reminding Joslyn of the rounded bliva tents used both by the desert nomads and by tinkers like Master and Mistress, who owned Joslyn and her older sister Tasmyn.

Paratheen wasn’t fascinating just because it was a large and crowded city; traveling with Master, Mistress, and Tasmyn, Joslyn was already well-traveled for a child of only seven summers and she had seen plenty of bustling cities.  Paratheen fascinated Joslyn because it was unlike any of the other cities in the Empire, like one of the magical djinn cities from the tales Mistress sometimes told at night, a city conjured from nothing in the middle of the desert.

The thought of Paratheen as a city of the djinn — those shadowy servants of the Gods whose mood and actions could flip from benevolent to malevolent at the slightest provocation — made Joslyn shiver, and she gripped Tasmyn’s hand with more force.

“Ow, Joz,” Tasmyn complained.  “Not so hard.”

“Sorry,” Joslyn mumbled.

Both girls moved sideways to avoid a collision with a tall, severe looking man with a black beard and high red turban.  He held a rope that connected him to a small herd of at least a half-dozen bleating apa-apa calves.  They followed him dutifully, as a child follows a parent… or as slave girls followed their master’s cart.  But the fate of the young apa-apas, Joslyn feared, was far darker than hers and Tasmyn’s.  The meat of young apa-apa was considered far more desirable than old apa-apa.

Joslyn tore her eyes away from the unfortunate creatures, deciding it was preferable to study the city’s strange buildings than its stranger inhabitants, even though looking up at the tall buildings lining either side of the narrow streets made her feel somewhat dizzy and claustrophobic.

Not all the buildings were topped with a dome, she noticed.  Some of them were rectangles reaching up in perilous, asymmetric fingers towards the sky, which only made Joslyn feel nervous that they might topple down into the street at any moment.  To Joslyn, it looked as if a giant had made a game of stacking boxes, trying to see how high he could make his uneven stacks before they toppled.

Scarcely a single foot of the winding dirt streets went unoccupied.  Merchants barked out facts about their wares at passerbys; men in turbans of various colors argued loudly on street corners; tired apa-apa herdsmen in dusty sandals swatted their beasts forward with switches; women in long, brightly colored sarongs floated by gracefully with baskets of fruits and vegetables balanced on their heads; and ragged, grimy children even younger than Joslyn scampered past all the others, weaving in and out of the crowd, between legs, beneath wagons, behind fruit stands, laughing maniacally even as adults shouted at them.

Joslyn watched one of the children disappear into the crowd, a pilfered handful of grapes in one of his hands. For a moment, she imagined what it must be like to be a child here, to feel as much at home running barefoot through the dusty streets between the honeycombed, giant-stacked buildings as Joslyn felt at home amongst the wide open dunes of the high desert, traveling the Emperor’s Road.

She shook her head to herself, as if answering a question posed.  No, she would never belong in a place like Paratheen.  At least Father had sold her and Tasmyn to a tinker family.  With their donkeys and their jangling, awkward, overstuffed covered carts, the tinkers certainly didn’t belong in the desert the way the tribesmen did, but at least they didn’t belong to places like Paratheen, either.  Joslyn knew by the look on Master’s face that he didn’t want to stay in this loud, smelly, crowded, surreal place any longer than he had to.  At sundown, once his goods had been sold and his trading for the day was finished, the donkeys would pull the cart outside the city gates and the tinkers would set up their bliva in an open space beneath the stars, as they always did.

Still innocent at the age of seven, Joslyn had no way of knowing that one day she would be the good to be traded by the tinker, and she would end up spending two and a half brutal years in Paratheen, years during which the crowded streets would become her refuge and the street children her only companions.

~ NOW ~

Joslyn stood at the crest of a hill.  Paratheen’s harbor spread out below and behind her, sun glinting off the placid azure waters of the Adessian Sea.  The city of Paratheen itself spread out in a semicircle around the harbor, perching on a series of hills and cliffs overlooking the sea.

Despite the blazing sun, the lack of shade, and the way her leather armor trapped the heat and sweat close to her skin, Joslyn shivered in the same way she had as a child on her first visit here, when she was half-convinced that the city had been crafted by the djinn.

She hadn’t been back to Paratheen since she ran away from her second master somewhere between the ages of thirteen or fourteen.  She’d never thought she would be here again, standing on the hill above the harbor.

He’s not here anymore, she reminded herself.  He can’t hurt you again.

She sighed, irritated at herself for her hesitancy.  She was a grown woman, an accomplished warrior.  How could he hold so much power over her even now, in death?

Her second master had been the first man Joslyn had ever killed.

At the time, she’d assumed he would be the last.  But Father Mezzu, the god of the blue sky who gazed down on all the world’s creatures and wrote their fates at birth, had a different destiny in mind for her.

Joslyn adjusted the sword strapped to her back and began to walk.

Her possessions still consisted only of the shabby leather armor on her back (she’d traded her conspicuous palace blacks long ago in Reit), her sword, daggers, and boots, but at least she had a coin purse again.  The weight of the eight Imperial silver pennies the Captain had given to her was a comforting presence beneath her tunic.  He hadn’t intended to pay her at all, but she had saved his crew (most of them, anyway), ship, and cargo, and gained two prisoners for him.  He would earn back those silver pennies and then some when he handed the prisoners over to the magistrates.  In reality, he probably should have given her a full gold regal for the services she’d rendered.  But Joslyn couldn’t quibble.  Eight silver pennies were more than she had hoped for, anyway.

Unlike the villages she’d traveled through in the East on her way to the port city of Reit, where the combination of her Terintan features and her soldier’s dress made wary visitors stop and stare, she attracted almost no attention walking through the streets of Paratheen.  Long a crossroads for goods flowing east and west through the Empire, not to mention a favorite watering hole for the Adessian traders, smugglers, and pirates from the south, along with the only place within traveling distance where the high desert nomads could reliably find buyers for their apa-apa wool, milk, and meat, Paratheen was filled with far too many different kinds of people for anyone to take much notice of Joslyn, which was how she liked it.

It would be freeing, almost, if not for the fact that the task ahead of her was so daunting.

The wick of a candle clock burned continuously inside her head.  Seven weeks had passed already since she woke in a burned-out hut at the foot of the Sunrise Mountains.  Seven weeks in which she had heard no news of Tasia.  Seven weeks that brought her closer to the end of the single year she had borrowed from the undatai.

Joslyn had traveled as far west as fast as she could because she knew that they would have taken the Princess that way once they captured her.  She’d hoped to find a ship to Port Lorsin, but Paratheen had been the closest she could come.

Part of her wanted to rush to Port Lorsin as swiftly as possible, to find another ship or a caravan traveling that way and attach herself to them, but a more rational part of her mind, the part, perhaps, that represented the wisdom of her ku-sai, reminded her that she didn’t yet know if the Princess even lived.

She needed to answer that question first, before she rushed towards Port Lorsin with her sword drawn.

So her first errand was to a moneylender, where she exchanged one of her silver pennies for fifty copper ones, less the lender’s fee.  Two thuggish men with heavy wooden clubs hanging at their belts eyed Joslyn’s Imperial Army uniform with suspicion until the transaction was complete.  Imperial soldiers were recruited with a single gold regal, and after they had earned that regal with two years of service, they were paid in copper pennies, not silver ones.  Which was part of the reason she needed to make the exchange.  Paratheen had provided anonymity so far, but if she began paying for things with silver pennies, word of the woman soldier with a purse full of silver would spread far too quickly through the city’s more unscrupulous quarters.

With the copper pennies clinking inside her coin purse, Joslyn headed for the town’s central market square, where she knew she would find a ring of cafés beyond the vendor carts.  Paratheen’s cafés were watering holes for Terintan merchants and other locals, which made them not quite as rough as the taverns closer to the docks and a much better place to hear gossip and news.

She found the kind of café she’d been looking for on the far side of the horseshoe-shaped market square and took an outdoor seat that placed her back against the sun-warmed adobe wall.  A red-and-white striped awning sheltered the seat from the worst of the midday sun, its canvas flapping gently in a breeze that carried the faint, mingled scents of the ocean, strong coffee, and apa-apa dung.

“May Mother Eirenna bless you,” said a serving girl in Terintan as she approached Joslyn with a tray of pickles, olives, and small triangles of flat bread.

“May rain cool your days,” Joslyn replied automatically.

Both the language and the traditional Terintan greeting warmed Joslyn nearly as much as the uncompromising sun above.  And like the sun, after being gone from her homeland for so long, the warmth was both pleasant and jarring at the same time.

Joslyn looked the serving girl over.  The yellow dress the girl wore was simple and frayed at the edges, but clean, as was the cream-colored headscarf that hid most of her black hair.  Was she a slave? Joslyn wondered.  Or the café owner’s daughter?  Joslyn supposed it didn’t matter; it wasn’t as if she had returned to Paratheen to liberate more of the city’s slaves.

“Do you serve kuzyn?” Joslyn asked.  It had been at least ten years since she’d had the fermented, mildly alcoholic apa-apa milk.  Something about the nostalgia Paratheen was evoking in her made Joslyn suddenly crave it.

“Of course, Madame Soldier,” said the girl in a grammar meant to denote polite respect.

“I will take that,” Joslyn said, despite the flash of surprise the formal grammar had given her.  She was fairly certain that no one had ever spoken to her in formal Terintan.  “And a dish of oranges, if you have them.”

The girl frowned slightly, probably because it was customary to order something more than just fruit with one’s kuzyn, something more like a goat stew, or at least fried shrimp over mashed corn.

Seeing the girl’s discomfort with the order, Joslyn took out six copper pennies from her coin purse and opened her palm to show them to the girl before sliding them back into a trouser pocket.  “I will be here for some time,” she told the serving girl.  “I promise that I will order more later.”

That seemed to reassure the girl.  She nodded again and hustled away to fetch the kuzyn.

Joslyn nibbled absent-mindedly on a pickle while she waited for the girl to come back with her drink and her oranges, leaning back again against the adobe wall behind her.

Joslyn shut her eyes halfway as she opened her ears, spreading out her sense of hearing the way Ku-sai had taught her to do, unfurling it like one of the rolled up rugs the desert people carried to line the floors of their tents.

The café she sat at was one of several surrounding the busy market.  The one in the corner of the square, a hundred feet or so from where she sat, seemed to be the busiest.  Like the café where Joslyn had taken up her vigil, almost every café had its kitchen inside and its seating for patrons outside, which made eavesdropping easier.  At the busy café across from her, a group of finely dressed merchants had gathered in chairs set on a raised outdoor patio, bantering boisterously in Terintan as they sipped their kuzyn and their coffee.  Joslyn gradually tuned into their conversation.

“…prices going up and up and up,” one merchant said, lifting his palms skyward for emphasis with each up.  He was a wiry, birdlike man who looked as if he might take off mid sentence.

“What do you expect?” asked a heavyset, slouching merchant.  “Andreth loved his war.  Every Emperor loves a good war.”

“War isn’t always bad for business,” said a third merchant.  “This one’s been good for me.  The soldiers who flee to Paratheen, they stay so long at my brothels that I’m thinking of renting them rooms.”

“You and your brothels,” said the birdlike one with a hint of disdain.  “You’re happy and the mushroom men are happy, while those of us selling silk hardly have any customers left.  No highborn to buy in the East — half of them are dead.  But no one to buy in the West, either — that damned Emperor raised his taxes too high.”  He sighed, seeming to deflate.

The slouching merchant shook his head.  “You’re looking at it the wrong way, my friend.  Meravin mushrooms are even rarer than silk, and the mushroom men are making more money than ever.”

Their conversation turned to meravin mushrooms, which grew only in the dense forests located between the Northeast and the rest of the East, and Joslyn let her ears roam on, floating from the merchants to a group of horse traders on the eastern edge of the square, to a gang of teenage street urchins squabbling over a game of knucklebones.

None of them gossiped about what Joslyn cared about the most — the death of the Emperor and the trial of his daughter for the murder.

The serving girl arrived with Joslyn’s kuzyn and peeled orange slices.

“Thank you,” Joslyn said.

The girl turned to go, but Joslyn reached a hand out to stop her.

“What news in Paratheen?” she asked the girl as casually as she could.  “I’ve been traveling by sea for some time and am hungry to hear something more than sailors’ rumors.”

The girl shrugged.  “I don’t know if I’m the best source for news, Madame Soldier.  All I hear is the talk of merchants and herders all day long, along with whatever my papa says about grain prices.  They’re high because of the war being worse, you know,” she added sagely.

“The talk of merchants and herders is more than what I know,” Joslyn said.

“Well,” said the girl, fingering her headscarf thoughtfully.  “They say the Emperor is dead.”

“I heard that.  Who rules now?”

“His Wise Man,” said the girl.  “They say he is old and ugly and hunchbacked and cast an evil spell so he could marry the Emperor’s daughter, even though she’s not even marriageable yet.”

Joslyn lifted an eyebrow.  His Wise Man could only mean Norix.  But Norix wouldn’t have taken a wife; Wise Men never married.

“Which daughter of the Emperor did he cast the spell on?” Joslyn asked, still keeping her tone light and curious.

But the girl tilted her head to the side and gave Joslyn a puzzled look.  “The Emperor had more than one daughter?”

“The Emperor had two daughters,” Joslyn said.

“Really?” said the girl.

Joslyn nodded again.

“Oh, then I guess I don’t know which daughter.”  The girl glanced over her shoulder.  “I should get back before Papa gets angry,” she said apologetically.

Joslyn smiled.  “Of course.  Will you bring me some stew when you get a moment?”

The girl nodded and disappeared inside the café, and Joslyn went back to her kuzyn and the business of eavesdropping.

The afternoon wore on.

Joslyn leaned her head back against the sun-warmed adobe and halfway closed her eyes.  The merchants at the neighboring café had gone back to debating whether or not the War in the East was good for business or bad for business, and the melodic drone of their Terintan lulled her.

“Madame Soldier?”

Joslyn started awake.  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but given the hues of orange and yellow bleeding into the sky, she realized she’d done more than simply doze for a few minutes.  The sun was going down; the merchants were gone; the stew she had ordered sat cold and untouched before her.  She must have slept for at least two hours.

The kuzyn, she realized, chastising herself.  She hadn’t had any alcohol in months — no, years — and it had fogged her mind and put her to sleep.

“I apologize,” Joslyn told the girl.  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.  Is the café closing?”

“No,” said the girl.  She shifted her weight and looked down.  “But Papa says you must pay before you order anything else.”

Joslyn gave the girl two copper pennies, hesitated, and added a third.  “That should be enough, yes?”

The girl only took the coins and headed back inside.

Joslyn rubbed her forehead, feeling the dull ache of a headache coming on.  That would be the kuzyn, too.

Careless, said Ku-sai in the back of her mind.  Reckless.

“Heyyyy, comrade,” said a low voice in the Empire’s common tongue.  The words originated from the shadows that reached from the corner of the café into the dusty market square.

Joslyn’s hand flew to the dagger at her waist as she twisted in her wooden chair to find the speaker.

A ragged veteran soldier came into view, his leather armor even shabbier than the set that Joslyn wore.  He held up his hands defensively.  One hand was bound in dirty rags.

“I mean no harm,” he said in a scratchy Port Lorsin accent.  “I just thought ye might help a brother in need.”

“I have no brothers,” Joslyn said, though it was not technically true.

“Aye, of course ye do,” said the man.  “All soldiers are brothers and sisters.”

Joslyn looked the man over.  He had the stench of one who had been living outdoors for at least several weeks.  Grime, sand, and dust coated every crevice of his sunburnt skin.

His left hand was not the only thing bound in rags.  His left leg was wrapped tightly in dirty bandages in several different places.

“What is it you need, soldier?” Joslyn asked.

“Only a bit of coin,” he said.  “A penny or two.  Or, barring that, perhaps ye could spare me a meal and some whiskey…?”  He cleared his throat.  “Terintan whiskey, that is.”

Joslyn frowned.  Terintan whiskey was far stronger than the whiskey found in other parts of the Empire.  She typically carried some with her, but used it only for cleaning wounds; it was much too strong to drink for all but the most dedicated of drinkers.  The last time Joslyn had drunk any Terintan whiskey had been after she killed her master and realized that Anaís was not going to flee Paratheen with her.

“Drinking Terintan whiskey?  Is that what you’ve been doing?” Joslyn said harshly.  “Living on the streets, begging for coins just to drink?  That is no way for one of the Emperor’s men to behave.”

“Aye, but the Emperor’s dead, innit he?”  Bitterness laced the soldier’s words.  “He left me in the East to die.  He left a lot of us to die.  And Terintan whiskey’s the only thing strong enough to keep the demons out o’me head.”

Joslyn opened her mouth to refuse him, but then she hesitated.  “Demons?”

“Aye.”  He shuffled his feet and looked away with an air of self-consciousness.

She looked again at the way the soldier had bandaged himself in strips of cloth, including his right hand.

Joslyn hadn’t forgotten the strange tale that Alric told her and Tasia just before Tasia had been arrested, the tale about the survivors of Fox Battalion.

One moment they were normal men, pleading to be let out, promising they could control themselves, Alric had reported to them with a haunted expression.  But then… something would happen to them.  Hatred filled their eyes, they would begin to shout and snarl and… and their hands transformed into flames.

Their hands transformed into flames.

“Sit,” Joslyn commanded, pointing the chair across from hers.

The soldier obeyed, but shrank back when the serving girl returned carrying a candle.  She stopped a few feet short of Joslyn’s table, glancing from Joslyn to the tattered soldier.

“Madame Soldier,” she said in hushed Terintan, “this man is crazy.  The children of Hyena plague him.”

Hyena was one of the Terintan gods.  Like the god Raven, Hyena was a trickster, but unlike Raven, who played his tricks for innocent fun, Hyena had a malicious streak about him.  When Raven hurt others, it was because a prank had gone too far.  When Hyena hurt others, it was because he took pleasure in their pain.

The children of Hyena were said to be the desert hyenas he had possessed and driven mad.  Deep in the Great Desert of Terinto, the manic, eerie laughter of the children of Hyena could be heard outside the ring of campfires that protected the tribesmen each night, their barking laughter tempting susceptible men and women to join them in madness.  The unstable men and women of the tribes, the ones who talked to themselves, who yelled or swung their arms at invisible tormenters, or who laughed for no reason, were said to be plagued by the children of Hyena.

“It’s alright,” Joslyn said to the girl quietly.  “I know of his type.  Would you bring us both more stew and more kuzyn?”  She hesitated.  “And a tumbler of whiskey.”

The girl nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes off the soldier, who stared at his feet, embarrassed.  The girl inched forward, set the lit candle down on Joslyn’s table, then turned and practically sprinted back to the safety of the café.

“Now, brother,” Joslyn said to the soldier in a gentle voice.  “Tell me about the demons in your head.”

6

Tasia watched Linna pick at a loose thread on a frayed edge of her sandal.  They’d been sitting against opposite walls on Lord M’Tongliss’s rooftop for at least an hour, and Tasia could feel her fair skin blistering beneath the power of the midday sun.  Father Eiren, the Terintans called the midday sun — a harsh and vengeful god who always had murder on his mind.

“Have you always served Lord M’Tongliss’s household?” Tasia asked Linna, mainly to distract herself from the heat.

Linna looked up, then shook her head.  “No, ma’am.  I belonged to a tinker’s family before this.  It’s why I speak the common tongue.”

“A tinker’s family,” Tasia mused.  Joslyn had been a slave for a tinker family.  But she’d never spoken much to Tasia about her years as a slave, and now with this girl who reminded Tasia so much of what she imagined a younger Joslyn might have been like seated directly across from her, Tasia found herself hungry for the details of Linna’s life.  “What was it like, living with the tinkers?”

The girl shrugged.  “We traveled a lot.  I saw many places.  Learned to fix things and cook things.  The tinker’s family was kind to me, and I was their only slave.”

“Were you with them a long time?”

Linna’s gaze went back to the frayed spot on her sandal.  “Yes.  From the time I was a baby until I was eleven summers.”

“From the time you were a baby?” Tasia said, surprised.  “What use is an infant slave?”

Linna didn’t look up.  “Tinkers aren’t always honest people, ma’am.  While the tinker and his sons mended tools and pots, the tinker’s wife would take me to a street corner and beg for coin.  She would say her husband had been an Imperial soldier who had been killed in the East, and she needed money to feed her baby.”

“And the tinkers were never caught at this deception?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Linna said.  She glanced up for a moment, a shy smile flashing across her face.  “They used to say I earned a lot of coin.  More than the tinker’s sons ever did when she tried the same game with them.”

“I knew a woman from Terinto who was once a slave in a tinker family,” said Tasia.

The girl stopped fiddling with her sandal and looked up.  She wanted to ask more, Tasia guessed, but had been too well-trained to pry for details.

“She wasn’t a slave when I met her,” Tasia said.  “She was my personal guard — a sword master.  A very good sword master.”

Linna stared at Tasia.  “The tinkers freed her?”

“No,” Tasia said.  “The tinkers sold her to someone else.  And she… ran away,” Tasia concluded, deciding at the last moment to leave out the fact that Joslyn had murdered her master.

The girl’s expression changed.  At first, Tasia thought it was anger, but then she realized it was skepticism.  She looked back down at her sandal.  “Running away is punishable by death,” she said.  “Such a person could never be guard to a royal.”

“A person could,” Tasia countered, “if a person joined the Imperial Army and never revealed they’d been a runaway.  Especially if the same person was very adept at the dance of the Seven Cities.”

Linna looked like she might say more, but returned her attention to her sandal instead, pulling at the frayed thread ferociously.  Tasia wondered what the battered shoe had done to offend the girl.

Tasia heard footsteps coming up the far set of stairs and she tensed, hand flying to her dagger.  How strange it was that she, a royal, the heir to her father’s crown, would find instinct drawing her hand to her weapon so naturally.

Joslyn would have been proud.

Linna tensed, too, but it was only Halia.

“The magistrates are gone,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Tasia said, her hand still on her dagger.  The suspicious part of her — and a much larger part of her had grown to be suspicious over the past few months — wondered if Halia had been sent to the rooftop as a mere trick, as bait to draw her back down to the main floors of the mansion, where she would be captured.

Or killed.  Tasia would rather die fighting than die beneath an executioner’s axe.

“I’m sure,” Halia said.  “I had Lucos follow them discreetly most of the way back to their offices near the harbor.”

Beside her, Linna stood up and brushed her hands off upon her trousers.  She stood quietly, head bowed and hands folded in front of her, waiting for Halia to give further instructions.

“How’s your cough?” Tasia asked Halia.

Halia grinned.  “It’s not contagious, if that’s what concerns you, Empress.”

“Didn’t you hear the Wise Man, my Lady?” said Tasia, returning the grin.  “There is no such thing as a contagious cough.  That is a superstitious rumor.”

“So I have heard, your Majesty.”  But then all traces of mirth disappeared from Halia’s face.  “Although the magistrates did share news that is no rumor, I’m afraid.”

“What?” Tasia asked.

“I think it is best if I let my husband explain what the magistrates said, over our evening meal,” Halia said.

#

As always, all of Lord M’Tongliss’s house waited ceremoniously for her at their places in the long, open-aired dining hall when the evening meal finally arrived.  Tasia had hoped to catch up with Evrart before the meal, to finish the conversation they had begun before the magistrates’ unexpected arrival had ended it so abruptly, but he had been missing all afternoon — gone to visit his Brothers was all the information that Halia seemed to have.

The whole household stood behind their chairs in their evening finery.  On one side of the table was Lord M’Tongliss and Renyl, his first wife, and five of the children; on the other side of the table, Tasia’s side, stood Halia and the other four children.  The chair in the middle of the table, the most important chair, had been reserved for Tasia.

She walked past the marble columns and potted cypress trees that marked the boundaries of the dining hall, catching the faint scent of citrus in the evening air.  Above the long table, lanterns hung every few feet from the grid of wooden beams that supported a canopy of long, swooping swaths of silk.  The silk undulated in the breeze like gentle ocean waves.  Their presence was fitting, Tasia thought, since Lord M’Tongliss had made much of his fortune as a silk merchant long before he bore the title of “lord.”

Smooth as the cloth that had built him this opulent miniature empire, Lord M’Tongliss smiled and bowed deeply when he saw Tasia.  “You look more stunning than ever, Empress.  The dresses Halia chose flatters you.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Tasia said.  “You were very gracious to have them made.”

He spread his hands in a gesture that was half shrug, half benediction.  “We wanted you to be comfortable during your stay, Empress.  And we knew you were not able to bring much with you when you fled the palace.”

Tasia had to admit that finding an array of Empire-style dresses waiting for her in Terinto had been a pleasant surprise.  Not that her wardrobe had been at the forefront of her mind lately.

She nodded her thanks to the slave who pulled the chair out for her, then settled into her seat.  With the scraping of chairs against brick, the rest of the household sat down after her.

The table had been set with olives and flat bread, and since Tasia knew that none of them would eat until she had, she picked up an olive and took a small bite.

“Mmm,” she said.  “It’s quite good.”

“Are you sure it is to your liking?” Lord M’Tongliss said.  “I can have the cooks bring you something else if you like.”

“No, don’t dream of it,” Tasia replied.  “It is already superb, and it is not even the first course.”

M’Tongliss gave a satisfied nod.

This was all part of the Terintan ritual, Tasia had learned.  The host’s job was to feign concern that the guest may not actually enjoy the food; the guest’s job was to insist that he or she loved the food, and that each course of the meal would be better than the last.  Only when this ritual had been completed could the actual meal begin.

Tasia was anxious to get through the rituals and talk to M’Tongliss about what really mattered to her — the search the magistrates had conducted earlier in the day and the news they had let slip.  But Lord M’Tongliss could not be rushed on such matters, she’d learned.  So the two of them exchanged pleasantries for some time, about the food, the weather, the horses the Lord raised as a hobby, while the rest of the table mostly listened and occasionally had their own quiet side-conversations.

Finally, Lord M’Tongliss said, “Quite a close call we had today with the magistrates, eh?”

“Yes,” Tasia agreed.  “Far too close for comfort.”

“Part of it was my fault,” said a voice from the far end of the dining hall.

Tasia glanced up from her plate.  “Evrart.  Glad you could join us in time for dinner.”

He made his way to the open seat near Tasia, nodding respectfully to his Empress, his host, and both of his hostesses before sitting down.  “Sorry for my tardiness,” he said.  “I wanted to speak to the Brothers about the magistrates’ visit.  And restock my supplies.”  He looked at Tasia.  “I left us all in a vulnerable position today.  It was careless in the extreme, and you have my sincerest apologies.”  He turned to Lord M’Tongliss.  “You, too, my Lord.”

“Ah, do not worry so much, Brother Evrart,” Lord M’Tongliss said lightly.  “We managed the situation without requiring the formidable power of your illusions.  I believe our Empress earned a bit of sunburn in her hiding place on the roof, but she, my clever wife, and one of my more resourceful attendants managed to allude the magistrates without too much effort.  The morning’s excitement reminded me of my smuggling days.”  He winked at Tasia.

Attendants, Tasia thought.  He calls his slaves attendants.

For some reason it chafed at her.  She was used to a palace filled with servants, not with slaves.  Many of the palace servants stayed to work there for their whole lives, of course, as working within the palace was a choice job for even the lowest message boy or chambermaid, but at least they had the choice to leave if they wanted to.

Tasia studied one of the slaves who set a dish and goblet of wine down in front of Evrart, wondering if he would choose to go elsewhere if given the opportunity, wondering if he had been a slave all his life, like Linna.  Maybe when she earned her crown back, she could outlaw slavery.  Or at least limit it in some way.  It would be a way to honor Joslyn’s memory.

“…shouldn’t have let it happen to begin with,” Evrart was saying when she tuned back into the conversation.  She’d missed the first part of what he’d said, but based on the disgusted look on his face, she could guess.

Tasia reached over one of the Lord’s daughters to touch Evrart’s arm.  They had their differences, and she doubted she would ever fully trust him, but overall, she believed he was a good man who was trying to do what he thought was right.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Wise M — Brother Evrart,” she said.  “It is as the Lord said.  We are well and safe.”  She turned to M’Tongliss.  “But while we are discussing the topic, Halia said you learned something from the magistrates today?  Something we did not expect to hear?”

Lord M’Tongliss patted his mouth with a cloth napkin before answering.  “We did.  I’m sure the news will not come as a surprise to you, but it did happen sooner than I think any of us anticipated.”  He paused.  “The Wise Man who calls himself the ‘Regent’ has declared a treaty with the mountain tribes in the East.  The Empire will cede several territories to the mountain tribes — the lands of House Druet, the lands of House Fontan, and the lands of House Pellon — in exchange for lasting peace.”

Tasia dropped her fork.  Her father had been murdered over the twelve-year War in the East, she knew that, and the men who had taken the crown for themselves had made ending it their top priority, even if it cost them Empire territory and the lives of its citizens.

But this.  This — !

Evrart wiped a hand down his face.  “The fools,” he muttered.

“What can they possibly be thinking?” Tasia demanded, though she couldn’t say who she was demanding it from.  “If they had no choice but to cede some of our lands, then at least ceding House Druet has some wisdom to it.  It is a small holding, and its only strategic importance to the Empire was to act as a buffer zone between the mountain people and the rest of the East.  But House Fontan?  House Pellon?”

“House Fontan is the largest producer of wheat in the entire East,” Evrart said, his ire clearly as incensed as Tasia’s.  “Losing it will force grain prices up everywhere.  People will starve.  It is madness.”

“Perhaps they won’t quite starve, Brother,” said Lord M’Tongliss thoughtfully.  “If I remember my Empire geography correctly, there are a handful of large estates in the Northeast that produce a sizable quantity of grain.  Not as large as House Fontan, but working together, they might come close.”

“Gods curse them,” Tasia said, understanding what Lord M’Tongliss implied.  She knew which estates the lord meant — the string of Minor Houses along the Northeast’s southern  border were all distant relatives on her mother’s side.  And almost certainly close allies of Lord Hermant of House Farrimont.  “My grandfather is a short-sighted pig with a heart of coal.”

“You should not say so, Empress,” admonished Lord M’Tongliss.  “Pigs are too clever to be associated with your grandfather.  Clever and with a good temperament — quite unlike your grandfather.”

“Lord M’Tongliss is right,” Evrart said.  “Their scheme will work for a little while — the estates in the Northeast might make up from the lack of grain that House Fontan produces for a short while, but they’ll never be able to keep up with the demand.  Sooner or later, the Empire will face a famine it won’t be able to control, and the Regent will have riots on his hands.”

“Perhaps they are not trying to avoid a famine,” Halia said quietly from her place beside her husband.  “With fewer citizens to feed in the East and a famine wiping out more in other regions, the grain of House Fontan will eventually not be needed.”

“Very good, Halia,” said Lord M’Tongliss like a tutor praising a pupil with the correct answer.  “And then the confederation of houses in the Northeast will be the primary source of grain for the entire, if somewhat smaller, Empire.”

The table fell silent at this troubling thought.  Such cold-hearted cruelty seemed more likely to be her grandfather’s plan than Norix’s.  Norix, at least, seemed to think he had the Empire’s best interest in mind when he conspired to assassinate the Emperor.  Lord Hermant probably didn’t care what — or whom — he had to destroy in the pursuit of his own power.

“Losing House Fontan is one thing,” Tasia said.  “But why House Pellon?  The lands there include our easternmost port city.”

“Reit hardly qualifies as a city,” said Evrart.  “It is more town than city.”

“Town, city, either way,” said Tasia.  “It may be small, but it is still the Empire’s easternmost port — it doesn’t make strategic sense to give it away.  And what do mountain barbarians want with a deepwater port?  They don’t sail.  They don’t even read.”

Lord M’Tongliss held up a finger.  “Ah, careful, Empress.  It was not all that long ago that my people were called barbarians.  Yet we have proven ourselves clever enough, have we not?”

“I beg your pardon, my Lord,” said Tasia, her cheeks pinking.

“The mountain tribes must have wanted Reit for something,” Evrart said.  “The question is, for what?”

“We cannot let this happen,” Tasia said, shaking her head.  “We must stop this treaty from being signed.”

“How?” Evrart said.  “Perhaps you have forgotten, Empress, but we have no allies except Lord M’Tongliss and the Brotherhood.  We can’t stop the delegation the Regent sends to the East; he’ll send hundreds of soldiers.”

“Possibly more than hundreds,” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “One of your father’s final council meetings included requests for soldiers in preparation for a spring offensive.  Many of the troops they gathered are still in training camps outside Port Lorsin.”

Tasia and Evrart both considered this for a moment.  The call for more troops had gone out just as Tasia had begun her disastrous journey East, and that was months ago.  By now, most of the training barracks around Port Lorsin would be crammed with soldiers.

“Yes,” Evrart said, nodding slowly as he probably shared Tasia’s same thoughts.  “They’ll probably send as many as they can with the delegation.  A final show of force to remind the mountain men that they can push the Empire into a stalemate, but they should not press their luck.”

“Stalemate,” Tasia hissed.  “This cannot stand.  We must stop the delegation — we will stop the delegation.”

“Empress, we don’t have — ” Evrart began.

But Tasia had already heard that they didn’t have allies, that they didn’t have resources.  She was tired of hiding in Lord M’Tongliss’s mansion.  She hadn’t been spared from the executioner’s axe seven weeks ago merely to cower in Terinto while a third of the lands of the East were signed away to the mountain men.

“We have already heard that some of the lords in the East are in open rebellion against the crown,” Tasia said.  “We will send a messenger to them, ask them to send as many soldiers as they can muster.  Their soldiers will meet the delegation as it travels east, and we will come up behind the delegation from the west.”

“‘We’?” Evrart said.  “With what soldiers?  With what generals?”

“We have the Brotherhood,” Tasia said.  “You said so yourself.”

“Yes, but the Brothers — ”

Tasia spoke over him, turning to face her host.  “How many soldiers can you give me, Lord M’Tongliss?”

Lord M’Tongliss stroked his beard thoughtfully, a smile playing on the corners of his lips as though he had been waiting for such a question.  “It so happens that I may have some soldiers to offer to your cause, Empress.  But let us stop talking politics and enjoy our meal for now.”

Tasia pressed him for details, but the Lord would not budge, only smiled at her indulgently and offered her more olives.  Finally Tasia relented, eating woodenly and assenting to the ritual.

She ignored the looks of warning that Evrart kept sending her way.

7

The soldier waited until the girl was gone, then seated himself across from Joslyn.  His stench was strong, but just as Joslyn’s ku-sai had taught her to unfurl her senses, he had also taught her how to withdraw them.  She did so now with her sense of smell, reeling the sense inward until she could smell only her own scent — the gentler smells of sea breeze, leather, and kuzyn.

“Thank you, sister,” said the soldier with obvious relief.

Joslyn studied him for a long moment before speaking.  She pointed to the bandages.  “What happened to your hand and your leg?”

He stared at his lap.  “Ye will think me as mad as the girl does if I tell ye.”

“Perhaps.  Perhaps not.”

He said nothing.  Absent-mindedly, he rubbed his bandaged hand.

Joslyn decided to change the subject.  “I’ve been at sea for the better part of a month, returning home from the East.  What news do you hear?”

At this, the soldier looked up, some of his unease disappearing.  “Much news,” he said.  “In Port Lorsin, the Emperor is dead, his eldest daughter was accused of the murder, and his senior Wise Man now rules as Regent.”

“The Princess murdered the Emperor?” Joslyn asked, feigning surprise.

The soldier shrugged.  “Far be it from me to try to answer that question, sister.  I heard there was a trial before the Imperial council.  They say the council voted to have her…”  He drew his index finger slowly across his throat, and Joslyn fought back bile as an image appeared in her mind of Tasia’s head rolling from her shoulders.

“But no one knows if she really killed the Emperor or not — the lords convicted her on the strength of only a single vote,” concluded the soldier.

“So they executed her.”  Joslyn kept her tone devoid of the emotion that roiled inside her.

“Well, but there’s the thing,” he said.

And like any soldier sharing a tankard with his pals around the evening campfire, Joslyn could feel the damaged man warming up to spin a tale, momentarily forgetting his discomfort.

The soldier leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table between them.  Despite the fact that Joslyn had withdrawn her sense of smell, his nearness brought the unmistakable scent of rot on his breath.

“Some say the Princess is dead and buried,” he said.  “But others say she escaped, and that half the palace guard helped her do it.  Ye can’t find two men with the same opinion on what happened, no more’n you can find two men who agree on whether or not she was the treacherous bitch who killed her Pa, or got herself framed by a weaselly Wise Man.”

Joslyn ground her teeth, frustrated that this was the most information she’d managed to gather all day and it still didn’t tell her if Tasia was dead or alive.

“Paratheen’s been quiet, but I hear there are some places in the Empire what don’t accept the Wise Man holding the throne,” he said.  “There’s been fighting.  Even some Eastern lords pushing back with what’s left o’their forces, ’cause none of ’em want to live in the shadow of the mountain men, now do they?  They say some o’the Western lords is unhappy, too.  Includin’ the lord whose wain was set to marry the Princess.  Rumors say it’ll come to blood in the West, sooner or later.  About time them uppity highborn kill ’emselves all off and leave the rest o’ us in peace, am I right, soldier?”

He gave Joslyn a crooked grin, showing off yellowed and broken teeth, but his grin faltered when she didn’t return it.

The soldier glanced left and right.  “Where’s the girl with that whiskey?”

While they waited for their meal to arrive, the café began to fill with other patrons, who had come to eat and socialize.  A group of young men, still looking and smelling like a long, hot day’s work at the harbor, sat down at a larger table a few paces from Joslyn’s.  An old woman hobbled into the circle of chairs and tables a few minutes later, seating herself at a small, round table opposite Joslyn’s.  She eyed the soldier, then Joslyn, before shifting her attention to her own table.

The serving girl finally reappeared a few minutes later, setting down stew, kuzyn, and whiskey on the small table.

“Thanks to the Mother Moon,” the soldier muttered, snatching up the whiskey and immediately tossing it down.  He coughed once, then slammed the empty clay tumbler onto the table.

“Another,” he said hoarsely to the girl.

The girl frowned, looking from the man to Joslyn.

Joslyn understood her confusion.  In the Capital Lands, whiskey was often drunk in a single gulp, the way the soldier had just downed his.  But in Terinto, where the drink was far stronger, the same amount of whiskey was meant to be sipped slowly, lasting the entire course of a meal.  And as a single tumbler was more than enough to get many full-grown men drunk, a second tumbler was almost never ordered.  A second tumbler, in many cases, would put a man under the table.

But Joslyn gestured for the girl to get another anyway.  The girl scuttled back towards the kitchen.

“Eat before you have more,” Joslyn instructed the soldier.

Already his cheeks had flushed a bright red.  He shook his head vigorously, rubbing his bandaged hand.  “No,” he said.  “You don’t understand.  If I don’t — ”

“Eat before you have more.”  Joslyn’s patience was wearing thin.

He chose not to argue this time.  Instead, he picked up the wooden spoon with his good hand and proceeded to shovel soup in his mouth.

“How does the war proceed in the East?” Joslyn asked.

His eyes flitted to hers before returning to his stew.

“How should I know?” he said gruffly around a mouthful of stew.  “I’ve been in blinkin’ Paratheen for the past two and a half months.”

“Were you one of those who survived the assault at Deerpark Pass?”

The spoon froze for a moment halfway between the bowl and his mouth.  Then he resumed eating.  “No,” he said.  “I ran before that, during a different disaster — the Battle of Meravin Wood.  Slaughter of Meravin Wood is more like it.  Ye hear of that one?”

“You ran,” Joslyn said darkly.  She’d meant it to be a question, but it came out as an accusation.  Only the lowest kind of coward would abandon his fellow soldiers in the middle of a battle.

The soldier put his spoon down and wiped his mouth with the back of his unbandaged hand, which only managed to spread a brown streak of broth across an already dirty cheek.

He met Joslyn’s gaze.

“Ye can think what ye want, sister,” said the soldier.  “I’ve been soldierin’ since the days when yer nomad pa didn’t even know what an empire was.  And in all them years, I ain’t never run from a battle.”  He touched his bandaged hand.  “I didn’t desert me brothers-in-arms, I saved ’em.”

Joslyn’s brow knitted in confusion.  “What do you mean?”

“Where’s that girl?” the soldier said, glancing around.  “I finished me soup.  I need more whiskey.”

“What do you mean you didn’t desert?” Joslyn repeated.  “You left your friends to fight and die while you ran.  How is that saving them?”

But he wasn’t listening.  “Where’s the whiskey?  I need more.”

He began to tremble — just his hands at first, like an old man’s tremor, but then the shaking spread like a wave, consuming his entire body.

“Soldier?” Joslyn said, alarmed.

His head jerked backwards, his back went rigid, and he fell sideways out of the chair.  “Whiskey!” he cried, the word half-strangled in his throat.

Joslyn leapt from her seat, one hand on the hilt of her dagger as she dropped to one knee beside the man.  His limbs were stiff; his eyes had rolled back to reveal their whites; froth bubbled from his lips.

Around her, the café’s other patrons were murmuring in various dialects of concerned Terintan.  One of the young laborers approached Joslyn.

“A tumbler of whiskey,” she told him without looking up.  She slipped a hand underneath the soldier’s head to prevent him from banging it against the ground as he seized.  “Now!”

The young man obeyed, hurrying off towards the café’s kitchen.

The old woman who’d been sitting at the table across from Joslyn’s got to her feet.  “It’s finally taking him to the Shadowlands,” she said, shaking her head sadly, like a grandmother disappointed by a heedless grandson.  “He fought well, but I always knew he’d lose in the end.”

The old woman turned and walked away, swiftly but limping slightly as she went.  Joslyn watched her go, puzzled both by her words and by the fact that she’d left her barely touched stew and kuzyn behind on her table.

The soldier drew Joslyn’s attention back.  He made a piteous whimpering noise in the back of his throat, a sound that made Joslyn think of a whipped puppy.

The girl appeared then, running to Joslyn’s side holding another tumbler of whiskey, the laborer close on her heels.  Joslyn wrestled the soldier into a sitting position and pried apart his jaws, which had gone as stiff and rigid as the rest of him.  Joslyn snatched the clay tumbler from the girl’s hand and poured the whiskey down his throat.  But the soldier gagged, spewing most of the pungent amber liquid back up.  Joslyn pinched his nose and forced his mouth closed again, watching his Adam’s apple bob when he finally swallowed it.

The shaking stopped almost immediately.  He went limp, his weight falling back against Joslyn.

His eyes, which had been open but unfocused a moment before, regained a sense of presence.

“It’s too late,” he said.  “It’s coming.  Run, sister.”

Then he fainted.

Joslyn glanced up, looking at the girl and the young man as if for an explanation, but both of them stood staring down at the soldier in silent, wide-eyed horror.

Behind them, the other dock workers had gathered in a tight semicircle a few paces away.  They wouldn’t come closer than that, Joslyn knew.  Terintans were a superstitious bunch.

“Are there Wise Men or healers near — ”

But the soldier didn’t give Joslyn a chance to finish her sentence.  His limp body went rigid again, and his eyes flew open.  A wildness took over his face, and he laughed maniacally.

“Joslyn of Terinto, daughter of Salif and A’eshan,” the soldier said in a deep, booming voice that was not his own — a voice which, with a gut-wrenching chill, Joslyn recognized immediately.  “I did not think we would meet again so soon.  Your year is not yet up.”

Joslyn froze.

In retrospect, she would realize that it only lasted a moment — three or four seconds at most.  But in those few seconds, she traveled back to the night on the mountain when she had fought the undatai, back to the moment of her death inside the roofless hut at the edge of the Sunrise Mountains.  Back to the many sleepless nights in between the bookends of those two horrific moments, nights when she stayed awake for as long as she could, praying that merciful Mother Eirenna would spare her the nightmares, nightmares in which the undatai would inhabit the bodies of her mother, her ku-sai, her Princess, and Joslyn would be forced to slay each of them, one by one.  And when she woke from those terrors, it always seemed that the boundary between the real world and the world of her nightmares had grown just a little more vague, a little less distinct.

The soldier — who, Joslyn knew, was now less man than undatai — attacked.

With a snarl, he lunged at Joslyn, who recovered herself just fast enough to leap out of his path with reverse frog.  The lunge left him off-balance, but with impossible speed, he righted himself, finding his feet in a single fluid motion, a motion that was more insect-like than human.

Joslyn scrambled backwards, drawing her sword at the same time.  She planted her feet into mountain.  Without taking her eyes off the undatai-soldier in front of her, she said to the people behind her:

“Run.”

8

Like stunned animals, neither the girl, nor the dock worker, nor his friends behind him moved to go.

And in the next instant, the shadow-possessed man charged, cackling with mad laughter.  But it wasn’t Joslyn he charged; it was the girl.  Joslyn stepped to the side and sent her sword singing through the air.  The possessed soldier leaned back in a fair imitation of wind through wheat, the sword’s blade missing him by mere inches.

The dock worker beside the girl produced a long, thin knife from his baggy, traditional Terintan trousers with surprising speed.

“Wait!” Joslyn shouted, but it was too late.

Yelling an improvised war cry, the dock worker ran at the undatai-soldier, placing himself between the charging monster and the girl while swinging the knife in a downward arc toward’s the soldier’s heart.

It was a competent move that would have slain an ordinary man, but the undatai-soldier was faster than the dock worker.  The monster’s bandaged hand burst into flames, and just as the knife angled down towards his heart, the creature thrust its burning hand outward.

It sank into the young man’s chest, sliding in as effortlessly as the dock worker’s knife might have skewered a cube of apa-apa meat.  The knife clattered to the ground as the dock worker’s eyes went wide with silent shock and pain.  He collapsed backwards, blood pouring from his chest and onto the dusty ground.

The undatai held up something in its hand.  The flames had disappeared, leaving just an ordinary hand again, coated in the young man’s blood up to the elbow.

With mounting horror, Joslyn realized he was holding a human heart.

The girl must have realized what was in his hand at the same time, because she let out a high-pitched scream and turned to flee.  But the other four dock workers, the friends of the dead man, still stood right behind her, and she collided into them as she tried to run.  One of them caught her in his arms; another yelled the dead man’s name; a third turned to run himself.

The undatai used the chaos as an invitation to strike again.

With the same impossible speed it had shown before, it fell upon the men before Joslyn even had the time to draw a breath.  Bodies fell to the ground, falling before the men could scream or raise their arms in self-defense.

Joslyn flew into a furious counterattack, moving through dancer’s grace, viper striking, swooping hawk, and tiger’s fury with a speed and determination which she had rarely had to employ.

One blow cut a deep gash across the undatai-soldier’s bicep, rendering the arm useless.  But still the monster fought on, matching each of Joslyn’s parries with a parry of its own, each of Joslyn’s strikes with a strike of its own.  Only through sheer instinct and fourteen long years of experience did Joslyn manage to stay one step ahead of death.

After minutes of this, the two fighters finally stood back, panting, circling each other warily.

“Why kill them?” Joslyn said.  “Is it not me that you want?”

“You?” said the creature.  “No, Joslyn of Terinto.  We already have you.”

“Then why attack?  Why seek the blood of the innocent?”

“Why?”  The undatai-soldier let out a throaty, eerie laughter.  “Why do birds fly?  Why do dogs follow their masters, why do waves beat the shore, why does the sun rise and fall each day?”  It paused.  “I seek blood because killing is my joy.  Like you.”

“No, not like me.  I kill only for necessity.  Never for joy.”

It laughed again.  “Are you so sure, Joslyn of Terinto?  Do not forget that you were once our guest, and we have seen your mind.”

The accusation took her back in time once again, back into the realm of her nightmares.

Her hesitation lasted less than a moment, less than a moment of a moment, but it was long enough.  The creature swiped at her, landing a glancing blow with claw-like fingers against her shoulder.  The leather armor stopped it, but its fingers left behind three deep gouges, nearly shredding the leather in two.

Joslyn danced back out of its way before it could strike a second time.

She feinted high with bird aloft, and when it moved to duck her sword, she dropped to the ground and swept a leg outward in a scissoring motion.  She caught the thing in its ankles, and the undatai-soldier tumbled into the pile of dead dock workers.  Joslyn sprang back to her feet, then attacked with an unbridled tiger’s fury.

She landed another blow, this time piercing the creature’s thigh.  She thought she had successfully immobilized it, but when she pivoted into dancer’s grace, hoping to land the kill stroke, the creature rolled out of her way, picked up one of the café’s wooden chairs, and hurled it at her.

Joslyn tried to dodge the improvised missile but wasn’t quite fast enough.  It struck her hard in the ribs.  She expected another assault, but instead, the undatai fled from the café, disappearing into the black shadows that blanketed the market square.

She took off after it.  Why had it run?  Unless…

The undatai, she suspected, was close to immortal.  She thought she’d killed the one on the mountaintop some three months prior, but now she knew she’d really only succeeded in driving it back to its own nightmarish realm.  The Shadowlands.  That was what shamans and sorceresses called it.  A realm which she’d been dragged into herself thanks to the injury it had left her with.  By injuring Joslyn, it was as if the undatai had marked her, had tethered a piece of her soul to the Shadowlands forever.

An undatai might be immortal, but a human body could be killed.  No one knew that better than Joslyn.  And Joslyn had already struck the soldier’s body twice — once almost severing the arm above the bicep, once deeply piercing the thigh.  Either injury would have been enough to down a regular man.

The soldier’s body, the undatai’s host, had to be losing blood rapidly.  What would happen to the undatai if its host died?  Would it be forced back into the Shadowlands?

Intuition, or possibly the part of Joslyn’s mind that was still connected to the undatai’s world, told her that it would be.

She followed the bloody footprints the creature had left behind as it fled, going as fast as she dared while staying alert to potential ambush.

The sun had already fallen beneath the horizon, but the full inky blackness of night hadn’t swallowed Paratheen just yet.  The night sky was a deep violet, leaving the market square illuminated only by the rising crescent moon and the firefly-like glow of various lanterns and candles.  Street lanterns weren’t as numerous in Paratheen as they were in Port Lorsin, but they would be enough.

The bloody footprints took a sharp right turn, disappearing behind a fruit stall that had been covered in canvas for the night.  An alleyway reached back behind the stall, its darkness untouched by the lanterns or the moon.

Joslyn slowed, rounding the corner of the stall cautiously while she used her ku-sai’s teachings to slow her breathing and pounding heart.

There was no undatai-soldier hidden behind the stall.  And if it was in the alley, she could not see it.

Sword at the ready, breathing in panther prepares to spring, Joslyn approached the alley’s entrance, spreading out her senses, stretching her hearing and sense of smell to their outer limits.

Joslyn walked with a cat’s silent grace into the alley, sword in one hand, a dagger in the other.

Debris cluttered the alleyway’s sides.  Broken furniture, heaps of refuse, muddy puddles of something foul.  Joslyn tensed when she heard something rustle, but it was only a passing rat.

Then an animalistic shriek of anger suddenly echoed off the adobe walls, deafening Joslyn.

The creature was on her even before her ears could fully recover.  It leapt down from a windowsill some ten feet above the ground, knocking Joslyn down with its weight.  Her sword and dagger both fell from her grip.

It swiped at her, but she dodged, reaching at the same time for the spare dagger she always kept hidden in her boot.  Snarling like a wild dog, the undatai in the soldier’s body grabbed Joslyn by her leather jerkin and yanked her towards the jagged yellow teeth of its mouth.

Joslyn bucked her hips, forcing it off of her.  Once it rolled off, she pulled the dagger free from her boot and threw it.  The creature was fast enough to anticipate the flying dagger, but Joslyn had anticipated it, and so although the dagger went wide, it still caught the creature in the shoulder.  The monster stumbled back against a pile of broken table legs.  Joslyn retrieved her sword and dagger and braced for the next attack.

But instead of charging, the monster in the soldier’s body stood a few feet away, swaying and slightly hunched, the boot dagger still lodged in its shoulder.

It grinned.  “We like you, Joslyn of Terinto.  You are a worthwhile opponent.”

Joslyn didn’t wait long enough to see if it would continue to sway and taunt her or attack again.  With a mighty lion’s roar, she spun forward and beheaded it.

The corpse fell; the head that had once belonged to a soldier of the Imperial Army tipped forward and hit the dusty ground, rolling a few inches before coming to a stop, its eyes still open and staring up at Joslyn.

The head should have been lifeless eyes, but it wasn’t.  The mouth opened and it laughed — a long, guttural, and menacing sound.  Then thick, noxious smoke poured from the head’s open mouth and filled the alleyway.

Joslyn squinted and coughed, waving a hand to clear the smoke.  But it cleared on its own.  And once it did, the head was as it should be:  the head of a dead soldier.

Joslyn sheathed her sword and dagger.  With one hand, she picked up the head by its dirty, matted hair.  With the other, she took hold of the soldier’s body, grasping it by its wrist.  Then she began to drag.

#

“Have more kuzyn,” said the beefy café owner, pushing a clay mug of the milk towards her.

“No, thank you,” Joslyn said.  “I have had enough for one night.”

He glanced past her, into the market square.  The flames of the impromptu funeral pyre they had built there reflected off his dark eyes, making him look as if he had eyes of fire.  Joslyn turned away, unwilling to see anymore men and flames mingled for one night.

The smoke of the fire, the kuzyn, and the lack of sleep had conspired together to give her a powerful headache.  She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples, making sure to keep her sense of hearing sharp lest anything else unexpected reveal itself.

“What about stew?  Can I get you more, Madame Soldier?” asked the serving girl in a small voice.

Joslyn looked back up.  The girl’s clothes were smudged with ash and the rust-brown of dried blood, but she had managed to scrub her hands and face mostly clean.  Nevertheless, she still looked less like a café owner’s daughter and more like the dazed survivor of a battle.  Which, Joslyn supposed, she was.

“No, it’s alright.”  Even if Joslyn hadn’t had her fill of food for the day, she didn’t think she would be able to eat right now.

The pyre had drawn the attention of local residents, of course.  How could it not?  It was not every day that five healthy young men were so easily murdered by a single, unarmed soldier.  Nor was it every day that a sword-wielding woman warrior engaged in fierce one-on-one combat with a demon.  Joslyn was sure that the story was spreading already, breeding and mutating like the rats of Paratheen’s alleys.

She could understand why they came to gawk at her — close enough to get a view of the blood-spattered woman who had killed the monster, far enough to stay safe if she inexplicably turned on them.

Joslyn understood their curiosity, but it was all too much.

“Is there a guest house nearby?” she asked the café owner.

He straightened, puffing out his chest.  “I would not allow my daughter’s savior to sleep anywhere but my own home,” he said.  “Please, let me take you there.”

Joslyn hesitated, then nodded.  She wasn’t in a position to turn him down.

She followed the café owner around the back of his humble shop and up a worn set of wooden stairs to a small but clean apartment above the café.  His wife, the owner explained as he led Joslyn up the stairs, had died some years earlier during an epidemic of sheep’s cough that had hit Paratheen hard; now it was only him and the girl.  And since it was only the two of them and they rarely had guests, Joslyn was welcome to stay for as long as she wished.

He led her to a straw mattress behind a heavy curtain in one corner of the room — his own bed, Joslyn guessed.  A window covered with a bit of apa-apa wool let in the breeze, which tonight was heavy with the scent of ash and burnt flesh.

Would the Madame Soldier need anything else tonight?

No.  The Madame Soldier wished only to rest, and hoped the shop owner and his daughter would do the same once the pyre was safely out.

The man nodded and departed, closing the door softly behind him as he left.  Joslyn listened to the sound of his footfalls upon the wooden stairs until it faded.

Fully dressed, she laid down on the rough blanket of apa-apa wool that covered the mattress.  She laid her sword across her chest like an Emperor inside his sarcophagus; she kept her daggers at her belt and in her boot sheath.  Weary though she was, she found it unlikely that she would sleep this night.

If the soldier had been inhabited by an undatai, but he had not been a survivor of Fox Battalion… what did that mean?  How many more soldiers were there like him, wandering, perhaps undetected, throughout the Empire?  How long would it be before the creatures within them destroyed what was left of their humanity, and turned them into monsters like the one she’d slain tonight?

She shuddered to think of the destruction a dozen of such creatures might cause.  She had only barely defeated the one, and she was an accomplished swordswoman.

And was the soldier’s fate her own?  Was that what it meant to have struck the bargain with the undatai at the moment of her death — would she one day be like him, her body no longer under her control, her eyes wild and mad, living only for the joy of killing?

The monster said she took joy in killing, but it was wrong.  Joslyn killed only when she had to.

Didn’t she?

The art of the sword master is death.

The troubling questions swirled through her mind.  Hours later, after the light of the funeral pyre that flickered through her window finally faded, and the black of the night sky began to fade to the dark blue of the predawn hours, Joslyn fell asleep, and dreamed.

9

Tasia stood beside Lord M’Tongliss, shaded from the midmorning sun by a date palm tree while they watched several squads of soldiers drilling.

Technically speaking, all of the Lord’s armed men belonged not to him, but to the Imperial Army.  Almost all the noble houses employed a small standing army for purposes of policing and protecting their lands.  Great Houses might salary as many as a thousand men,  with another thousand held in reserve and called upon only when needed, while Minor Houses employed anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred soldiers, depending upon their wealth and the size of their holdings.

But any soldier employed by a noble house was simultaneously and automatically employed by the Imperial Army, and the Emperor’s army could request the use of these men at any time.

With a twelve-year war dragging on in the East, the Empire had called upon the armed men of the noble houses many times.  Most houses, even the largest, had been emptied out of their professional soldiers long ago.

Yet here Tasia was in the House of Paratheen, standing in a courtyard and watching over a hundred soldiers drill.

“How many of them are there?”

“About five hundred, altogether,” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “This is only about a fifth of them.  They come here in groups of one hundred each day to drill in the privacy of my courtyard.”

“Five hundred?  I am surprised you still have that many men to muster,” she said to the Lord beside her.  “Did the magistrates not request troops from you for the spring offensive?”

Lord M’Tongliss smiled, his gaze staying on the drilling men.  “Well, Empress, I hope you do not mind knowing, but yesterday was not our first experience with hiding things from the Empire’s magistrates.”

Tasia frowned.  “Meaning?”

“Meaning,” said the Lord, “that when the magistrates asked to know how many soldiers I could muster for the war, I might have told them numbers that were not… entirely forthcoming.”

Tasia stared at him.  “You lied to the Emperor about the number of soldiers you had?”

“‘Lied’ is such a strong word in the common tongue, with such a negative connotation,” he said.  “I prefer to think that truth sometimes changes, depending upon the place where you stand.  You, for example, are called ‘Empress’ by some, ‘traitor’ by others.  Which word should we call ‘truth’?  If more people call you ‘traitor,’ does it make that word more true than the other?”

She bristled.  “That is different.  You know very well I did not betray my father or the Empire — there is still only one word which represents the truth.”

“But as I have already pointed out, not all of the Empire is convinced of that.  Not even most of them, perhaps,” Lord M’Tongliss said, the smile still on his face.  “So to protect your truth, we deceived the magistrates yesterday.  Did that constitute lying to the Regent?”  When Tasia didn’t answer, he shrugged.  “We in Terinto understood more about what was happening in the War in the East than many did in Port Lorsin, just as you understood more about what the false Regent was doing at your trial than most of the council of lords.  You were not willing to needlessly sacrifice yourself; I was not willing to needlessly sacrifice my warriors when I had greater use for them here.  And besides, look at them.”  He waved a hand at the rows of soldiers.  “They have different equipment than the Imperial Army.  Different techniques.  Being forced to conform to Imperial standards would be dangerous both to them and to the Imperial Army.  So I chose to give sixty men to the War in the East, sixty sons and daughters of Paratheen whom I fear are almost certainly dead by now.”  He paused, meeting Tasia’s eye.  “Or worse than dead.  These five hundred, well, I kept them here, under my own employ.  And are you not glad that I did?  Because now I can give them to you, the Empire’s rightful ruler.”

Tasia pressed her lips together into a tight line.  If he was willing to lie to her father, he would be willing to lie to her.  It didn’t particularly come as a surprise, but knowing it bothered her anyway.  It underlined the reality of her situation — that she was an exile in hiding, dependent upon the generosity of men she did not trust.

“How many of these soldiers can you give me?”

“All of them,” he said easily.  “And if you will permit me a journey into the desert, I can probably find another thousand to add to these five hundred.”

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.  “For what price?”

“Price?” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “I only serve my Empress.”

“Deceive the magistrates, if you will, but do not be so fast in your attempt to deceive me:  You serve yourself before your Empress, my Lord,” Tasia said.

“I served you yesterday,” he countered.  “The magistrates spent three hours in my home searching for you, but at my orders, my family and my entire household staff ensured they did not find what they came for.”

“Yes, but if they had found me, it wouldn’t have been only my life forfeit.  It would have been yours, too, and probably your wives,” Tasia said.  “So.  As I said.  You are not the type of man to give away something for nothing.  Especially when the ‘something’ is your whole fighting force.  I ask you again:  What price do you ask of me in exchange for fifteen hundred soldiers?”

The Lord only chuckled, gesturing at the courtyard’s drilling warriors.  “Empress, do you not know that it is rude to ask a merchant his price while he is still demonstrating the quality of his goods?  Besides, the desert nomads will be only too glad to help you take the Empire back.”

“Why?” Tasia asked, her suspicion only growing.  “Why would desert nomads, who hardly care of the Empire’s existence, be willing to fight for its deposed Empress?”

“They will not fight for its Empress,” said the Lord.  “But they are a people who understand far more about this strange world we live in than the Empire’s Wise Men give them credit for.  My tribesmen know more about the threat building in the East than most Wise Men ever will.”

Tasia studied him a long moment.  “You mean the monsters.  The creatures whom Evrart calls shadows.”

He nodded.  “That is something your Brother Evrart and I agree upon — the shadows are a greater threat to all of our lives than the Regent.  And the nomads know it; their seers foretold of what would come years before your guard sent the creature on the mountain back to the Shadowlands.  I tried to tell the Emperor’s council of the soldiers wandering onto my lands after deserting their fellows in the East — soldiers who had changed into things not quite human.  The nomads killed most of them, but they have been shaken by the experience.  So yes, I can gather another thousand warriors to join your cause.  The people of the desert tribes are like anyone else — they will fight to defend what is theirs, even if they must join the Empire to do it.”

Lord and Empress gazed at the drilling soldiers in thoughtful silence.

“I have given you safe haven here in Terinto,” he said after a moment.  “Give Terinto safety again by pushing the shadows back to where they belong.  That is the first half of the price that I ask of you.”

“And the second half?”

His eyes flitted over to meet hers for a brief moment before returning to the soldiers.  “We will discuss that at another time.  When you return victorious from disrupting this delegation the Regent and his compatriots are sending to give away the East to those who consort with demons.”

“I don’t like open-ended debts, my Lord,” Tasia said.  “I would rather know the price I am paying for these men now, before I march them off to war.”

He took a few seconds to answer.  “Very well.  We can discuss it tonight.  Over dinner.”

Tasia looked back out at the men she would “purchase” at an as of yet unknown price.  Instead of the swords and shields a normal Imperial soldier would carry, the fighters wielded short, thick spears, tipped with spearheads on each end.  A long knife, longer than an ordinary dagger but not quite long enough to count as a short sword, hung at their waists.  Instead of armor, they wore nothing but heavy hides covering their torsos; instead of boots, they wore sandals.

She squinted at them.  Were they Terintan?  Terintans tended to be darker in skin tone than most of the rest of the Empire — except for certain regions of the Central Steppes — but these men (and a few scattered women, she noticed) were even darker than that.  Perhaps the soldiers spent even more time under the sun than the average Terintan, and that accounted for their dark coloring.

The men mixed in kicks, knee and elbow strikes, punches, and defensive ducks and dodges in with their spear thrusts and parries.  In a way, it reminded Tasia of the movements Joslyn had taught her, the ones she still practiced every morning on Lord M’Tongliss’s rooftop.

She tried to imagine these troops facing off against Imperial ones.  Without shields, full-body armor, and boots, these soldiers might certainly be more agile.  But would agility alone be enough to defeat a well-trained Imperial soldier?

“You are wondering if my men are capable of defeating the delegation,” Lord M’Tongliss said, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“It’s not that,” Tasia said.  “It just seems that they are… not particularly well-equipped, by Empire standards.  Whatever else you may say about my father, he took pains to ensure that his soldiers received the very highest level of equipment and training.”

“Kort!” the Lord shouted.

The man leading the drill stopped the soldiers and jogged over to where Lord M’Tongliss stood with Tasia.

“Yes, my Lord?” the man said, bowing his head towards Lord M’Tongliss.  He spoke the common tongue, but not in an accent that Tasia recognized — it wasn’t a Terintan accent.  Tall, lanky, with a shaved head and skin the color of fertile earth, both his ears were pierced twice, once at the top of the ear, once in the earlobe, with a thin string of gold threaded through the top and draping down to attach to an iron stud at the bottom.

Definitely not Terintan, Tasia decided.

“Kort, this is Empress Natasia,” Lord M’Tongliss told the man.  “Empress Natasia is the rightful heir of the late Emperor Andreth the Just.  Do you know who that is, Kort?”

“No, my Lord,” Kort said without looking up.  Despite being taller than Lord M’Tongliss by at least a handspan, Kort’s head was bowed so low that he looked almost hunched.

“But you know the Empire, yes?” said M’Tongliss.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“A pretender has stolen the throne from Empress Natasia.  We are going to help her get it back,” Lord M’Tongliss explained.

“As you say, my Lord.”

“Now, Kort, tell the Empress where you come from, and where most of the men under your leadership come from.”

His head still down, Kort said, “I come from Fesul, my Lady.  Most of us who serve Lord M’Tongliss come from Fesul.”

Fesul…

Tasia unrolled a map in her head, trying to recall where Fesul was.  She knew the name from her long years of study under Norix, but struggled to place it.  “Fesul… It’s one of the Adessian Islands, is it not?” she said a moment later.  “Far to the south?”

“That it is,” Lord M’Tongliss agreed.  “But it is not your average Adessian Island.  I’m sure you know that all the islands rely heavily upon trade for their subsistence?”

“Of course.  They are islands, after all.”

“Most of the Empire is familiar only with the islands that provide us with our silks and satins and ships and tea, but there are islands that specialize in other trade goods.  Kort, tell the Empress of the trade good Fesul specializes in.”

“Warriors, my Lady,” Kort said without a moment’s hesitation.

“Call her ‘your Highness’ or ‘your Majesty’ next time, Kort,” the Lord instructed.  “An Empress is higher than a Lady.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“‘Warriors’ seems an inadequate word for what it is that Fesul produces,” Lord M’Tongliss said ponderously, running a hand down his beard.  “Fesulian boys and girls begin their martial training at three years of age.  Every seven years, they are tested — so once at ten, once at seventeen, and the last at twenty-four.  Some die in those tests, others are maimed so badly that they are fit to be nothing but laborers and field hands.”  He turned to Kort.  “How many began the training with you, when you were three?” asked Lord M’Tongliss.

“About three hundred, my Lord.”

“And how many were left, after all three tests?”

“Ninety-one, my Lord.”

M’Tongliss addressed Tasia, sweeping his hand towards the courtyard, where the other Fesulian fighters rested as they waited for Kort to return.  “I managed to acquire five hundred of them — the graduates of five consecutive years of final testing.  I would have bought more, but five hundred was what I could afford.  For now.”

“Bought?”  Tasia looked again at the warrior with the bowed head before her.  “These men are all slaves?”

“Not precisely,” Lord M’Tongliss said.  “Think of them more like… mercenaries whose loyalty never need be questioned.  In exchange for the purchase price, they are both contract-bound and honor-bound to serve me for seven years.  Those still alive at the end of seven years will go home, where they will have the right to marry and train the next generation of fighters.”

Tasia’s eyes roamed the courtyard.  The seven-year contract still sounded like slavery to her.  But at least these men — and women, since about one out of every ten of them were female — had a path to freedom.

“Get your men back to work, Kort,” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “Tell them we will break for the noontide meal in an hour.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Kort answered, and jogged off.

“I don’t know how much of his art Brother Evrart has explained to you, Empress,” M’Tongliss said quietly, “but the Brotherhood is not fond of using seers to peer into what fortune or misfortune the future may hold.  They will tell you that the future is too malleable to warrant investment in glimpsing it.  But for myself as a businessman, I find it very useful to have a sense of what might be coming.  My own mother is a well-respected seer within our tribe.  Did I ever tell you that?”

Seers.  Predictors of the future.  She’d been taught by Wise Men that the tinker women who traveled from town to town telling fortune were all frauds.  But it seemed the Wise Men had been wrong about that.  As they had been wrong about so many other things.

“No,” Tasia said.  “You’ve never spoken of your family to me.”

“Well, my mother is a seer — and a good one, at that,” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “I owe much of my business success to her… and my political success, too.  It was thanks to my mother’s advice that I sided with your father during Terinto’s final war for independence.”

Tasia raised an eyebrow.  The revelation said much about the Lord, who had double-crossed the other powerful merchants in Paratheen by aiding Emperor Andreth.  When the war ended, the other merchants were all dead, and Emperor Andreth made M’Tongliss the lord of the newly created House Paratheen.

And he’d betrayed his compatriots on the advice of a fortune teller.

“I find that it is always better to be on the winning side of a fight than on the losing side,” Lord M’Tongliss said, probably noting the dark look that had crossed Tasia’s face.  “So trust me, your Majesty — I would not have invested so heavily in my Fesulian warriors if I did not believe them more than capable of defending my interests in the battles to come.  Battles against the shadows, yes, but also battles against the Imperial Army.  Should it come to that.”

“And battles against me?” Tasia said.

“I certainly hope not, Empress.  We are allies.  Let us remain so.”

“What does your mother say about my prospects of taking back my father’s crown?”

He grinned.  “Only that you are a good investment.”

10

“I know the reputation of Fesulian warriors,” Evrart said again.  “But my sources say the Regent is sending far more than a ‘delegation.’  It’s going to be ten thousand men, Empress.  We cannot defeat them with five hundred soldiers, no matter how good they are.”

“First of all, we don’t have to defeat them,” Tasia said.  “We only need to make sure they do not complete their mission in the East.  That treaty cannot be signed, Evrart.”

“The only way they will fail to carry out their mission is if we force them into a retreat,” Evrart countered.  “And we don’t have the manpower to do that.”

“We can gather the manpower,” Tasia said.  “The East does not support the false Regent.  They will answer my call.”

Evrart cocked his head to the side.  “Answer your call?  What call?”

“I had Lord M’Tongliss send messengers on his best horses to every Eastern House, Minor and Great,” Tasia said.  “They carry letters marked by my seal, asking for help in turning back the delegation.  The East supported my father to the end.  They will support me now.”

I hope, she added silently.  She spoke with more confidence then she actually felt.

Evrart opened his mouth, closed it again, then shook his head.  “I cannot believe you revealed us to the Eastern lords without consulting me first.”

“You were away again, conferencing with your Brothers.”  There was not a small amount of bitterness in her tone.  “You are nearly always away.  I had to keep my own counsel.”

“You could have waited a few hours before making such an enormous decision,” Evrart said, starting to pace.  “You’ve practically asked the East to declare war upon the Empire!”

“Parts of the East are already in rebellion.”

Evrart wiped a hand down his face.  “Parts of the East,” he repeated, “not all of the houses.  The East is already weakened from twelve years at war; asking them to rebel openly now puts them at further risk before they’ve had a chance to rebuild their forces.”  He stopped pacing and faced Tasia.  “This isn’t what we agreed to.  We agreed to write to House Gifford and House Brundt in the West and ask for their support first.”

Tasia nodded — writing to Lord Roland of House Gifford, who’d wanted Tasia to marry his son Mace, and to Lord Simon of House Brundt, who’d been a close friend of Tasia since childhood, was something she and Evrart had discussed in their early days of exile.

“Yes, and I sent messengers to them, too,” she said.

“What?!  We were not ready for that!” Evrart said, fury turning his face a bright red.

But his anger only triggered Tasia’s own.

Who did Evrart think he was, this so-called Brother who had once arranged for her assassination?  Did he think that he could raise his voice to the rightful sovereign of the Empire without consequences?

But she must demonstrate her royal bearing.  Even in the face of such gross insubordination.

And like it or not, she needed Evrart.  They both knew it, and that was part of the problem:  The Brotherhood was a powerful potential ally, and she was not in a position to turn down powerful allies, no matter how distasteful it was to work with them.

“As you said, it is what we discussed.”  Tasia kept her words cool, measured.  “I am perfectly capable of writing my vassals without your assistance, and with the delegation already en route to the East, there was no time to waste.  With any luck, House Gifford and House Brundt will receive my letters and marshal their forces.  By the time we defeat the delegation with Lord M’Tongliss’s soldiers and the Eastern Houses, half the West will be marching for Port Lorsin.”

“Defeat the delegation.  You assume much, Empress.”  Evrart sat down heavily on the edge of Tasia’s bed.  “And if not a single house in the East answers the call?  If you chase the delegation with only five hundred soldiers to face ten thousand, and discover that no one from the East has sent their support?”

“Fifteen hundred, not five hundred.  You forget the tribesmen M’Tongliss plans to gather.”

“Very well — five hundred mercenaries and a thousand nomads against ten thousand Imperial troops.”  He looked up.  “I do not remember you being a particularly apt student in arithmetic, but even you must realize those numbers cannot be calculated in our favor no matter how they are turned.”

“It is a risk we must take,” Tasia said, though her stomach was beginning to twist with doubt.  “The time to act is now.  You said so yourself — we cannot cede a third of the East to the mountain tribes.  They bring the shadows with them.”

He shook his head mournfully.  “You are determined to bring ruin to your own Empire.”

Self-doubt or no, Tasia had heard enough.  “Mind your tongue, Brother Evrart,” she snapped.  “As my counselor, I grant you the right to provide your opinion, but not the right to patronize me as if I am nothing more than a willful child.”

Evrart looked up.  “You are nothing more than a willful child, Tasia.”

The words sent such a shock into Tasia that she couldn’t reply for a moment.  “Excuse me?”

He held her gaze.  “Your father only named you heir because he knew a traitor lurked somewhere amongst his upper ranks and didn’t want to risk exposing his back to his enemies more than it already was.  If a better choice than naming you his heir had been available to him, believe me, he would have taken it.”

Self-doubt warred with furious indignation inside Tasia’s chest.

“The East will rise up,” she said.  “They will heed my call.  And the West will not pass by an excuse to remind the Regent that they remain a force to be reckoned with.”

“The East is decimated,” said Evrart.  “And most of the West opposed the war.  If you march M’Tongliss’s men east to face the delegation, you kill them and you kill yourself.  Your rule will be over before it even begins, Empress Natasia.”

Tense silence hung between them.

“And what then?” she asked at last.  “If I die, who do you think will rule the Empire?  Your precious Brotherhood?”

He said nothing.

“We share a common enemy and a common goal, Brother Evrart,” Tasia said.  “You know as well as I do that the Brotherhood cannot rule the Empire by itself.  You said yourself that you need a member of the House of Dorsa to work with, just like Norix does.  And regardless of his reasons, my father named me heir.  You know that, all the lords and ambassadors know that.  Norix and my grandfather know that.  Which means I am still the Brotherhood’s best chance at saving the Four Realms.  So disagree with me if you wish, but help me.”  She paused.  “And if we don’t have ten thousand men to face the delegation, then let us make it look like we do.”

He was still for a moment.  “And how would we do that?”

Tasia sighed.  “You are the one who calls yourself an illusionist.  Why must I, the willful child, be the one to suggest a grand illusion?”  She picked up the map she had been studying earlier from the writing desk and carried it to where Evrart sat on the edge of the bed, dropping it in his lap.  She tapped it.  “Do you see this?  The Great Desert ends here, right at the border with the East.  Right where the Emperor’s Road turns and descends into a valley.”  She traced the route with her finger.  “When the Regent’s soldiers turn that corner, what if they look up and find themselves facing half the Imperial Army?”

Realization slowly dawned on Evrart’s face.  “You’re suggesting an illusion of twenty thousand men on that ridge?”

“Of course that’s what I’m suggesting.”

His eyes narrowed.  “This was your plan all along — an illusion.”

“I was not the most apt student of arithmetic, but it had in fact occured to me that we would need more than fifteen hundred soldiers,” said Tasia.  “So yes.  It had been my plan all along.”

Evrart sat thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head.  “It is far easier to make people believe something isn’t there that is than to make them believe something is there that isn’t.  And making so many men believe a lie so large…”

“So you’re saying it cannot be done?”

He shook his head slowly.  “No, it can be.  But an illusion that size… it will take at least fifteen Brothers working in tandem.  Twenty would be safer; twenty-five would be best.”

“Then we will find thirty Brothers.”

He hesitated.  “The Brotherhood is not a vassal state of the Empire, and the purpose they serve is higher than holding the political boundaries of the Empire together.  I don’t know how they will feel about supporting this effort.”

She threw up her hands.  “Are they our allies or not, Evrart?  What use is the Brotherhood when they do nothing to help but endlessly conference with you?”

“They are allies,” Evrart said.  “But like any ally, their support is not unconditional.  And since there are not many of us, the Brotherhood only fights in battles it knows it can win.”

“We can win this one,” Tasia said adamantly.  “But only with the Brotherhood’s help.”

Evrart didn’t respond.

Bending over the map, Tasia drew circles with her fingertip around the Eastern regions that belonged to House Druet, House Fontan, and House Pellon.

“The lands Norix will sign away to the mountain men represent more than a third of the East.  And you said it yourself — the loss of House Fontan alone will trigger a famine, either sooner or later.  Were you living in Port Lorsin the last time there were crop shortages in the Capital Lands?  Do you remember the food riots, the chaos?    The death?  Imagine an entire Empire in chaos, people starving in cities from Reit in the East to Gifford in the West to Azyck in the Central Steppes.  And as that chaos spreads, the mountain tribes settle into the East, bringing the shadows with them.  This is not about mere political borders.  This is a matter of survival.”

Evrart gazed at the map.  “I will talk to my Brothers,” he said at last.  “Given your rash choice to send messengers both East and West, you have hardly left me with any other option.”

She nodded curtly.  That was the intention, she thought.  “You are dismissed, Brother Evrart.  Now you will finally have a reason to disappear and ‘conference’ with your friends.”

11

~ THEN ~

“I’m hungry,” Joslyn whispered into her sister’s ear.

“Shhh,” Tasmyn said.  “We’ll probably eat when Mistress is finished.”

Mistress gave the girls a sidelong glare.  Joslyn forced herself to stop fidgeting and turned her gaze down towards her sandals.  The sandals were too small for her, and the leather at the heels was almost completely worn away, but that was what it meant to be the youngest.

The tinkers had a daughter once, before they bought Tasmyn and Joslyn.  They never spoke of her, but Tasmyn and Joslyn learned about her through the clothes that they inherited.  Everything the tinkers’ daughter had worn, Tasmyn eventually wore.  And once Tasmyn outgrew it, Joslyn wore it.

Whenever Joslyn complained about the order of inheritance, Tasmyn told her she should be glad that she had clothes at all.  Many slaves had masters who hadn’t bothered to give them sandals at all, for example.  Joslyn didn’t tell Tasmyn, but she preferred to go barefoot most of the time, anyway; she only wore the ragged sandals in Master or Mistress’s presence.

“I see a young man in your future,” Mistress told the young woman seated across from her.  She exaggerated her Terintan accent as she said it — she always did that with clients, despite the fact that, like almost all tinkers, she’d been speaking both Terintan and the Empire’s common tongue since she learned to speak.  Yet the richer the clients, the stronger Mistress’s accent.

The woman across from Mistress let out a small gasp and leaned forward, as if Mistress had whispered and she was straining to hear.

Truth be told, the client currently seated across from Mistress in their bliva, or rounded tent of poles and apa-apa wool, was hardly old enough to be called a “woman.”  She was of marriageable age, yes, but she’d obviously grown up in a life of ease.  And that, by Joslyn’s estimation, made a person at least four or five years younger than they really were.

“Tell me more,” the young woman said to Mistress.

Mistress closed her eyes for a moment, and a soft smile spread across her weathered, leathery face.  By contrast to ease, when a person led a hard life, a desert life, aging worked in the opposite direction:  Mistress probably wasn’t older than forty summers, but she looked to be closer to fifty-five summers.  Of course, for the fortune-telling wives of tinkers, looking older only seemed to make their clients even more likely to believe the ruse.

“He is tall,” said Mistress, then quickly added, “but not exceptionally tall.  His hair is brown, as are his eyes.”

The woman-girl let out another gasp.  “I think I know of whom you speak.”

Joslyn rolled her eyes.  They were in Everly, a Western town just beyond the border with the Capital Lands.  Practically every man and woman in Everly were of medium height, with brown hair and brown eyes.

“Ahh,” said Mistress.  “Yes, I see now that you already have an acquaintance with this young man.”  Her eyes still closed, Mistress’s smile faded, and her brow crinkled slightly.

“What?” said the young woman.  “Is there something wrong?”

Mistress opened her eyes.  Joslyn could see the shrewdness in them, a shrewdness probably invisible to the young woman.

“There is something… something just at the edge of my vision,” Mistress said.

“What is it?”

Mistress took a breath, held it for a moment, then let it out slowly.  “No.  It remains just out of reach.”

“I need to know,” the young woman said urgently.  “Does Thomas plan to ask for my hand or no?  Father is working on a betrothment with the youngest son of House Everent, but I have no interest in marrying him.  And if Thomas may still ask for my hand…  Will he?”

Mistress shook her head, as if saddened.  “I do not know.  It is out of the edge of my sight.”

“Then try harder,” the young woman commanded.

Mistress frowned again, but this time it was no ploy; it was an expression of displeasure with the young woman who’d given her an order.  Mistress did not appreciate her rich clients attempting to force her hand at anything.  Tinkers were like that — ferociously independent to their core.

“It is not a matter of ‘trying harder,’” Mistress said, leading the girl deeper into her trap.  “The vision is either there or it isn’t.  In this case, it isn’t.”  Her expression softened, and she placed a wrinkled hand atop the girl’s in a maternal gesture.  “I am sorry.  I hope you and your Thomas find a path to happiness.”

“Is there truly nothing you can do?” the young woman asked.  Her tone had changed from demanding to pleading — which, of course, was the change Mistress had been waiting for.

But Mistress only shook her head again.  “No.  I’m sorry, dear.  I…”  She stopped, cocking her head to the side like a crow that had just spotted a shiny object.  “Well… there is one way I might be able to extend my vision, but…”  She appeared to hesitate.

“But what?”

Mistress waved her hand.  “The price is too high.”

“How much?” the young woman said, a hint of wariness in her voice.

At least she has the good sense to be suspicious, Joslyn thought.

Mistress shook her head.  “Not the price you pay,” she said.  She gestured behind her, to where Tasmyn and Joslyn stood waiting.  “The price one of the girls must pay.”

The young woman glanced at the slaves positioned behind the fortune teller.  “What do you mean?”

Mistress just shook her head again.

“No, Mistress,” Tasmyn whimpered.  Her acting was remarkably better than Joslyn’s, which was why she played this part while Joslyn only stared at her sandals forlornly.

“Hush, child,” Mistress said.

The young woman glanced from Tasmyn to Mistress.  “What does it take to extend your vision?” she asked quietly.

“The creatures of the Shadowlands who grant me my powers do not do so for free,” Mistress said.  “Just as my husband the tinker requires payment when he sharpens a knife or sells a cloak, so the Shadowlands require payment for sharpening my vision.  But they do not take the useless circles of metal mankind calls ‘coin.’”

Mistress gazed at the young woman steadily, waiting.

“What… what kind of payment do they require?” the young woman said, nearly whispering now.

“Blood,” said Mistress.  “Pain.  Sometimes… death.”

“I see,” said the young woman, but she didn’t look at Mistress when she said it.  Her gaze was fixed on Tasmyn and Joslyn.

Heavy silence filled the bliva.  The only sound came from Tasmyn, who had begun to tremble and whimper like a frightened puppy.

“I will pay more,” the young woman said.

“No amount of coin pays for an entire life,” said Mistress.

“But it does.  It can,” said the young woman.  “The girls are slaves, are they not?  So coin can replace them.”

Mistress squinted pensively, as if considering the argument.  But at last she shook her head.  “No.  Training a slave takes many years.  These girls are worth far more than what my husband initially paid for them.”

“I will pay double what you bought them for.”

Mistress raised an eyebrow.  “That would be a hefty sum, my Lady.  And even that amount of coin…”  She turned her head, studying the girls at the back of the bliva as if seeing them for the first time.  “No.  I cannot.”

“Triple what you bought them for.”

Now Mistress narrowed her eyes with genuine skepticism.  “Triple?  That would be nine silver pennies — for each of them.”

The young woman leaned back, reached into her coin purse.  A moment later, she produced a silver eagle.

Joslyn’s eyes widened, and she stared at the coin in wonder, completely forgetting she was supposed to be sad and scared and staring at her sandals.  Tasmyn elbowed her in the ribs, and she looked down again.

“I do not carry dozens of silver pennies,” the young woman said haughtily.  “It would be impractical.  So here is an eagle.  That is your eighteen pennies and then some.”

She set the eagle down on the narrow wooden table with a definitive clink and slid it across to Mistress.

Surprise crossed Mistress’s face, but only for the briefest of moments before she hid it.  Joslyn was pretty sure the young woman had not caught the look.  Mistress picked up the coin from the table and bit into it, never taking her eyes off the young woman.  She examined the bite mark carefully, looking for evidence that the silver was just a thin coating around a less valuable metal, like iron or copper.  But what she saw must have satisfied her, because the coin disappeared into the folds of her skirt, where Joslyn knew she kept a hidden coin purse.

“Alright,” said Mistress at last.  “Tasmyn, Joslyn, bring the herbs and the knife.”

“Please, noooo, Mistress,” Tasmyn whined.

“Do as I say, girl,” snapped Mistress.

The two slave girls did as they were asked.  Tasmyn fetched the dried herbs; Joslyn fetched the ceremonial knife.  They brought both to Mistress’s table, where she took the items from them.

“The water, Joslyn,” Mistress said.

Joslyn nodded once and walked to the center of the bliva, carefully lifting the kettle from its spot above the cook fire with a hooked rod.  It was a little too heavy for her to manage smoothly, but she managed to wrap a thick cloth around the handle and carry it back to Mistress without burning herself.

Mistress took the herbs Tasmyn had brought her and dropped them into a porcelain cup — the finest thing the tinkers owned — and carefully poured steaming water on top.  The bliva filled with a green, earthy scent, and Mistress breathed the fumes in deeply.

Horsetail mushroom tea.  Joslyn didn’t like this part.

Mistress picked up the ceremonial knife, glancing between Tasmyn and Joslyn as if trying to come to a decision.

Tasmyn shook her head vehemently.  “Please not me, Mistress?  Please?”

Thanks, sister, Joslyn thought sarcastically, even though she knew Tasmyn was only acting.

“Joslyn,” Mistress said at last.  “Remove your brizat.”

Joslyn pulled the poncho off, revealing a dirty, sleeveless undershirt that barely qualified as a rag.

When Master and Mistress’s daughter wore it, it was probably nice, she thought.

“Hold out your arm.”

Joslyn did.

She exaggerated her flinch and sucked in a sharp breath when the knife bit into her bicep.  Mistress knew how to make the cut look deeper than it really was, but still.  Even though the cut was shallow, it still stung.  Joslyn watched the blood well up on her arm.

Mistress looked up at Joslyn with false compassion as she squeezed the blood into the porcelain cup with the herbs.

Tasmyn kicked Joslyn lightly in the ankle.

Oh — right.  She’d allowed herself to get distracted by the false kindness in Mistress’s eyes and had forgotten to perform the rest of this part of the act.

Joslyn let out a long, low moan, rolling her eyes into the back of her head before collapsing to the ground.

The young woman went pale.

Joslyn writhed on the ground, continuing to moan while she thrashed her limbs and gnashed her teeth.  After about thirty seconds of this, she went still, her head lolling to the side.  She kept her eyes open, letting them glaze over as she stared at nothing on the bliva’s ceiling.  There was a water stain near the smoke hole, she noticed.  Probably from the horrible hailstorm they’d been caught in not far from House Brundt.  Joslyn tried not to blink while she stared at the stain.

“The creatures of the Shadowlands are here,” Tasmyn whispered.

It was originally supposed to be Joslyn’s line, but Joslyn’s acting was so bad that Mistress had reassigned it to Tasmyn.

From the floor, Joslyn watched out of the corners of her wide open eyes as Mistress sipped on the blood tea.

The part that came next was truly frightening, because it was no act.  The blood was still a part of the act, but the horsetail mushroom tea was not.  And when Mistress stiffened and the whites and pupils of her eyes transformed into blazing miniature infernos, that was real.

Joslyn wasn’t exactly sure why Mistress, who truly did have the powers of a sorceress, contented herself with earning coin primarily by weaving such elaborate deceptions.  Why not always call upon the shadows, if she could do it at will?  What made her decide that this time, she would give her client something real, whereas the previous ten rich girls got nothing but vague half-truths and creative lies?

Was the difference the silver eagle?

No, Joslyn suspected the reason was more complex than money.  Probably, she thought, Mistress gave every tenth or fifteenth client real sorcery for the sake of maintaining her reputation as a fortune teller.  One client who witnessed Mistress’s true power in a city seemed to be more than enough to bring twenty fresh clients in the next city.

“Bessa, daughter of William and Dawna,” said Mistress — except Joslyn knew it was not really Mistress anymore.  The voice had changed to something deep and metallic.  It was a shadow, a creature of the Shadowlands, temporarily inhabiting Mistress’s body.  “You love Thomas, but your love is misplaced, for he loves another.”

“No, that’s not true.  He does love me, but his father — ”

“Quiet, foolish girl,” said the thing inside Mistress.  “Even while he lies with you, he also lies with another.  Callah, the wheelwright’s daughter.  He is fond of her red hair.”

“A wheelwright’s daughter?” the young woman — Bessa — said.  “But she’s a commoner.”

So are you, Joslyn thought from her place on the floor.  Just because you’re a rich commoner, you’re still a commoner.  Just like the wheelwright’s daughter, just like this Ambassador’s son you’re so “in love” with.

Joslyn had only lived for nine summers, but she already knew she would never fall in love.  It turned women into dunces who would do anything, say anything, pay anything to have their feelings returned.

The creature that looked like Mistress chuckled, and it was an eerie, grating sound.  “He does not love Callah, but neither does he love you,” it said.  “He only loves the satisfaction of feeling flesh pressed against his.  Your talk of marriage only makes him grow bored of you.”

“But he said — ”

“Accept the marriage your father arranges with the son of Everent,” said the creature, “and you will enjoy a pleasant life.  Your husband will die young, after a horse throws him while traveling, but he will leave you with four healthy children first, three daughters and a son, the last of whom will be the apple of your eye and will care for you well into old age.  Refuse the marriage, pin your hopes on Thomas, and you will never marry at all.  You will die a lonely and bitter old woman, with no one to care for you except those you pay to do it.  This, Bessa of Everly, daughter of William and Dawna, is my advice to you.”

A whoosh of cold air blew through the bliva as if someone had opened the tent’s outer flap.  The fire blazed, and the pot hanging above it swung gently back and forth.

Mistress seemed to almost deflate, and the flames disappeared from her eyes.  When she spoke again, she was tired without pretending to be.

“Did you get your answer?”

Bessa stared at her, stunned.  Then she burst into tears.  “You’re a fraud!” she shouted, jabbing her finger in Mistress’s direction.  “I should have listened to my friends, I never should have wasted silver on you!”

“I take it there will be no marriage proposal from the boy?” Mistress said, glancing at Tasmyn for confirmation.  Tasmyn nodded.

That was one of the many things Joslyn didn’t understand about Mistress’s sorcery:  She couldn’t always remember what the shadow said through her when it happened, only fragments.

“I’m sorry, child.”  Mistress’s sympathy sounded genuine.

“I’m not your child,” Bessa snapped.  She stood abruptly, knocking over the stool she’d been sitting on.  She stomped towards the bliva’s entrance, then stopped and turned back.  “You’re nothing but a dirty old tinker’s wife.  I’ll see to it that my father has you out of Everly by sundown.”

With that, she stormed out.

Mistress sighed.  “You can get up, Joslyn.  Put the girl’s stool under my feet, I’m tired.”

Joslyn did as she was told.  “May Tasmyn and I eat, Mistress?  We haven’t had anything today.”

Mistress fished for the coin purse within her skirts and flipped a coin to Joslyn, who caught it automatically.  Joslyn’s eyes widened with surprise when she realized she held an entire silver penny in her hand.

“You did well today,” Mistress said.  “Both of you.  Get anything you want to eat, and be sure to pick something up for the Master and myself, too.  I’m sure he’ll want us to be far from here before Mother Eirenna comes, thanks to that senseless girl.”

“Thank you, Mistress.”  Joslyn was still staring at the bright penny in her hand.  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten something more than gruel and table scraps.  Her stomach rumbled impatiently in anticipation of a real meal.

She looked at Tasmyn to see if her sister was ready to go, but Tasmyn hesitated.

“Will you be alright, Mistress?” she asked.

“Yes, child,” Mistress said.  “I simply need to rest.”

Still Tasmyn did not leave Mistress’s side.  Joslyn gave her a look, the kind that said, Let’s go before she changes her mind, dummy!

“Alright,” Tasmyn said reluctantly, and she followed her younger sister outside, into the streets of Everly.

~ NOW ~

Joslyn’s pleasant dream, a memory of Tasmyn and Mistress, morphed into a dark nightmare.  In it, Ku-sai fought an entire army of undatai-possessed soldiers.  He was outnumbered at least a hundred to one, but he fought on with the ferocity of a desert sandstorm, whirling, spinning, leaping, rolling, moving from dancer’s grace to viper striking to wind through wheat to weaving snake with an effortless fluidity that Joslyn knew she would never match.  But one man, even a man like Ku-sai, simply could not fight an army of monsters indefinitely.  He was struck down with a blow to the neck in the end, and Joslyn, disembodied and powerless, heard herself scream.

The dream morphed again, the undatai-soldiers dissolving into blackness, her mangled ku-sai, his head nearly severed from his body, standing and facing her.

“Gon tajin,” he said.

But his words were in that dialect of northern Terinto that he slipped into sometimes, his native tongue, the tongue of the Seven Cities.

“I don’t understand,” Joslyn said.

He began to fade, like an afterimage or wisp of smoke.

“Please,” Joslyn said in his dialect.  “I don’t understand.”

“Gon tajin.”

And Joslyn woke up breathing hard, tears streaming down her cheeks.

12

Joslyn was surprised by how late she had slept.  By the time she moved through each of the thirty-seven movements of the dance twice and washed her face and limbs with the small basin of fresh water the café owner had left for her, the mid-morning sun was high and already strong above Paratheen, Mother Eirenna ceding the blue sky to Father Eiren.

It unnerved her to have woken so late.  Joslyn couldn’t remember the last time she had slept past dawn.

When she made her way down to the café, the small table with the chair against the adobe wall was open again, so she settled into a chair there.  The café owner’s daughter appeared a minute later, wearing a broad smile on her face.

“Madame Soldier,” she said.  “We worried that perhaps you had left without saying goodbye.”

“I would not have done that,” Joslyn said.  “Not when I owe you a debt of thanks.”

“No, Madame Soldier.  We are the ones who owe you thanks.  My father and I gave you only a poor mattress for a night; you gave me my life.”

Joslyn looked away, embarrassed.  “The mattress was not ‘poor.’  Most of my life, I’ve had no mattress at all.”

“May I bring you something to eat?” the girl said.  “Zabata and bread?”

Zabata, a kind of thick cream made from apa-apa milk, was typically served with nuts and fruit stirred into it and doled onto flatbread for a pre-lunch snack.  It was a traditional Terintan meal, but not often consumed outside Paratheen, Negusto, and their surrounding villages.

“No, thank you,” Joslyn said.

“Coffee, then?” asked the girl.  “We buy our coffee fresh every month from a merchant of Hebil.  I promise it is the richest coffee you will ever taste.  And if you’ve been traveling outside Terinto as you said, you probably haven’t had a chance to drink even poor coffee lately.”

Joslyn shook her head.  She’d never liked coffee; the rich, earthy scent reminded her too much of her second master.  “Tea will do.”

The girl nodded her acknowledgment of Joslyn’s request and floated off towards the kitchen on light feet, reappearing a few moments later with a clay pot and teacup.  Next to these, she set down a small jar of honey and a spoon, smiled at Joslyn, and headed back to the kitchen again.  Joslyn almost called her back to insist that she take the honey with her, as it was a delicacy far too expensive for her taste, typically imported from the farthest reaches of the West.

But she stopped herself.  She had saved the girl’s life, after all, and father and daughter were now trying to repay her in the only way that they could.  She’d refused their offer of food, then their offer of coffee; she should at least accept the honey without complaint.

Besides, honey reminded her of Tasia, as the only time Joslyn had tasted honey that she had not stolen had been during her months living at the palace with her Princess.

“The girl seems quite taken with you, Mizana,” said a voice to Joslyn’s left.  “If I did not know any better, I would call her ‘smitten.’”

Joslyn turned towards the voice.  The words had come from an old woman, so small and shriveled with age that her sandaled feet did not even reach the patio’s floorboards from her perch in her chair.  She eyed Joslyn with sharp, speculative eyes.

The old woman looked familiar to Joslyn.  At first, Joslyn thought it was because the woman bore a resemblance to her former Mistress, the tinker’s wife, and she’d just dreamed of Mistress the night before.  Then she realized that wasn’t it; the old woman was familiar because she’d been at the café the night before, moments before the soldier had been overcome by the undatai within him.

It’s finally taking him to the Shadowlands, the old woman had said.  I always knew it would.

Despite the sun, Joslyn suddenly felt chilled.

“I do not think the girl is ‘smitten,’ Grandmother,” Joslyn said, using the polite grammar of formal Terintan.  “I think she is merely grateful to be alive today.”

“Alive because of you.”

Joslyn shrugged.  “Alive thanks to the grace of Mother Eirenna, and the fate woven for her by Father Mezzu.”

“You place no stock in the gods, Joslyn, daughter of Salif and A’eshan.  You have long known that if we do not fight for our destiny, no god will give it to us.”

Joslyn stiffened at the mention of her biological parents.  The last time she’d heard their names, it had been the night before, when the monster inside the soldier —

“No, Mizana,” the old woman said, waving her hand dismissively.  “I am not like the man you met last night.”

Mizana was a term of respect, a northern Terintan word for a female sword master.  But no one had ever addressed Joslyn that way before.

First the names of her actual parents, now Mizana?  Joslyn tried not to narrow her eyes with suspicion, for that was a rude way to respond to an elder in Terinto.

“I am no Mizana, Grandmother.”

The old woman pursed her lips, deepening the wrinkles mapping her face into crevasses.  “False modesty does not become you, Joslyn.”  She pointed at the chair beside her.  “Come.  Sit with me.  There are things we need to discuss.”

Joslyn did not rise from her seat.  “I am not accustomed to following the orders of strangers.”

The crone scoffed.  “You were a slave, then an apprentice, then a soldier, then a guard.  Your entire life has been a series of one stranger after another giving you orders that you have had no choice but to obey.  Now, come sit down.  You should know more about the man you killed last night, and more about what comes next.”

Joslyn hesitated.

The tiny, wrinkled old woman hardly seemed to be a threat.  But the serving girl reappeared before Joslyn could decide whether or not to rise from her table and cross to the woman’s.

“Here you are, Grandmother Ajda,” the girl said, also using formal grammar as she set down a plate of flatbread and zabata, then a carafe of what smelled like coffee along with a clay mug.  “And look,” she added, emptying a handful of nuts into the zabata.  “We had pistachios this morning.”

The old woman clapped like a child.  “My favorite!  A rare treat — how kind.”  She smiled up at the girl.  The smile was warm and guileless, not at all the smile of a woman who knew far too much about strangers and spoke of the Shadowlands almost casually.

Pleased with herself, the girl returned the smile.  “Is there anything else for you that I can fetch, Grandmother?”

“Yes, actually,” Ajda said.  “I will be needing some of my tea.  With horsetail mushroom.”

The girl’s expression changed into one of… was it surprise?  Or fear?

Or both?

“Yes, Grandmother,” she murmured, and scurried towards the kitchen.

“You’re a fortune-teller,” Joslyn said once the girl had disappeared from sight.

Grandmother Ajda cackled.  “Fortune teller.  You think I am the same as that old fraud you called ‘Mistress’?  No, Joslyn, I am not some tinker’s wife who spins a fantastic yarn for a gullible farmer’s daughter.  I am a seer — a real seer, and there are not many of us left.  The Brotherhood finds us useless, the tinkers’ wives have diluted our art, and now only a few of us remain to pass on the sight to our daughters and granddaughters.”  She reached out for the chair adjacent to her and pulled it out, its feet scraping against the patio’s weathered boards.  “So come.  Sit.  You have questions for me.  I have answers for you.”

Joslyn hesitated a moment longer, then accepted the old woman’s offer, settling onto the edge of the wooden chair across from her.

“Mizana,” Grandmother Ajda said, clicking her tongue.  “I ask you to join me and you sit with the comfort of a cat in a puddle of water.”

“And why should I be comfortable?” Joslyn countered, forgetting her politeness.  “I sit across from a woman who knows more about me than she should and who just asked the serving girl for tea with horsetail mushroom.”

The seer smiled.  “True,” she said with a shrug.  She paused a moment.  “Are you ready, then?”

“For what?”

“To ask me your questions.”

Joslyn drew in a breath.  She didn’t like seers, but…

“Does she live?” she asked softly.

A look of disappointment spread across Grandmother Ajda’s face.  “Chained to the Shadowlands by a foolish bargain you never should have made, confronted only last night with a threat that endangers us all, and yet all you can think of to ask me about is the pretty face that bewitched you?  You are no better than the clients of your Mistress.”

The seer’s black eyes were rheumy, but they displayed her disapproval with perfect clarity.

The serving girl interrupted their staring contest.

“Your tea, Grandmother Ajda.”  She set a clay mug of earthy, steaming liquid onto the table.  Then she hurried off again without speaking.

The old woman wrapped crooked fingers around the clay mug, blew on the tea, and took a small sip.  She set it back down on the table.

“Yes,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Your Tasia lives.”

Joslyn closed her eyes lightly, relief coursing through her body.  She let out a long, shaky breath before opening her eyes again.

“Where?” she asked.

Grandmother Ajda sipped her tea again.  “No.  No more questions about her.  The girl should be the least of your concerns right now.”

“Tasia is my only concern,” Joslyn said emphatically.  “I vowed to protect her — and I intend to honor that vow.”

“Yet she has been performing the job of staying alive without the help of your vows for nearly three months now, has she not?” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Besides, the true danger she faces is the danger we all face.  Let me hear a question about that from you, Mizana.  Show me that some of the good sense your ku-sai gave you still remains.”

Joslyn would find out from the old woman where Tasia was, but given that she had already waited weeks upon weeks just to find out that Tasia still lived, she could wait another few minutes.

“Alright,” Joslyn said.  “The man I killed last night:  He was inhabited by an undatai, wasn’t he?”

Grandmother Ajda leaned back in her chair, thoughtful.  “That is a word I have not heard said aloud in a long time.”  She wagged a finger at Joslyn.  “And one you should not use so freely, given your situation.  Let us not say it again.”

“Why?” Joslyn asked.

“Because, Mizana, that word belongs to the Old Tongue, and the Old Tongue has a power in it that the untrained should not trifle with,” said the seer.  “And at any rate, I certainly hope the shadow inhabiting the broken soldier was not an… the word you spoke.  If it was, things are much worse than we had imagined.”

“I am confused,” Joslyn said.  “If not the word I spoke, then what was wrong with him?  Are you suggesting it was simple madness?”

“No, no,” said Grandmother Ajda.  She drank more of her tea.  “He was indeed inhabited by a shadow.  But there are different kinds of shadows in the Shadowlands, just as there are many different types of men and women walking the streets of Paratheen.”  She waved a hand to indicate the busy street beyond the café.  “There are serving girls and sword masters, seers and princesses.  There is not quite the same diversity in the Shadowlands as in the mortal realm, but it is diverse enough.  And the word you spoke, that is like saying…”  She thought for a moment.  “It is like saying ‘knight’… or perhaps ‘prince’ might be better.  A Prince of Shadows.”

“But the word I said is the word the small men used, the night I defeated the creature on the mountaintop.”

“I know,” said the seer, her tone shifting into something that was almost sympathetic.  “And given that you faced a Prince of Shadows, you were lucky to escape your encounter alive.”  She cocked her head like a curious bird.  “Though you did not quite escape with all of yourself intact, did you?”

Joslyn said nothing.

“The shadow inhabiting the man you killed yesterday was no prince,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “That shadow was more like a commoner.  Yet it would be better to compare shadows to a society of ants than a society of men.  In a society of men, a commoner serves the prince, yet has a mind of his own.  In a society of ants, the workers share the mind of the queen.  Which explains why the soldier you slew last night recognized you as the same Mizana who bargained with the Prince for her life, and why the shadow inside that soldier sounded like the one you met before.”  She took another sip of tea.  “You should reflect, Joslyn, what it means that even one of the Prince’s lesser minions was nearly enough to defeat the greatest living sword master in the Empire.”

“I am not the greatest,” Joslyn said automatically.  “My ku-sai is.”

“I said the greatest living sword master,” the seer said gently.

Ku-sai… was dead?  How could that be?

Shock and grief rolled through Joslyn like a wave, but she would not allow her face to so much as twitch.  When she’d left Ku-sai to join the Imperial Army, she’d always assumed that she would be back one day, that she would be able to repair the damage her leaving so abruptly had done to their relationship, and that he would finally forgive her.

But if the seer was right and he was dead, she would never get that chance.

Joslyn clenched her jaw, struggling to push back down the potent mix of grief and guilt that threatened to overwhelm her.

“You are the greatest living sword master in the Empire now, Mizana,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Once, there may have been those in the Seven Cities whose dance outshone your own, but those days are gone — your ku-sai was the last great master of that art, and you are his only heir.”

The art of the sword master is death, Joslyn thought bitterly.  My inheritance is death.

“Which is why your responsibility goes far beyond a single pretty girl,” Grandmother Ajda continued.  Her expression shifted from sympathetic back to disdainful.  “Already there are shadows hiding in the bodies of men and women all over the East, spreading each day like a wicked pestilence, lying dormant, waiting for the day when they will be numerous enough to destroy the Empire itself.  With each new mind they take, they grow stronger.  The survivors of Deerpark Pass may have held off their infection for weeks; now, the freshly infected resist the possession for only half that time.  Without intervention, the Empire will soon be nothing more than an extension of the Shadowlands.  And with Port Lorsin in chaos as that fool Wise Man tries to exert his stolen power, who else is there but our one Mizana to protect the innocent?”

Joslyn hesitated.  “Tasia will take back the crown.  And she will protect the Empire, once she wears it.  Which is why I must honor my vow to her.”

“You don’t understand,” said Grandmother Ajda, shaking her head.  “The girl’s fate is… murky.  There are signs that she may yet prove herself a savior of us all… and other signs that she herself will be one of the first to succumb to the plague of shadows when it arrives in Port Lorsin.  But your own destiny?  The ink of your fate is already dry, Mizana — you have been claimed by the shadows, thanks to your foolishness.  You were strong enough to fight off the infection, yet it has left its mark on you.  That is why the shadows are drawn to you.  How do you think the one found you last night?”

Joslyn was quiet.

Grandmother Ajda leaned forward and spoke in urgent tones.  “You stink of the Shadowlands, Joslyn.  Wherever you go, you will draw them, just as a single crumb of bread draws an entire battalion of ants.  And if you get too near that pretty girl you chase, you will draw them to her.”  She paused, waiting for Joslyn to object, perhaps, but Joslyn did not.  “You cannot ‘protect’ her anymore.  The mere notion is contradiction.”

“You say I have a responsibility,” Joslyn said after a moment, “but what would you have me do?  Hunt down every infected man, woman, and child and slay them, like the soldier last night?  It is impossible.”

The old woman sighed, as if Joslyn’s ignorance was trying her patience.  “When you fought the beast on the mountaintop, it gorged you, did it not?”

Joslyn nodded.

“And what happened to you then?” Grandmother Ajda asked.  “It rent your soul,” the old woman said without waiting for Joslyn to answer.  She held up her fists, then pulled them violently apart, like someone ripping a brizat in two.  “It did not have to kill you to divide you against yourself, to send a part of you into the Shadowlands.  Only because your soul is so strong did you come back to this world.”

Wrong, thought Joslyn.  I am not strong.  I came back for Tasia.  Only for her.

“You do not have to slay to send a shadow back to where it belongs,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “With the right weapon, the smallest cut — ” she sliced at the air with a crooked outstretched index finger “ — will mend souls rather than rend them.”

“I have known many weapons.”  Joslyn narrowed her eyes skeptically.  “I have never known one that heals.”

“That is because you left your ku-sai before he had a chance to teach you.”  The seer’s tone was harsh, and it slapped Joslyn with a sting of fresh guilt.  “Some weapons are forged with the Old Tongue, like the rune-marked pike the small men gave you.”  She paused.  “You destroyed the host body the shadow inhabited last night, but you did not destroy the shadow itself.  It will simply find another body to inhabit.  To send it back to its own world, you need more than an ordinary sword.”

“Then — what?  Am I to get another rune-marked pike from the small men?”  Joslyn shook her head slowly.  “Even if I believed everything you are telling me, the small men keep their own counsel.  They will be found if they wish to be found; chasing them is useless.”

“For the Empire’s best hope at avoiding disaster, you are very nearly hopeless, Mizana,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Do you think I spent a sleepless night, draining myself, dancing with shadows, just to pull an elaborate trick on you?  Do you think I would have exhausted myself searching out your ku-sai just for my own amusement?”  She pursed her lips.  “He has been trying to reach you through your dreams, you know.  But you are too stubborn to let him in.  Which is why I had to find him, instead.”

Joslyn’s mind flashed involuntarily to the dream she’d had just before she’d woken.  Gon tajin, Ku-sai had said.

“I thought you said Ku-sai was dead?”

The seer drank more of her tea.  “He is dead.  Mostly.”  For a moment she appeared to search for the right words.  “Your ku-sai… history has rarely seen a dreamwalker of his skill.  Skilled enough to leave an echo of himself behind, in the Shadowlands, and to sustain himself for many years in order for this moment to arrive.”

Joslyn shook her head.  “No.  Ku-sai was not a dreamwalker.  He was a sword master.”

Grandmother Ajda quirked an eyebrow.  “Do you really believe that your ku-sai was the type of man to reveal all of himself at once?  Even to his kuna-shi?”

Joslyn gave no reply.  Of course he wasn’t.

“He would have trained you, you know, had you not been in such a hurry to prove yourself in the Imperial Army,” the old woman went on.  “We women are naturally stronger in the shadow arts than men.  We possess a greater resistance to the pull of the Shadowlands.  Your ku-sai would have made you the most powerful dreamwalker who ever lived, had you let him.”

Joslyn sat in silence.  It was all too much to absorb — first hearing that her ku-sai was dead, then that he was a dreamwalker, then that he had somehow anticipated this time, when shadows poured into the Empire.

How much of it was she to believe?  As a rule, Joslyn did not trust seers or sorceresses.  Half the time, they were old frauds.  The other half, they consorted with something… with something that made her skin crawl.

Grandmother Ajda finished her tea, and it seemed to Joslyn that the pungent liquid had made some kind of change in her.  She looked… younger, somehow.  The cloudiness in her eyes wasn’t so pronounced; her fingers did not seem so crooked.

“Your ku-sai wanted me to tell you that there is more to the art of being a sword master than what he told you that afternoon on the mountaintop outside his hut,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “And he said it is time for you to learn the other half of your art.”

Joslyn considered this statement but said nothing.

Grandmother Ajda clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.  “You are a suspicious one, aren’t you, Mizana?  What reason do I have to deceive you?”

“A seer allows herself to be inhabited by shadows to ply her trade,” Joslyn said.  “Anyone who does that willingly must want something desperately — power, maybe.  Money in the case of my old Mistress.  Knowledge, they say, in the case of the Cult of Culo.  But in any case, desperate want makes a person dangerous.”

“A young Mizana carrying no less than three blades, who bargains with the Prince of Shadows to come back from the dead mainly to chase a pretty face, calls an old woman like me dangerous,” Grandmother Ajda said, amused.

But Joslyn did not blink.

“Suspicious and stubborn,” said the seer, clearly growing exasperated.  “Fine.”

She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes for a moment.  When she opened them again, there were no black irises set against black pupils; there was only flame.

“It has been many years since last we met, Joslyn, daughter of Salif and A’eshan,” said a grating, masculine voice through the mouth of the seer.

The undatai, Joslyn thought, a surge of adrenaline pushing her hand to her dagger on reflex.

But then she realized this was not the same creature she had made a bargain with, the one who waited to consume her soul at the end of one year’s time, who would use her body to enter this world, the way the monster she slew the day before had used the soldier’s body.

This voice did not belong to that monster.  This was a voice she had not heard since childhood, since… Mistress.

“Yes.  Now you remember me,” the shadow said through the old woman.  “Our kind and your kind fought for many thousands of years, each of us nearly destroying the other many times.  Not all of us are so eager to reignite that endless war.  Some of us prefer to leave the  realms as they are — balanced.  Your ku-sai fought for such balance.  Now he is but a dream in our world.  A dream with one final gift to give you.”

It seemed to wait for Joslyn to speak, but she held her tongue.

The shadow chuckled — an eerie, grating sound that sent a chill down Joslyn’s spine.  “Ah, still the more recalcitrant sister.  I shall tell Tasmyn you have not changed much, the next time I see her.”

Joslyn’s stomach somersaulted to hear her sister’s name.  Tasmyn still lived?  They had not seen each other since the day Master sold Joslyn to Captain Samwin.  Joslyn hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.

“Stop toying with me, creature,” Joslyn hissed, regaining her composure.  “Say what the old woman brought you to say.  Or let me be.”

“Very well,” it said.  “Go to the last place you saw your ku-sai.  He left you the fifth limb of his body.  A single prick from it is enough to undo the binding between shadow and man.”

The fifth limb of his body.

No, it couldn’t be true.  Ku-sai never would have…

“You are reluctant to believe me,” the shadow said.  “Did I ever lie to your Mistress’s clients?”

“Perhaps you did not lie, but you took pleasure in their misery.”

The shadow shook Grandmother Ajda’s head.  “Wrong.  I take pleasure in truth.”

“Since when have monsters honored truth?”

“Stubborn,” the creature said, but not in the voice it had used before, nor in the voice of Grandmother Ajda.  “Rash.”

It was the voice of Ku-sai.

Icy fingers of fear wrapped around Joslyn’s spine.  Whatever this creature was, Joslyn was certain of one thing:  It was not Ku-sai.

The shadow chuckled again.  “You do not need to trust me to learn that we fight a common enemy, Mizana.  Go to where you last saw your ku-sai,” it said again.  “Then you will know the truth for yourself.”

“If you are truly my ally, tell me where Tasia is,” said Joslyn.

This time, the shadow seemed to hesitate — if it was possible for such a creature to hesitate.  At the very least, it didn’t answer right away.

“The seer warned you,” it said.  “You are marked by my kind.  You will bring shadows upon her — and not ones such as me.  Our common enemies seek her even now, but the Brotherhood of Culo keeps her well-hidden.  She is safe.”

“I will judge the truth of that for myself,” Joslyn said stonily.  The only person Joslyn trusted with Tasia’s life was Joslyn.  “I ask again:  Where is she?”

“You waste time we do not have,” the shadow said, an unsettling growl creeping into its voice.

“It is you who wastes time.”

A standoff ensued, each challenging the gaze of the other.

Joslyn did not want to stare into the flames that had replaced Grandmother Ajda’s eyes — there was something about them that made her profoundly uneasy — but she would not allow herself to look away.

“I will tell you where the girl is,” said the shadow, relenting.  “But in exchange, you must promise that you will leave here and find the Mizanto’s limb.”

“I have made enough promises to shadows already,” Joslyn said.  “But I promise that if you do not tell me where Tasia is, then I will never seek out Ku-sai’s sword.”

A tense moment passed between them.

“The girl some call ‘Empress’ and others call ‘traitor’ is here, in this very city,” it said at last.  “In a few hours, she will dine at the Lord of Paratheen’s table, and make a bargain she will come to regret.  Find her, if you must.  But if you bring the shadows upon her, do not say I did not warn you.”

Its final words faded, like a sound carried on the wind.

Joslyn sensed its departure from the seer more than she saw it.  Grandmother Ajda seemed to deflate, aging twenty years in a single moment.

She looked up at Joslyn, her eyes returned to their rheumy black.  “Was it enough?” she croaked.  Everything about the old woman’s posture and voice said she was exhausted.  “Do you see yet that you can do something that no one else can?”

Joslyn shook her head.  “No.  That is not my understanding at all.”  She stood from the table.  “I see only an old woman who consorts with demons.  An old woman, who, for all her years of wisdom, still hasn’t learned the lesson that demons cannot be trusted.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Tasia.”  Joslyn stepped around the table, heading towards the market square.

“Then learn that lesson yourself,” Grandmother Ajda called at her back.  “You’ll only lead the shadows right to her, which is exactly what they want.”

Joslyn hesitated but did not stop.  She found a street that pointed north and headed towards it, adjusting her brizat to better cover the sword on her back as she walked.  She did not know exactly where Lord M’Tongliss’s mansion was, but she knew the wealthiest merchants and smugglers of Paratheen had their homes on the bluffs at the city’s northern edge.  She knew the area far too well, and she knew she would find who she sought there.

“Stubborn.  Rash,” she heard behind her as she walked away.

She couldn’t say for sure whose voice it was — Grandmother Ajda’s, the shadow’s, her ku-sai’s… or all three.  But it didn’t matter.

13

~ THEN ~

“Lord M’Tongliss, House Paratheen,” announced the manservant at the ballroom’s entrance.  “And Lord Ythil, House Hebil.”

“They came,” Nik said excitedly in Tasia’s ear.  “They really came.”

Tasia risked a glance towards the entrance, even though it meant she had to lean forward to peer around the lord who was currently fawning over little Adela.

She was rewarded with a stern glance from Wise Man Norix, but also with the sight of the two strangest lords she’d ever seen.

The taller lord, Lord M’Tongliss of House Paratheen, was a tall and broad-shouldered handsome young man with a deeply tanned face, a long, pointy black beard, and a cream-colored turban with a purple jewel at the forehead.  The other lord was thin and wiry, with a scar across his face that reminded Tasia of Cole of Easthook.

This was the first time the newly minted lords of Terinto had personally attended the Emperor’s council meetings; in earlier years, they had always sent representatives.  According to Norix, it might be because the lords didn’t feel comfortable in Port Lorsin or the palace, where there were many who still harbored animosity towards the Terintans.

Tasia thought the lingering hostility towards Terinto was silly.  The last pockets of resistance in Terinto, including the northern region of the Seven Cities, where Lord Ythil was from, had been put down by Father’s troops nearly twelve years ago.  Tasia had been a toddler when Terinto had been fully incorporated into the Empire; Nik hadn’t even been born yet.  She didn’t see why everyone acted as if the Terintans were still fighting the Empire for their independence.

“Stand straight, Prince Nikhost, Princess Natasia,” Norix said quietly.

Tasia stopped leaning around the lord talking to Adela, but Nik couldn’t stop fidgeting.  He could barely contain himself as he waited for the two Terintan lords to approach.

But of course, they reached Adela first.

“Lord M’Tongliss, Lord Ythil,” Norix said, a pleasant smile on his face.  “Welcome to Port Lorsin.  We are glad you could make it to the council meetings this winter.”

That was Adela’s cue.  She curtsied to the lords.  “Thank you for coming to our ball tonight, my Lords.”

Lord Ythil merely nodded at the courtesy, but Lord M’Tongliss, the one with the cream-colored turban, tittered with delight and bowed deeply to Adela.

“The honor is all ours, your Majesty,” he said with a thick Terintan accent.

Adela pinked at being bowed to and called “your Majesty.”  She tried, unsuccessfully, to bite back a pleased grin.

Tasia curtsied next.  Normally, the eldest child of a noble bowed or curtsied last, but in this case, since she was a girl and Nik was a boy, she curtsied first so that the crown prince could be the one to go last.

“How do you do?” she said to the lords politely.  “As representatives of our father the Emperor and on behalf of the entire House of Dorsa, we are happy to have you here tonight.”  The words rattled off her tongue, given that she’d repeated them at least a dozen times already this evening.

Both lords went to one knee and kissed the seal of the House of Dorsa on Tasia’s ring.  They hadn’t done so with Adela, because she wouldn’t wear the ring until she was twelve.  At thirteen, Tasia was considered a young woman already.  In five more years, she would be marriageable, but the proposals would start coming in well before that.  There were lords eyeing her already, wondering if they’d be lucky enough to marry a son or nephew to her.

She hated those looks, which had grown considerably more common as her breasts had developed over the past year or so.  At least these two odd Lords of Terinto — especially Lord M’Tongliss — seemed to bow more out of amused obligation than an attempt to ingratiate themselves to her.

At last they came to Nik.

“As future Emperor of the Four Realms,” Nik said, in the most regal (but squeaky) imitation of his father he could manage, “I extend a warm welcome to you both.”  Again the lords bowed, and before they could even straighten again, Nik asked in a low voice, “Is it true what they say about the desert tribesmen, Lord M’Tongliss?  Do they really sleep beside their apa-apa at night for warmth?  Would they not invite fleas that way?”

“Prince Nikhost,” Norix snapped.

“You must never forget that, regardless of your age, you are the superior of the nobility by birth alone,” Norix was fond of telling them.  “When you behave as children instead of members of the House of Dorsa, they are reminded that you are just a child, and they will treat you as a child — for the rest of your life.”

Yet the question was so… Nik.  Tasia couldn’t help herself; she snorted out a giggle, earning her own glare from Norix.

Lord M’Tongliss also apparently couldn’t help himself.  He threw his head back so far that Tasia thought his turban might fall off, put one hand on his belly, and let out a long, bellowing laugh.  He was so loud, in fact, that several of the other nearby lords and ambassadors, who stood chatting in tight circles based on political alliances, turned to see what the disturbance was.  When they saw that it was one of the lords of Terinto, some of them frowned and quickly looked away — as if the mere act of witnessing Lord M’Tongliss’s un-lord-like laugh might associate them with him.  Other lords appeared amused and whispered quiet jokes to their friends.

“Well, my Prince,” Lord M’Tongliss said to Nik once he’d finally recovered himself.  “Most of the desert tribes live in blivas, and their herds do not.  And being inside a bliva made of their cousins’ coats and skins might unnerve the poor apa-apa.”

“Oh,” Nik said, clearly disappointed.  “A bliva is a tent, right?”

“A bliva is so much more than a tent, your Majesty,” said Lord M’Tongliss in a serious tone.  “A bliva is a whole universe.  Inside a bliva, there is love and war, birth and death, alliances formed and enemies made, promises given and promises broken.”  His eyes roamed over the clusters of lords and ladies, then Lord M’Tongliss gave Nik a sly smile.  “A bliva, I suppose, is not at all unlike a royal ballroom.  That you can understand, yes?”

“I think so,” said Nik uncertainly.

Tasia didn’t need to see Norix’s expression to know that he was fuming.  The Wise Man lived by the strict codes of conduct laid out by the Wise Men of the past, and any breach of those written and unwritten rules apparently had the power to destabilize Norix’s whole existence.  Nik’s question about nomads sleeping with their apa-apa had been a tremendous breach of etiquette, and Lord M’Tongliss’s decision to educate his future sovereign, the Prince of the Four Realms, on something as petty and inconsequential as the tents that desert nomads used might’ve been a breach even worse than Nik’s.

Norix’s wrath wouldn’t be turned upon Lord M’Tongliss, however, because he would consider the nomad who had only recently been elevated to lord a novitiate in the world of polite society, and as such expected about as much from a “Lord” than one might expect from a common child from the Merchant Quarter’s north end.

A royal child, however?

Tasia knew she and Nik would be in for a series of lectures tomorrow thanks to Nik’s blunder, and they’d probably even be made to copy entire passages from Wise Man Rewan’s Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations.

“Lord Sigfried, House Becker,” called the servant at the ballroom’s entrance.

“Enjoy the ball, my Lords,” Tasia said hurriedly, with a polite goodbye nod to the two lords of Terinto.

But Nik didn’t take the hint.  “I don’t understand why the nomads would need tents or apa-apa to keep them warm.  Isn’t the desert already quite hot?”

“During the winter, desert nights can be close to freezing,” Lord M’Tongliss replied, even as Lord Sigfried of House Becker approached the receiving line behind him.  “The apa-apa have wool that is ideal for the desert — porous enough to allow for airflow, thick enough to provide insulation from the cold desert nights.  That is why our apa-apa wool is such a valuable commodity for the Empire, your Majesty.”

Nik cocked his head, appearing to mull over this new information.

Lord Sigfried gave a pointed clearing of his throat.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Lord Ythil said gruffly, and he moved away from the royal children, pulling Lord M’Tongliss with him.

~ NOW ~

With Linna’s help, Tasia squeezed herself into unfamiliar Terintan finery only a quarter of an hour before the formal dinner was set to take place with Lord M’Tongliss and his household.  It wasn’t the first such dinner they’d had; he’d held one in honor of her arrival a few days after she and Evrart came, and another one when M’Tongliss had hosted Lord Ythil of House Hebil a few weeks later.  Perhaps it was the failure of the previous formal dinner that made Tasia anxious now.  Lord Ythil had refused to pledge his support to Tasia, and it was only thanks to Lord M’Tongliss’s persuasion and veiled threats that he had agreed not to reveal Tasia’s whereabouts to local authorities.

Or perhaps her nerves were still frayed over the near-disaster with the magistrates who had nearly discovered her a few days previous, or her fight with Evrart, or that she dreaded learning what price her host would demand of her in exchange for his fifteen hundred soldiers.

Will M’Tongliss be satisfied with land? Tasia wondered as she examined herself in the mirror.  The silk dress embroidered with complex geometric patterns was unlike anything she’d ever worn before.  Its several layers draped around her in long, billowing swoops of fabric, and only after several turns around her body did it fasten in the center of her chest, held in place as if by sorcery with a single jeweled broach.

He doesn’t seem like he wants land, she thought, straightening the broach.  What use is land in the desert?  But if not land, then…?

Tasia pivoted in front of the mirror.

“Why are all the clothes in Terinto so difficult to put on?” she huffed, half to herself and half to Linna.

The slave girl made no reply.

Tasia turned again and smoothed the front of the dress.  “I hope it looks alright.  I can’t very well negotiate with the Lord while looking like a fool who cannot dress herself.”

“It flatters you, Empress,” Linna said softly from behind.

Tasia caught Linna’s eye in the mirror.  “Thank you.  But my features are too fair for this color.  It would look much better on you.”

Linna shook her head quickly, eyes widening.  “Not on me, ma’am.”

Tasia took a step backward, held up an edge of the pale lavender to Linna’s cheek.  She examined the effect in the mirror.  “See?  The color flatters you.  You should try it on, after the dinner.  Though it would be too big on you.”

Linna shook her head again.  “No, ma’am.  Silk is forbidden to slaves.  It would be five lashes if anyone saw me, at least.”

Tasia turned to face her, lips pursed.  “Is that right?  Slaves cannot wear silk?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why?”

Linna dropped her gaze.  “I think, ma’am… I think they worry that if we wear silk, like the rich people, then they might not be able to tell slaves apart from citizens, and then the slaves could escape.”

Tasia was quiet for a moment, thinking of Joslyn’s escape from this very city more than a decade earlier.  “Does that happen often?  Slaves escaping their masters?”

“Lord M’Tongliss and his wives treat me well, ma’am,” Linna said, dodging the question.  “I have no reason to want to escape.”

An idea occurred to Tasia, but she pushed it aside.

“They are probably waiting for me,” she told Linna.  “I should make my way to the dining hall.”

Linna fidgeted, but did not move to go.

“What?” Tasia asked.

“Empress, ma’am, is it true that you are preparing to leave with the Lord’s soldiers soon?  I have heard other slaves saying that it might be the case.”

The idea that had occurred to Tasia earlier came back to her.  It might have only been because Linna reminded her so much of Joslyn, but Tasia liked this girl.  Liked her so much so that she wondered if she’d be able to convince Lord M’Tongliss to let Linna come with her.  Would he accept the excuse that Tasia needed a personal servant?  It sounded like a plausible reason.

“We leave within the week,” Tasia answered.  As soon as we can gather the remaining supplies for our journey.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask, Linna?”

“It is nothing,” the girl said after a moment’s hesitation.  “Only that we will miss having you as our guest.  You are very kind to the slaves.  Everyone says so.”

Tasia smiled.  “I wish I could say that I’ve always been kind.  Perhaps it is less that I am kind and more that I wish to make up for past mistakes.”

Linna tentatively returned Tasia’s smile.

Discreetly, Tasia patted her hips.  She thought she had done a reasonably good job of disguising the twin daggers that hung beneath the folds of the Terintan gown.

“Will you walk me to the dining hall, Linna?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

#

Lord M’Tongliss bowed deeply a few minutes later, when Tasia paused underneath the archway that separated the main part of the house from the open-air dining hall at the rear of the home.

“You look more stunning than ever, Empress,” Lord M’Tongliss said after a slave announced Tasia’s presence in a baritone Terintan.  “Terintan styles flatter you.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Tasia said, nodding to M’Tongliss, his two wives, and his nine children.

He approached and offered his arm.

She took his arm and allowed him to escort her to an upholstered, high-backed seat in the center of a long table.  Once she was seated, they went through the normal Terintan mealtime rituals, with Tasia taking the first bite, Lord M’Tongliss openly worrying it wouldn’t be to her liking, Tasia insisting that it was all the most incredible food she had ever tasted.

“What a feast,” Tasia said, nodding at the trays of olives, flat bread, fresh vegetables, and fragrant fruits.  And even though it was all ritual, the rich scent of something — lamb, Tasia guessed — made her mouth water as it wafted into the dining hall from beyond the partition that hid the open-air kitchen.  “After tonight, I doubt I will be able to fit into any gowns, Terintan style or Empire style.”

Lord M’Tongliss chuckled and opened his arms to indicate the spread of food.  “Let it never be said that the Empress Natasia visited my home and left underfed.”

The evening breeze ruffled the canopy of silks above.  The long rivers of silk were spaced just far enough apart to allow in the last remnants of the evening sun, making the copper lanterns hanging from the wooden beams temporarily unnecessary.

Using silk for a canopy was a bit like using a fine longsword as a table knife, but Tasia had learned that it was in keeping with the Lord’s ostentation to display his wealth in such a way.  The long swaths of silk above them, each some three feet wide and twenty feet long, had to be worth at least a silver eagle a piece.

Tasia clenched her fists beneath the table.  This grinning lord across from her had so much silk carelessly above their heads yet a single thread of it on one of his slaves would earn them the lash.

She glanced around, frowning.  “Where is Evrart?” she asked Lord M’Tongliss, once she identified what was missing.  She hadn’t seen her counselor since Halia had taken her upstairs to bathe and rest hours earlier.

The Lord gave a disinterested shrug.  “He left about an hour ago.  Something about having business to attend to.”

Business to attend to?  She smiled even as she ground her teeth in irritation.  She was getting so tired of her “counselor” constantly disappearing without consulting with her first.

“I’m sure he’ll turn up when he’s finished, then,” Tasia managed lightly.  She took the cloth napkin at her place setting and spread it across her lap.  “Please, let us eat.  I’m famished.”

14

~ THEN ~

It had been a few years since Master and Mistress had taken them to Paratheen, and to eleven-year-old Joslyn, the city was even brighter and livelier than she remembered it.  Without doubt, of all the towns and cities she had visited, Paratheen was her favorite.  There was something about being inside Terinto, yet being in a city — a real city — that made the place extraordinary to her.  Regardless of what names Terintans were called in the rest of the Empire, Paratheen made her believe that her people were capable of marvelous things.

Besides, Paratheen was so much more colorful than other cities.  Yes, most of the buildings and all of the streets were all the same dingy, dusty beige, but the people themselves were draped in so many colors that they were like living banners.  The merchants, some of whom Joslyn knew were also smugglers, were the most colorful of all, wearing tall turbans of bright Adessian silks and long, loose robes that had to be far more comfortable than her own old trousers in the desert heat.

Then there were her own cousins, the nomadic apa-apa herders and other desert tribesmen, who visited Paratheen only briefly for business.  The men also wore turbans, the women wore headscarves, and although the pale yellows and pale greens they chose were less exotic than what the merchants wore, it seemed to Joslyn that they still possessed more farzun in their dress and manner than people in other parts of the Empire.

The other sight in Paratheen that somehow lightened Joslyn’s step was that of all the slaves.

She didn’t much mind being a slave.  She hadn’t known much else — she could barely remember her childhood with the tribe of Marisan, and Master and Mistress generally treated her and Tasmyn quite well.  The sisters were beaten by the tinkers only rarely, only when they deserved it.  Yet they never saw slaves in other parts of the Empire.  Slavery was not precisely illegal elsewhere, but neither was it common, and most people regarded her and Tasmyn as if they were circus creatures.  Adults and children alike kept their distance from the sisters, as if their condition of being enslaved was something that might be contagious.

But in Paratheen, slaves were everywhere, and no one looked at her askance for being someone else’s possession.  Everybody seemed to have a slave in Paratheen, from the merely middle class merchants, to the café owners, to the Adessian sailors who were only passing through.

Joslyn could tell the slaves from the free because the slaves would catch her eye as they passed in the streets, giving a quick, acknowledging nod, or a smile, or a quiet “Fleeting blister.”  That last note of camaraderie, which sounded to most ears like a nonsense phrase, was actually Paratheenian slave slang.  To keep their conversations private from their masters, the slaves replaced common words with words that rhymed, which meant “Fleeting blister” actually translated into “Greetings, sister.”  Some of the slang was common, like the greeting, while in other cases the listener had to think fast to decode what their compatriot was trying to tell them based on context alone.

While Tasmyn arrogantly refused to learn the slang or communicate with it, Joslyn had soaked up as much of the street talk as she could.  Knowing it made her feel like she was a part of something greater than herself — nearly a family of sorts.  And for a slave girl, a poor, loose substitute for family was better than no family at all.

She had expected Master to stop and set up his cart when they reached Paratheen’s largest market square, but instead it was Mistress and Tasmyn who stopped, unfolding a table to do card readings on a street corner.

“You and I continue,” Master said to Joslyn when she moved to help Tasmyn with the table.  “We have another appointment.”

Joslyn only nodded obediently and followed him through the crowd without bothering to ask where they were going.

Over the past year, Joslyn had begun to work with Master more and Mistress less.  These days when they arrived at a city or a town, Tasmyn and Mistress would stay behind with the bliva or card table, telling the fortunes of whatever young women (they were almost always young women) might arrive, while Joslyn went with Master to set up his tinker cart in the square.  There, they would sharpen farm tools and knives and repair broken things until sundown, then pull the cart back to the bliva to eat and sleep.

That was fine with Joslyn.  Learning Master’s trade seemed like more natural, wholesome work than Mistress’s.

It wasn’t until Joslyn and Master left the crowded markets behind, then the cafés, then the beehives of tenement homes, and finally emerged into the wealthier northern section of town that Joslyn finally asked:

“Master?  Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he said over his shoulder.

They finally stopped at a fine, large home with a low adobe wall around it.  Two date palms — signs of true wealth — stood on either side of a round wooden door set in the wall.

Master knocked on the door.

A small window at the top of the door slid open, and a pair of dark eyes looked out at them.

“Yes?” said the owner of the eyes.

“I am the tinker N’Galyn.  I have an appointment with your master.”

The door swung open, revealing a brick-paved courtyard.  Joslyn had been taught by Master and Mistress that it was rude to gawk, but her eyes widened and her jaw fell despite herself; she had never seen a home so grand up close.  She’d seen the houses and castles of lords and ladies from a distance, of course — nearly every town in the Empire larger than a village had a lord with a castle, or at least a fine house — but she’d never been inside the walls of one.

A man — an Adessian-born slave, given his dark complexion and the star-shaped symbols tattooed on his left cheek — ushered them into the courtyard.

“Commoners and slaves enter through the kitchen.  At the back,” he said curtly, and pointed.

“Come, Joslyn,” Master said, and there was something in his voice that Joslyn had heard only rarely:  unease.

Joslyn followed Master around the side of the large house, not bothering to hide her wonderment at the three tall spires that rose from it and reached towards the blue sky like fingers trying to touch Father Mezzu himself.  Each tower was topped with a mushroom-shaped dome painted in bright green and yellow stripes.

Who could live in such a home as this?  And what business could Master possibly have with the owner?  Mistress was always telling Joslyn that she had far too much imagination than a girl her age had a right to, but now Joslyn couldn’t help but imagine that she must be inside the home of one of the merchants who ruled Paratheen, or maybe the second home of an Adessian prince… or perhaps even a sorcerer of the Cult of Culo.  The last thought made her bite her bottom lip in nervous anticipation.

They found the kitchen at the back of the house primarily through scent; the afternoon meal, it seemed, was already being prepared.

Two sides of the kitchen were open; the other two connected to the walls of the main house.  This was practical, Joslyn saw, because the large twin clay ovens, which to her eyes looked like giant, upside-down cooking funnels, spilled their extra heat not back into the house, but into the sky and the courtyard.  A freestanding partition wall separated the far end of the kitchen from a secondary courtyard, which was covered overhead with what looked like a giant bliva.

“Fleeting color,” said a skinny man in a blood-splattered apron to Master.

“I’m not your brother,” Master snapped irritably.  “I’m the tinker, here to see your master about my girl.”

The skinny man’s eyes flitted from Master to Joslyn, and Joslyn felt the first stirrings of apprehension deep in her gut.  She bit down harder on her lip.

Joslyn was the only “girl” Master could possibly mean.  What business could Master have with an Adessian prince that had to do with her?

“Apologies, tinker,” said the skinny man in formal Terintan.  He turned to a girl a few years older than Joslyn and rattled off a sentence in slave-slang that was too fast and complex for Joslyn to follow.

When the girl turned to go, Joslyn saw that one side of her face looked like melted candle wax, and the eye on that side was milky and unseeing.  It was such a horrific sight that Joslyn took half a step backwards, gaping rudely.  The girl must have immersed half her face in fire to earn a mass of scars like that.  Joslyn supposed that was the natural consequence of working in a giant kitchen like this one, and she thanked her luck that all the tinker made her do was sharpen tools and run errands for him.

The scarred girl returned only seconds later.

“Our master will see you now, tinker,” she said in a voice that rasped and wheezed when she spoke.  Maybe she’d burned more than just her face in her accident.

The girl led them into the open courtyard beneath the enormous bliva.  It appeared to be some kind of grand dining hall.  Marble pillars stood in long columns of each side of the space, holding up the bliva top.  Parallel to the pillars and trees were long, polished tables, with at least a dozen high-backed chairs pushed in at each one.  The far end of the space held one last table, perpendicular to all the rest and set upon a dais.  At its center sat a single man with a plate of food before him.

The man looked up.

He was not an Adessian prince, that was for sure.  Nor did he look like any wealthy merchant Joslyn had ever seen — he didn’t wear a turban or silks, and he had no beard.  He probably wasn’t even Terintan.  If Joslyn had to guess, she would say he was a Westerner.

But a Westerner?  Living in such a grand house in Paratheen?  Why?

Joslyn followed a few steps behind Master, whose pace slowed as he approached the table.  Joslyn stopped when Master stopped.

The Westerner was middle-aged, his face was pock-marked, and one cheek had a vertical scar that ran from his eye to the corner of his mouth.  When he looked up at Master and Joslyn, the scar itself seemed to frown.

There was something undeniably severe about this man.

He put down his fork and looked at them, but it seemed to Joslyn that his glowering gaze landed on her rather than Master.

Master gave a slight bow.  “Good to see you again, Captain Samwin.”  He gestured at Joslyn.  “I brought the girl.  As requested.”

Captain Samwin stood and walked around the end of the table, stopping before Joslyn and crossing his arms against his chest.  He looked her up and down, then circled slowly, saying nothing.  Gooseflesh rose on Joslyn’s arms, on the back of her neck.

“She’s a good girl,” Master said, and Joslyn could hear the anxiety in his tone.  “She works hard and knows better than to talk back.”

The feeling of the man’s eyes on her made Joslyn fidget.

“She’ll do,” said Captain Samwin to Master.  His tone was lazy, bored.  He reached into his shirt and tossed Master a pouch of what sounded like coins.

Master bobbled the pouch awkwardly before opening it and peering inside.  He nodded to himself and cinched it closed again.  “Thank you, Captain.”

Wait.  Had Master just sold her?

Panicked, Joslyn glanced from Master to the Captain.  “Master?” she said, the word coming out as a frightened squeak.

“Captain Samwin is your master now.  Treat him with respect and obedience, as we have trained you.”  He hesitated.  “Goodbye, Joslyn.”  He looked like he might say something more, but instead he turned on his heel and strode swiftly towards the partition wall that separated the dining hall from the kitchen.

Trembling, eyes wide, Joslyn turned to face Captain Samwin.  He did not speak.  He did not move.  His eyes drilled into her.

Not knowing what else to do, Joslyn offered a deep bow.

“I am at your s-service, M-master,” she stammered.

“Go find Yael,” said Captain Samwin.  “The kitchen wench with the scarred face.  She’ll show you to your bunk.”

~ NOW ~

Joslyn arrived at the grand mansion of Lord M’Tongliss in the late afternoon, just as the sun started to fall beyond the western horizon, the golden light of late afternoon giving way to the softer tones of early evening, lengthening the shadows cast by the home and its evenly spaced decorative date palms.

So many date palms.  They were symbols of status in Paratheen, and Lord M’Tongliss had enough to broadcast to the entire city that he had more status than any other.  The amount of fresh water it took to keep a single palm alive was a wasteful luxury that few could afford; the multiple palms Lord M’Tongliss had planted not just inside his courtyard but also outside his walls screamed a declaration of his wealth.

And in a city like Paratheen, one only flaunted one’s wealth if one also controlled an army of swords who were prepared to protect it.

So it was with no small amount of caution that Joslyn first counted the twelve guards patrolling outside the walls, estimated the number of guards inside the perimeter, and only then decided she was ready to breach the sprawling home.  There was very little sunlight left by then; she kept to the shadows cast by the setting sun, searching for a way in that wouldn’t force her to scale the wall or confront too many guards.

Joslyn was certain there would be another way in besides the main gate or climbing a wall.  No one in Paratheen, not even the wealthy and powerful, built homes like this without at least one hidden way to escape in case of emergency.  Besides, many of Paratheen’s wealthiest citizens had earned their fortunes through nefarious means — smuggling was the most common of those means, and smugglers needed doorways other than the main gate for their goods to come and go without being seen.

She found what she was searching for at the wall’s northwest corner — a small, nearly invisible hidden door obscured behind a date palm.  It was so well-hidden that she might have missed it entirely, except for one fact:  The hidden door was already ajar.

It wasn’t open by much.  An inch, maybe two.  But the crack was enough to draw a faint dark line outlining the entrance.

Joslyn frowned.

Someone else had already snuck in this same way, skilled enough to find a hidden door that she herself might have easily overlooked.

She approached, cautiously nudging the door, which couldn’t be more than about three feet high.  Just large enough for an adult to hunch through.  Her nudge opened  the door a few inches, but then it stopped.

Something blocked the door on the other side.  Something heavy.

Glancing right and left to assure herself that both squads of perimeter guards were still on the opposite sides of the building, Joslyn pushed the door harder.

Her efforts yielded only a few more inches.

Drawing a breath and a dagger, Joslyn put her shoulder against the door and pushed as hard as she could.  Whatever was on the other side gradually gave way; she could hear the gritty sound of an object sliding against the courtyard’s bricks.

Finally, the door opened enough for her to slip inside.

The reason for the jam was apparent as soon as she stepped into the courtyard:  Two dead guards, one atop the other, lay facedown in a pool of blood on the other side of the hidden door.  Joslyn’s heart rate spiked.  She fell into a crouch, scanning the courtyard as she brought her breath and pulse under control.

There was no sign of the killer — or killers.  And given the way the guards’ blood had darkened and partially dried against the brick, Joslyn judged that they had died at least an hour ago, perhaps two.

She knelt beside the bodies.  The bottom one’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, purple bruising blossoming at the sides.  The body on top had a deep gash a few inches long, located with almost surgical precision, just below the jaw.

Their deaths had been swift, silent, and efficient.  Each fatal wound bore the signs of a professional.

Joslyn searched for bloody footprints on the brick in the dying light, but was unsurprised when she found none.

She straightened.  There was one thing she was relatively certain of:  These guards had not been the killer’s targets.  They were simply the unfortunate men stationed here to guard the hidden door.

So who was the final target of the assassin?  Lord M’Tongliss?

Or perhaps an exiled Princess?

In the growing dark, there was nothing much to see, so Joslyn unfurled her sense of smell and hearing as her ku-sai had taught her.  She heard nothing out of the ordinary, only the night crows, who were probably picking at the dates.  But she smelled a fine, rich meal.  Spices contrasting against tomato.  And meat.  Not apa-apa.  Not goat or chicken or duck, either.  It was…

Lamb.  The delicacy one reserved for an honored guest.

Joslyn moved towards the smell with her dagger still at the ready, letting her nose guide her steps like a bloodhound, stealing from shadow to shadow closer to the source of the fragrant meal.

The stronger the scent grew, the louder the accompanying sounds of pots, plates, footsteps, and chattering slaves became.  The rhyming pidgin of the slaves gave rise to a mixture of emotions inside Joslyn; nostalgia blended with nameless anxiety to form a soup of unease.

She pushed the feelings aside.

Light spilled out from the open-ended corner of the kitchen, and one of the clay ovens, which looked like a duplicate of the upside-down funnel of an oven she knew from Captain Samwin’s house, came into view as she crept along the adjacent wall.    Slaves bustled in and out of view, sliding trays and cooking stones into the oven on long wooden paddles.  Beyond the oven, she saw the false wall that divided the kitchen area from the dining area.  Beyond that partition, she guessed, would be Tasia.

Movement flickered across Joslyn’s field of vision, drawing her gaze upward.  Was there someone on the roof?

Yes — there.  Ten feet above the noisy, barely contained chaos, the dark swirl of a cloak or a brizat slid just out of view as someone moved along the overhanging roof.

Just as at Captain Samwin’s home, two of the kitchen’s sides were open, leaving a square  roof supported by a pair of pillars on either side.  The roof hung over the kitchen like a giant canopy.

The only way to the roof was to scramble up one of the pillars, which thankfully were not the same as the smooth marble pillars she knew would lie beyond the kitchen, lining each side of the open-air dining hall.

With chilling clarity, Joslyn realized that was probably why the assassin was above the kitchen — climbing the kitchen’s stone pillars was the easiest way to access the space above the dining area without being seen.

Joslyn waited until the slaves all faced away from her, then darted into the shadow of one of the kitchen’s pillars.  She waited until they faced away again, sheathed her dagger, and scampered up to the roof with the practiced ease of a tree squirrel.

She drew her dagger and braced for an attack as soon as the balls of her feet touched the sloping clay tiles of the roof.

But no attack came.  The intruder she’d glimpsed earlier was already gone.

Joslyn crept to the edge of the kitchen roof.  Smoke from one of the ovens billowed into the night sky on her left; she could feel the heat emanating from its chimney radiating towards her.  She crouched there a moment, calculating.

It was only about four feet from the roof’s edge to the partition wall separating the kitchen from the dining area, but the partition was only about six inches wide — it would make for a precarious landing.  And from the wall to the closest dining hall pillar looked to be about five or six more feet.  It wasn’t too much of a leap if she had a running start, but she would only have a few inches, not a runway.

Joslyn was about to look for another way onto the top of the dining hall pillars when the rising moon, still large and low in the sky, silhouetted a figure.

The assassin.

He had already managed to make it to the top of one of the pillars lining the open-air dining hall.  Like an ominous gargoyle, he perched on his pillar and gazed down upon the diners below.

The canopy over this dining hall was quite unlike the bliva-like one Joslyn had grown used to during her three years with Captain Samwin.  The Captain’s hall had been covered by a single felt canopy, peaked in the center just like a traditional nomad’s bliva.  This canopy was made of long, banner-like strips of silk that hung from a grid of wooden beams suspended across the pillars.  The strips of silk were spaced out evenly over the whole hall, with one or two feet between each strip.

Joslyn supposed the gaps between the silk swaths were meant to let in the breeze and, during daylight hours, the sun.  But right now, all those gaps succeeded in doing was to provide the assassin with an inconspicuous view of the dining hall and its occupants.

She examined again the route of two leaps she would need to make — the first from her spot at the edge of the kitchen roof to the partition wall, then from the wall to the top of the closest marble pillar.  It would take a feat of acrobatics that she wasn’t sure she was capable of.

But the assassin had made it.  So she would have to make it, too.

The assassin produced something from within his cloak — slender, cylindrical, and about two feet long:  a blowgun.

With the speed of a striking snake, Joslyn whipped her boot dagger free and took aim for the assassin’s throat.  But just as she prepared to loose the dagger, a second silhouette appeared from nowhere atop the wooden grid, mere feet from the assassin.  Before either Joslyn or the assassin could react, the second man lunged awkwardly, off-balance but managing to wrap an arm around the assassin’s neck.  The two teetered on the edge of the pillar, and for a moment, Joslyn was sure they would topple off the edge.

By some miracle, they both kept their feet.  The second man was bigger than the assassin, but the assassin was more skilled.  The assassin pawed at the arm around his throat, but Joslyn knew his show of struggle was only that — a show.  With his other hand, he reached for a hilt at his waist.

Joslyn didn’t pause to think.  She couldn’t throw the dagger now without risking hitting the second man, so she charged off the edge of the roof, launching herself towards the partition wall.  As soon as her feet struck, she pushed off and up.  Mid-flight, she realized too late that she had miscalculated her jump and would miss the top of the pillar by a foot.  She stretched her hands up, willing her fingers to find the top of the pillar — and barely managed to catch the pillar’s top ledge.

She let out a grunt of pain when her body slammed into the pillar’s trunk, and for a moment she was certain the slaves below would discover her.  But no cries of alarm came.

Joslyn hauled herself up to the pillar’s top before she could lose her grip, then leap-frogged from the first pillar to the next, the second to the third, until finally she was in reach of the assassin and the mysterious second man, who were still embroiled in their precarious wrestling match between the wooden grid and the fourth pillar.

The assassin held a long, thin curved dagger in his hand, but the second man had grabbed the assassin’s forearm, keeping the dagger just at bay.

Joslyn scampered sideways, making a short jump from her pillar to the wooden grid, and from there she hopped to a cross beam within striking distance from the struggling pair.

But now she hesitated.

All this time, she’d assumed that the assassin was the threat, which made the second man her ally.

But what if her assumption was wrong?  Joslyn didn’t know what was happening here, or why.  For all she knew, the assassin had been hired by Tasia, and the second man was the threat.

The second man caught Joslyn’s eye.  “What are you waiting for?” he hissed in a harsh whisper.  “Kill her while we still can!”

Her?

The moonlight caught them, and two things became instantly clear to Joslyn:

First, the assassin’s profile, illuminated by moonlight, was unmistakably feminine.

Second, the mysterious man struggling to keep the woman’s dagger away from his flank was none other than Wise Man Evrart, whom Joslyn knew from her days serving Tasia in the palace.

But still Joslyn stalled her strike:  Wise Man Norix had been the one who falsely accused Tasia of murdering her father the Emperor; Evrart was Norix’s protégé.

Joslyn’s earlier doubts deepened.  What was Evrart doing so near to Tasia?  Was he here to help or to harm ?  And how had he appeared out of nowhere atop the canopy beams?

“Please, Joslyn!” Evrart said, fighting to keep his grip on the assassin’s forearm.

The assassin thrust her hips backward, trying unsuccessfully to throw Evrart off balance.  The moon glinted against her chest in the process, catching a metallic disc just below her hood.

And all at once, Joslyn had the answer to her questions.

15

Tasia waited for the slaves to clear the remnants of the meal and M’Tongliss’s two wives to usher the children to bed before she turned to business.  She’d wanted Evrart to be here for this part, because, like all palace Wise Men, he had been trained in political negotiation.

But he was still inexplicably missing, the food at his place cold, the gravy around the lamb congealed.  She glanced at his empty chair, then told herself she would be fine without him.

No matter what Evrart thinks, she thought, I don’t need a wet nurse.

Doubt gnawed at her anyway.  She wasn’t her father.  And M’Tongliss was cunning.

But then a soft voice in the back of her mind whispered:  Your spirit is made of fire and rock; you are more than capable of handling M’Tongliss without him.

Joslyn’s voice.  Joslyn’s words.  How Tasia wished the warrior was still with her, watching over everything with that stoic silence of hers, stealing Tasia’s breath with the smallest of looks, the gentlest of touches.

An image of Joslyn bleeding to death on the floor of the roofless hut a few miles from the winter camp flashed through Tasia’s mind.

Her throat was suddenly tight.  She cleared her throat, but it didn’t help; all it took for tears to threaten was the mere thought of her missing guard.

At the sound of of Tasia clearing her throat, Lord M’Tongliss turned towards her with a sunny smile.  He must have assumed that the throat clearing had been meant for him.

“We are quite alone now, Empress, I assure you,” he said.  He produced a polished bone pipe from within his robes.  “Would you like to smoke with me?”  When Tasia hesitated, he added, “Do you know of the white cactus flower of the Great Desert?  Amongst the tribes, smoking it together is a common way for new friends to affirm their friendship, and for allies to seal their pacts.”

“Is that how you see me, my Lord?  As an ally sealing a pact?”  Tasia waited a moment, then added, “The last time I checked, we were not allies.  I am your Empress and you are my vassal.”

He chuckled, packing the bowl of the pipe with dried white petals.  “True enough, your Majesty,” he said, but Tasia couldn’t quite tell if his tone was mocking, or deferential, or mockingly deferential.  “I think you must agree, though, that for an Empress, you find yourself in a rather compromised position.  A position which will require you to forge both friendships and allies before you can speak of having vassals again.”

Tasia watched silently as Lord M’Tongliss dipped a thin, dry reed into the flame of one of the candles before him, then used the reed to light his pipe before shaking it out.  He puffed on the pipe, exhaling a cloud of white smoke a second later.  The air filled with a tangy, sweet smell that reminded Tasia of cloves.

“You are the one who made the choice to support a compromised Empress, my Lord,” Tasia said.  “But I am sure you have an end goal in mind.  So tell me:  What profit do you chase by supporting me?”

He regarded her pensively for a long few seconds, then smiled and drew again on his pipe, making its end glow orange in the encroaching darkness.  “I have already told you, Empress.  You and I — and the Brotherhood — we know what the real threat to the Empire is.  While your grandfather and his puppet Wise Man play at ruling, the shadows lengthen.”  He examined the end of his pipe, then put it back into his mouth.  “That is the most important reason I have for supporting your bid to control the Empire.”

Smoke escaped his mouth and nostrils as he spoke, reminding Tasia of the fantastical dragons from the children’s books her mother used to read.  The dragons were clever beasts, always managing to find a way to trick the story’s hero before finally being defeated by him.

The smoke was starting to make Tasia feel slightly light-headed.

“But it is not your only reason for supporting me,” she said.

M’Tongliss smiled broadly.  “I am a businessman, Empress.  War of any kind brings with it… opportunity.”  He packed more dried white petals into the bowl of his pipe, tamping it down with a thick but manicured thumb.  “I admit it, Empress, you are the riskiest investment I have ever made.  But great profit comes only from great risk.  I think you already know the basics of what I want in exchange for my risk:  I want what every man wants — for my family’s influence to spread, for my children to be provided for long after my death, for my name to be famous for more than just silk.”

“And what will be the base of that influence and fame, my Lord?  More land?”

“Land?  Where, in Terinto?”  He chuckled.  “Surely you realize all of Terinto is a worthless wasteland except for its northern third.  And the lords of the Seven Cities are unlikely to relinquish that any time soon.”

“More subjects, then?” Tasia said.  “You wish to control the desert tribes?”

His chuckle transformed into a hearty laugh.  “The desert tribes will be controlled by no one but themselves.  I am chief to one clan already, and that is one clan too many for my tastes.  No,” he said, waving a dismissive hand.  “I don’t want more of Terinto’s land or its people.  I am the Lord of Paratheen with no interest in acquiring Negusto, and although acquiring the Seven Cities is intriguing, it would require too much blood-letting.  As for subjects, Terintans are much like cats:  A cat may permit you to feed it and pet it, but anyone who thinks that they own a cat is a fool.”

Tasia’s eyes narrowed.  “You want your family’s influence to grow, but not through land and not through subjects.  What else is there to control?”

He paused, then smiled.  “I wear a traditional Terintan turban, which marks me as a leader of my tribe.  But the rest of the Empire does not respect turbans.  They respect crowns.”

She stared at him, not understanding.  The cloud of smoke around them seemed to make her thoughts lazy and slow.

“A crown?” she said.  “No one in the Empire wears a crown except — ”  And finally clarity broke through the haze of smoke, and she barked out a short laugh.  “You want to be Emperor?”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Is it so strange?  You are not married.  Your father was working hard to find you a husband before his death.  I am a lord.  I hold sway over Paratheen and most of the desert tribes, and I have strong connections with the Adessian Islands.  I would bring many resources to the Empire, which it will need after twelve years of an expensive war and the withdrawal of the Northeastern coffers by your grandfather.”

Tasia shook her head in disbelief.  Perhaps it was the effect of the white cactus smoke, but she found his marriage proposition more baffling than threatening.  There were so many reasons why Lord M’Tongliss could never be Emperor that she hardly knew where to start.  She settled on the most practical of reasons.

“I am already betrothed — as you know from my trial.  To Mace of House Gifford.”

“Are you so sure you are still betrothed?”  Lord M’Tongliss asked.  He puffed on his pipe and gazed into the darkened courtyard.  “I am not convinced that Lord Roland still wants his son to marry you, given that your status has gone from princess of the House of Dorsa to traitor and regicide in hiding.”

“Mace knows very well I did not kill my father,” Tasia said.  “He was there for the trial.  He knows the truth and will convince Lord Roland of it.”

I hope, she added silently.  The letter she’d written asking for Lord Roland’s support was already well on its way.  She needed both House Gifford and House Brundt behind her if she was to convince the rest of the West to rise up against Norix.

“Hmm,” Lord M’Tongliss said ponderously, still gazing into the courtyard.  “Relationships between fathers and sons are complicated, Empress.  I have three sons of my own, you know.  They are good boys, but they are like wild colts who must be broken first before they can take a saddle.”  He turned to Tasia.  “If Lord Roland has already saddled Mace, then the young man is unlikely to plead your case, even if he is convinced of your innocence.”

Tasia didn’t respond.  She’d told herself that writing Lord Roland and asking for his help wasn’t a gamble — his ambition to see a crown on his son’s head and his grandsons’ as future Emperors would surely be enough for him to muster his troops for Tasia.  But now a poisoned seed of doubt grew in the pit of her stomach.

“From what I know of Lord Roland of House Gifford,” Lord M’Tongliss said, pausing to suck on his pipe, “he is a greedy man, but he is also a cautious one.  He never joined the Western Rebellion when his friends rose up against the Empire.”

“Because he is loyal to the House of Dorsa,” Tasia said quickly.

“No,” said Lord M’Tongliss, turning his gaze back to the courtyard.  “Because he only fights battles he knows he can win.”

The statement hung in the air between them.

“Mace of House Gifford will not marry you,” Lord M’Tongliss said.  “Not now, at any rate.  And not because he doesn’t want to, but because he wears his father’s saddle, and Lord Roland will only ride his best horse into a battle that ends in a guaranteed victory.”

“You underestimate Lord Roland’s loyalty.”

“You overestimate it.”  Lord M’Tongliss set his pipe on the table and met Tasia’s eyes.  “You have a natural instinct for politics, Empress, but you are still a wild colt — all power and no discipline.  Become my wife, and I will take your education in a direction your father and his Wise Men never could.  You will find it to be a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“I could never marry you, my Lord,” she managed to say calmly.  “You claim that you can educate me in politics, yet your very marriage proposal reveals political ignorance.  The council would never accept such a marriage.”

“The council has no say in matters of marriage when it comes to the House of Dorsa,” Lord M’Tongliss retorted, quoting from Wise Man Rewan’s Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations.

“I’m not speaking of legalities,” Tasia said.  “There is no way I could win back the crown if I had taken — if I had a…”  Tasia fumbled for the right words.  No matter how ridiculous his marriage proposal, he was still her benefactor and she still needed his troops.  She did not want to offend him.

“Turban-wearing Terintan for a husband?” he supplied, an amused smile crossing his face.  “They will not like it, but once you best them in battle and reveal the Regent for the true traitor, they will have no choice to accept it.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“I cannot marry you, my Lord,” Tasia finally said.  “It simply cannot be.”

He shrugged.  “Very well.  Then I withdraw my support.”

“My Lord — ”

“You may leave my home tomorrow as planned, but not with the Fesulians,” said Lord M’Tongliss.  “And I will let my cousin and the thousand desert riders he gathered know that their services will no longer be required.

“My Lord,” Tasia said again, flustered, “you cannot withdraw your support.  Not now.  The Empire’s future hangs in the balance!”

“Then put a crown on my head.”

“No,” Tasia said firmly.  “I already told you, I cannot marry you.  It is out of the question.  I may be able to force a marriage with a Terintan lord upon the council, but it will bring instability and discontent at a time when that is the last thing I need.”

He sucked on his pipe.  “It seems to me,” he said mildly, “that the first thing you need is a way back into your palace.  And you will not gain that without me.”

“You said that your first priority is protecting the Empire,” Tasia said, trying to reason with him.  “I must have the troops you promised me.”

“A merchant does not give his goods away for free.”

“You — ” Tasia began angrily, but then shook her head.  For a moment, she squeezed her eyes closed, already hating herself for what she was about to do.  “My sister,” she said when she opened her eyes.  “She is thirteen now, and reaches marriageable age in five years.”

Lord M’Tongliss cocked his head to the side.  “Surely you are not proposing that I marry your sister?  The age difference is quite great, even by Terintan standards.”

“That is not what I am suggesting.”  Tasia drew a breath.  “You have three sons, you said?”

The Lord smiled.  “I do.  Fine young men, each of them.”

“Are any of them betrothed yet?”

“Ahhh, Empress.”  Lord M’Tongliss picked up his pipe, relighting it before leaning back in his chair.  “Do you see that?  You have negotiation skills after all.”  He drew upon his pipe and let out a long exhalation.  “Tell me more about the Princess Adela.”

A queasy feeling in Tasia’s stomach told her this was where the Lord had always intended to take the conversation.

16

~ THEN ~

Judging by the position of the moon, the guard relieving Joslyn was nearly an hour later than he should have been.

“Heya,” he said by way of greeting when he finally arrived, his breath clouding in the cold, damp night air.  Curly red-brown hair matted, uniform disheveled, he ambled up to her with an air of nonchalance, and Joslyn could smell the ale on his breath from four feet away.

She was glad that it was dark, because she knew she would not be able to keep the contempt from her face.

“Frockin’ cold tonight, innit?” he said conversationally.

It’s winter, she wanted to say.  And we are in the foothills of the Sunrise Mountains.  It’s cold every night, and your whinging over it only underscores your mediocrity.

“Yes,” she said.  “It is.”

“Sorry I’m late for me shift,” he said.  “Had one tankard too many with the boys and lost track of time.  You know how it is.”

He grinned, but his smile faltered when he got close enough to see Joslyn’s expression.

Not for the first time, Joslyn wondered at the choices of young General Galter.  He was very popular with the common soldiers, and they were very devoted to him — that much was true.  But for the sake of keeping morale high, he kept discipline low.  And so it was that half-drunk men could show up late to their nightly guard shift without any consequences.

“Is the General already in his tent, then?” he asked her in the too-loud voice of those with no self-awareness.

“Yes.  He’s asleep,” she said with a pointed softness.

“Ah, right, right, sorry,” he said in a rasping stage whisper.

A dozen yards away, oxen stamped and shuffled within their pen.  Joslyn tensed automatically, hand going to the pommel of her sword.

Her companion squinted into the dark.

“Animals been restless tonight?” he asked.

“No,” said Joslyn.  “They’ve been quiet.”  She extended her senses to their outer limits, trying to detect anything unusual.

An ox snorted.  Another tossed its great head.

“Probably they just smelled something on the wind,” said the soldier.  “Like one of their cousins in the cook pot.  Made ’em nervous.”

He chuckled.  Joslyn didn’t.

“Maybe one of us ought to do a loop around the pen, just in case.”  He waited a moment, probably to see if Joslyn would move in the direction of the pen.  He looked disappointed when she didn’t.  “Yeah, I’ll do a loop ’round.  Back in a jiff.”

Joslyn tracked him with his eyes as he walked down the short hill from the general’s tent to the oxen pen.  He peered inside, then looked over his shoulder at Joslyn and shrugged.  The soldier ambled towards the back of the pen, and Joslyn lost sight of him, her view obscured by darkness and animals.

A minute passed.  He didn’t reappear.

Probably stopped to take a piss, Joslyn thought disdainfully.

Another minute passed, but the soldier still didn’t return.

Annoyed, she imagined the red-headed soldier passed out in his drunkenness on the far side of the pen.

She hesitated.  Going after him meant leaving the General’s tent momentarily unguarded.  But when the soldier still didn’t return a minute later, she sighed and made her way down the hill.

She found him on his back at the far side of the pen, just as she had anticipated.  But as she neared him, she realized he hadn’t passed out.

Mouth hanging open, neck at an unnatural angle, the dead soldier’s sightless eyes gazed up at the night sky as if transfixed by a star.

Joslyn immediately drew her sword and fell into panther prepares to spring.

Her body thrummed with energy, like a bowstring knocked, drawn, and ready to release.  But she controlled that energy, listening to her ku-sai in the back of her mind as he advised her not to let the power building inside her to bleed off, but to concentrate it into the inevitable attack.

She found a single footprint in the mud pointing to the oxen pen.  Only one?  She frowned.  It wasn’t a deep footstep, nor was it long; it barely made an imprint in the mud.  Its size and shape looked almost… feminine.

Slowly, cautiously, Joslyn approached the edge of the pen, climbing the simple wooden fence and landing softly amongst the normally docile beasts.  But they had indeed become unusually restless.  She crouched down, peering through their legs.

No human legs were visible amongst the bovine legs.

Come on, Joslyn thought to whomever had killed the hapless soldier.  Where are you?

Staying low so that she was as obscured by the beasts as her opponent, she edged deeper into the pen, keeping her senses alert and extended.

Even with her senses extended, the overwhelming stench of oxen nearly blotted out the contrasting odors of human skin, cloth, and leather.  Joslyn twisted sideways just in time, but although she managed to avoid the fatal blow, the woman’s razor-sharp curved blade still sliced through her armor, tunic, and skin.  Joslyn moved to counterattack, but the woman was already gone.

Joslyn sucked in a sharp, pained breath, aware that the sticky wetness against her ribcage was her own blood.  She stripped off the useless armor and tunic, which had both been sheered nearly in half.  Bare above the waist except for her breast bindings, Joslyn used heron’s wing to adjust her breathing and reset her senses.

She advanced slowly, weaving around frightened oxen, praying to Mother Eirenna that they wouldn’t panic and stampede.  A single woman with a blade was someone Joslyn could defeat, but a herd of unhappy two-thousand-pound draft animals she could not.

Steel flashed in the moonlight, and sheer instinct made Joslyn duck into diving falcon.  Steel whistled through the air, missing Joslyn but striking an ox in the flank.  Pained and terrified, the animal kicked with its rear legs, sending a spray of mud behind him.  The woman staggered back, shaking dirt from her face.

Joslyn didn’t hesitate.  With tiger’s fury, she thrust out with her sword, impaling the woman.  Only as the woman crumpled forward did Joslyn realize how small she was.

Fifteen summers.  At most.

“No!” cried a shrill voice to Joslyn’s left.

A second woman?

A dark shape leapt at Joslyn, who threw herself backward with reverse frog and threw a dagger at the same time.  The dagger bit into the woman’s shoulder, but she merely pulled it free and charged.  She fought fiendishly, striking and parrying and striking again with a speed Joslyn could scarcely keep up with.  Under the silver light of the half-moon, Joslyn would have sworn the woman’s eyes flashed with flames.

Ku-sai had taught Joslyn that an emotional fighter was a sloppy fighter, and eventually, the second attacker, whose fury had to be driven by her need for vengeance, made an error that left her off center.  Joslyn took the opening, first slashing deep into the woman’s thigh with her sword, and then, when blood loss finally forced the furious woman to slow, Joslyn feinted high, ducked, and pulled the hidden dagger from her boot.  This time when she threw, the dagger hit its mark, burying itself in the girl’s chest.

The young woman froze, eyes widening, then stumbled back, bumping against a mottled brown ox before falling.

Joslyn pounced, pinning both the girl’s wrists to the ground before she could reach for her fallen sword.

“Who are you?” Joslyn demanded.  “Who did you come to kill?”

With a mighty grunt, the girl thrust her hips up, pushing Joslyn off balance.  Joslyn’s grip on the girl’s wrists loosened, and in the next moment, the girl had a dagger in her hand — Joslyn’s dagger, the same one that had buried itself in the girl’s chest moments earlier.

How could that be?

Anticipating an attack, Joslyn sprang backwards, out of the dagger’s range.  But the girl didn’t slash at Joslyn or let the dagger fly.  Instead, she met Joslyn’s eye, a wicked grin spreading across her face.  For the briefest of moments, Joslyn would have sworn there were flames in her eyes.

Then she drew the blade across her own throat.  Blood sprayed, spattering Joslyn’s face like warm rain.  The girl collapsed.  Her body jittered for a minute, then fell still.

Joslyn approached cautiously, nudging the girl with the toe of her boot to make sure she was really dead.  Lifeless eyes, brown with flecks of gold that glittered in the moonlight, stared up at Joslyn.  There were no flames.  Joslyn had only imagined it.  She crouched beside the corpse.

“The art of the sword master is death,” Joslyn told the girl, a note of apology in her voice.  Joslyn leaned forward, causing the long cut in her side to throb in hot pain, and gently closed the girl’s eyes.

Something flashed silver in the moonlight.  Joslyn frowned, spotting a pendant of some kind lying against the woman’s chest — flat, light, the color of tin.  It hung from a leather cord.  Joslyn cut it free and held the pendant up to the moonlight, trying to get a better look at the symbol etched into it, then slipped it into her pocket.  Joslyn collected her weapons, wiping them clean on the dead girl’s black cloak, then stood with a groan of pain.

She would need to wake General Galter.  He would want to see the pendant she had found.  Perhaps he would know what the symbol meant.

~ NOW ~

Joslyn easily dodged the assassin’s wild kick with a fluid wind through wheat, then countered with a deadly, surgically precise viper striking.  Joslyn’s dagger bit through two layers of leather armor and sunk into the girl’s chest.

Joslyn’s aim had been true; the assassin was dead instantly.  She went limp, but Wise Man Evrart was ready for the weight, nimbly pulling the dead girl onto one shoulder as if she was little more than a sack of grain.  He traversed the wooden beams towards the back of the dining hall, glancing once over his shoulder to make sure that Joslyn was following.

He had better balance than Joslyn would have expected for a palace Wise Man.  Not to mention better fighting instincts.

When he reached the far end, the Wise Man gingerly deposited the assassin’s corpse on top of the last pillar.  He moved to withdraw Joslyn’s dagger from the assassin’s chest, but Joslyn held up a hand.

“Not yet,” she whispered, nodding towards the dining hall below.  “Not unless you want blood to start running down the pillar.”

Evrart nodded and wiped perspiration from his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic.

Why isn’t he wearing Wise Man’s robes? Joslyn wondered.  Why has he let his hair and beard grow out?

“Thank you,” he said.  “I probably could have stopped her without you, but it’s likely I would have lost my own life in the process.”

Joslyn reached towards the dead assassin’s throat, finding the metallic disc that had glinted in the moonlight earlier.  Like the two pendants she’d found on the dead assassins in the oxen pen three years earlier, the disc was feather-light and engraved with a serpent wrapped around a stylized symbol of the sun.  Drawing her other dagger, she cut the leather cord the pendant hung upon, then handed the disc to Evrart.

“I’ve seen one like this before,” she said.  “When I fought in the East, I killed two female assassins who appeared one night near my General’s tent.  I still wear a scar that one of them left me with.”  She tapped the disc.  “Neither my general nor anyone else knew the symbol.”

“My Brothers will know,” Evrart said.  “I will take it to them, discover its meaning.”

Brothers?

Evrart patted down the corpse, pulling forth the blowgun Joslyn had seen earlier.  “One of these poisoned darts would likely be strong enough to drop a bear.”

“Who was her target?”

Evrart looked up.  “The Empress, of course.  I assumed you knew, and that was why you helped me.”

“No.  I helped you because I saw the disc.  And because I know those who wear that symbol mean harm to the Empire.”  Joslyn paused, glancing down at the dead woman beside her.  Woman might have been an overstatement; like the two girls Joslyn had killed before, this one was young.  Probably eighteen to twenty summers.  “Who wishes her dead?”

He let out a protracted sigh.  “At least half the Empire, I imagine.  She has no idea how hard it is to keep her safe.”

Both of them were quiet for a moment.

“The Empress said you died in the East,” Evrart said.

“I did,” said Joslyn.  “But then… I woke up.”

“How?”

Joslyn didn’t answer him right away.  When she did, she avoided the question.  “You were Wise Man Norix’s top assistant.  Why are you even here with her?”

But just as Joslyn had ignored his question, Evrart ignored hers.  “There is no coming back from the dead,” he said.  “There is only coming back from the Shadowlands.”

He leaned closer to her, squinting through the darkness.  Joslyn shifted her weight and prepared to defend herself.

But Evrart only nodded to himself.  “You’re marked by the Shadowlands.  The creature you fought on the mountaintop injured you, correct?  Tasia said you were comatose for hours, but you weren’t.  You were more than just infected; you went there.  You went to the Shadowlands.”

Unbidden, dark memories flooded Joslyn.  Memories of a dream-like world where friends morphed into monsters and she had to kill them again and again.  But the monsters would morph back into the forms of her friends at the last moment, as they lay dying.  Pleading with her.  Begging her to let them live.  She vaguely remembered promising the monsters something to leave that place, but when she woke to Tasia bending over her, the knowledge of the promise faded, as dreams so often do.

“You can’t be here,” Evrart said suddenly.  “You’ll draw the shadows to Tasia.  You’ll endanger everything we’ve been trying to do.”  He glanced at the dead assassin.  “How long have you been in Paratheen?  I wouldn’t be surprised if this one finally found her because of you.”

Joslyn worked the muscles of her jaw.  He had no place telling her where she could and could not be; his master framed Tasia for murder, and for all Joslyn knew, he had been a part of it.

“How do I know you aren’t the one endangering Tasia?” she demanded.  “How do I know you aren’t still working for Wise Man Norix?”

Evrart pulled something from inside his tunic and tossed it to her.  She caught it on reflex.  It was a cast iron knife.  When she saw what it was, she nearly dropped it.

“You are Cult of Culo,” she hissed.

“Brotherhood of Culo,” he corrected.

Joslyn had half a mind to return his knife by lodging it in his throat.

“We are not the enemies of the Empress,” he said.  “We are her allies — her only true allies.”

“The Cult of Culo tried to kill Tasia.”

“No,” said Evrart calmly.  “Lord Hermant and Wise Man Norix tried to kill Tasia.  The Brotherhood merely provided the knife.”

Joslyn narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on the hilt of the iron dagger.

“I know how she feels about you,” Evrart said, holding up a palm.  “She still mutters your name in her sleep.  Which means I can guess that your relationship with the Empress was… somewhat more than guard and charge.  I also know that if you want to kill me, you’re more than capable of doing so.”  He hesitated.  “Yes, the assassination attempt was my fault.  I entered the Brotherhood into an alliance that never should have been, and I regret it.  But you must believe me when I tell you that I thought sacrificing Tasia’s life would protect the Empire in the end — protect all of mankind.”

With nimble grace, Joslyn danced across the wooden grid and grabbed the front of Evrart’s tunic, pushing him off-balance so that he leaned precariously towards the courtyard below.  With her other hand, she held his iron knife to his throat.

“I should slit your throat right now and tell Tasia who you really are.”

Evrart didn’t flinch.  “She knows.  I told her everything the night that I helped her escape the palace.”

Joslyn kept the knife against his throat.

“I made up for my mistake by saving her life, and she forgave me.  You should forgive me, too.”  Evrart held up both palms in a gesture of surrender.  “Kill me if you want.  But I’m her best chance of taking back the crown right now.  On some level even you must know that.”

“Even me?” Joslyn repeated.  “Because I am nothing but an ignorant and superstitious nomad?  Or because I know that the Cult of Culo cannot be trusted?”

“Don’t confuse the propaganda promoted by Wise Men to discredit the Brotherhood of Culo with reality,” he said.  “The Brotherhood has only ever had one mission, and that is to protect the realm of man from the shadows that would consume us.  We want Tasia to take back the crown as much as you do, because it is only through the Empire and the Brotherhood joining forces that we will be able to push the shadows back to where they belong.”

“I will only believe that if it comes from Tasia’s mouth, not from yours.”  Joslyn straightened Evrart upon the beam but kept a tight grip on his shirt and his knife.  “If she tells me you are lying, I will kill you.  Take me to see her.  Now.”

“No,” Evrart said stubbornly.  “I will not allow you any closer to her than you already are.  You’ll kill her as surely as the assassin would have.”  His tone took on a note of urgency.  “Don’t you know that’s why you’re really here?  The shadows want you close to her.  And if you do what they want, it’s her you’ll kill, not me.”

They stared at each other in the darkness, the corpse of the girl they killed together lying in a heap on the pillar behind Joslyn like an ill omen.

You will bring shadows upon her, the creature inside the seer had said.

“Joslyn, listen to me,” Evrart said.  “I know you love each other.  But let your love act as wisdom, not folly.  Let it take you far from here, before the shadows take over your body completely.  Once that happens, nothing — not even love — will be enough to protect Tasia from you.”

“I am not a monster,” Joslyn said.

“Joslyn of Terinto is not,” Evrart agreed.  “But the shadow inside her is.”

Marked by shadows.  The words echoed within her.

Marked.  Tainted.  Spoiled.

Joslyn had felt “marked” her whole life.  Marked for slavery and poverty, tainted by Captain Samwin’s sick appetites, spoiled like bad fruit unfit to be touched.  But then she had met Tasia, and though it hadn’t happened right away, Joslyn had begun to feel something new:  hope.

Hope that she might still be washed clean one day, that she could be something more than a nomad who was good at killing.

But she should have known better.  Hope was a fruit for other people.

Joslyn hesitated, but loosened her grip on his tunic.  “How do I know you will protect her?  How do I know you are not plotting her death like the other Wise Man?”

“Because if that were the case, I would have killed her long ago.”

Joslyn remembered first seeing him appear on the wooden beams before the assassin a few minutes earlier.  He was not there, then he was.  Sorcery of the Cult of Culo.  Yet he had stopped the assassin.  He had risked his own life to save Tasia’s.

“I’m begging you to listen to me,” Evrart said.  “If you really care about Tasia, you will get as far away from her as you can.”

And go where? Joslyn wondered.  And do what?

What place did she have in this world, if not by Tasia’s side?  A lump formed in Joslyn’s throat.

But then a familiar voice inside of her answered her own questions:  Gon tajin.  The words Ku-sai had said to her in her dream.  She still didn’t know how to translate the words into standard Terintan, but it didn’t matter what the words meant; the message was clear.  Joslyn needed to go to the edge of the Zaris Mountains, to the place where she had lived and trained with her ku-sai for four years.  She needed to find his sword.

“Protect her,” Joslyn said to Evrart.  She pressed the hilt of the iron knife into his hand.  “And swear to me no one will get this close to her again.  If they do, deal with them as we dealt with this one tonight.”

Evrart nodded seriously.  “I do swear it.  Both I and all my Brothers will strive to protect her.”

There was nothing more to say.  She didn’t want to leave her precious Princess in the care of this man, but the seer had told her, and now this man was telling her, that by being close to Tasia, she put Tasia’s life at risk.

Joslyn nodded goodbye to the palace Wise Man and stepped sideways, prepared to rappel down the marble pillar.

“Where will you go?” Evrart asked.

She hesitated.  Just because she would agree to stay away from Tasia didn’t mean that she trusted Evrart, or his so-called Brotherhood, enough to share what Grandmother Ajda had told her about her ku-sai’s sword.

“Do not tell Tasia I still live.  She should not be distracted by me.”

Like an Adessian acrobat, Joslyn dropped off the side of the pillar, caught its ledge with her fingertips, pushed off, and landed with cat-like quiet on the brick courtyard below.  She heard voices in the dining hall, but turned her back on it, heading toward the compound’s hidden door.  She wondered if anyone had yet discovered the dead guards.

The sound of Tasia’s voice interrupted her thoughts.  Joslyn halted.

Just once, she told herself.  Just one look, so I can see for myself that she is whole and well.  Then I will leave.

Checking that she was still hidden by the shadow cast by the pillar, Joslyn turned.

And there was Tasia, more stunning than ever.  Joslyn’s breath caught in her throat.  Lantern light made Tasia’s fair hair golden, and under the same soft light, the pale green tones of the Terintan-style silk gown nearly glowed.  A haze of smoke wreathed both Tasia and the Lord across from her, but it only enhanced her otherworldly beauty.  White cactus smoke, Joslyn knew from the scent.  The smell, together with the smuggler’s smile on Lord M’Tongliss’s face, nearly made Joslyn recant her decision to leave Tasia in the care of the Cult of Culo.

“You have negotiation skills after all,” Lord M’Tongliss said.  He pulled on his pipe and breathed more white cactus smoke into the already thick air.  “Tell me more about the Princess Adela.”

Joslyn took a single step in the direction of the dining hall, angry that the Lord would so deliberately cloud Tasia’s mind, angry that Evrart hadn’t yet reentered the dining hall to stop whatever was about to happen.  She would stop it if Evrart would not.

I can’t, she reminded herself.  I am tainted by shadows.  Even a deceitful Lord is safer for her than I am.  She is better off without me.

Jaw clenched, Joslyn forced herself to turn back towards the courtyard.  This time, she would walk away without looking back.  There was a way she might still be able to help Tasia, but it wasn’t here, and it wasn’t now.

Part II:

Journeys

“The greatest challenge a novice Brother faces is learning to wield the power he draws from the Shadowlands without allowing the Shadowlands to wield him.  Furthermore, it is a widely acknowledged fact that women, though generally less capable than men in most other regards, are less susceptible to the dangers of interacting with the Shadowlands than men.  This is why, in most primitive peoples, such as the nomads of Terinto and the horse herders of the Central Steppes, tribal shamans are far more likely to be female.  Novice Brothers are therefore encouraged to learn from these women, but without adopting their superstitious habits.  The Brotherhood is a ‘brother-hood’ precisely because it is up to men to refine what was originally developed by our mothers and our sisters in logical, systematic, and precise ways; or in other words, like most other things started by women, the shadow arts are best finished by men.  The following chapter examines the way in which female shamans and self-proclaimed ‘sorceresses’ have traditionally protected themselves from the dangers associated with shadow work, and what novice Brothers can learn from these traditions.”

— Brother Remon of Gifford,

A Primer on the Shadowlands and Wielding Its Power for Aspiring Brothers

17

Tasia guided her horse to where Kort stood at the edge of the ridge, surveying the descent and the valley below.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

He glanced up at her, pensive.  “It is steep, Empress,” he said after a few moments.  “It will be better if we have archers.  Will the Easterners have archers?”

The unofficial leader of the five hundred Fesulians squinted up at her, the late afternoon sun glaring off his face — he was much taller than Tasia, but she was mounted, he was on foot.  Tasia had learned that the Fesulian soldiers did not have true “ranks”; they called Kort “first spear into battle” because he had earned their respect over the years through demonstrations of his courage and tactical intelligence, not because he’d been promoted into the position.  The rest of the Fesulians would follow him as long as they trusted his opinions.

Tasia hoped they would keep trusting him.  She had worked hard over the past two weeks to build rapport with Kort as they traveled eastward; she didn’t want to have to start over with a new commander.

“They will have archers,” Tasia answered.  “But only about a hundred.”

A message from Lord Voris of House Pellon had arrived three nights before, stating that the surviving lords of the East had conferenced and decided to heed Tasia’s call for support.  They would be sending as many troops to her as they could.  A victory for Tasia at last.  But, Lord Voris’s letter warned, the armies of the East had been decimated by the war; the most Tasia could hope for was three or four thousand soldiers.  They traveled west as Tasia traveled east, and would likely catch up to Tasia’s position in about three more days.

Three thousand Easterners.  One thousand desert riders from M’Tongliss’s tribal alliances.  Five hundred Fesulians.  So far, Tasia could count on almost five thousand fighters.  Which meant they were still outnumbered by the delegation soldiers by nearly two to one.

They had the better position; they had the element of surprise.  And they had the illusion being prepared by the Brotherhood, so that when the delegation looked up to the ridges above them, they would see not five thousand soldiers but ten thousand.

Would it all be enough?

“One hundred archers is good,” said Kort, gazing down the ridge into the valley below.  “From here, a hundred smart archers will do much damage.  Men on foot and horseback making a charge, though… it is steep.”

Tasia followed his gaze, understanding his point.  Their position on the ridge was perfect for an ambush, but sending men racing down the ridge was a proposition that begged disaster.  The soil was too loose, a combination of sandy dirt and rock that would crumble beneath feet and hooves.  She imagined the scene if even a few of Kort’s soldiers stumbled and fell, impaling the warriors ahead of them with their deadly, double-pointed spears.

Evrart and Y’Farsil, the arrogant leader of the thousand tribesmen M’Tongliss had mustered, along with Y’Farsil’s translator, rode up to join them.

Evrart had been keeping late nights with the thirty Brothers who had accompanied Tasia’s campaign, preparing the illusion that was key to their strategy.  Now he slumped in his saddle,  bags under his eyes, bushy beard long past the point of needing a trim.

Y’Farsil, on the other hand, sat tall, chin raised and hawk-beaked nose so high in the air that Tasia thought for a moment he was sniffing at the wind.  His clothes were somehow still fresh, as if he hadn’t ridden hard with his thousand horsemen south and east to meet Tasia’s group on short notice.

The nomad’s horse stamped and snorted, looking as proud and regal as his rider.  Y’Farsil gestured at the ridge and rattled off something in Terintan.

“It is too steep for horses, ma’am,” Y’Farsil’s translator told Tasia.

The translator was a slave, of course, with features that weren’t entirely Terintan.  Subtle folds creased his eyes, but those eyes were a stormy blue, not the typical black eyes of Terinto.  Tasia guessed that the translator was probably half Terintan, half Northeastern.  An uncommon combination.  Like Y’Farsil, the translator sat straight-backed on his horse, but the resemblance ended there.  His eyes were sunken, his skin wan, his clothes hardly more than shabby rags.  In the four days since Y’Farsil’s arrival with his mounted warriors and slaves, Tasia had only seen the translator a few times.  But each time she saw him, new bruises had blossomed on his arms, neck, and face.  They mottled the man’s skin in an ever-changing rainbow of blues, purples, yellows, and reds.  The abuse the man was receiving irked her, but so far she’d held her tongue.  She needed Y’Farsil, and unlike Kort, he was not contract-bound to fight for her.

An odd alliance we make, she thought, glancing from Y’Farsil and the translator to the solemn Fesulian warrior and the tired Brother of Culo.

“Yes, I know the ridge is too steep,” Tasia responded, careful to keep her tone patient, careful to address Y’Farsil and not the translator.  “We will place whatever archers the Easterners bring here.”    She scanned the horizon and pointed westward, where the ridge’s shoulders softened from rocky bluffs into gentle hills.  “There.  Our foot soldiers and mounted men can set up their positions where the ground is not as steep.”

She had almost phrased it as a question — What about there, where the ridge isn’t as steep?  But Tasia had learned that it was better to make statements than ask questions.  Questions would be interpreted as womanly uncertainty and weakness, so it was better to state her ideas and wait for the men’s inevitable criticisms as a method of refining their plans.

The truth was that she wanted their criticism.  She’d watched her father’s advisors criticize his ideas dozens of times over the years.  But the difference was that they always criticized his ideas, not him.

With her, it was different.

Kort shaded his eyes and turned in a slow circle, then nodded.  “Yes.  Archers here.  My soldiers spread out there,” he said, pointing to the place Tasia had indicated.  “We on this side, the nomads on that — ”

Y’Farsil interrupted before Kort could finish.

“Master says the riders would be better on this side,” said the translator.  “Horses take up more space than pikemen.”

Kort glowered at Y’Farsil.  “That slope is longer.  Men on foot will take longer to traverse it than mounted men.”

The translator repeated Kort’s words quietly as he spoke.  Y’Farsil answered with a sharp retort.

“Master… respectfully disagrees,” the translator said.

A whip Tasia hadn’t realized Y’Farsil had snaked out and cracked the translator on the back of his neck.  An angry red welt immediately appeared.

“My translittor failed to said you have the intelligence of an horse arse,” Y’Farsil told Kort in broken common tongue.

Kort reached for the long knife at his belt.

“Hold,” Tasia said sternly.  “We cannot hope to defeat our enemies if we fight each other instead of them.”

She chose to glare at Kort instead of Y’Farsil, because she knew she stood a better chance of getting him to see reason than Y’Farsil.  She knew this because it was not the first time the two men had nearly come to blows.

Evrart grunted but said nothing.  Tasia wasn’t sure if it was a signal of his approval or his disapproval.  He would not be shy about sharing his opinion later.  That she knew for sure.

“The desert riders will be on this side,” Tasia said.  “Kort, you will arrange your squadrons on the other side.”

Kort kept his hand on the hilt of his knife, but he nodded curtly.  Y’Farsil grinned.

“The Eastern archers will position themselves here.  Their foot soldiers will follow your command, Kort, there.”  Tasia glanced at Y’Farsil.  “Any mounted Easterners will follow you, Y’Farsil.”

She imagined delivering the news to an Eastern commander that he would be following the lead of a Terintan nomad.  That, she assumed, would go over about as well as commanding Kort and Y’Farsil to befriend one another would.  But it was a problem to deal with later.

Y’Farsil said something in Terintan.

“Master wishes to know how many Easterners there will be,” said the translator.

“Four thousand,” Tasia said without hesitation, despite knowing from the message she received that she was probably overestimating.

Y’Farsil harrumphed but remained silent.

Tasia could guess what he was thinking.  It was probably the same thing they were all thinking.  Two to one.  They were going to be outnumbered two to one.  At best.

“The goal is to avoid a battle,” Tasia reminded the men.  “We will not show them five thousand men; we will show them ten thousand.”  She nodded at Evrart, and the two other men both glanced in the Brother’s direction, as if they’d forgotten he was there.  “When they see that they are surrounded and outnumbered, they will be forced to accept my parley and my terms.  We will meet success without needing to shed blood.”

I hope, she added silently.

“A gathering of fifteen thousand soldiers is unlikely to end without the shedding of blood,” said Kort.  “Even with the Brotherhood’s illusions.”

Y’Farsil spoke.  “I agree with the horse’s arse, for once,” said the translator.

Tasia suppressed a groan.

“I have faith in the Brotherhood’s talents.  But if we have to fight, then we have to fight.”  Tasia did her best to project an air of confidence.  “I assume no one here is afraid of a battle?”  She gave Kort, then Y’Farsil, a long, pointed look.

“Of course not,” Y’Farsil snapped in the common tongue.  Then he switched to Terintan.

“The master simply does not want to waste lives needlessly,” said his translator.  “And he doubts the ability of the Cult of Culo to stop ten thousand men with — eh, the word does not translate into the common tongue.  With… tricks and desert mirages.”

Kort nodded his agreement solemnly.

Neither of the men liked Evrart.  They had made that clear in prior meetings.  In Y’Farsil’s case, the nomads’ superstition meant that they both respected the Brotherhood and feared it.  All of the desert riders placed their hands on their sword pommels whenever Evrart or one of the other Brothers were near, not relaxing again until they passed.

Fesulians, on the other hand, turned out to be the most pragmatic and straightforward people Tasia had ever encountered.  They had no objection to the shadow arts per se; they simply had no use for anything on the battlefield that was not a weapon.  Tasia had tried to explain to Kort that the illusion the Brotherhood would produce was a weapon, but she knew he remained skeptical.

Evrart glanced at the two military commanders.  Then he muttered something and flicked what appeared to be a dried leaf into the air.

Tasia gasped.  Kort took a stumbling step backwards.

A mounted Terintan warrior had appeared beside Evrart from nowhere.  Tasia’s horse whickered nervously; the translator struggled for a moment to control his own mount.

Nothing about the warrior suggested he wasn’t actually there.  His apa-apa brizat, his cream-colored turban, his braided beard — even down to his grin and the creak of the leather saddle as his tall grey horse stamped the ground — it was all perfect.  Tasia wondered what would happen if she touched the illusory horse’s neck, and found herself reaching up.  But Evrart muttered something else, and the warrior vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“The illusion is no mere ‘desert mirage.’”  Contempt laced Evrart’s words.

Kort nodded absently, still gazing at the spot where the illusory rider had been.  Y’Farsil pressed his lips into a tight line, for once appearing unsettled.

“How long can the Brothers maintain the illusion?” Tasia asked.

“Long enough for you to parley,” said Evrart.  He thought a moment.  “But finish within two hours.  Maintaining an illusion of this complexity… with this degree of coordination between illusionists… longer than two hours will be difficult.”

Tasia nodded.  Two hours to negotiate a surrender.  She could work with that.

“Are we done here, Empress?” Evrart asked.  “The Brothers and I have spent the day training, and I would like an early night.”

Tasia glanced around at the other men.  “So we are agreed upon our ambush location and where each of your forces will be?”

All three men nodded.

“Thank you for your input, gentlemen.  The Empire appreciates your service,” Tasia said.  “Our meeting is adjourned.”

#

“You are a gift from Mother Moon, Linna,” Tasia said as the girl freed the thin steel circlet from where it had tangled with Tasia’s hair.  Tasia sighed in relief, glad to have it free from her head at last, and rubbed the places where it had chafed against her scalp.

The crown, whose center held a thumb-sized silver eagle of the House of Dorsa inlaid in onyx, was a smaller, more feminine version of the steel crown her father had worn whenever he wanted to send a signal of strength to the council of lords.  Both the crown and Linna had been parting gifts from Lord M’Tongliss when Tasia, the five hundred Fesulian soldiers, and thirty solemn Brothers departed Paratheen in the middle of the night two and a half weeks earlier.  Tasia appreciated the gifts, but the necessity of stealing out of Paratheen in those still pre-dawn hours had only served to remind her of the fragility of their mission.

“They exhausted me this afternoon,” Tasia said as Linna brushed out her hair.  “All they do is argue — with me and with each other.  I swear to you, Linna, don’t bother with men.  They are all the same.  They spend most of their lives looking for various ways to prove that their own penis is larger than anyone else’s.”

Linna only smiled.

“And you?  How did you spend your evening?” Tasia asked.  “Distract me with your news.  And please tell me something hopeful.  Or if not hopeful, then at least entertaining.”

This had become their nighttime ritual since Y’Farsil and his riders had joined them halfway through their journey:  Tasia would conference with the three men who had evolved into her informal council, while Linna held a council of her own.  Much as Tasia had once had Alric befriend the soldiers at the Imperial Army’s winter camp on the eastern front, Tasia had asked Linna to get to know the men and women they traveled with.  She was an ideal choice since she spoke both Terintan and the common tongue fluently.

Linna had proven herself to be as clever and resourceful as Tasia had expected.  Circulating amongst the camp, making friends with the slaves the desert riders had brought with them, and even learning some of the Fesulian dialect spoken by Kort’s soldier’s, the girl had become Tasia’s way of gauging the mood and monitoring the gossip that wove through the camp’s common soldiers.

“Things between the nomad riders and the Fesulians have gotten a little better since we made camp,” Linna said.  “Travel puts everyone into a foul mood.  I learned that from my time with the tinkers.  But especially the desert riders were irritated, since they had to press hard to meet us on time.  They lost a handful of horses and two slaves on the journey due to sun sickness and exhaustion alone.  But tempers have cooled since we stopped our daily marching.”

“We were all tired of traveling,” Tasia observed.  “Maybe that’s why Evrart has been especially ill-tempered these past few days.  Wet a cloth for me, will you, Linna?”

Linna dipped a washcloth into a clay basin and handed it to Tasia, who used it to wipe the sweat from her face, the back of her neck, and her underarms before wringing it out and handing it back to Linna.

“That’s better,” Tasia said.  “I’ll be glad when all this is over and I can have a real bath.  I haven’t been this grimy since the ride through the Zaris Mountains with Jos — ”  She bit the name off before she could say the rest of it, before the sound of it could send that familiar stab of pain into her heart.  Linna gave her a curious look.  Tasia cleared her throat.  “And what do they all think of our chances of success?” Tasia asked, shifting back to the original topic.  “Do they still doubt?”

Linna shifted her eyes from Tasia to the washcloth in her hands.

“I won’t be angry at you for simply reporting news, Linna,” Tasia said.

“They are men, ma’am.  Most of them, anyway,” Linna said without looking at Tasia.  “So it’s as you said before.  They say crude things about what the Imperial troops will do to you once you’re caught.  The Fesulians seem proud that they might die in battle; they say the nomads are cowards for saying they will melt away amongst the dunes before the Imperial Army can catch them.”

“I see.”

Tasia supposed she couldn’t blame them for thinking it was a suicide mission; she thought the same thing herself, some nights.

With Linna’s help, Tasia removed her riding dress and got into her night gown.  She would have preferred to ride in trousers and tunic, as she had on her last journey eastward, but now she was an Empress.  There was never room to appear anything less than the picture of elegance and grace, even at the desert’s edge, where there wasn’t enough water to spare for a hot bath.

“If all goes according to plan,” Tasia said, pulling her long hair free from the back of the nightgown, “there won’t be a battle to die in or run from.  If all goes according to plan, I parley with their general, convince them to turn back to Port Lorsin.”

Or convince them to join my cause, she added silently, but stating such a bold hope aloud seemed like it might bring bad luck.

A tap came on the canvas flap that served as the tent’s doorway, a Fesulian soldier allowing herself inside before Tasia had scarcely turned around.

“You do not enter without permission!” Tasia barked at the soldier.

The woman was even darker than most of the other Fesulians, her skin nearly the color of midnight.  Which meant that the white gleam of the broad grin she gave Tasia practically glowed in the dim light of the tent.

“Pardon, my Lady,” said the soldier, whose name was Ammanta.  Her voice had a gravelly, almost masculine quality to it.  “I came to report that the night guard is taking over for us.”

“Thank you,” Tasia said stiffly.

Ammanta’s smile grew, and she did not attempt to hide the fact that her gaze lingered on Tasia longer than was proper.  Then she nodded and left.

“Somehow I have trouble believing that Ammanta ‘forgets’ the custom of knocking before entering,” Tasia grumbled quietly to Linna, “no matter what she says about the absence of doors in Fesul.”

“She is sweet on you, ma’am,” Linna said.

“She can be ‘sweet’ on me all she wants,” Tasia said.  “But I am the Empress of the House of Dorsa.  And when all this is over, I will fulfill my promise to the House of Gifford and marry Mace.”  Even stating the truth of her pending marriage aloud made Tasia feel heavy, tired.  “So she will have to admire me from a distance.”

Linna only nodded and pulled the covers back on Tasia’s narrow cot.

Tasia studied the girl’s profile, backlit from the lantern on Tasia’s nightstand.

Gods but the girl looked so much like a younger version of Joslyn.  Linna could have passed as Joslyn’s baby sister.

Joslyn had once promised to tell Tasia everything — everything about her childhood, her youth with her ku-sai, her decision to leave him in order to join the Imperial Army.  But she’d died before she fulfilled that promise, leaving Tasia desolately alone.

“Linna,” she said suddenly.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Do you remember when you used to sneak onto Lord M’Tongliss’s rooftop to watch me practice with my daggers?”

Linna glanced at her feet, abashed.  “I’m sorry, Empress,” she said formally, probably thinking that Tasia was comparing Ammanta’s deliberate insubordination with Linna’s own.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Tasia said.  “It was always fine.  I was going to ask you, actually… would you like to learn?  I am not nearly as good as my teacher was, but it would be nice to have someone to practice with.”

The corners of Linna’s mouth twitched as she worked to try to stop herself from smiling.  The sight eased some of the ache in Tasia’s heart.

“Are you sure, ma’am?” Linna asked.

“Quite.”

“Then… that would be very kind of you, and I would like to learn very much.”

“I thought you might,” Tasia said, pleased.

Linna blew out the lantern and moved to leave the tent.

“Wait one more moment,” Tasia said.

Linna paused, glancing at Tasia over her shoulder.

“Would it be… inconvenient for you to move your bedroll into my tent?” Tasia asked.

Linna hesitated.  “You do not wish for privacy?”

“It’s alright if you’re more comfortable where you are,” Tasia said by way of an answer.  “I do not wish to impose upon you.”

Linna actually let out a short laugh.  “I am a slave, Empress.  It is not possible to impose upon me.”

Tasia sat halfway up, studying Linna’s face in the darkness of the tent.  The sun had only just gone down, leaving enough light that Tasia could still make out the girl’s eyes.

“I set you free,” Tasia said simply.

The girl’s brow immediately furrowed.  “What do you mean, ma’am?”

“I mean that you are no longer a slave, Linna.  You’re free.  So sleep wherever you want.”

“You can’t set me free,” Linna said, shaking her head vigorously.  “I belong to the Lord M’Tongliss.”

“No, you don’t,” Tasia said.  “He gave you to me when I left Paratheen, remember?  That means you’re mine now.  Including mine to free.”  She smiled.  “And even if he had not gifted you to me, I am the Empress.  I outrank Lord M’Tongliss.”

Linna didn’t move.  “Does this mean… do you not wish for my service anymore, ma’am?”

“No, I certainly wish for your services,” said Tasia.  “But if you choose to work for me, it will be as a servant, not as a slave.  And as soon as I am able, I will pay you wages, just as any servant would receive wages from her mistress.”  She gave a moment for this information to sink in.  “So, freewoman L’Linna of Terinto.  Do you wish to bring your bedroll and sleep on your mistress’s floor tonight, or do you prefer where you are at, with the other servants?”

“I will get my bedroll,” Linna said.

“Good,” Tasia said, lying back down.

Once the girl returned with her bedroll and settled down on a spot at the other side of the tent, Tasia’s mind finally quieted, and she drifted off to sleep.

A commotion outside the tent woke her only a few hours later.  Tasia sat straight up, pulling a dagger from beneath her pillow.  A tap came on the tent’s door, a Fesulian soldier popping his head inside.

Linna was already on her feet, speaking to him in broken Fesulian.  She nodded, and the man disappeared.

Tasia had already lit the lantern and slipped her feet into the boots beside her cot by the time Linna turned back around.

“What is it?” Tasia asked the girl.

“The Easterners.  They have been marching through the night and just now arrived, ma’am.”

“They’re early,” Tasia said, surprised.  “But then again, I suppose early is better than late, isn’t it?”

18

~ THEN ~

“There is a recruiter for the Imperial Army in the village this week,” Joslyn told Ku-sai, dropping the sack of barley on her shoulder to the floor beside the clay oven.

He greeted her arrival and remark with the merest of glances before turning back to his work.  He was writing again, wire-rimmed spectacles low on the bridge of his nose.  He’d been wearing them more often lately when he wrote or read.  Joslyn had never even seen a pair of spectacles — never even knew they existed — until she saw his.  The thin convex lenses made him look more like an owl than a deadly swordsman.

“They offer new recruits a gold regal when they join — a whole regal!” Joslyn continued, in case Ku-sai hadn’t comprehended the import of what she’d said the first time.

He put down his quill and peered at her over his spectacles.  “So you are a mercenary now?  You rent the skills I have taught you to the highest bidder?”

“It’s not like that, Ku-sai.”  Joslyn’s earlier enthusiasm dissipated.  “The Imperial Army protects the Empire.  There’s a war in the East, you know.  The Imperial Army is all that stands between the barbarians beyond the Sunrise Mountains and ordinary folk.”

“The Empire called your people barbarians once.”

Joslyn’s face burned.  “The nomads are not my people.  My people sold my sister and I into slavery when I was just a girl.”

“Even if there were any honor to be had in fighting ‘barbarians’ for the Empire, your training here is not done.”  He said the word Empire as if it left a sour taste in his mouth.  Picking up his quill, he turned away from Joslyn and back to his writing.  “Go into the yard and practice your movements.”

“I did already today.  Twice.”

He paused, taking off his spectacles and turning back around.  “Kuna-shi.  Go into the yard.  Practice your movements.”

Joslyn hung her head.  “Yes, Ku-sai.”

She should have listened to him.  She should have trusted in his wisdom.  But she was rash, stubborn — seventeen summers, nearly eighteen, and at least half the time convinced that her wisdom was greater than her ku-sai’s.

Perhaps it was youthful arrogance that explained why, despite his admonishment, Joslyn found herself racing back up the mountainside from the village below two days.  She was covered in blood.  Most of it was not her own.

“Ku-sai!  Ku-sai!”

He appeared in the hut’s doorway, snow-white eyebrows drawn together.

“The villagers… their boys,” Joslyn panted.  “The recruiter — he wouldn’t believe me, Ku-sai.  He made them… they attacked, and I… I didn’t want to, but I — ”

“Kuna-shi.  Calm yourself,” Ku-sai said.  “Mountain.”

“I had to defend myself,” Joslyn said.  “Those boys — they would have killed me.  I saw it in their eyes.  The recruiter told them — and they — they…  But why?”  She looked up at Ku-sai, eyes brimming with tears.  “Why did they want to kill me?  What did I ever to do them?  Why do they hate — ”

“Kuna-shi.  Mountain.”

He touched her shoulder lightly, and something about the gesture snapped Joslyn out of her shock and grief and confusion long enough to process what he had said to her.

Mountain.

Joslyn straightened and drew a deep breath, momentarily closing her eyes.  She found the flow of energy inside herself, connected that energy into the earth.  The stability of mountain washed over her… then evaporated.

She swallowed and tried again.  Mountain.  It would not come to her.

“The army recruiter did not want me,” Joslyn said.  “First he called me a dirty nomad, then he said the only place for a woman was at the cook fires.  I argued with him.”

“Of course you did,” said Ku-sai, sighing.  “Rash, Joslyn.  Now put yourself into mountain.”

She closed her eyes and took another deep breath.  The energy in her body was more “startled rabbit” than mountain; frenetic, it swirled within her in every direction.  She breathed in — long, slow, deliberate.  Gradually her energy settled.  She pulled it into a single stream in the center of her body, directed the stream downward, where it forked into two, exited through her feet, and laced her to the earth.

She opened her eyes, steady at last.

“Now,” said Ku-sai.  “Tell me what happened.”

“The recruiter from the Imperial Army.  He laughed at me when I wouldn’t stop arguing with him,” Joslyn said.  “Then he said that if I wanted to be a soldier so badly, I needed to prove it.  He turned to the village boys — there were eight of them, they all had the swords he’d given them when they committed to join.  And he said, ‘Here is your first order:  Kill the nomad girl.’  And… th-they attacked.”  She paused.  “I think the recruiter thought I would run, or maybe he thought the boys would only try to scare me.  But you know how the village feels about me.  About both of us.”

Her ku-sai grunted.

“The boys surrounded me.  I knew it would not be honorable to kill them, but they trapped me.  I couldn’t get away.”  Joslyn swallowed.  “I had to defend myself, Ku-sai — they left me no choice.”

“How many did you kill, Kuna-shi?”  His tone had softened.

“Three.  The baker’s son, the blacksmith’s middle son, and one I did not recognize — one of the farmer’s boys.”  Joslyn hesitated.  “And two others, I… I do not know if they still live.”

Ku-sai was silent for a moment.  “Each time you take a life, your soul tears.  I would have taught you how to heal that tear, but now you will need to teach yourself.”

Voices — angry voices — echoed from somewhere down the mountain, coming from the direction of the village.

He drew the curved sword that always hung at his side, the sword he called the fifth limb of his body.  The boys’ swords might have been brand new, yet Ku-sai’s sword gleamed in a way that none of theirs had.

“Go,” he said.  “Find the recruiter.  After you showed him what you are capable of, he might finally give you what you want.  One of you is worth twenty farmers’ sons.”  He met her gaze, eyes hard and cold.  “Get your gold regal.”

Despite the calming influence of mountain, Joslyn’s heart lurched.  In one breath, he’d told her she was worth more than any of the village boys; in the next, he’d condemned her greed, her fantasy of being an Imperial soldier.  Pride and shame warred inside her.

More voices echoed up to them.

“Ku-sai, I — ”

“Go, Kuna-shi.  I will deal with the villagers.”

Joslyn gave him a pained look.  “Will you kill them?”

“Like you, I will kill them only if they give me no other choice,” he said.  “Now go.”

Joslyn hesitated, then nodded.  She hurried into the hut to gather her few meager possessions — the daggers Ku-sai had gifted to her, her bedroll, the dried purple flower pressed into a square of parchment.  The short sword she had stolen from the drunken soldier who had wanted to rape her was already in its sheath at her hip.  Joslyn shoved her things into the canvas backpack she used on market days and hurried from the hut, stopping a few feet behind Ku-sai.

He stood in the center of the yard, the same yard where she had slept when she had first come to him to be accepted as his apprentice, the same yard where she had practiced the thirty-seven moves of the dance of the Seven Cities countless times.

“Goodbye,” Joslyn said quietly.  Lately, she had spent much time imagining her departure from her ku-sai, striking out into the world to make her mark on it.  But now she found that she didn’t want to leave.  What a fool she had been.

He turned around, looked her up and down.  “Find a stream and wash yourself, as soon as you are far enough away.  You look like you just slaughtered a pig.”

Joslyn looked down at herself.  She had forgotten that blood still smeared her arms, stained her tunic.  Some of it had begun to dry into a rust-colored brown.

“May we meet again,” Ku-sai said.

She pushed past the lump in her throat.  “May we meet again.”

And with that, Joslyn turned away, heading in the opposite direction from the voices of the angry villagers.

She willed herself not to look back.

~ NOW ~

Joslyn stood before Ku-sai’s burned-out hut, transfixed.  A light rain fell, obscuring the late afternoon sun.  The chill rain and cloud cover was common for this time of year in the Zaris Mountains.  Barely a fortnight ago, she’d been in Paratheen, where summer was still at its peak.  After her journey north — out of Paratheen, through the Great Desert, across the dry savannas of Northern Terinto, the mountains seemed particularly cold.  She tugged her brizat closer.

Joslyn knew the hut had burned long ago, but the sight of it reduced to burnt timbers and ash still filled her with unease.  It was almost as if she would turn to see angry villagers storming up the mountainside at any moment.

“We want your girl,” they would have said to Ku-sai.

“She is not here,” he would have answered.

“The nomad filth killed my son!” the baker would have shouted — he’d always been quick to anger.

“Your son tried to kill her,” Ku-sai would have responded.  He would have said it in the same even tone he always used.  Relaxed but unyielding.  That was what characterized a true sword master.  “All of your sons tried to kill her.  She defended herself.  Would not you have done the same, if eight young men with weapons drawn fell upon you at once?”

Joslyn wondered how many of the villagers Ku-sai had been forced to maim or kill that day.  Innocent blood shed.  Because of her.  Because she had been so eager to join an army that hadn’t really wanted her.

She took a step forward, stopped.  A human skull sat in the middle of the yard, empty eye sockets staring up at her as if in warning.  The rest of the skeleton was nowhere to be seen.  Carried off by animals long ago, probably.

He killed at least one, then, Joslyn thought.  I wonder if it was the baker.

Ku-sai would have fled after whichever villagers who still lived stumbled back down towards the valley.  He would have fled not because he feared the greater numbers they would return with the second time, but because he wouldn’t want to kill more of them than he had to.  He only fought them in the first place to stall them, to give Joslyn enough time to escape the danger of their fury and grief.

Joslyn crouched down, brushed the dirt and dried leaves from the top of the skull.  In the Great Desert, the nomads favored sky burial practices, pulling corpses apart and leaving them exposed upon the dune as a final offering to Father Mezzu.  When the vultures arrived, it was a sign that Father Mezzu had accepted the offering and had sent his messengers to transport the dead into his domain — the eternal and unending blue sky.  But here in northern Terinto, it was exceptionally bad luck for a corpse to be dismembered.  One did not go to greet Mother Eirenna without one’s head.

She picked up the skull.  She wouldn’t be able to find the rest of the skeleton, but she should find a place to properly bury the baker’s head.  It was the least she could do.

But she had another task to complete first.

Joslyn walked towards the burnt remnants of the hut, picking her way around blackened chunks of beams and bricks.

This was the kitchen, she thought, standing beside the remnants of the clay oven.  I slept in front of this oven for four years.

She walked to the back corner.

And this is where he slept and meditated, behind a paper screen.

The screen was gone, of course, no doubt one of the fire’s first victims.  She studied the ground anyway, half-expecting to find something of the screen’s remains, or the remains of Ku-sai’s simple bedroll, but there was nothing.

Just soot and earth with weeds growing from it.

Beyond the corner of the hut where her ku-sai had slept was what remained of the chicken coop.  There was even less of the coop than there was of the hut, which at least had a raised stone floor and clay oven that survived the fire.

Joslyn walked towards where the coop had been, even though she wasn’t sure what she expected to find there.  She remembered all the times she’d fed the hens, all the times Ku-sai had sent her down the mountain to the village for the grain he’d fed them, all the times she sat on the rock at the far side of the chicken coop, gazing out at the valley far below and temporarily obscured from her ku-sai’s view by the coop itself.  Those had been peaceful moments.

Ash clung to her damp boots as she sat down at her old spot.

Why had she spent two and a half weeks of hard travel to come here?  Had she really believed the shadow inside the seer who had told her she would find her ku-sai’s sword at the last place she had seen him?  Or had she come simply because she realized she could not be near Tasia and had nowhere else to go?

And what of Ku-sai?  Where had he gone after Joslyn slew or permanently crippled so many of the villagers’ sons?  The shadow said he was dead, but how could that be?  If that was true, why hadn’t she known — felt his passing, somehow?

Joslyn had no answers to her questions, and Ku-sai’s sword was nowhere to be found amongst the ashen ruins of the hut.  She hadn’t really expected it to be here, though.  There was no circumstance Joslyn could imagine in which Ku-sai would have left the sword behind.

Joslyn started to stand back up from the rock, but paused.  In the grass a few inches in front of her was a small wooden box, no wider than her palm, unmarred by the fire that had destroyed everything else.

She picked it up and thumbed open the bronze clasp that held it shut.  Inside was a dried purple flower — the same kind Anaís had given her so many years ago — resting atop something wrapped in cloth.

Joslyn’s heart picked up speed.  The placement of the box inches from the spot she always sat, the dried purple flower — whatever was wrapped in the cloth had obviously been left for her.  She picked it up and sniffed it cautiously.  It smelled… familiar.  Earthy.

She unwrapped it.  Inside the cloth was a square of parchment the size of her palm, folded around something that crunched when she gave it a tentative squeeze.  Joslyn unfolded a corner of the parchment, then stopped when a few brown flakes spilled out.  She closed her fist around the packet and stood abruptly.

Now she realized where she knew the scent from.  The small parchment packet contained tea — tea infused with horsetail mushroom.  It was a shaman’s brew.  And Ku-sai had left it for her.

The old seer’s words came back to her:  He would have trained you, you know, had you not been in such a hurry to prove yourself in the Imperial Army.  He would have made you the most powerful dreamwalker who ever lived.

The evening sun had nearly disappeared behind the western peaks by the time the water inside Joslyn’s water skin boiled.  It had been a maddeningly slow process — first finding the branches to build a lean-to that would shelter the fire from the drizzling rain, then finding and digging out enough dead, dry wood to start a decent fire, and finally holding the leather water skin close enough to the flame to boil its contents but far enough to prevent the skin itself from burning.

Joslyn’s patience was frayed by the time the tea had finally steeped, but she forced herself to wait longer than she thought would be necessary.  She drank it so fast that it scorched her mouth and throat, but she hardly noticed.  What mattered was that she had found her ku-sai’s message.  What mattered was that he wanted her to drink this tea for some reason.  And for once, she had obeyed him without arguing.

Joslyn waited.

She’d witnessed Mistress drink horsetail tea a hundred times, and the effect was nearly always instantaneous.  Within moments of finishing the drink, Mistress’s face would slacken and her eyes would change.

But a minute passed, then two, and nothing happened for Joslyn.  Had she done something wrong?  Had she failed her ku-sai yet again?

An hour passed.

The rain grew heavier, then began to drip through the moss Joslyn had woven into the branches of her lean-to.  It would be a cold, miserable night.  If she hadn’t been in such a rush to brew the tea, she would have spent more time constructing a decent shelter.

Another hour passed, and still Joslyn felt nothing.

Frustrated, exhausted from nearly three weeks of hard travel, she spread her bedroll out beside the dying fire and laid down.  Sleep took her without permission in mere minutes.

And she began to dream.

19

“Pig shite,” the soldier repeated.  He spat into the bowl of stew and handed it back to the Terintan slave who had served it to him.

His companion, another one of the bedraggled Eastern foot soldiers who had arrived the day before, glanced uncomfortably between him and Tasia.

“You should watch your tongue,” the companion admonished.  He gave a respectful nod in Tasia’s direction.  “This here is our future Empress.  The heir named by Andreth the Just before that rat Wise Man put a knife in his back.”

“I don’t care if she’s the bloody living incarnation of Mother Moon,” the soldier said.  “I’m not eating nomad food.”

There was a tense pause, and the small crowd the soldier’s outburst had drawn — other Easterners, Terintan desert riders and slaves, Fesulians, and even a Brother — seemed to hold their collective breath.

All eyes turned to Tasia, waiting for her response.

She would be well-within her rights to have the soldier whipped for such blatant insubordination, and she considered that choice for a moment.  But such an exertion of her power in this situation would only make him a martyr to the ones who shared his frustration.

“Very well,” Tasia said calmly.  “I will not force you to eat.”

She caught a glimpse of Ammanta’s face beside her.  Since the Easterners’ arrival in the camp a few days earlier, both Kort and Evrart had insisted that Tasia always be accompanied by at least one guard.  While Tasia was glad that they’d finally found something they could agree upon, the fact that their agreement was predicated upon the unrest brought to the camp by the Easterners seemed an ill omen.

Tasia gestured to the slave serving stew to give her a bowl.  He hesitated a moment, then ladled a serving into a fresh bowl.  Another slave handed her a spoon.

With all eyes still glued to her, she spooned some of the apa-apa stew into her mouth and gave the crowd an exaggerated grimace, smacking her lips pensively after swallowing the salty concoction.  A murmur — seemingly an amused murmur — rippled through the crowd.

“I must admit, it is not the kind of fare I am used to myself,” she said.  “But besides their best riders, the other thing the nomads brought to our campaign is food.  And the staff to cook it.”

“‘Staff,’” the soldier said, drawing the word out sarcastically.  “‘Slaves’ is what you mean.”

Tasia shrugged.  She had her own objections to the quantity of slaves in Terinto, but now was not the time to fight that battle.  “There are slaves in the East.”

“All Easterners are no more than slaves in the eyes of the Empire,” another soldier said.  “Soldiers most of all.  Taken from our homes, forced by our lords to fight, then sent from that front to this one to fight for you.  No one ever asks us what we want.”

Like wind stirring leaves, the soldier’s words sent a wave of restless movement through the group.  Tasia could feel the precariousness of the movement.

“Do you want to fight for me?” she asked.  She allowed the statement to hang in the air for a moment.  Slowly, she looked from face to face — Easterner to Terintan slave, slave to rider, rider to Fesulian.  “Leave if you wish.  Go home.  I don’t have the resources to chase deserters — I think all of you know that.”

She waited again, gauging their responses.  Some of their gazes dropped to their worn boots; others held her eye defiantly.

“But if you go back to the East, know what you are going back to,” she continued.  “Regent Norix, the man who led the conspiracy to kill my father, is ceding the lands of House Druet, House Fontan, and House Pellon to the mountain tribes.  If you feel the mountain men would be better lords — if you think your children will not be ripped from your arms and enslaved, if you think their warriors will not take your wives as their own — then by all means, leave our camp tonight.  Steal away under the cover of darkness and be free from the Imperial Army.  Be free from the entire Empire.”

She paused.  Silence from the men and women surrounding the cook pots.

“Or stay,” Tasia said.  “Fight for me.  Stop the Regent’s delegation from amputating a third of the East from the Empire.”

“How?” a soldier from the crowd asked.  “They say the Regent is sending fifteen-thousand men.”

“Sorcerers,” another called out.  “The nomads say we’re using sorcerers.”

Voices erupted everywhere.  Some seemed to think the comment was a joke; others demanded a response from Tasia.

She hesitated.  Tell them the truth and she risked further alienating the ones already wary of her leadership.  Lie to them and who knew how they would react when the time came for the Brothers’ grand illusion.

“Treacherous times,” she started, but the crowd’s conversation drowned out her voice.  Some of them shushed each other, and she tried again.  “Treacherous times sometimes make for unexpected allies.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked the soldier who’d spat out the apa-apa stew.

“It means,” Tasia said carefully, “that I have found a way to make our enemies think that our numbers are greater than they are.”

This statement quieted them again as they contemplated her words.

Tasia turned to the man who had refused the stew, the one who’d forced this impromptu rallying of her troops.

“So don’t fight if you don’t want to.”  She took another bite of stew.  “And don’t eat Terintan food if you don’t want to.  But just so you know, the apa-apa herds and cactus fruits the nomads brought with them is the only food we have.  And since we are watching our rations carefully, the stew you poured onto the ground was the only bowl allotted to you for our midday meal.”  She shrugged and glanced around at the faces still trained upon her.  “None of us get a second serving.  Including me.  But please,” she added, waving her hand at the soldier, “feel free to refuse it if you still have food of your own.”

He muttered something under his breath.  A few of his fellow Easterners chuckled.

Tasia knew the soldier had no food — none of the Easterners did.  One of the reasons they sped up their arrival in the camp was that they had run out of food.  And it wasn’t just food the Easterners lacked.  Their lords, it seemed, had sent only the shabby remnants of their armed forces to Tasia.  The boots they wore were falling apart, the armor — those who had armor at all — was threadbare and patched haphazardly, their swords were notched and spotted with rust.  There were officers scattered amongst them, but if their discipline was anything like their equipment, Tasia wouldn’t be surprised if the Easterners would break ranks and run at the first sign of serious trouble.

It was a good thing she was counting on a ruse rather than a fight to defeat the delegation.

“Apa-apa stew is sounding better and better to me!” one of the Easterners called out.  His friends laughed.

Tasia smiled.  “Good.  I’m glad you can see reason.”

She turned to go, with Ammanta, Linna, and another Fesulian guard close on her heals.

“Long live the Empress!” an Eastern soldier called out behind her.

“Long live the Empress!” a few more voices echoed.

Only a few voices.  But a few was far better than none.

Tasia walked to her tent without slowing or looking back.

“I’ll be outside with the rest of the day shift if you need me,” Ammanta said when Tasia pushed back the tent flap.

Tasia merely nodded and stepped inside.  Linna followed her.

Tasia stood in the center of the tent and blew out a long exhalation, then placed a hand on her stomach.  She felt like she might be sick.

“Are you alright, ma’am?” Linna asked, concern in her eyes.  “You’re trembling.”

“I’m fine, Linna,” Tasia said.  She managed a weak smile.  “Go find Kort for me.  Ask him if the scouts have returned yet.  I need to know how much longer I must hold this camp together before the delegation arrives.”

Linna nodded and exited the tent immediately.

Tasia sat down on the tent’s sole chair.  She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.  She rubbed her eyes in small circles with her fingertips.

Joslyn, she thought.  These are the times I miss you the most.  I need someone who believes in me.  Someone to tell me I can do this.  Someone besides a thirteen-year-old girl who reminds me of you.

Tasia sighed and straightened.  There was work to be done.

#

The dust cloud kicked up by ten-thousand feet, hooves, and wagon wheels was visible by mid-morning the next day, and within minutes, Tasia’s camp was a beehive of activity.

“How close are they?” Tasia asked Y’Farsil as they surveyed the dust cloud from the ridge where they planned to set up their ambush.

“Six hours,” he said through his translator.  “They will arrive by late afternoon.”

Six hours of waiting.

Six hours in which Tasia paced in her tent, running through her negotiation points with Evrart again and again until she knew each one backwards and forwards.  Six hours to feel both hungry but too sick with nerves to accept Linna’s offer to fetch her food.

“Empress, I must go,” Evrart told Tasia with two hours left in the countdown.  “The Brothers and I need to make our final preparations.”

Evrart was so pale he was nearly white.  She wasn’t sure if it was because Evrart was as nervous as she was, or if whatever he was doing with the other twenty-nine Brothers was draining him.  Either one seemed plausible.

“Very well,” she said.  “Thank you for your help.”

He nodded and moved to leave, but stopped near the tent flap, turning back to Tasia.  “You should not have written to the Western and the Eastern lords without consulting me first,” he said.  Before Tasia’s temper could flare, he added:  “But I must admit that this plan we are about to enact has a certain wisdom to it.  And if it works, then you will have done the Empire — and perhaps all of mankind — a great service today.”

“It will work,” Tasia said, feigning confidence.  “As long as your illusion holds, it will work.”

He regarded her for a moment, his sunken eyes giving her the eerie feeling that a skull was studying her.  Then he gave her a rare smile and left.

Tasia turned to Linna, who had been sitting quietly beside the cot while Evrart and Tasia practiced the negotiation with the delegation’s leader.

“Well, Linna,” Tasia said.  “It’s you and me now.  How much time do you think we have left?”

“A little less than two hours, ma’am.”

“Ugh,” Tasia said.  “Not enough time to relax.  Too much time to get dressed for the battle.”

She resumed her pacing.  Linna tracked her with dark, solemn eyes.

“Maybe you should speak to the troops, ma’am?” the girl suggested.

“I fear I would just be in their way.”

“You are their Empress.  I am sure they would appreciate seeing you, so close to the time of battle,” Linna said.  “Especially if you were in your own battle gear.  It would raise their spirits.”

Tasia stopped pacing and sighed.  “Alright.  Help me into my armor.”

#

Tasia’s mare huffed and stamped beneath her.  The beast was not the only one disconcerted by the sudden appearance of thousands upon thousands of illusory soldiers.  Several of the mounted Easterners momentarily lost control over their horses when the Brothers cast their grand illusion; the Eastern foot soldiers, too, seemed nearly as uneasy as the animals.  The Terintans and Fesulians barely flinched.

The illusion was impressive.  Over ten thousand soldiers — cavalry, longbowmen, artillery, foot soldiers, officers — all appeared from thin air, each of them so distinct and precise that Tasia felt she could walk up to any of them and hold a conversation.  In fact, the most unsettling part about the illusion was that she could no longer distinguish her actual soldiers from her illusory ones.

One moment, her forces had numbered less than five thousand.  The next, they numbered nearly fifteen thousand.

This is going to work, she reassured herself, patting the mare’s neck.  This is actually going to work.

She glanced at Evrart beside her.  He was sweating and taking short, shallow breaths.  She wanted to say something to him, to congratulate him, perhaps, or thank him, but she worried what effect interrupting his concentration might have upon the illusion.

His eyes darted to hers, and he nodded.  Tasia nodded back.  She supposed that would have to be thanks enough for now.

“We are not as different from the shadows as we like to think, and their world is separated from ours only by the merest of breaths,” he had told her earlier, when she’d asked how the illusion functioned.  “An illusion draws upon the part of us that is already near to the shadows and expands upon it.  We believe that the illusion exists outside of us, that we see it with our eyes.  But what we see is inside; we see it with mind.  We see it and believe it with that part of ourselves that is nearly shadow itself.”

The esoteric explanation had made no sense to Tasia.  But she didn’t really need to understand it, and it hardly mattered how it worked.  What mattered was that the delegation would look up at the soldiers on the ridge, rendered golden by the late afternoon sun, and believe that they not only faced an ambush, but were significantly outnumbered.

Tasia took a deep breath.  She gestured to the guards surrounding her — a handful of her Fesulian guards, mounted Terintans, and Eastern officers — and together, they edged forward to the lip of the ridge, close enough to see into the valley below but far enough away from it that they could not yet be seen.

The vanguard of the delegation, about five hundred foot soldiers and mounted men, had just rounded the corner into the valley.  The main body of the delegation was not yet visible.

“We wait,” Tasia said quietly to whomever might be listening.  “We need all of them in our trap before we spring it.”

There were a few nods around her.  They all knew the plan; she’d stated it again out-loud to assuage her own nerves more than to instruct her leaders.

Tasia fidgeted atop her horse.

Gods, how can they be so slow? she thought as she watched the delegation creep into the valley like an unhurried snake.  Their march was leisurely; their columns of soldiers were messy, barely in formation, more as if they were a group of friends taking an afternoon stroll than an army marching towards potentially tense negotiations.

Banner men were spread out amongst the indistinct columns, marking the different sections of troops.  She saw the wolf head crest — black upon a field of red — of House Aventia, the white towers of House Boling, the shield and crossed swords of House Reed, the red and white checkered squares of House Yount.

All banners from the Capital Lands.  That was curious.  She could understand why there would be no troops from the East, but where were the Western houses?  Where were the Central Steppes?

But it was a mystery to solve at another time.

“Almost,” Tasia said.  “I can see the back of their train… I can see — ”

The words died in her mouth.  There, near the very back of the delegation with only the rear guard behind it, was a large carriage drawn by six horses.  Pennants flew from each corner of the carriage.

Black pennants with a blue circle in the center.  And inside the circle, a white mountain.

The crest of House Farrimont.  The crest of her grandfather.

“Empress?” Ammanta said beside her.  “Is everything alright?”

“Lord Hermant — my mother’s father,” Tasia said after she’d recovered herself.  “I think he’s the one leading the delegation.”

20

When Joslyn dreamed, some part of her was almost always at least vaguely aware that what she saw was only a tale spun by her own mind.  But Ku-sai, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the fire, was so vivid that he did not seem to be a dream.  Yet he must be, because the fire between them had gone strange.  The flickering flames should have illuminated his weathered face in yellows and oranges, but he was shadows of blue and green and white.  The fire itself was blue.

“Kuna-shi,” said the old sword master.  “You found my message at last.  I always knew you would eventually.”

Joslyn sat up.  “Ku-sai?”

Was this a dream or not?  It must be; why else would Ku-sai suddenly be here?  Why else would the fire be blue?

She glanced around.  The lean-to was still above her head, its boughs black with rain.  But beyond Ku-sai, where there should have been the yard with its single skull in the middle, the ruins of the hut, the mountainside dotted with birch trees, there was nothing.  Only a blue-black void.

Part of Joslyn’s mind told her to panic and reach for her weapons, but she didn’t.  She felt oddly calm.

“What place is this?” she asked.

“It is called a q’isson, a dream chamber,” Ku-sai said.  “It is not sleep, though anyone seeing your body would assume that you are asleep.  Let us say that a part of you is awake, but in a place between worlds.”

“Between worlds?” Joslyn repeated.

“A q’isson straddles our world and the Shadowlands,” he said.  “It is woven of pieces of shadows, but also the dreamwalker’s mind.”

“Then you are really here, Ku-sai?  I am not dreaming?”

He took a moment to answer.  “What is left of me is here with you, yes.  I am both a dream and not a dream.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are as curious as ever, Kuna-shi,” he said.  “But there is not enough time to answer every question.  Right now, I need you to attend to my words closely.”

Joslyn nodded.

“You entered into an agreement with a powerful creature of the Shadowlands.  You should not have,” said Ku-sai.  “But you can still turn that agreement to your advantage for the war that is to come.”

War — surely he did not refer to the War in the East.  Did he mean a war with… the Shadowlands itself?

“Because of your ill-fated bargain with the Prince of Shadows,” Ku-sai continued, “you have expanded that part of yourself that already touches the Shadowlands.  And as a result, the shadows can feel you, find you wherever you might go.  It puts you at perpetual risk.  But the connection works both ways.  You can find them, utilize them as any shaman would.”  He paused a moment.  “I always told you that there are no short paths to mastering the art of the sword master.  But you stumbled upon a short path to unlocking your abilities as a shaman, however ill-advised your bargain was.  Use what you have unlocked, Kuna-shi, and we may still prevail in this deadly duel.”

He fell silent, gazing at her.  It was Ku-sai’s way of saying it was her turn to speak and ask questions.  The familiarity of the ritual, the familiarity of the way Ku-sai’s face subtly changed when he was ready for her to speak, awoke an ache deep in Joslyn’s chest.  How she had missed him.  How she wished they could talk about more than shadows and shamans.  She wanted more than anything to win his trust again.

“What is the war you speak of?” Joslyn asked, choosing a single question from the many that buzzed inside her like angry insects.

“The Prince of Shadows and its allies seek to dissolve the boundaries between the Shadowlands and the mortal realm, to make them one, so that shadows will walk amongst us as they once did.”  Ku-sai held up his hands and interlaced the fingers to illustrate his point.  “The Prince has allies in both realms; it also has enemies in both realms.  The so-called ‘Reunification’ its allies seek comes at a steep price:    Shadows are merciless masters, and any man or woman who fights unification with the shadows will eventually be consumed by them.  If the Prince succeeds, then the mortal realm will become nothing but an extension of the Shadowlands.”

Joslyn tried to process what this might mean.

“…Consumed?” she asked.

“We each have an essential, interior part of ourselves.  Some call it ‘soul.’  Others call it ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ or another name,” said Ku-sai.  “Whatever you choose to call it, a shadow seeks that very core of us.  It seeks it the way a fox seeks a rabbit, the way a lion seeks a deer — instinctually, unstoppably.  There are those in the realm of men who would share that part of themselves with a shadow willingly, who bargain away themselves in exchange for the power and longevity the Shadowlands offer.  The rest of us, the ones who fight that inhabitation, we face only doom.  Can a rabbit succeed in a battle against a fox?”

His rhetorical question hung between them as Joslyn thought of the soldier she’d slain in Paratheen, of the men who survived the battle at Deerpark Pass.  They’d fought the shadows inside them, but they were slowly controlled by the shadows anyway.

Consumed, Ku-sai had said.

As if Ku-sai could hear her thoughts, he added, “The thinner the boundary between our world and the Shadowlands becomes, the faster the process is.  Shadows are not each separate individuals, like mortals.  They are connected, like bees in a hive.  Each time a shadow succeeds in taking a mortal body for itself, the next shadow becomes stronger, and the mortal they inhabit weaker, less able to fight it off.”

There was another moment of silence as Joslyn considered the implications.  “If this is true, Ku-sai, how do we win this war?  When I slew the possessed soldier in Paratheen, he very nearly overcame me.  I did not succeed so much as Mother Eirenna smiled upon me by granting good luck.”

“How do you stop the body of a snake?” Ku-sai responded.

The question confused Joslyn for a moment, but then she understood.  She nodded.  “You cut off its head.”

Ku-sai made a grunt of approval.  “The Brotherhood created the Shadowlands long, long ago — well before they ever called themselves a Brotherhood or even conceived that a Brotherhood would be necessary to maintain the shadow arts.  It is their own fault the shadows grew to be so strong and nearly wiped out mankind, and so they remedied their mistakes by pushing the shadows out of this world and into a new one — a miserable, barren world.  A prison world.  A shadow of the real world.”

He paused and met Joslyn’s eye to see if she had understood.  Joslyn nodded — another familiar ritual between them.

“But inside their prison world, the Shadowlands,” Ku-sai said, “the intervening centuries have only created creatures who are stronger than ever.  Within the Shadowlands, there are benign shadows and childish shadows who harbor no fantasies of revenge, but there are those princes among them — the creature you fought on the mountainside, Prince of Shadows you bargained with — who are powerful and dangerous and possess a predator’s intelligence.  Which bee do you kill in a hive, Kuna-shi?”

“The queen,” Joslyn said automatically.

Another grunt of approval.  “The Prince is the only shadow you must defeat.  I would have taught you this and more if you had remained with me.  The dance of the Seven Cities, the sword my father passed down to me — these were designed for just this purpose.”

Ku-sai’s gaze hardened; he did not need to speak his admonishment aloud for Joslyn to hear it.

You left before your instruction was finished, his gaze said.  You left to chase foolish fantasies, when the real work had not yet even begun.

She dropped her eyes, fourteen again, an apprentice neither entirely compliant nor entirely confident within her rebellion.

He reached down, lifted a sword that had not been visible before.  It shimmered in the blue flames of the firelight, momentarily translucent before hardening into the curved steel Joslyn recognized well.

“There is not enough left of me, and not enough time, to teach you how to use my sword,” Ku-sai said.  “But its most important functions — its ability to detect a shadow inhabiting a mortal host, its ability to separate host from shadow — these functions do not need to be taught.”

“How can a sword — ” Joslyn started.

The ground shook.  No — it wasn’t the ground.  It was everything; it was the very air around them.

“What was that?” Joslyn asked.

In one fluid motion, Ku-sai came to his feet and tossed the curved sword to Joslyn, who caught it by the hilt.

“Our time is up.  The shadows have found our q’isson,” he said.  “You must go.”

But Joslyn wasn’t sure how she had arrived.  How did you leave a place you never arrived at in the first place?

An echoing roar came from somewhere behind her.  She spun, lifting the unfamiliar sword of her master to the ready.

But there was nothing behind her.  Just the vague outline of her wet lean-to, its branches swirling in an indistinct black haze.

Another roar came — then another — and another.

“Go, Kuna-shi!” Ku-sai shouted.

The q’isson shook violently, throwing Joslyn off-balance, nearly sending her to the ground before she regained her footing.

“How?” she yelled above the deafening noise, turning to face him.  The ground shook again, and Joslyn lowered her stance into panther prepares to spring.

Ku-sai’s back was turned.  Hands raised above his head, he faced a long, jagged ribbon of red that had appeared in the black void around them.

Joslyn squinted at it.  It wasn’t merely a line.  It was more like… a tear.  Like a gash cut into a curtain by a dagger, letting sunlight seep into a dark room.

She watched with mounting horror as the tear in the fabric of the q’isson stretched longer, then wider.  Whatever Ku-sai was doing to try to stop it, it wasn’t working.  Or wasn’t working well enough.

The air stirred, first nothing more than a whisper of breath, then quickly gusting around them, whipping Joslyn’s hair into her face, pushing at her feet, tugging her shabby leather armor.

Something like smoke stung Joslyn’s eyes, making them water.  But smoke from where?  The campfire in the q’isson had been smokeless.  Flameless, even.

And the acrid air didn’t smell like smoke.  It didn’t smell like anything.  It reminded Joslyn more of —

Ku-sai shouted incoherently, a furious battlecry aimed at the orange-red crack in the q’isson.  In the next moment, light burst forth from everywhere and nowhere.  For a moment, the light blinded Joslyn.

When the world came back into focus again, the q’isson was gone.  In its place was a new landscape, a landscape Joslyn was all too familiar with.  A barren wasteland spread out before her, the ground made up of a rust-colored silt that was not quite sand and not quite soil.  Where Father Mezzu’s blue sky should have been, there was only a dim haze, a sunless sky only a few shades lighter than the silty earth beneath her feet.

The Shadowlands.

“You must go,” he said.  “They are coming.”

Who is coming? Joslyn wanted to ask, but there was no time for her question.

The ground boiled and, like maggots fleeing a corpse, it poured forth creatures neither entirely shadow nor entirely solid.  They screeched and cried, gradually solidifying into bodies that resembled deformed, misshapen humans.  Each grotesque creature was a grey-black, the color of shadow, but covered with flame-colored veins.  On battlefields, Joslyn had seen corpses whose skin had been burned away, and that was what she thought of now — skinless charred corpses, if corpses had lava instead of blood in their veins.

Ku-sai positioned himself just in front of her, adopting the same panther prepares to spring stance that she had taken.  Joslyn turned slightly so that she and Ku-sai were back-to-back — the safest formation when a small number of fighters faced a much greater number.  The creatures encircled them, an ocean of vile snarling things, black jaws snapping, ready to attack.

But they didn’t attack.  They came no closer.  What were they waiting for?

The ground shook violently once more.  Joslyn turned her head slightly, just enough that she could see what was in front of Ku-sai through her peripheral vision without looking away from the monsters who faced her.  About a hundred yards in front of Ku-sai, a pillar of shadow rose from amongst the sea of shadow creatures.

Its form took shape, and Joslyn stopped breathing.

The undatai.  She knew without being told it was the same undatai she had fought on the mountainside, the same one she had bargained with before, in the moments after her death.

If the smaller monsters could be described as charred corpses with lava inside them, the undatai could be described as lava itself.  It was a beast made of fire.  Horns stretched out from either side of its massive head, curved at the tips like a steer’s.  Its arms of flame ended in taloned fingers, each one as long as Joslyn was tall.  And as she watched, the lower half of its body morphed from a column of flame into two legs, haunched like a horse’s.

“It wants the sword,” Ku-sai said.  “But we must not relinquish it, not under any circumstance.”

Joslyn opened her mouth to ask how — how they would survive this, how did she escape the Shadowlands, how did she bring Ku-sai’s sword back with her — but the undatai bellowed in deafening fury before she could speak.  Like an unholy chorus, the creatures answered the undatai’s roar with ear-splitting shrieks of their own.  The air pulsed with sound.

“Kuna-shi,” Ku-sai said softly without turning his head.  “The Shadowlands has no fixed materiality, no physicality.  What is a shadow in one moment is a tangible form in the next.  That is the first thing you must learn about dreamwalking:  You are not really here.  The body you possess here is made with mind — and therefore can be unmade with mind.  You must go back to your physical body.”

The circle of shadow beasts around them tightened.  Joslyn knew what an army about to attack looked like.  They waited only for the signal from their commander.

“But how?” she asked her teacher.  “How do I get back?”

“Your physical body is an anchor,” he said.  “Your mind is tethered to it, like a child’s toy boat is tethered to his finger by a string.  Find the string.  Follow it back.”

“I don’t know h — ”

“I will make time for you,” he said.  “Find the string.”

Ku-sai howled and leapt into the air, somersaulting at the peak of his jump and landing again in the midst of the shadow creatures.

“Ku-sai!”

Joslyn watched in horror as they swarmed him.  He had no weapons — she had his sword.  She whirled towards him, prepared to toss the sword to him, but even as she watched, each of his hands transformed into swords.  He thrust forward — viper striking, to the side — scorpion sting, danced away from one monster — light on water, then plunged his blade-hands downward with swooping hawk into another.  With each strike, shadow creatures disappeared like dispersing smoke.  Yet there was always another monster there to take its place, snarling and snapping and clawing at Ku-sai.  There were just too many of them.  It was only a matter of time before he would be overrun.

In the distance, the undatai bellowed once more.  Like an angry bear, it dropped to all fours and charged.

Find the string.

The shadows around Joslyn surged, and she found herself in a sword master’s dance of her own, cutting the charred-flesh creatures into smoke with furious speed.

Find the string.  There is no fixed materiality here.

Even as Joslyn’s sword arm sent the curved blade slicing through the sea of shadows, her mind searched desperately for a string.  She had been trapped in the living nightmare that was the Shadowlands once before, when she had been injured by the undatai on the mountaintop.  How had she made it back to her body that time?

Tasia.  Joslyn had come back because of Tasia.

And that was when Joslyn felt it — not a string so much as a rope, a golden cord made of a love so strong she could scarcely explain it to herself.  Joslyn’s body might be the anchor of her mind, but it was love for Tasia that had allowed Joslyn to fully inhabit her body again.  For so many years, Joslyn’s body had been nothing more than a weapon wielded by others — a deadly tool whose purpose was destruction.  Tasia had changed that.

Joslyn had known the touch of many women over the years, but only Tasia’s touch had been infused with love.  Only Tasia’s touch had made Joslyn feel that her body could be something more than a sword and a mass of ugly scars.

The memory of that touch became a funnel, a narrow point of light in the hellscape that surrounded Joslyn.  But then something remarkable happened:  As she focused on the way Tasia had made her feel — had made her body feel — a new rip appeared from nowhere on the Shadowlands’ dull red-brown horizon.  Brilliant light filled the tear’s interior — not the thin and sickly light of the Shadowlands, but a different kind of light.

Sunlight.  Golden light.  The light Joslyn felt in the depths of her heart when Tasia gave a secret smile meant only for her.

Joslyn knew without needing to be told that this rip in the fabric of the Shadowlands was the route back to her body, back to the mortal realm.  But scores of shadow creatures stood between her and escape.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder.  Behind her, Ku-sai did battle with the undatai.  Her teacher held his ground, but there was no way he could hold off both the beast and its minions indefinitely.  Joslyn needed to make her escape now, before the window of opportunity Ku-sai gave her closed.

Dancer’s grace:  She sent the blade spinning forward, charged into the gap she had created, spun forward again.  Two of the creatures leapt onto her back, biting at the leather armor she wore.

There is no fixed materiality here.

The creatures on her back became light as parchment rolls; she shook them off without effort.

Scorpion sting:  The sword was a scythe; the creatures nothing but stands of wheat.  She whipped through them, turning each one into a tendril of smoke.

Five yards to go to the disembodied rip in the Shadowlands’ reality.

Love.  Tasia.  Touch.  The light beckoned Joslyn forward.

She abandoned the graceful dance of movement her teacher had taught her and resorted to hacking through the monsters like so much dense underbrush.

Three yards.

She kept shaking the creatures off; they kept piling upon her.  She yelped in pain when one of the monsters managed to hang on long enough to bite into her sword arm.  They seethed around her on all sides; for each one she eliminated, two more seemed to take its place.

Two yards.

Joslyn swung her ku-sai’s sword blindly, ignoring the throbbing in her sword arm that was radiating into her chest.  Her body might not have a fixed physicality in the Shadowlands, but she had an intuition that it could still be destroyed.  Behind her, she heard the undatai roar — either in triumph or in pain, she couldn’t tell.  And she couldn’t afford to look back.

Thrust, swing, dodge; push forward.

One yard.

It was almost within reach now, that golden light, that physical manifestation of the love she held for her princess.

I only have to touch the light, she thought, not knowing how she knew that or why it was true — those were questions to ask and answer later.

Joslyn hacked at the creatures — right, then left, then right, then left.  She managed a step forward.  Another step.  And another.  Right, left.  With her free hand, she reached forward, stretching for the light inside the archway.  But a column of creatures, one crawling atop the other, seized her arm, dug talons and teeth into her hand.  Searing pain reverberated up her arm, and Joslyn cried out, but she kept reaching.

Something tugged at her other arm, her sword arm.  She tried to lift it but realized too late that the moment she had stopped swinging the sword to reach for the archway of light, a crowd of the shadow creatures had pinned her sword arm to her side.  For a few tense seconds, she struggled against the weight, trying to lift her arm, but it was useless.  Teeth pierced the skin of her sword hand, sending white hot pain racing up her arm.

They want the sword.

With a final, desperate push, Joslyn lunged for the jagged tear of light.  One of her outstretched fingertips brushed the golden light, and with a whoosh she felt in the pit of her stomach, the Shadowlands disappeared all at once, like a candle flame suddenly snuffed out.

Joslyn opened her eyes — the eyes of her actual body, she realized — and sat straight up, sucking in a long, ragged breath.

The rain had slowed to an anemic drizzle, but droplets still plink-plinked down from between the branches of her lean-to.  The fire had nearly died, reduced to glowing embers that reminded her far too much of the red veins of the shadow creatures.

She deliberately slowed her breathing and did a quick scan of her body.  As far as she could tell, she was whole; no gashes, no bite marks lined her arms.  No damage had been done to her armor.

But her sword hand was still wrapped tightly around a hilt.  She lifted it — and her heart fell.

Joslyn had managed to escape the Shadowlands with her ku-sai’s curved sword, the sword that the seer told her was the key to restoring the balance between the Shadowlands and this world, but she had only escaped with a fragment of it.  About eight inches above the hilt, the sword had snapped off, leaving only a jagged remnant behind.

I failed him, Joslyn thought.  I failed him again.

She placed the broken sword on the ground beside her, covered her eyes with the heels of her palms, and for the first time in a very long time, Joslyn wept.

21

For a moment, Tasia’s plans and intentions lost themselves inside the shock of recognizing the crest of the House of Farrimont.  The negotiation she had been confident that she could win now seemed a naïve and innocent fantasy.

Was she capable of talking down her grandfather?  Lord Hermant was as deadly as a viper and as cunning as a fox.

But she had come this far.  She had to try.

“Now,” Tasia said.

The officers around her nodded and rushed back towards their troops, shouting orders as they went.  One of the Fesulians waved the giant red and black flag in a snapping arc before Tasia — once, twice, three times.  The signal to the soldiers on the opposite ridge to make themselves visible.

Make themselves visible they did.  Within moments, thousands upon thousands of soldiers  — some of them real, some of them illusions — appeared along the ridge on the opposite side of the valley.  The sight sent a thrill down Tasia’s spine.  There were six, maybe seven thousand of them, Terintan desert riders mixed in with troops in regular Imperial uniforms.

She couldn’t tell the fake soldiers from the real ones, and if she couldn’t tell, then the delegation troops in the valley below wouldn’t be able to tell, either.

Tasia glanced down as the last of her army filled in the spaces along the ridge on either side of her.  The panic sweeping through the delegation below was nearly palpable.  As one body, ten thousand marching soldiers stumbled into a halt.  They were close enough that she could see the panic on some of their faces now.

The ruse was working.  Ten thousand men believed they had just wandered into a deadly ambush.

But even as she reveled in their fear, she hated it, too.  The soldiers in the valley below weren’t at fault.  They were her people, children of the Empire, the same subjects her father had worked so hard to protect.  They were caught in the middle of a power struggle that they hadn’t caused and likely didn’t even understand.

Tasia consoled herself by remembering that, if all went according to plan, not a drop of innocent blood on either side would be spilled.  She would accept the surrender of the delegation, give the soldiers the chance to swear fealty to the true heir to Emperor Andreth, and replace her illusory troops with real ones.  Then she could turn this army around, and march them to Port Lorsin.

She glanced left and right, checking to see that her people were ready.  Every hundred yards or so, a banner man held aloft the royal crest of House Dorsa — a silver eagle and two silver moons on a field of black.  The silk banners had been another gift from Lord M’Tongliss.  No other House banners were used, which itself was symbolic.  While the Regent’s army showed a federation of Houses, Tasia’s banners represented one people, one Empire.

One rightful heir.

She turned to Evrart.  “Good luck,” she said.

He gave her a tight nod.  “And good luck to you, Empress.  Remember:  two hours.  Longer than that and we cannot guarantee the illusion.”

“Very well.  Two hours.”  Tasia turned to her other side.  “Ammanta, prepare the guards.”

Ammanta barked out a series of orders to Tasia’s personal guard of Fesulians, Terintans, and Easterners.  They formed a spearhead-shaped formation around Tasia.  The two riders at the back lifted two banners — the black banner with the silver eagle and moons of House Dorsa and the white flag of parley.

Situated in their center, Tasia nudged the flanks of her mare, and the group slowly made its way down the slope towards the edge of the delegation.

Towards the wagon that housed her grandfather.

#

“Princess Natasia,” said the colonel who came to greet Tasia’s group with a deferential nod of his head.

Judging from his shock of strawberry-blonde hair, the same color as Tasia’s, she guessed he was a Northeasterner.  And judging from the way he carried himself, she guessed he was of noble blood.  For all Tasia knew, this man was one of her cousins.

“Lord Hermant invites you to parley with him in his carriage,” the colonel said.

“I will not meet Lord Hermant within his carriage; he will come to me,” Tasia said, projecting her voice so that as many soldiers as possible would hear her.  She paused, looking the colonel up and down.  Yes, this man was definitely noble, which meant he had been educated by Wise Men, which in turn meant he would recognize Wise Man Rewan’s Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations when Tasia quoted it to him.  “A member of the royal House of Dorsa never comes and bows to a member of another noble house; nobles of other houses come and bow to the House of Dorsa.  And colonel, do not address me as ‘Princess’ again.  Since my father’s death, the correct title is ‘Empress.’”

This, too, Tasia projected so that as many of the common soldiers around her could hear it.  They might not recognize Wise Man Rewan, but they could understand the message well enough.

The colonel hesitated, then nodded.  Stiffly, he said, “I will pass along your request to Lord Hermant, Princess.”

“Empress,” she corrected loudly.  Her gaze roamed over the common soldiers, and she addressed them instead of the colonel when she spoke again.  “My father named me his heir before the traitor Regent and Lord Hermant of House Farrimont murdered him and stole the Empire to satisfy their own greed for power.”

A low murmur rippled through the soldiers behind the colonel.  How much had they heard about the accusations against Tasia, her trial, and her daring escape with Evrart the night before she was to be executed?  Which rumors prevailed — that she had been unjustly accused, or that she was a self-centered princess who’d heartlessly murdered her father?

Let them hear Tasia proclaim her innocence with their own ears.  Let them circulate new rumors on her behalf.

The colonel turned to go.

“Wait a moment, colonel,” said Tasia.

He turned back.

“What is your name — your full name?”

“Colonel Tarsus of House Farrimont,” he said, straightening.

“House Farrimont,” Tasia said with interest.  “Did you know my mother?”

“The Empress Crestienne was my first cousin once removed,” he said, lifting his chin.

Tasia nodded.  It made sense.  House Farrimont was the largest house in the Northeast, which meant not all of its noble progeny could be land owners.  Distinguishing oneself as an officer in the Imperial Army was one of the best ways for a lower-ranking member of the House to advance in status and importance.

“So that makes my grandfather Lord Hermant your…”

“Uncle,” Tarsus said.

“I see.”  She made a show of thinking for a moment, then asked, “Tell me, Colonel Tarsus:  When you swore your oath to protect the Empire against all foes, and to place the Empire’s needs above the needs of your own house, did you ever intend to honor it?  Or had you always planned to betray your oath as soon as it became inconvenient to your own advancement?”

Tasia had gained the rapt attention of all the common soldiers around the colonel.

She cocked her head to the side.  “What did my grandfather promise you for betraying your oath?  Is it land you’re hoping to gain?  A generalship, perhaps?”

Colonel Tarsus paled.  He clenched and unclenched his jaw a few times before responding; Tasia couldn’t tell if the man was angry or frightened — or both.

“I will deliver your message to Lord Hermant, Princess Natasia,” he said.

“Empress,” she corrected.  “And if you refer to me as ‘Princess’ again, I will have you stripped of your rank and title when all this nonsense is over.”

It was a bold threat for a royal in exile, Tasia knew.  Especially bold given that all she truly had was a ragtag army of nomads, mercenaries, and depleted, demoralized Easterners.  But it had the effect she had hoped for:  She saw doubt on the faces of the common foot soldiers.  They were no longer certain that they served legitimate masters.

Joslyn had told Tasia once that a soldier’s first loyalty was to the man on either side of them, their second loyalty to the officer they trust the most.  If Tasia could undermine the trust these soldiers placed in their officers…

Thirty minutes passed.  Colonel Tarsus still did not return with Lord Hermant and his guard.  Tasia saw no hint of movement within the Lord’s grand carriage.

With a force larger than her grandfather’s — or at least appearing larger than her grandfather’s — and surrounding him on the high ground, Lord Hermant had little choice but to acquiesce to Tasia’s demand that he come to her rather than the other way around.  She had the upper hand, and they both knew it.

But he could still make her wait.  They also both knew Tasia wouldn’t attack before a parley, and she could not force the parley to happen a moment sooner than he chose.

It was his way of reminding her that he still possessed power.

The late afternoon sun baked the valley.  Beads of sweat rolled down Tasia’s back beneath her oppressively hot leather armor.  Her mare grew restless, snickering softly as they continued to wait.  The desert riders began to chat quietly amongst themselves in Terintan, but the Fesulians, ever-disciplined, remained still, like statues of themselves.  Many of the delegation’s foot soldiers, meanwhile, simply sat down, despite their officers barking at them not to.

They’ve been marching for weeks, not to mention nearly ten hours today alone, Tasia thought, sympathetic towards the soldiers who were as much her people as the men and women on the ridges behind and before her.  I hope they’ve been as well fed as their officers.

She hated that these Imperial soldiers were being made to march all the way to the Sunrise Mountains just to betray their brothers and sisters in the East.  She wondered if any of them resented being a part of the delegation that would give away Empire lands to the mountain tribes.

Thirty minutes became forty, and still Lord Hermant did not appear.

Two hours, Tasia thought, nerves jangling.  In her mind’s eye, she saw the wick of a candle-clock burning, the hash marks behind it gradually revealing themselves as the wax melted.

After almost an hour, Lord Hermant emerged from his carriage.  Tasia straightened in her saddle, the Terintans stopped chatting, the delegation soldiers hastily clambered to their feet.

He managed to make this about him and not about me, Tasia thought, irritated.

A bubble of guards surrounded Lord Hermant, and the delegation soldiers parted for them as they approached Tasia.

“Natasia.”  Her name was honey-sweet on her grandfather’s tongue.  “So I take it that the rumors of you hiding in a brothel in Everly aren’t true after all.”

Tasia gritted her teeth, but kept her face neutral.

Lord Hermant gestured to a soldier, and two of his guards stepped forward and unfolded a pair of wooden chairs, placing them between Tasia’s entourage and his own.  A third soldier unfolded a small, round table and set it between the chairs.

“Please.  Sit,” Lord Hermant said to Tasia.  “It’s not as comfortable as my carriage would have been, but the chairs really aren’t so bad, compared to a saddle.”

“I prefer the saddle, actually,” Tasia said.  She didn’t want to sit across from him as if they were equals.  And she liked being higher than him, forcing him to look up to speak to her.  “What I have won’t take long to say, anyway.”  Raising her voice, so that her words would carry beyond Lord Hermant to the soldiers around her, she said, “You betrayed the Empire and the House of Dorsa by conspiring with Wise Man Norix to kill my father and seize power for yourself.  Now you betray it again by preparing to sign away a third of the East to the barbarians.  Given that House Pellon alone accounts for about a third of the grains in the Capital Lands, you betray not only me, but also every man, woman, and child who will starve to death in Capital Lands, every Easterner who will be enslaved by the mountain men, every nobleman who will be forced to flee the lands his family has held for hundreds of years.”

Lord Hermant chuckled, then gave Tasia a sneering half-smile.  “Quite the speech,” he said.  “Whoever helped you write it should be praised for his oratorical skills.”

Snickers spread through the officers around him, with even some of the common soldiers joining in.

He glanced up at the army spread out along the hills and ridges.  “And I must admit, Natasia, that you managed to gather a rather impressive number of ragtag Imperial Army leftovers and deserters.  I’m surprised there are even that many Imperial soldiers left — we had a hard enough time scrounging up enough for the delegation.”  His eyes roamed the ridge behind Tasia, then settled on the guards surrounding her.  “Nomad riders… well-known for their ferocity, even though they lack discipline.  And… are those actually Fesulians you brought with you?  I haven’t seen contracted Fesulians on Empire soil in — well, at least a decade.  You must have a benefactor with some rather deep pockets.”

Tasia said nothing.

“But unfortunately for you, granddaughter,” he continued, “everyone knows the truth of this situation.”  He raised his voice.  “You accuse me of being a traitor, yet you were the one convicted by the council of killing your father and betraying the Empire.”  Murmurs rippled through the soldiers around him.  “As for this delegation, your father spent twelve years dragging the Empire towards poverty and bankruptcy.  He called the people of the Empire his children, yet he sent his children off to die at the hands of the mountain men by the thousands.  Do you know how many mothers will never see their sons again?  How many wives will never see their husbands, how many children will never know their fathers?”

The common soldiers nodded and spoke softly amongst themselves.  Tasia spoke over them, projecting her voice as far as she could.

“Don’t act as if you care for the common people of the Empire,” she said.  “You forget that I know you better than any of them, Grandfather.”  She looked past him, catching the eyes of as many soldiers as she could.  “This man is my mother’s father, and I know him all too well.  He cares about two things only — his wealth and his power.  He killed my father to increase his power; he seeks to end the War in the East to increase his wealth.  When House Pellon no longer sells its grain to the Capital Lands, where do you think grain will come from?  The Northeast.  And which House controls the most land in the Northeast?”  She raised her finger, pointing down at her grandfather.  “His House.  House Farrimont.  Don’t let him trick you into believing he cares for you or your families.”

The soldiers exchanged glances.  They were uncertain.  Good.  Uncertainty was probably the most she could hope for at the moment.

She addressed Lord Hermant again.  “You have until sundown to give me your unconditional surrender and turn your delegation back to Port Lorsin.”  She paused, letting her words sink in for Lord Hermant and the soldiers alike.  “I don’t wish to spill the blood of innocent men, pitting Imperial soldier against Imperial soldier.  But we will attack if we have to.  So if you truly care about the soldiers of the Empire as much as you say you do, you will accept my terms — I will grant these soldiers their lives in exchange for your surrender.”

“And me?” Lord Hermant asked wryly.  “Am I spared when I surrender?”

“Obviously not,” Tasia said.  “You die at my own hand as payment for taking my father’s life.”

Lord Hermant laughed.  “Of course.  You forget — I know you all too well, too, Natasia.  You are nothing but a bloodthirsty, impulsive brat who cares only about taking the crown for herself.  This isn’t about vengeance; it’s about greed.  You will kill me only because you know I am capable of stopping you.”  His gaze hardened, and Tasia saw the hate there, as cold as the icy blue of his eyes.  “There will be no surrender.  I dare you to attack — let’s see if you can maintain control over those nomads of yours.”

With that, Lord Hermant spun on his heel and walked away.  Tasia watched him go, grinding her teeth.

Colonel Tarsus shot a worried look at his back, then glanced up at Tasia.  He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“If you value the lives of your soldiers — if you value your own life,” Tasia told Tarsus, “change his mind.  Change his mind before it’s too late.”

The colonel hesitated, then shook his head.  “I thought you said you knew him,” he said.  “There is no changing his mind.”

He walked away with the remaining officers.

The only men left were the common soldiers who had crowded around to hear the proceedings.  One of them — a young Northeasterner, from the looks of him — caught Tasia’s eye.

“If you really are the rightful heir,” he said, “if you really care as much as you say you do, you won’t kill us for his treason.”

The nods of the other soldiers gave Tasia an idea, sparking a momentary hope.

“There are more of you than there of them,” she said.  “Don’t let them take you to your death needlessly.”

“Yer suggesting we mutiny?” asked another soldier incredulously.

“I’m suggesting that you look into your heart and know the truth for yourself.  Let’s go,” she told Ammanta before the men had time to fully process her words.  Tasia wheeled her mare around, and her guard followed her back up the hill to where her army awaited her.

Evrart found her before she found him.

“We have less than an hour before the illusion fails,” he said, voice as strained as it had been when she’d left him.  “Please tell me your parley worked.”

“Lord Hermant is a stubborn old man,” Tasia said.  “We need another hour.  We may have to ride on them and hope that enough soldiers lose their nerve — or change whom they support — that we stand a chance.”

Evrart shook his head.  “We can’t extend the illusion, Empress.  We have already given everything we can.”

“Talk to the Brothers,” said Tasia.  “You must find a way.  You must.”

22

~ THEN ~

The Imperial Army recruiter had not been difficult for Joslyn to track.  He and the two village boys who still lived had tramped through the foothills like wild boars, leaving a path of crushed foliage, broken branches, and muddy bootprints that were easy to find and follow.  It surprised Joslyn; were all Imperial soldiers this careless in the woods?  Or were they careless only when so far removed from a battle front?  Once Joslyn unfurled her senses, she also realized she could track the recruiter’s progress with her nose:  The scent of onion seeping through his pores was so strong that she could smell him from nearly a quarter of a mile away.

But she didn’t reveal herself to him and the boys that first night, nor did she reveal herself to them the second night.  She kept her distance.

Joslyn couldn’t say why she hesitated.  Perhaps she worried she would be forced to kill the two remaining boys.  Perhaps she was having second thoughts about joining the Imperial Army.

Judging by the direction he was heading, he was probably planning on visiting the Seven Cities to pick up more recruits.  That would make sense.  Even though her ku-sai was one of the last true masters of the dance of the Seven Cities, the inhabitants of the string of northern Terintan towns still enjoyed a reputation for producing some of the Empire’s most ferocious warriors.  Not that the recruiter was likely to have much luck in the Cities; the northern Terintans were also the last to accept Empire rule, and many still resented being forced into a peace treaty that had been largely engineered in Paratheen.

But by the third day of tracking them, Joslyn’s stomach pinched with hunger.

Hunting a rabbit or a squirrel wouldn’t be hard for her, but cooking it would require moving far enough from the recruiter and the recruits that they would not detect the smoke from her fire.  There were ways around that problem, but…

But did she want to become a soldier or not?

If not, then what?

She was too ashamed to go back to Ku-sai.  He might not even be there anymore, anyway — it was quite possible the villagers had driven him out.  Or he could have left voluntarily, just so he wouldn’t have to slaughter half the village in his self-defense.

If she didn’t join the army, she would have to go back to the way she had lived before she met Ku-sai — wandering village to village, finding odd jobs when she could, begging and stealing when she couldn’t.

Joslyn was eighteen now.  She was too proud to go back to being a street urchin.

She could become a mercenary.  Or an assassin.  She knew that in Paratheen, smugglers often warred with one another, with one confederation assassinating the leader of another all the time.

But —

Ku-sai’s voice:  So you are a mercenary now?  You rent the skills I have taught you to the highest bidder?

But there was no honor in being a sword for hire.  Maybe there wasn’t as much honor in being a soldier as she thought, but at least she would be fighting to protect the Empire and not just money.

Joslyn approached the recruiter and the two boys in the morning of the fourth day, after they had broken their camp and put out what was left of their fire.  She walked slowly, both palms up, making her steps as heavy and reckless as theirs so that they would hear her coming.  The village boys, no doubt more attuned to their environment than the recruiter, heard her first.  One of them muttered a curse and awkwardly drew his new sword; the other shrank back, putting the burly recruiter between himself and Joslyn.

Only then did the recruiter see her.

She stopped at the edge of the clearing where they’d spent their night.

“Ah, look who it is,” he said.  “The murderous nomad girl.  Come back to finish off me recruits?”

“No.  I came to join the army.”  Joslyn hesitated, then added, “I never wanted to kill the boys.  But you told them to attack me.  And they would have killed me if I hadn’t defended myself.”

“Aye, so they would’ve.”  The recruiter nodded with an air of mock thoughtfulness, then crossed his trunk-sized arms against his massive chest.  “Surprised me a little, the way they went after you.  Was it only me own perception, or did them boys hate you, girlie?”

“All the Empire hates nomads, except nomads,” Joslyn said, dodging his real question.

She didn’t want to explain that the villagers vacillated between fear, hate, and admiration for Ku-sai.  She didn’t want to explain the way they called him sorcerer under their breath, or that they were jealous that he’d taken her on as a pupil, nothing but a grimy, homeless ex-slave, after he’d turned away so many others, including dozens of their own sons.

“I s’pose that’s as true a point as any.”  He looked her up and down, eyes lingering on the sword at her waist.  “That’s an army sword.  Innit?”

She nodded.

“How’d you come to have it?  Slit another throat for it?”

“I met a soldier who wanted to hurt me once,” Joslyn said.  “I stole it when he fell asleep.”

He chuckled.  “I bet you did.”

A tense moment passed as the recruiter’s gaze scoured Joslyn up and down.

“Will you take me as a recruit or not?” Joslyn asked.

The village boy who’d drawn his sword — an orphan who’d been the wheelwright’s apprentice — glanced from Joslyn to the recruiter.  “Stealing is a crime,” he told the recruiter in his northern Terintan accent.  “In our village, we cut off a hand when we catch a thief — the first time.  The second time we catch them stealing, we hang them.”

The recruiter turned on the boy, giving him a withering stare.  The wheelwright’s apprentice, who was at least a full head shorter than the recruiter and not even half as wide, took an instinctive step back.

“Ye’d have me take one of her hands?” said the recruiter disdainfully.  “Which one?  Her sword hand?”  He looked back at Joslyn.  “I reckon both hands are sword hands.”  He reached for something at his waist, and Joslyn tensed.  Her hands twitched — both of them — as she mentally calculated the likely trajectory of a dagger and the speed with which the recruiter could draw it.   Diving falcon followed by scorpion sting should be sufficient.

The recruiter paused, one hand still obscured at his waist.  His eyes narrowed, but then he grinned.  “You’re already thinking about how yer going to take me down if I pull a dagger on ye, aren’t you?”

Joslyn said nothing.

The recruiter pulled his hand free, and flung something towards Joslyn that flashed gold in the morning light.  She started to move into diving falcon, realized what was in the air, and reached out a hand to catch it.  The gold regal was smooth and cool in her palm.  Surprised, she looked up at the recruiter.

To the wheelwright’s apprentice, he said, “I ain’t chopping off either of the girl’s hands.  The Imperial Army paid too much for ’em to waste them.”  The recruiter jabbed a meaty finger into the boy’s chest.  “And if you ever get your sword stolen by a girl after ye pass out drunk, yer buying a new one.”

The boy blanched.

“What did ye say your name was, girl?” the recruiter asked, taking a step forward.  “Jasmine, was it?”

“Joslyn.”

“Joslyn, welcome to the army of Emperor Andreth the Just, Defender of the Four Realms, father of all the children of the Empire, heir of the Great House of Dorsa.”

He extended a hand, and Joslyn shook it.

~ NOW ~

Dawn came.  Mother Eirenna’s gentle light bathed the mountainside, giving everything a soft yellow glow.  The mist that always swirled at ground level in the pre-dawn hours slowly rose, burning off as the sun grew stronger.  Joslyn watched it from her spot at the edge of the lean-to, her arms circling her knees, the broken sword still on the ground before her.

She had not slept at all after she woke from the shadow-dream, had not even attempted it.  When she finished shedding her tears for her lost ku-sai, for the fact that she had failed him yet again, for the fact that she had made a bargain with a Prince of Shadows and now it held dominion over her very soul, she had simply sat and stared at the fire’s dying embers until they went out.  And once they did, she shifted her gaze from the ground to the night sky.

The black blanket with its pinpricks of starlight was the god Uncle Q’Util’s realm.  Terintan lore held that the stars were his many children, the results of the trysts he had with mortal women when he came down to Earth disguised in human form.

Joslyn had never been one to put much stock in the gods.  Perhaps if she had been raised in the desert tribe she had been born into, it would have been different, but as it was, she only knew the tales Mistress had told her and what little she had picked up from the slaves in Captain Samwin’s household.  Uncle Q’Util, Mother Eirenna, Father Mezzu — maybe they were real, maybe they were just tall tales the night watch apa-apa herders told one another to stay awake while the rest of a nomad camp slept.

But the Shadowlands were real.  That was one thing Joslyn knew for sure.  And Ku-sai had been a shaman — a dreamwalker.  The kind of shaman that could enter into the dreams of others and communicate with them there.  And Ku-sai would have taught her the art of dreamwalking, had she not left so impetuously and impulsively for the Imperial Army.

She sighed.

Mother Eirenna, perhaps hearing her doubts, reached out her fingers and touched the broken sword that still laid at Joslyn’s feet.  Light glinted off metal, drawing Joslyn’s attention downward.  She picked up what was left of the sword, her eyes tracing the patterns etched into the flat of the blade.

Writing of some kind.  She’d noticed the letters years ago, when she’d first been accepted by Ku-sai as his kuna-shi.  But now that Tasia had given Joslyn reading lessons, she knew the letters did not belong to the common tongue.  She was also fairly certain they were not Terintan letters.

Joslyn ran a finger lightly along the etchings until they ended abruptly at the jagged break a third of the way up the sword.

What now?

Joslyn got to her feet and slipped Ku-sai’s broken sword between her belt and trousers.  Perhaps she could make a sheath for it on her journey.  She stamped on and scattered the blackened remnants of her fire, then disassembled her lean-to, tossing the boughs in different directions.  By the time she had finished, there was no trace she had ever been there.  She did a quick check — her sword was secure on her back, daggers all in their sheaths, leather armor properly fitted.

The lazy swordsman never checks his equipment, Ku-sai said in the back of her mind.  The lazy swordsman is the first one to die in battle.

How many times had he said those words to her?  A hundred?  A thousand?

I’m sorry I let you down, she thought.

“Kuna-shi.”

Joslyn spun around, pulling a dagger free and dropping into panther prepares to spring with the ease and speed it took most people to draw a single breath.

But there was no one behind her, and nothing except the ruins of Ku-sai’s hut.

She scanned the area, unfurling her senses and bringing her breath under control.

“Who’s there?”

The mountainside gave no reply.

She waited in her fighting stance for a full minute before she relaxed and re-sheathed the dagger, convincing herself she had only imagined her teacher’s voice.  After all, she’d had a long night.

Joslyn made a quick check of her travel sack.  There was still a fair amount of the tea Ku-sai had left her; she put this at the bottom of the sack and shoved her bedroll in on top of it.  Then she shouldered her bag, checked the position of the rising sun, and began walking northeast — the same direction she’d walked in many years ago, when she’d fled a pack of angry villagers intent on revenge and sought out the army recruiter.  The Zaris Mountains were barely visible from here, still half-hidden in the morning mist.  Backlit by the sun, their peaks rose above the clouds like a jagged row of black teeth.  The sight filled Joslyn with both dread and bitterness.

Back towards the maw of the monster, she thought.

But she could think of no other alternative.  She had broken Ku-sai’s sword — a sword that had turned out to be far more special than she had ever realized, and the only people who might possess the skill to repair such a sword were the small men.

Joslyn had told Grandmother Ajda that it was useless to chase the small men; they would be found only if they wanted to be found.  Now, she could only hope they would want to be found.

23

With only thirty minutes of the illusion left, Tasia sent a messenger to Lord Hermant:  As the compassionate mother of the children of the Empire, she would give the Lord one last chance to avoid spilling innocent blood.  She’d given him a deadline of sundown to avoid an attack, but she would show mercy to the innocent and extend the deadline until dawn.  And if he attempted to flee the valley in the dead of the night, she would know.

Then she ordered her troops to withdraw, illusory soldiers and live ones alike.  On Tasia’s side of the bluffs, the Fesulians and half the Eastern soldiers pulled back a few hundred yards to their camp.  On the opposite side, Y’Farsil’s riders and other half of the Easterners pulled back and made their own camp.  Tasia ordered her people to spread out.  For every one camp fire you normally light, she told them, light three.  When the delegation below settled into their own uneasy sleep for the night, she hoped they would look up into the hills surrounding them and see the fires of an army of fifteen-thousand and not the number she actually had.

Evrart joined her in her tent almost as soon as the illusion ended.

“You look horrible,” she commented.

“We are exhausted,” he said.  “In the thousand-year history of the Brotherhood, I don’t think an illusion of that size has ever been executed.”

“Well, you need to do it again by dawn,” Tasia said.  “Or else all of us are going to die.”

From her usual spot, seated beside her bedroll in the corner of the tent, Linna glanced between her mistress and the Brother uneasily.

“Empress, I told you before, there is no second chance at this illusion.”

“Then think of another way,” Tasia snapped.  “I didn’t come here just to lead forty-five hundred soldiers to their deaths.”

“I did think of another way,” said Evrart, voice dropping into a growl.  “My way was for us to wait in Paratheen while we gathered enough allies to win you back your crown.  But you had to prove yourself as impetuous as ever and — ”

“Stop it.  I don’t need lectures from one of the men who helped create this mess in the first place.  You’re as much to blame as I am.”  Tasia rubbed her forehead.  She searched her mind for a way out of this crisis… and found none.  “We’ll have to run,” she said at last.  “He already made it clear he has no intention of surrendering.”

“Run where?” Evrart asked.  “We can’t move five thousand soldiers fast enough to save them.”

“Run to the Great Desert,” Linna said quietly.

Tasia and Evrart both turned to her, having forgotten the girl who was better than a Brother at making herself invisible.

“Y’Farsil can lead us,” she continued.  “We could move north and west until we find the tribes.  The nomads will take us in.  And no one would follow us into the Great Desert.”

Tasia contemplated the girl’s words.

“It might be our best option,” she told Evrart.

“We won’t survive the journey,” he said.  “We don’t have the provisions for a retreat into the desert.  We were running low on supplies as it was, counting on the delegation’s surrender to restock our food and water.  Going into the Great Desert… the water that would require alone… it’s suicide.”

“So is staying,” Tasia said.  “At least running gives us a chance.  Unless you can think of a better choice?”

She waited, but Evrart said nothing.  After a moment, he shook his head.

Tasia sat heavily upon her cot.  “It’s a game of Castles and Knights,” she said.  “Our pieces are on the board, now we just have to think through the moves available to us and the consequences of each move.  One move open to us is north and west like Linna said.  We run for the desert in the middle of the night, and hope we get far enough that they won’t follow us.”

“The Great Desert is at least a full day’s march away,” Evrart pointed out.  “More likely two, given the state of the Easterners.  We won’t even make it to the first dunes if we flee in the middle of the night.”

“Then what are the other moves on the board?” Tasia asked irritably.  “You reject each one and yet offer no solution, counselor.”

Empress and Brother stared at one another for a moment — a battle of wills.

Tasia sighed.  “Are you completely sure the Brothers can’t cast another illusion?”

“Not without losing their minds,” Evrart said darkly.

Tasia cocked her head to the side, waiting for him to elaborate.

“It is a shadow art.”  Evrart pulled the rickety wooden chair from the small round table and moved it to face Tasia, lowering himself into it wearily.  “Shadow arts are always dangerous, because the practitioner has to enter the liminal space between our world and the Shadowlands.  Only through the will of the practitioner does he prevent himself from being consumed by the shadows completely.”

“Or herself,” Linna put in.

Evrart and Tasia both turned to her, and the girl blushed ferociously and shrank into herself.

She dropped her gaze and mumbled, “I’ve heard that women resist the shadows more easily than men.  That’s why most of Terinto’s shamans are women.”

Evrart nodded.  “Yes.  In general, that is true.  But a well-trained member of the Brotherhood does through skill and years of training what a woman only does on instinct.”  He gave Tasia a grim look.  “I’m sorry, Empress.  Another illusion might be possible with a few days for us to rest — three days, perhaps — but right now…”

“We can’t stall them for three days.”  Tasia mentally removed the game piece of the Brothers from her imaginary board of Castles and Knights.  She could think of only one more possible move.  “We could attack,” she said.  “Attack them in the middle of the night, as most of them sleep.  Maybe we could create enough chaos and confusion that we would stand a chance, even out the numbers before they gather themselves for a response.”

“Lord Hermant will be expecting a move like that,” Evrart said.  “Because it’s exactly the kind of move he would make himself.”

Tasia let out a long breath, wishing she was someone else.  Someone who’d paid closer attention to her father’s lessons — even to Norix’s lessons — instead of frittering away her time as an over-indulged royal.  Someone like General Remington, who would see ten moves on the imaginary Castles and Knights board when Tasia only saw two or three.

Or someone like Joslyn.

Tasia nearly muttered, I wish my father was still alive, then none of this would be happening, but it was stupid and petty to think like that.  It was the thinking of an over-indulged royal who didn’t want to accept responsibility, and that wasn’t Tasia anymore.  She had to be the leader Joslyn said she could be.

“We run for the Great Desert,” she announced.  “It’s the best move on the board.  Linna, pass the message.  Leave all the campfires lit, and tell the officers to keep the soldiers as quiet as possible.  Do you think you can sneak across the valley safely and give the same message to Y’Farsil and the rest of the Easterners?”

The girl thought a moment, then nodded.

“Alright, then after you — ”

But Tasia was cut off by a shout coming from outside the tent, then another, then a third.

“Gods, what now?” she said.  It was probably the Easterners, squabbling amongst themselves again, or picking fights with the Fesulians.  She marched to the tent flap and threw it open — and only through Joslyn’s training did she manage to dodge the arrow whizzing towards her.

“The delegation is attacking!” Tasia shouted.  “Linna, go to Y’Farsil, tell him we need — ”

But the words died in her throat.  It was already too late.

Time slowed down.  Sounds faded to dull echoes.  An acrid haze of smoke stung her eyes and her nose.

The camp was chaos and death; it was the mercenary ambush Norix had arranged months earlier all over again but a hundred times the size.  Tents burned.  The ground was already littered with dead Easterners; the ones who still lived had terror in their eyes and fled recklessly in all directions.  Even as she watched, the sword of a delegation soldier bit into the leg of a fleeing Easterner.  Blood sprayed; the man collapsed; the delegation soldier plunged his sword into the Easterner’s back with a full-throated battlecry.

A hand seized Tasia’s upper arm, and she snapped out of her reverie, drawing one of the daggers that was always at her hip.

“It is me, Empress, only me,” Ammanta said, letting go of Tasia’s arm and holding up her hand.  “Come.  We must get you away from here.”

With a gentle shove, Ammanta pushed Tasia back inside the tent.  The rest of Tasia’s Fesulian guard — a half-dozen solemn faces armed with their double-pointed pikes — followed Ammanta into the tent.  Like water around a rock, they flowed around Tasia as a single body.

“Where’s Kort?” Tasia asked.

“Fighting,” Ammanta said simply.  She drew her long knife and slashed through the rear of the tent, peaking outside of it before nodding to her companions and saying something to them in her native tongue.

Whatever she said, it made their jaws clench and their fists tighten around their pikes.

“Linna, Evrart,” Tasia said hastily.  “With me.”

They came into Tasia’s protected bubble of Fesulians.  Tasia grabbed Linna’s forearm as soon as the girl was close enough.

“I’m not losing you, alright?” she said, meeting the girl’s frightened eyes.  Tasia had lost Joslyn; she’d been separated from Adela.  She couldn’t lose Linna, too.  “We survive this.”

The girl nodded; Tasia drew her second dagger and handed it to Linna.

“We go,” Ammanta said, and she led the small band onto the chaotic battlefield.

24

The mesa outside Tasia’s tent had become less a scene of battle than one of slaughter.  Everywhere, delegation soldiers butchered unprepared Easterners.

“Not a single rebel escapes!” an officer shouted to his men, and as Tasia watched, the officer spun, parried a feeble attempt at a blow, and ran his short sword through an Eastern officer’s throat.

“I led us to our deaths,” Tasia mumbled numbly.  She turned, caught Evrart’s eye.  “I should have listened to — ”

“It’s the bitch of Dorsa!” a soldier yelled.

“Father-killer!” another snarled.

“Get her!”

“Run her through!”

“Traitorous cunt!”

An officer’s voice rose above all the others’.  “Take her alive, or face my wrath!”

The circle of Fesulians tightened around Tasia as the soldiers charged.  Tasia held her remaining dagger at the ready, but the Fesulians held their own against the soldiers.  Their double-pointed pikes whipped through the Imperial soldiers, cutting down the first wave of attackers almost effortlessly.

The second group of soldiers approached with more caution, having seen the ease with which their mates were dispatched.  Tasia’s guard was ready, but there were only six of them, and the delegation soldiers were nearly countless.  They were surrounded.  When the delegation soldiers charged again, they were strategic in their attack, pitting three soldiers against every one of her guard.

Her guard cut down a dozen men, but finally one of the Fesulians fell.

Tasia looked down at Linna.  “They don’t want you,” she said.  “Run.  Save yourself.”

“But Empress, you — ”

“I command you to go, Linna.  I’m not worth dying for.”

Linna looked as if she might argue, but finally gave Tasia a single nod.  When a gap opened between the dueling warriors, she slipped through it with the grace that only a child who has been invisible her whole life could manage, and dashed into the thick of the raging battlefield.  Tasia soon lost sight of her in the haze of smoke.

She turned to Evrart next.  “You were right,” she said.  “I’m sorry I didn’t — ”

But he mumbled something incomprehensible and vanished, leaving Tasia with her mouth half-open and the rest of her apology still in her throat.

The Brother of Culo had chosen to save himself rather than be captured with her.

She supposed she should be glad.  If Evrart was alive, perhaps the Brotherhood would find a way to rescue her from the executioner’s axe a second time.

Or perhaps she’d made enough mistakes that she was finally all on her own.  Joslyn was dead, Adela was a world away and possibly believed her older sister had murdered her father. Tasia had squandered the support Lord M’Tongliss had given her on a foolhardy mission, and now Linna and Evrart had both fled.

Only two of the Fesulians still stood between Tasia and the delegation soldiers — Ammanta and one other.

Tasia breathed in deeply, assumed a ready stance Joslyn had taught her whose name she had forgotten.  It had “panther” in it somewhere, but Tasia didn’t feel like a panther.

One of the Imperial soldiers feinted high at Ammanta, and as she blocked the blow, another soldier swung low, striking her in the thigh.  Blood flowed freely, yet the woman did not fall.  Spinning her pike so fast that it was a blur, she took out both soldiers in a single strike.  But those two were quickly replaced by three more.  Even as Ammanta put her pike through one man’s throat, another landed a blow with a club to the side of her head.  And finally, the warrior fell.

And Tasia was all alone.

The soldiers encircled her, swords drawn.  One of them placed his sword on the ground, then straightened slowly, both palms raised.

“Now Princess,” he said, accent marking him as a Port Lorsiner, “we don’t want to hurt you.”  He took a step forward.  “There are a dozen of us.  There’s one of you.”  He took another step.  “Why don’t you put the dagger away, and all this can be over?”

Tasia tightened her grip on her dagger.  “You’re fighting for the wrong side.  Lord Hermant and the Regent betrayed my father.  They murdered him.  They took power for themselves.”

A few of the soldiers exchanged nervous glances; the rest only scowled.

“You lie,” spat one of them.

“No,” Tasia said.  “It’s not your fault that we meet like this.  They are the ones who have lied to you.”

She heard something behind her and spun around.  Another three soldiers had inched closer.  The noose was tightening.

“Don’t do this,” Tasia pleaded.  “It isn’t too late.  You can help me escape.”

“Why in the name of all the gods would we do that?” asked a soldier.

“Because,” said Tasia, “Lord Hermant cares nothing for your lives.  He sells the East to the barbarians only so he can corner the grain market for himself.  It doesn’t matter to him that half the Capital Lands will starve.”

A few of the soldiers seemed to hesitate at her words, but the rest looked unaffected.

“Please.  I don’t want to hurt any of you,” Tasia said.

“If you don’t want to hurt us, put the blades away,” said the first soldier.  “Surrender and come with us.”

“Why?” Tasia asked, tightening her grip on the daggers.  “So that the traitors can complete their betrayal of the House of Dorsa?  Are you soldiers of Dorsa or not?  My father named me heir for a reason.”

“And you’re such a greedy bitch that you couldn’t wait for him to die, so you killed him!” a soldier yelled.

He lunged for Tasia, but she was faster.  She sidestepped and slashed downward with one of her daggers, catching him in the forearm.  The soldier cried in pain.  Even before the sound of his scream faded, the rest of the soldiers rushed forward.

Tasia fought for her life.  All the graceful moves Joslyn had taught her degenerated into wild thrusts and slashes.  She heard herself screaming before she realized she was doing it.  Blood sprayed across her face, but she couldn’t tell if it was hers or a soldiers.  Rough hands grabbed at her arms; she pulled free once, twice, but finally their strength overwhelmed hers.  One of her arms was twisted hard behind her.  She yelped, dropping the dagger.  Another man grabbed her from behind, locking his hands around her chest and pinning both her arms to her side.  Off-balance, Tasia’s feet scrabbled for purchase, but the ground itself did not seem to want to cooperate.  Something — an arm, she guessed — tightened around her throat.  She wanted to claw at it, but she couldn’t; her arms were still trapped against her sides.  Tasia tried to force air into her lungs, but the arm against her throat was too tight.  Her vision sparkled, then greyed.

Then there was only blackness.

#

The sound of a snuffling animal woke Tasia with a start.  She scrambled into a sitting position, then attempted to stand, but the back of her head slammed into something hard only a few inches above her, the sudden impact forcing tears to her eyes and making her vision swim.

Gradually, the world came into focus.  She was in a cage — a kennel, actually — surrounded by dogs on three sides.  It was their curious snuffling that had roused her, but now that she was awake and moving, their sniffs had transformed into snarling and barking.  One of the beasts snapped at her repeatedly through the bars of her cage, trying to force its snout through the small opening to get to her.  Saliva dripped in long white strings from its jowls.

A man chuckled, and Tasia automatically turned towards the sound.  She immediately regretted the movement; her head still spun dizzily from whacking it against the top of the cage.

Lord Hermant stood before her in polished leather battle armor.  The armor was obviously only for show; not a scratch marred it, and the white cape that hung from his shoulders was unstained by the dirt of travel or fighting.  Tasia, by contrast, was filthy.  She had been stripped out of her own armor and left in her undergarments only.

“I see that you’re finally awake,” said Lord Hermant.  “I was surprised that you were out for so long.  But I suppose the combination of stress and a good blow to the head might keep someone unconscious for a while.”

Had she been hit on the head?  Tasia didn’t remember that; she only remembered passing out when her air supply was cut off.  She felt her scalp gingerly.  There was the spot where she’d smacked against the cage; to its right, an egg had risen, and blood matted her hair to her head.

They must have struck her after she’d lost consciousness.  Cowards.

“Striking a member of the House of Dorsa is punishable by execution, depending on the circumstance,” Tasia croaked.  She cleared her throat.  “I’d say the circumstances more than warrant execution.”

Her grandfather only laughed.  “Spoken by a brat in a dog cage.”  He swept his hand out, indicating the row of kennels and barking dogs.  “I figured this would be a fitting place to keep a bitch like you.”

Tasia scowled.  “I will kill you myself, before all this is over.”

“Will you, now?” asked Lord Hermant, amused.  “Just like you were going to secure my surrender through that fool plan of yours?”

Tasia said nothing.  The barking made her head ring.

“I’m guessing you know that your Wise Man was my Wise Man first,” said Lord Hermant.  “It was easy to convince your Evrart to help us murder you.  All we had to do was dangle a promise to deal with his so-called ‘shadows’ fighting with the barbarians in the East once we ended the war.”  He gazed skyward thoughtfully.  “Terribly easy to manipulate, I’m afraid, those who hold onto their superstitions.  It’s why the Wise Men have worked so hard to eliminate the old religions.  Men scared by fairy tales and things that go bump in the night are apt to believe almost anything.”

“When the shadows move westward, you’ll realize you’ve killed us all — including yourself,” Tasia said.  “But by then it will be too late.”

“Oh, dear,” said Lord Hermant, frowning with mock concern.  “Did the ‘Brother’ of the Cult of Culo convince you that his fairy tales were true?  I must admit that I never thought much of you, Natasia, but I really did think you were smarter than that.”

“They aren’t fairy tales,” Tasia said, grinding her teeth.  “I’ve seen one with my own eyes.  They — ”

She stopped herself.  There was no point trying to convince him.  He was a shallow man who, like all those who had conspired to kill first her and then her father, cared only for his own wealth and status.  Everything was a game of Castles and Knights to him, and the only thing that mattered was his own position on the board.

He waited for her to continue, but when she didn’t, he chuckled again.  “What’s wrong?  Can’t figure out how to extend your lies?”

“They aren’t lies.”

Lord Hermant swept the bottom of his cape around him to keep it out of the mud, then took a few steps closer to Tasia.

“We’re not that different, you and I,” he said to her, speaking in a voice low enough that he wouldn’t be overheard.  “I like to think that you inherited some of my ambition — and my cleverness.  Because I grant you that it was a clever plan, getting Evrart and his fellow ‘Brothers’ to perform their little parlor trick.  My men were totally convinced by it, and several of my officers even tried to convince me to capitulate to your demands.  If I hadn’t insisted to Norix that I must command this treaty delegation personally, you would’ve won.”

Tasia narrowed her eyes and pressed her mouth into a tight line.  She wanted to know how her grandfather had managed to call her bluff, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking.

He smiled, and she knew immediately that he had guessed just what she was thinking.  “Over these past few months that you’ve been missing, I’ve made it my business to know exactly who supports the Regent and who supports your claim to the throne.  And because I took the time to gather that knowledge, I knew that there was no possible way you could have gathered the number of troops that you appeared to have.  It was a puzzle I couldn’t solve at first.  Until I remembered that Evrart calls himself an ‘illusionist’ or some nonsense like that.  Then I could guess what was really going on, and your extension of the deadline to sunrise only confirmed my suspicions.  You were afraid to attack despite appearing to have superior numbers.”  He considered Tasia for a moment, looking her up and down inside the dog kennel.  “A bad stroke of luck for you that I was the only one of ten thousand men in the delegation who knew what Evrart was capable of, granddaughter.  But at least you will die with the pleasure of knowing that you nearly succeeded.”

“What now?” Tasia asked.  “You hang me in the morning?”

“Hang you in the morning?  If only I could,” he said.  “But I married my daughter off to the son of the Emperor, which makes my grandchildren members of the House of Dorsa.  That means you’re too good for a noose, apparently.  No, two of the Regent’s Wise Men — along with a rather large detachment of soldiers — will escort you back to Port Lorsin.”  Lord Hermant toed a rock in the mud before him.  “You’re doing me a favor, really.  The Wise Men the Regent sent with me are nearly as intolerably sanctimonious and priggish as he is.  My head will ache less once they are on their way.  What is it the common folk say?  I’ve killed two sparrows with only one arrow.”

He gazed at Tasia thoughtfully for several seconds.  She tried to put defiance and hatred into the glare she gave him back, but although her hate was genuine, she couldn’t rouse much defiance.  She’d never felt more like a foolish girl-child with no right to wear a ruler’s crown than she did now, sitting in her undergarments in the filth of a dog kennel.  It had all been an elaborate fantasy, the thought that she would unite the Empire under her rulership, punish her father’s killers, and save the Four Realms from the Shadowlands.  She knew that now.  It was time to stop fighting, to meet her death with whatever shred of dignity she had left.

Tasia stopped glaring at her grandfather, and hung her head.

Lord Hermant let out a snort that sounded like it must be half-laugh and walked away without another word.

Tasia rocked back and forth inside her muddy cage, covering her ears with the heels of her hands to block out the barking.

25

~ THEN ~

Joslyn finished the final, thirty-seventh move in the dance of the Seven Cities in the small yard before Ku-sai’s hut.  She bent forward for a moment, resting her hands on her knees as she caught her breath.

Ku-sai never pants for breath like a dog when he does the dance, she thought, chastising herself.

Nearly a year had passed since she first arrived in this yard atop Ku-sai’s mountain, and in that year, she’d grown at least two inches, added ten or fifteen pounds as muscles she never knew she had appeared and hardened, and she’d memorized all thirty-seven moves of the dance.  Her hands toughened with callouses from sword and dagger work; her steps had become nimble and quick.  But she still lost her breath completing the dance.

However much she learned from her ku-sai, the gap between them always seemed insurmountable.

Joslyn glanced towards the hut.  All was quiet; she saw no sign of movement through the open door.  She wiped the sweat from her brow, then tipped the water skin into her mouth, drinking until she had to stop for air.  Would this summer heat ever break?  At least it was cooler here, on Ku-sai’s mountainside, than it was down in the village below.  She supposed she should be grateful.

“Ku-sai?” she called as she stepped into the hut.

Birch trees, their leaves broad and bright green at the height of summer, shaded the hut from the worst of Father Eiren, the wrathful god of the midday sun.  Nevertheless, even with the shade provided by the tree and the hut’s door wide open, the interior was almost unbearably stuffy.  There was a window in Ku-sai’s corner of the hut, but apparently he’d closed it.  How could he stand it?

The birch paper screen that separated the corner where he slept from the rest of the hut was unfolded; Joslyn guessed she would find him behind it.

“Ku-sai,” she said again, taking a step closer to the screen, “I finished the dance twice.  Like you told me to.”

Cautiously, she peeked around the screen.

Ku-sai sat cross-legged on his bedroll, back against the wall, hands in a meditation posture in his lap.

A teapot sat in front of him, which explained the familiar, earthy scent that filled the hut, along with some of the extra heat.  Joslyn glanced down at the pot, wondering how he could drink something so hot on a day like today.

“Ku-sai?”

His eyelids were opened into thin slits, but Joslyn saw only the whites.  Both eyes twitched rhythmically, like they did when a person dreamed.  Despite the heat, Joslyn shivered.

She crouched, hesitated a moment, then reached out and touched his shoulder lightly.  He did not move.  Ever-so-gently, she shook him, saying his name once more.

Like a man breaking the surface of the water after a deep dive to the bottom of a lake, Ku-sai gasped in a long, raspy breath.

His eyes flew open.  For a moment, Joslyn was sure his black irises had been replaced by flames, and she scrambled backwards.  But it had to have been a trick of the light, because in the very next second, the stern, black-eyed gaze she had grown so familiar with bored into her.

“Now you see fit to interrupt my meditation as well?” he asked harshly.

Joslyn shrank back.  “I finished the dance twice, like you told me to.  I wanted to see what I should do next.”

“And your patience is so poor that you could not wait until the end of my meditation?”

“I didn’t know when you might be done,” Joslyn said weakly.  She’d known him to meditate for two, sometimes even three hours at a time.

“Then you should have waited.”

She looked down.  “Apologies, Ku-sai.”

He grunted and unfolded his legs.  “You are as rash today as the day you arrived,” he said.  “You want to know what to do next?  Next, you learn to meditate, so that you might gain some control over that wild boar’s mind of yours.”

Ku-sai rose from the meditation cushion slowly, stretching into a brief rising stork before stepping off the bedroll.  He gestured for Joslyn to sit.

Oh, no.

Now she’d really done it.  He’d tried teaching her to meditate before, and it had not gone well.  She’d fidgeted the whole time despite his admonishments to be still, and when he told her to make her mind motionless, like mountain, quiet, like the deepest part of a lake, all she could do was think about the fish and slimy things that lived on lake bottoms, wriggling back and forth, scooping up whatever unfortunate little creatures got in the way of their open mouths.  That had made her hungry, and the hunger had made her want to go fishing, and when she said so out-loud, Ku-sai had ended the meditation session abruptly and told her they would try again another time.

She guessed now must be that another time.

“Do we need kernels for the hens?” Joslyn asked.  “I could go down to the village if you need me to.  The hens might be… extra hungry because of how hot it’s been lately.  I think we — ”

He scowled at her.  “Sit, Kuna-shi.”

Joslyn sighed and settled onto the meditation cushion.

“A warrior is only as strong as her mind,” Ku-sai said.  “And just as muscle is the basis of strength for the body, patience, silence, and control form the basis of strength for the mind.”

~ NOW ~

On the third night of her journey north from the ruins of Ku-sai’s hut, Joslyn made camp at the edge of a meadow.  The meadow itself looked inviting in the light of the setting sun, the last few wildflowers of autumn still dotting the carpet of yellowing grass that sloped down towards the base of the mountain.  But Joslyn was too well-trained to make her camp in such an open space, so she built her campfire just inside the line of birch trees outside the meadow.

The meadow ended at the foot of the mountain that the locals called “Wazantu Pada,” which, in the dialect of northern Terintan, meant “Father of Storms.”  The villagers had believed that all the weather in the area came from this mountain, especially destructive weather.  The particularly superstitious locals believed that all ill-fortune of any kind came from Wazantu Pada.

Joslyn was not as superstitious as they were, but it still made her skin itch to camp so close to the great mountain.  As the sun set and turned the mountain’s western face into flaming reds and oranges, she was reminded too much of the undatai she had faced in the Shadowlands just a few nights before.

She could almost feel it calling to her, that undatai.  Whispering her name every time a breeze rustled the dying birch leaves.  Telling her that their dance was not done yet.

Joslyn sat before her campfire, regarding Wazantu Pada grimly and thinking of shadows.  She pulled a packet of dried apa-apa meat from her pack.  Her supply of it was nearly exhausted.  She’d have to hunt soon, but that was fine.  She was relatively certain that a mountain leopard had been stalking her all day, anyway.  They would have a confrontation by this time tomorrow, no doubt, and they would see whose ku-sai had been the better teacher.  For now, the fire would keep it away.

Tomorrow would be a big day.  A fight with a mountain leopard and the beginning of her climb up Wazantu Pada.  Going around the mountain wasn’t an option; it would add too many precious days to the journey.  She wouldn’t have to climb all the way to Wazantu Pada’s peak, but she would have to climb some of its sheer faces.

She sighed as she finished the apa-apa meat and washed it down with water from her skin.  She hated climbing cliff faces.  Especially since she didn’t even have rope with her.

“A warrior does not complain,” Ku-sai said in the back of her mind.  “A warrior simply does, and moves on.”

Joslyn folded up the rest of the meat and placed it back into her pack.  Her hand brushed against the small pouch of the tea Ku-sai had left for her as she did so.  She hesitated, her hand still inside the pack.  Then she pulled the tea packet forth.

Joslyn turned it over in her hands, regarding it, trying to decide.

Grandmother Ajda’s words came back to her:  He would have made you the most powerful dreamwalker who ever lived.

What would happen if Joslyn used the tea — not to find her ku-sai this time, because she was pretty sure the last echoes of her ku-sai had perished four nights ago in the Shadowlands — but to teach herself to dreamwalk?  Could a person learn such a skill without a teacher?

Someone must have.  Someone had to have been the first dreamwalker, stumbling upon the art by accident, maybe when they were trying to do something else.

What else would they have been doing, when they discovered dreamwalking?

Joslyn opened the pouch of tea and sniffed it.  The scent of horsetail mushroom was strong.

Maybe the first dreamwalker had only been trying to sleep, a simple cup of tea before bed.  That was habit Terintans must have had for centuries.  Maybe for millennia, since before the days when the tribe of Dorsa migrated into the area.  Joslyn imagined some tribeswoman — a tired mother, maybe, glad that her children finally slept soundly — brewing herself tea inside a bliva.  Did she add the horsetail mushroom on purpose, or did it get into her tea accidentally?  An accident seemed unlikely; the mushroom was common enough in arid and semiarid climates, but it couldn’t be used for cooking because of its hallucinogenic properties, and it was poisonous for most of the livestock raised by nomads.

But why should Joslyn bother teaching herself to dreamwalk?  As she understood the art from tall tales and stories, it was used primarily for three purposes:  to terrorize enemies in their sleep, to spy on an enemy’s innermost thoughts, and to communicate.  These days, Joslyn had no enemies but the undatai, and it could not be found in a dream anyway.  As for communication…

Tasia.  I could tell her that I’m still alive.  That I’m going to come to her as soon as I can.

Did small men dream?  Could Joslyn reach them by dreamwalking?  She wasn’t yet deep enough into the Zaris Mountains to be in their territory, but perhaps if she reached them by dream, she could tell them why she sought them, and then perhaps they would allow themselves to be found.

Joslyn gazed at her camp fire.  If she was going to drink horsetail mushroom tea, the fire needed to be bigger.  She didn’t want her leopard friend to take advantage of her compromised state.

She pulled out a small metal pot from the bottom of her pack.  It was one of the heaviest items she carried, but it was a luxury she was reluctant to part with — without it, her travel diet would never be able to expand beyond dried meat.  With it, she could at least add water and wild greens to the dried jerky and create a sort of makeshift stew.

With deft hands, Joslyn fashioned three branches into a simple tripod above her fire, hung the pot from it, and threw in a pinch of the tea together with the water remaining in her skin.  While her tea heated, she gathered more wood.

Joslyn was sweating beneath her leather armor by the time she sat back down in front of the fire and lifted the pot from the tripod with a forked branch.  Her fire had grown so big that she probably wouldn’t only scare off the leopard that had been stalking her; she’d scare off all the game within a half-mile radius.  It was a little unfortunate, given that she’d been hoping to hunt soon.  But she could always hunt on Wazantu Pada.

It took several minutes for the pot to cool enough to drink from it, and even then, she burned her bottom lip as she took her first sip.

“Patience,” she heard ku-sai say in the back of her mind.

How did one start to dreamwalk?  When Ku-sai had found her, he told her they were inside a q’isson, a dream chamber woven of shadows and the dreamer’s mind.  It made little sense to Joslyn.  But someone had solved the puzzle once.  And if they could solve it, she could.

She had to solve it.  It was the only way to make up for breaking her ku-sai’s precious sword within the Shadowlands.

As the horsetail mushroom began to take hold, Joslyn settled into a meditation posture.  She would find the small men this way.  Not Tasia.  No, she was definitely not going to direct her thoughts towards Tasia.

Ku-sai would be happy to see her finally meditating without being forced.

See? she told him.  I learned to meditate eventually, like you wanted me to.  You were right about a warrior only being as strong as her mind — you were right about a great many things.  Being able to clear my mind and find that still, deep lake within has saved my life more than once.

“I knew you would learn,” Ku-sai replied.  “Just as I knew you would dreamwalk one day.”

Joslyn’s eyes flew open.  She was on her feet and had a dagger in her hand before she even realized she was getting up.

She was alone at the edge of a meadow.  The firelight revealed that no one and nothing, not even a tree rat or a curious fox, was anywhere to be found.

Yet…

Yet the night sky above the meadow was filled with swirling colors.  Where the stars should be were spinning orbs of pink, yellow, light blue, bright green.  Joslyn cocked her head and looked at the green one.  It was the green of a leaf bud in early spring.  How odd for it to be dancing in the sky.

She felt a presence, and glanced to her right, in the direction of Wazantu Pada.  The hulking black mountain was… breathing in the dark.

Joslyn’s pulse quickened.

The mountain was watching her.  It wasn’t angry or hostile — not yet — but it wondered openly why such a small mortal camped at its base.

She would make an offering to the Father of Storms before she started to climb tomorrow.  She must show it proper respect.

Joslyn, she told herself sternly.  The tea.  You’re hallucinating.

She drew in a long, steadying breath, sheathed the dagger, and sat back down on the folded-up bedroll.  Once again, she folded her legs, placed her hands in her lap, and lightly closed her eyes.

The first step of meditation was setting an intention.  Normally, Joslyn’s intention was simple — to make her mind steady and calm, so that she could face whatever the day brought with poise and balance.

This time, her intention was different.  As her eyes closed, Joslyn set an intention to dreamwalk.

The same lights she’d seen in the night sky now danced inside the darkness of her closed eyes.  The lights were playful, entrancing, intriguing, and Joslyn found herself following them like a child might follow a bright bird into the forest.

But children in the forest too often got lost and died.

Joslyn pulled her attention away from the lights, brought it back to the intention of forming a q’isson, of dreamwalking.

The lights followed her.  She could feel them flowing around her, like river currents.  In her mind’s eye, she saw herself reaching out, scooping up a current of yellow light, spinning it around her. For a moment, it held the shape she’d given it, then dissipated again.

Ah.  So perhaps the currents of light around her were more than distractions.

Thinking of a q’isson, Joslyn tried again.  With hands she felt but could not see, she shaped the light into a sphere that surrounded her.

And then all was quiet.

Joslyn floated inside a sphere of shimmering light.  There was no up, no down, no left, no right.  There was no time.

Was this a q’isson?

Ku-sai had said that a q’isson was built from the dreamwalker’s mind and from shadows, but Joslyn saw no indication of shadows.  Unless…

Could the lights she had molded into this sphere be more shadow than light?

Cautiously, she reached out a dream hand to touch the sphere around her.  It flickered, yielding to her fingers.

And a black hand reached through the sphere, seizing her wrist.

Joslyn gasped, panicking.  Instinct reached for the dagger at her waist — but there was no dagger, because this was not her actual body.  The hand around her wrist pulled hard.  Whatever it was, it wanted to pull her out of the sphere.

“Into the Shadowlands,” Ku-sai’s voice whispered.

Panic subsided; perfect clarity washed over her.  She had won a thousand battles against a thousand foes.  She would not fall now, to a disembodied shadow hand.

“No,” Joslyn told the hand around her wrist, using the tone a mother might use with a disobedient child. “No,” she said again, more firmly, and she twisted her arm free from the shadow’s grip.

The hand withdrew, but it left a hole in her sphere of light.  Through the hole, Joslyn could see it — the Shadowlands.  Barren, brown and red, like a dismal desert landscape if the sky was the color of rust instead of blue.  She tried to close the hole, shaping the light to knit it closed the way she had before, but now the light — or the shadows — would not comply.  The hole remained.

And began to grow.

Wake up, Joslyn told herself.  Wake up right now.

Her eyes — her real eyes — flew open.  The currents of light dissipated, floating skyward like currents of smoke, mixing with the smoke and sparking embers of her camp fire.

Joslyn took her hands from her lap and placed them on the ground on either side of her, as if to reassure herself that she was no longer floating.  Cool earth pressed back against her palms.

The night sky was no longer filled with spirals of color where the stars should be; Wazantu Pada no longer breathed.  And her camp fire was nearly out, despite all the extra wood she had added.

Joslyn frowned.  How long had she meditated?

Judging from the stiffness in her body, from the way the cold of night had seeped into her muscles and bones, she guessed that she had meditated much longer than she’d thought.

An hour, at least.

Was what she had done dreamwalking?  It must have been.  She’d created her first q’isson.  And she’d nearly dreamwalked herself into the Shadowlands.

A chill spread through her body.  Joslyn stirred her fire and added wood, bringing it back to life, but the cold didn’t go away.  She kept thinking of the hand that had reached through the sphere of light and seized her wrist.  Something icy wound its way into her chest, and even as she warmed her hands before the fire, she felt that ice worm down into her gut.

Marked by shadows.

In a certain way, she’d never left the Shadowlands.  When she woke up on the side of that mountain in Tasia’s arms, she’d thought the ordeal was over, but it wasn’t.  The shadows were inside her now, always calling to her, always mocking her.  They were waiting for the extra year of life they had given her to expire, and then they would claim her.

And she would become one of them.

26

~ THEN ~

Tasia climbed the rickety wooden stairs of the belfry, lifting the hem of her new dress to keep it out of the dust and grime and rook droppings.

Honestly.  Couldn’t Nik pick a different part of the palace to retreat to when he was upset?  The climb to the belfry tower always made Tasia feel like she needed a bath afterwards.

She entered the belfry itself, remembering to duck as she climbed the last few steps so that she wouldn’t smack her head on the big brass bell again.  Pulling her dress tight against her body, she skirted around the edge of the tower.

She reached the side of the tower that opened over the roof and leaned out.  Sure enough, there was Nik’s back, a dozen yards away.  He’d crossed the steep roof and climbed the few rungs to the abandoned lookout tower on the other side.  Now he leaned against the lookout tower’s crenellations, staring down at the palace grounds.

Tasia sighed, wishing she had changed out of her gown and slippers before chasing Nik up here.  Riding breeches and boots would’ve been far more practical than slippers and her new ballgown.

She pulled off one slipper, then the other.  With the recent rains, the shoes would provide even less traction than her bare feet.  Fortunately, she and Nik had spent great portions of their childhood exploring every nook and cranny of the palace, which meant that she could traverse this roof in bare feet and a ball gown and probably not even get her dress dirty.

Well — probably not get her dress dirty.  She usually sat on the edge of the belfry and swung her legs around before dropping the two or three feet to the peaked roof below.  In the interest of not ruining her gown, which father had allowed her to order special for tonight’s ball, Tasia decided it was best not to sit on it when the ledge was so grimy and wet.  Instead, she stood on bare feet at the edge of the belfry and prepared to jump.

But she hesitated.

It wasn’t the height that gave her pause — from her perch on the belfry ledge to the roof was only about a five-and-a-half-foot drop.  It was the steep angle of the rain-slicked roof’s peak.  For a safe landing, she would need to plant one bare foot on either side of the peak without losing her balance, without pitching right or left.  That might prove tricky.

Tasia took a deep breath and jumped.

But what she hadn’t accounted for was the way the jump would send the wind ballooning into her dress and send it up towards her face, blinding her even as it changed her trajectory.

She gave a startled yelp and hit the roof all wrong, striking the inside of a knee against one side, while on the other side her bare foot slid too far, too fast.  A muscle in her leg protested loudly that too much had been demanded of it at once.  Instinctively, Tasia flung her torso at the peak itself, scraping her chin against one of the slate roof tiles as she did.

“Tasia!” Nik called, alarmed.  Within seconds, he had scurried down from the lookout tower to the peaked roof and nimbly made his way across the peak to where Tasia lay chest-down.  “Are you okay?”

Tasia grunted and pulled herself up to the roof’s peak.  No point in protecting the gown now, so she straddled the peak and sat up, rubbing her scraped chin.

“Why do you always have to choose the most difficult place in the palace to go hide?”

Nik straightened.  “I’m not hiding,” he said defensively.

“No?”

Tasia did a scan through her body, cataloging the injuries.  Nothing seemed too serious.  The same could not be said for her new dress, however, which was ripped in the center and stained with wet, slate-colored grime.

“Help me up,” she said grouchily.

Nik helped her to her feet, and the two of them made their way back to the abandoned lookout tower.

Neither said anything for a while; both royal children leaned against the crenellations and gazed out over the palace grounds.  Tasia had a good view of the pond that used to be their favorite place to play when they were little, the place where they’d spent many an hour trying to tame rabbits.  Until Father had demanded that they stop.

“You can’t let him get to you,” Tasia said softly.  “He only wants to make you a stronger ruler.  You’re going to be the one who…”

But she trailed off when he turned his gaze onto her.  Now that they were closer, she could see that his eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

“Don’t say I’m going to be the one who wears the crown one day,” he said bitterly.  “It makes you sound like him.”

Tasia didn’t answer.  Bearing the name of “Dorsa” was hard enough for her; for Nik, it was doubly hard, because he would be the one who had to succeed their father one day.  As the heir, every move Nik made — or, as in the case of tonight’s ball, even every sigh he made — was a subject of close inspection for Father and all the Wise Men.

“I wish you were a boy,” Nik said glumly.  “Then you could be Emperor one day.  Father likes you better anyway.”

“He doesn’t like me better.”

“Yes, he does,” Nik said.  “Even when you skip your lessons with Wise Man Norix, all he does is wag his finger at you.”  He pushed away from the crenellation he’d been leaning on and faced Tasia, shaking his finger and pursing his lips in imitation of their father.  “‘Now Natasia,’” he said, trying to make his voice as low as Father’s, “‘I expect more of you.  If you don’t go to your next lesson, I’ll take away one of your scarves.’”

Tasia rolled her eyes.  “He does more than that when I skip lessons.  Last week, he made one of the cooks whip me with a willow switch — he did,” Tasia added defiantly when Nik looked like he might argue.  Then she grinned slyly.  “Of course, I promised the cook’s daughter a new dress if she went easy on me and only pretend to hit hard.”

Nik laughed and shoved her lightly.  “You get away with everything.  I don’t get away with anything.”

For a moment, it seemed as if his dark mood might lift, but he fell back into a brooding silence a moment later.

“Sometimes I think about how easy it would be to jump off this tower.  I could balance on these,” he said, tapping the tooth of a crenellation.  “Then just tip my weight forward a little, let the wind take me, and…”

Nik clapped one hand down upon the other, and for a split second, Tasia had an awful vision of his body slamming against the earth below.

“Nik, that’s awful.”  She grabbed both his arms, gave him a light shake.  “Don’t ever, ever, ever say anything like that again.”

He looked away, gazing back down at the ground.  “Why not?” he asked morosely.  “Then I’d never have to be the Emperor.”

~ NOW ~

The cart rumbled beneath Tasia, its movement lulling her into a kind of trance.  She let her mind wander backwards in time, visiting her childhood, her brother, her sister, Mother.  Things had been easy once — balls and new dresses and occasionally whining about the cold chill her father’s shadow cast over the palace.  But as often happened in life, Tasia hadn’t realized how easy she had things until everything stopped being easy.

She wondered when the easy had stopped.  Mother’s death had been hard.  But she only began to feel truly alone after Nik died.  She thought back to the day of his hunting accident, when Father brought her and Adela into his office to tell them Nik had been gored.

Did Nik let it happen?  Did he really want to escape the weight of the crown that badly?

It had made her angry to think about that at the time, so she’d pushed the thoughts from her mind.  Refused to entertain them.  Now they came back to her, haunting her just as he did sometimes.

Maybe Nik hadn’t been so wrong.  Maybe the crown was too heavy for anyone to wear.  Anyone except Father.

From her spot inside the dog cage, Tasia watched the savanna roll past her — a vast, dry carpet dotted with scrubby bushes and the occasional rebellious tree.  They’d be entering the Great Desert soon, probably tomorrow.  She’d always wanted to see the desert, even more so since meeting Joslyn.  But she could muster no interest in it at the moment.  Not even the image of Joslyn roused emotion from her.

Through the haze of her numbness, Tasia tried to think of a phrase.  The phrase that meant I’ve been here before — I’ve already seen this, I’ve already done this.  Commoners claimed when you had that feeling of life repeating itself, it meant you were getting a tiny glimpse into the fate the gods had written for you.  Wise Men said that was nonsense, of course; they claimed that the eerie feeling was nothing more than faulty thinking, combined with an odd movement of the humours.

But Tasia didn’t think the commoners or the Wise Men were right in this case.  No, for her, she had the feeling of experience repeating itself because it actually was repeating itself.  This was the second time she was being returned to Port Lorsin as a captive and accused traitor, the second time she would face execution for a crime that she didn’t commit.

There were two differences in this journey west compared to the first one:  First, instead of riding in a carriage and still being treated with the respect a royal member of the House of Dorsa was typically entitled to, she rode inside a dog kennel lashed to a simple freight wagon.  They were so determined to make her feel like a dog that the soldiers fed her watered down, lukewarm stew in a dog dish, and likewise left a tepid bowl of water inside her cage instead of a canteen to drink from.  When she had to relieve herself, she had to do it outside, in the open, without even a bush to block the men’s view of her.

How they relished in the crude, creative jokes they invented about the princess who had dared to dream of an empress’s crown.

There was also no roof above her head to shield her from the sun, and so by the third day, Tasia’s fair skin was covered in bright red sun blisters.  Her lips chapped; her every movement caused a flare of pain.  And so eventually she stopped moving at all, content to sit hunched inside her cage like the dog they told her she was.

All of this treatment was on order of her grandfather.

The second difference in this journey westward compared to the last was that there would be no Evrart waiting for her in the palace when she got back.  She didn’t know where he’d gone after he made himself invisible as the soldiers closed around them, but doubted that he trailed the triumphant caravan of Wise Men and soldiers who escorted her back.

If Evrart and the other Brothers had wanted to rescue Tasia, they almost certainly would have done it by now.

No, Tasia had the distinct feeling that the Brotherhood of Culo had given up on her.  They’d thought that installing her as Empress would be the best and quickest way to beat back the shadows threatening the Empire, but now they realized they were wrong.  She’d gone against their plans for her and had proven too headstrong to control.  And her headstrong ideas had ruined them.

Tasia imagined the Brothers talking about her in some obscure hideout in Paratheen.

“Supporting Natasia of House Dorsa did not go as we planned,” one of the solemn Brothers would say.

“I told you it would not,” Evrart would respond.  “She is too impulsive, too young to rule an empire.”

One of the other Brothers would frown.  “Too young?  But she is the same age as her father was, when he took the crown, is she not?”

“Yes, but her father was a man.  Women are fickle and emotional — there is a reason why we have had very few Empresses in the thousand-year rule of the House of Dorsa.”

The Brothers would consider that, then nod thoughtfully.

After all, they were a Brotherhood for a reason, weren’t they?  Women might be naturally stronger in the shadow arts, but Evrart said men were the ones who had the patience for careful scholarship, investigation, and refinement of the practices.  The Brotherhood viewed themselves as the only legitimate practitioners of the shadow arts; everyone else, such as the female shamans that nearly every desert tribe possessed, were amateurs by comparison.

Yet Evrart was silent when Tasia had asked him how the mountain men had managed to bring so many shadows into this world and harness them well enough to turn them into soldiers.  Yes, one person infected by a shadow could spread the infection to another through injury, but it didn’t make sense — the Deerpark Pass survivors had fought for control over their shadows.  Evrart’s silence on the matter suggested that the Brothers didn’t have a good answer.

The cart rolled on.  The summer sun burned.  The water inside the dog dish sloshed.  And Tasia gazed out from behind the bars, watching the savanna, watching the men who watched her.

#

“Guard — hey, excuse me, guard,” Tasia said, trying to get the attention of the young soldier who stood closest to her.

He turned around, eyeing Tasia warily.

The rest of Tasia’s escort was settling in for the night, wrapping themselves in wool blankets to protect against the chill of the desert night, but Tasia was too cold to sleep.  And she’d been fighting against the call of nature for at least an hour.

“I need to use the latrine,” she told the guard.

“Aye, Princess,” was all he said, and tapped another young man on the shoulder before approaching Tasia’s cage with a ring of keys.

Tasia limped as she walked beside the soldier beyond the last row of tents.  Everything ached — her neck, her back, her shoulders, her hips, her knees.  And walking barefoot across the rough plain didn’t make matters better; her skin hadn’t had time to toughen against each little pebble and bur that stabbed at her sole.

“Ah — ow.”  She hopped forward on one foot, nearly toppling over as she reached down to pull a thorn from her foot.  The guard caught her before she could fall.

“Are you alright?” he asked, and Tasia was surprised to hear genuine concern in his voice.

Tasia tossed the thorn aside.  “It’s fine,” she told the guard.  “It’s the least of my problems.”

The guard, who looked to have about the same twenty or twenty-one summers as Tasia, frowned.  He looked as if he might say something.  But didn’t.

They carried on, slower now as Tasia limped even more, trying to avoid grinding dirt into the new cut.  It would be the height of irony if, after all this, she died of a blood infection.  At least it would rob Norix and Grandfather of their execution.

The soldier seemed as if he wanted to help her, but instead, his hand hovered a few inches from Tasia’s arm, prepared to catch her if she started to fall again.

“There are Easterners amongst us,” the soldier said in a sudden low voice.

Tasia gave him a sideways glance without slowing her stumbling, wobbly procession forward.

“They aren’t keen on knowing they may have nothing to go home to,” he continued, “or knowing that their wives and children might be in danger.  They hate knowing that we’re marching to sign over half the East to the mountain men, giving it up like a goat for sacrifice.”

Tasia stayed quiet.  The soldier carried a torch, but against the moonless dark, it hardly penetrated further than a few feet in front of them.

“Word spread to everyone about what you said to the Lord,” he said.  “About how he and the Regent’s who really killed the Emperor, not you.  And about how he aims to use selling off the East to raise grain prices in the rest of the Empire.  Some of them’s that from the East, they said it’s true.  They said half the bread in the Empire starts in a field of House Pellon.”

Not quite half, Tasia thought.  But she didn’t have the energy to educate him aloud.  A quarter, probably.  Maybe a third at most.  And parts of the West and the Central Steppes also supply grain.  They will profit, too.  Those regions will eventually make up for what we lose in the East, but it will take several harvests and much human misery before that happens.

Step, limp, half-step.  Step, limp, half-step.

“There’s them that talked about joining you,” the soldier went on.  “Them that say you’d be a better ruler than the cranky old Wise Man — don’t tell anyone I called the Regent a cranky old Wise Man,” he added hastily.

Tasia smiled, amused.  “Who would I tell?”  Her voice came out as a dry, croaking rasp.  A week of barely speaking, combined with sun and never having enough water.

The soldier grinned.  “I s’pose that’s true.”  He held out a hand for Tasia to stop.  “This is far enough, I figure.  I’ll just… I’ll turn around while you…  But, uh, don’t try anything.”  He paused.  “They say you can fight as well as any man.”

“I can fight,” Tasia said.  “But I don’t like killing Imperial soldiers unless I absolutely have to.”

The soldier looked Tasia up and down, uncertain.  “You don’t figure on having to kill me… do you?”

Tasia nearly laughed.  “What would I kill you with, soldier?  My ratty underskirt?”

His face relaxed.  “I guess not.  I’m gonna… I’ll just… I’ll turn around now.”

Once his back was turned, Tasia squatted and lifted the grimy underskirt she’d just mentioned.  That and the sleeveless undershirt were all she had left of her clothes.  She finished her business a moment later.

“Alright,” she told the soldier.  “Let’s go back.”

They began their slow trek back to the camp.

Tasia worked over his words.  She’d written lords to find soldiers to help her take back the crown — Mace’s father in House Gifford, Simon in House Brundt, the Eastern lords who stood to lose the most to the treaty with the mountain men — but maybe she’d searched for soldiers in the wrong place.  Maybe instead of lords, she should have spoken directly to the commoners.  After all, there were more of them, and when famine came, they would be the ones to feel it, not the lords.  Their children would be the ones who starved to death first.

She put a hand on the soldier’s arm, leaning on it for support.  He started at first, then relaxed and slowed his pace further for her.

“Thank you for saying what you did,” she told him softly.  “Tell your Eastern friends…”  She paused, searching for the right words.  To her surprise, tears welled in her eyes.  “Tell them I tried.  I tried my best.  And please — make sure they know I would never kill my father.”  The tears flowed freely now.  “He wasn’t always an easy man, but I loved him all the same.”

“Aye, Princess.  I’ll tell them.”

Empress, Tasia thought.  He was supposed to call her Empress, not Princess.

But then again, a lot of things were supposed to be that weren’t.

27

Halfway up Wazantu Pada, Joslyn finally killed the leopard that had been stalking her.  She thought it might lose her trail on the mountainside; after all, she had to spend the better part of one day climbing the sheer face of a cliff wall, a feat that no leopard would be able to replicate.  But it found a different route up the mountain and attacked at dusk that same night, before she’d had a chance to start her camp fire.

It was a brutal, primitive fight, one that left Joslyn with a deep, three-clawed gash down one forearm that she was sure would leave a scar.  But steel won out over claws and teeth in the end, if only barely, and the leopard was kind enough to replenish Joslyn’s meat stores.  A part of her regretted butchering such a magnificent creature, but that was how life worked in the Zaris Mountains — kill and eat or starve and die.

She also camped an extra day to tan the leopard’s hide.  She didn’t want to see its beautiful coat go to waste, but besides that, the days were getting colder the further north she traveled, and in the Zaris Mountains, autumn was already drawing to a close.  Joslyn appreciated the extra layer the leopard provided her.

Each day, she hiked.  Each night, she built a fire, brewed her horsetail mushroom tea, and tried to dreamwalk.

She’d gotten better in the week that had passed since her first attempt.  She’d learned how to make the q’isson stronger, manipulating the energy so that the Shadowlands could not break through.  But how to proceed from building a q’isson to actually dreamwalking remained a mystery.  How had Ku-sai found her when she slept?  And once he found her, how did he enter her dreams?

She turned the problem over in her mind each day as she hiked; she experimented inside the q’isson each night.  But each night left her with less tea and more frustration than the night before, until finally, on the eleventh night after leaving Ku-sai’s hut in the foothills, she had her first major breakthrough.

Her trouble, she realized, was that she had been thinking of the dream chamber as a place, as a physical thing whose dome around her was made of brick and wood.  But it wasn’t a place.  As her ku-sai had taught her, it was a dream-thing, made of thoughts and shadows.

And what could dream-things do?  They could move.  And they could morph, shift, change shape, alter themselves according to the whim of the dreamer.

On the night that Joslyn discovered this, she turned the q’isson from a small sphere into palace-sized one, then from a huge sphere into something as form-fitting as her leather armor.  No shape took any more or less energy than any other, which thrilled her so much that her concentration faltered and she nearly lost the q’isson altogether.

If she could stretch or shrink the shape of the q’isson, could she also wrap it around another living creature?

Inside her dream chamber, Joslyn wiped her hand across an interior surface of the sphere, telling herself she was creating a window.  And no sooner had she thought of the window than one appeared.

Looking out of her new window, Joslyn saw her campsite — her fire, the birch trees dotting the mountainside, the overhanging boulder she’d chosen as a shelter for the night.

And she saw herself, sitting on her bedroll in meditation posture, the whites of her eyes barely showing beneath slitted eyelids.

The sight of her own body, of her eyes twitching behind closed eyelids, triggered a wave of vertigo, and she almost lost control.  But she recovered herself in time, looking away from her own body and into the birch trees instead.

The trees were thin here, this high up on Wazantu Pada, and through the lens of her dream chamber, they didn’t seem entirely solid.  Like the mountain itself, the birches seemed to breathe, looking less like solid trees than like vertical columns of energy currents.  Joslyn traced one of the currents of energy upward into the sky, saw how it pushed out from the trunk in the center into spindles that became branches, then stems, then leaves.

In one of the trees, she found a thick knot of energy that was different from the rest of the birch.  She willed her q’isson upward with a thought, floating high above the ground, then inspected the energy knot more closely.

The knot resolved into the shape of an owl, alert and curious on its perch high in the tree.

Did it see Joslyn, inside her q’isson across from it?  Did it sense her?  If it did, it gave no indication.

Excited, Joslyn pushed the bubble of her q’isson outward, creating an arm that wrapped around the owl, enveloping it.  She expected to see it appear inside her q’isson, the same way that she had appeared inside her ku-sai’s q’isson a week earlier.  But where she expected to see the owl, or at least its ghostly energy signature, there was only empty space.

Confused, Joslyn pulled the wall of the q’isson back in, then looked out at the birch tree once more.

And there was the owl, composed of the same flowing, translucent streams of energy that it had been before.

Why hadn’t it worked?  What had she done wrong?

Joslyn tried again — she pushed the q’isson out, enveloping the owl.  But the owl only vanished.  She tried a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth.

On her sixth failure, realization struck Joslyn all at once:  A q’isson was a dream chamber.  A chamber for a dreamwalker to invite him or herself into another’s dream.  But the owl was nocturnal.  It did not sleep and dream at night, but during the day.  Joslyn could not pull it into her q’isson because the creature was not dreaming.

She could feel her grip on her q’isson fading as the effects of the horsetail mushroom tea ran out.  Each night as she practiced dreamwalking, she was able to make the q’isson last a little longer on the same small pinch of tea.  The first night, she’d maintained the q’isson for less than an hour; tonight, she estimated that she’d already been exploring the dream chamber for nearly twice that time.  If she pushed tonight, she’d be able to last another ten minutes or so.  Which meant she needed to hurry.

At the speed of thought, Joslyn sent her chamber downward, but not all the way to the ground.  The thicker branches and forked trunks were about halfway down the birches, and that was where she’d seen the few mountain monkey nests during her crossing of Wazantu Pada.  There weren’t many monkeys this high on the mountain, but there were enough that she sometimes heard them chittering amongst themselves as she hiked.

And monkeys, she knew, were one of the mountain’s few diurnal creatures.

Joslyn zipped through the birch trees, their forms no more obstructing movement than a wisp of smoke could obstruct her physical body.  About a mile from her camp site, she found what she was looking for.  In the Y-shaped fork of a large, old birch tree sat a nest woven with leaves, branches, and bits of animal fur.  Joslyn hovered above it.

Inside the nest were three sleeping monkeys — a mother and two infants, from the looks of it.  There were probably other nests nearby; monkeys lived in tribes of ten to twenty creatures.  But she didn’t have time to be picky.  Joslyn pushed out the wall of her q’isson, re-weaving it around one of the baby monkeys.

The change was instantaneous.  The world of Joslyn’s dream chamber — a world of dancing lights and flowing currents of energy — disappeared.  Now Joslyn found herself floating a few feet from an infant monkey as it reached for a leaf-heavy branch just above its head.

Mid-morning sun streamed down through the forest canopy above them.  Songbirds chirped; the earthy scent of autumn on the mountain permeated the air.

Disoriented, Joslyn searched for the boundaries of her dream chamber, but couldn’t find them anywhere; they seemed to have disappeared completely.  Neither could she find her own body — typically, some dream version of herself was always there as she tried to dreamwalk, but now she was completely disembodied.  Yet somehow, she saw without having eyes to see with, smelled without a nose.

Where had her body gone?  Had she trapped herself inside the little monkey’s mind?  Panic welled up within her.

Too far, Joslyn’s mind screamed at her.  You have gone too far, and now you are lost completely.

But Joslyn was her ku-sai’s kuna-shi, and she would not yield to panic; she was master over her emotions, not the other way around.

She wrestled with the panic until reason won out.  This was the baby monkey’s dream.  Her body was gone because she had succeeded — she was finally dreamwalking.

The mountain monkey beside her finally reached the leaves it had been after, tearing a handful free from the branch above and managing to shove all of them into its little mouth at once.

But why was Joslyn inside the monkey’s dream, and not the other way around?  When Ku-sai had found her, he had drawn her into his q’isson.  She had seen what he created, not what she had been dreaming.  That was what dreamwalkers did, wasn’t it? — they drew others into their q’issons to communicate with them.

Joslyn concentrated on her body.  She couldn’t communicate with the monkey if she couldn’t even appear to it.  But Joslyn’s dream body refused to materialize.  She was pure consciousness; the physical realm felt so far away that she was no longer sure that she could even find her way back to it.

The baby monkey paused in its chewing, sniffed the air tentatively.

Was it sensing Joslyn’s presence?

She wanted to get its attention — to speak or move or touch it, anything that might prove that she had successfully communicated with the tiny creature.  But she seemed to exist in this dream only as a pervasive awareness, lacking the capacity to interact with what surrounded her.

The monkey went back to chewing its leaves.

But there is no monkey truly there, Joslyn reminded herself.  This is the monkey’s dream, not the actual monkey.  Those are not actual leaves; this is not an actual forest.  This is only the monkey’s perception of all those things.

A new thought occurred to Joslyn.  What if dreamwalking depended upon both parties — not just the dreamwalker but also the dreamer?  If everything she saw was the infant monkey’s perception, what if it could not see Joslyn because it had never perceived a human form, couldn’t even imagine one?

Joslyn concentrated on her body once more, but this time she envisioned the larger female monkey she’d seen asleep inside the nest.  In the next moment, Joslyn felt her awareness reshaping itself, weaving thought into form.

She felt her monkey’s body before she saw it, felt the way her long tail coiled around a birch branch, the way her hind paws gripped the same branch.

The baby monkey squawked in surprise, and the entire dream shimmered like still water suddenly disturbed by a pebble.  Joslyn remained motionless in her new form.  She could feel the q’isson around her; she could feel the way it drew both upon her dreaming mind and upon the monkey’s.

Cautiously, the baby monkey’s tail wrapped tight around the branch, it reached out a tiny hand towards Joslyn’s face.  She let it touch her, let it stroke the black and white fur that dripped down from her cheeks.

But then she felt something else, entirely separate from the infant monkey’s dream.  Just at the outer recesses of her awareness, Joslyn felt the Shadowlands.

She jerked at her mind hard, pulling it away from the monkey’s dream the way a child might pull on a string attached to a toy.  The infant monkey shrieked, and the part of Joslyn’s q’isson that had enveloped the monkey ripped free.  She felt herself flying backwards through the birch forest, pulled back towards her physical body as she fought desperately to wake herself, and at the same time, she could feel the fabric of the q’isson pulling apart, breaking the way Ku-sai’s had when he gave her his sword.

Find the string, Ku-sai had instructed her.  Follow it back.

Jagged cracks of red and orange appeared in the space around her.

My mind is tethered to my body, Joslyn told herself.  Tethered.

More cracks appeared.  Light began to pour into the darkness of Joslyn’s q’isson, but it wasn’t the kind of light that Mother Eirenna brought at dawn; it was the kind of light one woke to in the middle of the night as one’s house was consumed by flames.

Tethered to my body — Tasia! Joslyn thought desperately.  The world spun; her consciousness was being pulled in two directions — towards the Shadowlands and towards the physical world.  The fight over her mind would rend her in half.

Something reached for her — a misshapen, grey-black hand with molten flames mapping its veins.  Joslyn knew instinctively what would happen if it touched her:  The Shadowlands would claim her, and there would be no returning to the physical world or her physical body.  She could not allow that to happen.

Her mind slammed into her body all at once, the ethereal dreamworld disappearing.  Joslyn’s eyes flew open; she sucked in a ragged breath.  The regular world was back — the camp fire, the birch forest, the mountainside.  But it spun as rapidly as a child’s top.  She squeezed her eyes shut again for a moment, trying to make the spinning stop, but when she opened her eyes, the landscape still whirled around her.

Joslyn rolled from her cross-legged position onto hands and knees, crawled a foot from her bedroll, and threw up.  The remnants of her leopard stew splattered across a carpet of orange-and-red birch leaves.  She waited a moment to see if she would throw up again.  When she didn’t, she crawled back to the bedroll and collapsed.

It took almost a full hour for the world to finally stop spinning.  Joslyn found herself grateful that the leopard had attacked two nights earlier; if it had attacked now, she surely would have wound up in its stomach instead of the other way around.

Only when her vision and nausea finally settled did Joslyn analyze what had happened.  Things had been going so well — she had figured out how to enter into the dream of another, how to appear within their dream.  Why had the q’isson begun to crack?  How had the shadows found her?

The shadow arts, Joslyn knew, always involved an element of risk.  Practitioners drew their power from the Shadowlands, but drawing that power made them, if only temporarily, a part of the Shadowlands.  In the case of seers, like Grandmother Ajda and Mistress, they invited shadows to inhabit their bodies briefly for the purposes of fortune telling and knowledge.  In the case of dreamwalkers, Joslyn had learned, the dreamwalker pulled on the shadows to help weave a q’isson.

The more a practitioner drew upon the power of the shadows, the more risk they exposed themselves to.  That’s why seers never spent more than twenty or thirty minutes inhabited by shadows, but usually even less time than that.

How long had Joslyn explored inside her q’isson?  Her dreamwalking with the baby monkey couldn’t have lasted longer than five minutes, but she’d woven the q’isson long before that.  She estimated she’d been inside it for at least two and a half hours.

“Foolish,” she heard Ku-sai whisper to her.  “Rash.”

Joslyn cursed herself for her stupidity.  She’d spent far too long attempting to dreamwalk.  Not only was it too long for an ordinary practitioner of the shadow arts, it was much too long for someone like her, someone whose soul was already half-claimed by the Shadowlands.  If the shadow that had reached for her had actually succeeded…

Joslyn closed her eyes.  She didn’t want to go back to the Shadowlands.  Yet she had bargained with the undatai to come back to the mortal world for one more year, then return to its world, and she doubted she would be able to escape that agreement.  She’d already used three of her months searching for Tasia and then for her ku-sai.  She had only nine months left — nine months to repair Ku-sai’s sword and figure out how to use it to send all the shadows that had infected ordinary men and women back to where they belonged.

Nine months left.

She couldn’t leave the mortal realm before she ensured Tasia’s long-term safety.  She had to be more careful next time.

Exhausted, Joslyn fell asleep without intending to, and did not stir again until Mother Eirenna’s fingers touched her face.

28

~ THEN ~

Lord Hermant dropped to one knee, kissed the seal of the House of Dorsa inlaid into Tasia’s ring, and rose again, all in one fluid motion.  When he stood, he nodded to acknowledge Mylla, who curtsied in response.  She started to speak to the great lord of the Northeast, but Lord Hermant ignored her and turned back to Tasia.

“You’re looking quite fetching tonight, my dear,” he said.

“Thank you, Grandfather,” Tasia said.  “You look very…”  She hesitated for a moment, trying to decide on a word that would please him.  “…dignified this evening.”

He chuckled.  “We are family, Natasia, let us be honest with one another.”  He patted his paunch.  “I’ve gained at least one stone since the last time you saw me.  I am becoming a fat old man.”

Tasia smiled weakly.  She supposed it shouldn’t bother her that he never referred to her as “Princess” — after all, as he’d just pointed out, he was family.  Still.  Her mother’s father had always made her uncomfortable, even though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.  Maybe her discomfort came from the way Tasia’s mother often spoke of her own mother but almost never of her father.  And whenever she had, her eyes would grow distant, her mouth would subtly tighten.

“Nonsense, Grandfather,” Tasia said.  “You are simply robust and healthy.  Much better to be a stone too much at your age than a stone too little.  I don’t think fragility would become you.”

He grinned broadly.  “Well-said, my dear, well-said.”  He glanced about the crowded ballroom and lowered his voice.  “Your eighteenth birthday is just around the corner.  Have you pledged your hand yet?  I know your father hasn’t made any announcements yet, but I am assuming his silence is mere discretion.”

“It’s not discretion.  I just haven’t met anyone I like yet.”

Mylla coughed behind her — once, twice, then broke into a full coughing fit.  “Excuse me for a moment, your Highness, my Lord,” she said, and hurried off in the direction of the drink table.

Lord Hermant watched her go.  “That was… oddly indecorous for a lady of her standing.  Is she alright?”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Tasia said, biting down on the inside of her cheek to force the grin away.  “She probably had something caught in her throat.”

But Tasia was quite sure the coughing fit had been a way to disguise Mylla’s laughter; they both knew of Tasia’s recent tryst with Markas of House Boling, which was followed shortly thereafter with an encounter at the Midwinter Ball with Simon of House Brundt.  Simon was here tonight as well; Tasia hoped he might try to catch her attention before the night was through.

“Ah, of course,” said Lord Hermant, tracking Mylla with a slight frown on his face.  “But back to your marriage prospects:  How could it be that you are nearly eighteen and not engaged yet?”  He looked her up and down pointedly.  “Certainly it cannot be for lack of offers.  You have your mother’s beauty and your father’s lineage.”

“To be honest, Grandfather,” she said, “I do not feel entirely ready to wed yet.  I should like to wait a bit, if I can.  Or at least wait until Father introduces me to a young man who interests me for more than his land holdings, or for his own father’s ability to ingratiate himself with mine.”

Lord Hermant cocked a disapproving eyebrow, but then his face softened, and he laughed.  “I suppose that is understandable,” he said.  “After all, the man you marry will be our Emperor one day.  A discriminating taste might be warranted.”

The smile Tasia replied with was more authentic than her earlier one.  “Precisely,” she said.  “Though Father feels that the sooner I accept a husband, the better, because he wants to make sure he has more than enough time to train his heir.”

“Well, your father is — what did you call me earlier?  ‘Robust and healthy.’”

A nice way of saying that Grandfather wasn’t the only one to have added a stone in recent years.  They both laughed.

“You know, Natasia,” Lord Hermant said, lowering his voice.  “I am quite well-acquainted with all the Houses of the Northeast.  The other Great House besides my own, House Errit, has enjoyed a rising star for two full generations now.  Lord Bellun is a good man and a dear friend, and his son, Quentin, is only a year younger than you, I believe.  Smart lad — serious for his age.  And not bad to look at, if I can be a judge of such things.”  He winked.  “Have you met Quentin before?  Bellun has been so preoccupied with expanding his manor these last three years at House Errit that he and Quentin haven’t traveled to Port Lorsin much.”

Tasia’s smile faded.  It shouldn’t surprise her.  Regardless of talk of “family,” her grandfather was just like all the other lords:  He hoped she would marry in such a way that he would be able to exert more influence over the crown.  And he’d succeeded once, after all; he’d managed to marry his daughter to the Emperor.  If he could install his ally’s son as Emperor, his sphere of influence would grow even larger and stronger than it already was.

“I don’t believe I have had the pleasure of meeting Quentin,” Tasia said, keeping her tone diplomatic.

“I will be sure to make an introduction next time he visits the palace.”

Tasia forced a polite smile.  “Thank you for that, Grandfather.”

“Of course,” he said, full of false graciousness.  “You are my granddaughter, after all.  Surely it is part of a grandfather’s responsibility to see his progeny marry well, isn’t it?”

“Yes, my Lord,” said Tasia.  “Naturally it is.”

“Naturally.”  He glanced over his shoulder.  “Well.  I don’t believe I’ve seen such a crowded end-of-council ball at this time of year for several years.  It must be the mild winter we had.”

“Indeed.”

“And I’m sure you’re ready to talk with lords and ladies your own age, not old men like me.”

“Don’t be silly, my Lord Grandfather,” Tasia said.  “It is always a pleasure to see you.”

Lord Hermant smirked.  “You lie remarkably well, Natasia.  That is a skill you should continue to cultivate; it always serves a royal to be good at lying.”

With that, he gave her one final nod and disappeared into the crowd.

Mylla reappeared at Tasia’s side a moment later.

“Tell me you brought me a glass of wine,” Tasia said.

Mylla extended a full glass of dark red wine, which Tasia took from her gratefully.

“From the vineyards of House Yount,” Mylla declared.  “The finest wine in the Four Realms.”

“I don’t particularly care how fine it is at this point.”  Tasia took a sip, then a longer second sip.

She scanned the throngs of ambassadors, Wise Men, lords, and ladies in the ballroom.  The music hadn’t begun, so no one yet danced.  Instead, they hung back from the dance floors, forming little clusters of fours, fives, and sixes along the room’s walls.  They had mostly divided themselves by realms, except for the Terintan envoys, who stood apart from all the rest.  Tasia searched for the Western lords.

“Looking for someone?” Mylla asked in a sing-song voice.

Tasia responded only with a withering glare.

“You know Simon’s betrothed now,” Mylla said.

“Is he?” Tasia asked, surprised.

Mylla nodded.  “To a girl from the Central Steppes — the southern steppes, but still.”  Mylla wrinkled her nose.  “He might as well marry a horse.  I’ve seen horses with prettier features.”

Disappointment tugged at Tasia.  She drank more wine, emptying half the glass in a matter of a few seconds.  She actually liked Simon.  She might have even considered marrying him, had her father presented him.  If she couldn’t have Mylla, if she absolutely had to marry a man, Simon would have been more than palatable.  Far more than Quentin of House Errit.  Lord Hermant had called him “serious,” but from what Tasia had heard, it went beyond that — he was brooding and dark, possessing an arrogance nearly — but only nearly — justified by his cleverness, and prone to random bursts of cruelty directed towards his servants.  Tasia did not need to meet him in person to know that he was not someone she wanted to marry.

“What did your grandfather want?” Mylla asked.

Tasia knew the handmaid had seized upon a new subject to help her mistress get her mind off Simon’s unavailability, and Tasia appreciated it.

“To marry me off,” Tasia answered.

Mylla rolled her eyes.  “That’s all any of these lords seem to want to talk to you about these days.  And whom did he have in mind?”

“Quentin of House Errit.”

Mylla considered this.  “I hear he’s handsome.  Not as fair as most Northeasterners, but handsome.”

“There’s more important things to a man than his looks, Myll.”

“Like what?  The size of his — ” but she cut herself off at a sharp look from Tasia.

Mylla shrugged.  They were both quiet for a moment.

“Oh, look, Tazy,” she said a few seconds later, brightening.  “There’s Daniel of House Becker.  Do you mind if I go say hello to him?  I haven’t seen him in ages.”

“Go ahead,” Tasia said.  She should mingle with other guests, anyway.  “I haven’t said hello to Anna yet.  And you know how she can get when she feels snubbed.”

“True,” Mylla said, but she wasn’t really listening anymore; she was too busy trying to catch Daniel’s eye.  As Tasia watched, he glanced over and waved, smiling at Mylla.  “I’ll check in on you after a bit,” the girl told Tasia.

“Take your time,” Tasia said.  “And enjoy the ball — you deserve it.”

“Thank you, my Princess.”  She winked at Tasia, gave her forearm a gentle squeeze, and then, on light feet, practically danced to Daniel of House Becker’s side, greeting him with a kiss on each cheek, as Westerners sometimes did.

Watching Mylla, Tasia contemplated escaping the ball and climbing up to the old lookout tower where Nik used to hide.  Maybe she could pilfer a bottle of wine and take Mylla with her, and one way or another, Tasia’s troubles might float away for a while.

But no.  She wasn’t thirteen anymore.  Besides, she hadn’t visited the lookout tower since Nik died.  It didn’t seem right to be there without him.

And she doubted she would see Mylla again before dawn.

Tasia finished her wine, put on a smile, and walked towards Anna of House Aventia.

~ NOW ~

On the fifth day of the journey towards Port Lorsin, the caravan escorting the Prisoner Natasia of House Dorsa (that was the new title she’d given herself, because it amused her) entered the Great Desert.

The landscape change was more abrupt than she’d expected.  Sand dunes appeared from nowhere, as if the gods crafting the Earth had shoved a great pile of it towards the savanna for later distribution, but then became distracted and simply left it there.

It must be boring to be a god, Tasia thought.  I wonder if they have balls for gods — midwinter balls, midsummer balls, start-of-council balls, end-of-council balls… and fancy dresses, and handmaids, and grandfathers who want to marry them off.

She giggled.  Everything seemed terribly amusing these days.

A guard walking beside her cart glared at her.

“Apologies, sir,” Tasia croaked, but then she giggled some more.

He glared at her again, so she laid down inside her cage, curling into the best fetal position she could manage and covering her mouth with her hand to stifle any further giggling.

Tasia was half-delirious nearly all the time now.  Between the constant dehydration, the semi-starvation, the blistering sunburns, and the lack of sleep caused by being trapped inside a too-small dog cage day and night, she knew that giggling was the least of her problems.  She was somewhat surprised she hadn’t started hallucinating yet.

Although she had caught a glimpse of Joslyn — a much younger Joslyn — skulking around the camp the night before.  That was probably a hallucination.

Young Joslyn had looked so real, though.  But then again, it wouldn’t be a hallucination if it wasn’t convincing, would it?

Tasia’s giggling petered out.

You have to keep yourself together, she told herself sternly.  You have to prove yourself a member of the House of Dorsa.

Why should I? she thought bitterly, arguing with herself.  It’s all over this time.  I had my second chance and I ruined it because I was so eager to prove I could lead.  So eager to show Evrart I was more than the Brotherhood’s puppet.

It’s not over.

It is.

It’s not over until you’re dead.  Are you dead?

I might as well be.

But you’re not.  Maybe that’s why young Joslyn appeared to you last night — to remind you to keep fighting.  She fought until the last moment; so should you.

The same guard that had glared at her turned in her direction and frowned.

Whoops.  Had that argument with herself actually been out-loud?

The caravan rumbled on; the harsh sun above made the bars of her cage hot to the touch; the dunes rose and fell like ocean waves.  Tasia fell into one of her trance-like states, and for nearly an hour, she believed they really were waves.  She was on a boat, bobbing up and down in an ocean made of sand.

“I’m so glad we’re sailing today, aren’t you?” a woman’s voice beside her said.

Tasia looked over.  It was Anna of House Aventia, wearing a dark-green ballgown accented with pearls and black lace.  One of the least favorite of Tasia’s cousins.

“It’s a bit hot for my taste,” Tasia told Anna.

Anna shaded her eyes from the sun and gazed out at the horizon.  A particularly large wave of sand rose in the distance, and for a brief moment, Tasia worried it would capsize their boat.  But no, it was too far away for that.

“You’re lucky to live in Port Lorsin,” Anna said with an exaggerated sigh.  “You get to see the ocean all the time.  House Aventia is so far from the sea.”  She pouted.  “I almost never get to go sailing like this.”

“I don’t know if I would say ‘lucky,’” Tasia said.  “Sailing always makes me seasick.”  And as if to prove it, she turned to the boat railing and retched.  Only a little thin bile came out, though.  That was because the food at the ball the night before had been so terrible that Tasia had barely eaten any.

“She’s sick again,” said a lord beside Anna.  “Hey — the princess is sick again.”

The boat stopped — but wait, was it a boat?

No.  It wasn’t.

Tasia remembered now:  She was in a dog cage on a wagon traveling through the Great Desert.  Anna was only in her imagination.  And the man she thought was a lord was actually a common Imperial soldier, here to ensure she got back to Port Lorsin safely so that they could kill her.

A hand reached through the bars, offering her a dirty kerchief.  She took it and wiped her mouth, then handed it back.  The same rough hand took it back from her.  Her eyes followed the hand to a wrist, the wrist to an arm, the arm up to a shoulder, neck, chin, face.  A sunburned man, his face covered with fresh beard growth, gazed back at her.

“Are you alright?” he asked.  He actually sounded like he cared.

“Water,” Tasia said.  “I need water.”

He frowned, glanced over his shoulder.  “We all need water out here, Princess.  But there won’t be much to be had until we get to the outpost.”

“I need water,” she said stubbornly.  “My grandfather will have your heads if I die before we get to Port Lorsin.”

Another man marched over to the cart.  An officer — Tasia could tell by the way he walked, by the way his armor was crisp and clean and bore no scars of fighting.

“What’s the problem here?” he asked the first man.  “Why did we stop?”

“She threw up again,” said the guard.  “She has the sun sickness.  We should cover her cage and get her some more water.”

The officer narrowed his eyes, studied Tasia.  “Traitors don’t deserve more protection than the rest of us.  At least she doesn’t have to march through this gods-forsaken desert carrying all her gear.”

Tasia almost giggled again, because although the guard wore a sack full of gear, the officer did not.  He probably had his gear stashed on another wagon somewhere.

“I just hate men who take themselves too seriously, don’t you?” commented Anna of House Aventia beside her, looking the officer up and down.  “And the minor highborn — you know, the nephews and the grandnephews and the third cousins?  The ones who still bear a House name with great pride but are so far removed from their lineage that they are hardly more than commoners?  They are the worst of all.”

Tasia didn’t often agree with Anna of House Aventia, but she did this time.  She started to nod in agreement but caught herself just in time.  Anna of House Aventia wasn’t actually there.

“Water,” she told the officer weakly.  “I need more water.”

“Sir,” said the guard.  “I’ve seen men die from sun sickness.  In conditions far easier than the Great Desert.”  He hesitated.  “What will Lord Hermant say if she dies before we reach Port Lorsin?”

That seemed to make the officer think.  “Fine,” he snapped after a moment.  “Fill her water dish one more time — but no more after that until the outpost.”

“And the cage?” the guard pressed.  “We could cover it with one of the tents, block the sun for a bit.”

The officer waved his hand impatiently.  “Do what you need to do to keep her alive, soldier.”  He jabbed a finger towards the guard.  “And if she dies, you’re the first one I will hold responsible.”

The guard clenched his jaw.  “Yes, sir.”

The officer stalked away.

“Give me the water dish, Princess,” the guard told Tasia.

She turned the empty tin bowl sideways and passed it through the cage bars.  It was so hot from sitting in the sun all day that it scorched her fingers, but she was beyond caring.  The soldier wasn’t, though.  He yelped when Tasia handed it to him, and it tumbled out of his hand, bouncing off the wagon’s edge and landing upside-down on the sand-coated road.

He muttered something incomprehensible and passed his own canteen through the bars to Tasia.  “Here, take mine for now,” he said.  He scowled at the dog cage.  “And I’m going to find something to cover this.  Then maybe you’ll stop burning.”  A beat passed.  “You were pretty, the day we captured you.  Now…”  He shook his head, disgust on his face.

Tasia licked her cracked lips and smiled.  It hurt.  “Now I look like a tomato with long hair — a diseased tomato.”  She held up a hand when he looked like he was about to apologize.  “It’s alright.  I don’t need a mirror to know what I must look like.”  She took another long swallow of his water, then pushed it back through the bars.

“You keep it for now.”  He pushed it gently back in her direction.

Tasia felt tears well, but apparently her body didn’t have enough water to spare to make them actually fall.  “Thank you.”

29

The hallucinations stopped once Tasia’s cage was covered.  She was tempted to finish the whole canteen of water the guard had handed to her, but she thought better of it.  Her stomach was still upset, and she had a feeling that if she drank too much, too quickly, she would simply retch it all back up again.

Mercifully, they reached the outpost only a couple of hours later, which meant they could stop for the day.  That was how travel on the Emperor’s Road through the Great Desert worked — the road, such as it was in the middle of the desert, had been marked by thick, upright posts made of elm logs, and at every one hundredth log was an outpost stocked with food, barrels of water, and animal feed, along with several open-air, wood-roofed shelters angled to provide shade from the worst of the desert sun.

Empress Adela had built the original outposts nearly eight hundred years ago, when, at the end of her life, she established the first trade route between the Empire and Terinto.  Nomads had been crossing the desert to trade with Port Lorsin with relative ease for centuries before that, but that meant Empire merchants at the mercy of the prices the nomads set.  The Emperor’s Road (originally the “Empress’s Road”) solved that problem, creating the first safe route eastward from Port Lorsin through the previously uncrossable desert.  The Great Desert was still dangerous to cross, but when merchants and troops needed to move eastward, without having to bypass south through Paratheen or north through the Seven Cities, the outposts at least made the crossing feasible.

But Tasia didn’t think about history or the strategy of her ancestors when the caravan stopped for the day at the outpost.  She only thought of the sweet relief that came with the stillness, with the wagon rolling to a stop and not moving again until at least dawn.  How much time would that give her to be still?  Probably at least fourteen or fifteen hours, since they’d reached the outpost much earlier than expected.

Fourteen or fifteen hours.

The thought made Tasia practically joyful.

As soon as the wagon stopped, she laid on the bottom of her cage, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep.  She had to feign sleep at first; the men were loud as they hobbled their animals beside Tasia’s wagon and spread out their tents and bedrolls beneath the open-air shelters.

“Princess?” she heard a voice call softly.

It was the man who had given her the canteen of water, but she didn’t want to talk to him right now.  Tasia didn’t want to see the pity in his eyes again.  She didn’t move.  She wanted him to believe she had fallen asleep the moment they’d stopped traveling.

“Princess?  I can refill the canteen with water, if you want.”

She knew she should rouse herself, pass the canteen to him through the cage bars, but she didn’t.  Her mouth was as dry as the sand all around them, but she still had a little water left.  And she would get more in the morning, before they began to travel again.

He tried two more times to get her attention — he probably knew she wasn’t actually asleep — but eventually gave up.

Pretending to sleep must have helped the actual process of sleeping, though, because Tasia fell dead asleep shortly after the soldier left.

It wasn’t dawn that woke her, nor men’s voices.  It was something brushing against her tender, sun-scalded skin — but softly, like the legs of a spider.  She started awake, sweeping her hands over her arms and tattered underclothes in search of the offending insect or sand scorpion or desert spider that had crawled into her cage.  But instead of an insect, she saw a familiar face on the other side of the cage bars, dimly illuminated by camp fires a hundred yards away.

Tasia yelped in surprise.

“You’re not real,” she told the face, her heart still thundering with the shock of being awoken.  “You’re not real,” she said again, trying to make the face dissolve and disappear.  “I’m hallucinating again.  Anna of House Aventia wasn’t there, and neither or you.”

Young Joslyn’s brows knitted together in concern and confusion.

“I am here, ma’am.”

“No.”  Tasia clenched her fists.  Ragged nails bit into her palms.  “No, no, no, no, no.  You’re not.  Not here.”

Young Joslyn put a finger to her lips.

Wait.  That face didn’t belong to Joslyn.  The features were somewhat more narrow, the nose not quite as flat.  There was a striking resemblance to Joslyn — in fact, this face could easily belong to Joslyn’s younger sister — but it wasn’t Joslyn.

It was Linna.

“Not so loud, please, Empress,” Linna said.  “We added something extra to the camp’s stew to help everyone sleep deeply, but they can still wake up.”

Tasia stared at her, trying to take the words in.  “You… you’re really here?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m here,” Linna said.  “And Kort.  And Ammanta.  And a handful of other survivors.  They’re waiting outside of camp, beyond a dune.”

“Oh, Linna.  I thought you were dead.  I thought all of you were dead — I thought I’d killed every last one of you.”

“There are always survivors, ma’am.”

She glanced around.  Whatever they’d added to the stew must have worked; the camp was nearly silent, and the slumbering men laid still as corpses.

“I need to get you out of here, Empress,” Linna said.  “Do you know which guard holds the keys to your cage?”

“No,” Tasia said, shaking her head.  “The guards, they… the desert and the sun…”

It had been too much, that was what she wanted to tell Linna.  All of it had been too much — her camp being overrun by the delegation, the battle, her subsequent capture,  the way her own grandfather had spoken to her, the way he’d locked her in a dog cage.  She’d stopped processing new information at some point, resigned herself to her fate.

Yet she’d pulled herself together enough to talk with the guard who’d taken her to relieve herself a few nights ago, to reassure him that she hadn’t killed her father, to tell him to pass that information on to his friends.

She could pull herself together now.

Tasia took a breath.  “I know where the keys are,” she told Linna.  “Three guards.  They post three guards around me every night, and one of them carries the keys.  They’re — the one carrying the keys tonight has a mustache.”

“Alright.”

Linna backed away from Tasia’s cage, towards the first of the three bodies slumped at awkward angles between Tasia and the pack animals.  Gingerly, Linna turned him.  No mustache.  She went to the next guard, then the third.  Tasia held her breath, but the guards did not wake.  A moment later, Linna returned with the keys.  One of them fit the lock, and Tasia’s cage door swung open with a rusty groan.

She was free.

She’d dodged the executioner’s axe a second time.  If there were gods, perhaps they really did care for the affairs of mankind.  Perhaps they wanted justice for Tasia’s father and balance between the mortal realm and the Shadowlands.

“We have to go, ma’am.”

Tasia glanced down at Linna.  She realized she’d been staring at the open cage door but had not moved to go through it.

“Yes, of course,” Tasia said.  On hands and knees, she crawled to the opening, then swung her feet out, letting them dangle off the edge of the wagon for a moment before shoving off its end.

But her legs gave way as soon as her feet touched the ground, and she crumpled.

Tasia got to her feet again only with the girl’s help.  With effort, she straightened herself.  Everything hurt — every muscle screamed in pain, every inch of her sunburnt skin protested as it stretched again.  Tasia stifled the urge to cry out.

“I’m alright,” she said to Linna, even though they could both see she was not.  “Let’s go.”

They walked only a yard before something snagged Tasia’s ankle.  She toppled forward, landing face-first against the sand.

“Princess,” said a male voice.  “You… cannot… leave.”

The voice was thick and slurred, like a drunk’s.  Tasia turned to see the guard who had given her the canteen struggling to get to his feet, pulling his sword at the same time.

Linna was quicker.  In an instant, she stood with her feet on either side of Tasia’s prone body, a small knife in her hand.

This would not end well for any of them, Tasia realized.

She pushed herself to a sitting position.  “Linna, put the knife away.”  The girl gave her a questioning look, so Tasia repeated with more command in her voice:  “Put the knife away.”  Then she faced the guard, who swayed back and forth unsteadily.  Tasia cleared her throat, trying to make it sound clear and regal.  “You are a soldier of the House of Dorsa, not a soldier of the Regent Norix.  Sheath your sword.”

“You are a prisoner and a traitor,” he said, speaking slowly to keep his words from slurring.  “Get back into the cage, or I will wake the whole camp.”

Tasia reached for Linna’s arm.  With the girl’s help, she got to her feet.  Clenching her teeth against the pain, she straightened to her full height and fixed her eyes upon the guard.

“Norix and Lord Hermant are the real traitors.”  She paused.  “In your heart, I think you already know that.”

He hesitated, then shook his head.  “You highborn squabble amongst yourselves all the time.  I don’t care about your squabbles,” he said, his speech growing clearer the more he spoke.  “I care about feeding my family.  And if you escape on my watch, they will kill me, and my family will starve.”

“Your family will starve anyway, if the delegation succeeds in its mission.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

Then the soldier lunged for Tasia, dropping his sword in the process so that both hands would be free to grab her.  But from somewhere inside Tasia, the memory of Joslyn’s training asserted itself.  She side-stepped the soldier, executing a near-perfect light on water.  The momentum of the soldier’s lunge carried him forward past her, and he stumbled and fell to the ground.  He started to push himself up, but Linna was already there, holding the tip of the soldier’s own sword to his throat.

“Move another inch and your family will only get back your corpse,” the girl growled.

“Come with us,” Tasia told the guard.  “Fight on the right side of the battle that is to come.”

She put a hand on Linna’s arm.  Linna glanced between Tasia and the soldier, then took a step back.  But she kept the sword at the ready.

“Come with us,” Tasia said again.

The guard slumped, dropping his eyes.  “Go,” he said.  “But leave me my sword.  Or they will know I let you escape.”

Linna hesitated, then looked at Tasia.  She shook her head subtly.

“We will leave it at the edge of the Emperor’s Road.  No closer than that,” Tasia told him.  “Let’s go, Linna.”

#

Two dozen faces greeted Tasia when, with Linna’s help, they crested the dune.  Two dozen pairs of eyes, with the light provided by Mother Moon, took in the sight of her tattered underclothes, her blistered skin, her stringy hair.  She’d been leaning on Linna for support, but when she saw those two dozen faces, she stepped away from the girl.  She squared her shoulders, and did not let her shame stop her from meeting those eyes.

“Thank you,” she said to them.

“We are glad you live, Empress,” Ammanta said.  A bandage wound around her side, a rust-brown bloodstain showing on it.

Kort stood beside Ammanta, one arm in a sling.  In his other hand, he held his pike.  It was no longer double-pointed; one spear tip was missing, with only splintered wood where it should have been.  He planted this end into the sand and nodded definitively.

“Can you travel?” he asked.

Tasia didn’t hesitate.  “Yes.”

“Then we must go immediately.”

“This way,” a man said, pointing deeper into the desert.

His face lit only by the half-moon above, Tasia didn’t recognize the man at first.  But when he turned his head, she realized it was none other than Y’Farsil’s translator.  Y’Farsil himself was not in the band of twenty-five bedraggled soldiers, but several Terintan slaves were.

Tasia would see to it they weren’t slaves after this.

With the translator leading the way, the group headed down the dune, away from the outpost and deeper into the desert.

30

What is distance, to a dreamer?  One moment the dreamer’s village appears; the next moment, she is in a faraway and unfamiliar land, where flowers grow as large as a woman’s head, and the winged beasts of children’s tales blot out the light of Mother Moon.

And what is distance to a dreamwalker?  Is it any different?  Or is it, too, nothing more substantial than a thought, a barrier that only exists when the dreamwalker imagines it does?

It took Joslyn nearly another week after the night that the protective bubble of her q’isson burst to realize that distance, for a dreamwalker, does not truly exist.  The rules of dreams were different from the rules of the physical world; simply by thinking of a place, she could take her q’isson there instantaneously.

And so it was that even as she traveled deeper into the Zaris Mountains each day, drawing ever closer to the last place she had seen the small men and battled the undatai, each night, she traveled the whole of the Empire, searching for Tasia.

But finding an individual dreamer in an entire Empire was like trying to find a single hairpin inside a pile of hay.  She started in the place she had seen Tasia last — Paratheen, inside Lord M’Tongliss’s mansion.  But Tasia was not anywhere amongst the two wives, the eight children, the household staff of slaves.  Nor was she to be found anywhere within Paratheen.

Joslyn went to Port Lorsin next, searching every inch of the palace, but still she could not find Tasia.  She even entered into Norix’s dreams, shifting his dream-fantasy of defeating the highest members of the House of Wisdom in debate into a nightmare, but she did not stay longer to do more than that, because she did not have the time or the tea for petty revenge.

She probed both Norix and Lord M’Tongliss’s minds for Tasia’s location, but neither of them seemed to know.

That was the problem with dreamwalking.  She could enter into a dream, she could change it, she could communicate with the dreamer, but she could do no more than that.  She could only learn what they already knew.  She could not see beyond like a seer; she could not vanquish the wicked.  For that, she still needed a sword.

Given its limitations, what had been the point of Ku-sai’s dreamwalking, anyway?  She wished she could ask him why he had bothered cultivating the skill in the first place, or who had taught it to him.

Joslyn knew very little of her teacher’s history.  She knew only that he was originally from the Seven Cities, and that he had learned the dance of the Seven Cities from his father, who was also a great sword master.  Joslyn also knew that Ku-sai had fled the Seven Cities, had sought a solitary refuge on the side of a mountain outside an obscure village in the foothills of the Zaris Mountains, but she did not know why he had left his homeland, or how long he planned on staying, or why he took on only Joslyn as a pupil after rejecting so many others.

She also didn’t know whom he visited when he dreamwalked.

Why hadn’t she asked him more questions about his own life?  Why hadn’t she been more curious about his past?

But she knew why.  When Joslyn arrived at his hut at the age of fourteen, she didn’t care about anything except learning how to use the sword she had stolen.  And she had heard rumors that he was someone who could teach her.  She didn’t need to know more than that.

Her questions about Ku-sai would now go forever unanswered.  He wasn’t in this world or in the Shadowlands anymore; if he was, he would have found her by now, on the dream plane.  The last echo of him had dissipated, as any dream did upon waking.

She turned his shattered sword over in her hands one night before drinking her horsetail tea.  He had told her that the sword itself would teach her what she needed to know about defeating the shadows.  But she had ruined it.  Broke it the way she broke so many things.  She slid what was left of it back inside the leopard-skin sheath she had made for it, and turned her attention to her tea.

The pouch of tea leaves, so full two weeks ago, was nearly empty now.  Only a quarter of it, maybe less, still remained.  She’d been using less and less of it, trying to make it last, but the less tea she used, the less time she had inside her q’isson.  And the less time she had inside the q’isson, the less time she had to search for Tasia.

She needed more horsetail mushroom, but it was too late for that.  It was a common enough fungus, but unlike most mushrooms, it preferred a drier climate.  As far as Joslyn knew, it grew only in the savannas, and on the outermost edges of the Great Desert.  That might explain why there were so many more practitioners of the shadow arts amongst Terintans — they had the easiest access to the substance required to build the bridge between the mortal world and the Shadowlands.

Joslyn had considered exploring other aspects of the shadow arts.  Besides dreamwalkers and seers, the folklore she had grown up with said that there were skinwalkers — sorceresses who could inhabit the bodies of others, typically animals but sometimes other humans; illusionists, who could make a person believe something was there that wasn’t; engravers, who could write certain words on objects to imbue them with power (she suspected Ku-sai’s sword must have been created by an engraver); and finally summoners.  Summoners were feared most of all, because they had the power to bring shadows out of the Shadowlands and into the mortal world and control them.  Maybe the shadows that had inhabited the Imperial troops fighting in the East, along with the undatai Joslyn had fought months earlier, had been brought forth by summoners.

But although Joslyn had become curious about which of the shadow arts were true and which were only tall tales told around a camp fire, she didn’t dare use the tea to experiment with anything except dreamwalking.  She was running out of the tea as it was, and she still hadn’t found Tasia.

She tipped another log into her fire and drank her tea for the night.  She’d used a smaller pinch than the night before; it wouldn’t give her much time, but she had to conserve.

#

Joslyn started the night’s search skimming the waves of the Adessian Sea.  Maybe Paratheen had become too unsafe, and Tasia had fled southward for the Adessian Islands.  Inside her q’isson, Joslyn flew above the water, scanning the rolling horizon for signs of ships.  She found a few, but they were only Adessian pirates and smugglers, along with one Imperial warship patrolling off the coast of Negusto.  None of them included a sleeping Tasia.

Frustrated, she went as far south as Damaso, the northernmost island of the Adessian archipelago.  But except for a coastal village of about fifty residents, the mountainous island was virtually uninhabited.  She thought about going further south, but she just couldn’t imagine Tasia leaving the Empire while Norix still held the regency.  If Tasia had fled by sea, she might have gone to the West, towards the Gifford Peninsula.  Joslyn hated to think of Tasia going to Mace of House Gifford, but it would have made sense.  He had been her fiancé, if only for a brief time; he might have given her safe harbor.  Joslyn turned her dream sights westward, moving swiftly towards Gifford.

“Joslyn.”

The voice came from nowhere.  It came from everywhere.  It startled her so much that she nearly lost control of the q’isson.

“Who’s there?”

“We need to talk,” the disembodied voice said.  “I can help you.”

The voice was feminine and vaguely familiar.  Something in the back of Joslyn’s mind told her she knew the owner of this voice; she remembered this voice, but in a different form, from a different era of her life.

“Where are you?” Joslyn asked.  “Who are you?”

“My q’isson is not as strong as yours,” the woman said.  “And it will not last as long.  Follow my voice; you will find me.”

Normally, Joslyn’s fundamental instinct was to distrust, but there was something about this voice… Something that made her want to override her normal caution.

But distrust won.

“Tell me who you are first,” Joslyn said.

The woman seemed to sigh, although inside the dream realm, it wasn’t exactly a sigh.  “I don’t think you will believe me until you see me.  So come.  I mean you no harm.”

The voice left a trace of itself hanging in the air, rippling like one of the ocean waves below.  A ripple made of sound.  Joslyn could follow the ripples to its origin point in an instant — there was no distance in the dream world — but she did not.  She moved slowly, leaving the Adessian Sea and coming back over the land.

Negusto.  The Terintan coastline.  Paratheen.

The sound ripples grew stronger, more distinct, almost like lines.

The coast, Port Lorsin, the Capital Lands, Everly, the West.

Joslyn stopped, floating above a no-name Western village.  She’d passed Everly already, so the village couldn’t belong to the House of Everent.  From what Joslyn remembered of the West when she traveled it regularly with Mistress and Master, she decided the village was probably on the lands of House Korent.  But Joslyn knew no one this far West.

She tried speaking to the voice again and found that it was easy enough to do.  “I am here.  Near your village.”

“It is not ‘my’ village,” the woman said.  “We are simply here for a short while before we move on.  Surely you remember those days?”

It was maddening, hearing a voice that was so familiar but which she still could not place.  Joslyn moved closer to its origin but slowed her speed.

Inside the ghost-images of the village’s small, wattle and dob homes, residents slept peacefully, dreaming their dreams of farming and spring fairs and secret lovers.  Joslyn didn’t bother with their dreams; she searched for the place where the voice came from.

And then she found its epicenter — not inside a house, but coming from inside a bulb-shaped bliva.  A tinker’s bliva.

Joslyn stayed above the bliva.  Inside, she could see the forms of a sleeping man and two sleeping children.  The fourth inhabitant of the bliva did not sleep.  Instead, swirling lights surrounded her, making it difficult to see what or who was inside.

“Come, Joslyn,” the woman said.  “Let us join our q’issons and talk.”

“Not until you tell me who you are,” Joslyn responded.

“Like I said, it will be easier to explain if you simply see for yourself.”  Joslyn could hear the mounting irritation in her tone.  “Please.  I can’t hold my q’isson much longer.  A quarter of an hour at most.”

Joslyn hesitated.

This is not a stranger, part of her said.  The same part told her she had nothing to worry about.

Yet the trust Joslyn felt could be a shadow’s trick, could it not?

If something went wrong, Joslyn would break the connection and be back inside her own body in an instant.  She’d grown adept enough that she felt relatively confident of that.

“Alright,” Joslyn said at last.

She floated through the outer wall of the bliva, came closer to the woman’s glowing q’isson.  Joslyn reached out with her own q’isson, and the two q’issons connected.

Light flashed, momentarily blinding her.  But then Joslyn found herself standing on a tinker’s rug, a rug that looked remarkably like the one Master and Mistress used to have.  A woman about the same age as Joslyn sat before her in a rocking chair, legs crossed at the knees below her sleeping gown, hands folded in her lap.

Her hair, which was the same raven-black as Joslyn’s, had been twisted into a messy bun atop her head.  Her facial features were also like Joslyn’s — tawny skin, high cheekbones, folds around her dark eyes.

She looked… just like Joslyn, if Joslyn had been destined to become a mother and a wife instead of a warrior.

Joslyn stared in disbelief.

“Tasmyn…?”

Her sister smiled.  “I didn’t think I would ever see you again, baby sister.  Certainly not…”  She spread her hands out to indicate the walls of the q’isson a few feet away.  “…like this.”

“But you… the bliva…”  She understood now what Tasmyn had said earlier, about the village not being hers, about being there only a short while before moving on.  The question Joslyn was going to ask turned into a statement.  “You’re a tinker.”

“Well, my husband is the tinker, actually,” said Tasmyn.  “I am a tinker’s wife.”  She smiled, broadly, revealing a missing tooth in her upper row of teeth.

Joslyn remembered when that tooth had been knocked out, when they’d been playing with some boys in town outside of Brundt and one of them had pushed Tasmyn down into the mud.  When she looked up again, blood streamed from her mouth and panic shone in her eyes, and Joslyn had tackled the boy, punching him until he cried for his mother.

“How?” Joslyn asked.  “How are you a tinker’s wife?”

“We traveled with another tinker family for a while, a few years after you — ”  Tasmyn dropped both her gaze and her voice.  “After they sold you.  The other tinker’s son fell in love with me; he asked Master to free me so that he could marry me.”  She shrugged.  “There is more to the story, but… perhaps there will be time for that later.  At any rate, here I am.”

Even as gladness rose in Joslyn’s heart for her sister’s good fortune, bitterness rose up alongside it.  Master and Mistress had always preferred Tasmyn over her.  She reminded them of the daughter they had lost, whereas Joslyn… Joslyn was boyish and headstrong, and always had a way of finding a fight wherever they traveled.  Tasmyn was obedient — and curious about the fortune-telling Mistress did.  Joslyn, by comparison, hated being trapped inside the bliva all day, forced to assist Mistress in her shams.  She was glad when Master finally agreed to let her work with him, fixing tools and trading wares.

“I didn’t know they were going to sell you,” Tasmyn said, her eyes glistening.  “They never told me where you went.  But the shadows told me, later.”

Even though Joslyn’s body wasn’t actually there, even though it was only an insubstantial dream body, an imagined body, a lump formed in her throat.  She did not reply.  She did not want to speak about the year and a half she spent with Captain Samwin — the year and a half that had lasted an entire lifetime.

“I’m sorry,” Tasmyn whispered.

“It doesn’t matter.”

The sisters studied each other for a moment.  Perhaps Tasmyn was wondering the same things that Joslyn was wondering — what had the intervening years been like, since last they saw one another?  Joslyn counted the years.

Sixteen.

Sixteen years had passed, which meant that Tasmyn was about thirty-one summers.

But maybe Tasmyn didn’t need to wonder.  After all, she had a q’isson.  She said the shadows had told her about what happened to Joslyn.  Which meant that Joslyn understood something else about what had happened to her sister in those intervening years.

“You’re a seer,” Joslyn said flatly.  A statement.  No need to phrase it as a question.

“Yes.  It’s why they bought us, Master and Mistress.  Our mother — our real mother — was one of the shamans for our tribe.  As her mother was before her.  Did you know that?  After Master and Mistress’s daughter died, Mistress wanted someone she could pass down her art to.”

“And you wanted to learn.  And I did not.”

Tasmyn said nothing.

“How can you invite shadows into your body?” Joslyn asked, an unexpected anger rising inside her.  “Don’t you know they cannot be trusted?”

“Shadows are a part of us already, sister,” Tasmyn answered calmly.  “Making peace with that is what keeps them in their world, and us in ours.”

Joslyn frowned.  She didn’t understand and wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

“You said you have little time,” Joslyn said curtly.  “So why bring me here?”  Adding sarcasm to her tone, she said, “Am I here simply to reminisce about the past?”  Hurt showed in Tasmyn’s eyes.  She hadn’t anticipated Joslyn’s anger.  Or maybe she had — and maybe it wasn’t hurt, but guilt.  Guilt that she had been chosen by Mistress and not Joslyn; guilt that Master and Mistress had sold Joslyn once they’d decided which one of the sisters Mistress would pass down her art to.

And if Tasmyn was a seer, she didn’t need Joslyn to tell her what Captain Samwin had done.  She probably already knew.

Whichever emotion filled Tasmyn’s eyes, hurt or guilt, both sisters seemed to decide to let it go unsaid.

“I brought you because there are things you need to know — things the Empire needs to know,” Tasmyn said.

“Things gained from the shadows you consort with.”

Tasmyn hesitated, then nodded.  “Yes.  My information comes from the shadows I have a relationship with.  But that doesn’t make it untrue.”  She paused a moment, perhaps waiting to see if Joslyn would argue.  “The first thing you need to know is that the girl you seek is in the Great Desert, heading west towards House Aventia.  The Brothers were right to support her bid for the crown,” Tasmyn added.  “She needs to become Empress, Joslyn.  The balance between the worlds depends upon it.”

Relief mixed with excitement.  Finally.  After searching for night upon night, finally Joslyn knew where to find Tasia.  But why was Tasmyn — or, more specifically, the shadows whom she invited into her body — telling her this?  What did a shadow care about who ruled the Empire?

Relief curdled into suspicion.

“Why?  Why does she ‘need’ to become Empress?” Joslyn asked.

“Because the Wise Man who calls himself Regent and those who support him will never acknowledge the shadows spilling into our world through the mountain tribes in the East,” Tasmyn said.  “And those shadows, the shadows serving the mountain men, they care nothing for the balance between worlds.  I think you know that already.  If Tasia gains her crown, the destruction of the boundary between the Shadowlands and the mortal realm might still be avoided.”

“But if Tasia really is in the Great Desert…  There’s nothing I can do to help her, Tasmyn.  I’m a thousand miles from the Great Desert.”

“You can help her,” said Tasmyn.  “She is heading towards House Aventia because she has family there and believes she will be supported.  But she’s also beginning to contemplate finding support for her claim amongst the common people instead of the highborn.  And if she chooses that path, she might just succeed.  If she goes to House Aventia, her cousin Anna will betray her.  She needs only a nudge — a nudge away from House Aventia and towards the common people.”

Joslyn considered this.  “And you want me to nudge her.”

“Yes.”

“Why me?  Why not you?”  Joslyn gestured to the space around them.  “You can dreamwalk, too.”

“I’m not a dreamwalker,” Tasmyn said.  “I’m a seer who can hold together a q’isson for a short while with great effort.”

And I am a dreamwalker, apparently, Joslyn thought.  It surprised her.  How could she only have been doing this for a matter of weeks and already be a stronger dreamwalker than her sister, a trained seer?

“You brought a piece of the Shadowlands back with you when you returned — inside of you,” Tasmyn said softly, watching Joslyn’s face.  “It means you can do things easily that it takes others years of practice to learn.”

Joslyn felt her stomach turn.  Tainted.  Marked by shadows.

“I know it’s not what you would have chosen,” Tasmyn said.  Her tone was still gentle, and Joslyn guessed that her sister knew what she was thinking.  “But you can use it to your advantage.  To the advantage of us all.”

Joslyn looked away.  The initial thrill of finding her sister alive and well had dissipated.  She no longer wanted to be here.  She no longer wanted to be the one carrying Ku-sai’s sword, the one who could dreamwalk, the one caught between the Shadowlands and the mortal realm.  She only wanted to be with Tasia, but that was the one thing she could never do again.

“She will listen to you, even if she only believes you are a dream.”  Again Tasmyn spoke with the certainty of already knowing what Joslyn was thinking.  “Tell her not to go to House Aventia.  Tell her to find the soldier who calls himself Brick.  He’s hiding in Arthur’s Ferry, a border town between the Capital Lands and Terinto.  He will help her.  He will connect her with commoners who will rally to her cause, and together, they will form a plan that actually has a chance to save the Empire before it’s too late.”

“Brick lives?” Joslyn said, surprised.  She never had a chance to learn the fates of the others who helped Tasia escape from the winter camp; she’d assumed that, like her and Tasia, they had all been captured.  She was about to add, “But Brick is from Port Lorsin,” but stopped herself.  Of course he could not have returned to Port Lorsin after helping Tasia escape.  Half the Imperial Army would have descended upon whatever little hovel he called home.

Tasmyn nodded.  “He lives.  But Tasia should ask for him by the name of Quinn of Easthook.  He’s well-loved in Arthur’s Ferry, despite being a newcomer.  And he knows where to find Alric.”

“Alric also survived?”  Joslyn’s suspicion returned.  “How did they both manage to elude capture?”

“Because the Imperial Army cared less about finding them than finding Emperor Andreth’s heir.”  Tasmyn’s mouth pulled into a pained frown.  “Do you truly think I would deceive you, sister?”

Joslyn stared at her older sister, trying to decide what to believe.  Tasmyn would not deceive her, but the shadows inhabiting her might.  But Joslyn could not say that aloud, because the shadows would be listening.

“I haven’t seen you in more than a decade,” Joslyn said after a moment.  “And in that time you have become a seer and a tinker’s wife, traveling in a bliva and probably swindling rich women with false fortunes just like Mistress used to do.  I do not know you anymore.”

“And in the decade and a half since I last saw you,” Tasmyn said, “you have become a deadly Mizana who harbors an impossible love for the Emperor’s daughter.  A love so foolish that you negotiated with the Prince of Shadows for more time in the mortal realm.  Yet still I trust you.  Still I treat you like my sister.”

Joslyn didn’t answer.

“Our time is almost up,” said Tasmyn.  “But there is one more thing.  I brought you here not only to tell you how to help the exiled Empress, but also to warn you.”  She took a breath.  “Someone follows you, Joslyn.  Someone dangerous.  And they are closing in.”

“Who?”

Tasmyn hesitated.  “I — we — cannot see them.  They are nearly invisible to us.”

“Us… You and…”

But Tasmyn didn’t need to answer.  For a single brief moment, her eyes transformed into globes of flame, and the light around her shifted, like a cloud passing before the sun.  Us meant Tasmyn and the shadow, or shadows, she was aligned with.

“Whoever they are, they’re good,” Tasmyn said.  “Very good.  And they mean to harm you.  That I know for sure.”

Joslyn inclined her chin, acknowledging the warning.  From far away, she felt a tug — the tug of her physical body, calling to her from its place atop her bedroll in the Zaris Mountains.

“Your time is up,” Tasmyn said.  “You should go.”

“I should.”

“But if you take more tea now, you can still find the Empress.”  Tasmyn’s eyes flashed to flames again, and the tenor of her voice changed, becoming slightly deeper, more resonant.  “The Empress dreams now.”

Joslyn scowled at the sound of the shadow inside her sister, but it kept talking.

“Your ku-sai’s sword must be restored, Mizana.  The sword and the Empress together are the twin forces that will protect the mortal realm from doom.”

Tasmyn’s eyes returned to normal.  “Be careful, sister.  And after all this is well, find me.  Please.  I want you to meet your nephew.  And your twin nieces.  They should know their auntie.”

Joslyn did not answer immediately.  Tasmyn.  She was still Tasmyn, still Joslyn’s big sister, no matter how many shadows she consorted with.  And besides, hadn’t Joslyn consorted with shadows, too?  In her own way?

“If I live through my tasks, I will find you again,” Joslyn said.  “You have my word.”  She thought she might say something more.  But she didn’t.

Tasmyn smiled, and there was love in that smile.  The love of sisterhood that Joslyn had nearly forgotten existed.

“May Mother Eirenna bless you,” Tasmyn said in Terintan.  “May Father Mezzu guide you to your destiny.”

“May rain cool your days,” Joslyn answered automatically.  “May you always find shelter beneath the Father’s everlasting blue sky.”

If Joslyn had been inside her physical body, she might have felt the sting of tears.  Those words were the last their mother — their real mother, not Mistress — had spoken to them.

“Go now, Mizana.  Find the Empress.”

31

Tasia was trapped inside a nightmare.  She tried to tell herself it was only a dream — she tried to wake herself up, but her waking life, too, was little better than a nightmare.  Sometimes it was hard to tell dream from reality.

In her nightmare, she was back inside the dog cage, and the midday sun beat down on her.

“Water,” she called weakly to the guard who walked beside her wagon, but he ignored her.  “Water… please… water…”

She felt the presence of someone else inside her cage, and she turned to see who it was.

“Joslyn?”

“Tasia,” Joslyn said.  The warrior’s dark eyes touched Tasia’s body gently, inspecting each sun blister.  First her face, then her voice, filled with pain.  “Why are you dreaming about this?”

“Grandfather put me in a dog cage,” Tasia said.  “He sent me back to Port Lorsin in a dog cage.”

“Quiet, traitor!” snarled the guard beside the wagon.  He produced a whip from nowhere, and even though it didn’t make sense, even though the cage bars should have blocked the whip, he struck her anyway.

He raised the whip to strike again, but Joslyn moved between the whip and Tasia, absorbing the blow.  She barely flinched when it struck her.

“I don’t know enough to change your dream,” Joslyn said.  She flickered for a moment, as if she was a trick of the light.  “And I can’t stay long.  But Tasia, this isn’t real.  This is a nightmare.”

“I know,” Tasia said.  “But it doesn’t matter.  I dream about it every night anyway.  At least I managed to dream you here tonight, too.”

She reached out, cupped Joslyn’s face.  Joslyn lightly closed her eyes, pressed her cheek into Tasia’s palm.

“I miss you,” Tasia said, choking back the tears.  “I miss you so much.”

Joslyn flickered again, disappearing for a second before reappearing.  “I don’t have long, Tasia.  And I’m running out of tea, so I don’t know how many more times I can come.  But you can’t go to House Aventia.  Your cousin will betray you.”

Something inside Tasia told her that Joslyn was right.  Well, it wasn’t really Joslyn, just a dream version of her.  A piece of Tasia’s own wisdom, perhaps, appearing as one of the wisest people Tasia knew.

So she nodded.  “You’re probably right.”

“Go to Arthur’s Ferry instead.  Find Brick.  He goes by Quinn of Easthook now.”

And then Joslyn disappeared, leaving Tasia to her nightmare.

#

Judging by the strength of the sunlight streaming into Tasia’s makeshift “cave”, it was about noon when she woke.

She’d woken up once before, just at dawn, when she’d had the oddest dream of Joslyn.  It wasn’t that Joslyn’s appearance within the dream was odd; Tasia dreamed of Joslyn all the time.

But this dream…  Tasia couldn’t put her finger on why it was so different than her other dreams of the dead warrior.  It had been vivid, that was part of it.  And the instruction to find Brick in Arthur’s Ferry?  Tasia hadn’t thought of Brick and the other men who’d helped her escape the camp on the eastern front in months.  She’d mourned them when she mourned Joslyn, assuming all of them had died trying to save her.

It was just a silly dream.

But something about it followed Tasia back into her restless sleep.  Something about it tugged on her when she woke again at noon.

Tasia peered out the opening of her cave, but all she could see was sand.  An ocean of sand, stretching in all directions, glaring gold and red in the harsh sunlight.

They had been traveling by night, because it was too hot and too dangerous to travel during the day and because any search parties still looking for Tasia were likely to conduct their search by day.  Traveling by day, Tasia had learned, was something only those unfamiliar with the Great Desert did.  When a Terintan had occasion to travel through the desert any distance longer than a few miles, they went at night.  Traveling under the cover of darkness had its dangers — desert vipers, scorpions, and hyenas, to name a few — but the most dangerous predator of the Great Desert by far was the sun itself.

Fortunately, besides Linna, who was an experienced traveler herself, the ragtag survivors who had rescued Tasia from her armed escort also included Y’Farsil’s translator.  He was the one who led them now, who had taught them how to hide their “tents” (which were really just salvaged bedrolls, broken pikes, and stray bits of canvas) in such a way that they blended in with the desert landscape.  To the untrained observer, the tents appeared to be nothing more than low sand dunes.  Even Tasia, who knew that she was surrounded by a dozen tents, could hardly distinguish dunes from the disguised hovels of her companions as she scanned the landscape through the narrow opening of her own hiding place.

“Ma’am?” said a voice behind her.

“Don’t worry, Linna,” Tasia said without turning around.  “I’m not delusional anymore.  I won’t be wandering out again.”

There was a pause as Linna silently weighed Tasia’s self-assessment.  “And the burns?  How are they this morning?”

“They hurt,” said Tasia.  “But some of them itch now.  It’s all I can do not to scratch myself to death in the middle of the night.  Itching means healing, right?”

Linna rustled through their sparse possessions.  “That would be a shame, for you to scratch yourself to death.  Especially after we worked so hard to save you.”

Tasia permitted herself a wry smile.  She’d seen a different side of Linna since they’d been traveling together these past few days.  Perhaps it was because Linna finally felt in her element — trekking through the Terintan wasteland with common soldiers, injured mercenaries, and the surviving slaves.  There were more people like Linna around than there were people like Tasia.  But whatever the reason, the girl had started to reveal her sense of humor.  It was a dark humor, granted, but it was humor nonetheless, and after everything that had happened, Tasia needed to smile occasionally.

She hadn’t managed to laugh yet.

Linna crawled up to sit beside Tasia and followed her gaze out at the desert.

“Do you think they’ve given up searching for me yet?” Tasia asked.

“No,” Linna said simply.

She handed Tasia a broken clay pot with a pungent white paste coating its bottom.

Tasia wrinkled her nose at the smell.  “Must I?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Linna said, grinning.  “I know it smells bad, but it will help you heal.”

Tasia took the pot and scooped up some of the cream, rubbing it onto her face, then down her arms.  “Did you spend a lot of time in the Great Desert, when you were with the tinkers?”

“Some,” Linna said.  “Master Chi’sa sometimes took jobs from the magistrates to restock the outposts.  So we traveled the Emperor’s Road and usually traded with the desert tribes along the way.”

Tasia turned to face Linna, even though she knew she must look ridiculous with her face smeared with the cream the girl had made for her from cactus meat and scorpion venom.  “When your master traded with the desert tribes… did you ever… wish you were still with them?  Your original family, I mean?”

Linna’s eyes broke away, sliding across the desert sands.  Tasia supposed she shouldn’t have asked.  She’d learned from Joslyn, after all, that asking an ex-slave about their history could be a touchy subject.  But finally Linna spoke.

“I’m a half-breed — salvik, in Terintan.  That’s why my father sold me in the first place,” she said.  “My mother was my father’s third wife, and…”  She shrugged.  “I have as much tinker blood in me as I do nomad blood.  And the tinkers, they don’t care if you’re a salvik.  But the nomads are proud about the purity of their lines.  Salviks are treated worse than slaves in the tribes.”

“Why?  How are they treated?” Tasia asked.

“I would have spent my life as an outcast,” Linna said, eyes still somewhere else.  “And I wouldn’t have been allowed to marry, because I would’ve contaminated their bloodlines.  Not that I’d have wanted to marry,” she added quickly.

“You didn’t want to marry?  But that’s every girl’s dream.”

Linna didn’t hear the sarcastic tone in Tasia’s voice.  “Maybe for you, ma’am.  Not for me.  I’m… different from most girls.”

Tasia placed a comforting hand on Linna’s arm.  Joslyn, the sword master I told you about, the one who was once a slave just like you, she wasn’t like other girls, either, Tasia wanted to say.  And she was more to me than just a guard.

But habit made her hold her tongue.  “It’s alright to be different,” she told Linna.  “Come.  We should sleep more while we can.”

Linna nodded and rolled down the flap that marked the entrance to their “tent,” buttoning it tight and lining the bottom with rocks to keep out the lizards and vipers who might be tempted to crawl inside with them to escape the worst of the midday sun.

Tasia stretched out and closed her eyes, trying to convince her body and mind to find sleep again.  The astringent smell of the paste she’d spread over all her exposed skin filled the cramped space and made it hard to relax, but she had to try.  It would be another long night of walking, after all.  And maybe if she slept, she could dream of Joslyn again, if only for a moment.

But Tasia didn’t dream of Joslyn for the rest of the day; she dreamed only of Lord Hermant antagonizing her during their parley.  In her dream, she rode down to the valley where the delegation had gathered, only to discover that she could not speak.  The soldiers stared at her expectantly, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came out.  She tried again.

“What’s the matter, traitor?” her grandfather said, mocking her.  “Missing something?”

He opened a small wooden box.  Inside was Tasia’s tongue.

Tasia woke to the sound of her own screams.

“Mistress, it’s alright — it’s alright.”

Linna’s face was over hers, peering down at Tasia in the dim light of their shared tent.  Tasia panted, moving her tongue inside her mouth to assure herself it was still there.

“What time is it?” Tasia asked once she had caught her breath.

“Almost dusk.”

“I’ve had enough of sleeping; I’m going outside,” Tasia announced.  “I need to practice my self-defense movements.  You are welcome to join me if you wish.”

#

They made good time that night.  The ground flattened, with the sand dunes starting to give way to rocks and something that nearly approximated soil.  Tasia even saw a patch of grass.

“Grass means water,” said Goran, the former translator of Y’Farsil, when they came to the grass.  He pulled a knife from his belt and kneeled, digging into the patch of grass.

Tasia had hoped that the desert riders might have escaped the battle that had decimated her soldiers; after all, they had made camp on the opposite side of the valley from her, and they had mounts.  But they had been overwhelmed by superior numbers.  Such was the story Goran had told her.  He and five of the other Terintan slaves had escaped together.  There had probably been other survivors amongst the slaves, but he assumed they’d headed in a different direction.

Or died in the desert.

Goran’s mother had been a slave — a Northeastern peasant sold into bondage by a cruel father.  Goran was the product of a union between his mother and her master.  Too Northeastern to ever be accepted by the nomads, complete with grey-blue eyes and shockingly blond hair, but too Terintan to ever be accepted by the Northeasterners.

He might have been a slave and an outcast at home, but here in the Great Desert, he was the little band of survivors’ salvation.  Without the map he carried in his head and his knowledge of the desert, Tasia and her companions would have died several times over.

They made steady progress westward, darting south now and again to steal water and food from one of the outposts along the Emperor’s Road.  Tasia couldn’t guess how many miles they’d traveled since the night of her rescue — she’d been delirious with fever and sickness the first few nights — but she was relieved that the landscape was finally starting to give way to something that looked more familiar.  More like the northern reaches of the Capital Lands.

Goran worked a knife he had stolen back and forth in the sandy ground, until finally the earth  came out damp.  A minute later, his hole filled with muddy water.  One by one, they filled their canteens and water skins in the hole, and when those were full, they filled the apa-apa skin water jug that Goran had salvaged from the camp.  While everyone worked, Tasia looked east, noticing how the sky was just beginning to lighten in that direction.  It would be time to sleep again soon.

“How much longer until we reach the Lorsin River?” Tasia asked Linna, referring to the river that marked the border between Terinto and the rest of the Capital Lands.

Linna thought for a moment, brow wrinkling in concentration.  “The way will stay flat for another night, maybe two nights,” Linna said, pulling Tasia out of her thoughts.  “After that, the land will get rocky.  Hills that aren’t quite mountains.  We will have to cross in the day time, because the terrain will be too dangerous to travel at night.  It should take at least another day to descend… then after that…”  She shrugged.  “As long as the river isn’t too high, we should cross in about four more days.”

Others had tuned into their conversation.  The ones who knew this area — Goran and an Easterner, it seemed — nodded their agreement with Linna’s assessment.  The rest of them, like Ammanta and Kort, whose arm had nearly healed, watched Tasia to see what she would say.

But it was Goran who spoke.  “We should stop here.  Mother Eirenna approaches anyway, and it is good to be near a water source.  We push hard tomorrow night.  We might even reach the hills.  Once we cross, it will be another two days’ travel to the manor of House Aventia.”

Everyone nodded but Tasia.

“What if…”  She hesitated.  “What if we turned north when we reached the river, and crossed at Arthur’s Ferry?”

Goran looked puzzled.  “Arthur’s Ferry?”  Then he shrugged.  “As you wish, mistress.”

“I don’t know how well we can trust the highborn right now.  We don’t know which houses support the false Regent and which support me,” Tasia said by way of explanation, though none of her companions had asked her for one.  Nevertheless, a few nodded at the mention of not trusting the highborn, including Linna.  “I had set us towards House Aventia thinking to take refuge with my cousins there, but having had a few nights to consider it…”  She hesitated.  Gambling that Brick was alive and in Arthur’s Ferry, based on nothing but a particularly vivid dream, seemed delusional even to her.

But the thought that her cousin Anna, who had always been a fickle friend at best, might betray Tasia was not unreasonable at all.

Tasia nodded, her mind made up.  “There is a common soldier I am acquainted with — someone who helped me escape the last time Imperial soldiers were of a mind to escort me back to Port Lorsin.  I have reason to think he might be hiding in Arthur’s Ferry.”

There.  She’d said it.  And she didn’t have to mention the dream.

Goran, who tended to keep his features as stoic as Joslyn had, nearly displayed an expression of surprise.  Nearly.

“Very well,” was all he said, and the others, exhausted from another long night of trekking through the moonlit desert, merely nodded their agreement with the plan.

They broke apart to set up their tents, even though it was harder to hide them on this flat, crusty edge of the Great Desert.  But Tasia doubted it mattered anymore.  They had traveled methodically west for five full nights and had never seen even the slightest hint of their adversaries.  Tasia suspected that they lacked experience with tracking in the desert, where the dunes swallowed tracks within minutes, and they probably didn’t dare to wander too far from the safety of the Emperor’s Road.  Besides that, how could they even guess in which direction to search for Tasia?  Would she head east, back towards the delegation?  Or did she have some other destination in mind?

Eventually, they would give up and press on for Port Lorsin to report the unfortunate news that they had lost the traitor princess — again — to Wise Man Norix.  He wouldn’t be pleased.  Which pleased Tasia.

For now, though, Tasia cared little about who did or did not pursue her.  Her feet were sore from the sandals she’d been given, which were too big for her and whose straps irritated the sun blisters that coated the tops of each foot.  Not even Linna’s cactus cream provided much relief.

By the time she and Linna finished setting up the tent, Tasia couldn’t even be bothered to double-check the interior for tarantulas or scorpions.  She crawled inside, collapsed on the thin, scratchy apa-apa brizat that served as her bedroll, and closed her eyes.

And finally, in her dreams, Joslyn returned to her.

32

Joslyn tapped the bottom of the pouch of tea, trying to get the little bits that were stuck to the sides to fall onto the clump that still rested at the bottom.  In an attempt to stretch what she had just a little further, she’d tried a pinch so small that her tea tasted more like water the day before, but she’d hardly even finished forming the q’isson before she felt it fading.  She didn’t want to repeat her first experience of dreamwalking, when the Shadowlands broke through her protective bubble.

Which meant she’d have to use the rest of the tea this time.

Why was Father Mezzu so cruel, to finally reconnect Joslyn with Tasia, her love, her reason for being, only to break the connection again so soon?

It was a few hours after dawn in the Zaris Mountains, but despite the sun burning off the morning fog, there was still a distinct chill in the air.  The night before, Joslyn had camped in the saddleback between two mountains.  She was relatively sure she was only one more day’s hike from the place where she and Tasia had first made love.

The memory was bittersweet — sweet because every memory of every touch Tasia had ever bestowed upon her was the sweetest of all Joslyn’s memories, bitter because she doubted she would ever see Tasia in person again.  Joslyn estimated that three, possibly four months had passed since she’d bargained with the Prince of Shadows for her life.  Even if Joslyn found the small men and survived long enough to repair Ku-sai’s sword, her destiny would still take her back to the Shadowlands — for good this time — in eight more months.

At least she had one more chance to dreamwalk with Tasia.

Joslyn tipped the tea in her palm into the waiting pot.  It was strange to brew tea over a fire in daylight, but given the distance between Joslyn and Tasia, and the fact that Tasia was traveling at night and sleeping during the day, there was no other time.  Within minutes, steam carrying that familiar, earthy smell of horsetail mushroom and tea leaves wafted towards Joslyn.  It was hard to find the patience to let the brew steep, but she knew the longer she could wait, the more potent the tea would become.  Steeping it until the tea was strong and bitter was how she’d been able to dreamwalk so long with so little tea remaining.

Joslyn let it steep for a few minutes, took the pot from the fire and let it cool for a few more minutes, and at last, she drank it as fast as she was able and assumed her meditation posture.

#

The dream Joslyn found Tasia inside was very different from the last one she’d wandered into.

Tasia stood in a valley between two high bluffs, a place where the Emperor’s Road curved and descended, leaving the savanna behind before leaving Terinto and crossing into the East.  All around her were corpses — Imperial soldiers, mostly, but also Terintan desert riders, their mounts, and hundreds of Fesulians.  There had been a great battle here, but it appeared Tasia was the lone survivor.  As Joslyn watched, Tasia knelt beside a body.

“Linna?” Tasia said, panic rising in her voice.

The body was that of a young Terintan woman, probably thirteen, fourteen at the very most.  The girl’s mouth hung half-ajar, her eyes dull and sightless and staring at nothing.  Yet Tasia read an admonition in them.

Tasia reached for the girl’s cheek, but the body morphed.  The black hair and the black eyes stayed the same, but the face aged ten or fifteen summers, grew leaner, tanner, the nose flattened, the nostrils flared outward, the eyes showed more prominent folds.

Joslyn was staring at… Herself.  Her own face, marked by the perfect serenity of death.

Vertigo washed over her, and for a brief moment, Joslyn nearly lost control over her q’isson.

“I killed you,” Tasia told Joslyn’s dead body.  “I killed you, just like I killed them.  There is so much blood on my hands.  So much.  Why did I think I could do this?”

The pain in Tasia’s voice resonated as a physical ache within Joslyn’s own chest.

“Tasia,” Joslyn said gently.  She materialized a body Tasia would be able to see, but Joslyn’s princess continued to weep without looking up.

“Tasia, stop.”  Joslyn placed a hand on her shoulder.  “Stop.  I’m here.  I’m not gone.”

Tasia didn’t turn around.  “You’re not.  I can dream of you all I want, but it won’t bring you back.”

“You don’t understand, I’m not just — I…”

Less than nine months, Joslyn reminded herself.  Would it not be cruel to explain to Tasia that she still lived if her death would become permanent in a matter of months?  But Tasia’s grief, even in the form of a dream, clenched around Joslyn’s heart like an iron-glued fist.

I should tell her.  Tell her that it’s more than a dream, that I’m really here with her.

Joslyn hesitated a moment longer, then kneeled beside her princess, gently turning Tasia’s face towards her own.

“Do you know what I think, Tasia?” Joslyn said.  “I think the only real way any of us live is when inside the heart of another.  But when we become a part of someone else’s heart, our life no longer belongs just to ourselves.  It is shared.  And then, even if our body dies, something about us lives on, lives inside those who loved us.”  She paused.  “Do you love me?”

Tasia finally looked up, green eyes glistening with tears.  “I love you so much that I don’t even know how to fully express it.  If you were still alive…”  She swallowed and shook her head, closing her eyes for a second.  Tears clung to her lashes, then fell like raindrops to the sandy earth.  “I’d give anything to have you.  Anything.  Norix could have the crown, shadows could have the Empire.”  She searched Joslyn’s face.  “What good is an Empire that doesn’t have you in it?”

“Tasia…”  This is more than a dream, Joslyn wanted to say.  The words were on her tongue, struggling to make it to her lips.  I live — for now.  And there is nowhere I would rather spend the last nine months of my life than at your side.  “I will be with you always.  I will live so long as you keep me in your heart.”

“Don’t you understand?”  A hint of something like anger had crept into Tasia’s voice.  “You are my heart.  You always will be.”

Joslyn’s forefinger and thumb still held the tip of Tasia’s chin.  Her fingers — no, her whole body began trembling.  She leaned closer, and — gods — even in a dream, Tasia smelled like sunshine and a clean bath, like flower petals and the faint aroma of vanilla.  It wasn’t what she had come to do, and she knew she had so precious little time to say what she had come to say, but she couldn’t help herself.  Her lips parted.

Tasia twisted, and before Joslyn could react, she reached out and pressed her fingers against the back of Joslyn’s head, pulling her into a desperate kiss.  Their mouths didn’t so much meet as crashed together, teeth clacking from the sudden force of it.  Joslyn closed her eyes.  She could so easily lose herself in Tasia’s embrace, forget why she had used the last of her tea for this visit.  It would be so nice to bury her nose in Tasia’s red-blonde hair, to run her hands across the smooth curves of her body, to —

But Joslyn had come here for a reason, an important reason, and it wasn’t for this.  Against her own wishes, she pulled back.

“Tasia,” she said.  Her tone was gentle and urgent and desperate all at once.  “Do you remember your last dream of me?  Do you remember what I told you then?”

“You told me to go to Arthur’s Ferry.  To find Brick.”

Joslyn nodded, taking Tasia’s hands.  “I ran out of time in the last dream before I could tell you everything.”

“What ‘everything’?”

“The noble houses — you won’t find enough allies there to take back the crown.”  During her long, solitary hikes through the Zaris Mountains, she’d had a chance to contemplate what Tasmyn had told her, to consider why Tasmyn might be right about Tasia being better off recruiting commoners than highborn.  “Even the lords who believe in your innocence stand more to lose than they stand to gain from supporting you.  Their hands are tied.  But the commoners, Tasia,” Joslyn said, putting fresh urgency into her words.  “There are more of them than there will ever be highborn, and they have suffered enough abusive masters to recognize a leader who truly wishes to protect them, as you do.”

Tasia cocked her head, surprised.  “I have been thinking about commoners often lately, but I haven’t spoken of it to anyone.  But commoners are not soldiers.  If I try to storm the palace with an army of commoners, they’ll be slaughtered.”

“Most of the Imperial Army is already made of commoners.  They can be trained.”

“But can they be trained fast enough?  Before it’s too late?”

Joslyn squeezed Tasia’s hands.  “You will think of something.  You and Brick and Alric.”  She could feel the mushroom tea wearing off.  Time was running out.

“And Alric?”

“Yes — that was another thing I did not tell you in the last dream,” Joslyn said.  “Brick knows how to find Alric.  Between the three of you… I have faith in you.  It will work.”

Tasia’s expression soured.  “Look at this place,” she said, pulling a hand free from Joslyn to indicate the battlefield littered with corpses.  “No one should place their faith in me.”  Her gaze went somewhere far away, and she began to sniffle again.  “I thought myself so clever, getting Evrart and his Brothers to put together their grand illusion.  What a fool I was.  What a fool I am.”

Ah.  Now Joslyn understood why Tasmyn had sent her to talk to Tasia and hadn’t gone herself.  It wasn’t strategy Tasia needed; she would have thought of rallying commoners to her cause without Joslyn, especially once she found Brick.  What she needed was confidence.  Faith that she could grow into the crown her father had placed upon her head.  Joslyn had helped instill confidence in Tasia once before, by guiding Tasia to see what she was capable of becoming.  Now she needed to help Tasia rediscover that confidence once more — and she needed to do it before the last of the tea’s power ran out.

“You are many things, Tasia, but you are not a fool,” Joslyn said.  “Every emperor loses battles.”

“I lose every battle.”

“And how many battles have you actually had so far?”

Tasia took a moment to answer.  “Oh, Joslyn.  I’m not prepared to lead an entire Empire.  I never was.”  She avoided Joslyn’s eyes as she spoke.  “Even if I could gain the crown, which in and of itself seems an insurmountable obstacle, I would just bring everything to ruin.  I’m not my father or my grandfather — or their fathers before them — and I’m definitely not Empress Adela.”  She surveyed the battlefield again, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks.  “I thought Evrart and the Brotherhood wanted me to wear the crown because they believed in me.  But they only needed the name of ‘Dorsa’ to give legitimacy to their own plans.  They wanted to manipulate me into doing their bidding.  And maybe I should have let them.  Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have led four thousand soldiers to their deaths.”

“Tasia, look at me.”

She didn’t, so Joslyn shifted her own angle so that she could meet Tasia’s eyes.

“When I arrived at my ku-sai’s home in northern Terinto, I had nothing.  My only possessions were the clothes on my back and a rusty sword I had stolen from an Imperial soldier,” Joslyn said.  “And Ku-sai didn’t accept me as an apprentice right away.  He asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to, and ignored me when I answered wrong.  He asked me the same question day after day, and day after day I got it wrong.  I foraged for forest nuts for a while, but by the end, I was starving to death.  I got so weak I could hardly lift my head.  But I didn’t leave.  I never left.”

“Because you are brave,” Tasia said.  “Braver and stronger than I have ever been.  I am nothing but a pampered royal, and it’s all I will ever be.”

“You’re wrong,” said Joslyn.  “I didn’t stay because I was brave.  I stayed because I had nowhere else to go.  It was either starve to death on that mountainside or starve to death somewhere else.”

Tasia said nothing.

“I wasn’t a soldier then.  I wasn’t a sword master.  I was just a fourteen year-old runaway slave with nowhere to go.”  Joslyn paused, hoping that her words were having their intended effect.  “We don’t stay because we win.  We don’t stay because we have the answers.  We stay and we fight because it is our only choice.”

“Fighting isn’t my only choice,” Tasia said softly after a moment.  “I could hide somewhere remote.  Like Arthur’s Ferry.  No one would recognize me.  I could live out my days in anonymity.”

“And the Empire’s people?  What happens to them if Norix remains in power?”

Tasia dropped her gaze.

“You made a mistake and people died,” said Joslyn.  “You will make other mistakes.  More will die.  I am sorry that this is the fate Father Mezzu wrote for you.  But Tasia, how many more people will die if no one even tries to stop the shadows when they come?”

The tug of Joslyn’s physical body pulled at her, but she resisted.  She could not leave until she had done what she had come to do.

“But what if I try to stop the shadows from coming and fail?” Tasia asked.  “What if I just make it worse?  Everything I do only seems to make things worse.”

“I cannot tell you that you will not fail,” Joslyn said.  “But I know you will regret it if you do not even try.”  She reached up, cupping Tasia’s face.  “Living out the rest of your days in anonymity is not a choice for you.  Leadership is the burden of your birth.  And of your pure heart.”

The sound of rushing wind filled Joslyn’s ears.  Veins of ghostly red-gold light appeared all around her.  The q’isson was cracking.

Tasia’s eyes widened and she glanced around.  She must have been able to see the same cracks.

“Joslyn?  What’s happening?”

“I have to go,” Joslyn said.  “Find Brick, find Alric.  Together, you will organize the commoners.  And you will know what to do.”

She leaned forward and kissed Tasia — or tried to.  Even though there was nothing physical inside the q’isson, she’d been able to feel Tasia earlier, and gauging by Tasia’s reaction, the Princess had been able to feel Joslyn.  But now she could feel no contact.

“I love you, Tasia.  No matter what happens, always remember that.”

Joslyn let go.  She let go of Tasia’s insubstantial dream hands, but she also let go of the q’isson.  Within moments, she was crashing back into her physical body, opening actual eyes instead of dream eyes with a gasp.

And it was lucky that her eyes opened when they did, because otherwise she never would have seen the sword swinging towards her throat.

33

Tasia woke from her dream of Joslyn not long after dawn.  She laid still in the stuffy silence of the tent she shared with Linna, crying as quietly as she could so as not to wake the girl.  She stared at the patched-together canvas top of the tent, trying to decide if the dream was as significant as it had felt, or if it had simply been a particularly vivid fantasy of her dreaming mind.

Tasia wanted it to mean something.  She wanted Brick to be in Arthur’s Ferry and Alric to be alive.  But she found it more likely that the dream of Joslyn had been a product of grief and wishful thinking.  Wishful thinking that had mingled with her own thoughts about inciting a rebellion amongst the commoners.

She forced herself back to sleep, and did not dream of her warrior again.  Instead, she dreamed of a dog cage, the sun, blisters coating her face, and water turning too sand.

#

It took them three more days to reach the shallow river that marked the boundary between northern Terinto and the rest of the Capital Lands, another day to follow it north to the actual ferry from which the little town of Arthur’s Ferry took its name.

It was not really large enough to be called a “town,” yet too small to be called a “village.”  Tasia knew it as a trading outpost, mostly, a place where the merchants of the Seven Cities came south to trade the porcelain their craftsmen were known for in exchange for the fine wines of House Aventia.  Merchants from further west also made the trek to Arthur’s Ferry sometimes, trading things like barley and horses from the Central Steppes, cedar furniture from the forests of the West, for that porcelain and apa-apa wool of northern Terinto.

The irony was that Arthur’s Ferry itself didn’t really make anything of note.  It was more famous for the craftsmen of Terinto than it was for its own craftsmen.

Yet for all the trading in its marketplace, Arthur’s Ferry never grew larger or more sophisticated than a frontier town, a last stop of sorts that merchants and tinkers only visited but never stayed in for longer than a night or two.

Tasia and her dozen survivors arrived at the river’s edge in the middle of the night.  Moonlight glinted off the slow-moving water, and cast the clay-tiled roofs of Arthur’s Ferry a silvery light pink.  There was a bite in the autumn air, probably colder winds blowing down from the mountains of the Northeast; smoke curled from many of the town’s chimneys.  It didn’t smell like woodsmoke, which made sense as there were no forests to speak of in the area.  Given the pungent stink, Tasia guessed the residents burned mostly dried dung.

The motley band of traveling companions stood in the open, contemplating the town that spread its gangly limbs up and down the river.  There was no need to hide themselves; Arthur’s Ferry was too small to have a city guard, and those men and women who kept late hours, like those at the town’s inevitable brothels and taverns, were too far from the river to see them.

Still.

“We shouldn’t all go at once,” Tasia said, stating aloud what all of them were probably already thinking.  “They’re accustomed to travelers, but so many strangers in such a small town will be too conspicuous.”  She contemplated the river for a moment, then nodded.  “I will go.  Just me and a one or two others.”

“Ammanta and I will join you, Empress,” said Kort.  “We still honor our contract to fight for you and protect you.”

“Thank you, but you and Ammanta would draw too much attention,” Tasia said.  “The people here have probably never even heard of Fesul, let alone seen someone who looks like you.”

“A couple of us could go with you,” Yorst said.  He was one of about ten Easterners in their band, all of them common foot soldiers who had managed to flee the massacre when Lord Hermant launched his surprise attack.  “We’ll say we’re soldiers who’ve been discharged on account of the treaty.  The magistrates might question us, but it wouldn’t be too strange.”

Tasia considered his point for a moment.  “Yes, but any questioning by magistrates still puts us at risk and draws too much attention.  We need more anonymity, someone who has a plausible reason to be here while attracting as little gossip as possible.”  She glanced sideways at Linna.  “It should be Linna and myself.  We will say she is my daughter.  That should get us in without too much trouble.  Then I can search for…”  But she didn’t want to admit that she was searching for Brick, a man she hadn’t seen in many months and presumed dead, because her former guard, also dead, had told her to find him in a dream.  “I’ll say I’m looking for her scoundrel of a father, or… I don’t know, I’ll think of something.”

“Ma’am,” Linna said, “please pardon, but… you are not old enough to be my mother.”

“The girl is small for her age,” Ammanta said.  “And the Empress wears more years upon her face than she did when we left Paratheen.”

It wasn’t a kind statement, nor a tactful one, and all of Tasia’s companions except the Fesulians shifted uncomfortably.  One did not speak that way about a member of the House of Dorsa, and especially not the Empress.  But the Fesulians had a different sense of etiquette; they were blunt and direct — and always honest.  If only the highborn of the Empire had such cultural habits.  A great deal of time-wasting politicking might be avoided.

Tasia nodded.  “I think Ammanta is right.  I can make it work.”

“But Empress,” said Olan, another one of the Easterners, “we have no idea what awaits us in Arthur’s Ferry.  What if messengers have arrived, and they’re already looking for you?”

Tasia thought it unlikely that word of her disappearance could have reached Arthur’s Ferry already.  First the soldiers and Wise Men who had been tasked with taking her back would need to arrive in Port Lorsin and share the news with Norix, then Norix would spend at least a day or two dithering over what to do, and only then would he send out messengers and/or search parties.  Tasia doubted searching Arthur’s Ferry would be high on the priority list.

But Goran answered before she could.  “It’ll be a week yet before they start looking for us.”

All eyes turned to Tasia.  She turned to Linna.

“Are you ready to play my daughter?” Tasia asked.

Linna hesitated, then nodded.  “Slaves are good at acting.”

“Ex-slave,” Tasia reminded her.  She glanced around at the others.  “Linna and I cross alone at first light.  The rest of you can make camp out of sight from the river, and we will send for you when we are ready.  Goran, Kort, I’m leaving you in command.”

Her survivors nodded their agreement, and the group of them backtracked from the sandy riverbank, with Goran careful to erase the evidence of their arrival.

Tasia and Linna spent what was left of the night sleeping on their makeshift bedrolls next to the ferry dock that the little town took its name from.  They probably could have forded the river without too much trouble, given that the river couldn’t be more than waist-deep at its midpoint, but it would draw too much attention if they arrived in Arthur’s Ferry sopping wet in the middle of the night.  Spending the night beside the ferry and waiting for the ferryman was what normal travelers would do.

Tasia clinked three copper pennies into the ferryman’s calloused palm when they arrived at the town side of the river as first light broke some six or seven hours later.  It had been very fortunate that the Easterners had a few coins on them; Tasia had collected the six copper pennies and single silver penny from them before she left — the sum total of her entire treasury.  The ferryman’s price had only been two pennies, and his bushy eyebrows drew together in confusion when Tasia added the third copper.

“I’m looking for someone,” Tasia said, and she didn’t need to act the weariness and tight stress in her voice.  “A man.”

The ferryman’s eyes darted curiously from Linna, then back to Tasia.  “Aye?”

“Aye,” Tasia said, remembering to put on her Port Lorsiner’s accent.  “A lowlife, ye might say.  A man what got here probably a few months ago.  Callin’ ’imself  Quinn of Easthook, but with a true Shipper’s Quarter accent.”

“I know a Quinn of Easthook,” the ferryman said carefully.  “But he’s a good lad.  Family man.  You wouldn’t want no trouble with ’im, wouldya?”

Tasia scoffed.  “Family man,” she muttered, rolling her eyes.  “It’s me what’s in trouble, ferryman.”  One of her hands drifted to her abdomen, and the ferryman’s eyes followed.

His big lips pursed, eyes shifted to Linna.  He frowned. “Surely you don’t mean that Quinn’s the girl’s father,” he said after a moment’s thought.  “She’s got… too much of the desert in her.”

“The girl’s father is a matter ye shouldn’t concern yerself with.”  Tasia made a brusque gesture that said she was brushing the implied question away.  “Do ye know where Quinn is, or should I take back the extra penny?”

The man looked at the coins in his hands as if he’d forgotten about them.  They disappeared into a trouser pocket.

“Market square, maybe.”  The ferryman squinted up at the sun, which had already moved from dawn to morning.  “He an’ his boys make bricks… though I s’pose you probably knew that.  So if he ain’t at his market stall, then he’ll be north’a town, digging clay.”

A brick maker.  So that was where he’d gotten the nickname.

North of town was where Tasia and Linna eventually found him, when the sun was positioned almost directly overhead.  The sprawling but ramshackle home, which looked to be a hasty construction of bricks and scraps, was only a mile and a half north of Arthur’s Ferry.  It had taken some wandering to find, though, because Tasia thought it unwise to ask another townsperson for directions.  The ferryman’s tale of the harried young pregnant woman and her daughter looking for “Quinn” would surely have already wound through the town like a fetid river breeze, stirring up gossip and rumors as it passed from house to house, and Tasia didn’t need to draw even more attention to herself and Linna, or to Brick and his family.

The brick-making operation was off to the side of the house, in a dusty yard where several hens and one rooster strutted back and forth.  A young man — younger than Tasia but probably not by very many summers — flung clumps of clay out of a square hole he was about knee-deep in with a spade; a second, younger boy had his trousers rolled up to his knees and stomped on clumps of clay that had been doused with water; a third boy, about the same age as the second, was forming these wet clumps into roughly rectangular shapes.  As Tasia watched, a girl younger than all of them, with a bucket of sloshing water hugged to her chest, approached the stomping boy.  She dumped out her burden onto the unformed clay and set the empty bucket on the ground, then pointed wordlessly at Tasia and Linna.  One by one, the three boys noticed her outstretched index finger, and gradually stopped what they were doing to stare at the two strangers.  Finally, the young man in the pit stuck his spade upright into the clay he had been digging, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist and called over his shoulder.

“Pa!  Someone’s here!”

Tasia followed his gaze.  About fifty yards behind the children, a stout man faced a clay oven twice his own height, holding a long wooden paddle laden with wet bricks before him.  As Tasia watched, he slid the bricks into the oven, set the paddle down, and sauntered towards his children, brushing his hands down a leather apron.

Brick looked much as Tasia had remembered him.  A mop of rust-colored hair, together with a beard that had gotten bushier since last they’d met; short of stature but broad and thick; a certain glint of shrewd intelligence in his hazel-colored eyes.  His gaze slashed from his children — because all three were unmistakably his — to the two strangers in his yard.  He stopped short when his eyes landed on Tasia.

“Hello again, Brick,” Tasia said.

He didn’t respond at first, just stood staring, his face saying he was too stunned to find any words.  But he was Brick, and so he found them soon enough.

“Well, of all the gods-twisted fates.”  He barked out a short laugh while his children exchanged confused looks.  “Is that the Princess herself in me yard?”  He glanced at Linna.  “Yer nomad got a bit younger, didn’t she?”

A smile Tasia hadn’t expected grew on her face.  She hadn’t smiled very often lately.  “I found you.  And you’re in one piece.”

“Aye, ye did an’ I am.”  Brick turned towards his children and made an impatient sweeping motion with his hand.  “Hey, you band o’ ruffians.  We got visiting royalty.  On our knees now, as is proper.”

The children stared at him in bald confusion.  Tasia knew she didn’t look anything like royalty.  She was dressed in men’s trousers, a tunic tied with nothing but a scrap of rope that was much too big for her frame — which had grown even smaller due to the sparse rations of snared desert rodents and cactus she’d been eating over the past two weeks.  And although the blisters had mostly healed, except for splashing some river water over her dusty skin, she hadn’t had the luxury of a real bath in almost a month.

But — Mother Moon bless him — as far as Brick was concerned, Tasia was still his sovereign.  He pulled off his apron, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head respectfully.  Slowly, still uncertain, the three boys and the girl followed suit.

A woman appeared, framed by the open doorway of the ramshackle house.  Most of her blonde hair had been shoved under a tight cap on her head, but curly strands of it spilled out on all sides, some of it matted to her face.  She placed flour-coated hands on her hips and focused a severe look first on Brick, then on Tasia.

“An’ what’s all this, then?” she asked.

Brick extended a hand towards Tasia, palm up like he was offering a plate of food.  “This is the Princess what I told you about, Martha.”

Martha’s hands stayed on her hips.  She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.  “The one what got ye chased halfway back to the Capital Lands?” she asked.  “The one what has us living like peasants and telling a bunch of gossiping old maids we’re from Easthook?”

“Martha.”  Brick’s tone was somewhere between a plea and an admonition.

She huffed.  “Fine.  I’ll put on another plate for the midday meal, then.”

With that, she whirled away from them, long skirt flaring, and disappeared back inside the house.

“Please,” Tasia told Brick and his children.  “Come to your feet.  There’s much I wish to discuss with you.”

Brick stood, the children following his lead.

He grinned.  “Aye, I imagine there is.”

“Who are they, Papa?” the little girl asked.  “Is it really the Princess ye told us about?”

“Aye, Eula,” said Brick.  “She really is.  Now let’s all get inside where we can talk private-like before nosy Mrs. Sana waddles over to see what the fuss is all about.”

#

They seated Tasia and Linna at the head of their already cramped kitchen table.  Martha and her three boys plated the food and set it out while Eula sat in her father’s lap as he recounted the way he’d rescued Tasia, then eluded the search party with Alric and headed south for the coast, where they stowed away aboard a merchant vessel back to Port Lorsin.

Tasia got a feeling it was a tale he’d told his children before.

“We probably coulda stayed in Port Lorsin,” Brick said, gesturing to indicate his family.  “No offense, Princess, but the folk o’ the Shipper’s Quarter’s been stayin’ outta sight from the authorities for the history of the Empire.  But I didn’t want me children to have to grow up hiding.  So I gathered up me wife an’ me wains an’ we came here.  Tried a few other places before Arthur’s Ferry, but turned out they had a need for a brick maker here anyways.”

“The locals don’t find it odd, you and your family settling here?” Tasia asked.  “I doubt they get new families often.”

“They don’t,” Brick conceded.  “But that’s the beauty of being a veteran, ain’t it?  Plenty of ex-soldiers take their gold eagle and set themselves up somewhere new, away from them that would want t’collect old debts or keep them as tenant farmers on miserable lands that grow nothing.”  He shrugged.  “We said there was too many brick makers back in Easthook.  They was glad to have us.”  He quirked an eyebrow.  “But I’m guessing you didn’t come here to buy me bricks and catch up on old times.  ’Twere I t’guess, I’d say you’re hoping I’ve still got some soldier in me.”

When Martha heard this, she spun towards Tasia and jabbed a finger in her direction.  “Ye try to tell me husband to leave his family again, it’ll be the last words what ever leave yer mouth.”

“Mama, you shouldn’t speak to a princess that way,” Eula chided.

“And you oughtn’t speak to yer mother that way.  So hush before I warm your backside,” said Martha.

Eula’s mouth snapped shut.

The three boys, who still hadn’t uttered a word since stepping inside the house, took their seats around the table.  The two younger ones, who Tasia decided must be twins, studied her with matching puppy-wide eyes.

Brick shot a glance at his wife.  A warning glance, Tasia guessed.

“Hmpf,” was all Martha said in response.

But Martha had a point, didn’t she?  Asking Brick to help her incite commoners around the Empire to rise up against the nobles who ruled them was a little like showing him a noose and asking him to put it around his neck.

Yet the fate of the Empire, along with hundreds of thousands of families just like his, was at stake.

“I beg your pardon, Martha.  But the Empire requires your husband’s skills again,” Tasia said.

“An’ what place has a princess got in telling me husband to give his skills to the Empire?” Martha asked.  “You’re not runnin’ the army.  And he’s given plenty already.”

“Martha — ” Brick started, but Tasia spoke over him.

“Before my father was betrayed, he named me heir to the crown,” Tasia said.  “That means I’m not a princess anymore.  I’m the rightful Empress, the ruler of the Four Realms, the mother of all the Empire’s children.  So actually, yes, I am in charge of the Imperial Army.”

Martha scoffed.  “Aye?” she said, managing to fit a continent’s worth of sarcasm into the single syllable.  She pulled the cap from her head, sending curls of blonde flying everywhere, and gave Tasia an exaggerated bow.  “I’ve got an actual Empress in me kitchen.”  She glanced side to side.  “But where are ye subjects, Empress?  Should we be havin’ a parade for ye here in Arthur’s Ferry?  Ye making yer capital city here?”

“Martha!” Brick exclaimed, his face turning as red as his beard.  “Show some respect!”

“Respect,” Martha spat.  She glared at Tasia.  “Did yer pappy drag my husband to the East for two years because he respected us?  Eason became a soldier for the gold regal, ye know, not because he loved the bleedin’ Empire.  And why’d he need the regal?  ’Cause your pappy’s taxes got so high to pay for the self-same war that we couldn’t even eat but on store credit anymore, let alone put clothes on the backs of our children.  We was in debt in every direction because o’that war.  In the end, signin’ up with the recruiter for the very war that broke us was the only way we could get outta debt and feed our family.  I didn’t study with the Wise Men past four years, but ain’t the fancy word for that ‘ironic’?”

“I am sincerely sorry that happened to you, Martha,” Tasia said.

“‘Sincerely sorry.’  Isn’t that nice.”

Tasia turned to Brick, deciding to try a different tack.  “Did you tell your family about what you saw when you were in the East?  About what you showed Alric?”

Brick’s face changed.  What remained of his normal joviality evaporated; a haunted expression came over him.  “No.  I’ve tried to forget.”

Martha and the children looked from Brick to Tasia.

“Forget what?” Martha asked.

So.  The shadows were the part of his adventure with the Princess he’d never shared with his family.

“Something… happened to some of the soldiers I knew,” Brick said.  “Somethin’ strange and ugly.”

“What happened, Papa?” Eula wanted to know.

“Aaron, Talon,” Brick said, addressing the twin boys.  “Why don’t you take Eula and go play in the yard a while?”

“But we ain’t eaten yet, Papa,” one of the boys complained.

“What happened?” Eula repeated, pulling her father’s sleeve.

Brick ignored her.  “Take your food with you,” he told his sons.  He picked up Eula’s plate and handed it to her.  “Eat outside.”

Once the younger children had left, Brick turned to his older son — Sheldon, then to Martha.  “What I’m about to say doesn’t leave this room.  It’s something the little ones don’t need to hear.  It’s something I didn’t think you needed to hear.  I didn’t want ye to have the same nightmares I do.”

He glanced at Tasia, who gave him a solemn nod.

“Eason — ” Martha began.

Brick held up a hand.  “It doesn’t leave this room, Martha.  Not to the wains, not to Mrs. Sana, not to no one else.  Tell me ye understand.”

Martha still scowled, but she nodded.

Brick took a deep breath.  “A handful of men survived the mountain men’s raid on the Deerpark Pass outpost.  Some of them was friends of mine.”

Brick hesitated a moment, then launched into a harrowing tale of a monster of fire that fought alongside a band of no more than a hundred mountain men.  The five hundred men of Fox Battalion could’ve defeated the barbarians easily enough… until the creature appeared.

The creature  routed Fox Battalion, leaving behind only a couple dozen survivors from the battalion of five hundred.

The injured — vacant-eyed men who trickled back into camp in ones and twos had changed in ways that… weren’t entirely human.  At first, the commanding officers thought it was only battle-shock, but when one of the survivor’s eyes transformed into flames and took down five men before he was put down, they realized that something was very, very wrong.  Rather than write Port Lorsin for help, the officers tried to hide it.

They knew how the Wise Men in Port Lorsin would receive news of men whose eyes changed to flames and attacked their fellow soldiers like dogs gone rabid.  At best, they would be laughed at.  More likely, they would be stripped of their rank.

So they locked the survivors away in a makeshift prison, hoping the strange condition would pass.  That was where Alric finally saw them a month later.

Even though Tasia anticipated the contents of the story, it chilled her nonetheless.

When Brick finished his tale, the five of them — Martha, Brick, Sheldon, Linna, and Tasia — sat in heavy silence for at least a minute.

“Those men — the ones who survived,” Tasia said gently, “they are going to become the very thing that ravaged Fox Battalion.  They probably already are.”

“Aye.”  Brick nodded solemnly.  “I figured as much.  Me ’n the boys, we all figured as much.”  He dropped his head, staring down at his hands, which were folded on top of the table in front of his untouched plate of food.  Then he looked back up at Tasia.  “It’s probably good we sprung ye from that connivin’ Wise Man when we did and got outta that camp.  I know I made it home safe; so did Alric.  I hear Bratton’s still alive, don’t know about Vic or Horsey… Do ye figure anyone else in the winter camp is still there, or are they all dead or monsters by now?”

The question threw Tasia off-balance.  She’d been so focused on her own survival — first on escaping Norix, then on exposing him and her grandfather — that she hadn’t spent much time wondering about the current state of things in the East.

Twenty men, transforming into twenty… creatures.  Evrart had explained to her that not all men possessed by shadows were like the undatai Joslyn had battled in the Zaris Mountains.  Not all the men would transform into creatures of fire.  But even the ones who retained their human forms would be as deadly as five men in one.  Gradually, they’d become more shadow than man.  And the more of them who had shadows inside them, the faster they would transform.  Once the transformation was complete, they would have the power to infect others with nothing more than the slightest scratch.

Even one infected soldier in the winter camp would be dangerous.  Twenty of them?  Tasia doubted their prison had held them once the shadows had wrested complete control over their bodies and minds.  She could guess what had happened:  They broke free and either slaughtered or infected the rest of the winter camp.

And after that?  How many shadows disguised as soldiers or commoners were already in the East?  How long before they made their way westward?

Tasia shivered.

“I’m sure some survived.  A few always do.”  Her voice was barely above a whisper.  And she wasn’t sure if she was trying to reassure herself or the others seated around the table.

“Aye.  A few,” Brick said.  He reached across the table and took Martha’s hand.  His wife, for once, was quiet.

Tasia studied Martha’s face for a moment before speaking.  “I hope you understand it’s not about highborn politics,” she said.  “It’s not about fighting for my crown simply so I can wear it.  If I can’t find a way to stop them in time, those creatures will destroy the entire Empire.  No family’s children will be safe.”  She paused, fully aware of the sacrifices she was asking for and yet knowing she had to ask anyway.  “I need your help.”

Brick met Martha’s eye for a moment, then gave Tasia a slow nod.  “What do you need me to do?”

34

Only reflex saved her.  Joslyn threw herself backwards, rolling out of range of the blade at the last second.  Another swing came from a different direction, but this time she was ready, parrying with the dagger she kept at her waist.  She trapped this second sword near its hilt, and with a twisting motion, yanked it free from the hand of her attacker.  As she did so, Joslyn processed several pieces of information at once:

She faced two opponents, one who had approached her from behind and one from the front.

They wore black cloaks, with black hoods that obscured their faces.

The swords they wielded were narrow longswords, yet remarkably light.  Terintan swords were typically curved; Imperial fighters usually carried broad short swords.  That meant Joslyn’s attackers were neither Terintan nor Imperial.

Still on the ground, but now with one of the longswords in one hand and keeping her dagger in the other, Joslyn parried fresh assaults from the hooded attackers on either side of her.  The one whose sword she’d taken produced a throwing star from inside their cloak, and Joslyn barely managed to twist out of its way as it whizzed towards her.  It nicked her forearm as it went past, and the tiny cut immediately began to burn.

Poison! Ku-sai’s voice warned her in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t concern herself with that right now.  A blade in her chest or across her throat would kill her before poison could.

From her knees, Joslyn performed a modified version of wind through wheat, then backflipped to her feet so that she landed slightly behind the two attackers.  Before they could react, she launched her dagger at the one who’d thrown the star, then thrust forward with the longsword at the other one.  Both cloaked figures dodged her strikes, which Joslyn had anticipated, but at least the dagger grazed the upper arm of the one on the left.

That one gave a soft grunt but did not slow.

The attacker on the right still had possession of the long, skinny sword, and charged with a blur of slashes and thrusts so quick and so furious that Joslyn could hardly keep up.  She was forced onto defense, edging backwards as she parried, jumped, dodged, and ducked.  There was something familiar about the fighting style, something she’d encountered before, but much like the poison warming her left arm, the knowledge stayed on the periphery of her consciousness, an elusive fact which she didn’t currently have the capacity to examine.

But that fact jumped from the periphery to the center of Joslyn’s attention when the one whose arm she’d cut pulled something round and thin from inside the black cloak.

At first, Joslyn’s eye processed a pipe, the kind Terintan nomads smoked white cactus from when leaders of rival tribes were negotiating peace or trade rights.  But no sooner did the thought occur to her that she realized it didn’t make sense.  It couldn’t be a pipe.  Which meant it was —

Lord M’Tongliss’s dinner.  Tasia.  The assassin.  A blowgun.

Adrenaline rushed through Joslyn’s veins when she recognized that she was staring at her own death.  In a reckless move, she spun, thrust out a backwards kick at the sword hand of the attacker on her right, and launched the longsword like a javelin at the attacker who’d just raised the blowgun to their lips.  The sword impaled the assassin in the chest, knocking them back several feet at the same time.  Joslyn didn’t need to wait to see them crumple to the ground to know they were dead — or would be soon.

Already anticipating the new trajectory of the remaining assassin’s sword, Joslyn executed a perfect diving falcon, feeling the soft whoosh of air the sword made as it arced through the space her head had been a moment before.  She transitioned smoothly into weaving snake, crashing into her opponent’s knees with her shoulder.  Taken by surprise, the assassin toppled backwards, Joslyn’s arms wrapped like a bola around their legs.  The hood fell back, and Joslyn glimpsed the feminine features she had expected.

The woman reached for her sword, which had tumbled from her fingers when she hit the ground, but Joslyn brought a forearm down on her wrist, trapping her hand before it could grasp the sword.  But before Joslyn could neutralize her completely, the woman’s other hand snaked up and dug into the pressure point at Joslyn’s clavicle.  The flash of pain distracted Joslyn only for the shortest of moments, but a moment was all the assassin needed.

She bucked her hips and rolled Joslyn over.  Joslyn landed on the flat of the dropped sword, pinning it beneath her weight, but the assassin didn’t require her blade to be dangerous.  In an instant, the woman’s knees trapped Joslyn’s arms against her sides.  Joslyn struggled, but the assassin cut off her efforts with the hard blow of a forearm against Joslyn’s throat.  Almost instantaneously, the world went grey.  Joslyn’s vision began to spot.

With her free hand, the woman reached inside the black cloak.

More poison, Ku-sai told her.  Fight now, or die forever.

But Joslyn had no strength left.  She could not breathe; she remained conscious only through sheer force of will.  Any second now, she would lose that battle and blackness would take her.  The warm numbness in Joslyn’s arm that had started when the throwing star pricked her had expanded to encompass her entire chest.  It crept up her spine now, into her neck, washing through her throat.  Between the poison her desperately pounding heart was distributing throughout her body and the forearm closing her windpipe, Joslyn knew that she wouldn’t be able to hold onto consciousness much longer.  She tried to free an arm, but her body refused obey.  Poison pulled her down like a stone falling through a lake.

And then she was at the bottom of that lake.  Darkness.

Unconsciousness came for Joslyn, swallowing her not gradually but all at once.  But in the blackness she saw behind her closing eyelids, she saw something else, too.  A hint of color.  A glow, almost, like a lantern in the distance, or a fire on a distant horizon.  And as she focused her mind on it, the glow grew.  It became more than a glow; it became a current of light, reminding Joslyn of —

The first time I dreamwalked.

Forming a q’isson out of the flowing lights had become so second nature to Joslyn that she pulled the current of light towards her with nothing but a thought.  Although they looked like lights, Joslyn knew they were just the opposite; they were aspects (pieces?) of the Shadowlands.    Pieces of the shadows themselves.  She still didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but at the moment, that was the least of her concerns.  The light swirled around her anxiously, practically humming with agitation.

It took a few seconds longer, and a great deal more effort, than usual, but Joslyn managed to form a q’isson.  Instantly, the pain disappeared.  The burning numbness of the poison disappeared.  That sensation of sinking through darkness, of losing control over her faculties, also disappeared.

Everything was quiet.

Joslyn opened her eyes — and was immediately disoriented, because she wasn’t looking through her eyes but at them.  She was outside her physical body, floating inside the q’isson a few feet above the assassin, who still knelt atop Joslyn’s body.  Joslyn’s body was still but not dead — not yet.  But it would be soon if the pressure on her throat did not relent.

Without thinking about what she was doing but acting on a primal instinct to protect her physical body, Joslyn formed the q’isson into a cone-shaped spear, and hurled it towards the woman with all the energy and force she could muster.

It shouldn’t have worked.  The q’isson, and inside it, Joslyn, were both insubstantial, ephemeral, made of nothing but swirling lights.  When she’d first dreamwalked a month earlier, trying to interact with the owl, it didn’t work because the owl was on a physical plane and Joslyn was on… well, Joslyn might not have been in the Shadowlands, but while inside a q’isson she wasn’t fully in the physical world, either.

Yet even if her q’isson-spear shouldn’t have worked, it did work.

Like a disembodied shove, the q’isson pushed the attacker off Joslyn’s chest, flinging the woman backwards with such force that she slammed into a birch trunk, then slumped to the ground, momentarily dazed.

Joslyn’s physical eyes flew open, and she gasped in a much-needed breath.

Double-vision.  What was happening?  Joslyn could see through her actual eyes, her physical eyes, and she could still see herself and the assassin from inside the q’isson.

There was no time to question how she could be in two places at once.  Her physical body still responded to commands as usual, so she forced it to its feet.  The poison was still spreading, making her movements slow and clumsy, but she had enough control that she pulled her boot dagger from its sheath and stumbled forward towards the assassin.

The Joslyn inside the q’isson floated just above and behind her, following like an errant cloud.

The woman stirred from her daze against the tree, groping the ground around her for whatever it was that she’d dropped.  Joslyn saw it before she did — another blowgun, this one having tumbled from its hiding place when Joslyn’s q’isson flung the woman backwards.

Joslyn’s foot swung out in a sloppy kick, knocking the blowgun out of reach.  Then she dropped a knee onto the woman’s midsection, keeping her pinned to the tree.  With numb fingers acting on muscle memory, Joslyn seized the front of the cloak and twisted it tightly around the woman’s throat.  With the other, she pressed the point of the dagger to the underneath side of the woman’s jaw, in the spot where the artery pulsed beneath the skin.

“Struggle and die,” Joslyn said, her voice both slurred from the poison and hoarse from the woman’s attempt to strangle her.  “Cooperate and live.  Give me the antidote.”

The woman’s hazel-green eyes, which were flecked with gold, flitted upward, to the spot just over Joslyn’s shoulder.  For the briefest of moments, so brief that Joslyn was half-convinced her poison-addled mind had made it up, the irises transformed into flames.  But then they were green again.

She’s looking at the q’isson, Joslyn realized with a shock.  That shouldn’t have been possible.

The woman swallowed.  “You are a worthy opponent.”

Joslyn shook the woman by the collar.  “The antidote.  I know you have it on you.”

Every good poisoner carried antidotes to what they used, Joslyn knew.  And this woman was nothing if not good.

A grin spread across the woman’s face.  “Why would I give you the antidote when I’ve already succeeded in killing you?  All I need to do is wait.”

Joslyn glanced around, searching for the blowgun.

But the Joslyn inside the q’isson found it first.

There.  On the right, her second self informed her.

The end of the blowgun peeked out from beneath a layer of birch leaves.  The assassin’s gaze followed Joslyn’s.  They met eyes.  Joslyn knew what the woman was about to do a moment before it happened, but the poison had slowed her reaction time too much to stop it.  With the heel of her palm, the assassin executed a perfect chin strike, generating enough force that Joslyn’s head snapped back.  She lost her grip on the woman’s collar.  The assassin shoved Joslyn off of her and scrabbled towards the blowgun.  Off-balance and still slow, Joslyn threw her weight sideways, managing to land on the woman with enough force to flatten her to the ground.

But the assassin already had the blowgun in hand.  She pulled something from it — the poison-tipped dart.

Joslyn slammed a fist down onto the woman’s wrist, but the dart remained clenched between her fingers.  A knee connected with Joslyn’s ribs, and she felt something crack even as the air whooshed out of her lungs.  The woman rolled Joslyn’s off of her.  Joslyn landed hard on her back, two broken ribs protesting with a scream of pain so sharp that she almost blacked out again.

Watch out! the Joslyn of the q’isson exclaimed, and Joslyn regained just enough clarity to see the poison dart in the woman’s hand arcing towards her neck.  One prick from it in her jugular and she would be dead within seconds.

Joslyn caught the woman’s wrist.  The dart hovered an inch from the side of Joslyn’s neck, shivering in place as the assassin pushed it forward and Joslyn pushed it backward.  For a moment, Joslyn won the battle, forcing the hand holding the dart up and back.  But now it merely shivered above her face instead of beside her throat.

Desperate, Joslyn reached for her q’isson, trying to repeat the feat she had managed earlier, when she’d used it unintentionally to drive the woman off of her.  The q’isson was still there, but Joslyn felt her control over it weakening.  The dart came closer.

What Joslyn did next was not born from the dance of the Seven Cities, nor from the endless hours spent training with Ku-sai, nor from years battling the mountain tribes in the Imperial Army.  No, what came next was born from the months she spent living on the streets after she’d murdered Captain Samwin and before she’d found Ku-sai, from the months she’d spent begging for food when she could, stealing and fighting for it when she couldn’t.

Joslyn reversed the direction of her pressure on the assassin’s wrist.  Instead of pushing the dart away, she pulled, yanking it forward and to the side.  When the woman’s forearm came within reach, she bit down hard, and she kept biting until the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth.  The assassin cried out in surprise and pain — and loosened her grip on the poison dart.

Joslyn ripped the dart from her hand, then jabbed it — hard — into the woman’s neck.  The woman immediately sat up and tugged the dart free.  She held it in her palm, staring down at it with wide eyes.

“The antidote,” Joslyn said, her words slurring now.

“No.”

“Give it to me and I will save you some,” said Joslyn.  It was getting harder to speak.  “Otherwise, die.  All I have to do is wait.”

“You’ll die before I do,” the assassin said.

Joslyn checked her body to see if the woman spoke the truth, extending her senses inward instead of outward.  The poison had reached every part of her body now, its presence a warm throbbing inside of her.  It was a paralytic agent, she realized.  If the dose had been stronger, she would have been immobilized swiftly.  And once the poison closed its fist around her heart and her lungs, she would die.  It was getting harder to breathe.  But the throwing star had barely broken her skin, which meant…

“No, I won’t,” Joslyn said.  “Your dose… much bigger.”

And the assassin’s lie couldn’t stay hidden.  Even as Joslyn spoke, the woman’s face drained of color — her heart was already slowing, struggling to supply blood to her extremities.

Joslyn rolled the woman off easily and sat up.  With clumsy hands, she pushed open the woman’s cloak.  The assassin offered no resistance; her limbs were already stiffening.  Joslyn groped inside the cloak, numb fingers finally finding a hidden pocket with something small and weighty inside.  She pulled out a small bundle of cloth tied together with twine.  Unwrapping it revealed two small glass vials, one filled with green liquid, one with blue.

One would be the poison.  The other would be the antidote.

“Which?” Joslyn asked.

The woman’s eyes darted to the vials.  It was the only part of her face that moved.

“Which?” Joslyn asked again.  “I will give you half.”

Still the woman didn’t answer.  At first, Joslyn assumed that the woman had decided it was better for both of them to die than for both to live.  But then she realized the woman’s lips were quivering, struggling to form a word.  Joslyn put her ear beside the woman’s mouth.

“…ue,” the assassin whispered.

Joslyn uncorked the vial of blue liquid and swallowed half of it.  She hesitated a moment.  Why should she save a woman who’d nearly succeeded in killing her?

Information, whispered the Joslyn-in-the-q’isson.  The internal voice that was both inside her and not inside her startled Joslyn for a moment.  But she realized it was right.

Joslyn forced the woman’s stiff body into a sitting position, tipped her head back, and poured the remaining antidote into her mouth.

Searing heat flooded Joslyn’s body — far more heat than what had come from the original cut of the throwing star.  Had the blue vial contained the poison after all?  The pain was excruciating, and Joslyn moaned involuntarily.  She was on fire.  There was an inferno beneath her skin, and she would surely burst into flames any second.  On instinct, she pushed more of her consciousness into the q’isson — the more of her mind that was there, the less she would have to experience this torture.

The instant death she expected didn’t come.  Instead, after a few seconds, every inch of her skin beaded in sweat.  Sweat rolled down the back of her neck, dripped from her nose.  She wiped sweat from her eyes with the back of a hand, and the hand came back not just sweaty, but greasy, too.  Joslyn looked at it.  The sweat clinging to her knuckles was oily, and as the sun refracted off of it, it shone in a rainbow of colors — green, purple, yellow.  Her arms and legs began to feel normal again, so she allowed her mind to flow out of the q’isson and back into her body.  She still didn’t know how she was doing this — forming and maintaining a q’isson without any mushroom tea to trigger it, but solving that riddle was the least of her concerns at the moment.

Joslyn glanced at the assassin.  Color — but not sweat — had returned to the woman’s face.  The assassin’s recovery would probably be slower, but Joslyn moved as swiftly as she could anyway.  She picked the blowgun up from the ground and snapped it in two, then pulled the cloak from the assassin.  Inside were two more hidden pockets, one holding a dagger, the other three throwing stars.  The dagger Joslyn slipped into the waistband of her trousers; the throwing stars she handled gingerly, tossing them one by one into the embers of her almost dead fire.  She hoped the hot coals would burn off the poison that coated them inert, but even if it didn’t, they would be so hot to the touch within a few minutes that it would discourage anyone from reaching in to grab them.  Joslyn dropped the vial of green liquid to the ground and stomped on it hard, then scraped the sole of her boot back and forth across the earth a few times to ensure the glass shards and the poison soaked into the dirt.

Her work done, she glanced back at the woman who had attacked her.  The assassin was sweating now, all her visible skin flushed red and covered with greasy sweat, but she still hadn’t moved.

Joslyn twisted the woman’s cloak into a makeshift rope, then used it to tie the assassin to the trunk of a birch tree.  She grunted as Joslyn worked, her hands twitching, fingers flexing, but she didn’t resist.  Joslyn looped the cloak twice around the woman’s torso, making sure it squeezed the assassin’s arms tightly against her sides, then triple-knotted it in the back.

Once Joslyn was finished, she squatted in front of the woman who’d nearly bested her.

“I assume you can speak now,” Joslyn said, her own words no longer slurred.  “We have much to discuss.  You can start by telling me who you are and why you just tried to kill me.”

The woman swallowed and turned her face away.

“I was never an interrogator in the Imperial Army,” Joslyn said, “but I understand the concepts behind coaxing answers from a reluctant captive just fine.”

The woman said nothing.

Joslyn picked up the longsword she’d confiscated, turning it over in her hands to inspect its craftsmanship.

“Fine steel,” she commented.  “I assume it holds its edge well, doesn’t have to be sharpened even after it’s sliced through a few limbs.  But despite its length, I’m sure it’s equally capable of small, precise cuts as well.”  She touched a finger to the blade’s tip, and was instantly rewarded with a tiny red sphere of blood.  “Do you think it would slide under a fingernail well?”

“When my companion and I do not return with the sword,” the prisoner said in an accent Joslyn didn’t recognize, “they will send more of us.  Three or four this time.  You will not get so lucky again.”

At first, Joslyn thought the woman referred to the sword that she held in her hands.  But that didn’t make sense.  Which could only mean —

The sword.

Ku-sai’s sword.  But how could they have known Joslyn had gained possession of it?  After all, it had been hidden in the Shadowlands until a few weeks earlier, when Joslyn retrieved it from the shadowy echo of her former mentor.

But then Joslyn made a sour face.  The fact that it had been taken from the Shadowlands was how the woman knew Joslyn had it — the shadows themselves had told her.

Joslyn noticed that the assassin’s eyes weren’t focused on her, but on something behind her.  She tensed, bracing for another attack.  But no.  The mountain forest was quiet, containing just the two of them and the corpse of the other assassin.  The jarring sounds of their combat had driven away all the wildlife.  No one else was there.

What Joslyn did detect, however, was the presence of her q’isson.  She couldn’t see it, and she could no longer see through it — that had stopped when the poison faded and she allowed her consciousness back into her body.  But some piece of it was still there, still floating above and behind her like a silent observer just outside her field of vision, like an intuition that prickled the hairs on the back of her neck.

Was that what the woman was looking at?  How could she know it was there?

But Joslyn answered her own question almost as soon as it had formed:  shadows.  The woman knew about Ku-sai’s sword; she could see or sense the q’isson.  She was some kind of sorceress, some kind of ally or vessel of shadows.

“You are strong,” said the assassin in that same unfamiliar accent.  She had shifted her gaze from the q’isson to Joslyn herself.  “Far stronger than you know.  Stronger than we knew, I confess.  But now that we know your strength, you will not defeat us again.”

“What do you want with my ku-sai’s sword?”

The woman did not answer.

Joslyn sighed and got to her feet.  She’d always found torture distasteful at best.  It reminded her too much of her time with Captain Samwin, who took perverse pleasure in the pain of others.

“Thank you for warning me that more like you will come,” Joslyn said.  “It is always easier to be cautious when you know there is reason to be.”  She walked towards the smoldering remains of her fire.  If she heated the longsword’s tip, it would hurt more but also cauterize the woman’s wounds at the same time.  She pushed the sword into the embers, steeling herself for what she had to do.

~ End of Part II ~

Part III:

Battles

“Every Brother should remember that the primary battleground between the mortal realm and the Shadowlands lies not outside himself, but within.  The fallen amongst us never loses anything to the shadows that he did not first decide to give to them.”

— Brother Remon of Gifford,

A Primer on the Shadowlands and Wielding Its Power for Aspiring Brothers

35

The night air was chill and damp, a reminder that autumn would be giving way to winter soon in this corner of the Empire.  Pressing her back against the rough stone of the magistrate’s quarters, Tasia drew one of her two daggers from the sheath at her waist.  For a brief moment, she closed her eyes, trying to will her heart to stop its thunderous pounding.

Joslyn’s heart probably didn’t pound before she attacked someone.

The thought of Joslyn brought with it the usual bitter tang of grief, but also with the memory of the vivid dream that had taken Tasia to Arthur’s Ferry and led her to Brick.  The Wise Men always said that the notion that dreams carried significance was just more superstition, yet Brick had been in Arthur’s Ferry, just as the dream Joslyn had said he would be.  That fact softened the sharp edges of the knife of grief that always pricked at Tasia’s heart.  Maybe somewhere, in the realm of Mother Moon, where the old myths said people go after death, Joslyn’s spirit was still watching over Tasia, still guarding her.

Tasia pushed her wistful thoughts aside.  She didn’t have time for superstitious nonsense, or to puzzle out how some part of her had known to look for Brick in Arthur’s Ferry.  Right now, the dozen nervous commoners behind her needed her to lead.

She edged forward, still keeping her back to the wall as she neared the open window.  She peeked around the frame.  The Wise Man of Arthur’s Ferry, the sole magistrate for the town of just less than ten thousand and the three surrounding hamlets, sat in a padding rocking chair beside the fire.  An end table supported a lamp and a half-eaten evening meal beside him.  Tasia couldn’t actually see him, as the back of the rocker faced the window; the only indications that he actually sat in the chair were the gentle rocking motions it made and the sound of turning book pages.

Tasia hesitated, weighing the rightness against the wrongness of what she and the twelve men and women behind her were about to do.  The magistrate was nothing but a minor official, the minorest amongst minor officials, really, just another small-town magistrate with no real role in the Empire’s internal struggles for power.  It hardly seemed fair to ambush him in the way they were about to, but Tasia, Brick, and Alric had recruited so many commoners to their cause that it was getting increasingly difficult to keep their rebellion hidden.  If the local magistrate discovered them now, their nascent operation would be crushed before it ever really had a chance to get started.

She glanced back, catching Alric’s eye and giving him a single nod.  Alric, in turn, turned to the others, holding up five fingers to indicate the countdown was about to begin.  They’d prepared all week for this attack, but the commoners were still as skittish as colts in a burning barn.  Until two weeks ago, they were farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers who’d never held a weapon in their lives.  It probably never occurred to them that they’d one day kidnap the very magistrate who’d taught them to read as children, married them as adults, and meted out justice when they needed him to.

Alric’s countdown began.

Five.  Four.  Three.  Two —

On one, Tasia eased open the back door to the magistrate’s offices, wincing when the rusty old hinges groaned out a protest.  Unless the magistrate was deaf, he’d heard that.  But it didn’t matter at this point what he did or didn’t hear.  She was up the short flight of stairs and inside the building’s back hallway in seconds, keeping her footfalls as light as she could.  She was tempted to glance over her shoulder to make sure Alric and the others were following, but she didn’t.

Tasia stopped next to the door that led into the magistrate’s private chambers, the same one she’d peered into a few seconds earlier, as breathless as if she’d been sprinting.  She stood on one side of the door, Alric took up a position on the other; the rest of them lined up half behind Tasia, half behind Alric, just as they had practiced.

So far, so good.

The crew burst into the room as one, surrounding the elderly, unsuspecting magistrate within seconds.  He dropped his book; it bounced off the arm of the rocking chair and clattered onto the floor.  Tasia stood directly in front of him, dagger raised.

“My name is Natasia of House Dorsa,” she declared.  “I am the only legitimate heir to Emperor Andreth the Just, whose crown was stolen by the traitor Norix, the Wise Man who calls himself ‘Regent.’”

She paused to let him process that.  The old Wise Man had a long, thin face, with an unkempt, scraggly grey and white beard with hints of black in it.  A Westerner, probably.  His dark eyes were wide and terrified inside his cadaverous face.  A dark stain appeared and grew in the man’s lap, and Tasia caught the ammonia scent of urine.

“I offer you a chance to swear your allegiance to me and renounce loyalty to the Regent,” Tasia said.

The magistrate looked from Tasia, to Alric, to the dozen men behind them, some of whom he’d probably known their entire lives.

“I — you — why — ” the Wise Man stammered.  He caught the eye of one of the men.  “Rufus?  What is the meaning of this?  Tell me this is only a cruel joke on an old man!”

Rufus, a burly wheelwright whose hair was even redder than Brick’s, shook his head.  “It’s no joke, Wise Man Rakin, sir,” he said grimly.

Tasia slipped off the ring that bore the crest of her house and held it out to the magistrate for a moment before putting it back on.

“Do you swear your allegiance or not, Wise Man?” she asked.

He looked her up and down, opening and closing his mouth like a gaping fish.  “I can’t — I don’t — how do I even know you’re really the lost princess?”

The lost princess.  She’d heard that phrase from some of the men before, but didn’t realize it had become an official label.

“Believe me, mate,” Alric said, “she is.”

“Even if you are the Princess Natasia, I can’t simply…” the magistrate started.  He splayed his long, bony fingers in a gesture of helplessness.

“Should I take that as a no?” Tasia asked.  “You refuse to swear allegiance to the rightful heir?”

Wise Man Rakin’s mouth worked for another moment, but then he squared his jaw.  “I take orders only from the Regent.  Not from an outlaw princess and her band of…”  He shifted his gaze from Tasia to the men and women of Arthur’s Ferry who surrounded her in a tight semi-circle.  “And people who should know better.

Tasia heard an uncomfortable rustling from her companions.  Best not to let the Wise Man speak again.

She turned to the semi-circle behind her.  “You know what to do.”

They hesitated, exchanging glances.  Tasia felt her gut clench, fearing a sudden mutiny.  But then Rufus exhaled a heavy sigh and stepped forward.

“Sorry ’bout this, Wise Man Rakin, sir,” he said.  “I think you’ll understand why we got to do this one day.  It’s for the good of the Empire — you’ll see.”  And with that, Rufus put the empty wheat sack over the magistrate’s head, cinching it tightly enough to stay in place but loosely enough to allow the man to breathe.

Rufus’s action seemed to break the tension within the rest of the group.  They came to life, closing in on the Wise Man with their ropes, and when he began to scream for help, Alric quickly gagged him.  Two grabbed the magistrate by the shoulders, two more by the feet, and they carried him out the same door they’d entered and into the night.

Tasia stooped to pick up the book he’d dropped before following them.  The Wise Man would want something to read to pass the hours and calm his nerves in the upcoming days.  Hopefully it wouldn’t take them too long to turn him to their side; the locals claimed that he was a good man who had always been fair when meting out justice.

She glanced at the book’s cover before blowing out the lantern.  It was Wise Man Rewan’s Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations — the version Rewan wrote for the highborn and his fellow Wise Men, not the second version he wrote for the commoners.

A true classic.

#

Two nights later, Tasia sat at Martha and Brick’s kitchen table with Alric across from her.  A lantern held down one corner of the map spread out on the table before them, three brick fragments held down the others.

“Thanks to ‘Quinn of Easthook’s’ golden tongue,” Alric said with a nod to Brick, “the surrounding hamlets are already ours.”  He touched the squares on the map that marked the small, unnamed communities that surrounded Arthur’s Ferry on three sides.  “But the men we’ve added to our ranks are like the men I’ve already been training — farmers, mostly.  Men who walked away when the recruiter came through with his golden eagle last year and the year before that, for one reason or t’other.  But over here — ” Alric traced a line west from Arthur’s Ferry and tapped the image of a tower “ — is Aventia.  It’s the House seat.  Twice the size of Arthur’s Ferry, and there’ll be veterans there.  Real soldiers.  Maybe even them that knows the real story about what’s happening out East.”

“How long will it take?” Tasia asked.

“To travel to Aventia?” Alric said.

“No, how long will it take to find more men there, to recruit them, to train them?”

Alric shrugged, rubbing his thigh.  It was a new habit, one he’d developed in the time since Tasia last saw him.  He’d been waylaid months earlier, he’d told them, attacked by a crazy bandit who’d managed to stab him before Alric overpowered him.

“It’s taken us the better part of a month to gather our fifty here and train ’em up,” Alric said.  “I’m guessing another month for Aventia.”

“And then how many soldiers will we have?”

He shrugged again.  “Depends on how convincing our Brick can be — and how discreet.” Alric made a face that conveyed doubt.  “Our lad’s a charmer, but they know him here.  Trust ’im.  I imagine it’ll take a bit more time for his tongue to work its magic in Aventia.”

Brick’s “golden tongue” had worked wonders in the taverns of Arthur’s Ferry and in the hamlets.  Locals didn’t know many veterans of the War in the East; most of the men from their communities who’d “taken the eagle,” as they called it, had never returned.  They were hungry for stories, for news, and Brick’s natural charisma made it easy for him to make a smooth transition between war stories and the injustices he’d witnessed — first the survivors of the Deerpark Pass attack who’d been locked away for no fault of their own (he left out the part about them being inhabited by shadows), then the way the good-hearted Princess who actually wanted to change things for the common soldier had been framed by her own Wise Man.  By the time he finally introduced them to Tasia, they were already prepared to riot.  Giving them the final push they’d needed to join her cause had been easy.

But turning farmers and bakers into soldiers had been another matter.

“We don’t have the luxury of time,” Tasia said, half to herself, half to Alric and Brick.  “It’s taken a month to get as far as we have.”

“Which is fast, all things considered,” Brick put in.

“Yes,” Tasia agreed, “but we can’t afford to spend a month on every town we turn.”

She rose from the table, pacing in the small kitchen.  Her mind flashed to Wise Man Rakin’s copy of Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations.  In Rakin’s version, the same version she’d studied in her youth under Norix’s tutelage, the author pointed out that the commoners could never be allowed to realize the latent power they possessed.  There were far more of them than there were of the highborn, Wise Man Rewan explained, and should one amongst them ever be clever enough to realize that fact, a charismatic leader with a plan, it would not be too difficult for the commoners to seize the reigns of power from the noble houses.  This was why it was important for the highborn to be fair and just, lest they inadvertently endanger their own position.

That chapter wasn’t included in the version of Rules that was used to teach commoners to read.

“It takes time, Empress,” Alric said.  “Armies can’t be built overnight.”

“I know,” said Tasia.  “But… maybe it’s not an army we need.”

Alric and Brick exchanged a glance.

Tasia stopped before the small window that looked out into the field behind Brick’s house.  With what remained of the day’s light, Kort and Ammanta were putting their new recruits through a series of drills.  Training the Fesulian way, they’d told Tasia, would take less time than training the Imperial way.  Besides, it would be easier to arm Tasia’s new soldiers with makeshift spears and pikes than short swords.

Winter was in the air.  It was much too early for snow yet, but a few tentative flurries who didn’t know that swirled in the evening sky anyway.

“They’ll be slaughtered if they face a real regiment of soldiers,” Tasia said, half to herself.  “Or even city guardsmen.”

The bulk of the Empire’s forces were still in the East, which meant her recruits would be more likely to face guards than soldiers.  But even guards were better equipped and better trained than her commoners.

She turned away from the window and faced the table.  “Maybe we don’t need an army.”

The two veteran soldiers seemed puzzled at this.  Brick was the one to voice what they were probably both thinking.  “Not meanin’ to offend, Empress, but how do ye take down a Regent who commands the Imperial Army and has ’imself hidden inside a fortress without an army of yer own?”

“With a clever plan.”  Tasia was still thinking of Wise Man Rewan’s Rules, but of course neither man knew that, so the confusion on their faces only deepened.  She decided she should reference a tale they’d be more likely to know.  “Do you both know the children’s story about the fox and the turtle?”

“Aye,” Brick said.  “It’s one of Eula’s favorites at the moment.  I tell it to her so often she can recite it off by heart without me.”

“The fox knows he can’t eat the turtle while the turtle’s still in its shell,” Tasia said.  “So he’s got to trick the turtle to leave its shell behind.  All this time, we’ve been trying to eat the turtle in its shell.  But you’re right, Brick — we can’t defeat the Regent while he commands the army and has the palace walls around him.”  She pointed out the window.  “And by the time we gather and train enough commoners to have an army of our own, it’ll be too late.  The shadows will finish us all before we can finish Norix.”

Alric stroked his beard thoughtfully.  It had grown considerably more bushy since the last time Tasia had seen him.  “So we get the turtle to leave the protection of its shell.”

“Exactly,” Tasia said.

“Yer going to get the Regent to leave the palace?” Brick asked skeptically.

“Not the Regent,” said Tasia.  “Just his army and his guard.”

“How?” asked both men at once.

“With a little chaos,” she answered.  “And a clever plan.”  She strode to the kitchen’s entrance.  “Who’s guarding Wise Man Rakin tonight?  I need to see him.”

“For what?” said Alric, following her from the room.

“He’ll have the winter council schedule,” Tasia said.  “And I need to be at that council meeting.”

36

In the Zaris Mountains, fall had already turned the corner into the early days of winter.  The birch trees shed more leaves each day, and the few leaves that remained were less the orange of autumn and more the brown of winter.  What grass there was had faded from bright green to something much duller, and game was getting harder to find, especially now that Joslyn had two mouths to feed.  Fog lingered longer in the mornings; the days were noticeably shorter and colder.

And still Joslyn had found no small men.

“Yesterday we traveled mostly north,” the prisoner said in her oddly accented common tongue while Joslyn busied herself tying the woman to a tree.  “Today mostly west.  Am I correct in guessing that you don’t actually know which way you’re going?”

It had been overcast all day, a sure promise of rain the next day.  Joslyn didn’t generally mind the rain; she was accustomed to traveling in all types of weather.  But the rain, when added to everything else — her inability to find the small men, her long separation from Tasia, her failure to retrieve Ku-sai’s sword from the Shadowlands in one piece, the prisoner who seemed intent on needling her whenever possible — put her in a foul mood.

The foul mood might explain why the rope Joslyn cinched around the woman’s midsection was a little tighter than usual.

“I can’t breathe,” the prisoner complained.

“Then don’t talk,” Joslyn said.  “Silence takes less air.”

She double-checked, then triple-checked, the rope’s knots at back of the trunk.  Each night, she tied the woman in such a way that her arms were pinned to her side, allowing just enough movement at the elbows so that the prisoner could feed herself from the bowl of stew Joslyn gave her.  There wasn’t enough range of motion for the woman to reach behind herself and untie her bindings, but Joslyn nevertheless made the knots so difficult to work that it took even her, with freed hands and nimble fingers, a good ten minutes every morning to undo them.

Satisfied with her knots, Joslyn set about the business of building her fire and lean-to for the night.

“Joslyn, please,” whined the woman.  “It’s too tight.”

Joslyn ignored her, focusing instead on the task of gathering fallen boughs and cutting saplings for her shelter.  The prisoner, of course, would not enjoy the privilege of the shelter, but as usual would spend the night sitting up, sleeping, if she could, against the trunk of the tree.

“If I wanted to, I could call upon the shadows and break these bindings,” the woman said.  “Or you could simply loosen it for me.”

Joslyn paused, tightening her grip upon the branch in her hand.  The prisoner frequently made comments like that, about the shadows, about her relationship with them.  Much of the time, she spoke less as a captive might and more like an indulgent tutor trying endlessly to educate Joslyn.

“If you could break the ropes, you would’ve done so weeks ago.”  Joslyn didn’t turn around to face the woman as she spoke.

“That’s the longest sentence you’ve given me in three days.”

“If you can waste so much breath mocking me, then you can breathe perfectly well and the ropes are not too tight.”

“Truly, Joslyn, I don’t want to break your ropes.  You worked so hard in crafting them.  It would be a shame for them to be ruined.”

Joslyn finally stopped what she was doing and looked the woman over.  The prisoner wore a playful grin on her face, as if oblivious to the fact that she’d been the one who lost the battle with Joslyn, as if she hadn’t been forced to march with bound hands through the mountains, subsisting only on a nightly regimen of Joslyn’s thin leftover stew.

The woman should be half-starved by now.  But she didn’t have the gaunt, yellowed look of the chronically underfed.

And Joslyn should know; she’d been underfed enough times in her life to know what malnutrition looked like.

No, the woman looked nearly… jovial.  Her dark eyes gleamed with mischief, her auburn-colored hair and olive-toned skin maintaining the same healthy luster they’d always had.

“Last chance,” the woman said in a singsong voice.  “If I break your ropes, you’ll have to go back to using my cloak to tie my hands each day.  And I know you don’t want that.”

Joslyn dropped the branches she’d been holding.  “Fine.  But only so that you’ll stop complaining and go back to being quiet.”

As always when she handled her prisoner, Joslyn was exceedingly cautious.  She made sure she knew where the woman’s hands were at all times, and after the second night, when the woman had nearly managed to liberate one of Joslyn’s daggers from its sheath, Joslyn always disarmed herself before handling her.  Joslyn would rather take her chances in weaponless combat with the woman than be killed by one of her own blades.

“Most warriors die due to careless errors,” Ku-sai had been fond of saying, “not for lack of skill.”

Deftly, keeping her eyes on the prisoner the entire time, Joslyn’s fingers worked at loosening the same knots she’d tied a few minutes earlier.

“I think you know perfectly well that the small men will not be found unless they want to,” the woman commented while Joslyn worked.  “And clearly they don’t want to, or else we would have found them by now.  Do you know what I think?”

“I don’t care what you think.”

“I think you still seek the small men because you don’t know what else to do,” the woman said.  “You can’t go back to your lover because you will bring the shadows upon her, so you search futilely for small men because you need something to keep you busy.”  She paused.  “You’re the type of woman who needs to stay busy.  The type who must always be engaged in some noble quest or another to prove your worth.”

Joslyn loosened the ropes she’d woven from animal sinew and bits of the other dead assassin’s cloak, then retied the knots at the back of the birch trunk.

“That’s better,” said the woman.  “Thank you — I can breathe again.”

“You could breathe before,” Joslyn grumbled.  She put her weapons back in their places and returned to the business of preparing her camp.

“Since you’ll never find the small men, you’d be better off just finding a regular smith to repair the sword,” the prisoner continued in a conversational tone, as if she and Joslyn were old friends, discussing what to do about the broken blade.  “Then you could find a member of the Brotherhood to do the engraving for you.”

Joslyn ignored her.

“Vot taven De wecken hut,” the woman said.

The words — if that was what they were — had a harsh, guttural sound.  The hairs on the back of Joslyn’s neck stood on end, and she swore the forest rustled in response to whatever the woman had uttered.  Above and behind her, where the thinnest remnants of the q’isson Joslyn had formed accidentally during her fevered fight with the assassin still remained, something stirred — shivered, almost, the way an arm shivered when the reverberation of a strike traveled through it.

“It’s what was written on the blade before it was broken,” said the woman.  “It means, ’With this blade, I return you.’”

Joslyn turned, narrowing her eyes at the woman to show her suspicion.  “How would you know what was written on my teacher’s blade?”

“How do you think?”

For the briefest of moments, the prisoner’s eyes transformed into flames.  The effect disappeared so quickly that Joslyn could convince herself it hadn’t actually happened, that it had only been her imagination.  After all, Joslyn hadn’t entirely felt like herself since the fight.  Maybe there was still some small trace of poison remaining in her system, or more likely, it was the fact that the q’isson hadn’t ever gone away but hovered just outside her field of vision all the time now, like a tickling whisper that never stopped murmuring in her ear.

Joslyn turned away, crouching to strike flint against the steel of one of her daggers to light the fire.  Behind her, the woman chuckled.

“Your loyalty is to the wrong cause,” said the woman.  “You’ve concocted your latest quest to support something you don’t even understand.”

“You know nothing of my loyalty,” Joslyn snapped.  “Nor what I do or do not understand.”

“Wrong again.  As usual.  I know everything there is to know about you, Joslyn of Terinto.”

It unnerved Joslyn that the woman knew her name.  She’d never offered it, of course, just as she’d never offered her history as a slave, as Ku-sai’s apprentice, as a soldier in the Imperial Army, as a palace guard for Tasia.  Yet somehow, the prisoner knew it all.  Sometimes, it felt as if Joslyn was the real prisoner, and the woman she tied to a trunk each night was her captor.

The nest of grass and twigs Joslyn had made to catch her sparks wouldn’t light.  It was becoming more of a problem each night — this time of year in the mountains, everything was always damp.  Joslyn muttered a curse in Terintan.

“Call on your q’isson to help you with the fire,” the prisoner said.  “It’s an easy enough task to practice channeling its strength.”

What makes you think I want to practice? Joslyn wanted to ask, but held her tongue.  She wouldn’t get drawn into the woman’s games.

“You might as well,” the woman went on.  “The shadows that make up your q’isson, they’ve been bored ever since you called on them to fight me.  They’re tied to you now, because you never released them back to the Shadowlands, yet you never use them here, either.”

As if in response to the woman’s words, Joslyn felt the whisper of the q’isson above her grow just a little louder, a little more insistent.  Her spine tingled.

“The problem is that you’re so averse to allowing them inside of you,” said the woman.  “You fear losing control, yet you of all people should know that control only comes with practice.”

Joslyn closed her eyes, drew a deep, calming breath in through her nostrils.  The woman could talk all she wanted, it didn’t mean her words had the power to infect Joslyn’s thinking.  Joslyn’s mind was her own.  Only her own.

She tried again to light the tinder.  But yet again, the spark fizzled and failed the moment it touched the grass.

“That’s the only thing horsetail tea does, by the way,” the woman continued.  “It’s an amateur’s way of lowering our natural resistance to sharing our bodies and minds with our shadows.  With practice, we can draw upon the shadows without such an aide — as you did the day that we fought.  I must admit it was impressive, what you did.  I couldn’t have done the same when I was as new to the shadow arts as you are.”

The fragment of the q’isson rippled with energy, almost as if in anticipation.

“Stop talking,” Joslyn said.

“Why?  So you can continue to fail at lighting our fire for the night?”

“It’s not our fire.”

“Fire is an apt metaphor for the shadow arts,” said the prisoner.  “It can be as small and contained as the flame of a candle, or as wild and destructive as a forest fire.  Your problem — the problem of most practitioners of the shadow arts, really — is that you assume every use of your shadows will lead to a forest fire.  And so you fear your own pow — ”

“Stop talking unless you want a gag in your mouth,” Joslyn growled.

“You can’t stop what’s coming.”  The woman’s voice changed, becoming deeper, more resonant.  “The blade is broken, the small men refuse to be found.  Your time will come to an end, and we will free the shadows from their prison at last.”

Joslyn stood.  From her pack, she yanked out the rag she used to oil and clean her blades each night, then she pulled the pack’s drawstring free.  She stalked to the woman, balling up the rag as she went in one fist.

“The sand in your hourglass is pouring out swiftly now, Joslyn of Terinto, daughter of Salif and A’eshan.”

The woman — if indeed she was still just a woman — opened her mouth to speak again, but Joslyn shoved the rag in her open mouth.  Her eyes were flames again; Joslyn tried not to look at them as she tied the rag in place behind her head with the drawstring.

But by the time Joslyn returned to the place where she was building the camp fire, the woman’s eyes had gone back to an ordinary brown.  She tracked Joslyn with those eyes as Joslyn knelt and picked up her flint, not even trying to complain through the rag in her mouth.  Joslyn would take it out later, if the woman behaved herself.  Joslyn wasn’t heartless, and she wasn’t capable of cruelty — as she’d discovered when she’d initially tried to torture answers out of her prisoner.  She’d gotten as far as cutting free a single fingernail before she lost the stomach for it.  After her failed attempt at torture, she’d decided she would simply kill the woman and be done with her, but Joslyn discovered she couldn’t do that, either.  It was one thing to kill someone in battle, when her opponent was trying with all their might to kill her first.  But it was another thing to execute someone whose hands were bound behind their back.  And Joslyn didn’t have that in her.  The closest she had come to killing those who could not defend themselves was the day she slaughtered the village boys who attacked her, and she never wanted to do such a thing again.

The prisoner was probably laughing silently at Joslyn’s incompetence, at her weak stomach when it came to torture and execution, but she didn’t care.

Yet another spray of sparks arced from the place where the flint struck Joslyn’s dagger, dying the moment they hit the grass.  She should have gathered her tinder in the morning, spent the day drying it.  As it was, it was never going to catch.

She glanced over her shoulder.  The prisoner had finally grown still, silent at last thanks to the gag.

She still watched Joslyn.

The woman’s eyes were a few shades lighter than Joslyn’s, which, like many Terintans, were so dark that they were almost black.  The woman’s, on the other hand, were the tone of dark honey — a soft, warmer brown.  If they’d been any lighter, Joslyn would have thought of them as golden.  They went well with the woman’s olive-toned skin and brown hair, which had streaks of red in it when the sun struck it in the right way.  Under different circumstances, Joslyn might have found the woman attractive.

Joslyn’s gaze must have lasted too long, because the woman cocked her head and quirked one eyebrow.  The corner of her mouth twitched — it would have been a grin, Joslyn knew, if the gag wasn’t there.  Joslyn turned back to her flint and dagger, but didn’t strike it.

As contained as a candle flame.  Control only comes through practice.

Joslyn squeezed her eyes shut, visualizing the ghost of the q’isson behind her.  Then, as if she was forming her q’isson to dreamwalk, she reached for the shimmering energy at the outer reaches of her awareness.  At the same moment, she struck flint against steel, then pushed that energy into her tinder nest.

A vertical flame burst upward from the grass.  Joslyn jerked away just in time to avoid singeing her eyebrows.

The prisoner’s shoulders tremored with silent laughter.  Behind Joslyn, the remnant of the q’isson seemed to dance excitedly.  Was it only her imagination, or did the q’isson seem to have grown just a little bit stronger?

Joslyn took the prisoner’s gag off an hour later, when she was about to hand the woman what was left of the evening’s stew.  But she stopped before handing her the bowl.

“I’ll give you your meal when you tell me your name,” Joslyn said.

The woman smiled, and for once there was nothing mocking in it.  “I’m glad you finally asked, and you didn’t need to withhold my supper to get it,” she said.  “My name is Ty’Tsana vot Gogeni.  But most simply call me Ty’Tsana.”

Joslyn handed Ty’Tsana the bowl of stew and went back to her place on the far side of the camp fire.

Awkwardly, Ty’Tsana dipped her head while bringing the stew up as far as her bound arms would allow.  With some effort, she drank from the bowl, then rested it back in her lap.  She turned her face towards Joslyn, full lips glistening from the sheen of broth that clung to them.

“It’s the Old Tongue,” she offered.  “It means ‘she flies with eagles.’  But it wasn’t the name I was born with.”

“I didn’t ask you what it means,” Joslyn muttered.  She ate in silence for a few minutes, deliberating, wondering if it was wise to encourage conversation with the woman who’d nearly killed her, a woman whose skills nearly equalled her own.

But as Ku-sai often said, the more one knew about one’s enemy, the easier it would be to defeat them.

“Who gave you your name, if you weren’t born with it?” Joslyn asked.

The question might have caught a different prisoner off-guard, given that several minutes had passed since Joslyn last spoke.  But Ty’Tsana answered immediately, almost as if she had been waiting for it.

“The Order,” she said, smiling again.  The firelight caught her eyes.  For a moment, they were more golden than brown.  And before Joslyn could ask What Order?, Ty’Tsana added, “The Order of Targhan.”

37

The trees were sparse in this part of the Capital Lands; most of the forests had been cleared centuries earlier to make room for vineyards and other crops.  Harker Falls, though, was an exception, as it was surrounded by more orchards than vineyards.  Neat rows of almond, pistachio, and olive trees, along with scattered patches of apricot and fig trees, covered the rolling hills as far as the eye could see, with the boundaries between one orchard and the next marked by low stone walls.

It was in a grove of olive trees, just the other side of a shallow dip in the land, that Tasia stood with Linna and Ammanta while they waited for Brick and Goran to return from the farmhouse whose back windows winked with lantern light.  The lantern was the only light at all on the moonless night, a night so dark that Tasia could hardly see her own hand when she held it out in front of her face.

Just when it seemed that Brick and Goran would never return, a new light bobbed away from the farmhouse and towards the grove.  Ammanta took half a step forward, adjusting the grip on her pike.  Tasia already held one dagger; she handed the other one to Linna.

“Be ready,” she whispered.  “Just in case.”

Linna nodded seriously, and Tasia squeezed the girl’s shoulder.

But their caution was unnecessary.  When the circle of lamplight came near enough, it illuminated only Goran.

Holding the lamp at his side as he did, only half his face was visible; the other was covered in shadows.  Tasia tried to read the half that she could see, searching it for some sign of success or failure, but the trouble with reading Goran’s face was that he always wore a perpetual scowl.  His expression was always the same, whether irritated, frightened, or elated.

She’d come to trust Y’Farsil’s former translator, relying upon him almost as much as she did Brick and Alric, but unlike those two, Goran maintained a cool distance from Tasia — and from the rest of Tasia’s trusted inner circle.  The only person Goran occasionally smiled at was Linna, and at first Tasia worried he harbored some kind of desires towards the scrawny teen, but eventually Tasia realized his posture towards her was more protective older brother than anything else.  Realizing that only made Tasia appreciate him all the more.

Goran stopped a few feet from the three women.  “Everything is ready for you, Empress.”

“Did many people come?” Tasia asked.

He turned away to lead them to the farmhouse.  “You’ll see.”

Goran walked in the direction he’d come from, lantern illuminating the ground at their feet, and the women followed.  As had become their custom, Ammanta walked a pace in front of Tasia, Linna walked a pace behind.

Tasia’s eyes widened in surprise when Goran opened the farmhouse door.

Did many people come? would have been better phrased as Did any of the villagers not come?  The farmhouse was so packed with bodies that when Goran opened the door, there wasn’t even room to step inside.  Granted, the main room inside the farmhouse was not exceedingly large — its patchwork of different colored walls and floorboards indicated it had been expanded over the years as the family that owned it grew, but its central room was still hardly any bigger than Tasia’s antechamber in the palace.  Nevertheless, at first glance, Tasia guessed there were at least four score men, women, and teens inside, crammed together shoulder-to-shoulder like so many apples packed into a barrel.

Standing on a stool at the front of the room was Brick, and from the look of the way the villagers faced him, he’d been working his magic tongue and had their rapt attention.  But when the door opened, he stopped speaking mid-sentence and met Tasia’s eye.

“She’s here, my friends,” Brick told the crowd.

A ripple of gasps, whispers, and murmurs moved through them; heads turned towards the door as eyes sought out the daughter of their beloved late Emperor, the daughter who had been branded a traitor by the corrupt men who would steal the crown for themselves.

At least, that was what Tasia hoped their eyes were seeking.

An older woman close to the farmhouse door supported herself on the arm of the man next to her and, with some difficulty, went down to one knee.  She bowed her head.  The man who had supported her glanced left and right, hesitated, then did the same.

The rest of the room followed suit — an entire village of men and women in one room, kneeling, practically one atop the other, before an exiled royal.

Well.  Apparently Brick’s golden tongue had been just as effective in Harker Falls as it had been in Arthur’s Ferry.

The sight of the entire village kneeling made Tasia emotional, and she had to swallow down a lump in her throat.

She walked through the crowded room towards the place where Brick stood atop the stool, and the crowd parted for her.  She still wore men’s breeches, riding boots, and leather armor over a plain tunic — not the fine clothing an Empress was meant to wear — but she’d managed to clean both herself and her clothes before their journey to Harker Falls, and the smith in Arthur’s Ferry had crafted a simple steel circlet with an amethyst set in its center to wear as a crown.  It reminded Tasia of the crown her father used to wear when he wanted to project strength.  And that was what Tasia wanted the villagers before her to see as she made her way down the center of the room.  Not an Empress who approached them in silks with a painted face and coiffed hair, but an Empress who was ready to fight — to fight for them.

With a nod, Brick stepped off and helped Tasia on.

“People of Harker Falls,” she said, “please rise.”

Feet shuffled against floorboards as the room stood back up.

“Is it true?” someone near the back shouted.  “Is you really her?”

Tasia slipped the ring with the crest of the House of Dorsa from her finger and held it high.  She still wasn’t sure how Linna had managed to save it for her on the day that she was captured, but she was glad to still have it.  The villagers’ eyes followed the ring, eliciting more gasps.

“My name is Natasia of House Dorsa, daughter of Andreth the Just and Crestienne the Fair.”

“It’s true,” a woman called.  “I went to Port Lorsin once.  I saw her at the Midsummer Festival, giving out the boon with her brother.”

“That was ten years ago, Taluann,” an older man said.  “The Princess would’ve been just a girl.”

“She has the same face,” Taluann insisted.

Discussion broke out in the farmhouse, with some arguing that they had no way of knowing if Tasia was really who she said she was or just a pretender, others arguing that it was definitely her.  Some said the ring itself was proof — it was illegal for anyone outside the House of Dorsa to own anything with the House’s double-eagle crest on it.  Others argued that it wouldn’t be hard to forge such a ring.  Tasia caught another conversation in which one woman said she’d bought a painting of the royal family from a tinker and the woman before her didn’t much resemble the Tasia from the portrait; her companion argued that everyone knew tinkers couldn’t be trusted.

Tasia lifted her voice above the debating villagers.  “You can choose to believe whatever you wish,” she said.  By the time she arrived at the word believe, the room grew still again.  “What should matter to you more than who rules you is how they rule you.”  She glanced at Brick.  “My friend Quinn of Easthook has told you of the true situation in the East — ”

“He told us fairy tales!” a man shouted.  “Shadows and the Cult of Culo and murderous mountain men!  There’s more truth in the bedtime stories I tell me wains!”

“As I said,” Tasia continued calmly, “Quinn told you the truth of what’s happening in the East, but you can choose to believe what you wish.”  She waited to see if there would be another interruption, but there was not.  “I am Natasia of House Dorsa, the rightful Empress, but you don’t have to believe that.  You also don’t have to believe what Quinn told you about the Brotherhood of Culo and the shadows that threaten our Empire — I confess that I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.  But what you do know to be true from your own magistrate is that a delegation ten-thousand strong marches to the eastern front at this very moment, and when they arrive, the Empire will lose a full third of its lands in the East.”  She scanned the room, meeting the eyes of the villagers one by one.  Regardless of whether they believed she was who she said or not, they were listening closely now.  “The East supplies almost all the grain in the Capital Lands.  Without House Druet, House Fontan, and House Pellon, grain prices will rise above — ”

“They’ve already risen!” a woman interjected.

“Aye,” said the man next to her.  “We could only afford half what we normally buy the last time the merchant came through.  And that’s not even counting the new taxes.”

“Begging pardon, ma’am — Princess Natasia, or whoever you are,” said a worn-looking farmer near the front of the room.  “The War in the East has had prices up for years now.  Having prices go up a bit more…”  He glanced around at his neighbors.  “Well, it’s the way o’ things.  And it ain’t worth a rebellion.  We’ll tighten our belts like we always have.”

Tasia shook her head.  “I’m not talking about tightening your belts.  I’m talking about famine.  And famine will only be the beginning.”

The crowd grew restless at this, talking and arguing amongst themselves.

Tasia let the chatter go on for a few seconds before she spoke again.

“I can stop it,” Tasia said, but they didn’t hear her, so she said it again, louder this time.  “I can stop it, I can protect you from the worst of it — I will protect you from the worst of it.  But I need your help.”

“No offense intended, ma’am,” said the same worn farmer, “but how are you s’posin you’re going to protect us?”

“Because I’m going to teach you how to protect yourselves from those who would treat you like the most expendable pieces on the board of a game of Castles and Knights.”  Tasia reached into the leather vest she was wearing and pulled out Wise Man Rakin’s tattered copy of Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations.  “Did your Wise Man teach you this book?”

Now she had their attention again.  The villagers in the front leaned closer to read the title, passed it back to the rest of the crowd.

“Aye, he did!” called a young man in the back.  “He’s been using the Rules to teach us our letters for a generation or two.  ’S probably why so many of us stopped our studyin’ at level three.”

That earned a chuckle from the crowd.  Wise Man Rewan’s Rules Governing Conduct Between Stations was often the text that Wise Men used as a reading primer for commoners, which made it one of the most widely read books in the Empire.  But it was also used to justify a great many things, like harsh punishments for offenses as minor as a commoner spitting or coughing in the direction of a highborn.

“We only use the Rules as outhouse paper!” another woman said.  More laughter — some of it raucous this time.

Tasia opened the book up, scanning down the page for the passage she was looking for.

“Don’t tell us you’re going to read it to us,” said the young man in the back, “tell us we gotta support you ’cause you carry the name o’ Dorsa.”

“No, that’s not what I wanted to read to you,” Tasia said, marking the page with her finger.  “I wanted to read you something else.  You probably know the first part.”

She began to read.

The highborn and the lowborn are equally important to the health of the Empire, and their lives are intertwined in symbiotic benefit.  The highborn govern, protect, and ensure justice, while the lowborn work the fields, herd the cattle, construct buildings, city walls, and the like.  In a family, members depend upon one another — husbands depend upon wives, wives upon husbands, both upon children.  In the same way, the great family of the Empire depends upon all its members.  The highborn are like —

“Yes, yes, we know already,” the young man called.  “The highborn are like our ma and pa, with the House of Dorsa being like the honored grandparents what watch over the whole family, blah-tee-blah-tee-blah.”

A few of the friends around him laughed.

“You think you know this book,” Tasia told the man, raising her voice.  “But none you have ever been taught that there are actually two versions of this Wise Man Rewan’s book — one for commoners and another for highborn.”  She held the book up for all to see, tapping a symbol on its spine.  “You see this mark?  The eagle of the House of Dorsa?  That means that this is the version that only the highborn are allowed to read, the version with sections that have been kept secret from you your whole lives.”

The room fell silent.

“After the part you already know — the part about the highborn as parents and the lowborn as children,” Tasia said, “there’s this section:

The lowborn must be kept dependent and, at least to a certain extent, fearful, lest they realize that they always have and always will outnumber the highborn.  The highborn must take care not to abuse the lowborn, because just as an abused child will eventually lash out at his father, so even the less intelligent lowborn, if abused, will lash out at the highborn.  And if this happens, the lowborn will realize that they have greater power than they ever realized.”

Tasia stopped reading, looking up from the book to find every eye in the room on her.  It was a gamble, she knew — a gamble that could easily backfire on her.

The young man in the back was the one to break the tense silence.  “It don’t really say that.”  But he was uncertain.  Tasia could hear it in his voice.

“It says exactly that,” Tasia said.  She stepped off the stool, handing the book to the nearest villager, a woman heavy with child.  The woman took the book and, with one hand on her pregnant belly, mouthed the syllables silently as she read.  Three other young women crowded around her, craning their necks to get a better look.

“It’s true!” one of them announced to the room a moment later.  “It says that!”

The book traveled from villager to villager, each of them stunned by the unfamiliar passage in the one book that they had probably all read.

Tasia climbed back on top of the stool.  “Our Empire is healthy when we all do our own job, when we all respect one another,” she said.  “But right now, something is broken.  Something at the very core of Port Lorsin’s palace is rotten, and it will destroy us all, highborn and lowborn, if that rot is not excised.  My father loved the people of the Empire — all the people of the Empire, lowborn and highborn alike.”  Emotion unexpectedly surged through her, and she paused long enough to gain control of herself.  “He wouldn’t give up on the War in the East because he refused to make our people vulnerable.  But the men who are ruling you right now — the Wise Man who calls himself the ‘Regent,’ and the lords who helped him to betray my father — they do not have your best interests in mind.  They would gladly sell all the East if it means they can line their own purses with gold, if they can bask a little longer in the sun of the House of Dorsa by stealing its crown for themselves.  Mark my words, people of Harker Falls:  They will let you starve while they eat well.  They will let you die while they shut themselves safely inside their castles and surround themselves with soldiers.  Their short-sighted foolishness will kill us all — including them, but by the time they realize that, it will be too late.”

The villagers were quiet.  It was as if each one held their breath, waiting for something but not knowing what they waited for.

“You’re powerful,” Tasia said.  “You can be the knife that cuts out the rot before it spoils the entire Empire.”

They glanced amongst themselves, uncertain.

“What is it ye need us to do?” asked the grizzle-faced farmer who had spoken earlier.  “Surely yer not thinkin’ we can take on the Imperial Army?”

“No, I wouldn’t be so careless with your lives.”  Tasia spoke her next words slowly and carefully. “I need you to help me start a riot.  A very large, very destructive, riot.”

“A riot in Harker Falls?” asked one of the pregnant woman’s friends skeptically.  “We’re barely big enough to earn a label on the map.  Even if we do riot, no one’s much like to notice.”

“I know,” Tasia said.  “That’s why I need your help.  Our riot has to spread to every town and every village north of Port Lorsin.  Every magistrate needs to fear for his life and send messengers to the capital for help; every town guardsman needs to either be on our side or fleeing for safety.  We have to force Port Lorsin’s city guard out from behind the capital’s walls and spread them out deep into the countryside, and we need to do it within the next fortnight.”

“Why a fortnight?” a man asked.

“Because,” said Tasia.  “In a fortnight, the fall council meetings begin.  And I intend to be there.  If you don’t want to starve this winter, if you don’t want your family to starve, you will help me stop what’s coming before it’s too late.”

More discussion and debate broke out amongst the villagers, and Tasia held her breath until Brick caught her eye and gave her a reassuring nod.  The tide of common opinion was turning in their favor, his nod said.  No one could read a crowd the way Brick could, so Tasia started to breathe again.  Arthur’s Ferry was already theirs, so was Torrick Dam.  Harker Falls was the next village south, and if they could win this village over, it shouldn’t be too hard to win the little villages and hamlets that spread out west of here.

For once, Tasia had a plan that seemed to actually be working.

38

For some reason, it amused Ty’Tsana to no end to watch Joslyn’s attempts at regaining enough control over her sliver of a q’isson to dreamwalk again.  Some part of Joslyn already knew it was a futile effort; she’d run out of tea weeks ago and, although she had accidentally formed the fragmented q’isson during her desperate fight with Ty’Tsana, she certainly hadn’t gained mastery over it.  The q’isson mostly just followed her, a silent, emotionless observer while Joslyn and her prisoner trekked ever-northward.

Joslyn, meanwhile, grew more and more frustrated with the q’isson’s presence.  In truth, she was frustrated with everything — she was frustrated with the q’isson, frustrated that she still hadn’t found any sign of the small men, and, perhaps most of all, she was frustrated that she was forced to endure the wordless self-satisfaction of the captive she’d never wanted.

“You do realize that I could spare you your angst if you would just let me teach you,” Ty’Tsana said one night as Joslyn went through the nightly ritual of tying her to a birch tree.

“I don’t need your tutelage.”

“No?  That’s why you’ve been dreamwalking each night?”

Of course, Joslyn hadn’t dreamwalked at all.  If she had, she would know where Tasia was.  She would know if Tasia had taken her advice and found Brick in Arthur’s Ferry, or if she was lying dead and desiccated in the Great Desert.

“I don’t know why I bother feeding you,” Joslyn said by way of response.  “Having a prisoner only slows me down.  You’re a liability.”

She didn’t usually do this — respond when Ty’Tsana initiated conversation.  But she was in a particularly foul mood that night.  Early in the day, she’d allowed herself to hope when she saw a boulder marked with a rune, but when she’d gotten close enough to it to inspect it, she realized the “rune” was only smeared leaf mold that, for a moment in the tricky light of early morning, had seemed like something it wasn’t.  She’d found nothing the rest of the day, save some scat that she took to belong to a bear — never a good sign.  At this time of year, bears ate as much as they could to fatten themselves before their winter hibernation.  Joslyn and her prisoner might look like an excellent addition to the bear’s belly.  And to top it all off, Joslyn would have to hunt again soon.  Now that she was feeding two people instead of one, the rabbits, squirrels, birds, and other small creatures of the mountains didn’t last as long as they once did, and winter meant they were all becoming more scarce.

“You can admit that you keep me with you because you think you can learn something from me,” Ty’Tsana said, and for once she sounded as irritable as Joslyn usually did.  She was probably as tired of the aimless wandering in the Zaris Mountains as Joslyn was.  “And because you think you’ll be able to use me as a negotiating piece when more members of the Order arrive.  But my companions will kill you before you can even open your mouth to negotiate.”

“Your threats are empty,” Joslyn said.  “If your people were coming for me, they would have been here by now.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Ty’Tsana shot back.  “You hold yourself as a master at your craft, yet my sister and I tracked you for days without you ever noticing me.”

I am a sword master, not a woodsman, Joslyn thought to herself, but she didn’t say it aloud.  There was no reason for Joslyn to let Ty’Tsana know that she was merely passingly competent at surviving and tracking in the mountains and not precisely an expert.

“Do you want me dead or do you want to teach me the shadow arts?”  Joslyn jerked the final knot into place and rose to loom over Ty’Tsana.  “One moment you want to be my tutor, the next my executioner.”

“If you would let me teach you, I might not need to kill you,” Ty’Tsana said.  “The Order of Targhan could use someone of your skill.”

“I have no interest in the shadow arts and even less in your ‘Order.’”

“You are more interested than you pretend,” Ty’Tsana said.  “You think I do not detect your attempt to manipulate your q’isson each day?  All you require is a little direction.”

Joslyn turned away from Ty’Tsana, concentrating on building the night’s fire.  She couldn’t be sure if the fragment of her q’isson thrummed with energy in response to Ty’Tsana’s words, or if the pulse of its excitement was simply her imagination.

“Even if I cared to ask you about the shadow arts,” Joslyn said after a few minutes of silence, “I wouldn’t trust a word that left your mouth.”

“Then it is your loss.”

The silence stretched on for an hour and more, long enough for the last of the sun to disappear, long enough for Joslyn to cook a bland stew of rabbit and mushroom.

Normally, Joslyn let the fire die down after they’d eaten, keeping it fueled just enough that it would warn off any potential predators for whom two human women might look like a meal.  But tonight she kept a small blaze going, sharpening the end of a stick with her boot dagger as the fire crackled.  She held it up after a few minutes of this, nodding to herself in satisfaction.  Then she dipped the pointy end of the stick into the flames just long enough for the the tip to catch fire.  Joslyn pulled the stick free and shook it until the flames went out.

“Please tell me you’re not going to try torturing me again.”  Ty’Tsana sounded more annoyed and tired than frightened.

“No.”

Joslyn searched around the camp for a few minutes, turning over rocks until she found what she was looking for.

“What are you doing?” Ty’Tsana asked as she watched.

“This,” Joslyn answered.  She brushed the dirt and moss off the flat side of the rock she’d found, then drew a stylized sun on it with the charcoal end of her stick.  After she drew the sun, she drew a serpent around it.

She held it up for Ty’Tsana to see, and didn’t miss the flicker of recognition in the woman’s eyes before Ty’Tsana asked, “And what is that supposed to be?”

“You tell me,” Joslyn said.  “Is it the crest of your precious Order?”

“Yes.”

“Yet neither you nor your partner were wearing a pendant with this symbol when you attacked me.  Why?”

Ty’Tsana hesitated, and Joslyn watched her closely.  Something flashed across the woman’s face — deliberation?  She was making a decision about whether or not to answer… or perhaps… whether she should answer honestly?  Joslyn couldn’t quite tell.

Finally she spoke.  “Some of us must remain more discreet than others.”

“One of your kind attempted to murder Natasia of House Dorsa in Paratheen.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason Kerranna and I attempted to murder you,” Ty’Tsana said.

“Which is what?” Joslyn pressed.

She opened her mouth to answer, and then didn’t.  “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might be an ignorant ex-slave nomad, but I’m not an imbecile,” Joslyn said.  “Explain why your Order seeks Tasia’s death and mine.”

“Because our seers say that if you both live, you will give the Brotherhood what it wants.”

Joslyn said nothing, waiting for Ty’Tsana to say more.  The woman wanted to talk, Joslyn knew.  Like all true fanatics, she itched to win Joslyn to her side, to convince Joslyn of the righteousness of her cause.

And after another minute, Joslyn’s waiting paid off.

“Shadows were once a part of humankind, you know,” Ty’Tsana said.  “They were the spirits that lived inside each of us, guiding and supporting us.  It was the earliest members of the Brotherhood — in ancient times before they called themselves that — who separated man from shadow.  Outside of us, manifest in physical form in the mortal world, the Brothers realized the shadows would quickly grow more powerful than what they could control.  And so they created the Shadowlands, a purgatorial prison, where they could exploit the powers of the shadows once more without being overwhelmed by them.”

Ty’Tsana paused, probably expecting Joslyn to object or ask a question, but Joslyn was silent.  She was listening to Ty’Tsana’s tale, but she was also aware of her q’isson, which seemed to have expanded as Ty’Tsana spoke.

“All the Order seeks is the restoration of what should naturally already be,” Ty’Tsana said.  “That is what ‘Order’ means — the natural order.  The true organizing principle of humankind and shadow-kind.”

“And Targhan?  What does that mean?”

Ty’Tsana’s face changed to something both wistful and reverent.  “The one you call ‘undatai.’  In the Old Tongue we say Targhan — the shadow who shows the way.  The visionary who has never grown weary of fighting for reunification, who only grows stronger as the centuries pass.”

Yes, Joslyn’s q’isson seemed to whisper to her, vibrating its energy in a way that made Joslyn think of an excited child, exuberant and anticipatory.

“That is what the Brotherhood did not anticipate, and why they have sworn themselves to preventing the reunification,” Ty’Tsana said.  “The very Shadowlands they created to protect themselves wrote their own doom, because inside that realm, the shadows have only grown stronger, have only increased their number.”

Joslyn thought of her own bargain with the undatai, the promise she had made to give her physical body as a vessel.  The rest of her, she knew without asking, the part of her that was not physical but only mind, consciousness, would stay forever in the Shadowlands.  She would become one of them.

She shivered.

“Don’t you see?” Ty’Tsana said, tone urgent.  “The Brotherhood seeks to manipulate Natasia.  It seeks to turn her into its puppet for the sole purpose of keeping the Shadowlands intact.  And they will manipulate you, too, if you are not careful.”

Joslyn considered this a moment.  She had no love for the Brotherhood of Culo — or for any practitioners of the shadow arts, for that matter.  Yet there was Ku-sai, who had somehow preserved a piece of himself within the Shadowlands long enough to pass on a rune-inscribed blade to Joslyn.  And there was Tasmyn, who had told Joslyn that not all the inhabitants of the Shadowlands were so eager for their realm to be destroyed.

And there were the survivors of Deerpark Pass.

And the unfortunate soldier Joslyn had slain in Paratheen.

Something about the shadows “reunifying” with human hosts felt rotten to Joslyn, like milk long curdled.

Ty’Tsana took Joslyn’s pensive silence as a sign that she might be winning her argument.  She shifted, sitting up straighter against the tree trunk.

“Joslyn,” she said emphatically, “we don’t need to be enemies.  If only you would open yourself to the beautiful symbiosis that is possible with your shadows, you would see that.  Reunion is all the shadows have ever wished for.  You can give them that reunion — we all can — without losing yourself in the process.”

Joslyn thought she understood what Ty’Tsana was saying, and it sickened her.   The ghost of her q’isson seemed to understand it, too, and it quivered with the same enthusiasm it had before.

Unite with shadows?  Never.  That was the last thing Joslyn wanted.

“So you would have me fulfill the bargain I made with the undatai early, and offer up my body to it,” she said flatly.

Ty’Tsana didn’t answer immediately, seeming to choose her next words carefully.  “When a man and woman marry, does the union ensure the destruction of the individual?  Or does it provide an avenue to make each one stronger?”

Joslyn nearly laughed at the analogy.  Using it demonstrated that Ty’Tsana understood Joslyn less than she assumed.  But she wanted to keep Ty’Tsana talking, so she flashed back to the one betrothment she had watched happen — Tasia had agreed to marry Mace of House Gifford with the words I suppose he’ll do.  It hadn’t exactly been a ringing endorsement, and yet those words had filled Joslyn’s gut with a fire of jealousy that eventually left behind only the cold ashes of bitterness.

Would marrying Mace make Tasia stronger?  Joslyn doubted it.

“It depends on the marriage,” Joslyn said at last.

“That is precisely correct.”  Ty’Tsana gave an approving nod.  It irritated Joslyn.  “The more a wife fights a husband, the more he must exert force to control her.  And the more you fight your shadows, Joslyn, the more they will be forced to assert themselves over you.  But if you simply — ”

“Do not speak to me of husbands controlling wives,” Joslyn said coldly.  “And do not speak as though I am a headstrong bride of a shadow who would be my lord.”

“You miss my point,” Ty’Tsana said.  “If you are not interested in symbiosis, in union, then you are only interested in being dominated.  This is what those who fight the shadows soon learn.”

The soldier, Joslyn thought.  He’d fought the shadow inhabiting him, numbing his mind with Terintan whiskey, trying to keep it away.  But in the end, it had won the battle.

Would that be her fate?

Ty’Tsana leaned towards Joslyn as far as the rope around her torso would allow.  “You’ve been misled by the ignorance of others — misled by your ku-sai, the Brotherhood, your sister, by that reckless old seer in Paratheen.  The Order of Targhan is not the enemy of the Empire.  We are the opposite of an enemy — we are dedicated to building a better world, the world that existed before the Shadowlands, when mankind and shadow lived together in harmony.  You can be a part of what’s right instead of following those who have deceived you.  You can join us.”

Joslyn’s lip curled back into a snarl.  “I will never join you.”

Yet in that disembodied space above and behind her, the fragment of the q’isson danced with an unmistakable kind of joy.  And although the q’isson was separate from Joslyn, it was also a part of her somehow, connected to her.  Like an infection, that tainted joy flowed from the q’isson into Joslyn, even though she tried not to feel it.

Symbiosis, the sliver of the q’isson said.  Union.

Power.

Ty’Tsana was watching her again, studying her, waiting for… something.  Something Joslyn would not give her — would never give her.  She turned her back on the woman, stretching out on the ground beside the fire.  It was time to sleep — or at least to try to.

It was probably because of her prisoner, who would be deadly if she got free, that Joslyn slept so lightly.  An hour or two before dawn, some internal alarm bell woke Joslyn from full sleep to full wakefulness.

Something — someone? — was watching her from the black shadows of the trees beyond the campsite.  Joslyn wasted no time puzzling out why the hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stood erect; she was on her feet, sword drawn, before she’d even had a chance to process the fact that she was now awake.

The bear, she thought, planting her feet into mountain in preparation of a charge coming from the direction of the trees.

No, not the bear, her q’isson whispered.  The small men.  They’re here.

39

At the main gate in Port Lorsin’s north-facing wall, the gate that was the main thoroughfare for local farmers and merchants coming into the city each day to set up their carts and booths in the capital city’s market squares, it was time for the changing of the guard.  But the relief was running late.

In normal times, there were six city guardsmen on gate duty, three on each side.  The three on the right made sure that the farmers, winemakers, and merchants who drove their carts and carried their bundles into the city looked orderly and unsuspicious; the three on the left made sure all the folk exiting paid their gate tax.  When Emperor Andreth the Just still lived, the gate tax was a single copper penny.

But the Emperor was dead, and these days, the people grumbled now as they gave not one but three copper pennies to the single guard manning the gate’s left side.

“’Tis the War in the East,” said the left-hand guard.  “The Emperor — may the gods watch over him — ran our coffers to empty payin’ for it.  The Regent’s only tryin’ to get us back to where we were.”

The guard held out his open palm, and the farmer passing by him muttered complaints under his breath despite the explanation.  His eyes darted left and right before he reached into his hidden purse and produced two more grimy copper discs.

“I know, brother,” the guard said sympathetically as he accepted the two extra pennies and slipped them inside his vest.  “Times’ll get better.  You’ll see.”

The farmer replied with a comment that was inaudible to the baker’s girl who was listening just outside the gate, still waiting in line to be let into the city.

Whatever the farmer said, it made the guard grimace.

“Aye, some fools riot over nothin’ a’tall,” the guard said.  “But me mates’ll make it all end soon enough.”

The baker’s girl’s ear caught on the word riot.  That was all anybody around the capital city could talk about these days — riots, riots, riots.  Some rioted over the new taxes, some rioted over the grain shortages, especially worrisome this close to winter.  Still others rioted in the name of Natasia of House Dorsa, the missing princess, the one some said was Emperor Andreth’s rightful heir.

Regardless of why they rioted, the entire Capital Lands north of Port Lorsin had been engulfed in the spreading chaos over the last few weeks.  That was why there was such a traffic jam at Port Lorsin’s gate; for every two guards who remained in the city, the other four had been sent out to quell the unrest.  These days, it seemed not even the smallest hamlet had escaped the rabble-rousers and rebels.

And that thought made the baker’s girl grin, because she was a bit of a rebel herself.

The line in front of her inched forward.  She peered around the sack of apples slung over the shoulder of the woman in front of her, trying to see what the hold-up was.

Not only was there only one city guard instead of three on this side of the gate, but he was also taking the time to do a quick inspection of every apple sack, wine barrel, and egg crate that passed him.  The sight surprised the baker’s girl somewhat; they didn’t normally check so carefully on this side of the city.  But then again, these weren’t normal times.  For all the guard knew, the woman with the apple sack could be one of the leaders of the rabble.

Or the baker’s girl might be, for that matter.

“Oi!” shouted the man in line behind her.  “What’s taking so long?”

The baker’s girl turned halfway.  The man was tall and gaunt, a large pack strapped to his back.  When he spoke, he revealed that most of his teeth were missing, and the ones that remained were yellowed and crooked.  Children as gaunt as he who came up to his waist stood one on either side of him, each holding wooden crates that looked far too big for them.  Nestled inside the straw lining of each box were finely carved, finely painted wooden dolls.  A toymaker, then — his high-quality goods standing in odd contrast to his rough appearance.  He would be heading to a market square in one of the city’s nicer quarters, the baker’s girl guessed.  The Ambassador’s Quarter, perhaps, beyond the palace’s Sunfall Gate, or maybe the Garden Quarter, which stood on the palace’s eastern side.

They were both quarters that the baker’s girl knew well.

“Easy, mate.  Peace,” said the man behind the toymaker.  His features marked him as Terintan, and he held the reins of a donkey laden with bolts of apa-apa wool.  A tinker?  Tinkers didn’t typically trade wool, but on the other hand, the man didn’t look much like a nomad.  Nomads didn’t travel with donkeys.

“With only two guards on the gate,” the tinker continued softly, “they don’t bother to sort out who’s causing trouble.  They just drop the portcullis for the lot of us and don’t open again ’til the morn.”

“I’m not yer ‘mate,’ ye dirty nomad,” the toymaker snarled, but he did so without raising his voice, and he didn’t shout at the guard a second time.

“All the riots have them checking for weapons,” the tinker continued.  “And anything that might start a fire.  Ye ain’t got a flint in your bag, do ye?  They’ll be lookin’ for that.”

The tinker — he had to be a tinker — had an odd way of speaking.  Port Lorsin dialect tinged with a Terintan accent.  He must have traveled a regular route between Port Lorsin and Terinto.

The baker’s girl neatly shifted her basket of bread to one arm so that she could reach beneath it to pat the daggers hidden under her plain brown dress without the motion being noticed.  They were still well-hidden.  But she doubted the guard would pat her down anyway.  Since when could a baker’s girl be a threat to the city’s security?

The baker’s girl leaned out of line, searching the impatient faces behind the toymaker, the tinker’s donkey, and the tinker.  Finally she found the face she was looking for — a round, lined face framed by a red-brown beard.  The man caught her eye and gave her a subtle nod.

I heard, the nod said.  Don’t worry; we won’t be caught.

The rest of the swords and daggers and sharpened scythes — the most they’d been able to gather from a countryside that wasn’t used to carrying weapons — were hidden below the crates and barrels of Harker Fall’s autumn harvest.  Olive and freshly pressed olive oil, mostly, along with some pomegranates, eggplants, and garlic.  Some of the garlic at the bottom had begun to rot, and the baker’s girl figured that the scent alone would be enough to prevent the guards from checking the raggedy human-pulled cart too carefully.

She faced forward again, watching the guard’s cursory inspection of the wagon full of wine barrels three places in front of him.  The man with the red-brown beard was right; they wouldn’t be caught.  The guard was clearly overwhelmed, going through the motions of an inspection rather than actually checking.  It was clear that he didn’t expect to find anything, so he probably wouldn’t.

And after all, who would have the gall to start a riot in the capital city, the place that, even with two-thirds of the city guard missing, was still better protected than anywhere else in the Empire?  People that daring were either extraordinarily foolish or extraordinarily courageous.

The baker’s girl wondered which one she was.

The guard looked her up and down, pausing on her basket of fresh bread.  He quirked an eyebrow.  “Ye deliverin’ bread, then?”

“Yes, sir,” the baker’s girl said with appropriate meekness.

His face screwed into skepticism.  “Bread deliveries never come in to Port Lorsin.  They don’t usually even go out.”

The baker’s girl had prepared herself for this question.  “We trade with one of the bakers inside the city.  He makes pastries and sweet cakes; we only bake regular loaves.  He sells our loaves to Port Lorsin and we sell his sweet cakes in our village.”

The guard only grunted, not convinced.  He held out his hand for the basket, and the baker’s girl handed it over willingly.  If she was a real baker’s girl, she would cringe when he pulled back the cloth and rummaged through the fresh loaves of bread, paying little mind to how he damaged them.  So she cringed when that’s what he did.

He handed the basket back to her.  “You can go.”

The baker’s girl gave him a respectful nod.

She walked past the guard, relief coursing through her even though it was as easy as she’d expected it to be, glancing over her shoulder to see how much longer her bearded companion might have to wait.

But she should have been facing forward.  Then she would’ve seen that she was about to run  right into the two guards who had finally arrived to relieve the men on the gate.

“Oi, mate!  Sorry we’re — ” one of the new guards was in the midst of yelling.

He and the baker’s girl collided.  The basket took the worst of the blow, creaking and warping as it smashed simultaneously into the guard’s stomach and the ribcage of the baker’s girl.  It twisted sideways, dumping half its contents onto the cobblestones.  The guard gave a grunt of surprise, the baker’s girl let out a soft “Unff” as the collision partially knocked the air from her lungs.

But she recovered swiftly, mumbling an apology and crouching almost immediately to retrieve the dropped loaves.

“Apologies ’bout that, lass,” the guard said, also squatting down to help clean up the spill.  “Yer such a wisp of a thing that I didn’t even…”

He trailed off, and the baker’s girl didn’t have to lift her eyes to his face to know he was staring at her.  She didn’t want to look at him, she’d avoided looking at anyone directly since she first arrived in the hamlets that spread out in an arc outside of Port Lorsin, but the force of his stare finally made her glance up.

It was Mack.  The same guard who’d saved her life once, and then had nearly raped her.

Of all the city guardsmen the baker’s girl could have crashed into, she’d crashed into the only one likely to recognize her instantly.

His face exhibited much of the same astonished stupidity that it had held the last time she’d seen him, the time he realized the girl he’d taken as a whore was actually the eldest Princess of the House of Dorsa.

“Oi…” he said slowly, his eyes sweeping across Tasia’s features.

His gaze darted up, from Tasia to the guard on the gate, the one a few paces behind her.

He opened his mouth to speak again, probably to shout for help, but Tasia spoke first.

“You owe me,” she hissed.

They had saved each other’s life once, when Evrart’s assassin had almost succeeded in killing her and Mack and his patrol mate Dawkin had interrupted the murder entirely on accident.  But Tasia could’ve had the would-be hero hung for what had happened afterwards.  She never told her father about that part, and Mack had to know he still lived for that reason.

Mack narrowed his eyes.  “I already paid my debt, remember?  A life for a life.”  He meant the trial, when he’d told the council that Tasia hadn’t faked the assassination attempt.  “It’s twenty gold regal for whoever turns you in.  Twenty.  I’ll never have to work a day in me life again.”

“I’ll give you forty if you keep your mouth shut.”

It wouldn’t be the first time the guardsman had profited from keeping mum about seeing Tasia disguised as a baker’s girl.

He held out a hand, palm up.

She pursed her lips.  “I don’t have it now.”  She stopped herself before she could add, You idiot.

“Mack?” said the guard on the gate.  “You here to relieve me or flirt?”

Tasia glared at Mack.  Hold your tongue, her expression said.  But she had no leverage.  They both knew it.

Mack glanced up at the guard waiting expectantly.  “What’s the harm in doin’ both at once?” he asked jovially.  Then he looked back to Tasia and lowered his voice.  “Fifty.  People say times’ll be bad soon.  Fifty’s enough to ride out whatever’s coming.”

“Fine,” Tasia snapped.  “Fifty.”

“Tonight,” Mack said.  “The guard post at the edge of the Ambassador’s Quarter where ye met me before.”

“I can’t get it by tonight,” Tasia said.

“Then at week’s end,” said Mack.  “When the crier calls one-of-the-clock.”

“Fine,” she said again, though only Mother Moon knew if she would have her life, let alone fifty gold regals, by the end of the week.  She would worry about that later.

Mack picked up a loaf of rye and studied it pensively as he spoke.  “If ye don’t show up with me regals, I’ll make sure everyone will know yer here.  From me daffy old mother to the Regent hisself.  Everyone.”

Tasia said nothing, keeping her expression tight.  Better for him to think his threat frightened her.  If things went according to plan, the Regent would know Tasia was in the city well before Mack had a chance to blab.  Knowing Tasia was in the city would be the last thing the Regent knew before the noose slipped around his neck.

Mack gestured at Tasia with the loaf of rye.  “Mind if I keep this?  I’m guessin’ ye don’t actually need it.”  He took a bite from it before she could answer.

“Mack!” called the guard at the gate.

Mack stood.  “Quit yer whinin’ already, yer voice is so high when you complain that ye sound like a wee girl.  I’m on me way.”

Tasia rose hastily, holding the basket of bread before her like a shield.

Mack stepped around her.  “Week’s end.  One-of-the-clock,” he said into her ear before striding past.

Tasia walked southward down the avenue as casually as she could, resisting the urge to hurry.  She didn’t stop until she was several blocks away, finally sliding into a narrow alleyway between two rickety, multi-storied residences.  She pressed her back against one of them, tilting her head skyward as she drew in a long breath and let it out again.  Above her, the upper stories of the buildings seemed to lean towards each other.  Maybe it was an optical illusion, but maybe the two buildings were truly so shoddily built that they couldn’t help but bend like flower stalks.  Tasia closed her eyes, because illusion or not, it made her dizzy to look at.

“Empress?” said a soft voice from the alley’s mouth.

Tasia opened her eyes, relieved to see Brick standing a few feet away.  He wore a disconcerted expression, probably because she hadn’t stuck to the plan of waiting for him only two blocks away.

“A guard recognized me,” she said, anticipating his question.  “I had to promise him fifty gold regals by week’s end to convince him not to sound the alarm.”

He gave Tasia a lopsided grin.  “Ye’ll have access to the whole o’the Empire’s treasury by week’s end,” he said.  “Is it true there’s a room in the palace so full o’ gold ye can swim in it?”

Tasia laughed, the last of her tension trickling away.  “No.”

Brick’s mouth twisted in mock disappointment.  “That’s too bad.  I was lookin’ forward to seein’ that room.”  Changing the subject, he added, “Did ye notice?  Only two guards on the gate.”

Tasia nodded.  “It worked.  At least two-thirds of the guard is outside the city.”

“That’s what they get for sendin’ what’s left o’ the Imperial Army out with your grandda.  No one left to take care o’ the home front.  Ye did good, Empress.”

Tasia pushed herself off the wall and put a hand on Brick’s shoulder.  “No, we did good.  I couldn’t have done it without your golden tongue and Alric’s sense of timing.”

The “riots” that they started in Harker Falls had spread up and down the river, then west into the surrounding countryside.  They’d been faked riots at the beginning, but as the message caught on — that the Regent and his allies intended to end the War in the East in a manner that would lead to the starvation of huge swaths of the common people — the riots had taken on a life of their own.  Everywhere across the Capital Lands, mobs of commoners attacked the offices of the local magistrates and ambassadors, looting them, occupying them, destroying them when they couldn’t be occupied.  They questioned the powerful, refusing to back down even when nobles sent armed thugs to stop the chaos.  Meanwhile, ordinary men and women trickled into Arthur’s Ferry in little groups of threes and fours and fives, following rumors that a rebel soldier was training ordinary folk to take back the Empire from a corrupt Regent in the name of Natasia of the House of Dorsa, the missing princess who could be their savior, rather than the traitor they’d been told she was.

Empress was the whisper that now wended its way through taverns and shipyards and fields throughout the Capital Lands.

Heir to the crown.

Savior of the Empire.

“Where are the others?” Tasia asked, peering out the alleyway and down the avenue towards the gate.

“Coming, I’d wager,” Brick said with a shrug.

Tasia tried to smile, but she knew she wouldn’t feel reassured until all the men, weapons, and supplies they had brought with them made it safely into the city.  Smiles no longer came easily to her face.  She’d come to accept that wearing the crown meant that the lives of others constantly turned on the axis of her own decisions, but the weight of that responsibility had changed her, had made her something unfamiliar to herself.  Tasia was somber most of the time now.  Somber enough that the half-smile she’d just given to Brick was probably the only one that had crossed her face in several days, the only one that would show itself for several more.  After all, even if their scheme worked and they ousted Norix, there were still the shadows to face.  And that foe was far more dangerous than the man who called himself Regent ever would be.

“Should we wait for the rest of them?” Tasia said.

Brick shook his head.  “Better if we don’t.  Two of us will draw less attention than twenty.  They know where to meet.  And they have Linna with them.”

Tasia nodded and stepped into the main avenue, adjusting the basket of bread on her arm.  Between Brick’s eldest son, Sheldon, who was as resourceful as his father, and Linna, who seemed to carry a map inside her head of every inch of land from Paratheen to Port Lorsin, the others would be fine.

They would have to be, because Tasia couldn’t be everywhere at once.  That was another thing Tasia had learned about leadership — when to let others be the leaders.

“Let’s go, then,” she said, facing south.

The avenue sloped gently downward from here, traveling steadily downhill until it reached the artificial hill that the palace was built upon.  Only the highest spires of the Palace of Dorsa were visible from here, and with the sun getting lower on the western horizon as late afternoon grew long, even the palace spires were only shadowed spikes rising through the haze of chimney smoke that muted the colors of the city skyline.

Tasia began walking briskly downhill, Brick falling into step beside her.

“For all the years I lived in Port Lorsin,” he said wryly, “I can’t say I ever once had the notion to break into the palace.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘breaking in,’ exactly.  ‘Sneaking’ in, maybe.”

But whatever they called it, their plan still hinged on one great unknown:  the guards at the Sunfall Gate.  If they were the same crew Tasia had grown acquainted with over her many escapades sneaking in and out of the palace, the same crew that had helped her and Evrart escape some months ago, then she and Brick and the others might very well simply walk into the palace.  But the last time she had seen her favorite palace guards, they were fighting for their lives against their fellow watchmen so that Tasia and Evrart could get away.  She didn’t even know if they still lived, let alone if they would still be stationed at the Sunfall Gate as usual.

What if they’d hung Grizzle and the rest of the guards for treason?  It was a very real possibility.

One more set of lives — or deaths — for which Tasia was responsible.

Brick lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence.  He was probably contemplating the lives for which he was responsible.  The plan to sneak into the palace with ten commoners who barely knew their way around a weapon was reckless at best.

And one of those commoners would be Brick’s own son.

It was probably because she was lost in her worries that Tasia didn’t hear the footsteps  coming closer behind her.  Even when Brick stumbled — not forwards but somehow sideways — Tasia still didn’t recognize what was happening.  But just as she turned to ask Brick what was wrong, a hand grabbed her upper arm.

But — no, it wasn’t a hand.  It wasn’t anything at all.  An invisible force pulled her sideways, the same direction in which Brick had disappeared, dragging her from the avenue and into an alleyway.

“Empre — ” an alarmed Brick called out two paces ahead of her, but the shape of a hand, the same color and texture as the building behind him, suddenly appeared across half his face, silencing the end of his cry.

The shape of a hand.  The color of the building.

“Please don’t scream, Empress,” came a disembodied whisper in her ear.

The voice changed Tasia’s reaction from one of instinctive fear to one of baffled surprise.

“Evrart?”

40

No sooner had Joslyn’s q’isson informed her that the presence she felt in the trees beyond the campsite was that of small men than two of them stepped out from the trees that bounded the campsite.  Dawn hadn’t arrived on the mountainside yet, leaving Joslyn with only the dim light of her dying fire to see by, but she could still distinguish the forms of the two small men.  They could have been mistaken for human children if not for the saucer-sized eyes and the way one of them was wrinkled with age like a dried raisin.

Joslyn glanced over her shoulder to see if Ty’Tsana was awake and witnessing the arrival of the small men, and was not surprised to see that she was.

“Finally got your wish, didn’t you?” Ty’Tsana said in a low voice.

But Joslyn didn’t answer; she had already looked away from the prisoner and returned her attention to the small men.

“Warrior,” said the raisin-wrinkled small man, pointing at Joslyn.  “You are known to my people.  I am Balthzan.”

Joslyn relaxed out of mountain and sheathed her sword.  “Balthzan,” she repeated respectfully.  “I am pleased to — ”

A bestial roar that wasn’t entirely human interrupted her.  Joslyn whirled, her sword already drawn again, preparing herself once more to face the bear she suspected had been stalking them.  But once again it was not a bear.

It was Ty’Tsana.  The ropes that had bound her to the trunk of the birch tree laid in tatters at her feet, and her eyes glowed with fierce flames.

“We tried to give you a chance,” said Ty’Tsana in an unearthly voice that was not her own.  “We tried and we tried.  But you will not listen.  So now you must die.”

Ty’Tsana dropped to all four limbs, each one contorted unnaturally so that she looked almost insect-like.  And then she charged.

Joslyn almost didn’t react in time.  She vaulted sideways just as Ty’Tsana reached the spot where she had been, but one of Ty’Tsana’s hands snaked out, snagging the boot dagger from Joslyn as she leapt.

Joslyn wasted no time with her counter-attack, knowing from her previous battle against Ty’Tsana that even the briefest of hesitations would be exploited.  Joslyn slashed downward with strong spear, but Ty’Tsana rolled out of the blade’s path almost effortlessly, flinging the boot dagger at Joslyn even as she moved.  Joslyn leaned out of the dagger’s path at the last instant, hearing it whiz past her ear and thunk into a tree behind her.

Joslyn dove forward, hoping to pin Ty’Tsana to the ground before the woman could find another weapon to attack with, but Ty’Tsana met Joslyn in mid-air, and both crashed hard into the rocky earth below.  Ty’Tsana seized Joslyn’s short sword by the blade and twisted, wrenching it free from Joslyn’s grip without seeming to care that her hand was soaked with the red of her own blood.  She tossed the sword out of reach and snarled, reaching for Joslyn’s throat.  But Joslyn didn’t need a sword to be deadly.  She punched Ty’Tsana in the woman’s half-open mouth, once, twice, feeling a tooth knock free on the second blow.  Dazed, Ty’Tsana slowed for a moment, and Joslyn used the opportunity to free her dagger from its place at her right hip, pulling back to plunge it into the side of Ty’Tsana’s throat.

Yet even dazed, Ty’Tsana was too fast.  She sprang backwards as though yanked by a rope, pulling the same sword she’d wrested from Joslyn a few moments earlier from the brush it had gotten tangled in.  Joslyn took a gamble, aiming the dagger at Ty’Tsana’s heart but releasing it so that it would miss its target by almost two feet.

Her gamble paid off — almost.  Ty’Tsana did indeed dodge in the direction Joslyn had anticipated, but not so fast so that the dagger landed a kill shot in her chest.  Instead, the dagger lodged itself in Ty’Tsana’s side, a few inches below one breast.

Furious, she let out another animalistic screech, ripping the blade from her own flesh and sending it soaring back towards Joslyn so fast that not even her impeccable instincts would be able to save her.

But the blade stopped, freezing in mid-air an inch before it should have struck Joslyn’s chest.

Then it dropped, bouncing a little as it hit the earth.

“Witch,” said Balthzan the small man from the same place he’d emerged from a minute earlier.  His lip was curled into a sneer that revealed hatred, or disgust, or both, and in his outstretched hand he pointed a single white pebble, marked with a red rune, at Ty’Tsana.

A Ty’Tsana who was now suspended two feet above the ground, thrashing furiously but apparently helpless, like a bug snared in a spider’s web.  Her eyes still flashed with flames, but now they phased back and forth between flame and their ordinary honey-brown.

“Witch,” said Balthzan again, that same tone of disgust lacing the word.

As he held his rune-marked pebble, the other small man opened a leather satchel hanging at his hip and pulled forth more stones, each one the size of Joslyn’s palm and painted with other runes.  Moving swiftly but without the careless air of rushing, the second small man placed his rocks rune-side up in a circle around Ty’Tsana, spacing them out one every two or three feet.    Joslyn’s memory flashed to the boulders painted with runes on the mountainside where the small men had trapped the undatai inside a makeshift fighting arena.  This was the same trick, only smaller.

When the circle was complete, Balthzan lowered his pebble, and Ty’Tsana collapsed to the ground.

Balthzan met Joslyn’s eye, then gestured to Ty’Tsana.  “Order of Targhan,” he said.  “Also known to my people.”  He pointed to Joslyn.  “You come with broken sword.  She stay.”

Joslyn hesitated.  It was the invitation she had been hoping for, the very reason she was in the Zaris Mountains.  But the thought of leaving Ty’Tsana unattended seemed dangerous.

“What of the witch?” she asked.

“The witch will stay inside rune-circle until warrior returns.”

“And if she breaks free?”

Balthzan’s expression shifted out of its snarl into something resembling amusement.  Inasmuch as small men ever appeared amused.  “She will not.”  He cocked his head.  “Unless, does warrior want to kill witch now?”

“I — ”

“She will not kill me like this,” Ty’Tsana said, her voice mocking but human once more.  “Joslyn of Terinto does not kill things that cannot defend themselves.”

She was only trying to goad Joslyn into attacking again, to break the rune circle early so that she could resume the battle — and probably kill Joslyn in the process.

But Joslyn was not one to yield to goading.  She shook her head at Balthzan, and wordlessly gathered her fallen weapons and Ku-sai’s broken blade.

She held the broken blade before Balthzan.  “My ku-sai’s blade.  It can…”  She trailed off, because she wasn’t sure exactly what it could do.  Separate shadow from host, she thought.  But she wasn’t sure.

“Small men know, warrior,” Balthzan said, nodding.  “This is why we are here.”

“You will fix it?” Joslyn asked, a sudden lump in her throat.  It might not be too late to redeem herself in the eyes of her ku-sai.

“Yes,” Balthzan said simply.  He waved Joslyn towards the trees.  “Follow.”

“Even if you repair the sword, you cannot win, Joslyn,” Ty’Tsana said from behind her.  “Think it through.  A single cut from your master’s sword may have the power to separate a shadow from its human host, but you fail to realize how many of the shadows have already been liberated from the prison of the Shadowlands.  In the weeks you have wasted searching for the small men, hundreds — no, thousands — of shadows have already been united with mortal hosts.  You cannot defeat them all.  Not even you.”

Ty’Tsana sounded nearly sympathetic, like she already saw Joslyn’s doom.

And perhaps she did.

“Yet some battles,” Joslyn said, quoting her ku-sai, “are fought not to be won, but simply because they must be fought.”

With that, she turned her back on Ty’Tsana and followed Balthzan and his companion into the birch forest.

#

Dawn blossomed above the eastern mountain peaks when Balthzan finally came to a halt, pointing at a sheer granite face covered with vines.

“There,” he said.

Joslyn squinted in the direction he pointed, still catching her breath from the journey.  She estimated the small men had led her some five miles north and east of her campsite, angling mostly uphill the whole way.  Even Joslyn, an adept hiker, had trouble keeping up with the small men who guided her.  Not only was the predawn mountainside still blanketed in darkness, but the small men who led the way were as nimble as mountain goats, practically bouncing up the trail before her.

And now, even with the first few rays of light, Joslyn saw nothing before her but a rock face.

“What?” Joslyn asked Balthzan.

“The way to Xochitcyan,” he said.  “City of small men.”

As if he had spoken magic words, a tunnel entrance appeared in the granite face.  Had it always been there, and Joslyn only now had managed to see it?  Or had Balthzan’s words removed some type of illusion that had obstructed her vision before?

City of small men.  She tried to control the expression of surprise on her face.  The cities of the small men were the stuff of children’s tales; no one that Joslyn had ever met, even mountain villagers who regularly traded with small men, had ever been inside one of their underground cities.

Balthzan led the way, disappearing inside the tunnel, then down a ladder woven of birch roots.  Joslyn followed him, and the other small man followed a moment later.

At the bottom of the shaft, a tunnel angled down and away, soon plunging Joslyn into a blackness so complete that she couldn’t see even her hand in front of her face.

But Joslyn’s q’isson could see.  In a way, at least.  The faint sliver that still floated above and behind her guided Joslyn forward, not so much seeing for her, but giving her an intuition for what to expect next — the shape of the tunnel, its curves, its downward slope.

Yet even with the extra senses afforded to her by the q’isson, traversing the tunnel behind Balthzan was arduous.  Small men rarely grew past three and a half feet tall, which meant that the tunnel was rarely higher than about four feet.  In places, Joslyn was forced to crawl forward on her hands and knees.

Would their underground city be more of the same?  Total darkness and built for a race the size of children?

After what seemed like an hour of crawling and squeezing through the narrow tunnel, the path smoothed, broadened, and Joslyn could straighten to her full height.  And there was light coming from up ahead — dim light, but light nonetheless.  For the first time since she followed Balthzan down the shaft carved into the granite cliff face, she could see his outline ahead of her.  He stopped abruptly, and Joslyn nearly collided with his back.

“Welcome to Xochitcyan,”said the small man behind her, his voice a gentle baritone compared to Balthzan’s grinding bass.

There was not much of the Empire that Joslyn had not seen, from the magnificent opulence of the palace of the House of Dorsa to the meanest, poorest hovels in Negusto.  And because there was not much she had not seen, there was not much that surprised her.

But this.

Xochitcyan.

This was unlike anything she had ever seen, unlike anything she could have even imagined.

The most elaborate of children’s stories could not have adequately painted the magnificence of the underground city of the small men.  The rough cavern pathway ended in an intricately carved archway inlaid with a spiral pattern of rubies; beyond that, a broad, flat avenue wide enough for six grown, regular-sized men to walk shoulder-to-shoulder down traversed a glass-smooth underground lake and led into the city itself.  Rows of buildings lined this main thoroughfare, each with corkscrew spires that reached towards the cavern’s impossibly high ceiling.  The buildings themselves seemed to glow from within with a soft blue-purple light.

Sapphires, Joslyn realized.  The buildings had been constructed from polished sapphires and amethysts, and somehow, they emanated light.

There was more light than the soft glow of the buildings.  The entire city was bathed in a soft, silver light coming from lantern-less orbs that somehow floated above all.  Each orb was the shape and color of a full moon, as if the small men had plucked Mother Moon right out of the night sky and brought her into their home.

“Follow,” said Balthzan, waving her forward.

She walked beneath the archway inlaid with rubies and onto the main avenue that crossed the motionless lake.  Something caught her eye far above, and she craned her neck to stare at the ceiling, which rippled with black shadows.

More magic?

No.  Not magic.  Bats.  The cavern ceiling was covered with thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of bats.

The warrior in her, the woman who had endured deaths and killings and other losses too numerous to count, urged her to remain on her guard.  But the Joslyn who was a child of the streets, the Joslyn who had once been a slave and who had relied upon pure instinct to stay alive, told her this was the safest place she had ever been.  Xochitcyan was a world apart, in the Empire and yet separate from it, untouched by its politics and wars and corruption.

Xochitcyan was safe.

And yet she could not shake a certain foreboding, a sense that some danger yet unseen was stalking her.

She followed her guide down the smooth stone avenue and into the main body of the city.  Between the city’s buildings, which were magnificent, yet all small-man-sized, Joslyn felt as she once had in the days before she met Ku-sai — gangly, oafish, unruly, an inexpert thing that might clumsily destroy something at any moment.

The buildings on either side of her were delicate dollhouses carved from stalagmites and sapphires, inlaid with amethyst and smokey quartz windows.  Small men — and for that matter, small women and small children — scurried about everywhere, freezing momentarily when Joslyn passed by, stopping to stare at her with their overlarge eyes, whispering to one another in their strange, gravelly language.

How many small men lived in this city?  A thousand?  Ten thousand?  Other than the night she fought the undatai on the mountaintop, Joslyn had never seen more than two or three small men in one place.  Now there were dozens everywhere she turned.

Joslyn peered down a side street as she passed, realizing that Xochitcyan not only reached up, towards the stalactites and bats hanging from the cavern ceiling, but also down, into unseen chambers below the level she currently traversed.  The narrow side street split into two levels, with a surface level continuing to wend through the multi-story stalagmite and gemstone buildings, but a set of stairs led downward to what appeared to be a whole additional street continuing in the same direction ten or fifteen feet below the surface.  From the quick glimpse that Joslyn caught, it appeared that even more buildings lined this lower level, a dense, sprawling honeycomb of doorways and windows and alleyways that stretched on well beyond what she could see.

Closer to ten thousand residents than one thousand, then.

Joslyn’s two guides led her towards a huge cylindrical column of spiraling quartz that rose well above all the other buildings, so high that it passed the orbs of light illuminating the city and disappeared into the shadows that clung like clouds to the cavern’s upper reaches.

It took until they were nearly upon the column of quartz for Joslyn to realize that it was a tower, and that the spiral formations around its outside were actually balconies that stretched around its circumference.  She couldn’t help but marvel at the craftsmanship.  At least some parts of the tower appeared to be a natural formation of volcanic rock shot through with quartz and amethyst.  But from this natural foundation, the small men had clearly carved out doorways and decks, windows and walkways, resulting in a tower larger and more magnificent than any she had ever seen in all her roaming within the Empire.  It was a wondrous feat of imagination, artistry, and engineering.

“Warrior enter.  Balthzan and Tervongsin stay,” Balthzan said.  He pointed at an archway inlaid with multicolored gemstones.  Grim-faced small men bearing pikes two or three times the height of their bodies stood on either side of the archway, obviously guarding the tower’s entrance.

The sense of foreboding Joslyn had felt crawling up her spine earlier only grew as she squinted into the darkness beyond the archway.

Finding the small men had been her goal, had been her sole reason for trekking into the dangerous Zaris Mountains even as the season crept towards winter.  Only small man smiths were likely to have the skills necessary to repair Ku-sai’s broken sword and the Old Tongue runes inscribed upon it.

Yet entering the tower felt…

“Dangerous” was a woefully inadequate word for describing how the tower’s black maw made Joslyn’s every nerve ending buzz with the instinct to draw her sword and back away slowly.

She turned to her companions.  “What is inside?”

Her guide’s overlarge eyes were solemn.  “Warrior inside.”

She shook her head, thinking she’d been misunderstood.  “No, I mean the tower.  What lies within the tower?”

He reached up, touching his palm to Joslyn’s chest.  “Warrior inside.”

Joslyn didn’t understand.  Or didn’t want to understand.  “But the broken sword?”

Tervongsin pointed.  “Go.”

Joslyn wanted to argue, yet she knew she was in no position to do so.  She needed their help.  She needed the sword mended, if for no other reason than that she owed that much to Ku-sai.

She faced the archway, studied the runes she didn’t understand that were etched into its gemstones.  She tried using her q’isson to get a better sense of it, but that only gave her a dizzy, queasy feeling.

She had come this far.  There was only one thing to do.  Joslyn set her jaw and stepped inside the tower.

41

The sound of Evrart’s voice broke the illusion for Tasia.  He came into focus a moment later, as did the Brother with his hand covering Brick’s mouth.

“We should talk,” Evrart said.  He cast a furtive glance towards the mouth of the alley that he and the other Brother had pulled them into.  “But not here.  We control a building not far from here, at the edge of the Northern Quarter and the Merchant Quarter.  Can you follow?”

“I’m not following you anywhere,” Tasia hissed.  “And your friend needs to let go of mine or we’ll find out which pair of us fares better in a fight.”

“Tasia — ”

“It’s Empress.”

“Empress, then,” Evrart said.  A wagon overloaded with fruits and caged chickens rolled by on the street beyond.  Evrart waited until it had passed before speaking again.  “I’m sure you want an explanation for why I disappeared.  I have one to give you.”

“Then give it.”  Tasia adjusted the baker’s girl shift and drew a dagger free from beneath several layers of clothes.  She crossed her arms against her chest and quirked an eyebrow, the dagger in her hand serving as her warning.

Evrart hesitated, glancing briefly at the Brother who still held Brick.  Tasia chanced a quick look at her companion, too, and was pleased to see Brick’s hand inching towards the rear of his trousers, where she knew a knife was hidden snugly against the inside of his belt.

Tasia would keep Evrart talking.  Brick would do what needed to be done.  Not that Tasia wanted this to end with bloodshed, but if blood had to spill, at least it would belong to the Brothers and not to her and Brick.

“I regrouped with the six other surviving Brothers after the battle — if you can even call it a ‘battle.’  ‘Slaughter’ would be a better word,” Evrart said.  “I assumed you were dead like everyone else, or would be shortly, so the Brothers and I fled to a safe house on the edge of the Capital Lands.  We’ve been preparing to stop what’s coming ever since then.  Please know — I only suspected you were alive recently, when the riots began spreading and commoners whispered of the return of the missing princess.  I set my Brothers to watch the city gates after that, because I knew you’d come here as soon as you were able.  That’s how we saw you today.”

“How nice of you to sound as if you were concerned over my fate,” Tasia said.  “Should I assume that’s why we’re here?  You were concerned so you waylaid me in an alleyway?”

Evrart made a sour face.  “Don’t treat me like your enemy, like it’s my fault we were separated.  I warned you against that foolish plan of yours — against risking all the troops we had and the support of the Brotherhood on something that only ever had a sliver of a chance of succeeding.  But you were incapable of listening.  Stubborn, just like your father.”

Tasia’s grip tightened on the handle of her dagger.  “They will claim victory for themselves every time something goes well,” said her father’s voice in her head.  “They will blame you alone every time something goes wrong.”

“Just because you’ve known me since I was a child doesn’t exempt you from showing proper respect, Brother Evrart,” Tasia said.  “And as for the troops ‘we’ lost, I’m fairly certain I must have misheard you.  You must have meant the troops that I gathered, that I negotiated for.  You were conspicuously absent that night.”

“Because I was busy killing an assassin determined to kill you!”

Tasia was taken aback.  This was the first time he’d ever mentioned an assassin.

Evrart wiped a hand down his face, calming himself.  “I was also the one who talked the Brotherhood into contributing thirty of their best illusionists, almost all of whom are dead now.  The Brotherhood was the only real ally you had, and now they see you as impulsive and unready to rule.”

“I don’t need a group of superstitious, half-cooked Wise Men who consider themselves masters of the shadow arts for allies,” Tasia said.  “The Brotherhood has so far proven itself as trustworthy and as loyal as the men who betrayed my father.”  She cocked her head and tapped her temple with a finger as if a new thought had suddenly occurred to her.  “Oh, wait.  The Brotherhood did help betray my father.  I’d nearly forgotten.”

Evrart scoffed.  “You know so much less than you think you do,” he said.  “At least the Brotherhood has always remained true to a single cause — to push the shadows back before it’s too late.  Who else will help you do that?  The desperate lords of the East?  Lord M’Tongliss?”  He glanced pointedly at Brick.  “It seems to me that your most loyal followers are a group of rebellious commoners.  Astute negotiating, Empress.  Such impressive troops you have gathered.”

“The lowborn outnumber the highborn,” Tasia replied.  “They always have and they always will.”

Evrart chuckled and shook his head.  “You plan to defeat the entire Imperial Army with untrained commoners?  Your strategic powers never fail to astound me.”

Tasia’s lips curled into a half-smile.  “Not every fight must follow the rules of Castles and Knights.  I don’t need to defeat the entire Imperial Army.  I need only to cut off the head of the snake.”

“I don’t know what you’re planning, Empress, but join us,” Evrart said.  “Let me take you to the Brotherhood’s safe house and update you on the status of the real battle we all fight, the battle against the shadows.  Come with us and I will convince the Brotherhood that it can still benefit from allying with you.”

“How gracious of you to offer,” Tasia said sarcastically, “but I think I prefer my untrained commoners.”  She turned.  “Brick?  I believe our rebellious lowborn are probably waiting for us by now.”

With a deft twist of his hips, Brick pulled loose from the Brother’s grip, then flipped the taller man into the air, slamming him back-first onto the cobblestones.  He planted a knee on the Brother’s chest and put point of the small knife hidden behind his belt beneath the man’s chin.

The Brother didn’t cry out, but his eyes were wide with astonishment; his mouth trembled.

“Pardon, Empress,” Brick said conversationally, “but I did just see some of yer rebellious lowborn pass by a couple minutes ago.  I’m thinkin’ they’ll be wonderin’ where we are soon, if we don’t catch up.  Can we finish these twits and be off?”

Tasia smiled at Evrart.  “Do you see what I mean, Brother Evrart?  While I appreciate the offer to convince the Brotherhood to take me back in, I believe the Brotherhood needs the heir of the House of Dorsa far more than the heir needs the Brotherhood.”  She walked to the alley’s entrance, pausing to glance over her shoulder.  “We can leave them in peace, Brick.  They may be twits, but they are relatively harmless twits, and they are not our enemies.”

Brick lifted his knee from the Brother’s chest and walked backwards to where Tasia stood, knife still in front of him.

“You’re making a mistake,” said Evrart.  “The shadows are coiled to strike the capital, perhaps as early as tonight.  You focus on chopping off the head of a garden snake, but meanwhile the leviathan rises slowly from the depths behind you.”

“Thank you for letting me know,” said Tasia. “But I must focus on one beheading at a time, all while keeping my own attached to my shoulders.  And thank you also for helping me keep it the first time, by the way.  You may think me sarcastic, but I am sincere when I tell you that I do appreciate you saving my life — twice, if you were telling the truth about an assassin in Paratheen.”

“I was.”

Tasia inclined her head.  “Stay safe, Evrart.”

With that, she turned her back on the two illusionists, and followed Brick back onto the main thoroughfare.

Evrart’s warning disturbed her.  The shadows, already prepared to strike the capital?  What did that mean?  What would it even look like?  Yet she was so close to exposing Norix for a fraud and regaining her crown.

Crown first.  Then she would have the power she needed to fight the shadows — and to negotiate with the Brotherhood without coming to them again as a beggar.

“Don’t do this — you will fall without the Brotherhood,” Evrart called at her back

“If I need you, I’ll find you,” Tasia said without turning around.

#

The palace of the House of Dorsa had a gate in each of the four cardinal directions, primarily because the Wise Men who oversaw its construction some eight hundred years earlier believed at the time that allowing in air from each of the cardinal directions was beneficial to the humours and therefore advisable to the health of the royal family.  Later Wise Men would dismiss that theory, but the construction of the palace had been completed by then, so the gates remained.

Over time, the different palace gates became associated with the parts of the city they faced, and therefore types of Imperial citizens who used them to enter when they had palace business.  The Sunfall Gate, for example, faced the well-to-do Ambassador’s Quarter and was the primary entrance used by the aristocracy; the North Gate faced the commercial Merchant Quarter and was the way merchants and caravan owners would come and go; the East Gate faced the impoverished Arun’s Quarter, named for the now-extinct noble house that had once controlled the eastern half of the city, and was the place where alms were given to the poor; the South Gate, also called Canal Gate, faced the Shipper’s Quarter.  Canal Gate was actually a water gate; at that entrance, the iron portcullis dropped all the way down into the silty bottom of the canal that flowed from the palace to the port — the same canal that Tasia had escaped down when she fled the palace months earlier.  Its design made it more difficult to use and was therefore only opened when a member of the House of Dorsa or a visiting dignitary arrived or left the city by boat.

While the palace’s southern wall had an approach protected by water, the other three sides of the palace were buffered by a gravel pathway wide enough for four horses to walk side-by-side, and around this perimeter stood a thick, neatly trimmed hedge some ten feet tall and five feet wide.

The hedge wasn’t designed to stop an army — although Tasia knew from her studies with General Remington that one of the palace defense plans called for the hedge to become a ring of fire in the event of an attack.  But situated on a high man-made hill overlooking the port that the city gained its name from, the palace had never been attacked by an army.  The worst its guards had ever had to protect it from were drunken and ill-tempered noblemen, and the occasional thief brazen enough to attempt breeching the most protected fortress in all the Empire.

Indeed, over the years, the palace guard had been utilized most commonly not to stop outsiders from coming in but to stop those who were already inside from causing problems.  As far as Tasia knew — and admittedly, given how often she tended to fall asleep during Norix’s lectures on Empire history, her knowledge might be lacking — no one had ever attempted what she and her companions were about to try.

Which was to say:  No group of rebel commoners had ever tried to breech the palace walls, let alone walk right through one of the gates without a fight.

Brick had chosen the best eight fighters he could find for this endeavor, which, along with Tasia and himself, made ten of them altogether.  He and Alric, the latter of whom had stayed behind in Arthur’s Ferry to coordinate the ongoing riots, had decided that ten made a manageable number.  Small enough to be discreet, large enough to do what needed doing.

What little sunlight remained was not enough for Tasia to adequately read the faces of the fighters nearest her — and visibility was made worse by the fact that they were all hidden inside the dense hedge.  They’d cut a hollow inside of it to hide themselves, but it made a miserable hiding spot.  None of them could move more than a few inches at a time, for fear of rustling branches and stepping on fallen twigs.  And each time someone tried to turn his or her head, they were rewarded with a leaf in the eye or a twig scratching a cheek.

But thank all the gods the Wise Men had decided upon a hedge for a perimeter instead of a row of rose bushes.  At least there were no thorns to contend with.

The ten of them crouched shoulder-to-shoulder within the hedge, with Brick and Tasia at the center and four more on either side of them.  She could hear her companions breathing in the darkness.

Outside the hedge, blessedly free of branches and claustrophobia, Linna lingered in the shadows of the Ambassador’s Quarter as lookout.  Every ten minutes, she mimicked a songbird to let the rebels know that all remained quiet and that she was still there.  They were waiting for another call from Linna, a sharp, single “CAW!” to let them know that the other rebels had successfully started their mischief in other locations throughout the city.  Then there would be a signal of “CAW, CAW, CAW!” to indicate that the palace guards had been dispatched to support what was left of the city guard to deal with those mischief-makers.

That was the one variable in their plan that Tasia prayed she’d guessed right on:  Norix had sent most of the city guard into the countryside to quell the riots, banking on the assumption that the rioters wouldn’t be daring enough to bring their chaos into the capital city itself.  Tasia was betting that Norix would repeat the same mistake when riots started in Port Lorsin, sending out most of the palace guard to quell the riots in the city, leaving the palace itself woefully undefended.

Norix was so arrogant, and thought so little of commoners, that Tasia doubted he would ever suspect that the riots were nothing but an elaborate smokescreen designed to disguise her quiet entrance into the palace.

“CAW!” Linna called from her hiding place a hundred yards away.

Good.  That meant Linna could see the first signs of their rioters — fires lit with nearly simultaneous precision in the city’s various quarters, each quarter but the Ambassador’s Quarter.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Thirty minutes passed.  Forty.  Tasia’s nine companions grew restless inside the hedge.

“Stay still,” she told them.

An hour passed.  Had Tasia misjudged her former tutor?

“CAW!  CAW!  CAW!”

That was the signal — the palace guards were leaving, entering into the city to stop the rioting from spreading.

Tasia adjusted her squatting position inside the hedge, trying to get the blood circulating through her legs again without rustling too many of the dead leaves.  She glanced at Brick beside her.  She couldn’t make out his features in the dark, but he turned his head in her direction and gave a slight nod.

Only a few more minutes now, that nod said.

A foolish plan.  That was what Evrart had called Tasia’s plan for ambushing the delegation with nothing but a hodgepodge of underfed soldiers and a grand illusion.  Maybe he was right.  Maybe it had been foolish, and thousands had died to pay the price of her folly.  On the other hand, it probably would have worked if the commander of the delegation had been anyone but her grandfather.  She’d failed to take that into consideration.

Was she being foolish again now?  Should she have called tonight’s plan off and gone with Evrart?

Her mind turned to Joslyn.  Joslyn, whom Tasia hoped watched over her from wherever people went when they died.  What would Joslyn tell her?

Trust your instincts, whispered Joslyn’s voice in the back of Tasia’s mind.  You’re more capable than you think.

I’m not, Tasia argued back.  I’m just a foolish princess with foolish plans that get people killed.

But there was no more time for her imaginary debate with Joslyn, because from the direction of the palace came the sound of iron grinding against iron — the portcullis, probably on the North Gate, was being drawn up.

Voices.  Boots.  The palace guard was leaving.  Now was their chance — another roll of the dice that Tasia hoped would come up in her favor.  If the Sunfall Gate was still manned by her old acquaintances…

“Get ready,” Tasia whispered into the darkness.

The nine men and women surrounding her rustled in response.  All around Tasia, knives and clubs were pulled free, bowstrings were tested, arrows rattled softly as quivers were adjusted.

42

In Xochitcyan, Joslyn crossed the threshold into the giant tower of quartz and stone.  The moment she did, all light disappeared.  She froze, glancing behind her to look at her two small men guides.

But the entrance to the tower was gone; the blackness behind her was as complete as the blackness ahead of her.

Joslyn’s struggled to breathe as a disorienting vertigo overtook her.  The darkness was so thick that she could not see her own body.  Instinctively, she reached for the second set of senses she had become accustomed to, the q’isson just behind her, but for the first time in weeks, it was gone.

The darkness was so total that it felt like a physical thing, a weight upon her, not only blinding her but also suffocating her, closing in, sending its tendrils into her mouth and nostrils, down her throat, into her limbs, paralyzing her.

She opened her mouth to scream.  But from the darkness came a voice she knew.

“Mountain,” Ku-sai whispered.

The whisper came from everywhere; it came from nowhere.  The whisper was outside; it was inside.

Joslyn squeezed her eyes shut, even though the act only reminded her that there was no difference between her eyes being opened and her eyes being closed.  But she would obey Ku-sai’s voice, just as she always did.  She sent her energy downward, into a cavern floor she could no longer detect beneath her boot soles.  For all she could tell, she was floating inside a void that had no ground, no up or down.

It is there, she reassured herself.  The ground is there.

Mountain.  That was what mattered.

Her breathing slowed.  The energy of mountain flowed through her.  Joslyn opened her eyes — and the darkness was gone.

She was in a room now, large and sunny with a wide four-post featherbed set against one curved wall.  Tapestries covered most of the circular room’s walls, hanging everywhere except at the hearth across from the bed.  Beneath a window to the bed’s left was a wooden table set, with two place settings and a covered dish in the middle.  A woman stood at the window, gazing outside, her back to Joslyn.  Her fair hair had been swept up into a bun, revealing the line of a long and graceful neck.

Joslyn’s heart skipped a beat.  “Tasia?”

This wasn’t just any room, she realized all at once.  This was Tasia’s bedchamber.

But the woman who looked like Tasia didn’t turn at the sound of Joslyn’s voice.  She remained motionless, staring out the window.

This can’t be real, Joslyn told herself.  You’re inside the small men’s tower, not the palace.  Remember?

Yet here was the warmth of the sun on her face.  Here was the familiar scent of Tasia’s room — powders and perfumes and Adessian silk, all layered over the inevitable mustiness of a centuries-old stone fortress.  They called it a palace, but in the end, Joslyn knew it had been built for battle.

Joslyn didn’t know how, but she was in Tasia’s room.  She must be.  Perhaps the small men’s tower had transported her here.

Cautiously, Joslyn took a step forward, reaching automatically for the dagger at her waist.  But it wasn’t there.  She stopped, patting her belt for the dagger, then for the sword.  Both gone.

Yet there was some kind of scabbard strapped across her back.  Joslyn explored it with her fingertips.  A sword was inside it, a curved sword that —

Ku-sai’s sword, Joslyn suddenly remembered.  But why was it broken?  Why did she have it?  She struggled to recall the answers to these questions.

Perhaps Tasia knew.  Joslyn raised a hand, reaching for the beautiful girl at the window, to touch the bare smoothness of her neck.  But she let her hand fall.  She didn’t want to startle the girl unnecessarily.

“Tasia,” Joslyn said instead again, glad for another excuse to allow those two syllables to slide across her tongue.   She’d missed having her love’s name in her mouth.

At last Tasia turned around — and yet it wasn’t Tasia.  Not quite.

It was Tasia’s body, covered in Tasia’s blue silk gown, and the fair hair wound into a bun on the top of her head looked like Tasia’s hair.  But beneath that bun, where cream-colored skin tinted with pink should’ve been, was the wrong face.

It was Anaís’s face.

Joslyn sucked in a breath and took a step backwards, reaching again for the dagger that was not there.  What sorcery was this?

“Joslyn,” said the woman who was neither entirely Tasia nor entirely Anaís.  Like her face, her voice belonged to Anaís.  It was soft, like finely woven cotton, and carried the hint of an Adessian accent.

“…Anaís?”

The Anaís mouth on the Tasia body smiled.  “Of course.  Who else would I be?”

“I just… I expected…  Why are you in the palace of the House of Dorsa?”

Anaís giggled.  “Because I’m the princess, silly.”  Her expression shifted to one of concern.  “Are you feeling alright?”

She stepped forward; Joslyn took another step backward.  “You are not a princess.  You are a slave — or you were, before I helped you escape your master.”

Anaís furrowed her brow.  “A slave?  You’re not making any sense, my love.  I really think you must not be well.”  She gestured at the table beneath the window with its two place settings.  “Come.  Break your fast with me.  Surely eggs and duck with relish will make you right again.”

Joslyn hesitated.  Regardless of what Anaís said, she knew something about this situation wasn’t quite right.  Yet she could not put her finger on it.  Were her memories all wrong?  Had Anaís truly never been a slave?  Or was it Tasia who had been a slave, Anaís the princess?

Yes — that made sense.  “Tasia” was not a princess’s name, after all.  That was a nickname.  The Emperor Andreth would never allow his daughter to call herself something as whimsical as Tasia.  Joslyn should know.  She’d met the Father of the Four Realms herself when Cole of Easthook had plucked her from her General Galter’s service to be Anaís’s personal guard.

Joslyn nodded once and sat down at the table.  Anaís smiled and settled in across from her, lifting the lid off the dish in the center with a flourish.  The smell of scrambled eggs, wilted greens, and spiced duck immediately filled the room.

“See?” said Princess Anaís.  “Don’t you feel better already?”

“Yes,” Joslyn said gratefully.  “I do.”

Joslyn reached for the large serving spoon in the middle of the dish, but Anaís swatted her hand away.  “Let me,” she said.  “You do so much for me.  I want to be the one who serves you for a change.”

Anaís took Joslyn’s plate, heaping upon it a generous portion of eggs and duck.  Joslyn let out a sigh — a relaxed sigh, for once.  She wasn’t sure why she had been so out-of-sorts earlier.  Anaís was probably right; she obviously hadn’t eaten in some time.  In fact, now that she considered it, she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten at all.  She leaned back against her chair — and something dug into the spot between her shoulder blades.

What was that?  Joslyn reached behind herself, groping to find whatever had dug into her back.

Anaís watched her with a wary frown.  “Your eggs and duck are going to get cold, dear.”

“There’s something…” Joslyn began, and then her fingers encountered the scabbard.  A sword filled it halfway, but below the midpoint, the scabbard was abruptly empty.  Did she carry a broken sword strapped to her back?  Why?

Anaís clicked her tongue impatiently.  “How many times must I tell you?  I do not allow the drawing of weapons within my bedchamber.”

Joslyn had been about to draw the sword to examine it, but now she let go.  She offered Anaís a sheepish grin.  “I am sorry.  I seem to be forgetful this morning.”

“Indeed.  Forgetful and determined to vex me.  Now eat.”

Anaís picked up her own fork and took a dainty first bite.  Joslyn, mindful of the fact that she was eating in front of a princess, first spread a cloth napkin across her lap before picking up the silver-plated fork.  Her life at the palace — and her secret love affair with Princess Anaís — were such unexpected gifts.  She had once never known that the rich had invented such odd luxuries as napkins, and yet here she was, sitting in a palace across from a Princess, spreading one across her lap like a proper, well-mannered noblewoman.  What would Master and Mistress say if they could see her now?  For that matter, what would Ku-sai —

Joslyn’s fork fell from her fingers, clattering against the porcelain plate.

“Joslyn?  Whatever have you — ”

But Joslyn ignored her.  Instead, she drew the sword from the sheath strapped to her back.  The broad, polished blade had clearly been broken; halfway down its shaft, right where it began to curve, it ended in an abrupt jagged edge.

Anaís spoke shrill words, but the words were meaningless sounds in Joslyn’s ears.  She traced a finger down the blade of her mentor’s sword, feeling the texture of the Old Tongue ruins etched there.

All at once, Joslyn remembered.

She faced the false Anaís.  “You are neither Anaís nor the Princess Natasia, and this is not the great palace of the House of Dorsa.”

“What?  Of course it — ”

The tower, Joslyn remembered.  The underground city of the small men.  The darkness she —

“I do not understand what game you play at,” Joslyn said loudly, no longer directing her words at the woman in front of her — if she could even be called a woman.  Instead, she spoke to the very walls surrounding her.  “I come to your lands not to play at games but to repair my teacher’s sword so that I might defeat the threat facing the Empire.  Please stop this, and take me to — ”

But the dissolution of the bedchamber — and Anaís with it — interrupted Joslyn’s speech.      Like a shattering mirror, the scene before her suddenly fragmented into a hundred million tiny shards of color, flying apart in every direction.  Instinctively, and still holding her ku-sai’s sword, Joslyn ducked and covered her face with a forearm.  Yet nothing struck her, nothing sliced through her brizat or the tattered leather armor beneath it.

Cautiously, Joslyn pulled the arm from her eyes.

And saw nothing but velvet blackness all around her, opaque as a starless night sky.

Something struck the back of Joslyn’s ankles — hard.  Her feet flew out from under her and she crashed gracelessly to the ground.  The side of Joslyn’s face bounced against the dusty earth, filling her open mouth with dirt.

Joslyn winced and pushed herself up to a sitting position.  A broken sword lay on the ground beside her.  It looked curiously like her ku-sai’s sword.  She picked it up, her ears still ringing from the force of her hard landing.  More dirt caked the side of her face, and when she reached up to brush it off, she found that her palm was scraped and bleeding.  She spat the grit from her mouth — once, twice — then rubbed more dirt from her eyes.

“I have killed you,” said a familiar voice behind her.  “Again.”

Joslyn set the broken blade back on the ground and turned towards the voice, the movement bringing on a wave of dizziness that made her want to lie down again.  The round end of a wooden staff, inches from her eyes, gradually came into focus.  She suppressed an urge to shove the staff from her face, knowing from experience that such insolence would only earn her several more whacks and deep purple bruises the next day.

“I’m sorry, Ku-sai,” she said.

He snorted.  “‘Sorry’ does not prevent death.  I seek your improvement, not your apologies.”

Shamed and disheartened, Joslyn made her way to her feet.

She pointed at the broken sword.  “Ku-sai?  Why is your sword — ”

But he didn’t let her finish.  The staff snaked out, smacked the hand she’d extended towards the sword.  With a gasp of pain, Joslyn yanked her hand back, wringing her throbbing fingers.

“Never touch my sword.  It is not yours to wield, nor will it ever be.”

“I don’t know why I — ”

“You are my greatest disappointment, Joslyn of Terinto,” he said.  He planted the staff between his feet and held it with both hands, as if he might try to plunge it into the ground like a stake.  “For four years, I devoted myself to forging you into tempered steel, but you could never relinquish your impetuosity.  You remain half-formed bronze.”  His lip curled with contempt as he looked her up and down.  “What did you accomplish?  You murdered men of the Sunrise Mountains, men you had no quarrel with — ”

“I was a soldier in the Imperial Army,” Joslyn objected.  “I protected the borders of the Empire from those who would — ”

But Ku-sai ignored her, only raising his voice to speak over her.  “Then you gave way to the basest of your desires to pursue an affair with the very woman you were meant to protect, even knowing that doing so would compromise your ability to keep her safe.”

Joslyn’s face fell.  She could not deny the truth in that accusation.  Her love for Tasia had been the very thing that had put them both at risk.

“You rutted against her like a pig,” Ku-sai continued, “then fell into such a deep slumber that the party pursuing her took you by surprise.”

“I know,” Joslyn said.  “I never should have — ”

“And as if that was not enough, you made a dangerous bargain with a creature whose powers you cannot even begin to comprehend, all because your lust robbed you even of the dignity of an honest death.”

Joslyn kept her gaze on the ground, staring at the butt of the staff between her ku-sai’s bare feet.  Everything he said was true.  She had failed in her duty to him, then failed Tasia the same way.

And now what was she?  Half-monster.

One foot in the Shadowlands, with only months left alive in the mortal world before her physical body became host to an undatai who sought passage from its Shadowlands prison into the realm of men.  What could the undatai do with a body like Joslyn’s, a body that had been honed to kill?  The havoc and destruction Joslyn’s body would wreak once the undatai took it over would be unfathomable.

Ku-sai was right about her.  He had always been right.  She was a failure, a disappointment.

“I will stay here, with you,” she said suddenly, raising her eyes to meet his.  “Please.  Train me again — teach me your shadow arts this time — and maybe I can set things right.”

Maybe I can earn your forgiveness, she added silently.

He stared at her for a long moment, his expression cold and unreadable.  At last he nodded once and turned his back on her, stalking towards the hut Joslyn had once shared with him.  She trotted after him, more eager than ever to finish her training, to learn everything her ku-sai knew, to prove herself, to redeem herself.

But halfway to the hut, a nagging voice inside her warned that she was forgetting something.  Missing something.  Joslyn paused in the middle of the yard, the same yard where she had nearly starved to death before Ku-sai had agreed to train her.  She turned back around.

The sword.  She’d placed Ku-sai’s broken sword on the ground and never picked it back up.

Joslyn turned back around and ran to the edge of the birch trees that encircled Ku-sai’s mountaintop.  There, with dead, wet leaves sticking to the polished steel, was her mentor’s sword.  She picked it up, brushed the leaves from its surface.  What could have broken such a mighty blade?

She remembered.  She drank the horsetail tea, awoke to find herself inside Ku-sai’s q’isson.  Or what was left of Ku-sai.  He gave her the sword because it would help her stop the shadows from invading and ravaging the Empire.  Because it would help her protect Tasia.  But then the q’isson had begun to crack, revealing the barren wasteland of the Shadowlands beyond it.

“I thought I told you never to touch my sword,” said Ku-sai behind her.

The air whistled with the sound of a staff cutting through it, but Joslyn was ready this time.  She jumped and spun, the staff passing harmlessly where her feet had been a moment earlier.

“You are not my ku-sai,” she said when she landed.

“Insolent,” said the ku-sai who was not Ku-sai.

“And it is not your forgiveness that I need,” Joslyn continued.  “It is my own.”

As if she needed any more confirmation that it was not her teacher before her but an imposter, the ku-sai who was not Ku-sai did something Joslyn had never once seen him do:  He threw his head back and laughed uproariously.

She took a step back, cautious.  What new trickery was this?

As Ku-sai laughed, he grew, expanding upward, then outward.  At the same time, his skin began to smoke — or mist, perhaps, like something melting or burning down to its essence.  Then his skin cracked, and Joslyn could see the veins of lava, then the flames.

She shuffled backward, holding the broken sword before her.

And as Ku-sai transformed into the undatai, horns bursting forth from the place where her teacher’s head had been a moment earlier, torso transforming into an inferno of roiling fire, the ground around them shook and shimmered.  Just like before, when Joslyn had retrieved the sword from the q’isson of the real Ku-sai, the landscape changed from a peaceful mountaintop into the barren wasteland of the Shadowlands.  Birch trees vanished; rich earth became a fine silt that was neither sand nor soil; the clear blue sky became a muted, sickly red.

“Joslyn of Terinto, true born daughter of Salif and A’eshan.”  The undatai’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere; the air itself reverberated with the baritone notes of its words.  “Why do you continue to fight me?  Have you not yet realized that I am your friend, not your enemy?”

“Of all the things you are, creature,” Joslyn said, both hands wrapped tightly around the hilt of Ku-sai’s broken sword, “‘friend’ is not among them.”

“Yet that is where you are wrong.”  The flames around its mouth parted and curved, and Joslyn realized it was grinning at her.  She shivered.  “You called on me each time you dreamwalked, borrowing my power to supplement your own.  When you traveled to your sister, you invited yet more of me into you.  Then my servant Ty’Tsana vot Gogeni, daughter of Ty’Cala and Zerkosh, battled you.  She taught you to stay connected to me even without the aids used by most practitioners of the shadow arts.”

Joslyn shook her head slowly, not wanting to believe the monster’s words.  Yet she remembered how she formed a q’isson in the heat of battle against Ty’Tsana, during the battle’s most desperate moment.  She remembered how it lingered there, always with her, how she grew accustomed to reaching for its power whenever she needed it.

“Stop pushing me away,” the undatai said.  “Together, we can restore the world’s balance, reunite the mortal realm with the Shadowlands.”

It made a sweeping gesture with one of its arms of flame, and a scene appeared before Joslyn.  Tasia sat on her father’s throne, a crown of steel resting upon her head.  And Joslyn sat in a second throne beside her, a crown also on her head.  Without needing to see it, Joslyn knew that in this potential future, all of Tasia’s enemies had been defeated forever, and the two of them reigned together, dual Empresses of the House of Dorsa, supreme over the whole of the Empire.

No.  Not just the Empire.  They reigned supreme over every corner of the earth, over every inch of land beneath Father Mezzu’s sky.  Joslyn didn’t see it, but she felt it in the vision the undatai offered her.

She, Joslyn of Terinto, born to impoverished desert nomads, sold into slavery, rejected and disparaged her entire life, would rule as a co-equal Empress beside the woman she loved.

Joslyn shook her head.  “That is not what I want.”

“I know you better than you know yourself.  It is exactly what you want, in your secret heart.”

“It is not,” Joslyn said.  “I wish only to protect Tasia from the likes of you.”

The scene disappeared.  “So you say.  If what you say is true, then I offer you something else:  No harm will come to Tasia.”

Another scene appeared; this time, Tasia was dressed simply, like a commoner, a bundle of firewood in her arms.  She walked across Ku-sai’s yard towards a hut — a new hut, rebuilt in the old one’s place.  Joslyn appeared in the open doorway, smiled at her love, walked forward to relieve Tasia of her firewood burden.  A girl child with both Joslyn’s features and Tasia’s danced around Joslyn’s legs and towards Tasia, giggling all the way.

It was a scenario far more tempting than the first one the monster had shown her.  Tasia and Joslyn together, living out their days in peaceful, unadorned simplicity on Ku-sai’s mountain.  They would have a quiet life, a satisfied life.

Yearning rose up within Joslyn, so strong it was an ache in her chest.  The vision was everything she wanted.

“Say the word,” said the undatai.  “Unite with me, and this is yours.”

Joslyn could say yes.  She could say yes, and the struggle would be over at last.  Tasia would be safe; they would live together happily, untroubled by the world’s unceasing demands.

She felt the word rising from her throat, forming on her lips.

Yes, she would take a quiet life with Tasia.

Yes, she would take a life without swords, without killing.

Yes, she would form the family she’d never had, the kind of family she’d always wanted.

But something stopped her.  In her mind’s eye, she saw the soldier she had slain, the one infected by the shadows.  She saw the Paratheenian dock workers he had murdered; she saw the terrified eyes of the serving girl, daughter of the café owner.

“If I agree,” Joslyn asked, “what happens to the rest of the Empire?  What happens when the Shadowlands reunites with the realm of mortals?”

The undatai’s unnatural grin grew wider.  “Some will resist us, of course.  Mankind resents being reminded of his shadows.  Some will fight; many will die.  Then a new peace will rule the land.  A peace of shadows.”

“No,” Joslyn said.

She was fighting for more than Tasia, she realized.  The thought hadn’t really occurred to her before.  Yes, she wanted to protect her princess, she wanted to finally have a life of peace, but she also wanted more than that; she wanted the Empire itself to triumph in this battle against the shadows.  She didn’t want the dock workers in Paratheen to have died in vain; she didn’t want the café owner’s daughter to ever face a monster again.

And if she must, if it was the only way, Joslyn would sacrifice her own perfect future for all of theirs.

She still held Ku-sai’s broken sword.  Now she adjusted her stance, lowering herself into panther prepares to spring.

“You are a fool,” the Prince of Shadows said.  “We will triumph; you will merely die.”

Joslyn gave the monster a one-shouldered shrug.  “So be it,” she said.  “The art of the sword master is death.”

The art, Joslyn finally understood, lay not in bringing death to her foes, but in choosing the right death, at the right time, for herself.

And with that final realization humming inside her heart, the Empire’s last Mizana charged with a broken sword.

43

Tasia and her small squad of rebels remained hidden in the hedge like rabbits hiding from the fox while the palace guard marched forth and into the city.  At any given time, sixty to seventy guardsmen remained inside the palace walls to protect the royal family and any visiting nobles.  Based on the sounds of creaking leather, joking voices, and jostling swords, Tasia guessed that at least fifty guards were leaving the palace to support the city guards in putting down the riots.

Forty or fifty leaving meant about twenty to thirty still remained inside.  If she were Norix, she would put as many of the remaining men as she could on the palace gates.  Four gates, twenty men.  A skeleton crew of five men per gate, with a few less on the South Gate that sat at the mouth of the canal.

It left the palace woefully under-protected.  But then again, there were no walls stronger than the palace’s, and with the mountain men thousands of miles away, it seemed that the Empire’s only truly dangerous enemies were not something the palace guard needed to worry about.  Norix probably bargained that the risk of sending the lion’s share of the guard into the city was minimal.

Tasia waited until the sound of marching guardsmen had faded.

“Now,” she hissed as loudly as she dared.

Just as they had rehearsed, they darted out from the hedge in two groups of three, one group of four.  Keeping to the shadows, they pressed their backs against the palace walls, out of the line of sight of any vigilant guards.

One group of three — two women and one man — knocked arrows.  In their own villages, these three were considered expert marksmen and the best hunters anyone knew.  One of the woman could supposedly drop a stag with a single arrow from a hundred yards away.

Tasia only hoped the bowmen would be as good in Port Lorsin as they were at home.  Aiming at a deer or a wild boar was one thing.  Aiming at a man was quite another.

“Ye ready?” Brick whispered to her.  “This is your part.”

“I don’t want them killed,” Tasia reminded everyone.  “Only if there’s no other choice.”

The others nodded.  They’d heard this instruction before.

“Alright.”  Tasia drew in a breath and stepped into the circle of torchlight provided by the Sunfall Gate.  She would be covered by her archers, but if one of the gate guards decided to fire his own arrow, it was entirely likely that her allies would not be able to return fire soon enough to protect her.  She could only hope her hunch about the guards was right.  “In the name of Emperor Andreth the Just, and Natasia of House Dorsa, his rightful heir, I command you to — ”

“Princess Natasia?” came an uncertain voice, interrupting her.  A figure appeared on the battlement above the gate.  Backlit by a torch, he was all silhouette and shadow.

Tasia tensed.

“By Mother Moons and all the gods,” said the same voice, “is that really you?”

The tension drained out of Tasia.  She knew that voice.  She knew it as well as she knew Brick’s voice, or Alric’s, or Joslyn’s.  “Grizzle?”

“I’m comin’ down, Princess,” he called from atop the battlement.

A few seconds later, Tasia heard a bar slide free from the sally port door to the left of the massive gate.  The door opened, and Grizzle dashed out from it, skidding to a stop next to Tasia.

“Gods,” he breathed.  “It really is you.  I’d hoped — we’d heard rumors, but we — we never truly hoped that…”  He suddenly dropped to one knee, lowered his gaze reverentially.  Grizzle’s voice broke when he spoke again.  “My Princess — er, Empress, I s’pose.  Thank Mother Moon that yer alive.”

Competing emotions swelled all at once inside Tasia’s chest.  Affection for the old man and his loyalty.  Relief that he somehow hadn’t been hanged for letting her escape.  Amazed that her gamble with the riots and the guards remaining at the Sunfall Gate had actually paid off.  Anxiety over the task that still lay before her.

“Get up, you old goat,” Tasia said, the trembling in her voice betraying her heart.

Grizzle stood, and she went up on her tiptoes to kiss his stubble-roughened cheek.  His fingers flew to the place where her lips had been, and the look he gave her was as bashful and self-satisfied as a young squire who’d earned a lady’s kiss for the first time.

“Kissed by the true Empress,” said Grizzle.  “Now I truly have lived through everything.”

“I brought friends,” Tasia said, gesturing to the archers and the other commoners still pressed against the palace walls.  “Be a good man and let us inside?”

Grizzle’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, clearly noticing the other nine for the first time.  “Right, then.  I’m guessin’ ye didn’t come just to pay a social visit to ol’ Grizzle.  Let’s get yer people inside.”

Tasia’s companions stepped out of the shadows, and single-file, they made their way swiftly through the narrow sally port door.

Once everyone was safely inside the palace, Grizzle locked and barred the sally port door and called for the other guards to come down from their posts atop the battlement.  Tasia’s math had been right:  Besides Grizzle, only four other guards manned the gate.  In Norix’s arrogance, it apparently had not even occurred to him that the riots spreading through Port Lorsin might only be a ruse to draw his guards out from behind the safety of their walls.

“Boys,” Grizzle said to the four men in palace blacks who’d just come down from the wall, “we have guests tonight.”

Tasia glanced at the surprised faces around her.  Tedric.  Tomkin.  Two more young men whose faces she recognized but names she could not recall.

It was one of these who was the first to overcome his shock and drop to a knee before Tasia.  The other three followed suit behind him.  Tasia was nearly as shocked to see them as they were to see her — all four of them had been present on the night that Evrart and Tasia had escaped the palace.

Tedric in particular seemed particularly emotional to see Tasia again.  “I told ’em,” he kept saying.  “I told ’em you and that Wise Man was still alive somewhere.”

With the greetings finished, Grizzle herded all of them up the narrow stairs to the battlement  above.  “Ain’t expecting any patrols to come around, given how the Regent emptied out the palace guard into the city,” he said, “but better safe than sorry.”

“I was so worried that you would all die for helping me escape,” she told the men.  “I left you in pitched battle with those who wanted my head.  How are you all still here — alive and still gate guards?”

The men exchanged grim looks.

“We had to cut the others down.  There was no other way,” Tomkin said after a moment.  “I never liked Rob, he was a little lap dog, always barking his head off but shite in a real fight — pardon me language, Prin — Empress.  But the rest of ’em…”

He looked away from Tasia, shaking his head.

“Grizzle took down Cal of Everly and Peter of Colintown,” supplied one of the guards whose name Tasia couldn’t remember.

Tasia nodded, heart falling.  “I remember Peter.  And Cal.  Wasn’t Cal the one who’d just married the Western girl — the washerwoman’s daughter?”

“Aye,” Grizzle said, the single syllable husky in his throat.  “That’s the one.”

“I took out Rob,” Tedric said, picking up the story.  “Then Tommy here took out Cal, and got a good swipe at Wicker — ”

“And I finished Wicker off,” said the other nameless guard.  He paused a moment.  “A real card shark, was Wicker,” he said.  “Ye couldn’t play with him, he was that good.”  He choked out a laugh.  “Took me for a whole month’s salary once.  Waited til I was in my cups,  he did, and then…”  He trailed off, sniffed mightily, and rubbed at one eye.

Tedric clapped him on the back.  “Ye did what ye had to.”

“When the Regent’s men got to us, I told ’em opposite from what really happened,” Grizzle said, voice still hoarse.  “Said that the dead ones was them that let you an’ the Wise Man escape, that ye got away but we’d managed to kill the traitors.”  Grizzle turned his face, spat over the battlement.  “’Tis a nasty business, turning a sword on a man ye thought was yer friend.”  He met eyes with Tasia.  “But ’tis a nastier business to frame an innocent lass for her father’s death and then send her off to the chopping block.  ’Specially if that lass is yer rightful sovereign.”

Tasia took both of Grizzle’s hands in her own.  “I am sorry that you — ” she turned to include the other four guards in her gaze “ — that each of you had to make such sacrifices on my behalf.  It wasn’t fair to you.”

Grizzle straightened.  “I’ve been a palace guardsman for going on thirty and three years, and me pa was a guardsman for thirty-one before me.  I swore me oath to protect the Emperor an’ his family, an’ keepin’ that oath is a matter of me pride.”

“It ain’t no sacrifice for a man t’keep his oath,” said one of the others.

“And now our oath is to our Empress,” Tedric said.

The other men agreed in a broken chorus of “aye”s.

“I thank you,” Tasia said.  “I thank each of you.  And I have two last requests to make of you.”

“Make as many requests as ye want, Empress,” said Grizzle.  “We are yer sworn guardsmen.”

#

No one knew the palace and its grounds better than Tasia.  First she and Nik, later she and Mylla, had spent their every free moment discovering its secret places and forgotten corners.

As night spread and their strategically planned riots sent curls of smoke up everywhere over Port Lorsin, Tasia led her nine companions into one of these forgotten corners — the Winter Greenhouse nestled inside the South Garden.

The greenhouse was one of the oldest structures on palace grounds, constructed to feed the royal family and palace staff during the famine that broke out during the Pestilence of Albin, a devastating pandemic that nearly destroyed the House of Dorsa over eight hundred years earlier.  Pieces of the greenhouse had to be repaired and replaced over the centuries, of course, but the structure itself remained virtually unchanged in all that time.  The palace’s cooking staff knew about it, because they still used it to grow fresh greens during the winter months, but masked by trees and vines as it was, almost everyone else had forgotten its existence long ago.

It was balmy inside the greenhouse, providing respite from the chill early winter air.  Tasia crouched down on the broken tile pathway that ran through the greenhouse’s center, in between rows of squash on one side of her and cabbage on the other.  She gestured for her fighters to gather around her, and unfolded her hand-drawn map of the palace and its grounds, placing it between them.  Brick produced a candle, lighting it and wedging it into the dirt where a tile was missing.

The candle made Tasia nervous, and she instinctively glanced towards the greenhouse entrance.  But between the greatly reduced palace guard and the obscurity of their location, they could probably light a bonfire instead of a candle and still go undetected.

“We’re here,” Tasia said softly, touching a spot in the middle of the rectangle she’d labeled  North Garden.  “The nearest entry point into the palace proper is here, at the back of the Great Hall.”  She traced a line from their current location to the main body of the palace.  Tasia had strolled that line leisurely with Mace of House Gifford beside her and Joslyn trailing a few feet behind only seven or eight months earlier.  How times had changed.  “Grizzle and the others think there aren’t enough guardsmen left to patrol that entrance, but…”  She moved her finger eastward on the map.  “…This is the entrance to Norix’s tower, and if I know him, he hasn’t changed his residence since becoming Regent.  He’ll be at the tower’s top.  And we can expect at least four or five guards at the bottom, maybe one more outside his room at the top.”

“Six to seven guards total?” Brick said doubtfully.  “Grizzle reckons there might only be twenty, twenty-five guards left inside the whole palace, given how many left to help with the riots.  With five on each gate, that’s twenty already.”

“Even in normal times, the South Gate never has more than three guards,” Tasia said.  “It’s rarely open, and the canal makes it hard to enter anyway.  I’m willing to bet there are only two guards there tonight.”

Brick scratched his beard.  “So eighteen guards on the gates instead of twenty?”

“Probably,” said Tasia.  “And there won’t be a single guardsman off-shift tonight, everyone will be working, given the riots.  I think we should count on twenty-five guards at least.”

The others nodded.

“At any rate,” Tasia went on, “I’m guessing four to five guards at the bottom of Norix’s tower, another pair at the top.  And he’ll want to protect his other most important asset, so assume at least three guards inside the palace near Adela’s room.”

It was hard to get the word “Adela” from her mouth.  Capturing Norix and freeing Adela were Tasia’s two goals tonight — the two keys to her forcing the council to listen to her long enough to convince them of the truth.

Yet plucking Adela from her room felt more like a kidnapping than a liberation.  Tasia needed Adela because the Empire had been ruled by a member of the House of Dorsa for a thousand years; without Adela, Norix had no legitimate claim to the title of Regent.

But Tasia didn’t know what to expect from her little sister.  She’d once worshipped Tasia, and Tasia had been the closest thing to a mother Adela had ever really had, but Adela had also been taught to respect the Wise Men, especially Wise Man Norix, her senior tutor and father’s senior counsel.  Who knew what lies Norix had spun to poison Adela’s mind.  Tasia had to accept the possibility that her baby sister, the last living member of her immediate family, might very well view Tasia as a monster.

Tasia shook the thoughts from her mind to focus on the task at hand.  “We kill the guards only if we have to,” she reminded them.  “But remember that they will not hesitate to kill you.”

The others shifted uncomfortably.

“If we’re only facing a maximum of four guards at a time, we’ll outnumber them, Empress,” said a young woman about Tasia’s age.

The woman was an archer, one of the best shots Alric said he’d ever seen.  But she was also tiny, barely cresting five feet.

“We do outnumber them,” said Tasia.  “But…”

She searched for the right words.  Her band of hunters, bakers, smiths, and farmers were already nervous enough as it was.  She didn’t want to destroy what little confidence in themselves they had.  At the same time, she cringed to think what would happen if a fully armed and armored palace guard got his hands on one of them.  Her group might have a numerical advantage, but in every other way —

“A fully trained palace guard’ll squash ye like a beetle on its back, girl,” Brick said bluntly.  “Lest ye put an arrow through his throat from ten feet off.  Which the Empress don’t want to do.”

No one else said a word.  They knew what they were — common folk playacting at being soldiers.  They might win a wrestling contest or an archery competition in their home villages, but they were no match for professional palace guards.

Tasia’s companions stared at the map, each lost in thought.  They weren’t stupid; Tasia didn’t have to explain the obvious “small details” that they knew they had risked their lives this night.  And they knew there was a very high probability that one of them — or all of them — would never see their families again.

“Norix’s tower first,” Tasia said.  “Then on to Adela.  Brick and I will disable as many guards as we can, and the rest of you — ”

“Empress?” said Brick’s son Sheldon.  His father gave him a hard glare for interrupting, but the boy spoke anyway.  “I-I have an idea.  But it might be…”  He hesitated.  “Well, it might be stupid.”

Tasia waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“Spit it out already, lad,” Brick said irritably.

“Reynolds an’ me — that’s a mate I have back in Arthur’s Ferry — we came up with a way to…”  The boy grimaced and avoided his father’s eyes.  “It’s, uh, it’s a way to spook our little brothers and sisters.  I reckon it could get us past the guards without anyone havin’ t’die.”

44

In the tower of Xochitcyan, Joslyn lifted the broken sword of her ku-sai, shouted a war cry, and charged the Prince of Shadows.  But she never reached the creature.  Halfway through her charge, the world went black again — pitch black, like a moonless midnight.  She skidded to a stop, disoriented.

From the darkness, a soft pink light the size of a coin emerged in the center of Joslyn’s field of vision.  As she watched, the light expanded upwards — a glowing pink seam in the black void.  The line widened, becoming an oval, and from it, a child-sized figure emerged.

“Joslyn of Terinto,” the figure said — and now Joslyn could see that it wasn’t a child at all but an ancient, wizened small woman, “you have passed our test.”

Joslyn tightened her grip on the broken sword.  “What ‘test’?” she asked.  “Where am I?”

But even as she asked the question, memories came back to her.  She remembered walking through the city of the small men, determined to repair the sword she held.  They’d led her into a tower, and then…

What had come after she entered the tower?  Her memories of her time inside it were vague and already fading, like a half-remembered dream.  Had she seen Tasia?  Wasn’t she about to battle the undatai a moment earlier?

The tiny old woman waved her hand, and what was left of the darkness disappeared.  Gentle pink light illuminated a domed chamber with rough, cave-like walls.  A passage behind the small woman curved upwards and disappeared from sight.

“I am Grastinga, guardian of the tower,” said the small woman.  “Come.”  She waved  Joslyn towards the curving passageway.  “We go now.”

Joslyn didn’t move to follow.

“Come, warrior.  Test over now.”

The woman’s voice was gentle but commanding.  Instinct told Joslyn to trust her, but still she hesitated.

“What test?” she asked again.

Grastinga waddled forward and went up on her tip toes to place a gnarled hand onto Joslyn’s chest.  “Tower tests what is here,” she said.  “Tower asks what Warrior really wants; tower asks why.”  She removed her hand.  “Tower says Joslyn of Terinto possesses pure heart.  Now come; time is little.”

“But I can’t remember the test,” Joslyn said, disconcerted.  “Why?”

“Because small men keep tower test secret,” Grastinga said simply.  She turned away, her slow, duck-like gate carrying her into the passageway.  She did not turn to see if Joslyn followed.

Reluctantly, Joslyn sheathed the broken sword and headed after her, hunching to fit through a passage built for a people half her size.

#

The tunnel spiraled ever upward, and Joslyn grew dizzy from its corkscrew path.  Now that she remembered approaching the tower with the two small men who had brought her here, she also remembered the tower’s phenomenal height.  How high did the tower go?  Two hundred feet?  Five hundred?  If she had to guess, she would say that the small men’s tower was the equivalent of at least two of the palace’s towers stacked end-to-end.  The palace brought on thoughts of Tasia, and Joslyn said a silent prayer for Tasia’s safety.  She could not say to whom she prayed — Father Mezzu, Mother Eirenna, Mother Moon, Tasia herself — but she held the prayer in her heart anyway, like a luck charm.

Finally, the twisting passage up the tower ended, opening into a circular room inlaid with thousands of glittering jewels.  Open windows overlooked the city below, which from this height looked more like a collection of bright pebbles than a city.

It was even more impressive from above than it had been from the ground.  Joslyn had never realized so many small men existed; it was rare to see even one of them, let alone an entire city’s worth.  Judging by the number of buildings, and the way they layered one atop the other like a multi-level honeycomb, she guessed Xochitcyan was as large as Port Lorsin itself.

The small men had built an empire within the Empire, without the “tall men” ever realizing it.

In the center of the round room, a fire blazed, large enough and hot enough that Joslyn felt beads of perspiration forming beneath her armor, and this despite the fact that the hearth was at least ten yards away from where she stood.  Small men and small women bustled about, carrying woven baskets of materials, arranging something upon a long stone table that curved in a horseshoe shape around one side of the fire.

“Give sword,” said Grastinga, extending her palm towards Joslyn.

Joslyn pulled the sword free, but she didn’t hand it to the small woman.  This was her ku-sai’s sword, after all, a weapon to be revered and honored, and not something to be handed over to a stranger simply because it had been requested.  Yet this was why she had come, wasn’t it?

“You will repair it?” Joslyn asked.  “Including its magic?”

“Yes.  We fix,” said Grastinga.

Joslyn glanced down at the broken sword, rotating it, watching the flames reflect against its polished surface.

“Why Ku-sai?” she asked suddenly.  “How did he come to possess a sword that separates men from shadows?”

If Grastinga was annoyed by Joslyn’s refusal to hand the sword over, she did not indicate it.

“Small men make the sword, give sword to Ku-sai’s father when still young man,” she said.  “Small men seers foresaw one day needed — a warrior of Seven Cities to protect the realm of men.  Small men not see when.  Small men not see who.  But now we see sword is Joslyn of Terinto’s destiny.”

Joslyn shook her head.  No.  She did not believe in fate or destiny; destiny was what a person made of it.  Even Mistress, a seer herself, had once explained that the future was never absolute.  At best, and with the aid of the insight of compliant shadows, a seer could make an intelligent guess about what the future might hold.

Joslyn said as much to Grastinga.  “Your seers cannot know my destiny.  It is not fore-written; I write my own destiny.”

Grastinga nodded in agreement.  “Seers once say Joslyn of Terinto stay with her ku-sai twenty summers and learn to dreamwalk.  But Joslyn of Terinto ran away.  Seers did not foresee.”

The familiar old shame blossomed inside Joslyn’s chest, but she shook her head and let it go.  “I was eighteen.  I made a foolish choice.”

Grastinga shrugged, apparently uninterested.  “Not matter.  Joslyn has sword now.  Can still fulfill destiny.”

Grastinga held out her hand again for the broken blade.  Joslyn hesitated, but then she spun the broken sword deftly and passed it, hilt first, to Grastinga.  No sooner had Grastinga accepted the blade than a small man wearing what appeared to be a blacksmith’s apron hurried up to her and carried the sword to the curved stone table.  He held it with a reverence that Joslyn decided she approved of.

Her eyes still tracking Ku-sai’s sword, Joslyn asked Grastinga, “What do your seers say will happen next?”

“Seers say Joslyn takes sword to Port Lorsin, restores balance before shadows destroy Empress.”

“Empress?” Joslyn repeated, alarmed.  “Do you mean Tasia?  Is she in danger?”

“Empress Natasia soon faces shadows,” Grastinga said, her tone grave.

“What is ‘soon’?”

“Empress in Port Lorsin now.  Shadows arrive in hours.”

“Only hours?”  Panic and anger flooded Joslyn.  If Tasia was in Port Lorsin, it could only mean that she was ready to challenge Norix for the throne, but a noose of shadows was tightening around her neck.

Grastinga watched her.  “Sword repaired in short time.  Soon.  Warrior not need worry.”

“Not soon enough!” Joslyn exclaimed, her hands curling into fists.  She steadied herself with a deep breath, resisting the sudden urge to smash her fists into this maddening small woman who spoke in riddles.  More seers, more practitioners of the shadow arts.  Joslyn was sick of all of them.  “I traveled northeast for weeks in the Zaris Mountains; I must be near House Farrimont’s lands by now.”

“Yes.  Near Farrimont.”

“That puts me a fortnight from Port Lorsin.  At best.”

A fortnight was an underestimation, and they both knew it.  Even if Joslyn had a fresh horse she could push southwest — and she didn’t — it would take her close to a week just to get out of the Zaris Mountains, another week to cross the lands held by House Farrimont, and several more days once she reached the northern border of the Capital Lands.  And that was only if she went at breakneck speed, without rest for her or for whatever poor beast bore her.

“Then the Empress is doomed,” Joslyn said.

Grastinga reached inside her heavy robes and produced a glass bauble, not much larger than a child’s marble.  There was a rune etched into its surface.

She held it out to Joslyn.

Joslyn studied the bauble, realizing that it wasn’t glass like she’d first thought, but a smooth sphere of clear quartz, with sparks of red and green lights dancing inside it.

“Distance in Land of Shadows different than distance in Land of Men,” Grastinga said.    She took Joslyn’s hand, placed the quartz bauble in her palm.  “Traveler’s orb lead warrior fast where warrior wants to go.”

The bauble was cool to the touch and weighty.  Joslyn held it up, examining it closer.  The dancing lights in its center reminded Joslyn very much of the river of swirling light that appeared when she formed a q’isson.

So.  A “traveler’s orb.”  She supposed it explained something about the small men.  In children’s tales, small men could appear from seemingly nowhere, traversing the dangerous Zaris Mountains and their thick forests to arrive in the cities and villages of the tall men without ever being seen or tracked.  And once their trading with the tall men was done they vanished without leaving a trail.  Those who tried to track them never could.

More shadow arts.

Everything about the small men, from the runes they wrote, to the floating balls of light hung in the air without strings to illuminate their magnificent underground city, to the traveler’s orb Joslyn now held in her palm pointed to a close relationship with the shadow arts.  Joslyn didn’t like the idea of using the sphere of shadow arts quartz in her hand to create a shortcut through the Shadowlands.

But if it could take her to Tasia…

“This traveler’s orb.  It can take me to Port Lorsin?”

Grastinga nodded.

“But I have to go through the Shadowlands to get there?”

She nodded again.

Joslyn drew in a breath.  “How long?  How long will it take to reach Port Lorsin with this?”

“Time meaningless in Land of Shadows.  Time in Land of Men, only hours.”

“I am marked by shadows,” she told the small woman.  “If I enter their realm again… it will find me.  The one they call the Prince of Shadows.  It almost did the last time, when my ku-sai gave me his sword.  I will be no use to Tasia if I am waylaid in the Shadowlands.”

Grastinga shook her head.  “Shadows like mortals.  Some bad.  Some good.  Mortals have wars; shadows also wars.  Not all shadows want to stop Warrior.  Some shadows want help.  Some shadows like balance — Land of Men, Land of Shadows, separate.  Balanced.”

Joslyn processed Grastinga’s broken common tongue, then slowly nodded.  Tasmyn had said something similar, hadn’t she?  Tasmyn had said that it was imperative that Tasia become Empress because the balance between the worlds depended upon it.  Because if Tasia didn’t become Empress, the shadows who were not interested in maintaining that balance would destroy the world of men.

Ku-sai’s sword and Tasia’s crown — together they were the shields that protected all mankind.  That was what Tasmyn had said.

Joslyn closed her fist around the orb, reaching her decision.  “How do I use it?”

45

“Weather’s turning,” commented a palace guardsman to his three companions.  As if to emphasize his point, he stomped his boots against the flagstones and rubbed his gloved hands together.  “Me ma says we’re in for a hard winter this year.”

“What’s yer ma, a seer?” a second guard asked derisively.  He did not stomp or rub his hands together; he stood as one imagined a palace guard ought to, erect and still, with one hand on the pommel of his short sword.  “Every winter’s hard.”

“Aye,” said a third guard gruffly.

The fourth guard said nothing.  His gaze was fixed on the twin plumes of smoke that were still rising in the distance, visible over the eastern wall of the palace despite the velvety navy blue of the early evening sky.

Riots had arrived in Port Lorsin, and that did not bode well for anyone.  But none of the guards spoke of that.

“When d’ye think they’ll get back?” the first guard asked.  He didn’t need to explain that he meant the rest of the palace guard, the sixty-odd men who had left their posts and foot patrols to reinforce the city guard, a guard whose own ranks had been thinned when they left Port Lorsin to quell the riots in the surrounding towns and villages.

“When it’s done,” said the fourth guard.

They fell silent again.  The riots were a tricky business; many commoners (and almost to a man, the palace guardsmen were commoners) felt the riots were justified.  After all, the Regent was supposedly ending the War in the East to relieve the burden the people had been carrying for twelve years, so why were taxes and the price of grain suddenly skyrocketing?  With winter approaching, grain prices always rose a little, but nowadays grain was damn near unaffordable for the ordinary person — even for guards, who were paid well for commoners.

But on the other hand, it was the job of the guards to serve the House of Dorsa and keep the peace.  And Mother Moon knew that chaos of rioting and looting wouldn’t solve anything.  How did it help to pillage the shops and wares of other commoners?

If anything, it was the Regent who deserved the blame, and the palace was what deserved to be looted.  But none of the four guards at the base of the Regent’s tower would ever dare to say such a thing out loud.

In times like these, you never knew who you could trust.

The private thoughts of the four guards were interrupted by a sound — a strange, eerie sound.  From the direction of the veranda that ran along the palace proper’s eastern side came…

Laughter.

It was unnatural laughter — grating, high-pitched, and pinging off the stone pillars and archways that formed the veranda in such a way that it was hard to tell exactly where it came from.

And it stopped as suddenly as it had started.

“What in the name of all the gods was that?” asked the first guard, his words tumbling out in a single hoarse breath.

“Prob’ly just the boys, playing a game with us,” said the second guard.  He tried to look unimpressed, but he shifted his weight and flexed the fingers of the hand that rested on the pommel of his sword.

By “boys,” of course, he meant the other palace guardsmen.  But there was a flaw in his theory.  Normally, the night shift patrol consisted of at least twelve men — three patrolling each of the four cardinal directions.  But tonight, there was no patrol.  There were only enough guards left for the gates, the Regent, and the Princess.

The four guards at the base of the tower all knew this.

A second laugh came, closer this time.  It was just as eerie as the first, but this one was even higher in pitch.  Feminine, almost.

Which didn’t make sense, as there were no female palace guards.  Not since the nomad woman who was always trailing behind the traitor princess like an obedient puppy.

“Oi!” yelled the second guard towards the veranda.  “Stop messin’ around.  Ain’t a time for games.”

Silence.

All four guards peered towards the darkened veranda, straining their eyes to see more than shadows.  The veranda lanterns had been lit some hours earlier, but with the Regent cutting back on palace expenses, only half the hanging lanterns blazed with light.  Which meant that much of the veranda was as black as the inside of a cave.

A chorus of musical giggles broke out from the direction of the veranda — more than two voices this time, closer to a dozen or more, bubbling up like the carefree laughter of children.

The third guard cursed under his breath; the fourth guard pressed his lips tightly together.

“It’s the fey,” the first guard said breathlessly.

The second guard cuffed the first, making the man yelp in surprised pain.  “Ye soft-headed idiot.  The fey?  What are ye, seven summers now?”

The first guard rubbed the back of his head where he’d been hit, his expression appropriately embarrassed.

“I’ll flush out whoever’s having a go at us,” the second guard announced loudly, his words obviously aimed more at the troublemakers hiding in the shadows of the veranda than his compatriots at the foot of the Regent’s tower.

With stiff-legged self-importance, he marched towards the veranda.

“Come out now or be sorry later,” he told the veranda.  He stopped at the knee-high wall that ran between the veranda’s pillars, squinting left and right into the shadows.  He drew his sword.  “If I run ye through, it’s yer own stupidity what’s killed ye.”

Sword in hand, he stepped over the wall onto the smooth pink tiles that paved the veranda walkway.  A lantern swayed gently overhead some ten feet away, its light providing only a dim circle of yellow that hardly reached to his spot.

For all the guard’s dismissal of the fey, hairs nevertheless rose at the back of the second guard’s neck.  Tightening his grip on his sword, he took a few steps forward.

Several disorienting things happened all at once.  A hand clamped tightly over his mouth, and he felt himself yanked backwards into the shadows.  He scrabbled for purchase against the tiles, but they’d been scrubbed earlier that day, and his boot slipped on a patch of water that hadn’t quite dried.  The guard swung his sword wildly at whoever had grabbed him from behind, but a hard, dull blow struck his forearm.  The sword tumbled from his fingers, clattering to the tile below.

“Horace?” called one of his mates, alarmed by the sound his sword had made against the walkway’s tiles.  “Ye alright?”

But Horace the palace guard could scarcely hear his friend, because another voice hissed into his ear, “Ye feel that point against the pulse o’yer neck?  That’s me dagger.  Yer gonna sit down now, nice ’n easy, lest ye want yer blood staining this pretty pink floor.”

#

Tasia stood with her hands on her hips, gazing down at the four guards whom Brick and the smithy had roped together like a bundle of firewood.  Rags gagged their mouths, twine wrapped around their wrists so tightly that their fingers were swollen and red.  They’d managed not to kill any of them, but one of them had taken Tasia’s dagger in his side.  Although they’d stopped the bleeding and bandaged the wound as best as they could, Tasia still worried the injury would later prove fatal.

Behind her, Sal, the huntress who’d suggested earlier that their numbers would be to their advantage, sorted through the swords, daggers, and armor they’d taken from the guards.  Left only in their undergarments, the gooseflesh on the guards’ legs was visible beneath the soft overhead glow of the lantern.

Tasia hated this, sneaking into her own home under the cover of darkness, doing battle with palace guards who would’ve been loyal to her if not for the way Norix and his allies had lied to them.

As Grizzle had said, it was a nasty business, having to fight even the palace guard.

But perhaps they could be reasoned with.

“I assume some of you recognize me,” she said.  “For those who don’t:  My name is Natasia of House Dorsa, and I am the rightful Empress of the Empire.  The man you’ve been calling ‘Regent’ these last months accuses me of murdering my father, but I did no such thing.  It was the false Regent himself along with his co-conspirators who did this, and soon I will prove this to the whole Empire.”

She paused, giving them time to process her declaration.

Two of the guards were watching her, listening carefully.  The first one they’d captured, the one called Horace, refused to look at her.  Another guard’s back was to Tasia, and, tied in the manner he was, could not turn to see her.  She couldn’t tell if he was listening or not.

“I offer you a choice tonight,” she continued.  “Show me your allegiance is to the rightful heir of the House of Dorsa by giving me information that will help me capture Norix and free my sister, and I promise I will remember you and reward you later, when I sit on the throne that was my father’s, and my grandfather’s before him.  Hold your tongue and you will never be a palace guardsman again.  Speak falsely and I will promise you something else entirely — I promise you will lose your tongue so that you can never tell another lie.”

Tasia nodded at Brick and the smithy.  One by one, they pulled the gags free from the mouths of the four guardsmen.

“Say nothing, mates,” growled Horace as soon as his gag was out.

All four guards stared in stoic silence at the tiled walkway, its rosy pink now decorated with ugly blotches of blood.

Tasia sighed heavily.  She’d hoped at least one of the four guards would be like the Sunfall Gate guardsmen, unconvinced by Norix and Lord Hermant’s lies and still loyal to the heir named by the late Emperor.

No sooner had the sigh escaped her, the guard whose back was towards her spoke.  “The Regent keeps only one guard outside his chamber door.  Most call him Skinny, on account o’his size.  But he’s a mean bastard, and loyal to the Regent.  Skinny and the Regent was pals before the ugliness with Commander Cole and the Emperor.  Wouldn’t be surprised if Skinny helped the Regent — he always had beef with the Commander.”

“Shut yer trap, Faris,” Horace snapped.

Tasia walked around the circle of men to stand in front of Faris.  His face was familiar, even though his name was not.  But that was true of most of the palace guards; many of them had been charged with protecting the palace and its inhabitants since before Tasia’s birth.

Suddenly it dawned on her why she knew his face.  “I remember you.  You were there the night they brought in the man who tried to kill me.  You were posted at my father’s office door.”

“Aye, Majesty,” said Faris, the guard who, only twenty minutes earlier, had been watching the smoke rise beyond the eastern wall of the palace in grim and pensive silence.  “That I was.”

Another guard spoke.  “Sk-skinny’s one of them long-armed types,” he said.  Unlike Faris, whose voice was steady and measured, this guard sounded jittery and anxious.  “Fast and terrible long sword reach, but if ye can get inside his range…”

“Ye’ll have to kill him,” Faris said quietly.  “It’s the only way.  If ye give him a chance to talk, he’ll take at least one of you out.”

Horace muttered something under his breath that sounded like a colorful curse.

“An-an’ there’s only two guards outside yer sister’s bedchamber,” said the anxious one.  “But one of ’em’s old and fat, an’ the other’s got a limp that slows him.  If ye force ’em to give chase — ”

“Shut.  Up.  Both of ye,” Horace said.

Brick, who stood listening with his arms crossed against his barrel chest, met Tasia’s eye and gestured with his head to the side.  Tasia stepped away from the bound soldiers, and Brick whispered in her ear.

“The sooner we get out of here, the better,” Brick said.  He nodded at the huntress.  “Let me take Sal up the tower.  She can put an arrow through this ‘Skinny’ an’ we’ll snatch the old man.  You take the rest to get yer sister.  We’ll meet back up at the Sunfall Gate for the next part.”

Tasia nodded, then glanced over her shoulder at the four bound guards.  “And them?”

“They’ll find a way to get free,” Brick said without hesitating.  “But we’ll liberate ’em of their weapons ’n armor.  It’ll at least slow ’em down.”  His eyes flitted to the guards, where Horace was whispering to the man next to him.  “An’ I figure they’ll have their own arguments to sort out before they come after us.  I reckon it’ll come down t’fists.  By the time they work it out between themselves, we’ll be gone.”

“Alright,” Tasia said.  “Let’s go.”  She waved a hand at the smith, the one whose hammer had struck the blow that caused Horace to drop his sword.  “Smithy, gag them again.  Sal, Sheldon.  Get their things.  All of you — put on any of the armor that fits.  And if you feel comfortable with a short sword, take one.”

Brick strode forward and picked up Horace’s sword, spinning it in his hand before grinning down at the scowling guard.

“Ahh,” Brick said to him.  “It’s been a minute since I had quality steel in me hand.  They do equip you boys with the best, don’t they?  Not the shoddy stuff they hand out to us common foot soldiers.”  His grin broadened.  “Thanks for the sword, mate.  I got a feeling you won’t be needin’ it again, seein’ as ye don’t know what a real Empress looks like when ye see one.”

46

Three times.  That was how many times Joslyn could use the traveler’s orb before its powers were exhausted.  But that didn’t concern her, because she only needed to use it twice.  She needed to use it once to return to the place where Ty’Tsana was still captive inside the circle of runes created by the small men, because she did not plan to leave the woman alive, and she needed to use it once more to go to Port Lorsin, where she would use Ku-sai’s newly repaired sword to separate as many shadows from human hosts as she could.  A single cut, the small men told her, would be enough to drive the shadow from its host.  Joslyn didn’t know how many cuts she would need to inflict — Grastinga seemed to believe that thousands of shadows were already in the city, waiting only for the Prince of Shadows to activate them.  But Joslyn didn’t need to liberate each one.  She only needed the sword to touch enough of them that the city guard would be able to dispatch those who remained.

Even so, cutting even a hundred or two hundred shadow-infested men and women sounded almost insurmountable.  They would probably take her down eventually.  But at least she would die giving Tasia a chance to live.

Perhaps someone would pick up Ku-sai’s sword once she fell, and finish the work she’d started once she left the mortal world to fulfill her side of the bargain with the Prince of Shadows.

It was a strange feeling, to walk willingly towards one’s own death.  For much of her life, Joslyn had felt that it didn’t really matter if she lived or died.  No one much cared that she lived; no one would much miss her once she died.  The art of the sword master was death — both others and one’s own.  And when one didn’t much mind the prospect of death, one was willing to take risks that others were not.

But even though Joslyn was willing to take risks, she’d still fought to live.  Now she would fight to die, and the great irony was that she finally had someone to live for.  Yet at least she would die giving Tasia a chance to live.

Before she went to Port Lorsin to die, Joslyn would test the powers of her new sword on Ty’Tsana, who certainly needed her connection to the Shadowlands cut even if she did not yet realize it.

High in the underground tower of Xochitcyan, with the small men gathered around her in a semi-circle, Joslyn did what Grastinga had instructed.  She held the traveler’s orb firmly in her fist, closed her eyes, and envisioned as vividly as she could the place where she wanted to go.

A circle of birch trees.  A dark-eyed, slender woman pacing between pebbles painted with the runes that trapped her, frustration evident upon her face.  A mountain breeze, carrying with it the scent of wet leaves and imminent winter.

When the image was fixed within her mind’s eye, Joslyn uttered the word in the Old Tongue Grastinga had taught her.

As soon as the word left her lips, a seam opened in the air itself, like a crack in reality formed of red-orange light.  Even as the seam opened wider, Joslyn felt a sucking sensation, as if the light was a vortex that would pull her into it.  It occurred to her to resist, but she didn’t.  And a moment later, she was inside the seam.

She glanced behind her, looking for the faces of the small men who had been staring up at her a moment earlier.  But the round interior tower room with its blazing hearth was gone, the small men with it.

Joslyn stood on a barren plain.  Everything had the same dull color of a faded blood stain, even the sky.

She was in the Shadowlands.

Joslyn tightened her grip on Ku-sai’s freshly forged sword, and she glanced left and right, expecting that an attack was imminent.  But no attack came.  A gentle humming sound, like a honeybee or a narrow-beaked nectar bird, drew her attention forward.  There, floating at eye-level a few feet ahead of her, was a tiny orb of glowing light.  That was where the humming was coming from.

Follow light, Grastinga had instructed.

Joslyn took a step towards the pinprick of golden light, and it immediately buzzed ahead of her, eager and playful.  She followed at a comfortable jog, turning when the orb turned.

“Mizana.”

The word was a whisper that came from everywhere and nowhere.

Joslyn slowed her pace, scanning the bleak horizon and holding her sword at the ready.  She half-expected to see the ground begin to boil with creatures, as it had the last time she was in the Shadowlands when Ku-sai had given her the sword.  But it did not.  She set out after the orb again.

“Mizana.”

There was more than one voice this time; it was a chorus of voices.

“Mizana, Mizana, Mizana…”

The sky suddenly rumbled as if a thunderstorm brewed in the distance.  Joslyn picked up her pace, setting off after the orb at a loping jog.

Ahead of her, a vertical seam opened upon the horizon, like a narrowly cracked sliding panel.  Through it, a birch forest came into view.

The rumble grew louder.  “Mizana…”

Joslyn sprinted for the crack in the landscape.  The sucking sensation came again, and the dull light of the Shadowlands dissipated almost in the same moment.  She felt the spongy earth of the birch forest beneath her boots.

She’d returned to the mortal.  What should have taken three or four hours of hiking had taken only a minute or two.

As she had seen in her mind’s eye, Ty’Tsana paced like a tigress within the boundaries of her invisible cage.  She stopped when Joslyn materialized before her.

“So.  You’re back from your conference with the small men.”  Her eyes flitted to Joslyn’s closed fist, the one that held the traveler’s orb.  “And they gave you one of their little baubles, I suppose.”  Ty’Tsana cocked her head at Joslyn and scanned her up and down.  “You let them take away your q’isson?  I warned you they had other aims in mind.”

Ty’Tsana had noticed immediately what Joslyn had forgotten to notice despite hours inside the small men’s city.  Once she’d entered the tower and been confronted with their tests, the fragment of the q’isson that had been hovering behind her since the battle with Ty’Tsana had disappeared.

“I am grateful that it is gone,” Joslyn said, and she meant it.

Ty’Tsana snorted.  “Grateful?  They took away your power, because they fear what will happen if the so-called ‘tall men’ ever grow as adept in the shadow arts as they are themselves.  They only helped you repair the sword because they don’t want mankind uniting with the shadows, because then the tall men will be a race of sorcerers, just like they are.”

“A race of sorcerers?” Joslyn repeated, incredulous.  “You speak as if people willingly invite the shadows into their bodies.  As if they are as happy to be manipulated by shadows as you are.”

Ty’Tsana burst into laughter.  She laughed so hard that tears sprang from the corner of her eyes.

Joslyn gritted her teeth.  She was inconceivably tired of this woman.

“You fool,” Ty’Tsana finally said once she had recovered herself.  “You want to speak of manipulation?  You are the one manipulated.  Manipulated by the small men because they fear what a mankind reunited with their shadows might be capable of.  Manipulated by the Brotherhood of Culo because they fear the vengeance of the shadows they unjustly enslaved for more than a thousand years.  You don’t even know what you’re capable of, and yet you are happy to be manipulated into giving up your power before you can even discover your true strength.”

Joslyn drew the blade.  Unlike the other times she had held it since the small men mended it, the sword tingled in her grip, sending what felt like a gentle current of electricity up her arm.

It detects the shadows inside her, Joslyn thought.  It thirsts to engage, just as I do.

A single cut.  According to the small men, it was all it would take to separate Ty’Tsana from the shadows inside her.

“I am here, Joslyn,” Ty’Tsana said, throwing her arms wide.  “I am unarmed, caged by the small men’s runes.  You can finally kill me if you want.”

“I would not strike down an undefended opponent in cold blood,” Joslyn said.

Ty’Tsana glanced at the curved blade in Joslyn’s hand, eyes dancing up the runes engraved along its flat side.  “Ahh, I see.  You just want to test its power on me.  You want to cut away my soul.”

“The shadows that inhabit you are not your soul.”

“You understand so little.”

Joslyn took a step forward — not towards Ty’Tsana, but towards one of the rune-marked stones that formed the boundary of her invisible prison.  She would need to destroy the rune first, lest she inadvertently trap herself inside the trees with the assassin.

“What will you do, now that you have the traveler’s orb?” Ty’Tsana asked, no doubt stalling for time.

It occurred to Joslyn that she perhaps should not tell Ty’Tsana where she was going, but it didn’t matter anymore.  Ty’Tsana would be separated from her source of power, and as soon as Joslyn activated the orb again to go to Port Lorsin, all the Shadowlands would know where she was going anyway.

“I will go to Port Lorsin,” she said, putting the toe of her boot on one of the rune-marked stones.  “I will stop what is happening there, protect the Empress.”

“There are too many of us in Port Lorsin for you to defeat.  You must know that.”

“I don’t need to defeat all of them,” Joslyn replied.  “I only need to defeat enough, so that the city guard can take care of those who remain.”

“You’re too late,” Ty’Tsana said.  Her voice had deepened slightly, and Joslyn knew it was as much the shadow speaking as it was the woman.  “The battle to liberate Port Lorsin will begin within hours, and the city guard is not even there to mount a defense.”

“You lie.  You say the small men manipulate me, but you are the master manipulator.”

“I have no need to lie,” the Ty’Tsana-shadow said.  “Your precious love took your dream-advice and gathered the commoners around her.  But instead of mounting an impossible attack, she set the countryside alight with riots.  It was clever.  The city guard left to stop the riots, giving the girl a chance to sneak into the city.  Yet the  girl’s very success has already defeated her; she sent out the only men who might have stopped us.”

Joslyn’s stomach went cold.

The shadow was right; drawing the city guard out of Port Lorsin was clever.  But that meant there was practically no one left capable of fighting the shadows that had been quietly seeping into the city inside the disguise of human hosts.

The shadow inside Ty’Tsana laughed, and as if the laughter itself was a kind of trigger springing a trap, the electric current running from Ku-sai’s sword into Joslyn grew suddenly powerful.

With a furious yell, Joslyn kicked the ring of rune-pebbles surrounding Ty’Tsana, scattering them.  Then she spun forwards with a momentous scorpion sting.  Ty’Tsana leapt backwards, escaping the slash.  But not escaping it entirely.  The tip of Ku-sai’s curved sword nicked the woman’s shin, biting through black trousers and into the flesh below.  Ty’Tsana screeched and stumbled backwards, tripping over a tree root and collapsing to the ground.

Ty’Tsana writhed like an epileptic, one of her hands flopping like a fish against Joslyn’s ankle.  Joslyn stepped back as a curl of smoke rose from the fallen woman.  It looked like the sudden rush of steam that comes from a campfire extinguished with a ladle of water.

The smoke had to be the shadow — or shadows — leaving Ty’Tsana’s body.

The smoke dissipated quickly, and Ty’Tsana went still.  Joslyn had been deceived by this woman before; she did not trust the stillness.

“Sit up,” Joslyn commanded.

Slowly, gradually, Ty’Tsana pushed herself up.  “What have you done?”  There was nothing otherworldly in her voice now; it was that of a normal human woman.  She looked down, inspecting her own hands, torso.  Ty’Tsana muttered something in what sounded like the Old Tongue, and Joslyn tensed, preparing for an attack.

But nothing happened.

“What have you done?” Ty’Tsana said again.

Her tone was so forlorn, so wracked with grief that Joslyn nearly felt sorry for her.  Nearly.

“This changes nothing,” Ty’Tsana said, looking up at Joslyn from her place on the ground.  “Port Lorsin will still be lost, no matter how many men and women you sever from their souls.”

“I told you already.  A shadow is not a soul.”  Joslyn sheathed Ku-sai’s sword.  It was clear that the woman was no threat to her now.

“You say that only because of how little you know.”  Tears rolled from Ty’Tsana’s eyes.  “But it doesn’t matter.  The Order of Targhan will still triumph.  The gate remains open.”

The word gate made something inside Joslyn tingle, reverberating through her in a manner not dissimilar to how Ku-sai’s sword had felt in her hand when it detected the shadow within Ty’Tsana.

“What ‘gate’?”

Ty’Tsana did not respond.

“What ‘gate,’ you vile woman?”  Joslyn drew the sword once more, placed it beside Ty’Tsana’s throat.

Ty’Tsana would not meet her eye.  “We both know you will not open my throat as I sit on the ground with nothing to defend myself.”  Joslyn opened her mouth to reply, but Ty’Tsana sighed and spoke first.  “There is a gate in the Sunrise Mountains, far to the East of here.  It is a bridge between the Shadowlands and the mortal realm.  It is a gift the Order gave to the mountain men, to help them push back the Empire from their ancestral homelands.”  She looked up.  “Use your ku-sai’s sword on as many of us as you like.  It does not matter while the gate stays open.  For every shadow you sever from its human companion, two more shadows will come through the gate.”

Joslyn sheathed the curved sword.  “Get up.”

Ty’Tsana did not move.

Joslyn took half a step forward, kicking lightly at the hand Ty’Tsana leaned upon.  “Get.  Up, damn you.”

“Why?  Because you will feel better gutting me if I’m on my feet?”

“No.”

Joslyn’s hand snaked out, grabbing Ty’Tsana’s wrist.  In one swift movement, Joslyn twisted Ty’Tsana’s arm, pinning the wrist against the small of her back.  The woman yelped in surprise, but with no shadow to bolster her strength this time, she could not resist.  Joslyn kept Ty’Tsana immobilized with one hand while she pulled out the traveler’s orb with the other.

Joslyn closed her fist tightly around the orb.  “Because you are going to tell me where this gate is.  Exactly where the gate is.”

“You won’t be able to close it.”

“Then it should not bother you to take me to it.”

47

It was hard for Tasia to allow Brick and Sal to head to Norix’s tower without her.

Over the past seven or eight months, she’d often sustained herself with the fantasy of seeing Norix’s face the moment he realized his traitorous deception would be laid bare for the whole Empire to see.  Through his sly coup and subsequent Regency, Norix had probably assumed he would manage to make his way into the pages of one of the dusty tomes of Empire history he so admired, revered by Wise Man historians for uncovering the plot against the Emperor by his own daughter and leading the Empire out of the War in the East.

Just thinking about Norix being remembered that way made Tasia’s lip curl back into a snarl.  She’d wanted to be the one to storm into his stuffy tower room, dagger drawn.  But now that privilege would go to Brick and Sal.

It was alright, though, because Adela was more important to Tasia than revenge.

She led the other seven rebels to the royal family’s wing of the palace without detection.  It wasn’t difficult.  The palace guard did not roam the corridors; the nobles and ambassadors on site for the autumn council meetings were mostly already in bed.  And as for avoiding palace servants, Tasia had a few tricks up her sleeve.  She took her companions along a circuitous route of unused corridors and hidden passageways.

“Smithy, Sheldon, you’re with me,” she whispered when they reached the far end of the royal wing.  From their hiding place behind a marble pillar, they could see the two guards stationed in front of Adela’s room.  “The rest of you, wait until you see us, then charge the guards.”

“Where will ye be coming from?” asked one of the farmers.

“From the wall across from my sister’s bedchamber.”

“The… wall?”

“You’ll see,” Tasia said.  “Just watch the wall.”

The three farmers and one baker she was about to leave behind exchanged nervous glances.

“Don’t worry,” she told them.  “Remember your training and you’ll be fine.  This time tomorrow, you’ll be celebrating with your families.  I promise.”

Tasia worried it was a promise she might end up breaking, but now was the time to bolster what little confidence they had, not to express her own doubts.  By now, the battle at the top of Norix’s tower was likely already over, and Brick and Sal were either dead or heading to Sunfall Gate with their captive.  She wanted to gather up Adela as swiftly as possible and get to the gate herself so they could disappear back into the anonymity of the city.  Hesitation at this stage would benefit no one.

She glanced from face to face and gave a definitive nod, then gestured for Smithy and Sheldon to follow her.

Drawing both her daggers, Tasia moved swiftly from the mouth of the royal family’s private wing and into the large atrium that formed the central heart of the palace.  For a brief moment, her mind flashed to the many times when she had crossed this atrium with Joslyn at her side.  The guard’s presence had always made Tasia feel braver, more sure of herself, even though Joslyn usually said nothing at all.  Yet simply having Joslyn there, an ally Tasia trusted at her side…

She shook the thoughts off.  Now was not the time for distraction.

A few seconds later, Tasia glanced right and left to make sure no one else was around, and pushed a section of wall inward.  It rotated on a central access, revealing a narrow brick passageway curving away from the atrium.  Her companions did not appear surprised.  They’d already seen Tasia reveal two other hidden passageways in the palace; it was becoming commonplace.  She ushered the three of them inside, then followed, rotating the wall back into place behind her.

Once the wall was closed, the passageway was pitch black.

“Keep to the right wall,” she whispered behind her.  “The left wall has an archway that leads downward; I don’t want you tripping on its edge.”

Wordlessly, the three commoners behind her fell into a single file line behind their Empress; Tasia could hear their fingers trailing along the rough bricks of the tunnel’s right wall as she led them forward.  She did the same, moving ahead with one hand outstretched before her, the other skimming the bricks of the tunnel’s right wall.  Her outstretched hand brushed through only the sticky resistance of cobwebs for about twenty yards, then finally encountered something solid.

Tasia fumbled in the darkness for the seam in the wall, pushing gently against it once she found it.  The wall rotated outward a few inches, spilling muted light from the corridor outside into their tunnel.  The back of a tapestry bulged against the crack Tasia had made.  On the other side of that tapestry, she knew, was the door to what had once been Nik’s bedchamber.  As quietly as she could, she nudged the tapestry aside and slipped into the corridor.  Smithy and Sheldon followed.

Ten yards away, the two guards who stood vigil in front of Adela’s bedchamber chatted in low voices.  Just as the nervous guard at the foot of Norix’s tower had told them, there was a fat one and an older one who favored one leg.

Neither of the guards saw the three of them inch into the hallway, but the fighters Tasia had left at the mouth of the royal wing did.  The four of them drew their weapons — a kitchen knife, a handmade club, and one of the short swords stolen earlier.  The four crept forward in a low crouch, and Tasia couldn’t help but think that they looked more like farmers sneaking up on chickens than soldiers approaching their enemies.  There was nothing to do now but hope for the best — hope, and pray that Brick and Alric had been right in choosing them for this mission.

Tasia nodded at Smithy and Sheldon behind her, then stepped into the center of the corridor.  She adopted an imitation of the stance Joslyn called panther prepares to spring.

“Guards, I command you to yield to the true Empress of the Four Realms,” she said loudly, “or prepare to fight for your — ”

The door to Nik’s bedchamber swung open, interrupting her.  Even as the fat guard’s hand went to the hilt of his short sword, a youth stepped through the doorway who, for the briefest of moments, Tasia thought was Nik himself.

But she saw immediately that it was not Nik.  When Nik died at fifteen, his skin had been smooth and pale, like their mother’s, and he’d kept his shoulder-length cornsilk blond hair tied back in a ponytail with a leather tie.  The young man who’d stepped out of Nik’s bedchamber shared some of Nik’s angular facial features, but the resemblance ended there.  Acne roughened his skin, and wavy black hair fell just past his chin, tucked behind his ears and looking as if it needed a wash.

The boy swiveled towards Tasia, then froze.  He was clearly as shocked to see Tasia as Tasia was to see him.

“Cousin Theo?” Tasia said.  It was the boy Lord Hermant had hand-picked to marry Adela, which also made him the future Emperor.  That might explain why he’d taken up residence in Nik’s bedchamber.

It wasn’t his fault, but it made Tasia’s blood boil.

Theo swallowed, his eyes darting from Tasia to the guards in front of Adela’s bedchamber.

In her surprise, Tasia had let her daggers drop a few inches, but now she raised them again.

“Stand down, Princess Natasia,” the fat guard boomed.  His eyes shifted to Theo.  “Prince Theodorus, it would be best if you returned to your bedchamber for the time being.”

Tasia locked eyes with Theo, keeping the two guards in her peripheral vision.

“I agree,” she told her cousin.  “This doesn’t concern you.  Go back to your room.”

He took a single step backwards, then stopped.  Both his hands curled into fists and he lifted his chin in defiance.  “Are you here for Adela?  She is my betrothed.  Which means it does concern me.”

Blasted boy.  Now was not the time for him to decide to play hero.

“Prince Theodorus,” the fat guard said again.  “Please.  For your own safety, I implore you, go back to your room.”

But the “prince” seemed to have no intention of listening to the guard.

“You’re here to finish Adela off, aren’t you?” the boy said to Tasia.  “So that you’ll be the only child of Emperor Andreth left.”  In a surprisingly swift, graceful motion, he drew a boot knife from a well-hidden sheath.  “You’re not the only one trained in the art of self-defense,” he declared, and he charged.

The moment Theo moved, the two guards ran at Tasia from the other side, but Sheldon and Smithy were there first, cutting off their advance.  The four rebels at the end of the hallway took the sudden chaos as their cue, and ran forward, brandishing their weapons.

Tasia dodged Theo’s charge with an awkwardly executed diving falcon.  Joslyn wouldn’t have approved of the form, but at least Tasia had managed to get out of the way of the boot knife in time.  She tripped Theo, sending the boy crashing to the ground, and momentarily, their legs tangled together on the rich red rug that ran the length of the corridor.

“Terribly sorry about this, cousin,” Tasia told the boy — and she meant it, because the fact that he’d been manipulated by their grandfather hadn’t really been his fault — and then she thrust one of her daggers as hard as she could through his ankle.

Theo had likely never even been punched, let alone stabbed.  He wailed in pain and panic, like an animal taken to slaughter, tears springing to his eyes as he clutched at his bloody ankle.

There.  It would keep him out of this fight and hopefully save his life.

Tasia clambered back to her feet just as Smithy’s hammer swung down in a mighty arc, striking one of the guards square in the face.  The guard’s nose burst into a spray of blood, but he still managed to drive his short sword upward at the same time.  Tasia lunged forward in a desperate attempt to stop what was coming, but it was too late.  The short sword impaled the smith, the blade driving through Smithy’s stomach and out through the small of his back.  Someone screamed — maybe it was Tasia herself, maybe it was one of the other commoners — but the sound hardly registered.  Tasia fell upon the guard like a blood-frenzied warrior, forgetting all of Joslyn’s teachings and simply slashing at the fat guard again and again until he fell and stopped moving.

Then it was over.

Flecks of blood and gore had splattered across Tasia’s face, and she wiped it off with one sleeve as she surveyed the carnage around her.

Both guards and Smithy lay on the corridor floor, dead.  Cousin Theo still whimpered with pain behind them.  Sheldon, the three farmers, and the baker stared at the dead men with pale faces and wide eyes.

Sheldon looked up at Tasia.  “They got Smithy.”

“I know,” Tasia said, putting her hand on the boy’s shoulder.  She remembered the first time she had seen death and taken life, at the mercenary ambush that Norix had arranged for on their journey east.  Battle seemed like an adventure until it was survived, and then it just seemed ugly and desperate.

Sheldon swallowed, his eyes still on the corpses before him.

But there was no more time for comfort and conversation.  The ruckus they’d created would surely draw attention soon enough, if not from the slumbering highborn in the palace’s many guest wings, then from the servants who would have reason to travel in this direction.

Tasia left Sheldon standing dumb in the hallway, pushing open the door to Adela’s antechamber.

“Adela!” she called, crossing from the antechamber and into the bedchamber.  Her hand left a bloody print on the door.

But the bedchamber appeared to be empty.  The bed was made, its covers undisturbed.  A lamp sat at the bedside table, and a fire crackled in the hearth.  But Adela was nowhere to be seen.

“Adela, it’s me, it’s Tasia.”  Tasia’s eyes roamed the room.  “Where are you?”

No answer.

“Empress?” Sheldon had caught up with Tasia, and stood pale-faced beside her.  He raised a finger, pointing at the bed.  “Sometimes, when my little sister Eula gets frightened, she hides under her bed.”

Tasia’s mind spun backwards in time, returning to a time some three and a half years earlier, when Adela was nine and they had played a game of hide-and-find with Mylla.  She turned her back on Sheldon and the bed, striding across the room to stand in front of a tapestry that hung beside the room’s fireplace.

“Empress,” a voice called urgently from the door.  Tasia glanced over her shoulder.  One of the farmers was framed in the bedchamber doorway, his face as smeared with gore as hers was.  “We got the injured boy back into ’is room, but he’s still hollerin’ like a cut pig.  Beggin’ yer pardon, but it might be time we leave?”

“A moment, please,” Tasia said, and turning back to the tapestry, she reached beneath it, groping for the seam in the wall.  Her fingertips finally caught on it, and with a grunt of effort, she slid the wall open.  There, crouching on the floor of the hidden closet, was her baby sister.  Tasia extended her hand.  “It’s time to go, Adela.”

The girl didn’t move.  Her eyes raked Tasia up and down.

Tasia knew what she must look like; the blood that had painted her rough linen tunic in streaks of red.

“You killed them, didn’t you?” Adela whispered.

“No,” Tasia said immediately, shaking her head.  “Norix and Grandfather both lied.  I didn’t have anything to do with Father’s — ”

“Not Father and Cole.  Bruko and Dellin.  My guards,” Adela said.  Her face crumpled and her next words were high-pitched, a little girl poised to burst into tears.  “They were good men, Tasia.  They had families.  Bruko’s daughter is the same age as me.  And you killed them.”

“Oh, Adela,” Tasia said, her own voice shaking with emotion.  “I swear to you, on our mother’s name, I didn’t want to hurt anyone here tonight, least of all Bruko and Dellin.  I can explain everything to you if you give me the time.  Everything.  But we have to go.  We have to go right now.”

She extended her hand towards her sister.  Tasia would carry Adela from this place kicking and screaming and biting if she had to, but she wanted to give Adela a chance to come on her own first.

“Empress,” the farmer in the doorway said.

“I know,” Tasia snapped.

“You didn’t really kill Father and Cole, did you?” Adela asked.

Tasia shook her head.

“Then why did Grandfather and Wise Man Norix lie about it?  Why did they try to kill you?”

Tasia let out a heavy sigh.  Adela was the same age as Linna, but somehow Adela seemed much younger.  She’d been sheltered — sheltered by Father, sheltered by Nik and Tasia.  Protected from palace politics.  And perhaps protecting her had been Tasia’s mistake.  Now did not seem the time to try to explain to Adela that, as a member of the House of Dorsa, the whole world would try to turn her into a game piece to be manipulated on a grand board of Castles and Knights.

“I can explain later,” Tasia said at last.  “But right now, we need to go.”

Finally the girl reached out, putting her hand in Tasia’s.  Tasia pulled her up, not just propping Adela back onto her feet, but pulling her baby sister into her body, wrapping both arms tightly around her, burying her nose in the girl’s hair.  Only when her embrace was done did she tug Adela from her hiding spot and out of the bedchamber.

Adela’s hand in hers, all her crew but Smithy close behind her, Tasia shoved the tapestry aside and pushed hard on the false wall.  The cool air of the hidden tunnel greeted her, and she ushered everyone inside.  But instead of following the passageway back to the atrium, she took the lantern from Sheldon and pointed towards the narrow stone stairs they had passed earlier that led down into the darkness.

“This way,” she whispered.  “And watch your step.”

48

If Joslyn had not been so distracted by the thought of legions of the shadow-infested assaulting Tasia in Port Lorsin, if the secret fears of her heart had not interfered with the cool logic of her head, she might have spent more time questioning Ty’Tsana about the so-called “gate” in the Sunrise Mountains that was letting shadows into the mortal realm.  She might have wondered why, if the gate was such an important key in the undatai’s plans, the small men hadn’t told her about it.

Joslyn did wonder these things, but not for very long, in part because she viewed herself as a warrior already dead, with one last gift to give Tasia and the Empire before she left the land of the living forever.  If an open gate was a greater threat to Tasia than the shadows in Port Lorsin, then closing the gate was what she would focus on.

And as for the small men not knowing about it, Joslyn already knew that seers couldn’t see everything.  Maybe the mysterious Order of Targhan had hidden the gate from them.

She would think later that she should have wondered about it more — especially she should have wondered why Ty’Tsana would give up the information so easily.  But at the time, Joslyn grasped the traveler’s orb in one hand, Ty’Tsana’s wrist in the other, and opened the seam into the Shadowlands, heading towards the cave mouth in the Sunrise Mountains she’d forced Ty’Tsana to describe.

“Mizana.”

Joslyn pushed Ty’Tsana ahead of her at a brisk pace through the barren landscape of the Shadowlands, following the speck of light that danced and hummed a few feet ahead of them.

“Mizana… Mizana…”

The whispers were all around Joslyn, as they had been the last time she’d used the orb, but still she saw no creatures of the Shadowlands.

“What is it they call to you?” Ty’Tsana asked quietly.

Joslyn hesitated, not wanting to share more information with her prisoner than necessary.  “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.  For me, they call my name — my real name,” Ty’Tsana said.  “The name my mother gave me in the moments before she died of the rip I produced in her womb.”

Joslyn said nothing.

She kept her eyes fixed on the orb of golden light that proceeded them.  The orb had taken mere minutes to lead her from Xochitcyan back to her camp site in the Zaris Mountains; how long would it take to go from the Zaris to the Sunrise Mountains?  Did distance even matter?

“Mizana… Mizana… Mizana…”

Every minute inside the Shadowlands was a minute too long.

“The shadows see your true self.”  Ty’Tsana’s tone suggested an emotion somewhere between reverence and sorrow.  “Whatever name they call you is who you are at your very core — who you are afraid to be and who they will help you become.”

Joslyn kept her silence.  The shadows wanted her to become a Mizana, a true master of the dance of the Seven Cities?  Joslyn did not trust anything the shadows had to say, yet they could not all be evil.  Tasmyn relied upon their council.  Ku-sai had been a dreamwalker.  The small men’s entire city was woven with the shadow arts.

Perhaps Joslyn should have accepted Ty’Tsana’s offer to expand her own skills in the shadow arts.

Joslyn pushed the thought away as quickly as it had come.

“I don’t know why they call to me by my birth name, and not the name given to me by the Order,” Ty’Tsana said after a minute of uncharacteristic quiet.  “It was the Order that gave me the name I carry now, the Order that introduced me to my gifts and united me with my shadows.  The girl I was before… she was blind and vulnerable.  Powerless.”

“Perhaps that is your true self,” Joslyn said, unable to resist the barb.  “The blind, vulnerable, powerless self you deny.”

But Ty’Tsana’s reply was more thoughtful than offended.  “Ahh… maybe.”

Several seconds passed.

“The shadows call to us with those parts of ourselves we have pushed away,” Ty’Tsana said.   “It may be that I have pushed away that part of myself that was so blind and vulnerable before, and that is the very part of me that I must embrace in order to reach my full potential.”

“Mizana…  Mizana…”

Were the shadows telling Joslyn what it was she could be, if only she would let herself?

Ty’Tsana sighed.  “One day.  One day soon, we will all embrace our full potential.  The King’s plan has taken hold already.  The wound cut by the Brotherhood will heal at last.”

Joslyn thought to ask What king? but decided against it.  Even free of her shadows, Ty’Tsana could not be trusted, and Joslyn did not want to get drawn into another one of her mad explanations of how the Shadowlands and the mortal realm needed to be united.

“Reach your potential by holding your tongue for once,” Joslyn grumbled.  “And walk faster.”

“As you wish,” said Ty’Tsana, and although Joslyn could not see her face, she could hear the smirk return to it.  “After all, I am at your mercy.”

They walked on, maintaining a pace just slower than a jog.  The sooner they got out of the Shadowlands, the better.

#

It was no small relief to Joslyn when a fresh seam opened in the bleak landscape before them some five minutes later, revealing a lush forest of fir and spruce trees dusted by recent snow.  She welcomed the sensation of the forest sucking her and Ty’Tsana out of the Shadowlands and back into the normal human world.

The air was frigid, and their breath fogged the moment the seam closed behind them.  The smell of winter amongst the fir trees brought Joslyn back to the days when she had been a soldier in the Imperial Army, fighting in these very mountains.  She’d been glad when her battalion had been rotated away from the front, back to Port Lorsin for respite.

She realized now how innocent she had been then, how easy it had been to a simple soldier, fighting an enemy as uncomplicated as the warriors of the mountain tribes.  So much had changed in the scant year or so that Commander Cole of Easthook plucked her from the service of General Galter.

“There,” Ty’Tsana said, raising the hand that Joslyn had not pinned to her back.  “That’s the cave that holds the gate.”

Joslyn’s eyes followed Ty’Tsana’s gesture to a black hole visible between the trees.

The cave mouth was exactly as the woman had described it; a crack in a granite ravine face barely wide enough for a man to walk into it without needing to turn sideways, and shallow enough that Joslyn would need to stoop to get inside.

It reminded her of the entrance to the small men’s underground city, yet for some reason this cave entrance made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.  But perhaps that was only because she knew what lay on the other side — a portal into the heart of the Shadowlands.

She scanned the landscape, searching for disturbances in the snow, for anything that might indicate a snare or a trap.

“If the gate lies within this cave, where are the mountain men set to guard it?”

“Guard it?”  Ty’Tsana let out a half-laugh.  “The Prince of Shadows needs no guards.”

Joslyn slipped the traveler’s orb back into its hiding place inside her tunic.  She’d used it twice, which meant that she could use it one last time before its power faded.  Not that she would need it again.  Joslyn fully anticipated she would never exit the cave that she was about to enter.

Drawing her sword, she led Ty’Tsana to a narrow-trunked fir tree.  Joslyn pushed Ty’Tsana’s back against the tree, finally releasing the woman’s wrist.

“What are you doing?”

“Tying you too this tree,” Joslyn said.

“With what?  I broke your ropes.”

Joslyn peeled off her brizat, then drew her dagger and punched the blade through the apa-apa wool, cutting it into long strips.

Ty’Tsana stepped away from the fir trunk, but Joslyn was ready for her, and without her shadows, Ty’Tsana was hardly a threat.  The tip of Joslyn’s dagger immediately found Ty’Tsana’s stomach, pressing with just enough force to suggest she’d be run through if she tried anything more.

“Resist and die,” Joslyn warned.  She shoved Ty’Tsana back against the tree and resumed her cutting.  Seconds later, Joslyn had two brizat strips.  She began to wind the first strip tightly around Ty’Tsana’s chest.

“You can’t leave me here,” Ty’Tsana said.  “How will you find the gate?”

“I’ll find it.”

“You won’t.  You don’t even know what it looks like.”

“It’s a gate,” said Joslyn.  “It can’t be that hard.”

“It’s unlike any gate you know.”

“Then I’ll learn something new.”

Ty’Tsana opened her mouth to argue again but apparently thought better of it.  She shook her head.  “Fine.  But it’s a waste of a perfectly good brizat.”

Joslyn double-knotted, then triple-knotted the brizat strips against the trunk behind Ty’Tsana.  She stood back to inspect her work.

The torn brizat wouldn’t have held the shadow-infested Ty’Tsana for even a minute.  But this Ty’Tsana, the Ty’Tsana touched with Ku-sai’s sword… well, it still might not hold her forever, but it would hold her long enough for Joslyn to make her way into the cave without the woman babbling incessantly in her ear.  Or stealing Joslyn’s dagger and stabbing her in the back.

The breeze picked up, sending snow raining down from the tree branches above.  Some of the flakes slid beneath Joslyn’s tunic, melting against her skin.  She shivered, but told herself she wouldn’t be in the cold long enough to miss the brizat.  The cave would be warmer.

“You’re just going to leave me here?” Ty’Tsana asked.  “I’ll freeze to death if I’m here overnight.  Or a mountain leopard will make me his dinner.”

“You would kill me if given the chance,” Joslyn retorted.  “Why should I care what happens to you?”

“Because you have more honor than I do, and leaving a prisoner to die is not your style.”

Joslyn only grunted and tested the knots of the torn brizat.

“They’ll know,” said Ty’Tsana.  “The Order’s seers — they’ll know you’re here by now, and they’ll be upon you, and they’ll re-open the gate, and it will all be for naught.”

“If the Order comes, I will be ready for them,” Joslyn said, walking away from her prisoner.

Frost-coated fir and spruce needles crunched beneath her boots as she approached the cave entrance.  Now that Joslyn was closer to it, she saw that it wasn’t a cave opening at all, but two enormous slabs of granite propped against each other, forming a triangular, gash-like doorway.    It was definitely man-made.

The wind picked up again, making the entrance give a low moan.

Joslyn stopped before the two granite slabs.  Something had been etched upon them, some kind of writing.  At first, Joslyn thought the characters were more Old Tongue runes,  but upon closer inspection, she realized it was something else.  Something that looked almost like a hybrid of the Old Tongue and the common tongue.  She ran a finger tip along the marks.  Here and there, she thought she almost recognized the letters.  Almost.

She peered into the tunnel within, willing her eyes to pierce the darkness.  But the light of the slate-grey winter sky was already weak beneath the snow-dusted forest canopy, and it only penetrated a few feet inside the cave.

Well, not a “cave,” exactly.  Like the entrance, the passageway sloping down into the darkness was clearly man-made — a narrow shaft lined with roughly cut granite on either side and braced with fir timbers.  Why had Ty’Tsana led her to believe it was a natural cave?

She turned around, the question for Ty’Tsana forming on her lips.

But Ty’Tsana was gone.

Two strips of brizat lay in a heap at the foot of the fir tree where the woman had been a minute earlier, their muted gold-and-red colors contrasting against the white snow.

Joslyn drew her sword and sprinted the thirty or forty yards between the tunnel entrance and the fir tree where Ty’Tsana had been a moment earlier, scanning the trees for any sign of ambush as she went.  She slowed her pace a few feet from the tree, concerned that an incautious advance might either make her unprepared for an attack or might mar any tracks Ty’Tsana had left in the snow.

Joslyn lifted her sword into the ready position of river, then turned her gaze to the ground around the fir tree, expecting to see the petite footprints of Ty’Tsana.  She was disappointed, yet somehow unsurprised, when she found nothing.

How had the woman even broken free from the brizat?  Without the shadows to bolster her strength, there was no way she could have broken free like she had before.  Joslyn had made sure of it.

Joslyn knelt, picking up one of the brizat scraps.

It hadn’t been broken.  It had been cut.  But how…?

Joslyn’s stomach curdled as her hand shot to the boot sheath.  The spare knife she normally kept there was gone.  A memory flashed into her mind — Ty’Tsana knocking against Joslyn’s ankle when she fell to the ground, apparently in seizure, the moment after Ku-sai’s blade had cut her and separated her from the shadows that gave her power.

The shadows may have given Ty’Tsana power, but the wit was all her own.

Joslyn muttered a colorful Terintan curse under her breath.  How could she have been so stupid?

But if Ty’Tsana had the boot knife the whole time, why had she waited until now to use it?  She could have caught Joslyn completely unaware — in the Zaris Mountains, during the journey through the Shadowlands, here in the fir forest.  Why not attack?

Joslyn cursed again.

Ty’Tsana hadn’t attacked because Joslyn had done exactly what she’d wanted her to do — Joslyn had brought her here, to the gate.  To the bridge between the Land of Men and the Land of Shadows.

To the very place where Ty’Tsana could be reunited with her blasted shadows.

And at the same time, Ty’Tsana had managed to convince Joslyn to ignore the advice of Grastinga to come here instead of to Port Lorsin.

Joslyn should cut her losses.  She could use the traveler’s orb once more; she should go to Port Lorsin right now.  She pulled the orb out, stared at the firefly-like sparks dancing inside the quartz, brought up the overcrowded capital city into her mind’s eye.

But then she put the orb away.

Joslyn didn’t think Ty’Tsana had lied about the existence of a gate in the Sunrise Mountains.  Such a gate would explain how the mountain men were enlisting the shadows to help them fight against the Empire; it would explain how the infection of shadows had started to spread throughout the land.

And if the gate really existed — and remained open — then stopping the shadows in Port Lorsin would only be a short-term solution.  At best, it would buy Tasia time.  Someone would still need to come here, to the gate, and figure out how to close it.

And Joslyn was already here.  She might as well be the one to close it.

Joslyn turned away from the ruined brizat and back towards the granite slabs and the tunnel beyond them.  There was no point searching the unfamiliar forest for Ty’Tsana.  Besides, Joslyn had a feeling both she and the assassin had the same destination in mind — the gate.

Now it was simply a matter of who could get there first.  Ty’Tsana had a head start, but Joslyn had never been one to lose a race.

49

Tasia led her sister and her band of rebel commoners through a series of winding passageways, unused storerooms, and vacant kitchens until they finally emerged behind the stables a stone’s throw from the Canal Gate.  By now, the palace behind them was abuzz with energy — the two dead guards had been discovered, Prince Theodorus was injured, the missing princess had been spotted, and her baby sister had been kidnapped.  In the absence of a strong palace guard, the visiting noblemen themselves could be heard shouting orders and running through the palace corridors.

Once outside, Tasia extinguished the lamp and navigated the palace grounds by memory,  taking her group from shadow to shadow, hedge to hedge, then hugging the outer wall until they arrived at last at Sunfall Gate, breathless but unharmed.

Brick let out a sigh that was obviously relief when he saw Tasia and the others climb the steps to the battlement above the gate.  His sharp eyes scanned over Tasia and Adela first, then he craned his neck to look around the royal sisters.

“He’s fine,” Tasia told him.  “Not a scratch on him, I promise.”

Brick’s face relaxed into a grin as Sheldon moved around Tasia to embrace his father.  Brick ruffled the boy’s hair.

“I knew he’d be fine,” Brick said.  “Wily like his pa, this one.”

Tasia took stock of their group while Sheldon told Brick in low tones about the loss of Smithy.  The five survivors who’d gone with Tasia after Adela were still shaky and smeared with blood from their brutal fight with the guards, but Brick and Sal appeared unscathed.  Next to them, was a bound and gagged Norix, his grey robes askew and both eyes red and rapidly swelling.

So the old man had put up a fight.  That, or Brick decided to punch him in the face anyway.  Served him right.

Despite the swollen eyes, Norix’s face was still capable of displaying shock when he saw Tasia.  His reaction didn’t give Tasia the satisfaction she’d expected it would.  Mostly, she just wanted this whole affair to be over.

The same five guards who’d been at the Sunfall Gate earlier were still there, each of them wearing somber, determined expressions.  Tasia was surprised to see that two more guards had joined them — the same two who’d told Tasia how many guards to expect at Norix and Adela’s chamber doors.  These two guards also had their jaws set and brows furrowed.

All seven would fight and die for Tasia and Adela, should it come to that.  But Tasia was sick of needless death.  They had what they had come for; it was time to take their two prizes and leave so they could move to the next stage of the plan.

“Grizzle,” she said.  “Open the sally port door for us and we’ll be on our way.  I’ll get a message to you with a Terintan girl when I need your help again.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you out, Empress,” the old guard said.

Tasia did a double-take.  “What?”

“I can’t let you leave the palace,” Grizzle repeated.  “It’s too dangerous on the streets of Port Lorsin right now for me t’send out the only two heirs o’the House of Dorsa in good conscience.”

“You mean the riots?  My supporters are the ones who started them, silly.  It’ll be fine.”

She could understand why Grizzle would be hesitant.  From their vantage point atop the battlement, fires spread out in patches across the city, lighting up the night sky.  Tasia hadn’t expected the sheer quantity of fires and obvious destruction; she’d given instructions to her people to do as little damage as possible.  But in a crowded city like Port Lorsin, coming off the long dry season of summer, she supposed it was inevitable that a few fires might have grown out of control, or that some citizens joining in on the riots might have grown out of control themselves.

Port Lorsin had burned to the ground and been rebuilt several times in the city’s thousand-year history.  She didn’t want it to happen again, but if it did, she would deal with it.

Grizzle still looked troubled.

Tasia put her hand on his shoulder.  “We’ll be alright, Griz, honestly.  We have a safe place to go to, and it’s not too far from the palace.”

By now, Linna would have long since made her way to Markas of House Boling’s apartments with Tasia’s note asking for sanctuary.  The choice was admittedly risky; she hadn’t seen Markas since she’d been convicted of murdering her father, but of all the nobility who maintained homes in Port Lorsin, Markas was her best bet.  He harbored a not-so-secret love for Tasia, and besides that, he just wasn’t imaginative enough to figure out how to betray Tasia by the time she arrived with Norix and Adela in tow.

And even if Markas wanted to turn her into the authorities, whom would he call upon for help?  The city guard?  The palace guard?

Both were otherwise occupied at the moment.

Yet no sooner had she told Grizzle that she would be fine than a resounding, blood-curdling scream echoed through the night.  In the city below, a few hundred yards from the palace’s outer wall, a woman became visible beneath street lanterns as she rounded a corner and sprinted down a broad boulevard in the Ambassador’s Quarter.  She ran as fast as her torn, muddied silk evening gown would allow her, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds.

“Help!” the woman shouted, the word made tinny by distance and the tall buildings on either side of her.  “Helllllllp!”

Before Tasia could process what she was seeing, they heard a guttural, animalistic snarl.  A second figure appeared on the street, and Tasia’s first thought was that it must be a stray dog gone rabid.  But it was too big for a dog, and moved too awkwardly.

It was a man in servant’s clothes, pursuing the woman on all fours like a beast.  As Tasia watched, horrified, the man’s hands and feet momentarily burst into flames.

No.  It couldn’t be.

Tasia opened her mouth to scream something — to tell Grizzle to help the poor woman, or to tell the woman to head for the palace gate, or to shout at the shadow-possessed man to remember who he really was, she wasn’t sure — but before she could think of the right words, the monster leapt.

The man-beast struck the woman from behind, knocking her face-first into the cobblestones below.  Flames flared from his body again, and just like an animal, he ripped at the woman’s throat with his teeth.  The woman struggled at first, then fell still.

The flames disappeared, and the man stood up.  He brushed his hands off as if he had simply gotten them a bit dusty on the cobblestones, then turned his face towards the palace.  He was too far away for Tasia to make out his features, but she had a feeling he was grinning at her.  Then, as casually as if he was heading home after an errand, he turned his back on the palace and walked down the boulevard, soon disappearing around the same corner he’d originally appeared from.

Everyone on the battlement was silent.

“We can’t leave her body in the street like that,” Tasia said after several seconds.  “Grizzle, let’s send out — ”

She stopped when the woman she’d assumed was dead picked herself up, smoothed her ruined gown, and walked off in the same direction the man had gone.

Adela gasped and pressed her face into Tasia’s side.  Norix’s eyebrows shot up his forehead.  Brick and another man muttered a curse.  Several others whispered questions amongst themselves.

“Did you see — ?”

“She wasn’t dead?”

“How could she…?”

Tasia stroked Adela’s hair distractedly, her eyes on the receding form of the woman.

“That is why I can’t let you and yer sister outside o’these walls,” said Grizzle.

“The Wise Man and his mate — them that ambushed us in the alleyway,” Brick said to Tasia when he’d recovered himself.  “They was right.  What happened to the survivors of Deerpark Pass is happening here, in Port Lorsin.”

More screams rang in the distance — screams of sheer terror.

“Mother Moon,” Tasia muttered.  Brick had stated out-loud the conclusion Tasia had already arrived at herself.

Everyone’s eyes were upon her — Brick and the other rebels, Grizzle and the other guards, Adela, even Norix.  They were all waiting for her to tell them what to do — to know what to do.

But Tasia didn’t know what to do.  What she did know, though, was that if she didn’t find a way to stop the shadows spreading from citizen to citizen inside Port Lorsin soon, there was a very good chance that no one in Port Lorsin would be alive by dawn.  At least — not “alive” as ordinary men and women.

“It explains the rumors,” said Tedric.

Tasia turned towards him.  “What rumors?”

“Me cousin’s a city guardsman on the East Gate,” Tedric said.  “Told me a group o’ Terintans showed up yesterday, claiming all o’ Paratheen’s gone dead mad, people killing each other everywhere fer no reason a’tall.  Me cousin reckoned the Terintans were having ’im on, but now…”

Tedric trailed off uneasily.

Rebels and guards returned their attention to Tasia, waiting for her to tell them what to do.

Oh, Joslyn, Tasia thought.  I hope you were right about me.

She had no idea what to do.  But she did possess two skills she’d honed through many years of palace life and disobeying her father:  the ability to paint a mask of false confidence upon her face, and a knack for impulsive improvisation.

And so she painted confidence onto her face even as she improvised a new plan.

Tasia reached inside her tunic and pulled out a vial of yellow liquid she’d pilfered from Wise Man Rakin’s offices in Arthur’s Ferry.  She held the vial out in front of Norix, and the old man’s eyes flitted from the vial, to Tasia, and back.

She could read on his face that he knew exactly what the vial contained.

“I had planned for this to happen differently,” she told Norix, “but now is as good a time as any for you to start telling the truth.  Because we’re going to need the help of every noble residing in this palace, and we’re going to need it now.”

Brick already understood her intention.  He yanked the gag from the false Regent’s mouth, forced his chin back, and pinched his nose.  Tasia uncorked the vial and poured it into Norix’s open mouth.

Norix gagged, trying to reject the serum, but Brick was faster.  He clapped the man’s mouth shut again.

“Swallow, ye wee bastard,” Brick told him.

It took a few more seconds of struggle, but eventually Norix did.

Tasia nodded in satisfaction.  The truth serum would take about twenty minutes to take hold of him, and then she would have about two hours to get him to confess to the coup that killed her father and Commander Cole.

“You won’t get away with this,” he rasped.

Tasia let out a laugh.  “I already have.”  To Brick, she added, “Put the gag back in his mouth.  I don’t want to hear him again until he finally starts telling the truth.”

50

Joslyn itched to catch up with Ty’Tsana before the woman made it to the gate, but she knew that entering a tunnel that burrowed into the earth and was possibly suffused with the shadow arts was not the time for haste.  So when she found an unlit torch in an unadorned iron sconce a few feet from the entrance, she stopped to light it and proceeded at a cautious pace, the torch in one hand, Ku-sai’s curved blade in the other.  The sword did not tingle in her hand now; its leather grip was cold and soft like any ordinary sword.  Joslyn couldn’t say whether this ordinariness soothed her nerves or increased her trepidation.

She had to walk slightly hunched, slightly sideways, with her torch arm side leading the way — an awkward progression required by the narrowness and shallowness of the passageway.  If she hadn’t so recently witnessed the exquisite craftsmanship of the small men, she would have been tempted to think that the size of the passageway suggested that it had been constructed by their kind, but everything about the tunnel seemed entirely too crude and rough to be the work of small men.  This shaft had to be the work of mountain men.  The men and women of the East were mainly flatland farmers who did not dare venture into the Sunrise Mountains, and anyway, there was something about this tunnel that suggested it was very old — ancient, even — predating the Empire’s eastern expansion to the edge of the mountain range.

The dimmest beam of light appeared ahead of her, and she tightened her grip on the sword, preparing to meet either Ty’Tsana or a mountain man.  But instead, the passageway opened up into a circular chamber, about the same diameter as two farm wagons placed side-by-side.  The watery daylight came from a narrow shaft in the chamber’s domed ceiling — not enough to illuminate the room, but enough to make the darkness not quite so total.

The shaft was positioned above a rough stone basin that stood atop a waist-high pillar of granite in the exact center of the chamber.  A residue of fine grey ash coated the bottom of the basin.  Around the circumference of the chamber, roughly level with the height of the basin, were recesses in the wall.  And inside each recess…

Joslyn lowered the torch towards one of the recesses.

Yes.  Bones — human bones.  The recesses were crammed full of pile upon pile of human bones.  Skulls, femurs, finger bones, broken ribs, in some spots so numerous that there was scarcely any space remaining for more.

What was this place?

She shone the torch towards the basin.  A pattern of interlocking swirls had been etched into the rim, the grooves of which were stained a darker color than the rest of the basin.  Dried blood, she suspected now.  In the center of the basin was carved a grotesque and grinning human skull.

A burial chamber.  That was what this place was — a tomb.  The mountain men had hidden their gateway from the mortal realms to the Shadowlands inside a tomb.  That seemed fitting.

Perhaps for the mountain men, the voyage from the mortal realm into the Shadowlands was analogous to the voyage from life to death.  Perhaps they were one and the same.

Joslyn made her way around the basin in the center of the chamber to where the tunnel continued, its slope steeper now, moving not just forward but also down.

She shone her light through the archway opposite the one she’d entered by, but the torchlight only penetrated a few feet.

Where was this gate?  Where was Ty’Tsana?

Joslyn paused, listening, extending her senses outward, straining to detect anything other than black silence.

There.

There was something — it was on the very outer edge of her awareness.  The tiniest whisper of sound.  She strained harder, but she was still too far away.

She moved down the tunnel as fast as she dared but slow enough to minimize the echo of her footfalls against the tunnel floor.  Twenty yards in, the tunnel curved again, but this time a soft orange glow emanated from the curve.  The whisper of sound was louder, too.  Joslyn stopped, pausing to confirm that nothing stirred in the darkness behind her or in front of her.  This curve in the tunnel would make an excellent spot for an ambush.  But the firelight and the whisper of sound coming from ahead remained steady, suggesting whatever was making each was stationary.  When Ty’Tsana did not charge forth from the darkness and nothing ahead suggested change after a full minute’s wait, Joslyn placed the torch on the cold packed earth of the tunnel floor, and stamped out the flames with the heel of her boot as quietly as she could.

Without the torch, the tunnel plunged into blackness.  The sudden darkness was disorienting until her eyes adjusted enough to detect the soft glow of light in the distance again.  She listened.  The sound was there, too, but still just out of range for even her sharp ears.

Joslyn crept forward a few steps, the fingers of one hand trailing along the rough wall of the tunnel.  She paused.  Listened again.

The sound was… a melody?

Yes — someone was humming a tune to themselves.  The sound she heard was distinctly… human.

Ty’Tsana.  She must have made it to the gate before Joslyn after all.

Joslyn’s pulse quickened, and she shifted her stance to lead with the sword.

Which had begun to tingle again.  A shadow was near.

Joslyn stalked forward with the perfect silence of a predator stalking its prey, her mind falling into the blank clarity that often came to her just before a fight.

She rounded the corner.  The tunnel sloped downward again, emptying into another chamber of some sort.  Only one wall of the chamber was visible from where she stood.  She could see a torch mounted inside another iron sconce on that wall, and the pattern of flickering light suggested there were more torches she could not see.

The meandering melody echoed off the chamber walls, and Joslyn suspected the echo made it louder than it really was.  The tune was vaguely familiar, with the jaunty feel of a children’s song.

Joslyn craned her neck, trying to see something, anything, more than the wall of the chamber, but her angle made visibility impossible.  The only way to see what else was in that room was to make her way to the entrance.  She briefly considered charging the last few yards, with the hope that she would pounce on Ty’Tsana before the woman was ready to respond, but that was probably exactly the kind of move Ty’Tsana would be expecting.

So Joslyn advanced slowly, drawing the dagger at her waist as she went.

More of the chamber came into view.  This one was rectangular instead of round, and covered with the same swirling geometric designs she’d seen in the earlier burial chamber.  Shallow steps jutted out from the foot of the walls she could see, leading to the center of the room like the steps leading into a bathing pool at a bathhouse.  Where the steps met the chamber floor was smooth packed earth, like the tunnel floor.  Except this floor had been curved into a gently sloping bowl.

With every step that Joslyn took towards the odd chamber, the tingling in her sword hand grew stronger, until her entire arm was practically vibrating like a tuning fork.

Whatever was inside that room, it was infused with shadows.

She stopped just before the open archway that led into the chamber, trying to see as much as she could without being seen herself.  The tinny sound of the humming was clear now, and she definitely recognized it.  It came from a game that street children played, a game she’d played herself when she and Tasmyn used to travel the Empire with Master and Mistress:

The sick, the sick,

Can’t smash it with a brick,

Can’t clean it, green it,

Or suck it with a tick.

It’ll take you down

To the underground

You’ll be a human candlewick.

Joslyn frowned.  Ty’Tsana’s accent marked her as a foreigner; she wouldn’t know that rhyme.  Did that mean there was someone else in the chamber besides her?

There was only one way to find out.

Joslyn stepped through the archway into the chamber, careful to keep her back against the wall.

The humming stopped immediately.

“Hello?”  A child’s voice.

Atop a low stone platform, placed at the far end of the bowl-shaped floor, sat an iron cage.  It looked like the bird cages sometimes sold in Paratheen, containing the colorful, exotic birds wealthy Terintans sometimes bought as pets, but this cage was much larger, coming up to about the height of Joslyn’s chin, and its bars were all flaked with rust.

Around the cage were haphazard stacks of wooden bowls, with a greasy residue in the ones on top that suggested they might have contained something like stew not too long ago.  And inside the cage was a child no older than ten, dressed in a robe of animal skins far too large for his gaunt body.

Animal skins were what the mountain tribes wore.

“Hello,” he said again.

Joslyn didn’t immediately reply; she was busy scanning the chamber for threats — for Ty’Tsana.  But the well-illuminated, rectangular chamber contained no hiding places, it harbored no shadows where someone could hide.  And the only entrance and exit appeared to be the archway she had just stepped through.

So why did Ku-sai’s sword continue to vibrate so intensely that her hand was practically numb?

Joslyn’s gaze caught on a giant mural that filled the wall behind the child.  It was in the same primitive style as the geometric patterns on the walls and the crude skull carved into the basin of the burial chamber.  The mural depicted rows of men, women, and horses all facing some central figure — a towering human shape with its arms outstretched with an oval halo behind its horned head.  Flames stood upright in each of its palms.  The painting looked as if it might have once been colorful, but now it was dull, its colors muted into an almost uniform yellow-brown.

Something about that central figure was all too familiar.

“You don’t look like the other ones,” the child said as Joslyn inspected the mural.  “Your sword doesn’t look like theirs, either.”

Joslyn studied the boy.  If he was the only one in the room… did that mean he was infested with shadows?

It seemed the most logical conclusion.  Which meant she could not trust anything that came out of his mouth.

“Who are you?” she asked coolly.

He blinked his large grey eyes, inspecting her just as she inspected him.  “You don’t have their accent, either.”

“Who are you?” Joslyn repeated.

He hesitated, then touched a pale hand to his chest.  “Milo.”  Then he added, “Milo of Druet Village, son of Milo and Trea.”  He cocked his head.  “Who are you?  Are you here for a shadow, too?”

Here for a shadow?

“What do you mean?”

Milo shrugged and looked down, hands fiddling with something Joslyn couldn’t see.  “That’s why people usually come.  To get a shadow.”

Joslyn stayed where she was, eyes still scanning the room, waiting for the ambush that had to be coming.  For now, it might be best to keep the boy talking, to give whomever might be listening — Ty’Tsana or perhaps a hidden mountain man — the sense that she was distracted.

“What do you mean, ‘to get a shadow’?” she said.

He looked back up.  “You really aren’t one of them.”  He shifted inside his cage, and Joslyn tensed.  “Can you take me out of here?  Can you take me home?”

“Answer the question,” Joslyn said.  “What do you mean about getting a shadow?”

“That’s what they make me do — the mountain men and the ladies with the funny accent.  They make me get shadows for them.”  Joslyn could hear the resignation in his voice, the kind of heavy and bewildered sadness that belongs only to children who do not or cannot comprehend what is happening to them.  He looked down again, fiddling again with whatever he had in his hands.  “They bring people, and they say funny words, and they touch me… and a shadow comes out and goes into them.  It makes them strong.  And scary.”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Realization struck Joslyn all at once, and it made her sick to her stomach.  “It’s you,” she said.  “You’re the — ”

“Gate,” a voice said behind her.  “Our little Milo is the gateway between the Land of Men and the Land of Shadows.”

Ty’Tsana.  Are you here for a shadow, too?  She’d beaten Joslyn to the gate after all.  And she’d managed to sneak up behind Joslyn because she had already been reunited with her shadow.

Joslyn processed all this in the split second it took to whip towards her opponent, but it was too late.  Ty’Tsana leapt through the air like a mountain leopard, Joslyn’s own boot knife flashing in the torchlight, arcing down with unstoppable momentum towards Joslyn’s chest.

The blade bit hard, and Joslyn staggered backwards, her sword and dagger both knocked loose from her grip as she tripped on the shallow stairs and struck the ground back-first.

51

“Are ye sure about this, Empress?” Brick said, keeping his voice low enough that only Tasia could hear him.  “This room feels a little like a huge pile o’grey powder, waitin’ for someone to put flint to steel.”

“We were going to do it anyway,” Tasia reminded him.  She turned her face towards him so that she could also speak softly but kept her eyes trained on the dozens of lords, lordlings, ambassadors, and Wise Men who were still filtering into the council room.  “We’re simply… going about it in a slightly different way than what we had originally planned.”

“Aye,” Brick said sardonically.  “I s’pose that’s one way of lookin’ at it.”

As if on cue, Norix, who was seated at the center of the dais while Brick and Tasia stood behind him, turned around to address his captors.  “Lord Wendell gets fatter every year,” he declared in a hoarse stage whisper.  “He puts on airs, but we all know he’s not even a real lord.  He profited mightily from the Western Rebellion, din’he?”

Tasia’s rebels, who stood on either side of her and Brick, exchanged glances.  Tasia knew what they had to be thinking — “This?  This is the Wise Man Regent who’s been ruling the Empire since our Emperor was murdered?”

Tasia raised one eyebrow while Norix giggled.  She’d never actually seen the truth serum of the Wise Men in use before, but ever since it had taken full effect on Norix twenty minutes earlier, he’d apparently been giving voice to every thought that appeared in his head.  Tasia didn’t know what surprised her more — that Norix seemed to have absolutely no capacity for resisting the truth serum that he himself had administered countless times, or that a rural Capital Lands accent had started to come out of his mouth.

The door behind her, the one that led into the council room from the corridor behind her father’s office, opened.  Tasia whipped around, but it was only Grizzle.

“The rest o’ the lords an’ such are all on their way,” he told her.

“And the remaining palace guards?”

“Loyal to the true Empress or… neutralized,” he said, glancing away.  “We’ve got three on the door behind you, two on each palace gate.”  He nodded at the council room’s main entrance.  “The rest are checking them that’s coming in for weapons.”

“Thank you, Grizzle.”

The old guard nodded and slipped back out the door behind her.

Only two on each palace gate.  And with a city filled with the shadow-infested beyond the palace walls.  This meeting would need to be fast.

The men filtering into the council room wore a variety of angry, cautious, curious, and smiling — almost gleeful — expressions.  They’d been roused from the guest chambers by Grizzle and the other guards loyal to Tasia only a few minutes earlier, and some of them had obviously been asleep when the guards had started pounding on the guest chamber doors — some of them wore nightshirts tucked into trousers, hair tousled and faces unshaven.

We meet again, Tasia thought to herself as she scanned their faces.

The last time she’d been in this council room, she’d been on trial for conspiring to murder her father and the commander of the palace guard.  The council had split nearly down the middle when they voted on her guilt, with only a single vote tipping the scales to her execution.

That probably explained why at least some of them now looked happy to see her:  They’d been her allies all along, but had been forced to keep their reservations about the new “Regent” to themselves once Norix took power.  From what Tasia had gathered from the common people, Norix had done little to ease those reservations.  Under his short rule, taxes had already gone up, the price of grain was skyrocketing, and a third of the East had been given away to the mountain tribes.

Nevertheless, Brick was still right about the room having the atmosphere of grey powder about to explode.  For as many council representatives who looked happily surprised to see Tasia standing at the front of the room, just as many looked unhappily surprised.  There were those who’d suffered under Norix’s leadership, to be sure, but there were plenty who had profited.

The lords of the Northeast, for example, who could suddenly sell their lower-quality wheat for higher prices than they ever had before.  Some of the minor lords of the West, especially those whose holdings bordered the Capital Lands (like the traitorous Lord Galen of House Harthing), also had to be profiting; their farmers didn’t grow wheat, but they grew barley, and with supplies of wheat declining, the people were turning to other grains as an alternative.

There were two faces in particular that Tasia had been hoping to find within the crowd, but which were conspicuously absent:  Lord Simon of House Brundt and Lord Roland — or Roland’s son Mace — of House Gifford.  They were the two Western Lords she’d sent letters to while she’d still been in Paratheen, pleading for their help to take back the Empire.

Had the letters ever even reached them?  Did the letters explain why they were absent from the autumn council meeting?  And if so, should she read their absence as a show of their support?

Or was that only her own wishful thinking?

Once the majority of the council representatives had shuffled in and found a seat, Tasia projected her voice to fill the room.

“Lords, ambassadors, advisors to the councilors, greetings.”  Tasia paused before continuing, waiting for the conversations rippling throughout the room to draw to a close.  “The last time you saw me, I was in this very room, on trial for regicide and patricide.  The man seated before me — ” she gestured down at Norix “ — the one you’ve been calling ‘Regent’ for the better portion of a year, convinced enough of you of my guilt that just over half of you voted for my execution.”  Nods and murmurs from the council room.  “I wonder if any of you asked yourself at the time of the trial, ‘If the Wise Man is so certain of her guilt, why does he not simply give her the truth serum so that we may all hear her confession for ourselves?’”  The statement had the effect Tasia had hoped for — the nods and murmurs grew more numerous, louder.  Men shifted in their seats, exchanged glances with others.  It was clear that some of them had thought of that… and yet it had somehow never crossed the minds of others.  She held up the empty glass vial that had contained the yellow syrup of the serum a half hour before.  “Your false Regent did not give it to me because he knew I was not guilty,” she said loudly, her voice ringing above the whispers.  “But I am certain of his guilt, and so I invite you to learn the truth of what really happened to Emperor Andreth and Commander Cole of Easthook with me right now!”

The council room erupted into surprised exclamations and shouted arguments.

Norix winced at the sudden noise.  “Louder’n gossiping wives at a Midsummer Feast,” he grumbled.

Tasia let it go on for a few seconds, then nodded at Brick, who leaned forward and banged the hilt of his sword onto the dais table.  Gradually, the conversation subsided.

“How do we know it’s really truth serum?” asked a lord near the back in a Central Steppes accent.

Tasia pulled the small cork from the vial and held it near her nose for a moment.  The smell was so awful that her eyes watered.  She recorked it quickly.

“This is the first time I’ve ever had the displeasure of smelling truth serum,” she told the crowd.  “It turns out the scent is rather… distinctive.”

“It’s horse piss you smell,” Norix said, making a face.  “It’s one o’the main ingredients.”

Tasia searched the room for a moment, locking eyes with a young man in the grey robes of the House of Wisdom standing to the side of a well-dressed lord.  “You there,” she said to the young Wise Man.  “Have you ever administered truth serum?  Do you know what it smells like?”

He hesitated.

“I know it,” someone called.

In the center of the room, a white-haired Wise Man got to his feet, lifting his hand.  A hundred and fifty faces turned his way.

“That’s my Wise Man,” announced a lordling seated next to the elderly Wise Man.  Tasia didn’t know his name, but she recognized his face — he was the son of one of the Western lords, a friend of Mylla’s.  “We can trust him.”

“Then come here,” Tasia told the Wise Man.  “Smell it for yourself.”

“Burn yer nose hairs right off,” Norix put in.

The Wise Man threaded his way through the crowd, and Tasia handed him the empty vial once he got near enough.  With his eyes darting between Tasia and Norix, he took the cork out of the vial and held it to his nose.  His head immediately jerked back, face puckering.

“It’s definitely the serum,” he told the crowd.  He turned the vial upside down, shaking it until a single drop fell onto his outstretched index finger.  This he placed in his mouth.  He nodded.  “There’s no doubt.  A little old, but still serviceable.”

He handed the vial back to Tasia, who accepted it with a nod.

“Do any of you wish to be the one to question the Regent?” Tasia asked.  “Or do you want me to do it myself?”

“I’ll do it,” said the same Western lordling who’d told the room his Wise Man could be trusted.  He walked up the center aisle, chin held high, chest puffed out, stopping beside the white-haired Wise Man.  “We both will — Wise Man Gentric and me, Bailey the Younger of House Tew, son of Lord Bailey the Elder.”

House Tew — that’s why Tasia knew his face.  They were the third largest house in the West, smaller only than House Gifford and House Brundt.  Unlike those two Great Houses, though, House Tew had fought against the crown during the Western Rebellion.  Which meant that lordling Bailey’s grandfather had probably been executed by Tasia’s father.

It was therefore with some trepidation that Tasia said, “Well-met, Bailey the Younger.  Proceed with the questioning at your leisure.”

Bailey the Younger seemed to enjoy the spotlight.  He bowed to the room of council representatives, then turned slowly to face Norix seated at the dais before him.  He kept his body positioned so that he could be easily seen by both the council and Norix.  A stage actor’s trick.

But fine.  If Bailey wanted to turn this into more of a drama than it already was, so be it.  Tasia had the truth on her side.  Next to Norix, Adela fidgeted in her seat.  Tasia placed a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder.

This will all be over soon, she wanted to tell her sister.  And you’ll know beyond any doubt that I am not the monster who killed Father.

“The fugitive Princess Natasia of House Dorsa claims that you are the one who arranged for the death of the Emperor,” Bailey the Younger began.

Fugitive.  Tasia kept her face blank.

“Is this true?” asked Bailey.

Norix nodded vigorously.  “Oh, yes.  It’s absolutely true.”

The council room filled with sound immediately.  Tasia was pleased that she heard more than one variation on I always suspected the Wise Man was the real traitor.

Bailey the Younger, however, looked both taken aback and suspicious.  “You?” he repeated.  “You’re telling me you were the mastermind behind the Emperor’s assassination?”

“‘Mastermind’ is a strong term,” said Norix.  “It was Lord Hermant’s idea, originally.  I resisted at first, because it is a dark thing to assassinate an Emperor, ain’t it?  Especially an Emperor I’ve known since youth.  But ending the War in the East.”  He raised a finger.  “That was what was best for the Empire.  And the Emperor absolutely would’n listen to that counsel.”  He spread his hands wide in a what-can-you-do gesture.  “House of Wisdom dictates we serve the Empire first, the Emperor second.  So as the Emperor’s senior counsel, it was me duty to… remove him.”

Anger flashed within Tasia.  She wished she could plunge a dagger into the throat of this self-righteous Wise Man right now.

“Your duty to remove him,” Bailey repeated.  His voice was toneless now.  Whatever the lordling had been expecting, it wasn’t this.  “Meaning your duty to… assassinate him.”

“Precisely,” Norix agreed.  “By any means necessary.  Though poison worked nicely.  I’m a very good poisoner, ye know.”

Bailey glanced over his shoulder.  The council room’s initial reaction to Norix’s admission had settled, and now the lords, ambassadors, and other representatives were listening with rapt attention.

“You said Lord Hermant of House Farrimont convinced you of this path,” Bailey said.  His eyes darted to Tasia for a brief moment.  “Did anyone else conspire with the two of you?”

Ahh.  Tasia could see that Bailey the Younger thought he’d found his loophole.  He would accept that Norix conspired to have the Emperor assassinated, but he was still assuming that Tasia had a hand in the conspiracy, too, and the right line of questioning would draw this truth out from Norix.

“Oh, yes,” said Norix pleasantly.  “Assassinating an Emperor certainly requires planning and assistance.  First the good Lord Hermant convinced me it was the right path, then Hermant suggested I recruit Lord Galen of House Harthing.  Brilliant, really — Lord Galen’s always been keen to expand his power, and ’is daughter was already the Princess’s handmaid, weren’t she?  So getting the handmaid onboard was easy.  Then we got us a few palace spies thanks to Lord Wendell of House Korent…”

The council room erupted into sound again.  Like Tasia, they hadn’t been surprised to hear that House Harthing had been involved — that had come up in the trial, after all — but Lord Wendell?  The fat merchant-turned-lord who’d gained his title mainly thanks to his support of the crown during the Western Rebellion?

Tasia found Lord Wendell in the audience.  He’d had blanched as white as ghost; his mouth hung ajar while several of the lords seated around him glared or shouted accusations at him.

“…because Wendell’s another ambitious one, easy to control that way,” Norix continued, completely oblivious to the commotion his words were causing.  “And it was handy that Wendell still controls most of the smuggling routes from the West into the Capital Lands.”

Bailey frowned.  “Are you saying Lord Wendell smuggled something to you?”

Norix nodded.  “Indeed.”  He hiccuped.  “There’s a pink wildflower that grows just at the beginning of spring, right on the northern border between the West and the Central Steppes — very pretty, but very deadly when used for poison.  And it takes a great deal of skill to — ”

“Wait.  Are you suggesting there was also a conspirator in the Steppes?”

“Oh, well, of course, young man,” Norix said, smiling indulgently as if he was giving one of his history lectures to a particularly slow student.  “Ye can’t leave certain Realms out when you have a conspiracy to overthrow the rightfully crowned Emperor.  Ye need allies in every corner of the Empire, those who will protect yer secrets because it means protecting themselves.  Some might think the wisest course of action is to keep a coup small — the fewer the people who know, the easier to keep the secret, but if you consider historical examples, such as when the grandson of Dorsan himself sat on the throne nearly a thousand years ago — ”

“Who?” Bailey asked impatiently, cutting the rambling Wise Man off.  “Who was your conspirator in — ”

A flash of movement caught Tasia’s eye near the back of the room.  Someone was easing their way towards the council room door.

“Stop him!” Tasia shouted, just as Norix answered:

“Ambassador Lorent.  The sheep in his region are quite fond of the flower.  It’s not poisonous for sheep.”

But no one heard Norix’s words; they were swallowed by shouting and council members clambering to their feet.

Ambassador Lorent, who had nearly made his way to the entrance undetected, was suddenly tackled by a lordling from the East.  Two more men piled on, including a Wise Man, but Tasia couldn’t see what was happening from where she stood.  A few moments later, Lorent was hauled to his feet, chin lolling to his chest, one eye already swelling.

Elsewhere in the room, chairs were knocked to the ground; men grew red-faced from yelling at one another, shoving their index fingers in the faces of their fellow council member as they threw accusations of disloyalty and profit from treachery.  Fists flew.  In one of the rows closest to the dais, three Wise Men fought and shouted at one another, with two of them grabbing the third by the grey robes and pinning him to the ground when he tried to break for the exit.

The entire scene was surreal, as if a drunken barroom brawl at the Spotted Dog had somehow mistakenly ended up in the Emperor’s council room.

But where was the representative of House Farrimont?  Tasia looked out over the sea of faces, searching for the men of the Northeast.  She didn’t see anyone present to represent her grandfather’s House.

Then it dawned on her:  House Farrimont’s representative was seated just in front of her, on the other side of Norix.  “Prince” Theodorus, who thus far had been watching the proceedings with pale-faced defiance, his ankle tightly bandaged from his earlier skirmish with Tasia, now stared out at the room with wide eyes, his mouth slightly ajar.

Well.  At least the pure shock on the boy’s face told Tasia that he had not been a part of this conspiracy.

The lordling Bailey glanced at the chaotic scene behind him, but then he turned back to Norix.  “Are those all your conspirators?” he asked, voice urgent.  “Lord Galen, Lord Wendell, Ambassador Lorent, Lord Hermant?  No one else?”

Why was he continuing his questioning, when no one could hear him now except for Norix, Tasia, and the others seated or standing at the dais?

“There was one more,” Norix said with a cheery smirk.

“Who?” Bailey demanded.

“My novice.  Wise Man Evrart, the junior tutor to the royal children and me personal assistant,” Norix declared.

Confusion came across Bailey’s face, and his eyes went from Norix to Tasia.  “Evrart?  A Wise Man was your final conspirator?”

“Young Evrart fancied himself a Brother of the Cult of Culo.”  Norix lifted his hands and waggled all his fingers at once to show how ridiculous he found the proposition to be.  “He promised to help eliminate Natasia if we promised in return to take seriously the notion that monsters were responsible for turning the tide against Imperial forces in the East an’ not barbarians.”

Norix blew a raspberry between pursed lips.

Now Bailey was even more confused.  “Cult of… monsters…?”  He glanced between Norix and Tasia, and Tasia was reminded of the time Mylla had made fun of Joslyn for suggesting the Brotherhood of Culo might have had something to do with her assassination attempt.  Then Bailey cocked his head as if he’d just remembered something.  “Hold that.  Did you say Wise Man Evrart promised to help you eliminate Natasia?”  He pointed at Tasia.  “This Natasia?”

“Of course that Natasia.  Is there another?” Norix said, rolling his eyes.  “Once we removed the Emperor, we only wanted to work with the Andreth’s youngest.  Children are more pliable, really.  Far more likely to do as you say without question.”

In front of Tasia, Adela’s posture stiffened.

“Natasia, on the other hand, had grown too old, too clever, and entirely too stubborn.  Much like her father.”  He glanced sideways at Tasia, then laughed as if at a joke only he knew.  “But when pure bad luck foiled her assassination, we had to resort to other means to eliminate the Emperor’s favorite.  Especially after he named her heir.”  He made an annoyed sound that expressed just how he’d felt about the late Emperor’s choice.

Bailey’s eyes were on Tasia as he said slowly, “So the assassination attempt wasn’t faked.  And you really did frame her for her father’s murder — the Princess Natasia was never one of your conspirators.”

“Conspire against her father?  Tasia?” Norix said, giving Bailey an exasperated look.  “Are you stupid?  You seem like you might be stupid.”  Bailey opened his mouth to protest, but Norix kept talking.  “Andreth told me he would name her heir because she was the one person he could trust unconditionally to carry out his work.”  Norix shook his head in frustration and gazed skyward.  “The girl tried to pretend that she defied her father at every opportunity, but I’ve never seen a child secretly worship a parent the way Tasia worshipped Andreth.  And he knew it.”

Bailey closed his mouth, stared at Tasia for a long, silent moment.

Then he stepped away from Norix, and still ignoring the chaos taking place in the council room behind him, he bowed deeply in Tasia’s direction.  “I offer you my sincerest apologies,” he said when he rose from his bow.  “I should not have doubted you… Empress Natasia.  All hail Empress Natasia!” he shouted, his voice carrying through the raucous din of the council room.  He turned, faced the crowd.  “All hail Empress Natasia, rightful heir to the Emperor, Mother of the Empire!”

A few of the men near the front heard him, stopped arguing long enough to take up his cry.

“All hail Empress Natasia!”

More of them now:  “All hail Empress Natasia!”

Gradually the chaos died down, and the council room became less a cacophony and more a chorus.  Cries of “All hail Empress Natasia!” came almost in unison now, and gradually the men began to stomp their feet and clap their hands in time, turning it into a repeating chant.

“All… hail… Empress Natasia!  All… hail… Empress Natasia!”

Tasia could tell from their faces that not every member of the council was happy to be chanting.  Without doubt, some of them preferred the idea of Norix holding the crown until “Prince” Theo came of age.  But as often happens in politics, especially in volatile and uncertain times, it was easier to chant her name than raise an objection.  The objections, she knew, would come later.

Tasia let the chant go on for a few seconds, squaring her shoulders and setting her jaw the way she thought an Empress should.  When it felt as if the chant had gone on long enough, she lifted a hand, signaling for silence.  She waited for them to settle before speaking.

“To those of you who knew my innocence all along:  thank you,” she said.  “To those of you who doubted me, who chose to believe the actual traitor and his friends…”  She glanced down at Bailey. “…I understand.  Wise Man Norix deceived me, too, as did my own handmaid, the Lady Mylla of House Harthing, and her father, Lord Galen of House Harthing.  On this occasion, I forgive all of you for your doubts — except for those that Norix named tonight:  the House of Harthing, as already mentioned, Ambassador Lorent of House Serrell, Lord Wendell of House Korent, and my grandfather, Lord Hermant of House Farrimont.”  She looked to her right, catching Theo’s eye.  “Except for House Harthing, in which we already know there was more than one individual conspiring against the crown, we shall assume that the other members of these noble houses are innocent, unless proven otherwise by truth serum.”  The door behind the dais squeaked open, making Tasia flinch, but she relaxed when she saw it was only Grizzle slipping inside.  “Now, I know it’s the middle of the night and all this excitement roused you from your beds, but I’m afraid I must bring a final piece of important — ”

Grizzle stepped beside her, grasping her upper arm.  Irritated, unsure why he thought this would be a good moment to interrupt, Tasia tried to shake him off, but could not.

“Empress,” he whispered urgently.  “Something’s happening.”

“Can’t it wait?” Tasia whispered back.

“No, Empress.”  He hesitated.  “The… people who have been acting strangely.  They are attempting to break through the palace gates.”

52

On the other side of the Empire, even as the council room chanted Tasia’s name, Joslyn fought for her life.

The force of Ty’Tsana’s blow had knocked her over, the boot knife had lodged in her chest just below the collarbone, and the fall had driven the wind from her lungs.  Nevertheless, Joslyn regained her feet quickly just in time for Ty’Tsana’s next charge.  But reinforced with shadows once more, Ty’Tsana was faster and stronger than Joslyn, and Joslyn was forced to backpedal, slipping on the steps that rimmed the chamber and smacking the back of her head against the wall before managing to gain her balance again, all with the boot knife still stuck in her chest.

Why does it burn like that? she managed to wonder dully.  A knife wound doesn’t burn that much unless —

But there was no time to work the puzzle out.  Ty’Tsana roared and sprang, knocking Joslyn to the ground once more.  She yanked the boot knife free from Joslyn’s chest and lifted it high, preparing one final downward plunge.

Joslyn bucked her hips, forcing Ty’Tsana off-balance just enough that the downward arc of the knife veered off-course.  Joslyn barrel-rolled out of the way, towards where her dagger and sword still lay on the ground.  Ty’Tsana saw that Joslyn was about to recover her weapons and dove after them with a growl.  But Joslyn’s fingers reached the sword hilt first.

Ty’Tsana swung the knife again, her aim true this time.  Yet Joslyn, still on the ground, managed to bring up the curved blade of Ku-sai’s sword at the last moment, its runes emanating a soft white glow, just in time to parry.

Steel ground against steel, sending out a shower of sparks as the sword stopped the path of the boot knife a mere handspan before Joslyn’s throat.  With a grunt of effort, Joslyn threw Ty’Tsana off again.  But instead of taking an awkward spill, Ty’Tsana caught herself like a cat, landing on the balls of her feet and her fingertips, Joslyn’s knife still firmly in her grip.  She let out an inhuman snarl, eyes briefly flashing to molten flames before she sprang again.

Joslyn rolled out of the way before Ty’Tsana landed, then took a wild swing that the shadow-imbued assassin easily dodged.

“You can’t beat me, Joslyn,” Ty’Tsana said.  “Not while I remain united with my shadows and you are severed from yours.”

Joslyn got to her feet slowly, dizzy from blood loss.  From blood loss and… something else.  The wound continued to burn unnaturally as blood pulsed from it.  Poison again?  Joslyn touched the gash in her leather armor where the blade had punched through, glancing at her red fingertips.  The blood had an oily sheen to it.  Something had been on the boot knife’s blade before Ty’Tsana had stabbed Joslyn with it.

Ty’Tsana watched her, circling cautiously but not attacking.  “You’re dizzy,” she said.  “You feel your mother’s bloodline coming for you, don’t you?  Throbbing where I stabbed you.”

Her mother’s bloodline…?

Colors danced at the edge of Joslyn’s awareness — but not the kind of colors that came right before one passed out.  The colors she saw were more like swirls of bright paint on a freshly painted tinker’s wagon, like the first bloom of spring wildflowers, dancing in an empty meadow.

Tasmyn’s voice whispered in Joslyn’s ear:  Our mother — our real mother — was one of the shamans for our tribe.  As was her mother before her.  Did you know that?

“No,” Joslyn murmured, her voice far softer than she had intended it to be.

“Yes,” Ty’Tsana said, grinning.  “Do you know what the mountain men used to burn at every funeral?  Can you guess what was mixed with the ashes that I smeared on your boot knife?”

Not poison.  Horsetail mushroom.

Joslyn didn’t need Ty’Tsana to say it to know that it was true.  As if in confirmation, the swirling colors all around her intensified.  Ty’Tsana hadn’t actually wanted to kill her, Joslyn realized.  She’d merely wanted a way to introduce enough horsetail mushroom into Joslyn’s system that the power of Joslyn’s q’isson — the power of the Shadowlands — would call out to her.

“Why fight your destiny, Joslyn of Terinto, daughter of Salif and A’eshan?” Ty’Tsana asked, her voice deepening into something harsher, more masculine.

Joslyn blinked, trying to push the colors back.

“You’re so close to being one of us,” Ty’Tsana said, her voice back to normal.  “I know you can feel it.  All you have to do is reach out and take the power that is rightfully yours.  Aren’t you ready to stop fighting it?  To feel your soul as whole again?”

Ty’Tsana was right — Joslyn could feel the power of the Shadowlands calling to her, just beyond the horizon of her awareness.

Ty’Tsana tensed as Joslyn lifted Ku-sai’s sword.  But instead of charging the assassin, Joslyn raised her other hand.

And nicked her thumb upon the blade.

Her head cleared instantly, colors disappearing as if the horsetail mushroom had never been introduced to her system.

“My soul is already whole,” Joslyn said.

She leapt at Ty’Tsana, feinting high with bird aloft, but immediately dropping into swooping hawk, slashing low at Ty’Tsana’s shins.  But Ty’Tsana anticipated the movement, jumping out of the blade’s range before it could touch her.

“You can never hope to beat me,” she told Joslyn, panting slightly even as her eyes flamed unnaturally.  “Not while I’m like this and you are… merely ordinary.”

Joslyn went on the offensive, attacking Ty’Tsana with a ferocious whirlwind of blows that would have easily taken down any other opponent.  Armed with only Joslyn’s boot knife, Ty’Tsana didn’t even try to parry.  Like a dancer, she dodged and jumped, ducked and rolled, flowing like water just beyond the reach of Joslyn’s blade.

Ty’Tsana let out a childlike giggle when Joslyn paused to catch her breath.  “Don’t you see?  You can’t kill me.”

“I don’t need to kill you.  Not yet,” Joslyn said.  And in a flash, before Ty’Tsana had a chance to react, she threw the sword like a javelin.  Its curved blade hadn’t been designed for flight, and it wobbled awkwardly as it flew through the air.  But it achieved its goal:  Joslyn’s offensive against Ty’Tsana a moment earlier had taught her how the woman would move while defending against Joslyn’s blade, had revealed to her that her opponent favored her left slide just slightly, favored it just enough that she was more likely to leap left than right when faced with an object flying at her torso.

The blade grazed Ty’Tsana’s arm.  She clamped a hand against her arm, but it was too late. Smoke poured from the wound; her eyes rolled back in her skull.

But this time the smoke did not dissipate into the atmosphere.  Like a snake, it wound past Joslyn and Ty’Tsana and made its way to the front of the chamber.

It made its way to Milo.

The smoke — the shadow that had been inhabiting Ty’Tsana a moment before — curled around Milo’s face, then disappeared into his nostrils.  The boy’s big grey eyes morphed into flames for the briefest of moments before returning to normal.  He blinked and met Joslyn’s gaze, his expression somewhere between fear and resignation.

“Milo?” Joslyn said, alarmed.  “Are you alright?”

The boy nodded.

Behind her, Ty’Tsana laughed.  “Do you see?  Do you see now why you cannot close the gate?  To close the gate, you must kill the boy.  And you, Joslyn of Terinto, daughter of Salif and A’eshan, cannot kill the boy, no matter what it — ”

Joslyn darted forward.  With the toe of one boot, she flipped her fallen sword into the air, spun sideways to catch it by the handle, and, still spinning, separated Ty’Tsana’s head from her shoulders.  The head rolled away, eyes still surprised.  The body stood a moment longer, then crashed backwards like a felled tree.

Joslyn wiped a spray of the dead assassin’s blood from her face and turned back to Milo, who tracked her with wide eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Joslyn said to the boy.  “I’m sorry that you had to watch me do that.”

He said nothing for a moment, then:  “It’s alright.  I have seen death.”

Joslyn crossed the room to Milo’s cage, careful to step around the pool of blood forming around Ty’Tsana’s corpse.  She glanced around for a key.

“I will get you out of this cage,” she told him.  “Even if I have to pull these bars apart with my bare hands.”

“No!” Milo said immediately.  “You can’t.  I’m too dangerous — I have to stay in here.”

Joslyn stopped searching for the key long enough to meet the boy’s eyes.  “Whoever told you such a thing was lying, Milo.  You are not dangerous.”

He shook his head vigorously.  “You don’t understand.  I kill people.  Or… the things that come out of me do.”  His chin drooped, round face suddenly despondent.  “The other woman was right.  You should just kill me.  I deserve to die anyway.”

Joslyn stepped in front of the boy’s cage and knelt before him.  “No child deserves to die.  No child deserves to be in a cage, either.”

“I do,” Milo whispered.

Joslyn reached through the bars of the cage, her palm up, instinct telling her to comfort the boy by taking his hand.

But Milo immediately scuttled backwards, his back hitting the bars behind him.

“You can’t touch me!” he shrieked.  “The smoke will go into you, like it did to her!  Or else you’ll go into the smoke!”

Joslyn withdrew her hand.

Milo was still pressed against the back of the cage, breathing hard, everything about his face and posture making him look like a cornered feral cat.

“Stay away.  I hurt people.”

“Perhaps you do,” said Joslyn.  “But you didn’t always.  Tell me what happened.  Tell me who made you like this, and maybe I can help you.”

Milo said nothing, but his posture relaxed just a little.

“The woman I killed,” Joslyn said, trying a different approach, “she came into this room before me?”

Milo nodded.

“And what did she do?”

“What they all do,” the boy said.  “She walked up to the cage, and she reached through the bars like you did, and she took my hand, and… and it happened.”

“What happened?”

“The smoke came,” said Milo.  “It always does.  It comes through me from… from somewhere else that I can’t quite see, and it goes out of me and into the person who’s touching me.”

“How many people have been like her — how many have wanted you to touch them?”

He thought for a moment.  “A lot.  The mountain men, they came every day for a long time.”

“They were the ones who made you like this — the mountain men?”

Milo shook his head no.

“Then who?”

Milo’s eyes flitted to something behind Joslyn.  She glanced over her shoulder.  The only thing behind her of interest was the headless corpse of Ty’Tsana.

“Someone like her?” Joslyn asked.

Milo bit his bottom lip, avoided eye contact.

“Milo,” Joslyn said, keeping her tone carefully patient.  “Perhaps if you tell me what happened and who did this, I can find a way to help you.”

“But it would be easier just to do to me what you did to her,” Milo said in a small voice.  He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms tightly around his legs, rocking slightly back and forth.  “If I die, then it will be over, like she said.”

“I will not kill you,” Joslyn said firmly.  She thought of the day the Imperial Army recruiter came to the village at the foot of Ku-sai’s mountain, of the sounds the village boys made as they lay dying from the wounds she had inflicted.  “I killed people younger than myself once, boys a few years older than you are who couldn’t really defend themselves, and I swore I would never do it again.”

Milo continued to rock himself back and forth in silence.

Joslyn sighed.  “Sometimes, it can be hard to talk about the things that happen to us, especially when we think it is our fault.  But do you want to know what I’ve learned?”

Milo lifted his chin from his knees, just enough to turn his moon-round face towards Joslyn.

“What?”

Joslyn shifted her position, mirroring Milo’s.  She laid the curved sword down beside her and pulled her knees to her chest.  In her mind’s eye, she saw the inside of Tasia’s tent while they traveled through the Zaris Mountains.  She saw the paper tumbling out of her own pack, the paper that held a dried flower she’d kept for years — for too many years.  She saw herself speaking Anaís’s name to Tasia, a name she didn’t think would ever pass her lips again.  And then she saw herself set the dried flower alight, suddenly freed from a burden she didn’t think she’d ever be able to set down.

“I’ve learned that, sometimes, once we say a thing out-loud, it loses the power it has over us,” Joslyn said.

The two sat in silence for several minutes.  Joslyn wrestled with the warring emotions inside her.  Somewhere in Port Lorsin, Tasia might be in danger from the shadow-infested.  It would be easy to give the boy the merciful death he asked for and use the traveler’s orb to return to her.  The gate would be closed; Joslyn would take her place at Tasia’s side.

But she could not do that.  She promised the boy she would not hurt him, and she was going to honor that promise.  There had to be a way to close the gate that did not include his death.

Milo’s voice broke into Joslyn’s warring thoughts.  “My family, we were farmers in Druet Village.  We grew wheat for Lord Albert — Father always said he was a good lord, fair and just and caring for his people.”

53

~ THEN:  MILO ~

The war against the mountain men had started before Milo was born, and it had touched Druet Village more than once.  On one occasion, when Milo was five years old, he hid with his brothers, sisters, and parents in the root cellar beneath their home.  They’d stayed in the cellar for hours, silent as a family of mice, while the mountain men tore through the village house by house.  Milo had cried quiet tears when he heard his neighbors screaming in terror, the ones who weren’t so lucky to have a cellar hidden beneath the floorboards of their homes.

Eventually, the boards above Milo and his family’s heads creaked and groaned with the heavy footsteps of the mountain men, and Milo was so scared he didn’t even breathe.  It was very, very lucky that his baby sister didn’t cry.  When Father finally ventured back up the stairs around dawn, he reported that everything of value — mainly the golden necklace he had given Mother as a wedding gift — was gone, and everything else, like the furniture and the baby’s crib and all the cookware, was destroyed.

But at least they were still alive.  At least they were not wounded.  At least Milo and his brothers and sisters had not been stolen as slaves.

That raid on Druet Village had been the worst of the war, and after it was over, the villagers who survived breathed out a collective sigh and placed their attention on rebuilding their homes and resowing their fields.

For four years, life in Druet Village was quiet.  A recruiter came for the Imperial Army, and Milo’s big brother and big sister both left with him.  It was sad, but Milo was proud of them.  And the golden eagles they both earned for joining would feed the family they left behind for years to come, providing insurance against harsh winters and wheat beetle and the baby getting sick.

But then, last fall — or had it been two falls ago now?  Milo couldn’t remember for sure — the mountain men returned to Druet Village once more.

There was no warning this time, like there was last time.  One moment the barbarians were not there, the next moment they were screaming war cries and charging their long-haired ponies through the village gate.  Milo was in the field that day, helping Father with the last of the harvest since he was the oldest boy in the family now, and when he heard the commotion in the village, his very first thought was Mother.  His second thought was Nilla, his baby sister.  And although Father tried to stop him, calling for him to come back, Milo ran for the village as fast as he could — and he was very fast, one of the fastest boys his age.

Later, he wished to Mother Moon he had listened to his father.

It didn’t take long for one of the mountain men to snatch Milo up by the collar, to haul him, even as he kicked and screamed and cried, to the village green, where all the other children his age had been set in a line with their hands tied behind their backs.  And the village parents wept and tried to get to their children, but a mountain man twisted the neck of one mother, breaking it with a mighty snap, and when she crumpled to the ground, lifeless, the other parents stopped fighting, and only sobbed their grief from a distance.

Milo was placed at the end of the row of children, his hands tied like the others, and he tried to fight back but one of the mountain men boxed his ears hard, hard enough that his whole head rang like a bell, and he saw Mother, and Mother said something like, Don’t fight them my boy, my beautiful boy, my beautiful Milo, just be a good boy and do what they say, and Milo, whose head still rang, decided that he would be obedient for once in his life.

Then Milo saw something he did not expect.  Two women in fine black cloaks appeared from amongst the mountain men, speaking with one another in a strange, guttural language that wasn’t the common tongue and wasn’t the mountain men’s tongue either.  Both women were beautiful, slender but strong-looking, wearing long, thin swords at their hips and knee-high boots of supple black leather.  And the two striking women walked down the line of children, inspecting them like they were Lord Albert’s merchants inspecting bundles of wheat for sale after the harvest.  They would point at this child or that child and shake their head no, and a mountain man would come and pick the child up by the scruff of the neck and throw him or her into one of their slave cages on a waiting wagon.

Soon there were only a few children left, and Milo was one of them.

One of the ladies came up to him.  She put a finger under Milo’s chin and lifted his face towards hers for a closer look.  Milo stared back with all the cold defiance he could manage.  Then her eyes turned into flames, and he jerked his head away in surprise.

The first lady said something in her guttural language to the second lady, and the second lady nodded.  The first lady pulled Milo to his feet by his arm and took him to one of the mountain men’s wagons — not to the wagon with the cages like the other village children, but to a different wagon, one with a tent made of animal hides curving over it.  She put Milo inside the tent-wagon, then sat on her knees across from him.  She smiled.

“You have been chosen for something very special,” said the lady in an accent that sounded tinged by her guttural foreign tongue.  “What is your name?”

Milo had been doing a good job pretending not to be scared when he’d been sitting with all the other children, but now he was alone and he wanted Mother and Father, and he was so surprised to find out she could speak the common tongue that tears rolled down his cheeks and he answered her question automatically.

“Milo,” he said, and he could feel the tears making his nose and his cheeks turn apple-red, like they always did when he cried like a baby.

“Milo,” the lady said soothingly, managing to say it in a way that was both maternal and bone-chilling at the same time.  She touched an index finger to his red nose like it was a button.  “You, Milo, are about to become something very special.  You will be our gate.”

A gate?  Milo was confused.  A gate was a thing that you remembered to close behind you so that the laying hens didn’t get out of their coop.  A gate was made of wooden slats and rusted iron nails.  How could a boy be a gate?

He lost most of the next two or three days.  Milo was taken from Druet Village to… somewhere else.  There were more wagons and tents and mountain men and strange ladies speaking strange words over him.  Their eyes always turned to flames when they did scary things, and sometimes he saw the smoke.  He wasn’t always sure if he was awake or asleep, because sometimes the ordinary landscape around him dissolved into something nightmarish, everything barren and brown and lifeless.

A few days went by.  Then he was in the tent-wagon again, bumping down another trail to another place, but when the strange lady brought him out of the wagon, he saw that he was back in Druet Village.

His mother came out of their home and called his name when she saw the wagon, and she covered her mouth and she cried and she started to run to him, but Father grabbed her arm and pulled her back.  Father’s face was pale and grim and he looked thinner than the last time Milo had seen him, when they’d been working on the harvest a few days earlier.

One of the mountain men took a fistful of mother’s hair and dragged her to where Milo sat on the open tailgate at the edge of the wagon.  He pushed Mother onto her knees before Milo.  But then he backed away.  And everyone — the strange ladies, the mountain men, Father, Milo’s brothers and sisters, even the baby — just stared at Milo and at Mother, kneeling in front of him.  Their dog barked and snarled and tried to get to the mountain men, but one of Milo’s little brothers hung onto him.

“Milo?” said Mother, looking up at him.  “Are you alright?  Are you hurt?”

And she reached up, and touched his face, like maybe he wasn’t real and she was just imagining him, and that was when it happened, when the terrible thing happened.

Milo felt something surge inside of him, like a rushing wind, and then the smoke poured out of his nose and out of his eyes and he opened his mouth to scream and it came out of his mouth, too.  And the smoke went into Mother, and her eyes turned into flames, and she fell backwards in the mud, and she shook on the ground, and Milo heard screaming — his screams and Father’s screams and his brothers and sisters’ screams all mingled together — and the strange, beautiful lady said,

“Good, Milo.  Good boy,” and she told him to get off the wagon.

Mother stopped shaking.  She stood up again, and she smiled at Milo, and Milo thought it would be alright, but then Mother spoke, and he knew it was definitely not alright.  Because she was speaking in the guttural language like the strange ladies.  And her voice was deep.  Male.  And her eyes were still flames.

“Go to your father,” said the strange lady.

And Milo didn’t want to.  He said no and he started to cry.  But one of the mountain men took the butt of his spear and prodded Milo forward, and Milo went like he was told.

“It’s alright, Milo,” Father said, and he opened his arms for his son.  Milo ran to him, threw his arms around Father’s middle, but the smoke came again, and Father fell down and shook on the ground just like Mother had.

The mountain men and the strange lady made Milo do the same thing to each member of his family, even his baby sister.  He touched them.  Smoke came.  And then they were different.  They were… not themselves anymore.

And when Milo had touched every person in his family and made them not themselves, the strange lady took him to the rest of the village, and he touched every single one of them, too, and the same thing happened to them.

The strange lady smiled like this was a good thing, and she put her arms on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, and her body dissolved into smoke and went into him, and he felt turned inside out for a moment, but then it was over, and he didn’t see that particular strange lady again.

He wished he could see her again.  If he could, he would ask her to undo whatever she did to him, to make him normal again.

But he knew that was too much to hope for, because he could never go back to normal again, not after what he’d done.  He was a bad, bad boy.  A terrible boy.  A monster.  He had hurt every single person he’d ever known and turned them into something horrible.

After what happened in Druet Village, they’d taken him here, to this underground place and this cage.  The mountain men did not beat him or yell at him.  They fed him stew and they kept the torches burning most of the time so he wouldn’t feel so afraid in the dark by himself.  Sometimes, they would bring mountain man warriors, usually young men the same age as Milo’s oldest brother — the one who’d joined the army with his oldest sister and had gone off to war — and Milo had to touch them and the smoke would come out of him and they seemed happy afterwards.  Happy and strong.  Sometimes the young men could make flames appear around their hands, and Milo imagined his brother fighting one of them on a muddy hillside somewhere outside of Druet Village, fighting and fighting and then suddenly the mountain man’s hands would burst into flames, and he would grab Milo’s brother with flaming hands, and Milo’s brother would scream for help, and…

And Milo just wanted it to be over.  He just wanted Joslyn to take off his head, the same way she had done with the lady she’d fought — the lady who reminded Milo of the other strange ladies who’d done this to him, who still came to visit him every few days.

~ NOW:  JOSLYN ~

When Milo finally finished his story, tears and snot choking his words as he asked Joslyn to simply kill him and be done with it, she was silent for a long moment.

A picture of the true predicament the Empire was in was finally coming into focus for Joslyn.

The boy in front of her was the reason the War in the East had suddenly changed so dramatically, the reason the battalion at Deerpark Pass had been routed a year and a half earlier, the reason the well-trained, well-equipped Imperial Army had started losing battle after battle to the less sophisticated mountain tribes.  The “strange ladies” he’d told her about had to be members of Ty’Tsana’s Order of Targhan, assassins — or something else — who’d allowed themselves to be possessed by shadows to strengthen their abilities, to make themselves nearly invincible.

And the shadow-infected mountain men had gone on to infect countless other Imperial soldiers, soldiers like the one Joslyn had killed on the streets of Paratheen.  In the case of Ty’Tsana and those like her, the mortal and the inhabiting shadow seemed to live together in harmony.  In the case of the soldier Joslyn had killed, resisting the shadow had led it to gradually take hold of his mind and body, transforming him until he was more shadow than man.  That must have been what happened to the survivors of Deerpark Pass, too.

If Grastinga and the other small men were to be believed, the shadow-infected had been working their way westward for months, gathering momentum, aiming at Port Lorsin like a dagger aimed at a heart.  And once they controlled Port Lorsin, they would control the entire Empire.  Which was why Grastinga and the other small men had helped her, repairing her sword and giving her the traveler’s orb.

But why hadn’t the small men mentioned Milo?  Had the Order managed to hide him from the small men’s seers?  They must have.  And Joslyn suspected their instructions to her would have been different if they’d known of Milo, because while the boy remained as an open gate between the Shadowlands and the mortal realm, all other efforts to rid the Empire of shadows were ultimately futile.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Milo,” Joslyn said at last, after processing the boy’s story.  “And I’m sorry to hear what happened to your family.  But I’m not going to kill you.”

He looked up, the same expression of resignation on his face as before.

Joslyn knew that expression.  She had wanted to die once, when she wasn’t much older than Milo.  But Ku-sai had helped her to be whole again.  She would do the same for this boy, if she could.

Joslyn picked up Ku-sai’s sword, placed it between her feet and the edge of Milo’s cage.  “The small men gave me this sword.  I think it can help us.  Maybe it can help everyone in Druet Village, too.”

Milo hesitated.  “Can it help… me?”

When she’d first approached Milo’s chamber, she’d thought the sword thrummed with energy because of the boy.  But once the shadow inhabiting Ty’Tsana had streamed back into Milo, the sword had been still.  Normal.  Which had surprised her.  But maybe it shouldn’t:  Milo wasn’t shadow-infected; he was merely a conduit for shadows.

“Let’s try,” Joslyn said, even though she was doubtful it would work.  “Put out your hand.”

“No, you can’t touch me,” he said, his words shrill.  “If you do it will happen to you — the same thing that happens to everyone who touches me.”

“I won’t touch you,” Joslyn said.  “I have to — the sword needs to cut you.  Just a little, though,” she added.  “Just enough to draw blood.  Do you still want to try?”

Milo nodded, his moon face transforming into a somber and serious expression that made him look far older than his ten summers.  He pushed back the sleeve of his overlarge robe and extended his palm towards Joslyn.

As gently as she could, she nicked his hand.

And waited.

But nothing happened.

“Did it work?” he asked, a tenor of excitement creeping into his tone.

“No,” Joslyn said.  She had known it wouldn’t.  She shouldn’t have given him false hope.

“Oh.”

Joslyn tried to smile at him, but reassuring children was not a skill she had much practice with.

She would not kill this child.  But she had to close the gate, and Ty’Tsana had implied the only way to close it was to kill him.  That was why Ty’Tsana had told Joslyn that she wouldn’t be able to close it; she knew Joslyn wouldn’t be able to kill an innocent.

Yet she had to close the gate.  No one in the Empire, including Tasia, would be safe until she did.

“Are you alright?” Milo asked, cocking his head.

“I’m alright,” Joslyn said.  “I’m just thinking.”

I’m a monster already, Joslyn thought.  Even if I don’t kill the boy, my fate is still sealed.  I am marked by shadows, with only months left in the mortal realm before I will be forced to fulfill my bargain with —

“Milo,” she said suddenly, looking up.  “Tell me again about what happened when the strange lady who did this to you disappeared.”

Milo thought a moment.  “Instead of smoke coming out of me, she was smoke that went into me.”

“How?”

“I - I don’t know how else to explain it,” he said.  “She put her hands on my shoulders and she looked at me and she just… I breathed in and she was gone.”

Joslyn got to her feet and walked to the chamber wall adjacent to his cage.

“What are you doing?” Milo wanted to know, tracking her with his eyes.

Joslyn felt along the wall, probing the cool stones until she found one that was loose.

“I’m getting you out of that cage,” she told him.

“You can’t!”

“I can.  And I will.  And then you and I will do what the strange lady did.”

Milo whimpered behind her, but Joslyn was determined to ignore him.

She had a hunch, and her hunch might be wrong, but it was her only chance.  Joslyn was already shadow-marked; since bargaining for her life with the Prince of Shadows, she’d had a sliver of the Shadowlands inside her.  It was why Grandmother Ajda and Evrart had called her marked by shadows, tainted.  It was why dreamwalking had come so easily to her.  It was why she’d been able to form a q’isson while battling Ty’Tsana without horsetail mushroom tea.  And like a child who, once she got the pox, would never get the pox again, Joslyn’s hunch said that when she touched Milo, shadows would not flow into her.  Joslyn’s hunch told her that she could flow into him.  Into the Shadowlands.  And somehow, she would find a way to close the gate from the inside, even if it meant trapping herself there.

Having retrieved her dagger and boot knife from where they had fallen during her fight with Ty’Tsana, Joslyn used them to prise free a loose stone from the stair-like border of the chamber.  Then she returned to the rusty iron cage that held Milo.

He pressed himself against the bars at the back while she used the stone to hammer at the primitive, ancient lock.  Four solid strikes later, the lock broke and the door swung open.

Milo didn’t move.

“Come out now, Milo,” Joslyn said, gesturing to him.

The boy shook his head.

“You and I must do something scary.”  She crouched in front of the open cage.  “I have to go into a bad place, the place where the smoke comes from.  And…”  She hesitated, wondering for a moment if what she planned was even possible.  “And you have to go with me.”

Milo shook his head.  “If I touch you, the smoke will go into you, and then you will be different.”

“I already am different,” Joslyn said.  “In some ways, I’m… like the strange ladies.  Except that I want to help you, not hurt you.”

Milo visibly paled.  He remained motionless, grey eyes wide like a cornered rabbit’s.

“I don’t want to go where the strange lady went,” Joslyn continued, “but I have to.  And I need you to be very, very brave and go with me.”

“Will it… fix me?  Will it make me normal again?”

It was tempting to give him the comforting answer instead of the honest one, but Joslyn had once been a forgotten child herself.  She knew only honesty would help.

“I don’t know, Milo.”  She paused, then decided it was best to tell the whole truth.  “I don’t know if we can ever come back again, or if either of us can ever be normal again.  We may have to stay in the bad place.  But there’s also a chance that if we go, we might be able to fix things.  Fix things for your family, fix things for Druet Village, fix things for the whole Empire.”

Milo’s shoulders slumped.  “I’m afraid,” he whispered.  “But I don’t want to be bad anymore.  I want to help.”

“You’ve never been bad, and what happened isn’t your fault.”  Joslyn extended her hand towards him.  “Are you ready?  We need to try now.”

He stared at her hand, then scooted towards it.  “Alright,” he said.  “I’ll try.”

54

“They are attempting to break through the palace gates,” Grizzle had said, but Tasia didn’t see how that was possible.  How could Port Lorsin’s ordinary, unarmed citizens, even if they were inhabited by shadows, manage to break through the impenetrable fortress of the palace?

It made no sense.

Brick and Grizzle half-walked, half-jogged towards the Sunfall Gate, with Tasia and several highborn hurrying along right behind them.  The lordling Bailey and his Wise Man Gentric were both with her, along with a minor lord from the Central Steppes whose name Tasia had not learned.  When they reached the gate, Grizzle raced up the battlement, taking the narrow stairs two at a time.  Tasia and the others followed him, more cautious on the worn stone steps.  Tedric and Tomkin were both still at the top of the battlement, wearing anxious expressions and holding their short swords at the ready.

“Empress,” Tedric said when he saw Tasia.  “We… they… Look.”  He used his sword to point out into the city, in the direction of the Ambassador’s Quarter.

Tasia peered around a crenellation.  There, standing shoulder to shoulder, each of them staring up at the battlement in a complete and eerie silence, were the residents of Port Lorsin.  Merchant stood next to pauper stood next to aristocrat stood next to city guardsman.  Some of their clothes were unsullied, but most garments were mud-stained and torn, and their faces were smudged with ash and dirt.  Tasia recognized amongst them one of the commoners she had recruited from a nearby village to help instigate the riots.  The young woman’s plain dress was streaked with dirt from the knees down, as if she had been running and had fallen into a mud puddle.

Behind them, plumes of smoke continued to rise from every quarter of the city.

“Mother Moon,” breathed Bailey the Younger.  “What’s happening here?”

“They’ve surrounded the palace,” Grizzle told Tasia in a low voice.

“Have they said anything?” Tasia asked.

“Not yet,” Tomkin said.  “They started gathering about ten minutes ago.”  He shifted his gaze from Tasia to the line of men and women below.  “Ain’t said a word.  Puts a chill in me bones, Empress.”

It chilled, Tasia, too.  What did they want?

“What’s wrong with those people?” Tedric asked.  “Why d’they all look so… vacant?”

“Because they aren’t just people anymore,” Tasia said absently, looking not at Tedric but at the ground below, where Port Lorsin’s citizens stood in a motionless line, hollow expressions on their faces.

“Not just people?” Tedric echoed.

“No,” said Tasia.  “They’re possessed.  Possessed by creatures of the Shadowlands.”

Brick caught her eye, unease written into the lines of his face.  No doubt he was thinking about what he’d seen in the Imperial Army’s winter camp — the survivors of Fox Battalion.  The ones whose hands sometimes spontaneously burst into flames.

“But how could it have happened so quickly?” he asked.  “The men from Fox Battalion… they were still normal, half the time.”

“Fox Battalion?” asked Tomkin.  “The one what got routed by the mountain men?”

Brick didn’t answer the boy’s question.  His gaze flickered back and forth between Tasia and the silent men and women below.  “They was themselves most of the time, weeks later,” he said, and it was no longer clear if he was talking to himself or to Tasia.  “This… this has only been hours.  How?”

Tasia shook her head.  “I don’t know.  But it doesn’t matter.”

“Or maybe it hasn’t been hours,”  Brick said grimly.  “Maybe they been inside these folk the whole while, biding their time.”

Biding their time, Tasia thought.  And now time was up.

“Natasia of House Dorsa,” called one of the men standing in the line below.  He wore a city guard’s uniform, but his words were stiff and mechanical, his expression blank and neutral like all the rest of them.  He had a broad gash in his forehead above one eye, and dried blood from the wound caked his face and his beard.  “Come down and your people will be spared.”

“If you think we’re sendin’ the Empress down,” Brick called, “then yer dumber’n ye look.”

The city guardsman — if he could still be referred to as such — pulled the short sword free from the sheath at his waist.  He turned to the woman next to him, a white-haired older woman wearing a rough commoner’s dress and a bonnet, and unceremoniously thrust the sword into her chest.  It went straight through the woman’s torso and protruded from the other side as if she was little more than a shop owner’s straw-stuffed dressing dummy.

He pulled the sword free again and she dropped to the ground, dead.

Tomkin sucked in a breath.  Tedric and Grizzle both let out low curses.

“In the name of all the gods!” exclaimed Bailey.

“Natasia of House Dorsa,” said the city guardsman again, louder this time.  “You can choose to spare their lives or you can choose for them to die.”  He stepped sideways, placed the tip of his sword against a merchant’s chest.

Brick turned to Tasia.  “No, Empress.  Yer not going down there.”

Tasia glanced between Brick and the city guardsman.

“It’s happening,” she said.  “What Evrart warned about.”

One injury, Evrart had told her.  It only took one injury from a shadow-infected to spread the infection to the next person.

“They’ll kill my people,” Tasia told Brick.  “They’ll kill each and every one of them.”

“Ye can’t even think about going down there,” Brick said.  “They’ll kill you the moment ye walk through the sally port door.  Why else d’ye think they’re askin’ for you?”

Tasia gazed down into the blank faces of the men, women, and children who had been her subjects only hours earlier but were now inhabited by something dark and otherworldly.  What would they do with her?  She could think of fates worse than death that the creatures might have in mind.

Below, the thing dressed as a city guardsman drove his sword into the merchant’s chest, and the man fell dead as unceremoniously as the woman had.  The city guardsman moved to the next person in the line, a boy no older than twelve.  The city guardsman lifted his short sword again.

“Wait!” Tasia cried, leaning forward on the battlement.

The city guardsman stopped, the point of the sword mere inches from the boy’s chest.

“I’ll come out.  Just — don’t kill anyone else.”

“Empress, no,” Brick said, but the fight had gone out of his voice.  He knew Tasia well enough by now to know she would do what she wanted to do, and no one could stop her once she’d made up her mind.

She gripped both of Brick’s arms.  “Somehow, you have to find Evrart,” she told him softly.  Tasia turned to Bailey.  “And you.  Prepare the nobility to fight.”

“Empress, with all due respect,” said Bailey, “the majority of the high born in the palace have never fought for anything but sport.”

“Then now is the time for them to learn something more than sport,” said Tasia.  “Grizzle, do you have a way to get into the palace armory?”

“Aye,” he said.  “I’m sure I can figure out a way into’t.”

“Then work with Bailey of House Tew,” said Tasia.  “Arm the nobles.  Gods, arm the nobles, the ambassadors, the Wise Men.  Arm the servants.  Arm the cooks — arm everyone with a hand to hold a weapon.  And once that’s done, guard my sister.  Guard her personally, with your life.”

“I will, Empress,” Grizzle said, dipping his chin.

“Promise me you won’t abandon her,” Tasia said, her voice trembling.  “Even if you and she are the last to… And don’t let her become one of them.  Even if you have to…”

The old guard’s face was somber.  He set his jaw.  “The Princess Adela will never become one of them,” he said.  “I promise.”

“Let me at least go with ye,” said Brick.

“No,” Tasia said firmly.  “You have to find Evrart.  You’re the only one in the palace I trust  who even knows what he looks like.  It has to be you, Brick.  We need the Brotherhood’s help.”

“What do I tell him when I find him?”

“That they’ve taken me.”

“Will he know what to do?”

Tasia drew in a breath.  “We can pray to Mother Moon that he does.”

Brick walked Tasia as far as the sally port door.  She wanted to hug him, to reassure him that somehow things would work out; she wanted him to reassure her that she would find some way out of this.  But an embrace didn’t seem appropriate.  She might be dressed as a commoner, in men’s breeches and with daggers strapped to her hips, but she was still the Empress.  At least for a few minutes longer.  And Empresses did not hug their subjects for reassurance.

So she merely paused a moment.  She met his eyes, something unspoken passed between them — each of them wishing the other luck, each of them hoping that they might still meet again one day — and then she gave him a single nod before walking out the sally port door.

The shadow who wore the body of the city guardsman was there to greet her, along with a handful of other blank-faced men and women.  Tasia spared a final backwards glance at Brick.

“It will be alright,” she told him, even as the city guardsman took hold of her arm.  “Focus on what I asked.”

Brick’s expression was grim.  “I will.”

“You made the right choice, Empress,” said the city guardsman as the sally port door closed.  “You choose a future for your people that mankind could only dream about until now.”

He — or it, Tasia supposed — tugged Tasia along by the arm towards the line of men and women who surrounded the palace.

“What future is that?” Tasia asked derisively.  “One in which your kind use human bodies as if we are nothing more than pack animals?”

“No.  A future in which your subjects will not know death,” said the guardsman.  “A future in which they will have access to powers they never could have dreamed of before.”

The line of blank-faced people closed around Tasia and the guard like a phalanx.  As one body, they marched northward, angling across the boulevard that surrounded the palace and up the main avenue running through the Merchant Quarter.  The further north they went, the more automaton-like Port Lorsiners joined them.

Gods, Tasia thought.  Have they infected the entire city already?  How could it have happened so fast?

But then a terrible thought dawned on her:  the riots.  Evrart had told her that shadows spread their influence through injury.  That was why Joslyn had nearly been consumed by the Shadowlands after her mountainside battle with the undatai, and why the surviving members of Fox Battalion had gradually transformed from man to shadow.

And the riots Tasia had staged as a distraction to first pull the city guard out of Port Lorsin, then the palace guard into the city, had created the perfect opportunity for the shadows to spread swiftly through the population, burning through humans as effortlessly as fire burned dry wood.

Riots led to chaos.

Chaos led to injuries.

And injuries led to shadows.

Evrart had said it would happen faster, the transformation from human to shadow, the more humans there were who were infected.  That’s how they’d managed to take control of their human hosts with such scant resistance.  Unlike Joslyn, who’d never allowed the shadows to gain a foothold, and unlike the Fox Battalion survivors, who were visibly struggling against the forces taking hold of them, the citizens of Port Lorsin had never even stood a chance.

Tasia silently cursed herself.  She had done this — or at least, she had made it possible for the shadows to infiltrate Port Lorsin with ease.  The same riots that had made it possible for her to take back the crown had made it possible for the shadows to take her capital city.

She should have listened to Evrart when she’d had the chance.

The shadow inside the city guardsman spoke once more.

“You will be remembered fondly one day,” it said.  “When humans see what they can become with our aid, your Empire will praise you for being the one to usher in a new era of power and harmony.”

“An Empire of shadows is no real Empire at all,” Tasia growled.

“You say that now.  You will change your mind later.  Once you become one of us.”

Tasia didn’t say what she wanted to say, which was I will never become one of you.  It would be a lie, of course.  As soon as the shadows inhabited her body, she would become one of them.

“Where are you taking me?” she said instead.

They’d been moving gradually uphill for several city blocks, past butcher shops and dressmakers, past bakers and furriers.  They were starting to enter into the poorer part of the Merchant Quarter now, the part of the quarter that catered less to the wealthy than to the city’s commoners and its visiting farmers.

“We’re taking you to our version of an Emperor,” said Tasia’s guard.

“The Shadowlands has an Emperor?”

“The Prince of Shadows says he has met you once before,” the guard said by way of reply.

Tasia was tempted to ask how that could be possible, but then she understood:  Joslyn’s battle against the creature of fire in the Zaris Mountains.  That was the only shadow Tasia had “met” before.

“But that’s not possible.  Joslyn killed the undatai,” Tasia said.

“No.  The woman killed only a single manifestation of the Prince,” said the guardsman.  “A mortal has but one body — a weak thing of flesh and delicate gears.  A single prick of the wrong substance in the wrong place and the gears collapse and the mortal dies.  But a shadow?  How does one kill a shadow?  One does not.  Banish one piece of us back to the Shadowlands, and yet more pieces still remain.”

He turned, grinning at Tasia.  It was the first time his expression had been anything but blank, and she found it wholly disconcerting.  Because although he wore a human face, there was nothing human in his smile.  His grin was the curled snarl of a wolf, the jagged maw of a shark’s open mouth.

And like a rabbit confronted by a predator, Tasia’s instinct was to run — or, since she could not run, to at least look away.  But she would not allow herself to do so.

“The Mizana may have bested him that night on the mountain,” said the grinning predator, “but he took a piece of her with him, back to the Shadowlands.  And even when she returned to the mortal realm, when she came back for you, she carried a piece of him with her.”  His smile broadened, growing so large it looked fake, like a smile painted onto a jester.  “As much as she wishes to belong wholly to you, a piece of the Mizana will always belong to the Targhan, to the Prince of Shadows.”

Tasia’s entire face tightened into a mask, a mask she would not allow her true emotions to show upon.  She had never heard the word Mizana, but the creature beside her could only mean Joslyn.  And how dare he taunt her by disrespecting the dead.

“She belongs to no one but the Lord of Death and Mother Moon now,” Tasia managed to say through tightened jaw.

“No, Natasia,” said the guardsman.  “The Mizana lives.  The Mizana lives precisely because the Targhan lives within her.  Once you meet the Targhan and join with us, you will see this for yourself.”

But I saw her die, Tasia stopped herself from saying.

She wanted it to be true, though.  Even if it meant that Joslyn was controlled by the shadows the way this city guardsman’s body was, she wanted to see her love one last time.  Her heart physically ached with the thought.

It would almost be worth it to become infected by shadows just to see Joslyn again.  Almost.

They marched on, silent almost-human things through a silent city, still heading north.

But finally, as if an invisible leader had given them an order, the crowd of shadow-infected citizens stopped as one body when they reached one of the guard towers built into the city’s northern wall.  The shadow-infected formed a semi-circular ring around the tower eight people deep, all facing outward with blank faces.

Guarding whatever lay within the tower, no doubt.

And Tasia had a good guess as to what — or whom — that might be.

The guardsman led her through the narrow door at the tower’s base and up the spiral staircase to the guard room at the top.

Two automatons stood before the door that led into the guard room — one woman in commoner’s clothes and a man who looked like he was probably a sailor — and they moved aside in a synchronized side-step to allow Tasia and the guardsman to enter.

The interior was much as Tasia had suspected it would be.  One corner of the octagonal room  was stacked with barrels, which she assumed contained food and water stores.  The rest of the rear walls held racks of standard Imperial short-swords, maces, bows, quivers filled with arrows, and a variety of helmets and leather city guard armor of various sizes.

On the side of the room that faced outward towards the countryside, three rickety-looking wooden chairs with a small table between them sat before one of the room’s dozen-or-so arrow slits.  It wasn’t a window per se, but it was wide enough that it afforded a good view of the vineyards and orchards that dotted the landscape north of the city.

And in one of the chairs sat a broad-shouldered man, his back to Tasia and her shadow-infected guardsman.

The guard led Tasia to one of the empty chairs and sat her in it, then took a step backwards.

The man in the other chair turned leisurely towards Tasia.

Her breath caught in her throat.

“Al-Alric?” she sputtered.

Alric gave her a slight smile.  “Well, I haven’t been entirely Alric for quite some time.  And I’m definitely not Alric anymore.  He told you about the bandit who attacked him on the road, didn’t he?  The one who stabbed him in the thigh?”  The thing that wore Alric’s body grinned.  “He put up quite a fight.  He still struggles even now.  It’s too bad, really.  We could be so strong if he would simply work with me instead of against me.”

Tasia was too shocked to reply, and the creature took her silence as an invitation to keep speaking.

“I knew we would eventually meet again, dear Tasia,” it said.  “Ever since the Mizana first entered the Shadowlands and I learned about you through her eyes, I have been hungry to unite with you.  You will be an even better host than Alric.”

“I will fight you,” Tasia said, lifting her chin.  “I will fight you, and I will win.”

The thing chuckled.  “Oh, I have no doubt that you will fight me.  Your precious Mizana fought me, but even she eventually realized that she would never truly win.  That’s why she eventually entered into a truce with me.  I think you’ll eventually do the same.”

It leaned forward, and Tasia flinched away from him

“Don’t worry,” it said.  “It will only hurt for a moment.”

Suddenly there was a knife in his hand.  Its other hand clamped down onto Tasia’s forearm.  Before she could even process what was happening, Alric’s kind brown eyes transformed into flames, and it stabbed her in the shoulder.  Pain erupted where the knife was.  She struggled in its grip, trying to worm away, but she might as well have been trying to break free from an iron manacle.

Smoke poured forth from its eyes and nostrils, flowing towards the fresh wound.

“No,” she whimpered, still squirming.  “No!”

But there was no getting away from it.  Smoke flowed into the puncture in Tasia’s shoulder, and somehow she could feel it, feel the creature, coursing through her veins.

Everything went black, with Tasia’s own scream ringing in her ears.

55

Joslyn reached out a hand to Milo, palm up.  His eyes flickered from the hand to her face and back again, then slowly, reluctantly, he placed his hand in hers.

Smoke flowed from his nostrils towards Joslyn’s face.  Her instinct was to let go of his hand, to turn her head away from the smoke, but she forced herself to stay still.  When the smoke reached her own nostrils, she let it inside.  She could feel the shadow — or shadows, she couldn’t be sure if it was only one — spreading throughout her body.  Remembering what she had learned about forming a q’isson, she reached for the smoke inside her and pushed back, following its stream out of her body and into Milo’s.  For a moment, Joslyn felt as though suspended between two bodies, between two realms.  A piece of her was still inside her own body; the rest of her was entering into Milo, following the smoke into him the way the shadow had followed the same trail into her.

And then the feeling of her old body was gone completely.  Behind her, it slumped to the side, a husk emptied of its contents.  Joslyn was within Milo now, his unfamiliar child’s body a mould that gave her consciousness a new shape.

But no.  Being inside Milo was not what she had wanted.  She probed inside of him, searching for something she couldn’t name, something she would only recognize once she found it.

Ah.  And there it was.

It had the feeling of a loosely sewn seam, or that of the drawstring that cinched her pack closed.  She felt it not with her fingers or any physical sense, but with her mind.  Relying upon nothing but intuition, Joslyn pushed her consciousness at this seam, this boundary between Milo and what it was that lay beyond him.  And at the same time, she found that essence of Milo himself, and she pulled that piece of him along with her, even as she pushed.  As she had experienced when she used the traveler’s orb, Joslyn experienced a sucking sensation, and then she and Milo were suddenly there, inside the Shadowlands.  At the same time, they were each thrown back inside their physical bodies.  Joslyn suspected that if anyone else had been in the chamber to witness what had happened, she and Milo would have been in the room one moment, vanished the next.

Joslyn touched her arms, her chest, reassured by the sensation of being back inside her own body again.  Beside her, Milo did something similar, running his hands up and down his arms as if rubbing warmth back into his limbs.

“Are you alright?” Joslyn asked the boy.

He nodded.  “Are we… there?” he asked in a small voice.  “Are we in the bad place where the strange ladies went to?”

“Yes.  And I want you to stay close to me, Milo.”

“Alright.”

He slipped his hand into hers.  Having a child take her hand with unabashed trust wasn’t something Joslyn was used to, and it startled her momentarily.  But it seemed to comfort the boy, and that, in turn, somehow comforted her.

As it had been each time Joslyn had been here before, the landscape of the Shadowlands was bleak and empty.  In some ways, it reminded her of Terinto’s Great Desert:  the near total absence of vegetation, the endless sameness, the muted colors.  But whereas at least in the Great Desert there was a contrast between the yellow-brown of the vast, rolling sand dunes and the crystalline blue of Father Mezzu above, here there was not even that.  The ground was a kind of rust-red; the hazy sky nearly matched it.

Joslyn pulled her sword free, expecting it to hum with energy the way it did when a shadow was near, but in this place the sword felt oddly dead in her hand, just another length of steel whose only life came from the one who wielded it.  She supposed that made sense; the sword had been made to separate a shadow from a human host, and here there were no humans save her and Milo.

“Where do we go?” the boy asked, gazing up at her.

She reflected on his question, thinking of the previous times she had been in the Shadowlands.  The first time, she had been dragged here by the power of the injury given to her by the undatai, but on that occasion, the Shadowlands had not been a blank red-brown wasteland.  That first time, the Shadowlands was a fever dream, its landscape an ever-shifting patchwork of Joslyn’s past.  She’d been flung from scene to scene — from Ku-sai’s mountain hut, to the palace of the House of Dorsa, to battlefields she’d fought on in the East.  Then somehow, against all odds, she’d felt Tasia calling her, and she’d followed that call back to the mortal world, back into her body.

The second time she’d been thrust into the Shadowlands was when she found Ku-sai’s q’isson.  A q’isson, she’d decided, was like a soap bubble composed of shadows — both inside the Shadowlands and outside it at once.  But then the soap bubble had burst; the q’isson had been infiltrated by shadows once the undatai had tracked her down inside its realm, and she’d made it back only by finding and following the thread of her own physical body.

The third and fourth times, she’d used the traveler’s orb, following its spark through the Shadowlands the way one might traverse a tunnel through a hill or a mountain.  She’d brought her physical body with her those times, like this time, and it was the power of the orb that had guided her from Shadowlands to mortal realm.

But this time, there was no hint about where she was or where she should go to arrive at a destination.

She scanned the horizon, looking for something — anything — that might indicate a sense of here versus there, a sense of which direction to travel in order to find her quarry.

Milo squeezed her hand.  “Joslyn?”

The boy was studying her uncertainly, and she realized he’d been waiting for her to answer his question for at least a minute.

In a sense, they didn’t have to go anywhere, did they?  By bringing Milo with her into the Shadowlands, body and spirit, she had effectively closed the gate.  And she had done so without shedding innocent blood.

Yet she suspected that the Order of Targhan would open another gate as soon as they realized Milo was gone.  They would find some other farmer’s child, and then they would conscript him or her into becoming the new portal between realms.

There was only one way to end this, Joslyn knew:  The Prince of Shadows must be destroyed.

And yet that was as laughable as saying Father Mezzu and Mother Eirenna above must be destroyed.

“This way,” Joslyn said, choosing a direction at random and gesturing with her sword.

They walked.

The unchanging landscape barely gave them a sense of movement.  One step looked like the next step; the next step looked like the three before.

The fine silt-like dirt stirred in tiny clouds each time they  placed a foot against the ground, but other than that, there was little to suggest they had taken any steps at all.  The horizon did not change.  The landscape behind them contained no landmark that grew smaller in size the further away from it they walked.  Nothing in the distance grew larger as they approached.

Joslyn had anticipated that at least shadows would appear from somewhere, trying to bar their way, boiling up from the ground to attack the way they had when they had discovered her presence in Ku-sai’s q’isson, but there were no shadows to be found.  Nothing whispered Mizana to her.

By traveling through the gate that was the boy, they had somehow been rendered invisible to the Shadowlands’ residents, or at least inconsequential.  Why was that?

The warrior and the boy holding her hand may have walked a mile.  They may have walked five.  Joslyn couldn’t be sure.  And with no sun, no moon, no stars, it was as hard to judge the passage of time as it was to judge distance.

Maybe there was no time here.

Finally, though, she stopped walking.  Milo pulled up short beside her, turning his moon face towards hers.

How unfair it was to him that he trusted her.

“This place… things don’t work quite the same way here,” Joslyn said.

Joslyn let go of his hand.  She sat down, sending a poof of rust-colored dust into the air around her.  She kneeled, gingerly laying Ku-sai’s sword on the ground in front of her.  It would still be within easy reach, should she need it with short notice.

“What are you doing?”  The boy was frowning, glancing first in the direction they had been walking for so long, then at the sword lying upon the ground.

“Sit with me.”  Joslyn gestured to a spot on the other side of her sword.  “I want to teach you something that my ku-sai taught me.  Something I have neglected too often, for far too long.”

Milo hesitated for a moment, but then he sat down, mimicking Joslyn’s kneeling position and settling onto the rusty earth across from her.

“When you don’t know what to do next,” Joslyn said, “sometimes taking decisive action helps.  But other times, what helps is to stop.  To sit, and to breathe, and to clear your mind.  Watch.”

She let her eyelids lightly fall shut, rested her palms on her thighs, and turned her attention to her breathing, willing her breath to become slow and deep, willing her body to let go of its taut energy, like a bowstring drawn, and relax.  Across from her, the sound of Milo’s breathing also shifted, and for a few seconds she contented herself to listen to the sound of the child breathe.  It had probably been a long time since he had felt peace.  She knew it had been a long time since she had felt any, which meant that her meditation was long overdue.

Yet another one of Ku-sai’s teachings she had neglected.

At first, it was hard to let go of the alert, battle-ready energy she’d been holding for who-knew-how-long.  Had it been hours?  Days?

Months?

It seemed to her that she had not been granted a chance to slow down and take stock of her situation since the moment she had come back from the dead.

“A sword master maintains his weapons,” her ku-sai had taught her.  “Every night, he cleans, sharpens, and oils his sword.  But what protects a sword master is not here.”  He tapped his blade — the very blade that now rested in front of Joslyn.  “What protects a sword master is here.”  Now he touched Joslyn’s chest.  “This is the real weapon, kuna-shi.  This is where clarity comes from.  This is why we meditate.”

But Joslyn had never liked meditation.  She did it as rarely as she could get away with during the years she spent with her ku-sai.  And in the ten years since, she’d avoided it even more, sitting still and clearing her mind only when meditation called to her as absolute necessity.

She’d always preferred movement to stillness.  But even she had to admit that what she needed most right now was clarity.

It took several minutes for the tension to dissipate and the peace to take hold.  The private pains she had kept buried in her heart for so many months — the necessity of leaving Tasia yet again, the knowledge that she harbored somewhere within her a piece of the very monster she sought to destroy, along with the knowledge that after a year’s time, that monster would claim her whether she willed it or not — all of this and more bubbled to the surface.

The Empire’s last Mizana did not fight the tears when they came.  She let them roll free from her closed eyelids, let them wet her cheeks and drip from her jaw.

And then — finally — Joslyn felt the release she had been seeking rise within her, a warmth that spread outward from her chest, from the very place where Ku-sai had once touched her.  She let it fill her, body and mind.

With peace came clarity.  And only when the clarity came did Joslyn allow herself to turn her attention back to examining the problems now at hand.

Her problems were twofold, she decided, and both were seemingly impossible tasks.  First, she had to find the undatai, the Prince of Shadows, the one to whom she was beholden, inside its own kingdom.

Given that a fragment of the monster marked her, she wasn’t sure why it hadn’t already discovered her presence here.  Perhaps something else held its attention at the moment.  If so, that was something she had in her favor; it meant she would have the element of surprise.

Because the second impossible task before her was to destroy it.

It had been hard enough to defeat him when he had been in his monstrous fire form in the mortal realm, a beast of flame that she thought she had killed, only to realize she’d merely succeeded in sending it back to the Shadowlands.  Joslyn suspected that if she defeated it here, in this realm, her victory would be total.  Although… if it possessed a human body (or more than one — could it do that?) in the mortal realm, then it might still cheat death, even if she slew it in the Shadowlands.  Regardless, Joslyn suspected that fighting the undatai here, in the Shadowlands, would be foolhardy in the extreme.  If it had been powerful in the mortal realm, wouldn’t it be god-like in the Shadowlands?

There was little hope that Joslyn, even as the Empire’s last Mizana, would defeat the undatai within its own realm.  Or survive a battle with it.  And yet she had to try.  Even if it meant her own death.  Killing the undatai was the only thing that would truly make Tasia safe — that would make the whole Empire safe.

Joslyn’s mind snagged on the inevitability of her death.  She felt the resistance against the idea.  But she breathed through it.

She had died once before.  She could die again, if that was what it took.

The art of the sword master is death.

It was one thing to accept that she must sacrifice her own life, yet wouldn’t her own death sentence Milo to the same fate?  No one would protect a lost little boy in the Shadowlands if Joslyn died.  But sometimes in war, the innocent and undeserving die.  And she knew brave little Milo would, like her, prefer the dignity of death to the indignity of serving as a conduit to the creatures who wanted to destroy his family, his village, and everything he had ever held as sacred.

So death it was.

Her breath flowed in and out.  In and out.  Smooth and unobstructed.  The peace of accepting what she must do was a balm upon her body and mind.

It was resolved:  She would face the Prince of Shadows again.  She would defeat it, or she would die, or she would defeat him and then die.  But defeating the creature was the only chance she had to make Tasia and Tasia’s Empire safe again.  She had sworn an oath to protect Tasia; she would not break that oath, regardless of cost.

The only question that remained, then, was how to find the Prince of Shadows.  It had always been the one to find her the other times, when she was in the Shadowlands trapped within her fever dream, and again when she was trying to retrieve the sword Ku-sai had hidden here.

How had she found Ku-sai in this place?

First came the horsetail mushroom tea and her meditation.  Then came Ku-Sai — he had been the one to find her.

But no, that could not be true.

Ku-sai no longer had volition, because he was no longer a part of the mortal world.  He’d been a whisper of a dream, a ghost.  A remnant left behind, a dream waiting for a dreamer to form him.

Dream waiting for a dreamer.  Dreamwalker.

Joslyn’s eyes flew open and she sucked in a sharp breath, insight crashing over her like an ocean wave.  Within the Shadowlands, it wasn’t just Ku-sai who was a remnant of a dream.  It was everything.  All the Shadowlands was one giant q’isson, an insubstantial dream formed by the creatures who inhabited it.  Creatures who, just like Ku-sai, were hardly more than ghosts, who needed a dreamer to give them shape.

That was what a shadow was, all of them — they were dreams seeking a dreamer.

In a single flash of understanding, everything became clear to Joslyn.  The beings trapped in this plane were powerful, far more powerful than humans, yes, but they were also mere whispers of whatever it was they had once been.  That was why they came so gladly when called upon by shamans and sorcerers and seers and the Brothers of Culo.  They needed mortals for their wholeness, because what is a dream without a dreamer?

And when mortal practitioners of the shadow arts drew upon their strength, for a moment these shadows enjoyed the glee of being reunited with the physical world again.  While they were used, they were whole.

No wonder they were so desperate for mortal bodies to inhabit and to transform into their own likeness.  Mortal bodies were their pathway back to a full existence, to full power.  And some humans, like the mountain men and the Order of Targhan, were all too glad to lend their forms to these formless monsters.  While humans were conjoined with shadows, they were nearly invincible.

Joslyn knew how to find the Prince of Shadows:  She needed to dream him.  But now that she was already inside the Shadowlands, she wouldn’t need sleep and she wouldn’t need horsetail mushroom.  The man or woman who can control their dreams no longer needs to be subject to its whims.

She steadied herself, pulling in a deep breath.  She allowed the atmosphere of the Shadowlands to fill her lungs, to mix with her mortal body, bolster her strength.  For the mortal who comprehended the nature of the Shadowlands, the air itself was horsetail mushroom.

“Milo,” Joslyn said gently, reaching out a hand towards him.

The boy roused from his meditation with a start.  He studied Joslyn for a moment.

“I think I was starting to dream,” he said.

Joslyn nodded.  Every dream needed a dreamer.

“Did it work?” Milo asked.  “Do you know what to do next?”

“Yes.”  Joslyn stood.  Milo stood as well.  She held out a hand to him, and he took it without hesitation.  “We’re going somewhere very frightening.  And I will say things that will scare you.  But I want you to remember to trust me, and to do whatever I tell you to do, even if it sounds mad.  Can you do that?”

Milo swallowed, then nodded.

“Alright.  Hold on to me.”

Joslyn closed her eyes again, reaching for — and finding easily — the swirling lights that longed to form her q’isson.  In this place, forming a q’isson was the equivalent of forming a dream within a dream.  But that was what would make Joslyn more powerful than her opponent.

She pulled the sphere of the q’isson around herself and the boy.  Just as Ku-sai had once formed a q’isson within the Shadowlands and drawn her into it, Joslyn would pull into her q’isson her enemy, the Prince of Shadows.

56

Like a knife blade sheering through flesh, Tasia felt the white hot pain of some kind of force slicing through her consciousness, cutting her mind free from her physical body.  She pushed back, fought against it, struggled to keep mind connected to body as it always had been, but how did one’s mind even remain in one’s body?  She’d never had to consider it, or fight against its separation.  Every feeling that came was foreign, new, and she was as if blind and flailing for purchase in the darkness.

And then it was done.  Her body, her physical senses, her sense of being inside while the world was outside — all of it was gone, and she was floating free, a mind without an anchor to hold it in place.

At first, Tasia perceived nothing.  There was nothing to perceive.  There was only a voidness.  A nothing.

Is this death? she wondered.

That was what the Wise Men said death was — mere nothingness.  Mere absence, the end of all things.

But it couldn’t be death — could it? — if she could still wonder what it was.  That suggested she still existed.  Somewhere in this void, although there was no up or down, no forward or back, no sight, sound, scent, texture, or touch, there was still… her.  There was still Tasia.  And if there was still a Tasia to wonder what was happening, then…

I’m not dead.

As soon as the thought occurred to her, she found she could… well, not see exactly, because “seeing” would require eyes, and Tasia no longer had a body and therefore no longer had eyes.  But she could perceive something.  The only thing she could think to call it was light — a river of light.  A swirling pattern of colors that seemed to be flowing in some kind of direction.  It was like seeing dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight, dancing and spinning on the subtlest of air currents.  Tasia… watched, for lack of a better word.  And the moment she did, the moment she began to ask questions — What is that?  Why am I aware of it? — she was inside of it.

Part of it.

Now there were new perceptions, new awarenesses.  The river of light had a kind of hum to it, a kind of vibration.  Tasia concentrated on this, once again trying to understand what it was she was experiencing.  The more she concentrated, the more she realized that what she thought had been a single humming vibration was actually a multitude of hums.  Hundreds — or thousands — or hundreds of thousands — of distinct vibrations buzzed and coursed and flowed within the river of light.  She was reminded of the sound of the ocean as it slapped against the beach:  The sound could be described as a singular whole, yet the waves themselves were both individual and innumerable.

She focused her awareness on the humming.  Gradually, the individual vibrations became more distinct, and she realized

“… out, how do I…”

“… where … child … trapped …”

“… hurts, it … let me …”

each hum was a thought.  Tasia was tempted to think of the vibrations as voices and words, but that just wasn’t quite right; everything was still too ephemeral, too dream-like to be that which she was accustomed to experiencing.

Yes, “dream-like” seemed to be the best way for Tasia to comprehend what was happening.  She felt as though caught in a dream she could not wake up from, in which everything around her felt fleeting and unreal.

Perhaps this was a dream, then?

But it couldn’t be a dream, because the vibrations, the thoughts she was perceiving, were not her own.  Which meant…

Gods.  Others were trapped here, just like she was.  Others whose bodies had been stolen by the shadows.  Perhaps this river of swirling lights and vibrations was her own subjects, the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Port Lorsin and other places, expelled from their physical bodies by shadows, just as she had been.

“Hello?” Tasia thought, tentatively pushing out her own vibration into the river of light as its ever-shifting currents flowed around her.

“Can anyone hear me?  Is someone there?”

“… hear … who …?”

Tasia tried narrowing her awareness, focusing on the single vibration that seemed to be trying to respond.

“Hello?” she said again.  “I am Natasia of House Dorsa, Empress of the Four Realms.  Do you hear me?”

“Empress… I… yes … Pollut, Shipper’s … hear …?”

Pollut of Shipper’s Quarter.  That had to be what they’d been trying to say.

“Pollut of Shipper’s Quarter, I hear you.”  Even saying this — thinking this? — made Tasia’s mind clearer.  Yet what did she do next?  She wanted to escape from this disembodied, dream-like void.  But how did one “escape” from a place that was not a place at all?

“Natasia… I am here… I…”

There — that had been clearer.  Less of an echo and more distinct, like the difference between hearing a whisper at the far end of a corridor and hearing someone speaking normally within one’s own bedchamber.

“Pollut?  Concentrate on my words,” Tasia said.  “And keep talking.  I think we’re getting closer somehow.”

“Yer clearer, Empress,” said Pollut.  “I think I… can ye see me?”

At first, Tasia noticed nothing different.  It was still all a mass of spinning wisps of colored light.  But then a shape began to resolve itself within the void, wavering like the faintest of shadows cast at midday.

“I see something,” Tasia said.  “It’s like a — ”

The river of colorful light vanished, and Tasia had the sensation of falling.  And not just falling but tumbling end-over-end, spinning and whirling and careening side to side.

Then she was sitting — she was actually sitting, in a body again, one palm pressed against the fine silt of dusty earth, propping up her weight.

Tasia gasped as if surfacing after a dive in the ocean, reassured when her chest expanded with the effort.  And yet despite the sensation, a part of her realized this couldn’t be her real body.  The undatai had possession of that, in another world.

Tasia glanced around, trying to get her bearings.

The dusty earth supporting her was a red-brown, the color of rust.  People milled about all around her, walking in aimless circles in small, shuffling steps, sending minuscule clouds of the red-brown dust into the air each time they planted a foot.  The earth itself was flat, as flat as a table or countertop or flagstone, with absolutely no distinguishing features in any direction.  Above it was an empty sky that was nearly the same color as the earth below, hazy and dull and suffused with dim light, like sunlight three-quarters obscured by smoke.

She got to her feet.  Nearby, a grimy man dressed in rags pushed himself up from a fetal position and glanced around.  Tasia caught his eye.

“Pollut?”

Relief washed over his face.  “Empress?”

“Yes,” she said, mirroring his relief.

Others heard their exchange and stopped pacing, their gazes flickering between Pollut and Tasia.

A murmur rippled through them.  “Empress?” they whispered.

“House of Dorsa…?”

“Natasia…?”

“The heir…?”

“The Emperor’s daughter…?”

“The missing princess…?”

They turned towards her one by one, a blend of hope and desperation on each face.  Soon she was encircled by them — dozens of them, all staring at her with the same questions in their eyes.

Was she truly Natasia of House Dorsa, they wondered?  And if she was, could she help them?

A young woman about Tasia’s age shouldered her way through the crowd.  Vaguely familiar to Tasia, the girl wore a fine silk gown, and her hair was woven into an immaculate braid — the style of the Central Steppes.  She looked Tasia up and down.

“It’s really her,” said the young woman.  “It’s the Princess!”

Everyone began to talk at once — some with each other, some addressing Tasia.  Fingers tugged at her clothes — and she was back in the same outfit she’d donned for her raid upon the palace:  a tunic with a leather vest over it, man’s breeches, calf-high riding boots.  When she realized what she was wearing, Tasia’s hands immediately went to her hips.  The daggers were both there, the twin daggers Joslyn had given her.

“Quiet everyone, please!” she shouted, lifting her voice above the crowd.

The talking died down.  The hands upon her fell away.

“Did you do this to us?” asked a man who looked like he might be highborn.

“No, of course not,” Tasia said.  “I’m — ”

“She murdered her father,” said a commoner on Tasia’s other side.  “She’s a sorceress, she is, and come back to do in the rest of us like she did her Pa!”

“She ain’t a sorceress,” yelled another man.  “It’s that Wise Man what’s got us here — ”

They all began to argue.

Gods.  It was like being in the council room all over again.

“Mother Moon,” Tasia said.  “Will you please all just shut up for a moment?”

This seemed to get their attention.

Tasia took a breath, wondering where to begin.  “Does anyone know where we are?  Or why we’re here?”

“We’re dead!” someone called.

“Aye!” another agreed.

“We’re not dead,” said a disdainful voice, feminine and carrying a Terintan accent.  “We’re in the Shadowlands.”

The Shadowlands.  Tasia struggled to remember what had come before the void.  It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d lost that memory.  She remembered being at the palace, convincing the council at long last that she had been framed by Norix and his conspirators for her father’s murder.

Then Grizzle had come in… and she’d left the council room… and there’d been people, hundreds of blank-faced Port Lorsiners, surrounding the palace in a wide ring… and then —

She remembered Alric.  Smoke had flowed out of him.

Then pain.  Then a river of light.  And now here, a mind without a body.  Well, not exactly without a body.  She had a body of sorts.  But somehow she knew it was more like a dream of her body than her actual body.

Around her, it seemed as if the others were also remembering their final moments in the mortal realm.  One man let out a steady, colorful stream of curses under his breath.  A young woman began to whimper softly, supplicating Mother Moon to save her.

It made sense, their being in the Shadowlands.  Somehow, they’d swapped places with the shadows, the actual inhabitants of this realm.  The shadows had taken their bodies, and their — well, their what, exactly?  Their consciousnesses?  Their souls?  — their something had been discarded here, washed up like refuse on a beach into this featureless wasteland.

“Who said that, about being in the Shadowlands?” Tasia asked, looking for the woman who’d spoken.

An elderly woman, so small that the top of her head hardly reached Tasia’s chin, hobbled forward.  The crowd parted for her, perhaps sensing the same thing that Tasia did — this woman might be tiny and ancient, but something about her suggested power.

The old woman stopped a few feet before Tasia, looking her up and down before letting out a small, dissatisfied grunt.

“Fair skin, green eyes,” she muttered, as if talking to herself.  “Features artisan-delicate as only the House of Dorsa’s are.”  She nodded.  “You’re pretty, Empress.  I’ll give the Mizana that.”

“Mizana?” Tasia repeated, confused.  “Who are you?”

“My name is Ajda of Paratheen,” said the woman, ignoring Tasia’s first question.  “These days, most call me Grandmother Ajda the seer.  Though I am grandmother to none.”

“Grandmother Ajda of Paratheen, seer.”  Tasia was careful to keep her tone respectful, aware that everyone around them was listening intently.  “Do you know why we are in the Shadowlands?  And more importantly — do you know how we get out?”

“We are here because the Order of Targhan finally succeeded in building itself a gate in the Sunrise Mountains about two years ago, a fact I myself learned only in recent days, and they have been infecting the mountain tribes with shadows ever since,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Your Brother Evrart told you the parts about the Shadowlands he thought you needed to know.  What he failed to tell you about until it was far too late was the sheer quantity of shadows that have slipped into the Land of Men in the past two years.  The Order of Targhan calls this influx the ‘reunification,’ the time when the shadows will take back physical forms and walk the earth once more.”  She sighed, as though suddenly very tired.  “The rest of us might as well call it the end of the mortal realm as we know it.  That is why we are here.”

“And how we get out?” Tasia pressed.

“We don’t.”

Tasia had been about to ask What is the Order of Targhan?, but the question died on her lips with Grandmother Ajda’s final words.

A tense, silent moment passed.  Tasia became aware that the others, most of whom, she decided, must be residents of Port Lorsin, were staring at her, waiting for her to do something, say something.  But Grandmother Ajda spoke first.

“That lovesick warrior of yours might have arrived in Port Lorsin in time to stem the flow of shadows into the capital city — might,” the old seer said.  “But as usual, she failed to take the advice of those with more wisdom than she has, and went galloping off on another quest.  A quest she will almost certainly fail at, to the doom of us all.”

Tasia was quiet for a few seconds while she tried to process the old woman’s words.  Around her, the citizens of Port Lorsin grew restless again, speaking amongst themselves in quiet, urgent tones.

Their numbers were growing, Tasia noticed.  There had been a few dozen of them when she had first materialized here, arriving from nowhere into the Shadowlands.  More and more had appeared every few seconds since then, and now Tasia guessed there were probably hundreds of them.  Hundreds of the very subjects she was sworn to protect, trapped here in this netherworld.

But…

“My lovesick warrior?” Tasia said at last.

“The Mizana,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “The one you call Joslyn of Terinto.”

The name stole Tasia’s breath from her lungs, and it took her a few seconds before she could speak again.  “Joslyn?  You know Joslyn?”

“I sought her out when she was in Paratheen three months ago,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “I passed along a message to her from her ku-sai — a message which she stubbornly refused to listen to, I should add, because she was so intent upon finding you.  I was pleased when she gave you up to find her ku-sai’s sword, but even after the small men were finally talked into helping her, she decided she had a better plan than they, and went east instead of west.”  She raised her palms, gesturing at the crowd of people and the barren Shadowlands beyond.  “Which is why we are now in this predicament.”  The wrinkled old woman pursed her lips and shook her head.  “Stupid, headstrong, foolish woman,” she muttered.  “The Mizanto would have been better off training the dull son of an apa-apa herder than that thieving street urchin to be his kuna-shi.”

But Tasia had hardly heard what Grandmother Ajda had said.  She’d heard only one thing that had mattered:  This woman had seen Joslyn.  In Paratheen.  Only months ago.

Which made no sense.

“But she died,” Tasia said.  “I saw her die.”

“She did,” Grandmother Ajda agreed.  “And if she’d had any brains, she would have stayed dead.  Instead, she made a bargain with the Prince of Shadows so that she would have more time to protect you.”  The seer’s rheumy black eyes flicked up and down over Tasia again.  She grunted.  “Not that her bargain did much good, given that you landed your pretty face in the Shadowlands anyway.”

Joslyn was alive?

The strange, vivid dreams Tasia’d had in the Great Desert, when Joslyn had appeared to her and told her to seek out Brick in Arthur’s Ferry, came rushing back to her.  The dreams had felt so real at the time, real enough that Tasia had followed dream-Joslyn’s advice and had gone to Arthur’s Ferry instead of House Aventia.  And when Tasia had found Brick, just as the dream had said she would, she’d halfway convinced herself that Joslyn had somehow lived.  But rationality told her that death was death was death, and Joslyn, no matter how much Tasia wanted to see her again, was gone.  Yet now…

“Where is she?  Where is Joslyn now?” Tasia demanded of the old woman.

“I lost her thread when I came here,” said the seer.  “The shadows predicted that she would follow the small men’s advice and go to Port Lorsin.  But other shadows said she would come here, to the Shadowlands.”  She shrugged.  “I don’t know which path she chose.”

“What good is a seer with no answers?” Tasia barked, frustrated.

“Will you look around yourself, girl?” Grandmother Ajda shot back.  “Do you see where we are?  I am just as trapped within the Shadowlands as you are.  My abilities of sight come from channeling shadows into the mortal realm.  But I can’t very well do that when I myself am inside the Shadowlands, can I?”

Tasia’s gaze roamed the crowd, which had stopped growing.  Some of her citizens still listened; others had wandered away, back to milling about aimlessly.

All of Port Lorsin gone, its people trapped in the Shadowlands.

“Were the people of Paratheen,” Tasia started, unsure how to word her question, “were they… did they all come here, like you?”

Grandmother Ajda nodded.  “Some two weeks ago.  Like a silent sickness, spreading through the population, invisible until it was too late.  Even too late for those of us with sight.”

Tasia’s heart fell.  How much of the Empire had the shadows already consumed?  And how much longer before they destroyed the rest?  Would it take them long to reach the coast in the West, the tundra in the Central Steppes, the mountains of the Northeast?

“We have to get out of here,” Tasia said, as much to herself as to anyone else.

“I told you already:  There is no getting out of here,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “When those who practice the shadow arts draw upon the power of shadows, they use their physical bodies as anchors to pull themselves back into the mortal realm.  But all of us have been ejected from our physical bodies completely.  There is no way back to the mortal realm.”

57

The q’isson came to Joslyn with ease.  Now that she understood that the Shadowlands was nothing but mind, nothing but an expansive q’isson, manipulating it was simple.  And she manipulated the q’isson like a potter moulding clay into the first thing that occurred to her:  the interior of a large round bliva.

She knew the bliva wasn’t exactly “real” because she’d formed it herself, yet there was nothing about it that hinted at its dream-like nature.  Like any traditional nomad’s bliva, it held a large fire in its center, the pungent smoke of dried apa-apa dung rising from it in lazy tendrils, escaping through the round hole in the roof.  Two tall support beams stood on either side of the fire, holding up the bliva’s peaked top, and long carpets woven of apa-apa wool, each decorated in colorful geometric patterns, covered most of the sandy ground, while hanging apa-apa wool screens divided one end of the bliva into private sleeping chambers.

Joslyn stood with Milo, his hand still in hers, not far from the fire.  Kneeling on the fire’s other side, with a long braid of black hair that reached to her waist, a nomad woman sat humming to herself while she sewed.  Mother, Joslyn thought with a shock.  She’d unconsciously woven her own biological mother into this scene she’d created without intending to.  But it wasn’t really Joslyn’s mother; it was a faint memory of her, patched together from wishes and dreams like so many flimsy scraps of fabric.

“Where are we?” Milo whispered.  “Who is that woman?”

“You don’t have to whisper,” Joslyn said.  “She cannot hear us.”

Indeed, the woman beside the fireplace did not stir at the sound of Joslyn’s voice, nor turn towards them.  She continued to hum and sew.

“As for where we are, we’re inside one of my memories.  Or dreams.”

“I thought you said it was going to be scary,” Milo said.

“It’s about to be.”

Joslyn let go of Milo’s hand and walked across the bliva to its tent-flap entrance.  Hanging from pegs attached to two support poles were brizats of various sizes — a large one for her father, slightly smaller ones for her brothers, tiny ones for her and Tasmyn.

Strange that Joslyn’s mind would include her mother and her family’s brizats, but no other members of her family itself.  After all, if their brizats were here, then her father and siblings should be inside the bliva, not outside it.  But Joslyn didn’t waste much time wondering where her father was.  She had no nostalgia for the man who had sold her and Tasmyn into slavery.

Beneath the hanging brizats was a red lacquered chest, as high as Joslyn’s knee and several feet long.  She opened the chest, pulling out the boots and shoes of various sizes and setting them aside, then gesturing for Milo to come closer.

“I want you to hide in here,” she told him.  “And no matter what you hear, stay until I tell you that it’s safe to come out again.”

Milo hesitated, swallowing audibly.  But then he climbed inside the shoe box and laid down, watching Joslyn with that look of trust in his grey eyes she’d become so accustomed to seeing.

Would she prove worthy of his trust?  They would both find out soon enough.

Joslyn closed the lid and stepped away from the box, praying it wasn’t constructed to be airtight and therefore that it wouldn’t suffocate the boy.

It’s not really a box, she reminded herself.  It’s a dream of a box — it cannot suffocate him.

She could feel the faint buzz of her q’isson all around her, holding the illusion of the bliva like a shimmering yet stable mirage.  She supposed Ty’Tsana would be pleased, had she lived to see this moment — Joslyn had finally gained a degree of mastery over her dreamwalking, her shadow art.  It was so easy to use, here in the Shadowlands.  Forming a q’isson in the mortal realm was like pulling a fragment of the Shadowlands towards her, but she’d had to control it so that she didn’t pull so much of it that she pulled herself into the Shadowlands in the process.  Here, she didn’t have that worry.  She could draw upon as much of the Shadowlands as she liked without any worry that she would accidentally trap herself in the Shadowlands.  She was already trapped in the Shadowlands.

The bliva she’d formed was a snare.  The undatai was the rabbit she planned to trap.  The noose was set; all she needed now was to bait the undatai to put its neck into the snare.

Joslyn steadied herself with a breath.  Then she turned the blade of her concentration towards the undatai, drawing it to her the same way she’d drawn the energy of the Shadowlands to her to form the q’isson-bliva.

Every dream needed a dreamer.

But nothing happened.

The mirage of her mother continued to hum the same melody, continued to dip her needle in and out of the same cloth.  The fire crackled in its hearth; otherwise, the bliva was still.

She tried again, stoking power into her q’isson not unlike the way a blacksmith stoked a fire with bellows.  She stopped short when she heard something.

A voice — no, more than one voice.  Masculine.  Laughter.

There was a stomping outside the tent flap entrance to the bliva, the sound boots made when they were pounded into the ground to knock loose caked-on dirt and mud.  A hand pushed aside the tent flap, and a man strode in, a broad smile flashing across his face, which was weathered like old saddle leather.

Father.  Even after all these years, Joslyn still recognized him.

Behind him were two younger men — older than Joslyn but younger than Father by at least fifteen or twenty years.  These, she guessed, had to be two of her brothers, though she couldn’t guess which ones.

“Well, then,” Father said in Terintan, looking Joslyn up and down.  “You’ve grown into quite the bucking mare, haven’t you?”

Joslyn drew Ku-sai’s sword and shifted her stance into panther prepares to spring.  The man before her might resemble her father, but that was the one thing she was sure he was not.

His smile faltered.  “That’s not a way to greet the one who sired you.”

“You didn’t sire me.”  Joslyn’s tone was low and dangerous.  When she’d first “arrived” in the bliva, everything in it had a certain familiarity to it; everything was an extension of her q’isson, even Mother, humming to herself by the fire.  She’d also been able to feel the way the q’isson enveloped Milo but hadn’t included him — he’d been the only thing present that wasn’t an aspect of Joslyn’s own mind.

The three newcomers felt like that.  They might wear the faces of her father and brothers, but they had not been birthed from Joslyn’s q’isson.  The rabbit was sniffing the bait, inching closer towards the loop that formed the snare.

“True enough,” the creature who looked like Joslyn’s father said, his tone still light and jovial.  “But it surprised you for a moment, didn’t it?  Caught you off guard, so soon after you thought you’d become the new mistress of the Shadowlands.”

He took a step forward, the two younger men flanking him on either side.  Joslyn took a step back.

“Who are you?”

“That’s an exceedingly stupid question, even for you, Joslyn, daughter of Salif and A’eshan.”  The creature wearing her father’s face began to glow as if illuminated with some kind of internal sun.  When it spoke again, its voice transformed into something familiar — the low, baritone snarl of the undatai, the Prince of Shadows.  “I’m impressed by your control over your q’isson.”  Its skin crackled, coming apart like a vase shattering in slow motion.  “Your understanding bloomed quickly — your mother’s blood.  Yet I am also amused that you thought your q’isson would hold me.  Here.  In my own realm.”

The rest of the bliva crackled, too, glowing just like the undatai’s human body then.  A sudden gusting, swirling wind came from everywhere and nowhere, whipping Joslyn’s hair to the side.  Chunks of the bliva broke away, flying into the rust-red void that was suddenly all around them.

The Prince of Shadows flicked what was left of its human hand towards the red lacquered box.  The box splintered into a hundred million pieces immediately, leaving a tiny Milo curled in on himself, vulnerable as a newborn.

“Milo!” Joslyn called above the wind.  “Run!”

Somehow, the boy heard her, tried to obey.  He staggered to his feet, pushing against the wind, the mountain man skin he wore flapping like a sail.

The undatai laughed, the sound a horrid and inhuman grating.  At the same time, the two young men beside him dissolved into a molten current of energy that flowed into their master, who grew into its monstrous full size.

The bliva was gone.  In its place was only the barren nothingness of the Shadowlands, the undatai at its center, once again the enormous, horned creature of flame Joslyn had battled and nearly succumbed to in the Zaris Mountains.  This time, however, Joslyn had no enchanted spear with which to fight it, and it was not imprisoned by a circle of rune-marked boulders.

But she had her ku-sai’s sword, and she would defeat this creature again or die in the attempt.

The wind still blew, but not as ferociously as before, and Milo finally gained some traction, running as fast as his stick-thin legs could carry him across the open plain.

The undatai reached for the boy, its arm growing, lengthening like an uncoiling snake.

Joslyn was moving before she was aware she had decided to do so, sprinting on an angle to place herself between the arm and the boy before the Prince of Shadows could reach him.  With a mighty yell, Joslyn launched herself into the air, spinning her sword into arc of the sun as she came down.  The blade sliced through the undatai’s outstretched arm, cutting through whatever the monster was made of with a metallic screech.  The severed hand and forearm, which were nearly as long as Joslyn was tall, fell to the dusty earth, as dead and grey as petrified wood.

Joslyn landed in the crouch of fox in the grass beside the dead limb, sparing it a glance before retraining her focus upon the undatai.  She didn’t know what she had been expecting to happen when she sliced at the undatai, but it certainly wasn’t that.  The runes etched into the flat of Ku-sai’s curved blade emitted a soft, silver-grey light.

Perhaps the sword wasn’t entirely devoid of its magic once in the Shadowlands, after all.

The undatai seemed to be as surprised by the result of Joslyn’s wild sword swing as Joslyn herself had been.  It lifted what was left of its arm, examining the stump.  Then it gave a ferocious roar, and the limb reappeared as if it had never been lost at all.

Well.  It had been promising while it had lasted.

With a roar, the undatai swiped out at Joslyn with its clawed, regrown hand.  But Joslyn had anticipated this, and sprang backwards with reverse frog, easily dodging.  She caught a glimpse of Milo out of the corner of her eye, behind her and somewhat to her side.

He had stopped running and was looking past Joslyn, up at the face of the shrieking beast.

What in the name of Mother Eirenna did the child think he was doing?

“Go, Milo!” she shouted.  “Get as far away from here as you can!”

“I know this thing,” Milo called back.  “It has come through me before, when I was underground, in the cage.”  He cocked his head, like he was listening to a distant sound.  “I don’t think it wants to kill me.  I think it wants me to go back to the cage.”

Before Joslyn could fully consider the boy’s words, he darted forward, running straight for the beast.

The deafening, terrified scream came from Joslyn’s own throat, bursting forth from her fear for the boy.  But Milo apparently knew what he was about.  The undatai hesitated, turning its great pupil-less eyes away from Joslyn to track Milo, and the distraction provided Joslyn an opportunity for another charge.  She ran straight for the thing’s legs, sliding between its two massive, tree-sized calves and swinging out with the curved blade as she went.

The blade bit with the same ear-splitting grind of metal on metal as before, but the blade simply wasn’t long enough to cut the creature’s leg out from under it as Joslyn had hoped.  The cut went about halfway through.  Joslyn popped back onto her feet and pulled her sword free, then spun into a kneeling dancer’s grace to slice again from the other side.

And it worked.

Screaming in either pain or frustration — or both — the now one-footed undatai stumbled forward.  Joslyn had to move fast — if what had happened with the hand was any indication, the creature would regrow its ankle and foot within a matter of seconds.

But she only needed seconds.  She hoped.

Joslyn dashed to the creature’s other leg, swinging Ku-sai’s sword like a woodcutter felling a tree.  One stroke.  Two strokes.  But the second stroke didn’t go deep enough.  She wound up for a third strike, but she was too late.  The other foot had grown back, and now the monster lifted the injured foot and brought it down with a crash, trying to crush Joslyn beneath it.

She rolled out of the way just in time, red dust flying into her face as the undatai’s foot came down.  She was blind, but she didn’t need to see; she only needed to get out of range.  She ran with all the speed she could muster, not stopping until she was sure she was well out of reach.

You can’t get out of its range, an internal voice whispered.  Remember the way it extended its arm to reach the boy?

Joslyn halted and spun to face the beast, blinking the last of the dust from her eyes and holding her sword with both hands in front of her.

The undatai pivoted to face her, but it did not advance.  Perhaps Joslyn’s last attack had unnerved it?  If it had been human, she would have guessed that to be the case.  But the undatai was not human.  It might not even be capable of fear.

Regardless of its fear or lack thereof, it seemed to be… assessing her.  Circling her, the way a swordsman with enough skill and brains that Joslyn couldn’t kill him immediately might circle her.

It might not fear her, but she had almost cut both its legs out from under it a moment ago.  That was enough for even a monster to gain a bit of caution.

“You will tire long before I do, Joslyn of Terinto,” boomed the Prince of Shadows.  “Cut me as many times as you want, but it will not matter.  My form will restore itself faster than you can fight it.”

It was probably right about that, but Joslyn did not reply.  She was making an assessment of her own, moving counterclockwise around the beast while she simultaneously scanned the horizon for Milo.

Where had he gone?

Then she saw the boy.  He was opposite her, creeping up on the undatai from behind with something in his hand.  Joslyn strained to see what it was without tipping off the Prince of Shadows that she was watching something other than him.

Curses of Eiren.  The boy held a piece of the undatai’s severed hand — a broken talon, from the looks of it.  He approached stealthily from behind, as if the undatai was nothing more than a rat that had made its way into his father’s granary that he planned to impale on a sharpened stick.  Did the child not realize that the undatai was no rat?

Joslyn attacked — it was the only thing she could think to do to get the undatai out of Milo’s range before he attempted something foolish.

She darted to the side, as if to flank the monster, but only wanting it to give her chase.

And it did — after a manner.  It stepped sideways towards her position, but instead of intercepting her, its arm lengthened as it had before, swiping at her as if she was no more than a pesky insect it was brushing aside.  Joslyn evaded its swipe with wind through wheat, then countering with bird aloft.  She managed to nick the creature, taking off a finger that crashed to the ground like a log, but for the Prince of Shadows, such an injury barely even qualified as an inconvenience.

Joslyn backpedaled out of reach while it howled its irritation and regrew the digit.

Unfortunately, the skirmish hadn’t deterred Milo.  He simply changed direction, stalking the Prince anew.  Joslyn couldn’t let him reach his goal.  If he did, the undatai would surely obliterate the child out of sheer fury, whether he was the gate or not.  The Prince’s Order of Targhan allies could always create another gate, after all.

So Joslyn charged again, feinting with a thrust that she shifted into dancer’s grace at the last moment with the hope that she could sever its leg again.  But she never reached her destination.  The undatai anticipated her attack and, with one swoop of its hut-sized hand, snatched her and lifted her into the air, level with its face.

Joslyn struggled to get loose, but the closed hand of the undatai had pinned both her arms to her side, which neutralized her sword at the same time.

It burned — oh Gods, how it burned!

“Now you die, Mizana,” said the Prince of Shadows.  It grinned wickedly, if a face of ever-shifting flame can be said to grin.

The air was being squeezed from her lungs; her ribs were caving in.  A jagged line of pain shot through her breastbone — Joslyn could feel it cracking, splintering through the center.

“Noooo!” someone screamed in the distance, and the voice wasn’t Milo’s, but Joslyn did not have the strength to wonder whose it was.

Joslyn teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.  She would welcome its blackness, once it came, because at least then, the pain might stop.

There was a shriek of pain — but not her own — and suddenly Joslyn was falling, falling,  plummeting downward, then skidding across the dusty earth.

What had happened?  Her mind, addled in its agony, fought to comprehend what had just occurred.  At the edge of her consciousness, she sensed, rather than saw, the swirling energy of her q’isson.  Who was more real in this world, this plane of dreams — the undatai?  Or her?  Or were they both made of dreams, after a fashion?

Could a dream be killed?

Could a dream burn?

Joslyn lifted her head to see a tiny dot (Milo?) running towards the horizon and an arm made of fire snaking after it.  Then her head fell, face pressing into the cool relief of the silt-fine earth, and the blackness of unconsciousness took her.

58

“No way back to the mortal realm.”  Tasia struggled to allow her mind to process Grandmother Ajda’s words.

She couldn’t accept that — wouldn’t accept it.  Over a million souls resided within the Empire’s borders, according to the census conducted by the House of Wisdom some five years ago.  By now, there were probably closer to a million and a half, with nearly a hundred and fifty thousand of those in Port Lorsin alone.  If there was no way back to the mortal world, to her Empire, then all those people would be consumed by shadows.

What kind of Empress would Tasia be if she allowed that to happen, if the Empire was extinguished while she was the one responsible for its well-being?

So she balled her fists and shook her head at Grandmother Ajda.  “There has to be a way away from here.”

“There isn’t,” the seer replied.  “Not unless you have a way to reclaim your mortal body from here.”  She spread her arms, indicating the vast and empty wasteland surrounding them on all sides.

An infinite ocean of dull earth without beginning or end, inhabited here and there by the listless citizens of Port Lorsin.

Was it only Tasia’s imagination, or were some of them becoming more and more listless, more vacant-eyed?

But hold a moment.

If the shadows had consumed the residents of Paratheen weeks before they consumed Port Lorsin, why was Grandmother Ajda the only Terintan Tasia saw?

Tasia cocked her head, studying the woman anew.  “How did you get here?”

The old woman shrugged her narrow shoulders.  “The shadows crashed in upon Paratheen in a wave.  Unlike many, I had forewarning.  A few of my kind, along with a Brother we knew, barricaded ourselves inside my apartments.  We managed to hide for several days, but eventually we ran out of food and water.  The Brother was braver than most I’ve known.  He volunteered to go out, find us fresh provisions, but the shadows found him.  He was no longer himself when he returned to us, but we didn’t know that immediately.  I suppose you can guess the rest.”

“Yes, but why are you here?”  Tasia swept an arm out to indicate the crowd of Port Lorsiners, which now numbered in the hundreds.  “Where are the Terintans?  I see no turbans and no brizats in this crowd.”  She fixed her gaze on Grandmother Ajda, eyes narrowing.  “Why are you the only resident of Paratheen in a crowd composed of the capital city?”

A chuckle escaped Grandmother Ajda.  “Call it curiosity.  I assumed the shadows would target Port Lorsin next — it was the next major city in that swarm’s path on its march westward.  I’d been tracking your progress — ”

“Tracking my progress?”

“I’m a seer, child.”  Her bemused tone suggested the kind of patience one reserved for the dim-witted.  “Surely you know what a seer does?”

“A seer sees the future.”

“And the past and the present,” Grandmother Ajda corrected.  “A glimpse of the future means nothing without context.  A seer sees, whether it is what will be or what currently is in places far away.  The shadows were interested in you; the Mizana was practically obsessed with you, so I became interested.  I started to watch, which is why I knew about the riots you orchestrated before you did yourself, and also why I knew you would try to retake your father’s crown shortly thereafter.”  She smiled, and it was not unkind.  “I admit that it was a good plan.  Just unfortunately timed.  Even if you had listened to poor Brother Evrart when you first returned to Port Lorsin, you wouldn’t have been able to stop the swarm of shadows that was about to eat your people alive like wheat beetles through a harvest.”

“You knew the shadows were coming for me — for Port Lorsin — yet you did not try to stop it,” Tasia stated coldly.

Grandmother Ajda did not look disturbed by the accusation.  “I did try to stop it.  I found the Mizana.  I set her on a path that might save us all.”  She shrugged again.  “It was not my fault that she is stubborn and reckless and incapable of listening.”

Mizana.  Joslyn.  Tasia’s heart ached, but the mention of Joslyn brought her back to her original question.

“So you knew I would end up here, in the Shadowlands,” Tasia said.  “How did you find me?  Where are the rest of the Paratheenians?”

“The rest of Paratheen is in a different dream,” said Grandmother Ajda.

Tasia cocked her head, confused.

Grandmother Ajda sighed as if resigned to the fact she’d have to explain something to someone unlikely to understand.  “Tell me, Empress.  When the shadow first entered your body and you found your mind dislodged like a bird from its nest, what did you see?”

Tasia strained to remember, surprised that the memory had faded so quickly.  “At first there was nothing, then there were… voices, kind of.  But more like vibrations, like a river of energy.”

“And how did you find yourself here, back inside something that approximated a body?”

“I focused on one voice — Pollut of Shipper’s Quarter,” said Tasia.  “And then we both found ourselves… here.”

“And what is here?” Grandmother Ajda pressed.

“It’s…”  Tasia glanced around.  “It’s the Shadowlands.”  But Grandmother Ajda looked disappointed with that answer, which Tasia didn’t understand.  “Isn’t it?”

“It is the Shadowlands, but the question you should be asking is ‘What is the Shadowlands?’”

Grandmother Ajda didn’t wait for Tasia to respond.  She reached out and took Tasia’s hand, and suddenly the Shadowlands, the milling residents of Port Lorsin disappeared.  Tasia and the seer stood on a balcony that overlooked a rocky beach some hundred feet below.  The ocean beyond the beach was a perfect aquamarine; ships of various sizes bobbed on gentle waves.  Above, the blue sky was perfectly clear and cloudless.

Tasia gasped.

“We’re standing on the balcony of my apartments, overlooking the Port of Paratheen,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “Or at least my memory of it.”

“I thought your powers didn’t work in the Shadowlands?”

“They don’t,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “I cannot see the future or the past from here.  But I can see this.”  She swept a wrinkled hand towards the ocean.  “Because it is not really here.”

The ocean, the sky, the boats all disappeared, and they were back on dusty earth that stretched endlessly in every direction.  But this time, Tasia saw no familiar Port Lorsiners.  This time, she saw high cheekbones, almond-shaped dark eyes, high turbans, brizats of apa-apa wool.

“You cannot think of the Shadowlands as a place,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Better to think of it as a dream.  A dream that we can share with those we have a connection to, like our neighbors and those we expect to see.”

“Where did the Port Lorsiners go?” Tasia asked, scanning for Pollut or the highborn girl or the others she’d seen since arriving in the Shadowlands.

“They didn’t ‘go’ anywhere, child,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “There is no ‘here’ or ‘there’ within a dream.  There is simply what your mind creates and expects to see.  You felt you were ‘in’ Port Lorsin, and so did the other Port Lorsiners, so they saw one another.  Now,” she said, waving at the residents of Paratheen, “I am helping you dream of something else.”

Tasia tried to absorb what Grandmother Ajda was saying, but it was all so confusing.

“The Shadowlands,” Grandmother Ajda said, watching her, “isn’t really a ‘place’ the way that Paratheen is a place or Port Lorsin is a place.  The Shadowlands is simply the refuge of abandoned dreams.  And once you understand it is naught but a dream…”

The Paratheenians disappeared; the blue sky and bobbing boats upon a calm ocean reappeared.  A breeze tickled the loose hairs around Tasia’s face.

“…then the dreamer can dream what she likes,” Grandmother Ajda concluded.

“You found me by… dreaming me?” Tasia asked.

“I prefer to think that I allowed my dream of the Shadowlands to intersect with your dream of the Shadowlands.”

“Then all the people of Port Lorsin I saw,” Tasia said, thinking it through.  “…they could see each other because… their dreams were intersecting?”

Grandmother Ajda nodded.

A thought occurred to Tasia.  “You said Joslyn is here, trapped in the Shadowlands like the rest of us.  Why have you not gone to her the way you went to me?”

Grandmother Ajda pursed her lips.  “Before I arrived in this place, I foresaw the Mizana embarking on a suicide mission.  I did not go to her because I prefer a dream existence over no existence at all, which is what she runs towards, headlong, as usual.”

“What suicide mission?” Tasia asked, alarmed, but the answer to her question occurred to her before Grandmother Ajda could respond.  “The undatai.  She’s going to try to kill it.”  Tasia seized the seer’s arm.  “Take me to her.”

Grandmother Ajda shook loose from Tasia’s grip.  “Go yourself, if you are so eager to die.”

They still stood on the dream of Grandmother Ajda’s balcony, the Port of Paratheen below them.  Tasia still didn’t understand how the old woman had made it appear.

“Fine, I will go myself,” Tasia said.  “But teach me how.”

“Change your dream,” the seer said simply.

“Speak plainly.”

“I am,” Grandmother Ajda retorted.  “You wish to see your fool of a Mizana, then change your dream.”

Tasia closed her eyes, picturing Joslyn, building within herself a wish to see her, a wish to see her right now.  She ground her teeth together, concentrating.

“You’re trying too hard,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “Do dreams appear through force?  No.  They simply appear.”

“How?”

“How does anyone dream?  You close your eyes.  You sleep.  You dream.”

Tasia huffed.  “Joslyn might be in trouble this very moment, and you are content to speak to me in riddles.”

“She is content to attack the Prince of the Shadowlands, the nightmare that rules over all these dreams,” Grandmother Ajda said.  “So her troubles are all her own — and if that is the dream your Joslyn wishes to create, she is welcome to it.  I will not be consumed by a nightmare so easily.”

Annoyed, Tasia closed her eyes once more.

You sleep.  You dream.

This time, instead of forcing an image of Joslyn and concentrating on it, Tasia allowed her mind to wander as if in fantasy.  She unclenched her fists, remembering the Joslyn she dreamed of while in the Great Desert, the Joslyn she made love to in a roofless hut in the rain on the edge of the Sunrise Mountains.  She envisioned the endless hours of training on the beach with Joslyn, the way she argued with the guard even while she harbored a secret attraction.  She remembered the first time she saw Joslyn, stiff and stoic in the shiny black leather uniform of a palace guard.

Something loosened inside Tasia, and she detected something she hadn’t felt for hours — or days, perhaps; the passage of time was odd in the Shadowlands.  It was the river of swirling light, the flowing energy of whispering voices.  She allowed its current to pull at her, adding her voice to the river.

Joslyn, she whispered into it.

Colors blurred. What remained of Tasia’s vision became a honeycomb mosaic of vague shapes.  Dreaming was easy, she decided, feeling herself carried forth on the current of energy.

But then her sharp sense of herself, of being Tasia, daughter of the Emperor, royal heir of the House of Dorsa, started to fade.  There was no need to fight this pleasant river of light and color and sound.  She could sink into it, could finally relax into —

No.  She was losing herself, dissolving.  She struggled against that sense of dissolution, searching for an anchor that would sharpen her mind again, the way the voice of Pollut of Shipper’s Quarter had anchored her before.

Joslyn.  She needed to find Joslyn’s voice.  That would be her anchor.

Tasia concentrated, sifting through the river of light to find that one voice she knew so well, that smooth, accented, calming voice of Terinto that she so longed to hear.

Then she heard something — but it wasn’t Joslyn.  It was a voice, but it wasn’t feminine; it was deep, guttural.  Grinding.

“Now you die, Mizana,” the voice said.  It was inhuman somehow, sounding the way one might expect a mountain to sound, if a mountain were capable of speech.

From the river of light, Tasia felt herself resolving into a body again — her body.  Or at least her dream of it.  The landscape was that of the bleak Shadowlands again, but in its center towered the fire-creature she had seen once before, the undatai.  But this time, it was easily three times the size it had been before, its bull-like horns practically filling the entire horizon.

The creature held something in one of its massive hands of molten flame, and it took Tasia only a moment to realize what that something was.

Joslyn.

“Noooo!”  It was as if the air itself had ripped the scream from Tasia’s throat.

The beast paused for a moment, turning its massive head in Tasia’s direction.

This was how Tasia’s world would end, then.  The undatai would crush her love in its hand before her very eyes, then it would kill Tasia the same way.  And Joslyn, who appeared to already be unconscious, would never even know that Tasia had been here, would never know that Tasia had found her again, against all odds.

But as the beast swung its head towards Tasia, a child-sized silhouette appeared some twenty yards behind it.  The silhouette held something in one of its hands — a short sword? — and dashed forward, thrusting whatever it was into the fire-creature’s foot.  Immediately, a spiderweb of black lines blossomed out from where the knife had hit, deadening the foot.

The silhouette sprinted away as quickly as it came even as the air shook with the undatai’s scream of pain.

Its hand opened, and it dropped Joslyn.

She fell to the earth, limp dead weight, sending up a small cloud of dust when she landed.

Tasia raced for Joslyn’s motionless body, slowing her run only momentarily to pick up an unfamiliar curved sword that had fallen at the same time Joslyn had.  It was longer and far heavier than the short sword Joslyn typically carried, and along its blade, runes glowed with a soft silver light.

Tasia couldn’t tell if Joslyn was breathing or not when she reached her.  She didn’t have time to check, though, because the undatai’s foot had recovered from whatever had stabbed it, and now the monster whirled to face Tasia.

It roared — not in pain this time, but anger.

Tasia planted one foot on either side of Joslyn’s body.  She had to use both hands to lift the curved sword to the ready.  The undatai would kill her in a few seconds, but that was alright.  At least she would die defending the woman she loved.

Tasia bellowed at the beast before it could bellow at her.  “You. Cannot.  Have her!”

59

Little sister.

Little sister, open your eyes.  This is not how your story ends.

The voice was distant and distorted, yet familiar.

Joslyn, the voice said, urgently now.  Your q’isson is good for more than dreamwalking and casting illusions.  You can heal yourself; you do not need to die.  Especially not here.  Please, sister.  The voice was pleading now.  Please.  Reach for your q’isson.

Tasmyn?

Joslyn tried to lift her face to find her big sister, but she couldn’t.  Trying to move was no use.  She had no strength left.  Every inch of her burned.  She was on fire, and she would die here in the Shadowlands, probably becoming a piece of its barren landscape — another swirling ebb of light, another dream that lacked a dreamer.

A groan escaped her lips.

Joslyn became aware of a presence — not Tasmyn, whose presence was likely her imagination anyway, but a different presence.  A presence coming from outside instead of inside, which was where Tasmyn’s voice seemed to be located.

Someone was standing near her.  No — not near her.  Above her.  Joslyn managed to open an eye.  Her vision was blurred, milky.  But she made out a shape that she took to be a leg that ended in a boot.

Someone was straddling her, one foot on either side of her prone, broken body.

“… Cannot.  Have her!” the someone standing above Joslyn shouted.

And just as Tasmyn’s voice had been familiar, despite layer upon layer of burning, broken misery, this voice was familiar, too.

The grating, mocking laughter of the Prince of Shadows rang out in the distance.

“I already have her,” said the Prince.  “Just as I have you, both in this world and the other.  There I consumed your body.  Here I will consume what remains of you.”

“You will never have either of us!”

The undatai only laughed again.

Tasia.  The defiant shouting came from Tasia, facing off against the Prince of Shadows in a futile attempt to protect Joslyn.  And she would surely die in the attempt.

Could a dream be killed?

Joslyn found her hands.  They were pressed palm-down into the earth on either side of her head, fingers splayed.  She told her hands to push, told them to lever her body upward, but they would not obey — they only screamed in pain when she tried.

She fought to hang on to consciousness.

Tasmyn? Joslyn thought experimentally.  How do I heal myself?

But Tasmyn — if indeed it had ever really been Tasmyn, and not merely Joslyn’s imagination — replied with silence.

Joslyn reached for the q’isson.  This, at least, was an action she could take that did not bring immediate torment.  The q’isson’s energy swirled around her, hovering and thrumming just above her like a cloud of insects.

She had formed the q’isson.  That was step one.  But how did she progress to step two and use the q’isson to heal her?

Then several things happened all at once.  She detected a whooshing noise, followed immediately by a soft grunt from Tasia and the impact of something nearby her, something striking the ground.  At the same time, she heard the horrible screech of metal upon metal, and a shower of sparks rained down around her.

That screech of metal could only mean one thing:  Tasia had Ku-sai’s sword, and against all odds, she’d used it to cut the Prince of Shadows.

The monster howled — it was angry and injured, Joslyn guessed, and probably failing to comprehend how three puny beings like Joslyn, Tasia, and Milo could still keep defying its wish to destroy them once and for all.

Even in her half-conscious state, Joslyn knew that the undatai’s retribution against Tasia would be swift and harsh.  It would be a kill stroke.

The q’isson, whispered a voice inside her.

Hastily, unsure what exactly she was doing or why or how, Joslyn threw the q’isson around herself and Tasia, forming the energy into a spherical bubble that surrounded them, just as she had the very first time she formed a q’isson.

Something slammed against the sphere, and the q’isson shivered like a struck gong, but it held.  Joslyn managed to lift her head.  She could not see the undatai, or Milo, or the red-brown Shadowlands.  She saw only the interior of the q’isson — like a bubble of night sky knit together with sparkling, ever-shifting light.

“…Joslyn?”

Tasia dropped to her knees beside Joslyn, took Joslyn’s face in her hands.

“Tasia,” Joslyn rasped.  Uttering even those two syllables left her breathless and burning, and she began to cough.

“Here, I’m going to roll you over and then — ”

“N-no,” Joslyn said between coughs.  “No… the burns… my ribs…”

The pain is too great, and if you try to move me, I think I will pass out, is what Joslyn wanted to say, if she could have managed such a coherent sentence.  She would have also added, The q’isson is the only thing keeping the undatai from killing us both, and if I pass out, we will both die in the same moment.

Joslyn might not have been able to say all of that in words, but Tasia seemed to understand.

“Alright,” Tasia said.  “I won’t try to move you.  We can just… sit here a moment.”  With the gentlest of touches, she  reached out and stroked Joslyn’s hair.

That touch.  Joslyn knew it was a goodbye touch, because they both knew they were doomed, but Gods, how she had missed Tasia’s touch.  Joslyn closed her eyes, allowing herself to revel for a moment in the simple sensation of Tasia’s featherlight fingertips.

Joslyn swallowed… and tasted blood.  She had a feeling she was bleeding internally, and not just in one place.

Above them, the q’isson rung with the force of another blow, but it did not give any indication that it would break.  Surprisingly, it took Joslyn almost no effort to maintain the q’isson.  Perhaps it was because she had spent so many nights in the Zaris Mountains teaching herself to dreamwalk.  Or perhaps it was because here, in the Shadowlands, forming a q’isson was as effortless as breathing.

Breathing.  That gave Joslyn an idea.

Experimentally, Joslyn tried to breathe in a small piece of the q’isson without distorting or disrupting the sphere that surrounded them.  The q’isson shimmered, and Joslyn could feel its energy shift as if it was about to collapse upon itself.  She let go of the energy immediately, and the q’isson resumed its previous shape.

Joslyn tried again, slower this time, her touch on the q’isson as gentle as Tasia’s fingertips upon her hair.  In a steady trickle, the q’isson’s energy entered into her body.  Instinctively, Joslyn guided the energy to the places where it hurt the most.  Her chest, where she was fairly certain that a broken rib had punctured one of her lungs.  Her midsection, where the undatai’s burning grip felt as though it had lit her entrails on fire.  The place where her spine met her pelvis, where Joslyn detected something had shattered.

Like a needle sewing closed a bit of torn fabric, the energy of the q’isson stabbed through her.  Joslyn moaned from the pain, once again clinging to only a shred of consciousness, but this time fully aware that if her concentration slipped, even for a moment, both she and Tasia would be greeted with instant death.

Beside her, Tasia made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat.  “Oh, Joslyn.  What can I do, my love?”

Inside Joslyn, ribs knit themselves back together, the tear in her lung mending itself at the same time.

My love.  Tasia had just called her my love.  Tasia had not forgotten her.  She still cared for Joslyn.  The words gave Joslyn strength.  The unnatural curve in her spine snapped back into place; the broken pelvis resumed its normal shape.

Whispering.  Joslyn heard whispering all around her — no, not around her.  Inside her.  The q’isson seemed to be talking to her, chattering like a roomful of playful children.

Who are you? Joslyn asked, but the whispers did not reply.

And then it was done.

Joslyn breathed in — a long, ragged inhalation, as if she had not taken a real breath in days.  Her hands were still splayed on either side of her face, and this time when she pushed herself up, her body obeyed without screaming agony in response.

Tasia’s breath caught beside her, and Joslyn could feel bright green eyes upon her, scrutinizing every inch, scouring Joslyn for details.

“Jos — ”

But Joslyn didn’t let her finish.  She grabbed Tasia’s face with both hands and kissed her hard.  It was an inelegant kiss — forceful, sudden, rough.  Joslyn’s lips were dry and scaly from traveling through the mountains for so long with nothing to eat but stew and jerky, and nothing to drink but water.  Tasia’s lips were hardly much softer.  But that didn’t matter.  Neither did it matter that their teeth clacked together with the clumsy urgency of the kiss, or that Tasia was knocked off-balance by the force of it and nearly tumbled backwards.

“I thought you were gone,” Tasia said, breathless.  Her hands flitted like nervous songbirds over Joslyn’s chest, feeling the places where the leather armor had been charred and shredded.  “I thought… I thought I found you again, but you were already gone.”

“I’m not gone,” Joslyn said.  “I’m here.”

She stood up.  The spherical q’isson, which had been high enough only to accommodate a kneeling Tasia and prone Joslyn, grew with her, pushing upward to accommodate her height.

Joslyn bent to pick up Ku-sai’s sword, expecting the movement to hurt, but there was nothing.  No pain at all.  Her body was lithe and unbroken again.  Somehow, she really had healed herself.

She spun the sword in her hand and looked at Tasia.  “You saved my life.  Now it’s time for me to save yours.”

As though on cue, the q’isson rang with another blow.

“The moment you remove whatever this armor is around us,” Tasia said, “it will kill us both.”

“But I don’t need to remove this armor,” Joslyn said.  “Not entirely, anyway.”

Joslyn understood more about her q’isson with each passing moment.  It was only energy.  Energy that, against all odds, she had discovered how to manipulate.  It could form visions, like her mother inside a nomad’s bliva.  It could form a shell of protection around her.  It could heal her.  And now she had a new idea to try.

“Get ready,” she warned Tasia.  “What I am about to try may not work, and the moment I remove the sphere, the creature will attack.”

Tasia nodded.  “I believe in you.”

Joslyn focused on what she wanted the q’isson to do, and it responded almost instantaneously.  The opaque sphere around them was gone, the energy instead wrapping around both her and Tasia like a human-shaped glove.  Joslyn could no longer see the q’isson, but she could feel it, a soft glow of warmth hovering an inch above her skin.

The first test of their new “armor” came immediately.  Seeing that the protective shell around Joslyn and Tasia was gone, the undatai brought down its fist upon Tasia.

Tasia screamed as the force of the blow knocked her from her feet, and for a moment, she disappeared beneath the creature’s flaming hand.

“No!”

Joslyn charged the undatai, swinging recklessly at the hand that had just struck down her love.  The blade found its mark, slicing through the creature’s wrist with the same awful metallic screech as before.  The Prince of Shadows stumbled backwards, its steps shaking the ground.

Joslyn kicked aside the monster’s petrified severed hand.  Tasia was below, arms across her face in a defensive posture.

“Tasia?”  Joslyn dropped to a knee beside her.  She could see the undatai approaching through her peripheral vision, no doubt preparing a final blow, but at the moment it didn’t matter to Joslyn.  What did she care if she defeated the undatai only to lose Tasia so soon after she’d gotten her back?

Tasia took the arms away from her face and looked up at Joslyn.  “I - I think I’m fine,” she said.  “Whatever you did with the river of souls, it worked.”

River of souls?

But there was no time to wonder what that meant.

“I grow weary of this fight,” the Prince of Shadows announced.

Joslyn pulled Tasia to her feet, then stepped between Tasia and the undatai.

“Then surrender,” Joslyn told it, “and I will make your death as painless as I can.”

The monster responded with grating laughter, holding up its freshly restored hand.  “Haven’t you learned yet that you cannot kill me?  I am immortal, Mizana.  You are the one who should be begging for a painless death.”

Behind her, Tasia had started kicking at the undatai’s petrified hand.

“Keep it talking,” she whispered to Joslyn.  “I saw a boy strike it with a stake that looked like this.  Once I break it off, we can attack together.”

Joslyn nodded as subtly as she could to acknowledge that she had heard Tasia’s whisper.

A boy.  Milo, then.  Milo’s attack must be why Joslyn and Tasia were still alive.  Joslyn remembered how he had charged the undatai with a stake made out of the creature’s own petrified talon.  Apparently it had worked.

She wondered where the boy was now but did not dare to take her eyes off the undatai to search for him.

“I will never beg you for anything,” Joslyn told the undatai.  “And besides, have I not just proven that we are immune to your attacks?”

“You will weaken soon enough.”

Its hand shot towards Joslyn and Tasia with blinding speed — not swinging this time, but growing long and thin the way it had when it first attacked Milo.

Joslyn didn’t have time to properly parry the blow; she barely managed to raise Ku-sai’s sword before her as it struck.  The force of the monster’s strike threw her backwards several yards.  She landed on her backside and skidded across the dusty earth for another yard before she finally stopped.  A quick body scan revealed that her q’isson had held firm.  She was injury-free.  The undatai, however, had not been as lucky:  a newly petrified piece of one of its fingers the length of Joslyn’s torso lay on the ground.  But it hardly mattered; the undatai regrew the digit and drew its arm back for another blow.

Tasia was now much closer than Joslyn to the monster, and the next attack was aimed at her.  Like Joslyn, Tasia didn’t have time to defend herself, but when she also careened backwards, Joslyn saw that she had succeeded in breaking off a piece of the undatai’s petrified hand.  It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do.

It was a good thing that the q’isson-armor worked, because the undatai unleashed a series of rapid attacks, striking out at Joslyn, then Tasia, then Joslyn again.  Twice Joslyn sliced off part or all of one of the creature’s limbs; each time, it grew back almost instantaneously.  She’d hoped the speed with which it could regenerate its limbs would begin to slow, but the hope went unfulfilled — the undatai seemed to have an endless reserve of energy.  Tasia, meanwhile, stabbed the undatai with her petrified piece of its own shorn-off hand, and for a moment this seemed to have more effect than Joslyn’s sword, sending a spiderweb pattern of black through its body.  But this, too, the Prince of Shadows quickly recovered from, and Tasia was forced to make a mad dash towards another severed undatai finger in order to create a new weapon.

The undatai struck again and again.  Joslyn and Tasia both parried and struck back, moving through an unending dance of the Seven Cities.  Soon Joslyn was sweating beneath her devastated leather armor, and she panted with the effort of keeping up.  Beside her, Tasia’s chest heaved even more than her own.

Joslyn knew what the undatai was doing.  In any duel, victory often belonged not to the swordsman with more skill, but the one with greater endurance.

The undatai was trying to wear them down.  And even in the Shadowlands, where physical bodies were a mere afterthought, Joslyn and Tasia were still only human, while the undatai was… something else.  If they continued like this, exhaustion would eventually get the better of Joslyn.  Then her q’isson would fail, and she and Tasia would die.

Joslyn fought her way towards Tasia, intending to re-form the sphere of tortoiseshell-like protection they had taken shelter in earlier.  Given a chance to rest within the sphere, perhaps they could work together to think of another solution.

As she got closer to Tasia, it at last occurred to her to wonder how Tasia was here in the first place.  If Tasia was in the Shadowlands, and Milo was the only gate into the Shadowlands other than infection, then…

Had Tasia lost her mortal body to a shadow?

The thought sent a fresh wave of fear through Joslyn, but she pushed it aside.  One problem at a time.

Joslyn had almost made it to Tasia when a small figure appeared on the horizon behind the undatai.  Milo.  And just as he had the last time she’d seen him, he held in his hand a broken piece of the undatai.  It was a bigger one this time — a talon nearly as big as the boy was tall.  He moved with it awkwardly, and Joslyn could see that he intended to charge the beast from behind.  She wanted to signal to him to stop, to stay away from the battle altogether, but there was no way to call to him without alerting the undatai to his presence.  All she could do was keep the Prince of Shadows as busy as she could and pray that the boy would get away before the monster turned on him.

But the undatai must have heard Milo’s running footsteps, because it spun away from Tasia and Joslyn suddenly to face the boy behind it.

Milo froze like a stunned deer.  The undatai reached for him.

Desperate to protect the boy, Joslyn sent out a current of energy from her q’isson.  The energy struck the Prince of Shadows, and the spiderweb of black lines spread down one of its legs in much the same way that they did when it was struck with one of its own petrified body parts.  It halted, swinging away from Milo and back towards Joslyn.

Joslyn aimed another current of energy at it, this time directly at its face.  Half the face blackened immediately, and the undatai bellowed in anger.

This was the way, Joslyn suddenly realized.  This was the one way she could defeat it:  The only way to destroy a shadow was with more shadows.

“Get ready!” Joslyn shouted to Tasia.

“For what?” Tasia replied, but Joslyn was already moving, charging towards the beast.

The undatai dropped to all fours, like a dog or an angry bear.  It lowered its half-blackened face, aiming its horns at Joslyn, and galloped towards Joslyn even as she galloped towards it.

She threw as much of the q’isson’s energy at it as she could muster without losing the armor for herself and Tasia, hitting the undatai directly in the face.  This time, the spiderwebs of black spread as the creature roared, racing through its body like a crack through glass.

Joslyn raced forward, and as she approached the limb nearest her, launched herself into the air.  She plunged Ku-sai’s sword into its arm, using it like a mountain climber’s pickaxe to swing herself up to its bent elbow.  The flames that made up the undatai’s arm licked at her body, and even with the q’isson protecting her, the heat was nearly unbearable.  But she ignored her blistering skin and yanked the sword free.  She skittered up its bent upper arm, leaped into the air, and with a roar of her own, plunged both the sword and all the q’isson’s energy into the undatai’s neck.

60

~ TASIA ~

If Tasia had known what Joslyn was about to do, she would have tried to stop her.  But of course, Joslyn wouldn’t have been stopped by Tasia or by anyone.  So instead, all Tasia could do was watch helplessly from fifty yards away as Joslyn dashed towards the fire-beast, leaped onto it, ran up its arm, and jumped again, the curved blade held out in both hands.

Tasia couldn’t be sure if she actually screamed or only wanted to, but regardless, everything was over seconds later anyway.

The sword struck its mark, burying itself to the hilt in the thing’s neck while Joslyn dangled from it like a stranded acrobat.  At the same time, the charred blackness that had spread through its face now spread even further.

It was crumbling.

And now that she looked closer, Tasia realized that Joslyn was doing more than dangling from the sword she’d impaled inside the undatai’s neck — she was pulling on it, using her bodyweight to drag the blade down.

Joslyn was trying to sever the beast’s head.

The undatai reached up, and because the black that was spreading through its whole body hadn’t gotten to its extremities yet, the talon-tipped hand reaching towards Joslyn was still made of flame.

If Tasia could draw its attention away from Joslyn, only for a moment…

Pieces of the undatai littered the ground everywhere now.  Tasia grabbed the one closest to her, a fragment barely the size of a dagger.  She rushed forward, jabbing the fragment into what passed as the undatai’s foot.

The monster paused a moment, but only a moment.  The tiny piece Tasia had jammed into the thing’s foot probably felt like nothing more than a mosquito bite.

But the brief pause was enough.  Joslyn had nearly finished sawing off the fire beast’s head now.  Desperate to buy Joslyn just a little more time, Tasia dove between the undatai’s feet to retrieve another fragment — a bigger one this time.

Nearly as long as she was tall, Tasia almost couldn’t lift it.  But she didn’t have to take it far.  Like a jousting knight, Tasia held it in front of her and ran full-bore at the undatai’s ankle, driving nearly all of the fragment inside.

It worked.  The web of black spread out from Tasia’s lance, spreading rapidly through the undatai’s foot and up into its calf.  The creature lurched violently to the side, as if the injured foot was giving way.  Its uninjured foot slammed into Tasia, throwing her into the air like a rag doll.

But this time, the armor Joslyn had put around both of them wasn’t there to protect her.

Was she on fire?  Tasia felt as if she was on fire.  Even if she wasn’t, she was burning, burning, like a pig turning on a spit.

The irony of the situation — the fact that she could be in such tremendous physical pain when her actual physical body wasn’t even on this plane — was the last thing Tasia thought of before she passed out.

~ JOSLYN ~

Only a little further now.

The Prince of Shadows lurched sideways, and Joslyn nearly lost her grip.  But she used the sword hilt to swing herself forward and up, landing with cat-light feet on the beast’s shoulder.  The soles of her feet burned for a moment before she managed to divert just enough of the q’isson’s energy to protect herself.

The undatai continued to careen to one side, but just when Joslyn thought it would collapse, it straightened again.

It wouldn’t stay on its feet for much longer, though.

With a grunt of effort and one final pull, Joslyn sent the blade and the q’isson through the last foot or two of the undatai’s neck.  One of its massive eyes, the one that hadn’t been blackened from the blast of Joslyn’s q’isson, turned towards her.  Then this eye, too, went blank, then black.  The Prince’s head wavered for a moment, then it toppled forward, separated from the rest of its body, spinning end-over-end until it crashed into the earth below.  And like the icy surface of a frozen lake cracking with a weight it could not support, veins of black shot rapidly through the undatai’s headless body.  Seconds later, it began to break apart.  The shoulder Joslyn stood on crumbled beneath her.

She launched herself into the air, drawing the q’isson around her as she fell.  When she hit the ground, it knocked the wind from her lungs and both ears rang with an awful, high-pitched whine, but she was otherwise uninjured.  Joslyn pushed herself to her feet, letting go of the q’isson’s energy once her ears returned to normal.  She surveyed the scene of destruction around her.

Charred pieces of the undatai were everywhere, scattered in a rough circle for yards in every direction, as if something inside it had exploded.  Some pieces of it still smoked, like hot embers after a camp fire had been extinguished.

Joslyn looked at Ku-sai’s blade.  The runes, which had glowed with a soft, silver light before, were dead again.  She started to sheath it, then thought better of it.

“Tasia?” Joslyn called.  “Milo?”

No one responded.  She called their names again.

A hundred yards away, a small figure stood from behind a pile of debris.

“I’m here, Joslyn,” Milo said.

She jogged towards the boy, kneeling before him when she reached him.  “Are you hurt?”

“A little.  But not bad,” Milo answered.  His face was pale, and he clutched one arm to his chest.  Joslyn traced the arm with her eyes, noting its unnatural angle, and the way the sleeve around it was charred black and wet with blood.

“I can fix it,” Joslyn said automatically, even though she had never attempted to use the q’isson to heal another.  She drew a breath and called up the q’isson anyway, sending a thin stream of its colorful energy into the boy’s arm.  It did its work instantly.  Joslyn could feel it inside his arm, knitting back together the broken bones and torn, burnt flesh.  Milo’s eyes widened with surprise.

“There,” she said a few seconds later, once she detected that the arm was whole again.

The boy’s eyes filled with something between love and hero worship.  It made Joslyn uncomfortable, so she stood briskly and turned away from him, scanning the field of the undatai’s wreckage once more.

“Help me find Tasia,” she said without meeting Milo’s eyes.

“Alright,” he said, and fell into place beside her.

Joslyn picked through the blackened rubble of the undatai, yelling Tasia’s name every few seconds, kicking over any particularly large mounds of embers and petrified flesh, worried that Tasia might be trapped underneath.

Seconds grew to minutes, and each minute felt longer than the one before.

Anxiety crept up the back of Joslyn’s neck.  She’d redirected the energy of the q’isson into her attack, taking away Tasia’s protection — and worse, she hadn’t warned Tasia she would do that.  She’d left her unprotected.

And that moment when the undatai had lurched sideways, giving Joslyn a chance to finish taking off its head… that had to have been Tasia.

Joslyn swore under her breath.  She had only herself to blame.  It was one of the very first lessons she had taught Tasia, when Joslyn began to train her in self-defense:  A fight is always about who has the advantage in any given moment.  And if the advantage is not yours, find a way to steal it back.

Tasia had stolen back the advantage for Joslyn.  And she may have traded her own life for Joslyn’s in the process.

“Tasia!” Joslyn called, a hint of panic entering into her voice now.

Had she really gone through all this just to lose Tasia again?

“Here,” a voice rasped weakly.

Joslyn stopped mid-step, scanning the rubble.  Then she saw her.

Like a discarded and bloodied wad of old rags, Tasia lay on her side next to a heap of smoldering undatai.

Joslyn ran, dropping down next to Tasia and reaching for her before she realized that half of Tasia’s body, the half she was lying on, had been burned so badly that the skin had practically melted off.

“Oh, Tasia, Tasia…”

Joslyn didn’t dare touch her now.  There wasn’t a touch light enough that it wouldn’t bring more pain.

“We… have to stop… meeting each other like this,” Tasia whispered hoarsely.  “Half… dead.”

“I can fix you,” Joslyn said.

“Even if… you do… it doesn’t… matter.  My real body… it…”  Tasia broke off, coughing.  Flecks of blood spattered across her lips, and more trickled from the corner of her mouth.

“Shh.  Don’t speak.”

Joslyn drew the q’isson forth, directing it into Tasia’s devastated body.  But it wasn’t like Milo’s broken arm.  Even though the arm had been broken in several places and was burnt nearly to the bone, it was just one isolated piece of him.  No, Tasia was as broken now as Joslyn had been earlier.  But healing another wasn’t nearly as easy as healing herself.

And maybe Tasia was broken beyond repair.  That was what it felt like when she sent the q’isson into her.

Time was strange in the Shadowlands.  Joslyn couldn’t say if three minutes had passed or three hours.  But at some point, Milo found her, kneeling next to her, somehow knowing not to speak and break Joslyn’s concentration.

Joslyn kept pouring more and more of the q’isson into Tasia, but it didn’t feel like it was enough.

It felt like Tasia was gone.

61

So this was death.

Tasia felt the river of light around her, felt herself merging into its vibrations, one thread amongst many in a tapestry of sound that wasn’t really sound, color that wasn’t really color.  Death was not so bad, after all.  It felt like that moment when the gentle lull of sleep begins to pull one into a dream.

But then came a discordant thread of light, pulling against all the others.  It grated against Tasia at first, jarring her out of that dream-like lull.  She didn’t want to follow it.  But the thread was insistent.  And the more Tasia noticed it, the more it seemed to notice her.  The more it pulled her from the gently flowing river of energy.

She would follow it, she decided.

But then — pain.  Oh, the pain.  She groaned, trying to escape the pain back into the currents of flowing light.

“Tasia.  Stay with me,” Tasia heard.

Stay… me…

She tried to comprehend the words, tried to remember what language was at all.  But — Joslyn.  Those words had been Joslyn’s.  And she was asking Tasia to stay.  Tasia clawed her way towards those words, feeling pulled apart by the two rivers of energy — one that flowed towards Joslyn, one that flowed away from her.

Tasia could not leave Joslyn.  She had experienced the grief of Joslyn’s death, had lived with the agony of her heart torn from her chest after Joslyn had gone, and she would not condemn Joslyn to grief like that.

She would make her way back to Joslyn, no matter how hard it was.

Tasia followed the thread that was Joslyn’s voice, letting it haul her mind up and out of black unconsciousness the way a chain lifted an anchor from the floor of an ocean.

She found her eyes.  She remembered how to open them.

The first thing Tasia saw was Joslyn — beautiful, precious Joslyn, with a tiny V between her eyebrows marking her frown.

“Jos… lyn,” Tasia said, her voice still weak.  She tried to reach for Joslyn’s frowning face,  but she winced, her hand falling as though weighed down by a boulder.  The torturous excruciation of being burned alive was gone, but everything still hurt.  Everything was heavy.

“Don’t try to move,” Joslyn instructed.  “I don’t think it’s done quite yet.”

Tasia decided that not moving sounded like a good idea after all.  Besides, in stillness, she had an excuse to drink Joslyn in with her eyes.  She traced every lovely Terintan feature, even the parts blistered from the undatai’s heat or smudged with ash.  She followed the elegant line of Joslyn’s neck down to the charred and shredded leather armor, letting her gaze linger a moment on the subtle curves beneath that armor, and then touched with her eyes each place where Joslyn’s bare arms were marked by burns and gashes.

“You’re bleeding, too,” Tasia said, her words stronger this time.  She tried again to lift a hand, and this time she could.  She pointed.  “Your forearms.”

Joslyn glanced down at herself for a brief moment before retraining her focus on Tasia.  “It doesn’t hurt.  I hadn’t even noticed them.”

Tasia’s lips twitched into a smile.  “Of course you didn’t.”  Her eyes flicked to the boy beside Joslyn.  “Who’s the handsome squire?”

The child, who couldn’t have been older than ten, smiled shyly, his face flushing a patchy bright red.

“This is Milo,” Joslyn said.  “He’s the one who brought us here.”

“Who brought you…?”  Tasia didn’t understand.  Grandmother Ajda had said that Joslyn was here, in the Shadowlands like the rest of them, but Tasia had assumed that this meant Joslyn’s physical body had been stolen by one of the shadows, the same way that hers had been.

Joslyn glanced at the boy briefly before returning her attention to Tasia.  “Milo has… a special talent,” she said.  “The Order of Targhan made him into a conduit of sorts, a bridge between the mortal world and the Shadowlands.”

“The Order of Targhan?” said Tasia.

Joslyn nodded, her expression thoughtful.  “We have much to catch up on.  But later.  How do you feel?”

Tasia scanned through her body, searching for pockets of pain and finding none.  “I feel… remarkably good.”  She wiggled her fingers experimentally, then tried bending her arm.  No pain.  No weight.  Tasia grinned then, and the hand closest to Joslyn shot up, seizing the warrior by what was left of the collar of her armor and pulling her down into a fierce kiss.  “Yes,” Tasia said breathlessly when she released Joslyn a moment later.  “I would say I feel very good.”

Joslyn’s cheeks pinked.  Tasia followed Joslyn’s sidelong glance at the boy, whose mouth hung slightly ajar.

“Sorry,” Tasia mumbled, though she wasn’t sure if she was directing the words towards Milo or Joslyn, and she wasn’t really very sorry.  “I suppose we will have to do our catching up later.”

Tasia sat up, grimacing, expecting her damaged side to hurt.

“Are you alright?  Do you feel any pain?” Joslyn asked.

“No, actually,” Tasia said.  “It doesn’t hurt at all.”  She got to her feet and surveyed the land surrounding them.  Nothing of the undatai remained that was larger than the size of a man, and most pieces were far smaller than that.  “Did you do it?  You destroyed the undatai?”

Joslyn graced Tasia with a rare smile.  “We destroyed it,” she said.  “I would have died if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”  She cocked her head to the side.  “How did you arrive here?  Tasia… Why are you in the Shadowlands at all?”

Tasia’s face fell, her sense of victory already evaporating.  “The shadows… they’ve consumed practically half the Empire.  I fear that all the East is already lost to them, along with swaths of the Capital Lands.  Port Lorsin is… all shadows now.”

The muscles of Joslyn’s jaw flexed.  She looked suddenly angry.  “Are you saying that your body in the mortal realm is inhabited by… one of them?”

Tasia hesitated, unsure why Joslyn seemed so suddenly upset with her.  Then she nodded.  “My body, along with the bodies of nearly everyone in Port Lorsin.”

Milo had come over to stand next to Joslyn, and now he slipped a hand into hers and gave Tasia a long, appraising look before gazing up at Joslyn.  “Does that mean the Capital Lands is filled with monsters?  Like Druet Village?”

Joslyn did not answer right away.

“Yes.”  The word came out of Joslyn as a hiss through clenched teeth, and she pulled free from Milo’s grip, turning her back on both the boy and Tasia.  She muttered something in Terintan that Tasia didn’t understand.  “It’s my fault,” she said, her back still facing Tasia.  “If I hadn’t listened to that Eiren-cursed woman and gone to Port Lorsin like the small men told me to, I might have saved the city.”

Tasia bubbled with questions — the small men?  What woman?  And how could Joslyn possibly think she would have saved the entirety of Port Lorsin by herself?  But she held her tongue, watching Joslyn’s back, waiting for her to turn around.

“The small men warned me,” Joslyn said, finally turning back to Tasia.  “They told me that the shadows were about to arrive in Port Lorsin, that you would be in danger.  But Ty’Tsana told me about the gate, about Milo.  And so I went east.”

“Joslyn,” Tasia said gently, taking a step towards her and reaching for her hand.  “You did the right thing.  You destroyed the undatai.”

“And lost the Empire in the process,” Joslyn said, but she didn’t pull away from Tasia’s touch.

“Perhaps not yet,” said a voice.  Tasia and Joslyn both turned, and there, a dozen yards away, stood Grandmother Ajda, one hand resting on a tree stump-like chunk of the destroyed undatai.

“You,” Joslyn said, the word half surprised question, half accusation.

“Yes,” said the seer, hobbling forward.  “Me.”

Joslyn spoke before Tasia had the chance.  “What are you doing here?”

“Your Empress just told you.”  If Grandmother Ajda was put off by the hostility in Joslyn’s tone, she didn’t show it.  “The shadows have infected practically every village, town, and city east of Port Lorsin.  Including Paratheen.  Though if you mean what am I doing here, specifically,” she said, pointing at another burnt fragment of the undatai’s body, “let us say that my conscience nagged at me after the Empress left.  So I came to help.”

“We destroyed it without you.”  Joslyn’s voice and face were both ice-cold.

“So I see.  Full of surprises, Mizana, as always.”  She stopped a few feet from Joslyn, Tasia, and Milo.  “I admit, your feat is astounding.  But unfortunately, the Empress is still here.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tasia.

“Ordinary shadows cannot be in two places at once,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “They are either here, in the Shadowlands, or there, in the body of a mortal.  Kill its human host and it returns to the Shadowlands, but kill it in the Shadowlands and it is destroyed forever.”  She pointed at a piece of rubble.  “The Prince of Shadows, though, is different.  You destroyed it here, but a weakened piece of it remains in the mortal realm, inside the Empress’s body.”  She paused, looking pensive.  “And perhaps in more than just the body of the Empress.”

Joslyn glanced at Tasia.  “Can you feel your body — your physical body in the mortal realm?”

Tasia shook her head.  “No, but should I be able to?  From the Shadowlands?”

“If your body is yours again,” Joslyn said, “then I think you should be able to… detect it, when you reach for it.  Like an echo you hear in the distance.”  She squeezed Tasia’s hand.  “I can’t be sure, but try.  See what happens once you reach for it.”

Tasia wasn’t sure what this meant, or how Joslyn had come to know so much about the Shadowlands, but she tried anyway, searching for any echo that might be her body, reaching for her own body the way she had reached for Joslyn earlier.

But there was nothing.

Tasia opened her eyes, disappointed.  She met Joslyn’s gaze and shook her head.  “I don’t detect anything.”

Grandmother Ajda gave a knowing nod.  “Because the undatai lives on inside you.”

Tasia’s shoulders slumped.

“Then I will return to the mortal realm,” Joslyn said.  She pulled what looked like a large glass marble from a pocket inside her tunic.  “And I will take Tasia’s body back.”

Grandmother Ajda frowned, shaking her head.  “The undatai will be protected by an entire city of shadows, Mizana.”

Joslyn’s hesitation was subtle, but Tasia knew how to read her eyes.  “I destroyed the undatai here,” Joslyn said.  “Surely I can destroy it there.”

“Not with an entire city to protect it,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “It will know you are coming before you can even approach.”

“Then what?  I stay here, let the Empire be consumed by the Shadowlands?”  Joslyn shook her head.  “I have to try.”

Tasia pulled herself to her feet, laid a hand lightly on Joslyn’s chest.  “You know this is not your fault, don’t you?  I am here by my own mistakes, not yours.”

Joslyn said nothing.

“I don’t want to lose you again,” Tasia said.

Joslyn reached out, touching Tasia’s face.  “If you do not regain your body, you will die in the Shadowlands… No, worse than that,” she amended.  She glanced at Grandmother Ajda as if for confirmation, then said, “If you do not regain your body, you will become the Shadowlands.”

The river of souls.  Tasia knew Joslyn was right.  She shivered.

“I cannot let that happen,” Joslyn said firmly.  “I have to at least try.”

Tasia hesitated, then nodded.

Grandmother Ajda regarded Joslyn a long time, then said, “The undatai is like the queen of a hive of honeybees.  Take out the queen, the rest of the hive withers and dies.  If, Mizana, you somehow manage to send the undatai back to the Shadowlands, you will free the rest of us, too.  At least those of us who are left.”

Tasia looked at her sharply.  “What do you mean, those who are left?”

Grandmother Ajda seemed as if she would not reply at first.  “Spend too long in the Shadowlands,” she said after a moment, “and you lose yourself altogether, regardless of the condition of your mortal body.  I am afraid that some of your citizens are already lost.”

A heavy silence hung over all of them.

Then Joslyn tipped Tasia’s face towards hers, kissing her lightly before stepping away.  “I must go.”

“Take the boy with you,” said Grandmother Ajda.  “His mortal body is here, which means that if you fail, he will be trapped here with the rest of us.”

Joslyn nodded and took Milo’s hand.  She held the sparkling marble in front of her.

“Wait,” Tasia said.  “Try to find Brick and Evrart.  And a Terintan girl, Linna.  They might be able to help you.”

“Where will I find them?” Joslyn asked.  “And where will I find… you?”

62

~ THEN ~

“How did you learn the dance of the Seven Cities?” Joslyn asked on the third night Ku-sai had accepted her as his kuna-shi, his apprentice.

They were sitting across from each other on cushions before the hearth, a small, low table between them.  The ku-sai had served the evening meal not long before, a simple chicken broth with wilted greens and mushrooms in clay bowls.  Joslyn had finished hers swiftly, in part because she was still hungry after nearly starving to death in the yard before the ku-sai’s hut, in part because, when one is accustomed to never knowing when the next meal will come, one tends to devour rather than to savor.

But Ku-sai’s spoon was halfway to his mouth when Joslyn posed the question.  The spoon hovered there for a long moment before it finally finished its journey.

The question had probably been inappropriate.  Joslyn knew that.  But she could also hear her stomach rumbling despite the broth in it, and she needed to distract herself with something to stave off the nagging question, I wonder if it’s alright if I ask for more?

It would have been fine to ask for more.  Ku-sai did not approve of a heavy evening meal, but neither would he allow his pupil to go hungry.

But Joslyn didn’t know that then.  She was fourteen, barely more than a feral street child, and it had been a long time since anyone had treated her as if she actually deserved more than a half-starved state, so long that not even she thought she truly deserved more broth.  And so it seemed better to risk a personal, potentially inappropriate personal question of her new master than to ask for more.

No, not master, she reminded herself. Ku-sai.  Teacher.

He’d been very firm on that point, on the distinction between a teacher and a master.

Just when Joslyn had decided that Ku-sai would not answer the question, that she had made yet another social blunder, he spoke.

“My father taught me the dance,” he said.  “My father was the greatest Mizanto — sword master, that is —  in all the Seven Cities.  Possibly the greatest Mizanto in all of history.”

He dipped his spoon back into the broth and offered nothing more.

Joslyn waited for what seemed like a respectful amount of time before she asked another question.  “Were you the same age as me when you started training?”

“In the Seven Cities, boys and girls who want to learn the dance start very young — usually at ten or eleven summers, while their bodies are still supple.”  His eyes took on a distant cast for a moment.  “But I rejected the training.  I wanted to be a café owner, the center of the market square where everyone came for tea and coffee and the arguing of politics.  By the time I finally picked up a sword, I was older than you.”

This was far more information than Joslyn had anticipated from her often taciturn new teacher.  And his answer hadn’t actually satisfied her curiosity but had only generated ten new questions in her mind.  She waited again, then asked the question that seemed to her to be the most obvious.

“Ku-sai, if your father was the greatest Miz… Mizanto in the Seven Cities, why didn’t you want to train with him?”

“Because, kuna-shi,” he said, “the art of the sword master is death.  When I was a boy, I wanted nothing of my father’s art.  I wanted to surround myself with life, like what I saw at the cafés.  I did not want to acknowledge death.”

“So what happened?”

“The war against the Empire came,” he said simply.  “Most people think of the war as something that started a few years before your fourteen summers and ended when you were still a toddler, but the reality is that there have been skirmishes between Terinto and the ever-expanding Empire for a hundred years or more, ever since the Empire found value in the caravan routes across the desert and port cities along Terinto’s coast.  The Seven Cities remained neutral at first, but over the course of decades, we were drawn into the conflict.  By the time my father was a young man, the fighting was even worse in the Seven Cities than in Paratheen and Negusto, because in the Seven Cities, it was not just a war with the Empire, but a war between ourselves.  Three of the cities fought to unite Terinto with the Empire; the other four fought to keep our independence.  My family and I were from Met, one of the four cities that fought the Empire until the treaty.”  He paused a moment, remembering.  “But even when war finally came to Met, still I did not pick up the sword.  It was only when my father died on a battlefield that I picked up his sword, and then only to protect my mother and my three sisters.”  Ku-sai set his spoon aside and steepled his fingers, gazing intently at Joslyn.  “Can you guess why I’m telling you this story, kuna-shi?”

Joslyn thought for a moment, then shook her head no.  She didn’t understand.  She was surprised, actually.  This was the first time her ku-sai had ever told her anything about himself, and he wasn’t offering a mere tidbit.  He was offering a tidal wave of information all at once.

“I am telling you,” he said, “because it is not enough to know that the art of the sword master is death.  Death is only the first thing to know.  The second thing a sword master must know is why death must sometimes be brought to others.  There are times, kuna-shi, when it is only through death that life can be preserved.  Do you understand?”

She nodded, even though she wasn’t sure that she did understand.

“Let this guide your decisions, because to bring death to others is a responsibility we should never take lightly.  We bring death when it is the only way to preserve life.”

Joslyn was silent for a minute, contemplating Ku-sai’s story and what it meant.

Had she preserved life when she murdered Captain Samwin in his sleep?  The feeling of the knife cutting through his skin and arteries and gristle of his throat still haunted her nightmares.  Yet other slave girls had died before Joslyn had arrived, she knew that.  Yael, the kitchen wench whom Samwin had discarded after he’d burnt half her face off, was still alive, but the slaves whispered of others, of the ones who came before Yael.  Ones who might have been glad to have been discarded with nothing more than a melted face.

“Was your father a good man?” she asked at last.

There was a long pause before Ku-sai answered.  “My father was the best man I have ever known.”

“Why did — ” but Joslyn bit the question off, deciding it best not to ask.

Ku-sai’s face remained impassive, his hands remained steepled before him.  He was waiting for the question, she knew.

“Why did he die, if he was the best swordsman of the Seven Cities?”

“For two reasons,” Ku-sai said, and if he was offended by the question, his face did not reveal it.  “First, because a battlefield is a dangerous place — remember that it is always a dangerous place, no matter how skilled the Mizanto or Mizana.  In all likelihood, my father’s endurance was worn down by many long hours of battle, and eventually, time and superior numbers simply overwhelmed even his abilities.  A single Mizanto skilled in the dance can defeat twenty warriors in battle with ease, but forty warriors?  A hundred?  Two hundred?”

He lifted an eyebrow, and Joslyn knew she was being encouraged to think about that, to think about facing scores of soldiers on her own.  Even the best training would only take her so far.  She nodded to show that she understood the lesson, then he continued.

“The second reason my father died that day is that Father Mezzu deemed that none of his human children should live forever, no matter how much they yearn to.  Like a sword master, Father Mezzu understands that death is a necessity for preserving life.  But,” Ku-sai added, gesturing to the place above the hearth where his massive curved sword sat peacefully in its rack, “I was able to rescue my father’s sword from that battlefield, if not my father himself.  So in that sense, his spirit is still with me.  We live on through what we create.  He created me through his sword.  Now I am creating you the same way.”

Joslyn followed his gesture to the sword.  For the first time, she noticed the flat of its blade had strange markings etched into it.  It wasn’t the common tongue, because she could recognize the characters of the common tongue, even if she could not read them.  And it wasn’t Terintan, because Terintan characters were of an altogether different style than either the common tongue and whatever was on the blade of Ku-sai’s sword.

“Ku-sai?  Is something written on the blade of your father’s sword?”

“Yes,” he said.  “Something very important, in fact.  But it is another tale for another night.”  Suddenly he clapped sharply, making Joslyn jump.  “Clean up our meal, kuna-shi.  I am retiring to meditate, then sleep.  You will do the same, once you are finished with your evening chores.”

Joslyn dipped her chin.  “Yes, Ku-sai,” she responded obediently, even though she had no intention of meditating before sleeping.  The day’s exercises had left her thoroughly exhausted, and she was still hungry, and she knew that as soon as she finished cleaning, she would fall asleep almost the same moment she settled onto her sleeping mat.

~ NOW ~

Tasia had described in detail the tower on the north side of Port Lorsin where she had last been before she had been expelled into the Shadowlands, but Joslyn did not go directly to this tower.  Nor did she go to the palace, which Tasia had already explained was surrounded by the shadow-infected citizens of Port Lorsin.  Having gained possession of Tasia’s body, the undatai’s focus was most likely on taking the palace itself, the last refuge of the city’s uninfected.

If the undatai’s eye was focused on the palace, then it wasn’t focused on Joslyn, and that was how she wanted to keep it.

So instead of the tower or the palace, Joslyn took herself and Milo into the first place in Port Lorsin she could think of that might not be overrun by shadow-infected — the dusty basement barroom of the Spotted Dog.

The room was empty when they arrived, and unnaturally still.  It looked much as Joslyn had remembered it, except in a state of disarray.  Tables were overturned, stools and benches lay on their sides.  Here and there, empty wooden mugs lay on the floor.

“This is Port Lorsin?” Milo asked quietly.

“It is,” said Joslyn.  “And it is where you are staying, until I come back for you.”

“But I could help you,” said the boy.

Joslyn shook her head.  “I appreciate what you did for me in the Shadowlands,” she said.  “You were very, very brave.  But you are also the gate between worlds.  Can you imagine what might happen if the shadows know you are with me?”

The boy said nothing, turned his gaze down to the dirt floor.

“I want you to stay safe,” Joslyn said.  “And stay hidden until I return.  Can you do that for me, Milo?”

He nodded, despondent.  Joslyn stepped towards the door, but then paused, looking back at the boy.  Impulsively, she kissed the top of his head.  “Stay here.  I will come back for you, I promise.”

And she headed out through the tavern’s only entrance and exit without allowing herself to look back again.

She hoped she would be able to keep her promise.

#

Joslyn knew she’d told Tasia that she would try to find Evrart, Brick, and others who might have kept their bodies in tact after the shadows had arrived, but Tasia hadn’t had any idea where they might be hiding.  Evrart had something about a safe house on the northern side of the city, but Port Lorsin was huge, and “northern side” could mean one of hundreds of buildings.

So Joslyn determined that her first job would be to scout.  As Ku-sai was fond of saying, a sword master’s first and most powerful weapon was always knowledge of her opponent.

The streets were as vacant and eerily silent as the Spotted Dog had been, but Joslyn chose to stay cautious and vigilant anyway, keeping off the main avenues, traveling by alleyway whenever she could.

She slowed when she reached the northern side of the city, the morning sun already high in the sky, and found a three-story tenement to climb up to get a better view of the wall encircling the back side of Port Lorsin.  When Joslyn found a good vantage point, she discovered that the situation was still just as Tasia had described, with a semi-circle eight-deep of blank-faced, shadow-infected Port Lorsiners surrounding a guard tower.  Joslyn was optimistic for a moment when she saw that almost none of them were armed; her optimism diminished, however, once she counted them.  She estimated that there were at least three hundred of them.  If they had been positioned differently, Joslyn might have been able to sneak around them, or pick them off one by one without the others noticing.  But the undatai was no fool.  There was no way to approach the tower from inside the city without the infected spotting her.  She contemplated scaling the tower from outside the city, but she knew that would not work, either:  The guard towers were built without windows, and their arrow slits would be too narrow for Joslyn to squeeze through.

She would have to find another way in.

Joslyn reversed course and headed for the palace next, the other place Tasia told her the shadow-infected had gathered.  The autumn council had just begun at the palace when the shadows had struck, trapping inside its walls a selection of the most important leaders of the Empire.  Joslyn cringed to imagine what would happen if the palace fell to the shadows; either the leadership of the Empire would be slain or, worse, they would be infected and carry the shadows to every corner of the Empire.

How long would it be once that happened before the Empire fell?  A month?  Two months?  The shadows were like a virulent virus, jumping from body to body, city to city, region to region.

Joslyn couldn’t let that happen.  The virus had to be stopped here, in Port Lorsin.

She crept from alleyway to alleyway, store front to store front, sword drawn, picking her way south from the city’s northern border towards the palace.

The streets were empty, empty in a way that the bustling capital of the Empire never were, not even in the middle of the night.  It made Joslyn’s skin prickle, the emptiness.  It meant that none of the city’s citizens remained entirely human.  Or if they were, they crouched in dark corners and trembled, praying not to be found.

It was probably because she’d been avoiding the thoroughfares that it took her until late morning to come across her first corpse.  It was a city guardsman, slumped sideways against a rain barrel in a gully.  He was white with death, vacant eyes gazing at nothing, mouth hanging open as if in surprise.  One hand still rested on his belly — or what remained of it.  The man’s entrails were on his outside instead of his inside, spilling out of him in a bloody mess like the refuse pile at a butcher’s shop.

Joslyn closed his eyelids as she passed him, a simple habit of courtesy and kindness offered to a fellow soldier she had gained from her years in the Imperial Army.

He was her first corpse, but not the last.  The closer she came to the palace, the more dead she encountered.  In a few places, the bodies were piled three and four deep.  Men and women, Joslyn supposed, who had refused to go easily when the shadows came for them.

She stopped pausing to close their eyes sometime after the twentieth body.  Time was precious.

Joslyn smelled and heard the palace before she saw it.  The smell was of something burning; the sound was what a battlefield always sounded like — metal clanging on metal, men and women yelling, fighting, dying.

She dashed up a rickety wooden staircase behind a building at the edge of the Merchant Quarter to get a better look.  Despite being prepared for what she was about to see, the sight was still shocking:  Shadow-infected citizens of Port Lorsin charged the palace walls in wave after wave.  Some, those who were dressed as guards and nobles, wielded swords, pikes, battle axes.  The rest carried whatever improvised weapon they had found — wooden clubs, stones, broken bottles, slats of ripped-apart barrels with nails protruding from their ends.  For the most part, they wore no armor.  They snarled like animals, moving with the same inhuman speed she had encountered when she fought the infected veteran soldier in Port Lorsin.  But so far the palace walls had not been breeched.  It was hard for an ordinary army to best a fortress like the palace of Dorsa, which had the best defenses in all the Empire; it was even harder for a weaponless, armor-less horde to do so.

But if Joslyn had thought the streets littered with corpses, it was only because she had not yet seen the foot of the palace’s outer wall.  There, dead bodies were stacked like cordwood, forming mounds that in places reached halfway up the palace walls.

There had to be ten thousand dead, at least.

Atop the palace battlements, Joslyn spied a motley assortment of fighters, the majority of whom appeared to be nobles.  They moved awkwardly, fought awkwardly, and Joslyn guessed that most hadn’t held a sword or bow since receiving basic instruction in the martial arts as children or young men.  She even saw a few on the wall whose grey robes and severe haircuts marked them as Wise Men.  Yet the improvised palace defense was holding their own, pushing ladders off the battlements and sending scores of shadow-infected tumbling to the ground below, cutting grappling hooks, shooting down would-be attackers, but there were simply not enough of them.  For every dozen shadow-infected, there was only one fat old lord or brazen young lordling striving to defend his section of the battlement.

Joslyn gauged their situation — and estimated how much longer the palace had before it fell — all in a matter of seconds.  She hadn’t been discovered yet.  She didn’t plan on being discovered.

At least she hadn’t thought she’d been discovered.  She turned for the staircase that would take her back down to the street and found a scrawny girl standing in the doorway, watching her.  Joslyn drew Ku-sai’s sword, but it did not hum with energy as it did when a shadow-infected was near.

“Are you Joslyn?” asked the girl.  “Joslyn of Terinto?”

“Who are you?”

The girl took a half-step backwards at Joslyn’s tone, no doubt preparing herself to flee.

“L’Linna,” said the girl.  “Of Terinto.”

63

~ THEN ~

“Come, child,” Mother said to Tasia after Nik had been escorted from the sick room by a fussy Wise Man.  Tasia hesitated, looking over her shoulder in the direction Nik had gone.  Mother must have seen Tasia’s inner conflict, must have seen the way she was wondering if it wouldn’t be better to follow her brother.  “It’s alright,” said Mother, her voice a wheezing rasp.  “The Wise Men think my fever contagious.  But they have never borne children before; they do not know that what ails me did not start with a sickness.”  Mother swallowed, an action that seemed painful for her.  Or at least difficult.  “Nothing has been right inside of me since Adela.  Nothing.”

Mother sounded sad.  The sadness drew Tasia towards the sickbed automatically, seeking instinctively to comfort her.  Or seeking to be comforted, perhaps.  To be comforted in a way that Father and the Wise Men and even Nik could not.

Mother coughed again as Tasia drew near — a horrible, racking, tearing sound.  She covered her mouth with a white kerchief fringed in lace.  It came away bloody when she put it back on the nightstand.

“Lie with me a moment, my Tasia.”

Tasia did as her mother said, pulling back the covers of the bed and snuggling against her side, laying her face on her mother’s chest.  She heard something rattle inside every time Mother took a breath.

“Sweet girl,” Mother said, stroking Tasia’s hair.  Mother and Tasia had the same color hair, but mother had been in bed so long that hers had grown dull, stringy.  “Brave, strong girl.  Perhaps I should have named you after the Empress Adela instead of your baby sister.  You have the spirit of a fighter inside you.  Would you have liked that?”

Tasia nodded because she assumed that was what Mother wanted her to do.  But the truth was that she didn’t want to be named for Empress Adela.  The Empress had lived through a frightening time in the Empire’s history, a time when the Empire itself was nearly torn apart before it really got started.  Of course, Empress Adela saved everyone, that was why she was so famous all these hundreds of years later.  But the way the young Wise Man Evrart described it, Empress Adela had only just barely survived.

“Mother?” Tasia said.  “The Pestilence of Albin that came during Empress Adela’s time.  Was it… was it like what you have?”

Mother started to laugh, but that triggered another coughing fit, another spot of blood on the white kerchief.

“No, my love,” she said when she finally caught her breath again.  “Has Wise Man Evrart been filling your head with his ridiculous tall tales again?”

Tasia didn’t think Empire history counted as a ridiculous tall tale.  But the young Wise Man, the assistant of Wise Man Norix and Tasia and Nik’s junior tutor, did at least make history more interesting than Tasia’s senior tutor.  Though she admitted that sometimes she couldn’t sleep at night when he told her about the Cult of Culo and the early fights for control within the House of Wisdom.  Apparently, some Wise Men thought that exploration of the shadow arts should be a valid course of study within the House of Wisdom, but others believed the shadow arts were nothing but old superstitions that needed to be erased along with the old gods.

It was strange:  Wise Man Evrart had sounded nearly sympathetic towards the Cult of Culo.  The thought made Tasia shiver, and she nestled closer, soothed by the fingers still running through her hair.

“Do you believe in the shadow arts, Mama?”

The fingers in Tasia’s hair paused a moment, then resumed.  “Why do you ask, Tazy?”

Tasia shrugged against her mother’s side.  “Wise Man Evrart said that when the House of Wisdom was being formed, some of the Wise Men wanted to study the shadow arts.  But other Wise Men wouldn’t let them.”

“The House of Wisdom teaches us that knowledge is mankind’s greatest treasure,” Mother said.  “Don’t you think it strange, then, that even the House of Wisdom forbids the pursuit of certain knowledge?”

Tasia hadn’t thought about it like that.  Wise Man Evrart had said something similar, but it sounded different, coming from Mother.

Mother shifted her position, sitting straighter so that she could look Tasia in the eye.  “What I have always found, my love, is that people stop wanting to learn new things once they reach a certain level of comfort and stability, even the Wise Men.”  She lowered her voice.  “I think one day you will realize that even the House of Wisdom is more interested in its own position within the Empire than it is in the pursuit of the wisdom from which it takes its name.”

Tasia gaped at her mother, wide-eyed.  She’d never heard Mother say something against the House of Wisdom.  She’d never heard anyone say something against the House of Wisdom, not even Father, and Father had many biting remarks to make about almost all the noble houses.

“So instead of asking if I believe in the shadow arts, Tazy, I want you to ask yourself if you believe in them.  You’re a princess, and princesses should learn to think for themselves.”

Tasia blinked.  “I think… everyone says the Cult of Culo and the shadow arts are just stories to scare babies.”  She lifted her chin defiantly.  “And Nik might still be a baby, but I’m not.”

Mother seemed to deflate a little, her earlier urgency vanishing.  Then she smirked.  “Oh, my love.  Always so grown-up.  I don’t think you were much of a baby even when you were a baby.”

Tasia giggled at this.

Mother squeezed her a moment, but that must have been too hard for her, because she let go again and settled back down onto her pillows.

“People will try to tell you what to do and what to believe all your life, Tazy,” said Mother.  “First they will think they can tell you what to do because you are young.  Later because you are a woman.  Then one day as you grow into yourself, they will remember that you are still a member of the House of Dorsa, and instead of trying to force you to think like them, they will merely try to convince you, sometimes with sweet words, sometimes with shame.  And when you show that you have a different opinion, they will be upset.”

Mother started coughing again when her strange speech had finished.  It lasted a long time this time, and the kerchief was soaked through with blood by the time it was over.  Tasia stroked Mother’s hair while she coughed, hoping it might soothe her the same way it soothed Tasia.

She felt so helpless in the face of Mother’s illness.  What good was it for Mother to be the Empress of the Four Realms if she was just going to die weakened, pained, and coughing like any ordinary commoner?

Helplessness mixed with anger inside Tasia’s heart.  Anger at the sickness, mostly, but also anger at Father because he hardly visited Mother anymore, anger at the Wise Men for saying the Emperor and the heir to the Emperor shouldn’t spend time around a woman so sick, and even though Tasia knew it was wrong, anger at her mother, too.

“Always be my brave, strong girl,” Mother rasped.  “Don’t let them tell you what to do and what to believe.  Be like Empress Adela.  Prove them — ” coughing “ — prove them wrong.”

Tasia squeezed her mother — gently, so as not to make the coughing come again.

“I will, Mama.”

~ NOW ~

“People of Port Lorsin,” Tasia called.

A few looked up, but most showed no interest.  The listless apathy they had displayed earlier had grown worse.  Most of her citizens were seated now, staring into space, into nothing.  Some of them were laid on their sides, curled into a fetal position.

It made her feel helpless and angry, to see her people like this.  To see them beginning to give up hope.

“You are in the Shadowlands,” Tasia continued, despite the fact that so few were listening.  “But you will not be in the Shadowlands much longer.  My personal guard, Joslyn of — ”

“The Shadowlands do not exist,” a man in the crowd shouted.

“Then where do you say we are?” Tasia challenged.

“We are dead,” the man said.  “This is the nothingness that comes after death.”

More people were listening now.  They nodded their heads in agreement.

“You are not dead,” Tasia said.  “And soon you will be reunited with your bodies in the mortal realms.”

“A madman killed me,” a woman in a servant’s uniform said.  “I was serving dinner to me lord, an’ a madman rushed in with a kitchen knife an’ stabbed me.  That’s how I know I’m dead, m’lady.”

“Listen to me, all of you.”  Tasia was growing frustrated.  “You’ll be reunited with your bodies, one by one, and when you are, you have to be ready to fight.”

“Yer spoutin’ nonsense, girlie.”

Tasia searched for the man who’d said it, found him sitting on the ground wearing a sailor’s uniform, smirking at her.

She wanted to slap the smirk off his face.  “Do not refer to your Empress as ‘girlie,’ sailor.”

“Oh, what?  Ye think yer still the Empress after yer dead?  Ye think yer birth rank an’ yer fancy talk makes ye special?  Ye ain’t special.  Yer dead.  Like the rest of us.  Death makes us all the same… girlie.”

The men around him laughed.  One clapped him on the back.

Tasia glanced around.  The only people still listening were the people who had tuned in for the show, to watch a sailor degrade an Empress without fear of retribution.

“I will prove you wrong.  I will prove you all wrong,” she said.  “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.  But when you find yourself in Port Lorsin, just remember that I told you to fight.  Fight with whatever you have.  Fight with all you have.  Fight for your families, for your city, for our Empire.”

The men around the sailor only laughed more.  Others watched Tasia curiously, but not with any indication that they were heeding her words.  But a young woman standing nearby listened.  About the same age as Tasia, she was dressed in a gaudy red dress, a dress that imitated the wealth of the highborn but whose very ostentation marked it as common.  She reached out, touching Tasia’s arm.

“How will we know who to fight, Empress?”

Tasia considered the question for a moment.  Like all the others, she was fighting a growing sense of listlessness, of distance.  Her memories grew hazier by the moment — thick, almost, the way thoughts got after too many drinks.

But finally, she managed to say:  “Fight the ones who have flames in their eyes.”

“The madman had flames in ’is eyes,” said the servant woman.  “The one what killed me.”

Even the sailors stopped laughing when she said this.  A hush spread over the whole crowd.  Were they each remembering their final moments in the mortal realm?  And had those last moments included memories of eyes that transformed into flames, as Tasia’s memories did?

“Flames,” a sailor muttered.  He shook his head and looked away.

Hurry, Joslyn, Tasia thought.  Please hurry.

64

“Linna of Terinto,” Joslyn said in the common tongue, and then in Terintan slave slang, she added, “Greetings, brittle blister.”

A crooked grin spread across the girl’s face.  Tasia had told Joslyn that Linna looked uncannily like Joslyn herself, but Joslyn didn’t see the resemblance.  They were both Terintan, with the high cheekbones, folded eyes, and tea-colored skin of the desert nomads, but as far as Joslyn could see, that was where the similarities ended.  Linna was built like a whip, long and thin, and while Joslyn had been scrawny too at Linna’s age, it was due to malnutrition.  Linna, on the other hand, simply seemed to have that naturally petite build — narrow-shoulders, long-legs, shorter than Joslyn but taller than most other women.  She would have made a better acrobat than a fighter.

Footsteps sounded on the rickety staircase behind Linna, and Joslyn tensed once more, but relaxed when Brick’s face appeared over Linna’s shoulder.  He pulled up short when he saw Joslyn.

“Well,” he said after he’d recovered himself.  “I know yer s’posed to be dead, but of all the gods-blasted creatures I’ve watched washed into me fair city today, yer surely the best one I’ve seen yet, even if ye are a ghost.”  He stepped around Linna and squeezed Joslyn into a tight embrace before Joslyn had a chance to pull out of it.  “The Empress said ye were well in the process of dyin’ the last time she saw you.  I take it you weren’t so dead after all?”

“It’s complicated,” Joslyn answered.

“Aye,” sighed Brick.  “Ain’t everything these days?”

A shriek, high-pitched and unnerving, came from the direction of the palace.

Brick’s expression soured.  “That’ll be our cue to leave, then,” he said.  To Joslyn, he said, “The Brothers got us doin’ one final sweep for survivors.  Then it’s out of the city and hoofing it for the Central Steppes as fast as we can go.  I hope ye like the taste o’ horse meat.”

“I’m not here to flee,” Joslyn said.  “I’m here to fight.  If we don’t stop the shadows in Port Lorsin, we’ll lose the entire Empire.”

“Did ye not get a good look at the palace, me lovely nomad friend?” Brick said, gesturing behind him.  “It’s the entire city o’ Port Lorsin against a handful of long-in-the-tooth palace guards and rich noblemen whose hardest labor in life has been liftin’ them heavy silver spoons into their mouths.”

“I know,” said Joslyn.  “But we can’t let them fall.”

Brick cocked his head.  “Yer a soldier, Joslyn.  Ye know as well as I do that sometimes retreat is an army’s only chance at victory.”

“I know where the undatai has the Empress’s body,” said Joslyn.  “I have a way of bringing her back from the Shadowlands — of bringing all of the infected back — but I can’t do it on my own.”  She paused.  “I need help.”

Brick hesitated at the mention of Tasia, then exchanged a quick glance with Linna.  “Is she in the northern guard tower?”

Joslyn nodded.

Brick cursed under his breath.  “I reckoned that was where they took ’er.”

“We don’t have to slay each infected,” Joslyn said.  “We need only the one in the body of the Empress.  Once it’s gone, the rest will fall.”

“How?” Linna asked.

Joslyn opened her mouth, then closed it.  “I’m not exactly sure.  It’s what a seer told me.  The shadows are like a hive; the one inside Tasia is the hive queen.”

Brick looked thoughtful, then nodded slowly.  “Alright, nomad,” he said.  “Let’s get back to the Brothers and make ourselves a plan.”

“We have to hurry,” Joslyn said.  “The palace won’t hold much longer.”

“Aye,” Brick agreed.  “I know.”

#

Linna led the way, guiding them through the empty streets at a steady jog, moving mostly west but occasionally north.  Sometimes she would pause and look up, and lead them up a ladder or a staircase, and for a while, they would travel by rooftop rather than alleyway.

It was at the top of one of these roofs where Linna stopped, perched on the peak like a cat.  Joslyn caught up with her first, then Brick, heaving for breath beside them.

“Why ain’t we moving?” he asked between pants.

“Look.”  Linna pointed towards the western horizon.

Joslyn squinted in that direction, shading her eyes against the sun, which was creeping towards midday.  Movement caught her eye in the distance.  Dark splotches she’d taken as vegetation at first glance weren’t vegetation at all:  They were men.  Thousands of men.  Perhaps tens of thousands.

Brick cursed under his breath.  “That’s an army if I ever saw one.”

He was right.  The dark splotches didn’t move randomly; they moved as one body.  Soldiers on the march.  They were far enough to be miles away, close enough that they would reach Port Lorsin within a matter of hours.

“Are they shadow-infected?” Joslyn wondered aloud.

If they were, a legion of shadow-strengthened Imperial troops, then there was no hope that Port Lorsin could still be saved.  If they were, then the best Joslyn could hope for was to save Tasia and flee with the others.

“Gods if I know,” Brick said.  “But we ain’t got the time to find out.  Linna?”

Linna nodded and led on, scrambling down the shingles of the other side of the roof and hopping nimbly to the next building.  Brick followed, making up for what he lacked in grace with a dogged determination to keep up.

Joslyn took a last look at the field of ant-sized soldiers, then ran after them.

#

The Cult of Culo illusionists — the Brotherhood, as they called themselves — had managed to disguise an entire inn in the Merchant Quarter’s northwest corner as nothing more than an empty stable.  But when Joslyn pushed open the gate to a vacant horse stall and walked inside,  she was suddenly inside a packed and busy common room.  Men and women stood, sat, or crouched on every available surface — benches, tables, barstools, stairs.  There must have been two hundred of them crammed into the room.

Several dozen were dressed as Wise Men, but Joslyn guessed they were Brotherhood of Culo.  She could tell apart the Brotherhood from the ordinary refugees of Port Lorsin, the ones who’d managed to avoid becoming infected by the shadows, because the Brothers appeared stoically determined and purposeful rather than afraid.

Linna and Brick threaded through the crowd, Joslyn a step behind them.  They stopped at the inn’s bar where, bent over a map and surrounded by a knot of men, was Wise Man Evrart himself.

When he looked up, he saw Linna first.  “Did you find any other surviv — ”

He stopped short when his eyes landed on Joslyn.

“Joslyn?”

“You promised you would keep Tasia safe.”  Joslyn was gritting her teeth.  The sudden anger she felt at Evrart surprised even her.

“I tried,” Evrart said after a moment.  “But the Empress and I were — we were separated by circumstances.”

Joslyn’s fingers curled around the hilt of Ku-sai’s sword.  It did not thrum with energy, but she had half a mind to draw it and separate Evrart’s soul from his body anyway.

“When I found her again here in Port Lorsin, I tried to get her to come with me,” said Evrart.  His eyes flitted to Joslyn’s grip on the sword hilt.  “But she had other plans in mind.  She is… famously stubborn, like her father.”

Joslyn nodded at the map before him.  “And now you’re evacuating the city?  Leaving her behind.”

Evrart’s expression clouded.  “I’m not ‘leaving’ her.  She is either dead or infected at this point.  And if we don’t leave, that will be what happens to the rest of these people.”

“There’s another way.”  Joslyn pulled the sword free and Evrart flinched, taking a hasty step backwards.

But instead of swinging it at him, she laid it atop the map and gestured at it.

“I can free Tasia.  But I need help.”

One of the men beside Evrart sucked in a breath and bent over the blade.  “This is rune-marked.  This is…”  He looked from the sword to Evrart and back.  “Brother Evrart, she has a Shaman’s Blade.”

Evrart studied the sword covering his map.  “A Shaman’s Blade?  No, it can’t be.”

“Call it by whatever name you wish,” Joslyn replied.  “I know it only as my mentor’s sword.  He’d hidden it for me, in the Shadowlands.”  She thought of explaining the way it had been broken there, the way she’d traveled through the Zaris Mountains until the small men found her and agreed to repair it.  But there was no time for stories.  “It separates shadows from their human hosts.  If I can get close enough, I can send the undatai inside Tasia back to the Shadowlands.  And if the seer I met from Paratheen is to be believed, the rest of the shadows will flee their mortal hosts once that happens.”

“It can’t be authentic.” Evrart was still examining Ku-sai’s sword, and his words seemed to be addressed to the other Brother of Culo rather than Joslyn.  “The last swords were destroyed a century ago, and there hasn’t been another engraver skilled enough to make one in twice that length of time.”

The second Brother, who, unlike Evrart with his beard and unkempt hair, still looked like an actual Wise Man, ran the tip of his index finger over the runes etched into Ku-sai’s sword, mouthing syllables to himself as he did.

“Be that as it may, the nomad woman’s right,” he said.  “The blade separates shadow from mortal.”

“Have you actually used it on a shadow-infected yet?” Evrart asked Joslyn.

“Yes.  But we’re wasting time.”  Joslyn picked the sword back up and put it back in its sheath.  “The palace is about to fall, Tasia’s body remains hostage, and an army marches in from the west.  Will you help me or not?”

Evrart’s brow furrowed.  “What army?”

“I don’t know if they are friend or foe,” Joslyn said.  “But they are thousands strong.  And only hours from the city, at most.”

Beside her, Brick nodded his confirmation.  “We saw it on our way here.”

Evrart stroked his beard, lost in thought.  “And they marched from the west?  You’re certain?”

“Aye,” Brick said.

“Perhaps they heeded Tasia’s call after all,” he muttered to himself.

“Who?” asked the Brother who’d been inspecting Ku-sai’s sword.

“The Western lords,” said Evrart.  “The Empress wrote them, asking for troops, while we were still in Paratheen.  We left to fight the delegation before they could send a messenger back, then we were routed, and… frankly I forgot about them.  But I can’t think of who else could march an army from the west.”  He turned away from them and shouted into the crowd.  “Colin!”

A boy — a Shipper’s or Arun’s Quarter street urchin, from the looks of him — scrambled forward.

“You and Linna get to the city’s western gates,” Evrart said.  “Find out who marches on Port Lorsin — infected or mortal.  And if mortal…”  He rummaged in a pouch and produced what looked to be a seal of the House of Dorsa.  “Get me parchment and something to write with, Hershen,” he said to the Brother who looked like a Wise Man.  Hershen nodded and hurried off.  “I’m writing them a message,” Evrart told Colin.  “If they are mortal, it is imperative you get my message to them.”

Brother Hershen returned with a scrap of parchment and charcoal pencil.  Evrart took it from him and scrawled hastily on it, folded it, dripped hot wax on it, and pressed the seal into it.  Before handing it to the boy, he addressed Joslyn.

“Your seer was halfway right,” he said.  “If you really can use that blade to send the undatai back to the Shadowlands — ”

“I can,” Joslyn said.

“Then that will make a tremendous difference with the rest of the shadows,” said Evrart.  “They won’t ‘flee,’ exactly, but they will be… how should I put it…”

“They will be like boats without oars,” Brother Hershen put in.  “Adrift.”

Evrart nodded.  “Yes.  Adrift.  Still dangerous, but… disorganized.  Chaotic.  Easier to slay.  More like vermin than soldiers.”

“Does this mean you will help me get to Tasia?” Joslyn asked.

“Yes,” said Evrart.  “We will call for volunteers.  How many do you need?”

“Only enough to keep the shadow-infected busy.  No more than a score.  If they can draw enough of the infected off, I can handle the rest.”  She glanced at Linna.  “But the girl stays with me.”

Linna looked taken aback.  “You want me to go with you?”

“If you will.”

Tasia had told Joslyn about Linna; it was clear that the girl was important to her.  Which meant there was no way Joslyn would let Linna wander into a shadow-infected Port Lorsin with a boy Joslyn did not know or trust.

Brick dropped one of his meaty hands onto Joslyn’s shoulder.  “Take me, too.  I don’t want to face the Empress again if she finds out I had a chance to go with ye and didn’t.”

Joslyn smiled and nodded.  “As you wish.”

“Colin,” Evrart said, “you’re alright to go by yourself?”

The boy lifted his grimy chin in a show of cocky confidence.  “Aye.  Faster by me’self, anyway.”

“Very well,” said Evrart.  “It seems as if we may have a plan.”

#

Besides Brick and Linna, Joslyn’s crew of fifteen included four Brothers of Culo — two illusionists and two healers — along with a member of the palace guard and a random assortment of other men and women who looked like they could hold their own in a fight.  Evrart had wanted her to take twice the number, but she insisted on keeping her group small, and therefore agile.  Evrart, meanwhile, would stay behind and prepare for several different outcomes.  If word got back that Joslyn had failed, then he would stick with the original plan of using the other Brotherhood illusionists to sneak Port Lorsin’s two hundred-odd mortal survivors out of the city.  If Joslyn succeeded and Colin came back with word that the soldiers approaching from the west were indeed friendly, then he would lead the counterattack on the shadows assaulting the palace.

Joslyn didn’t like the idea of so many infected being slaughtered.  After all, the bodies might be inhabited by shadows, but that was only temporary.  Or it could be temporary.  Joslyn imagined Tasia finally coming back to Port Lorsin, only to find the city had half the population it had before.

But Joslyn also knew it was unrealistic to use Ku-sai’s sword to try to liberate the city a single mortal body at a time.  Such a plan was likely to lead to her own infection.

They would save whomever they could.  That was the best Joslyn could hope for.

Joslyn led her crew back towards the tower that the undatai had turned into his headquarters, and thanks to the mirage of invisibility provided by the two illusionists, they had no need to take a circuitous route.  Once the semi-circle of blank-faced shadow-infected surrounding the tower came into view, Joslyn motioned for her crew to follow her into an abandoned potter’s shop nearby.  When she felt confident the infected would not see them or hear them, she caught the eye of the two illusionists and nodded.

One of them spoke a single word in the Old Tongue.  “The illusion is broken,” he said.  “We can speak again.”

“There’s a lot of them,” Brick said in a low voice.  “But we’ve got invisibility on our side.”

The eldest Brother shook his head.  “It’s not true invisibility.  It’s more like… a very good disguise.  The moment we do anything to call attention to ourselves, like speak or attack, the spell will be broken and they will see us.”

“Could we use the invisibility to sneak past them?” asked Linna.

“If we do, the monster will call them as soon as I attack,” Joslyn said.  “Then we will face all three hundred infected along with the undatai.”

“Aye…” Brick said thoughtfully.  “But a spiral staircase creates a hell of a bottleneck.”

The palace guardsman nodded.  “I like our chances better that way,” he said.  “The rest of us can hold the staircase, giving ye the chance to battle the creature.”

“We also have to consider the possibility that the undatai will use the Empress’s body as a weapon against us,” said one of the Wise Man-Brothers.  “It knows we want her body whole.  In essence, it has a hostage.”

“What if we do both?” Brick said.  “Fifteen is too many to be useful in a staircase anyway, and holding off three hundred won’t last very long.  But if we split into two groups… One group draws as many of ’em away as we can, t’other holds off the rest in the stairwell.”

Joslyn considered this plan, imagining seven or eight of her crew doing battle with over a hundred shadow-infected endowed with superhuman speed and strength.  It was suicide.  But they’d known that when they volunteered, and at least they had weapons and a modicum of armor.  The infected, by contrast, were strong only in speed and in numbers.  They attacked with teeth and fingernails, broken bottles and barrel slats, cobblestones and the occasional homemade knife.  Even superhuman strength could not stand up against a crossbow bolt to the chest.

The archers and crossbowmen could pick the creatures off from afar, baiting them ever-further away from the guard tower.  They didn’t need to kill hundreds.  They only needed to survive long enough that the hundred were too far to come to the undatai’s aid when it called them.

“Alright,” Joslyn said.  “I have an idea.  We passed a three-story building a few blocks back.  Tempt them into following you there, take as many as you can down, and then — ” she looked at the illusionists “ — disappear.  You four, go with these Brothers.”  Joslyn indicated one of the illusionists, one of the healers, and the four who carried bows.  “Healer, you must keep them alive.  The rest of you — ” she glanced at Brick, Linna, the palace guard, a handful of street toughs, and the other two Brothers “ — will go with me.”

Joslyn’s army of fifteen exchanged glances.  Some were pale, others sweated visibly.  They might not have been her first choice for soldiers, but they would have to do.  Time was nearly up.

“Joslyn?  I have an idea,” Linna said.  They turned to face her, but she wasn’t looking at them.  She was staring at the shelves filled with clay pots and jars.  “Would there be any lantern oil in one of these buildings?”

65

After all the encounters with the shadow arts Joslyn had over the last seven or eight months, from her resurrection near the Sunrise Mountains to defeating the undatai within the dream-realm of the Shadowlands, she could have been expected to trust in the powers of those arts.  But even after learning to wield the power of shadows herself, even after using that power to destroy the undatai, Joslyn hated having to rely upon the Brothers of the Cult of Culo to get her around the guard of shadow-infected.

She and her eight chosen companions crept along the foot of the city wall, rendered invisible for all intents and purposes by one of the illusionists, doing their best not to disturb a single pebble.  She led them as close to the edge of the semi-circle of shadow-infected guards as she could without risking detection.

Then they waited, backs pressed against the city wall, still as hunters lying in wait for a stag.

They only had to wait a minute before the other team went into action.

It was one of the street toughs who appeared first, standing brazenly in the middle of the street about a hundred yards south of the infected’s position.

“Oi!” he shouted.  The boy, who had to be less than eighteen summers, held a clay jar in one hand.  “Uglies!  Ye want my city?  Yer gonna have to come and take it from me.”

Two shadow-infected advanced, their pace showing that they were in no hurry to reach the boy.  Rail-thin and gangly, he certainly didn’t look like much of a threat.

As soon as the two moved towards him, the boy set the clay jar on the ground and kneeled beside it, striking flint on steel.  Immediately, the jar caught fire.  He picked it up and hurled it towards the base of the tower, where it exploded upon impact.  Three of the shadow-infected caught fire, and though they did not scream out in pain as normal men might, a ripple of motion spread through the semi-circle as faces turned towards their direction.  Other shadow-infected strode over to where the three who had caught fire stood, beating at the flames with scarves and petticoats and bare hands.

“Ye like that?” called the boy, backpedaling a few steps as he produced a second clay jar.  “If ye want more, come on and get some!”

The two infected who had been advancing on him picked up their pace.  Four more joined them, all jogging towards the boy.  Once the six infected stepped onto the cobbled avenue leading from Port Lorsin’s outer wall and into the city proper, more flaming jars rained down from the rooftops.  Four of the six caught fire almost immediately, and another twenty infected broke away from the semi-circle around the tower and gave chase, letting out snarls as they broke into a sprint after the boy.

In true Shipper’s Quarter fashion, the boy only laughed.  Then he turned tail and ran, heading full tilt for the three-story building Joslyn had picked out for the ambush, thin leather soles of his worn shoes slapping against the cobblestones as he went.  Another dozen or so from the semi-circle joined the other twenty, breaking away and from their posts and running after him.

The pack of infected was closing fast, but that was when the arrows started.  A crossbow bolt slammed into the chest of the one nearest him, and all at once, the rain of burning clay pots was replaced by a hail of arrows.  Shadow-infected fell right and left, and even more from the semi-circle ran forward to help their fellows.  Joslyn knew they were dead when the smoke curled from their bodies, indicating the shadow leaving the now useless mortal host.

She glanced from the stream of infected flowing towards the fleeing boy to the ones who remained around the base of the tower.  The ones nearest her had adjusted their ranks, spreading further apart to make up for the missing seventy or eighty who’d chased the boy.  She hoped the other half of her army would survive, but they were on their own now.

Joslyn rose from her crouch, and, hugging the wall, crept towards the door that led into the tower.  The gravel and dirt was loose at the base of the wall.  She had to step carefully to avoid making it crunch.  Ahead of her, the door stood a few inches ajar.  All she had to do was reach it without breaking the illusion.

The other eight followed her, mimicking her careful movements, with the illusionist in the center of them.   Beads of perspiration rolled down his strained face, although the day was not hot.  Maintaining the invisibility of nine people working by himself apparently required every bit of concentration he could muster.

But he wouldn’t need to maintain it much longer.  Ku-sai’s sword humming in her hand, Joslyn stepped away from the wall and behind the last row of shadow infected.  In front of her, a young woman in a bright red dress stood stock-still, a wooden stake that looked like a broken chair leg held loosely in one hand.  Taking a steadying breath, Joslyn reached out for the tower door.

The door resisted her touch, rusty hinges groaning out a protest as she pushed.  Joslyn froze.

The woman in the red dress whipped her head around, a low growl resonating in her chest.

But her flame eyes looked through Joslyn instead of at her.  Seeing nothing, she turned back around, still once more.

Joslyn waited to see if the woman would move again, and when she didn’t, Joslyn eased herself through the half-open door.  Linna, one step behind her, did the same.

That was when a loud “Uhnf!” came from behind them.

The palace guard.  He’d slipped on the loose gravel and stumbled forward, bumping into the illusionist in the process.  Three of the shadow-infected whirled at the sound, including the woman in the red dress.

But this time, instead of turning back around, they charged.

“The illusion is broken!” called the Brother.  “Save yourselves!”

Outside the tower, pandemonium broke out as the shadow-infected fell upon Joslyn’s eight companions.  She saw the palace guard and one of the street toughs fall under a pile of infected, then saw Brick push the illusionist ahead of him and throw his short sword up just in time to block the blow of the woman in red’s wooden stake.  Wood clanged against steel as Brick let out a stream of curses.

Joslyn pushed Linna aside and sprang with strong spear towards the woman in the red dress, catching her in the flank with Ku-sai’s sword just as she seized Brick by the front of his tunic.  She jerked, and smoke swirled out from her nose and mouth.  The flames left her eyes.  Dazed, the woman let go of Brick, who was already being assaulted from another angle.

“Gods,” said the woman.  “The Empress was right.  We really wasn’t dead.”

Another shadow infected careened into her and she fell backwards, screaming as she lifted the wooden chair leg in front of her.  The infected that had knocked her over fell onto it, impaling itself and going limp.

Joslyn took this in even as she spun into dancer’s grace and cut through four more infected with one swipe.  Smoke curled from their bodies and they glanced at one another, then at the bricks and knives and barrel slats in their hands.

One of them was immediately bowled over by a charging infected, his screams muffled by two more infected who joined in the tackle.

“Make your way into the tower!” Joslyn shouted.  With nimble grace, she moved right and left, trying to clear a path for Brick and the others to escape by while trying to kill as few of the infected as she could.  She only needed to nick them, yet trying not to kill them sometimes made it harder.  But every time her blade bit flesh, smoke would rise and the attacks would slow.  The newly liberated formed a kind of human barrier between Joslyn’s group and the rapidly advancing shadow-infected, but in many cases, no sooner had she liberated one than it was re-infected with a fresh injury.

Brick, only a yard away from her now, shoved the illusionist and another man through the open door of the tower, then turned to parry a knife attack coming from his right, backpedaling all the way.  As soon as he was within reach, Joslyn seized him by the back of the tunic and dragged him through the tower door.

“Get the door closed!” she shouted to anyone near enough to hear.

Linna and two of the freshly liberated, including the woman in the red dress, sprang forward to help Joslyn, pushing hard on the door.  Brick joined them as soon as he’d regained his balance, driving his shoulder against the door.

“Push, lads!” he called.  The palace guard was lost, but the other survivors of Joslyn’s crew, along with a half-dozen others whom Ku-sai’s blade had touched, all crowded around Brick, pushing against the door, pushing against each other against the horde trying to break in from the other side.  “Go,” Brick told Joslyn.  “Finish it.”

Joslyn didn’t hesitate.  She nodded once and raced up the spiral steps to the guard room at the top of the tower.

#

“You really are a worthy opponent, Joslyn of Terinto, daughter of Salif and A’eshan.”

It was Tasia’s voice, Tasia’s body, but Joslyn knew the words weren’t Tasia’s.

The Prince of Shadows had its back to Joslyn as she came into the room, not gazing down at the furious melee happening below at the tower’s base, but out the narrow arrow slit into the countryside beyond the city.

“I admit that you surprised me in the Shadowlands, defeating me as you did.”  It turned around.  All the features were Tasia’s except for the eyes, where flames had replaced Tasia’s green irises.  “Or it might be better to say that this one defeated me.”  It pointed at Tasia’s body.  “If she hadn’t figured out how to move through the Shadowlands when she did…”  The undatai shrugged and quirked an eyebrow.  It was a very Tasia-like gesture, and gooseflesh rose on Joslyn’s arms.  “Of course, I was otherwise occupied with what was happening here in Port Lorsin.  And elsewhere, but never — ”

But Joslyn hadn’t come to chat.  She charged forward, feinting a strike with tiger’s fury, then changing at the last moment to thorn on vine, and when the creature that possessed Tasia’s body slipped out of the way and swung a dagger towards’s Joslyn’s face with dancer’s grace, Joslyn countered with charging stag.  But the undatai slipped away, moving just out of Joslyn’s range at the last moment.

Joslyn circled it slowly, sword ready, eyes scanning the small guard room for something — anything — that would give her an advantage in this fight.

“You made a bargain with me,” it said, “and I would say you have delivered nicely.  You promised me your own body and one other’s, and here we are.”  It looked down at Tasia’s body again, inspecting.  “In all honesty, I had always imagined inhabiting your body.  But I must say I am rather fond of hers.”

Joslyn’s snarl was as animalistic as one of the infected.  She lunged.  The undatai seemed to anticipate the movement, though, and ducked easily out of the way.  With an unhurried movement that didn’t even belong to the dance of the Seven Cities, it sidestepped and countered with the dagger, plunging it towards Joslyn’s ribs.

The dagger bit, punching through the fresh leather armor she’d gained from Evrart and piercing Joslyn’s flesh.  She pulled away before the undatai could finish the thrust, but already blood welled forth from the wound.

“Did you know that when I inhabit a body, I gain all of its information, all of its memories at the same time?” the undatai with Tasia’s voice said conversationally.

Joslyn was only half-listening.  She was eyeing the rack of short swords that hung on the wall behind the creature.  If she could get behind it and bring the rack down on the undatai, pinning it long enough to score a blow…

“In the case of your precious Natasia — or should I just call her ‘Tasia’? — I have learned the dance of the Seven Cities.”  It smiled.  “Ironic, isn’t it, that the very teaching you gave for her to defend herself would later be used against you?”

That was good to know.  Joslyn changed her plans.

She slashed low, wolf’s snarl, and when the undatai countered with strong spear — which she knew it would, because that was exactly what Joslyn had taught Tasia to do — she let go of her sword.  The undatai had put its force into strong spear, but without a sword there to parry, the counter threw it off balance.  Joslyn slammed her elbow into its ribs — into Tasia’s ribs — feeling them crack sharply from the blow, then dropped to the ground before it could recover, snatching up Ku-sai’s sword again and executing a boar’s roll to get behind it.  The undatai spun — dancer’s grace — but Joslyn had expected that, too, and instead of jumping to her feet, she stayed under the swing and snaked out a foot, kicking an ankle out from under it.  The undatai flailed, pinwheeling before falling hard on its side.

Still in a crouch, Joslyn’s sword snaked out, and before the creature could boar’s roll away from her, the tip of the great curved sword nicked Tasia’s cheek.

Its face contorted in an apparent blend of agony and fury.  Smoke began to leak from its nostrils, but not at the same rapid pace Joslyn was used to seeing.  It rolled onto its back and Joslyn leapt to her feet, holding Ku-sai’s swords with both hands inches from its — from Tasia’s — face.

“Your ku-sai would be proud,” it said, no longer with Tasia’s voice but with its own deep baritone.  More smoke trailed out from its nostrils, and its eyes flickered from flames, to green, back to flames again.  Joslyn tensed herself for another attack — but it didn’t come.  “I had his body, too, you know… for a… moment.”

It was losing its power, losing hold of Tasia’s body, yet somehow managing to hold onto it.  Joslyn wondered if Tasia could feel this happening, within the Shadowlands, if she could feel the tug of her body calling her back from the mortal realm.

The eyes flickered to green.

Fight, Tasia, Joslyn thought desperately.  Fight!

Joslyn could use the sword to cut Tasia’s body again, but she didn’t want to.  She’d already broken Tasia’s ribs; she didn’t want to harm another hair on Tasia’s head if she could help it.

“But… only… for a moment,” the monster continued.  Its voice started to wheeze, like air being forced from a bellows.  “He threw… himself… from a mountainside… just as I came to possess… him.  He fell… hundreds of feet.  And then… his body broke… on the rocks be — ”

It suddenly raised Tasia’s dagger, and Joslyn moved automatically into fox in the grass in anticipation of its coming strike.  But at the last moment, the dagger’s trajectory turned away from Joslyn and plunged down and across, slashing deep into Tasia’s belly.

“No!” Joslyn screamed, but it was too late to stop, too late to put herself between the blade and Tasia’s delicate body.  The undatai let out a hollow, mirthless laugh, and thick, black smoke streamed from Tasia’s nose and half-open mouth even as blood gushed from Tasia’s gut.

The eyes were green again, and they blinked.

“Joslyn?”

In Tasia’s voice, not the undatai’s.

“Is it you?” Joslyn said, on the edge of hysteria.  “Is it really you?”

“It is,” Tasia said.  She started to smile, but winced.  “I… it hurts, Joslyn.”  She looked down at herself, trying to push herself into a sitting position, but quickly gave up the attempt, slumping back to the floor.

Joslyn let Ku-sai’s sword tumble from her numb fingers, falling to her knees beside Tasia’s body.  Already, Tasia’s skin was visibly paler than it had been a moment earlier.  Joslyn slipped an arm beneath Tasia’s shoulders, helping her sit halfway up.

Tasia put her hands on the bleeding wound across her abdomen, lifted her palms to look at the bloody fingers.

“This is… not exactly the welcome home I expected,” Tasia said.  Her words were weak, barely audible.  She glanced down her own body.  “Why am I bleeding?  Did you have to stab me?”

“No, Tasia, I — no, of course not,” Joslyn said, her voice cracking.  “It did this.  Its final revenge on us both.”

“Then it’s gone, at least,” Tasia said.

Her throat tight, Joslyn managed a nod.

Tasia let out a long, rattling exhalation, her head lolling to one side.  “It hurts so much.  It’s like… fire…”

Her green eyes went glassy.

“No no no, no Tasia.  Not again.”  Moving gently but quickly, Joslyn laid Tasia back down and stripped off the ragged, bloody tunic beneath it.  “I’ll stop the bleeding,” she said, pressing the tunic into Tasia’s wound, which was a lake of blood.  “I can stop it.”

But Joslyn was a veteran of the Imperial Army.  She’d seen her share of battlefield injuries.  She’d gained some herself.  She knew very well which wounds were survivable and which were not.

And she knew which kind Tasia’s was.

Tears rolled freely down her cheeks as she pressed the tunic into the lake of blood, desperate to stop the bleeding and yet knowing that this was one fight she would not win.

“You can’t die, Tasia.  People need you.  The Empire needs you.”

But Tasia had always had a rebellious nature, and her eyes began to drift closed despite Joslyn’s admonition.  “Jos… lyn,” she whispered.

And then she fell still.

“I need you, Tasia,” Joslyn whispered.  “I need you.”

But Tasia did not respond again.

A scream ripped through Joslyn’s chest — animalistic again, but this time it was a desperate howl.

And at the same time, something tickled within her, deep in the back of her mind.  No.  Not something within her.  Something outside of her.  But only just outside — above and behind.

Her q’isson.

Joslyn had healed Tasia once before, in the Shadowlands.  Could she heal her again?

Heart pounding, Joslyn reached for the q’isson, building it from a tickle to a fully formed sphere of energy.  Desperate, she pushed the q’isson’s energy into Tasia with all her strength.

But something went wrong.  Vertigo struck hard, and suddenly the world was spinning and Joslyn was upside down, inside out.  Instead of the q’isson being just outside of her and behind, now it was all around her.  She was inside it.

It surrounded her, a sphere of color and light.  And it was pulling at her, tugging insistently.

Tugging her towards its source.  Towards the Shadowlands.

Joslyn found the thread of her physical body, clawed her way back into it again, gasping.

Too much.  She’d used too much of the q’isson.  In the Shadowlands, she could draw on as much energy as she wanted, because the q’isson couldn’t pull her into the Shadowlands — she was already there.  But on this realm, she had to be more careful.  She had to go slowly.

Yet how could she go slowly?  There was no time for slow.

Joslyn pulled the q’isson towards her again, forming it, then directing the energy into Tasia.

Stop the bleeding first, she thought.

She found the gash beneath the lake of blood, directed the energy flowing from the q’isson there, knitting the skin back together an inch at a time, working as swiftly as she could.

And it was working.  She could feel the skin pulling back together, closing the long gash at the surface.  Now she pushed deeper, into the abdominal muscles, doing the same thing.  Muscle was trickier than skin.  Joslyn broke into a sweat, the vertigo threatening once more.  Nausea rose, threatening to break her concentration.  She pushed it away.

Strong body.  Strong mind.  That’s what Ku-sai would say, if he were here right now.

Gradually, the muscles knitted themselves together again.  Joslyn pushed further, into the intestines, blood pounding in her ears.  With the gentle touch of her q’isson, she wove the intestines back into the correct shape, then dissolved away the blackened, foul bits that had escaped from the ripped intestines into the rest of Tasia’s body, trying to poison what little blood Tasia had left.

Later, Joslyn wouldn’t be able to say how long the process took.  Brick would tell her she disappeared inside the tower for hours, but Joslyn was only aware of minutes passing.  She was aware of other people coming into the room at some point, of the Brother who was a healer falling to his knees on Tasia’s other side and extending his hands over Tasia’s body.  But Joslyn processed little of this.  All she knew for sure was that at some point, at last, Tasia’s eyes finally fluttered open and met Joslyn’s.  The eyes were still glassy, but not the same way they had been before.

Then Tasia smiled.  “There you are,” she said.  She reached up, cupping Joslyn’s cheek.  “I’m alright, my love.  You don’t have to cry.”

Epilogue

“Someone’s coming,” Joslyn said, tone urgent.  Within seconds, she rose from Tasia’s bed and resumed her place beside the open window, one hand on the hilt of her sword as if she had been there all along.

Tasia pursed her lips and shot Joslyn a dark look.  She listened intently, but it took another several seconds before she could hear the footsteps making their way down the hall.

What was it Joslyn called it when she did that?  When she translated it for Tasia out of Terintan and into the common tongue, she said the word that came closest was unfurling.  Unfurling her senses.

Linna gave two soft knocks on Tasia’s bedchamber door before opening it a few inches.  She glanced first at Joslyn, her gaze lingering a moment, then turned to Tasia.

“Brother Evrart is here to see you, ma’am,” the girl said.

“Thank you, send him in,” Tasia said.

Linna nodded and closed the door.

“You keep getting dirt on my sheets,” Tasia hissed at Joslyn, brushing at the offending bits of sand and grass beneath the bedspread.  She was about to tell the infuriating woman that it was a matter of taking her boots off first or not climbing in next to Tasia at all, but the bedchamber door opened and Evrart strode in.

He gave a bow to Tasia and an acknowledging nod to Joslyn.  In one hand, he held a handful of scrolls.  Tasia groaned.

“Good morning, Empress.  Guard.”

“Please tell me you have a good reason to arrive in my room before my breakfast has,” Tasia said.

“I do, actually.  May I?”

Tasia nodded, and he approached the bed, unrolling a scroll as he did.  “The riots you started north of Port Lorsin to draw the city guard out have, unfortunately, been too successful.  They have taken on a life of their own, still focused on grain prices.”

“Lower the prices again, then.  You can’t expect people to stop rioting if they can’t feed their families.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of the prices we’ve been setting,” Evrart said.  “It’s a matter of the grain merchants refusing to abide by them.”

“Refusing?  What?”

“Yes.”  Evrart held up the scroll for Tasia to see.  “This letter has been signed by three merchant guilds in and around Port Lorsin.  They claim that the prices we are demanding them to sell at are cutting into their profit margins so deeply that we will drive them into bankruptcy.”

“And?”

Evrart sighed.  “Well, and they have a point.  I had one of the Wise Men look into it, and the guilds are not being deceitful.”  He rolled the scroll back up.  “It seems that we either starve the families of the villagers and farmers and Port Lorsiners, or we starve the families of the merchants.”

“Then we open the palace stores to the people.”

“We already have,” Evrart said.  “I’m afraid the palace stores will only last another week or two.”

Tasia sighed and rubbed her forehead.  “We have to get the East back, Evrart.”

“I know, Empress,” he said sympathetically.  “General Alric marches this week with the troops sent to Port Lorsin by the Western houses.”

Tasia adjusted her position, wincing a little as something tugged inside her gut.

“Empress?” Joslyn said from the side of the room, concern in her voice.

“I’m fine,” Tasia said, waving her off.  “I’m just… sore, still.”

Evrart’s gaze lingered on Joslyn a moment, curious.  He knew Joslyn had been the one to save her life — he was one of the only people who knew — but he still couldn’t understand why Joslyn refused his help to improve her skills in the shadow arts.

“I’m glad to hear that, but they won’t get there in time,” Tasia said, bringing Evrart’s attention away from Joslyn and back to the topic at hand.  “It’s going to be a hard winter.  We’ll give away the palace stores until nothing is left.  Send messages to all the noble houses they must be prepared to do the same.”

It occurred to Tasia that their stores would last a little longer than they would’ve before the Battle for Port Lorsin (that was what people called it now).  Nearly fifty-thousand citizens had died in that battle and the hours leading up to it.

It was a dark thing to feel grateful for.  But feeding two-hundred thousand would be easier than feeding two-hundred-fifty thousand.

Evrart nodded, then seemed to hesitate.  “Speaking of noble houses and the Westerners…”

“Oh, Mother Moon,” Tasia huffed.  “Tell Lord Roland I will have his answer for him soon.  Tell him — oh, I don’t know, that I’m still too injured to consider anything serious.”

Beside the window, Joslyn shifted her weight almost imperceptibly.

“You cannot put him off forever, Empress,” Evrart said gently.

“I know.”  Tasia’s eyes flashed briefly to Joslyn — which Evrart noticed — and she heaved a long sigh.  “I’ll marry Mace.  But the Empire is hardly in any state for me to be thinking of weddings right now.”

“He brought what was left of his household guard and all the men he could muster to Port Lorsin,” Evrart reminded her.

“Yes, yes,” Tasia said impatiently.  “As did Lord Simon and several others.  Should I marry each of them?”

“He feels a wedding is exactly what — ”

“Put him off,” Tasia snapped.  “Schedule a meeting for him for next week.  Tell him I’m still recovering, or I’m too busy with other matters, or — well, tell him whatever you want, but put him off for a week.”

Evrart nodded.

“Is there anything else pressing?” Tasia asked.  “I wasn’t lying about still being injured.”

“No, Empress.  Those are the most important orders of business at the moment.”

“How is it with the Brotherhood?”

Evrart hesitated.  “The House of Wisdom is not fond of the fact that the Brothers are practicing their arts openly.”

“The House of Wisdom will need to get over it,” Tasia said, but even she knew the Wise Men would not be letting go of the issue of the Brotherhood of Culo anytime soon.  Already, there were deep divisions forming inside the House of Wisdom, divisions likely to rend the Wise Men into acrimonious factions any day now.  “What about the Order of Targhan?  Has the Brotherhood found anything new?”

“Yes, but…”  He trailed off with a grimace.  “The Brotherhood is reaching out to seers known to us.  We should have more to share with you soon.”

“Alright.  Well, if there’s nothing else…”

He shook his head.

“Thank you, Evrart.  The Empire is grateful for your service.”  She gave him a nod that said he was dismissed.  He bowed one final time and left the room.

“Linna?” Tasia called once he’d left.

The door cracked open and the girl’s elfin face appeared in the opening.

“Take the rest of the morning off and check back with me after your noontide meal,” Tasia said.  “Oh, and on your way to the kitchens, tell the guards at the entrance to the royal wing that I won’t be seeing anyone else until after the noontide meal myself.  No one comes in or out except Adela.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As soon as Tasia heard Linna leave, closing first the bedchamber door and then the antechamber door a moment later, she waved Joslyn over.

“If you bring your boots into my bed again, guard,” she growled, “then I swear you’ll hang before even Norix does.”

“I assume you’ll be wanting my sword belt off, too, then,” Joslyn said drily.

“At the very least.”

Tasia let her gaze roam over Joslyn’s palace guard blacks and raised one eyebrow suggestively.  During this past week of being confined to her bed, she’d learned that if she didn’t make it abundantly obvious to Joslyn exactly what she wanted, she wasn’t likely to get it.  Despite being the one to heal Tasia, Joslyn continued to treat her like something delicate and easily broken — like a glass toy, perhaps, or something made of butterfly wings.

Which was all especially annoying, given that part of the reason she’d remained in bed for the better part of a week was to make everyone else go away so that she could have uninterrupted hours of time with only Joslyn in her bedchamber.

With only Joslyn in her bed.

“Take the armor off?” Joslyn asked, reaching for the brass straps along her left flank that kept her palace blacks in place.

“I don’t know.  I’ve always found your uniform.  It’s… enticing.”

Now it was Joslyn’s turn to raise an eyebrow.  She sat down on the edge of  the bed, methodically unlacing and then unbuckling her boots.

“Mother Moon, Joslyn.  Could you go any slower?”

“I could.”

Tasia huffed and reached across the bed, ignoring the way the motion made her insides cry out in sudden pain.  She grabbed a fistful of Joslyn’s shiny black hair and pulled her down and backwards, craning her neck to get to the woman’s mouth.

“Tasia,” Joslyn said, when she freed herself from the kiss.  She sounded mildly annoyed.  “At least let me get the sword belt off.”

“I’m counting to five,” Tasia informed her.  “If it isn’t off by then, I’ll…”

“What?  Pull the rest of my hair out?  Assault me with kisses?”

Tasia slapped the side of Joslyn’s head playfully.  “Since when have you grown so bold and pert?  You didn’t used to be like this.”

“Dying changes a person.”

Tasia pursed her lips.  “Don’t joke about that.  It’s not funny at all.”

Joslyn didn’t respond, simply pulled the sword belt free from her trousers, her palace guard’s short sword hanging from one side, her dagger from the other.  She placed both gingerly beside Tasia’s pillow, as if they, too were made of butterfly wings.

Tasia missed seeing Joslyn with the other sword, the great curved one that had belonged to her ku-sai.  She suspected Joslyn missed it, too, especially since she had recently handed it over to Evrart for the Brotherhood’s engravers to attempt to recreate the runes on its flat surface.  Joslyn had looked as if she might use the blade to lop Evrart’s head off when he’d first asked her for it, but in the end, she’d entrusted it to him anyway.  She knew as well as anyone who’d lived through the Battle of Port Lorsin that the Imperial Army needed to be equipped with many more blades like Joslyn’s if the Empire was to survive another disaster like the one they had just narrowly escaped.

And they would definitely need more blades like Joslyn’s — Shaman’s Blades — if they were to triumph in the war that was surely coming.

But Tasia didn’t want to think about wars.  Not now.  There would be time for that later.

Joslyn at last was here, in bed beside her, whole and living and no longer “marked” by the terrible bargain she’d made with the undatai, and for now, that was all that mattered to Tasia.

“Come here already,” Tasia said, slipping her fingers beneath Joslyn’s leather armor and tugging her forward.

Joslyn obeyed, pulling the covers back to slide in closer to Tasia.  “You’re right,” she said once she’d positioned herself with one arm beneath Tasia’s neck and the other lightly draped over Tasia’s middle.  “I got dirt in your sheets.  It’s… gritty now.”

“And here I thought you scoffed at the frivolous luxuries of clean silk sheets.  Warriors are used to sleeping in the dirt.”

But Joslyn didn’t seem to be listening.  She’d shifted again and was trying to brush the crumbs of dirt from the bed.

Tasia had reached the end of her patience.  She grabbed the collar of Joslyn’s palace blacks and pulled Joslyn into her, their mouths crashing together once more.  Joslyn finally abandoned her project a moment later, and a moment after that, she was above Tasia, straddling her, her kisses roving from Tasia’s mouth, to her neck, to the pale line of her collarbone.

Tasia’s hands fluttered over Joslyn’s torso, running up and down the smooth black leather.  “Jos… Joslyn… hold a moment.”

Joslyn froze immediately.  “Are you alright?  Does it hurt?  Should I stop?”

“Gods no, if you stop then I’ll kill you again myself.”  Tasia tugged on the leather armor.  “I was wrong about the armor.  You need to take it off.  Now.”

“Yes, Empress.”  Joslyn gave Tasia a wry smile as she sat up on her knees and unbuckled the armor, pulling it off and placing it beside the sword belt.  Beneath the armor, Joslyn wore a loose blue tunic.

Tasia pulled the tunic free from Joslyn’s trousers.  She slid her hands up Joslyn’s sides, fingers tracing the scars that mapped the warrior’s many battles.  When the tips of her fingers encountered the bottom edge of Joslyn’s breast bindings, she shook her head.

“The rest of it, too,” she whispered.

Joslyn didn’t respond right away.  “If someone wanders in…”

“No one will wander in.  I’m the Empress.  They will do as I say, and I told them no visitors until noontide.  That gives us…”  Tasia glanced at the candle mounted to the wall that marked the passing of the day’s hours.  “Two hours.  Maybe even three.”

Joslyn nodded, lifted the tunic over her head.

“Help me sit up,” Tasia said.

Still on her knees, Joslyn propped Tasia up so that she sat braced against the headboard, one pillow behind her.

Carefully, slowly, her eyes on Joslyn’s face the whole time, Tasia reached behind Joslyn and found the subtle knot that held the bindings in place.  Joslyn’s breath quickened as Tasia unwound the bindings.  The change in breathing, Tasia knew, wasn’t simply about desire.  It was desire, but it was also something more for Joslyn.

Despite being such a ferocious fighter, it was hard for the guard to be bare.  It was frightening for her.  The bindings fell away, revealing the burn scars that covered Joslyn’s breasts.  Tasia ran her fingertips across each one, her touch gentle, pausing a moment at the place where one nipple had been transformed into a mass of scar tissue.

She leaned forward, kissing the spot softly, then moving her lips across each breast while her hands slipped down to unlace Joslyn’s trousers.

“You’re so beautiful, Joslyn,” she murmured against the guard’s chest.  “So beautiful.”

“No,” Joslyn replied.  “You’re the beautiful one.  You always will be.”

“Nonsense,” Tasia tried to say, but she didn’t get the word out before Joslyn stole it from her throat with a fresh kiss.

“You’re still tender,” Joslyn whispered into Tasia’s ear.  “Let me do the work today.”

With that, she laid Tasia back on the bed again and slid down her body, pushing up her nightdress at the same time.  Tasia sucked in a breath when Joslyn’s teeth grazed across the bottom of her ribs, then her sides, then her hips.

Tasia nearly lost control the moment she felt Joslyn’s tongue press between her folds.  She clapped a hand over her mouth just in time to suppress the sound of the long, low moan escaping her throat.  Her bedchamber walls were made of stone and finely hewn wood, so she probably didn’t need to worry about the sound of her pleasure escaping into Adela’s room or to the guards down the hall, but the window to the courtyard below was ajar to let in fresh air, and she didn’t dare be loud enough that she’d draw the attention of a Wise Man or noble or kitchen worker passing beneath the window.

Tasia pressed her head back into her pillow, clenched her thighs against Joslyn’s face until it occurred to her she might suffocate the poor woman, and instead reached down so that she could press both hands against the back of Joslyn’s head.  The motion made her belly twinge with pain, but Tasia didn’t care.

Harder, the hands on the back of Joslyn’s head said.  More.

And Joslyn heard the unspoken instruction, adding speed, adding force behind her tongue, seizing both of Tasia’s hips and pulling towards her face.

It was ecstasy.  It was bliss.  And just as Tasia was sure she would break from the pleasure of it all, just as she was sure she couldn’t take more, Joslyn pressed one… two… three fingers inside her, stroking gently up and down.  Tasia’s toes curled and she dug her fingers into the back of Joslyn’s head even harder.

She couldn’t take much —

Tasia nearly forgot about the open window, the courtyard, the palace denizens going about their business three stories below until it was too late.  The opening notes of her climax, high and shrill, escaped her lips before she remembered the window and grabbed the pillow behind her head.  She shoved it against her mouth, screaming into it, letting it muffle her until she was spent and out of breath.

Tasia lay there panting, sweating, trembling from head to toe for at least a minute.  When she finally opened her eyes, she found Joslyn laying on her side beside her, face inches from Tasia’s. She watched Tasia in a careful, inspecting way, the way one might scan a horizon for incoming storms.

“Are you alright?” she asked.  “Does anything hurt?”

“Will you stop asking me that?” Tasia said.  She’d meant for it to be a sharp retort, saucy and commanding, but it came out weakly, like air hissing from an empty water skin.  She lifted a limp hand and let it fall onto the curve between’s Joslyn’s hip and ribs.

It did hurt, of course.  Her belly ached and throbbed from the effort of her orgasm, but she wouldn’t tell Joslyn that.  Joslyn spent enough time worrying these days as it was.  She saw assassins from the Order of Targhan in every passing shadow.  Tasia worried, too, if she was being honest.  She worried over assassins coming for her or for Joslyn or Adela, but also she worried about why her injury still ached despite first Joslyn and then healers from the Brotherhood mending her.  She worried about the starvation she knew her people would face before the winter’s end, about having to marry Mace, about the ramifications of being the first woman to hold the throne in centuries, about dislodging the mountain tribes from the East.

And most of all, she worried about the undatai, still lurking in the Shadowlands, building its strength back up, no doubt preparing to strike again.

But she would face these enemies.  She would face them one at a time, and she would vanquish each, one at a time.  She’d done it before.  Surely she could do it again.  And this time, she would have Joslyn at her side again.

Her warrior.  Her guardian.  Her love.

Tasia wiggled closer to Joslyn, resting her head in the crook of Joslyn’s shoulder.  Joslyn leaned forward, kissed her gently on the forehead.

“Do you think it the height of laziness to have a nap before noontide?”

“I think you are still hurting, even if you won’t admit it,” Joslyn answered, brushing back the hair from Tasia’s temple.

“Then I think a nap is quite excusable.  Don’t you?”

“Sleep, my princess,” Joslyn said, still stroking Tasia’s hair.  “I will be here when you wake.”

“You’d better be.  You’d better not move one inch.”

“I promise that I will not.”

Tasia grunted her approval, trying her best to sound as though she might be grumpy, and pressed her face into Joslyn’s neck.  The guard smelled of leather and desert sun and soap.  Tasia let her eyes drift closed.

There were wars yet to fight.  But they could wait for an hour.

*    *    *

End of The Chronicles of Dorsa, Book 2:  Soldier of Dorsa

*    *    *

Thanks for reading.

Support independent authors — leave a review at Amazon.com.

Kind-hearted readers, thank you for making it all the way to the end of this book.  I know it was long; I hope it was a fun journey for your imagination.

I set out to write an epic fantasy novel that starred queer women, with the goal of appealing not only to members of my LGBTQ+ audience who happen to love fantasy, but also to mainstream fantasy lovers who happen to be open-minded enough to enjoy a story in which the romance subplots happen to be queer.  No matter which type of reader you are, I truly hope you enjoyed the final result.

And if you did enjoy it, I want to ask for just one more minute of your time — literally just one more minute — to leave a review of this book on Amazon.

I’m not sure if you realize how much reviews matter to independent authors like me.  We’re the “little guys” of the publishing world, trying to get our books noticed despite not having the same resources as big-name authors with big-name publishing houses.  Reviews are one of the things that make a difference.  People read them.  People make purchasing decisions based on them.  Online reviews are one of the only tools independent authors have to get their books to stand out in a crowded field of competition.

So would you mind leaving a review?  One minute, really.  That’s all I ask.

Get a chance to read the final book for free.

You have just read book two of the trilogy entitled the Chronicles of Dorsa.  The third book, Empress of Dorsa, will most likely be out late 2020 or early 2021.

Want a chance to read it for free?

When the new books come out, members of my Readers’ Club will get a chance to read them for free.  I pick a random selection of readers who say they are interested in the book to get advanced reader copies (ARCs) before the final version goes live.

If you want to be one of those readers and get a chance to chapter in this saga for free, you can sign up here:

http://authorelizaandrews.com/readersclub-s

I’ll also give you the free short story I give all the new members of my Readers’ Club.   My Readers’ Club is the best way to connect with me.  It’s where I share snippets of my works in progress, let you know about any sales or events I’m having, give you opportunities to get my new books for free, and highlight discounts from other authors I think you might like.  I totally do *not* spam you, and if you like lesfic and/or my work, you’ll appreciate being on my mailing list.

Other places to keep up with me:

Instagram — @author.elizaandrews

Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/authorelizaandrews

Blog — http://authorelizaandrews.com/blog

Email — eliza@ninja-writer.com

The Concluding Essay:  “This Bud’s for You”

[ If you’ve read my other Eliza Andrews books before, you’ll know that I often include a sort of personal essay at the end in lieu of an acknowledgments or about the author section.  I think acknowledgments / about the author sections are boring; don’t you?  I hope this will be more interesting.  Also, if you are interested in following my writing journey on a regular basis, take a look at my blog:  http://authorelizaandrews.com/blog ]

I don’t know if you read the dedication to this book (it’s easy to overlook if you’re reading an electronic copy), but this time around, I didn’t dedicate my work to my muse, LT.

I did dedicated Princess of Dorsa to her — and for very good reason:  Tasia and Joslyn were born on a dreary November day while I aimlessly wandered an empty tennis court talking with LT on the phone.  Our dynamic duo were birthed by LT as much as they were birthed by me.

At the time, I was binge-watching the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones on HBO (let’s just forget they ever made a season eight), and I was lamenting to LT that Game of Thrones, like so many other works of fiction, adhered to the “bury your gays” trope.  In case you’re not familiar with this old trope, it’s a tendency to paint queer characters as tragic figures who eventually suffer an untimely death.  For a long time, those were the only queer characters we could find in fiction — the ones who suffered and then died young.  From Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (1928), to Tom Hanks’s HIV+ character in Philadelphia (1993), to Renly Baratheon in Game of Thrones (TV version 2014), popular fiction has a long history of sending the message that our queerness is a life sentence of hiding and torment.

So on that overcast November day, I said to LT, “Maybe I should write a queer Game of Thrones.”  She thought it was a fantastic idea.  We spoke jokingly for a while about characters and plot ideas, and by the time the phone call ended, I had two main characters and a rough idea of the story I wanted to tell.  I wanted to write something that was an epic fantasy first and foremost that happened to have queer characters at its center.  I did not want to write a queer story that happened to be an epic fantasy.

But I feared no one would read it.  How many people could possibly live in the Venn diagram overlap that is both “LGBTQ+” and “fantasy nerds”?  It had to be a tiny sliver… Right?

LT said they would.  LT said that sliver was much broader than I thought.  So I trusted her and wrote Princess of Dorsa despite my misgivings.

This is the point where this tale stops being a story about me, LT, and a November tennis court and starts being a story about you.  (Yes, YOU, reader.)

Conventional wisdom within the community of authors who pen books about women who love women states, “For a book to be successful in the world of lesbian fiction, it must be a contemporary romance.  Stray from that path if you want to write for your own gratification, conventional wisdom dictates, but don’t stray from that path if you expect other people to actually read your novel.”

But apparently the conventional wisdom memo never reached you, because you read Princess of Dorsa, and for the most part, you liked it.  In fact, hundreds of you liked it a lot.  To date, I’ve never had a book that has generated more 5-star reviews, that has stayed ranked in the top 50 books in its category for so long, that has led to more emails from readers telling me how much they loved it.

That’s why I dedicated this second book in the trilogy to you, my readers.

But wait, there’s more:

I knew going into the twelve months between May 2019 and May 2020 that it was going to be a very tough year.  Besides writing Soldier of Dorsa, this has also been the year when I went back to school to earn teaching certificate to become a high school English teacher within a condensed, accelerated twelve-month master’s program.

I anticipated it would be intense.  I had no idea just how intense.

I had hoped I would publish Soldier of Dorsa in June 2019, but guess what?  Around the same time I started graduate school, already behind on my book, I looked at the 75,000 words I had written so far and decided most of it was garbage.  I threw away the vast majority of what I had written and started all over again.  Suddenly, instead of being more than halfway finished, I was starting from scratch.

I was discouraged.  I said so on my blog and on social media.  But you were there for me.  Readers emailed and commented on posts and said, “Don’t worry.  Take your time.  We can wait.”

And then the homework came.  My God, the homework!  Besides writing papers, giving class presentations, and drafting lesson plans, I was reading 200+ pages per week for my classes.  This was while I was still working, taking classes, writing, and trying to have a personal life.  For a while, I stopped writing altogether.  Towards mid-summer, when I got used to the pace of graduate school, I turned my attention back to Soldier of Dorsa, and determined that even though I’d missed my original deadline, I’d finish by September.

However, by the middle of August, I wasn’t even halfway finished.  I knew a September deadline would be impossible, and I became even more discouraged.

But you said, “Don’t worry.  Take your time.  We believe in you.”

I used to think that when actors in a television show talked about how great their fans were, and how they wanted to make a good show for their fans, they were just sucking up and trying to get people to keep watching.  But I get it now:  You helped me finish this book.  Every time you sent me an email during this hard time saying how much you’d loved Princess of Dorsa, my spirits lifted just a little.  Each 5-star review (most of which ended with the line “I can’t wait for book 2!”) encouraged me to keep going, keep slogging away.  And so, despite the intensity of graduate school and full-time student teaching, I made time to write.  I wanted to do it for you.

Usually, I write a story for myself, because the story is itching to be told, because writing is therapeutic and creative and satisfying.  If other people like it, all the better.  But Soldier of Dorsa wasn’t like that.  Whether you realize it or not, finishing it was a communal effort.  I was the boxer, but you were the coach in the corner, urging me to keep stepping into the ring, to keep swinging, to keep believing in myself even when I wanted to give up.  I’ve never written a book this long; I’ve never taken this long to finish a writing project.  Every time I felt like giving up, you were there to pick me back up and give me a pep talk.

“Adriannnnnnnnnnnn!” (Sorry, random Rocky allusion.  Please cue “Eye of the Tiger.”)

So I just wanted to lift a glass in your direction, to tell you how much I appreciate you, and to end this book by telling you, “This Bud’s (book’s) for you.”