CHAPTER XVIII

No clear line defined the border here for human eyes. Away to the left and below them, a turf wall cut off a valley like a snow-filled bowl, barring what might otherwise have been a trail away to the north and Denanbak, but it did not stand on the true border, the boundary between stone and stone. Nearer, on the clifftop, a square grey watchtower stood. Not on the border that Ghu could feel. Not, any longer, a guarded border, either. Not today. The dogs sniffed the wind.

“It’s deserted,” Ghu said, and Yeh-Lin nodded agreement.

They had come from higher up a steep and unstable slope down a shoulder of mountain, keeping well in among the juniper to work around the tower. No need for such caution. Wind whipped fine, stinging snow over what tracks they left; Yeh-Lin’s doing.

At their feet, now, the ground dropped away in two directions, towards the tower, and to the south, in a long, broken fall of stone and occasional pines, thickening with the descent until they hid the land, though still they fell away into the green depths. Snow, here, and wind-bared grey rock. The rising air already smelt warmer. Living. Home?

Here. At his feet. The line of the land, the lip of the slope. It followed in a curve, around, angling to the northeast. Here. He could just barely see the mountain, the Father, away to the east. A small and regular peak behind others, white against the blue; greater than them all, in truth.

Ghu caught Ahjvar’s arm when he would have started down.

“Wait.”

The land pulled at him. Stone and water. He could fall forward into it. Drown. Again.

Not yet.

Without a word, Ahjvar went wearily down to one knee, sitting back on his heel. The dogs sat, likewise waiting.

Yeh-Lin, too, waited, turning to look up again at the deserted watchtower.

He could still turn back. Now. This moment, no other. And then what?

Chase the sun to its setting. Sand, forest, sea.

Ahjvar would die. But he had come this far only to see Ghu to Nabban. He still had no desire to live for his own sake, for life itself. On or back, his choosing or Ghu’s, Ahjvar would die when the knotted curse was released, when Ghu no longer held what the goddess Catairanach had made, what he had stolen from her in his borrowed godhead. For Ghu to pull himself from the hands of his gods was to let Ahjvar go, but that came, and probably soon, regardless of what doom he chose for himself. He had promised. Sworn himself to it.

To be free, to go where he would, do what he would, alone and seeking . . . nothing.

He could smell the land: stone, root, leaf, water. Hear it. Hear them, Mother Nabban, Father Nabban, in their silence, waiting. Their hope. Their apprehension.

Dotemon. They recognized her, and they remembered.

He could hear the land. The folk of the land. If he listened . . .

He never in his life had been free. Sand Cove. A timeless time. That had been his. That only.

Ahjvar’s head was against his hip, sliding into sleep again. He gripped tangled hair and Ahj looked up at him, shadowed eyes the colour of the sky, awake after all, and sombre, seeing what he did not say. “We could go back,” Ahjvar said.

“I could, Ahj. You—”

“I don’t weigh in the balance. Go, if you will.”

“No.” Ghu tried to speak lightly, but he felt his smile twist. “It’s not for your sake, Ahj. Don’t think that.” He drew a deep breath. “I know where I need to be.”

“So, then.” Ahjvar caught Ghu’s arm to pull himself upright again. “All downhill from here, at least.”

No choice, really. Far too late for that. Ghu nodded and started to pick his way down, taking a slantwise path. Loose stones rattled away from his feet, for all his care. The land whispered, a slow weight growing against the ears, a light touch like the brushing coil of a cat around the ankles. A wave, rising over him.

“Son of Nabban.” He caught himself on the nearest stable thing, which was Ahjvar, and looked back. Yeh-Lin still stood above them, a twist of smoky darkness against the sky, edged in light, veins of fire glowing within. He blinked that vision away. Only a woman dressed in the fashion of another age.

She waved a hand along the line of the border. So, she felt it too. No surprise. “This. I . . . would rather not, unasked. I would return in your service, or not at all. I swore so.”

“To whom?” Ahjvar demanded.

“To myself, when I left Praitan to follow your young god. You’re not the only who doesn’t trust himself without a polestar.”

“When did I say that?”

“You never did. Will you tell me it is not your truth nonetheless, dead king? Nabban, I swear—”

“Don’t,” Ghu said.

“But I do. I did not kill the goddess who wrapped my grave in her roots above the buried river, beyond the green mountains of the priests, in the dry south across the sea. No other one of the seven came to battle her and call me back. The chains of the Old Great Gods were weakened, yes, and I could have put forth my strength and broken them, and I did not. She let me go, Nabban. She told me, ‘You have work to do in service to this world before the end. Redeem yourself. Go.’ She said that, my tree, my old river-goddess, and she set me free. But still she holds a part of me, that I may not—be the danger I was. I am—leashed. I do not fight my leash. She is right to constrain me. Do you see it?”

There was a tremor in Dotemon’s voice that Ghu did not know if he could swear was truth. That she was restrained—he did not know either. He did not know how she might appear, that fire in her, in her full strength. She was a devil. The tales said there was no truth in them.

The wordless gods, aware through him, grew small and hard with apprehension, the way some sea-thing might draw in on itself. But they did not wake into any anger, any denial, even in their fear. Their judgement lay surrendered, in this moment, to him.

Why? How could they trust to his judgement? He was too small and young and human for this.

He could not look to Ahjvar for guidance. Ahj, as the devil claimed of herself, only waited. Only followed, with no strength but to carry himself, if that.

He did like her, wanted to like her or the person she seemed to be, but she had charmed armies to their destruction and set the pattern for Nabban to become what it was.

So might he. In what cause?

“Where will you go, if I send you away?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Nabban. To find the others, I suppose. To find my death, maybe. There is a sword of ice waiting for us all.” The last was a whisper.

He tried to listen to the land. It feared. In her, there was fear, too, that he would send her away. That she would be alone. Was that why she followed, simple loneliness? Fear of her fellows. It was not his, to save her from her fears. But in her, too, there was a yearning, a reaching for peace, for place, to know the green hills and the wild and the slow-snaking rivers again.

Ghu found words. Tasted them. Reluctant. Uncertain.

“Come, then. You’ve given your oath. I take it. And I hold you to it, Dotemon. Serve Nabban. Serve me.”

Yeh-Lin drew her sword, then, one swift movement, and closed both her hands over the blade. He saw the blood fall, felt it, hot drops on the boundary of Nabban soaking his earth, his skin. Could taste it in his mouth, warm and salt.

“Yours,” she said. Only that, and she went to her knees, forehead to the stones, sword laid before her.

“Idiot,” he said. “Stand up and come on.”

But there had been no mockery in her prostration.

Yeh-Lin came down to them slowly, stood breathing deeply, looking down into the valley. The thin red lines across her palms were already scabbing.

“Hah.” She looked up then, meeting his eyes. Grinned. “Home, Nabban. Do you feel it? We’re home.”

“Yes.”

“Well, come, then.” She laughed aloud and dodged past, clapping him on the arm as she went. Abandoning all caution, she plunged a zigzag course like a hare down the slope, ploughing through snow, slithering on stone, catching herself on the isolated grey trunks to change course, exuberant as a girl. The dogs surged after her, Jui yapping like a pup, skittering and skidding.

Ghu watched her disappear into the first thick stand of pines, a bright flash of colour before she was lost amid the crooked boles. A flock of birds took flight, scolding, wheeling against the sky. He laughed and caught at Ahjvar again.

“Come on. It’s spring down there.”

They followed breakneck in the devil’s wake.

After the first stand of woods they all lost their reckless abandon. The light began to fail, the sun plunging towards the unending mountains that stretched west, and there were long and sudden drops, deep gulleys filled with ice, the meltwater chiming through it, woken by sun and soon to sleep again.

Darkness wrapped them by the time they reached the thick forest of the valley bottom, and scents of pines and moss. It was as though they had walked out the dying of the old year and into the new, the big flower-buds swelling on the understorey rhododendrons, a chorus of frogs singing in the branches overhead.

Ahjvar dropped his pack and slid to sit himself against a tree, eyes closed, as if too tired to stand. But he spoke. He had not, much of the day past. “Yeh-Lin the Beautiful. Loose in Nabban.”

“Like you, dead king, I am but another of Nabban’s hounds.” Yeh-Lin bowed to them both. “Though handsomer than the four-legged ones and better-tempered than you.”

“Do you want to be buried again?” Ghu asked lightly. “Plenty of trees here to put you under.”

“One of his hounds, until he sends me away,” she amended.

“And what cause would you give him to do that, old woman?” Ahjvar demanded, opening his eyes again.

“I don’t know. But he will, someday. I see it.” Her eyes were shadowed. “I—Old Great Gods, I do not care. Not for any betrayal of mine, I swear it, again. And we are here, now.” She chuckled. “And there is a civilized town only another day’s march distant, and in the foreigners’ ward there are bathhouses that will admit even the likes of you, barbarian that you are, and if you two will avail yourselves of them, I will finally be rid of the stink of rancid rykersyld. Or filthy, unwashed male, which is almost the same thing.”

“No money,” Ghu said. “And we’re not going into the town.”

“Then the first brook we come to, you are going to wash. Both of you.”

“No soap,” Ghu said.

“I,” Yeh-Lin said, “have soap.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, Nabban, I do. But what you need is a razor, because those few otter’s whiskers that seem to be all you can grow are not going to charm the girls.”

“Ketkuiz didn’t complain.”

“Ketkuiz probably thought a man who smelt like camels was at least a change from men who smell like horses. And do I look to you as if I have ever in my life been in need of a razor?”

“I don’t know. Old women. Bristly chins.”

“The first brook we come to, heir of Nabban, I am going to push you in and hold your head under.”

“I can’t drown, you know. And it’s barely spring.”

“Cold baths are good for you,” Yeh-Lin said. “At least if soap is involved. And you’ll wash what of your clothing can be washed. Damned Great Gods, listen to me! I am not here to be mother to either of you.”

“Dotemon the Dreamshaper lures us to our doom,” Ahjvar muttered. “We survive the badlands in winter and she kills us with a spring ague.”

“A long-laid plan,” said Yeh-Lin. “I shall then rob you of your—your—you have absolutely nothing I would think worth the stealing. And bury you under a tree, I suppose. Both of you in one grave. A touching ballad.”

“A cautionary tale,” Ahjvar countered, eyes shut again. Last night he had nearly flung himself and Ghu both into the fire in his dreaming.

“Children, you really do reek. Why aren’t we going into town? I was looking forward to a hot meal and a soft bed, even one with fleas, in addition to the bathhouse.”

“We have no papers, no caravan-master to say we’re his folk,” Ghu said. “They’d have turned us back at the border for that alone. Ahjvar looks like trouble—you do, Ahj. No magistrate’s guard is going to let you walk the streets without question. And I’m a runaway. There are people in this part of the world who might even know me, for all I’ve grown up since then.”

“Slave, Nabban?”

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“I said Ghu was a slave’s name, when first we met. I only meant to be rude. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Why a slave’s name?” Ahjvar asked. He caught at Ghu’s arm, heaved himself up again as the night settled around them, mountains claiming the sun.

“Because it’s a joke,” Ghu said. “It’s Lathan, from the south. Listen, I hear water. There’s a brook near. We’ll camp by it.”

“Why is it a joke?” Ahjvar persisted.

“It’s a name you’d give a dog,” said Yeh-Lin.

“Or a horse,” Ghu said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my name. I didn’t see any smoke, coming down from the mountain. No villages, no soldiers. We should be safe to make a fire. I’ll cook. Find wood, you two.”

Her eyes were open, blue-grey, empty. Lips blue, mouth bruised, and the marks of his thumbs on her throat. Brown hair, a few white threads shining in the candlelight, snarled his hands.

No. No. No.

Two of them, dead where they had scrambled in confusion from their sleep. Old man, old woman, blood pooling together on the rush-strewn floor. The door hung broken.

King, champion, sword. Hot hands on him, digging in, burning. A body lying over him.

Open your eyes, dead man.

Blistered skin, crumbling to the touch. Slimed with stagnant water.

Knife in his hand, the small, fine blade.

There was a fire behind her eyes.

Pain, a sharp blow. Hand opened.

“Ahjvar. Ahj!”

Eyes opened too, on night, on firelight. Ghu, who had struck his hand against a twisted root to break his grip on the knife. Ghu, who snapped, “Get that,” at the devil. Ghu kneeling over him, pinning him down. Yeh-Lin far too close beside him, on one knee, plaid over her shoulders as she had slept, sweeping up his small last knife in her hand.

He gasped for air, throat raw. Not smoke. Not water. He had forgotten how to breathe. Ghu hauled him up, dragged him close. He pressed closer yet, shaking.

“Great Gods damn, we need to search him before we lie down to sleep,” Yeh-Lin said, and rubbed a tear below her breast, a dark smear in the amber firelight. “It’s all very well saying the dogs will keep watch, but they don’t seem to have been watching him.”

Safe. Ghu had him. Yeh-Lin flicked the bloodstain with angry fingertips and the darkness was gone, the brocade whole.

“Not faster than me after all,” he muttered into Ghu’s shoulder, but the words came broken, stuttering.

“I was asleep.” Outrage in her voice. Yeh-Lin drove the knife point down into the moss at his side. And then, more gently, “Tu’usha—the Lady—is dead. That is truth. You know it. I saw it in the mirror. I told you before—I can show you, if you will. If that would help.”

“No.”

“She has no hold on you; she will not touch you again. She is gone from this world; the black sword took her. I am not she. And I’m not hurt. You couldn’t do me lasting harm if you tried, Ahjvar, so sleep, both of you. I’ll sit up. No more dreams tonight.” He flinched from her hand, but she did not touch him, only sketched something in the air. “Possession atop possession. I suppose the wonder is you’re as sane as you are.”

“Don’t—”

“Too late. And it’s only small wizardry. It won’t hold you if you fight it. So don’t fight it. Let it be. Sleep.”

“Don’t.”

“Sleep.”

The weariness was too heavy and the panic that wanted to break free was muffled, stilled against warmth, a song half-whispered.

“Not a horse.” Mumbled protest. Ghu sang to horses. But he gave up the struggle, did not want to wake, after all, to remember he had forgotten the knife at his wrist. Ghu had him still, lay down with him on their coats. Ahjvar curled against him, head on his chest, held to Ghu as if the night might yet tear him away. Yeh-Lin piled blankets over them and retreated to the fire. He shut his eyes, not to see the flames reflected in hers.

Sleep, she said, or maybe it was memory. Know you dream. Learn to fight the dreams, not your friends.

The sun was high when Ahjvar awoke, standing almost at noon. The fire was down to embers and no one was near but the dogs. He crawled out of the nest of blankets and coats chilled and stiff. Spring, maybe, but winter’s cold had rolled down off the mountain in the night. Splashing, out of sight. Under the densest pines the ground was clear, soft-carpeted with bronze needles, but where the canopy was thinner, leather-leafed bushes were snarled and woven into impenetrable thickets. He wound around several such and found Ghu downstream, crouched on stone, wringing out a sodden bundle of greyed linen in water already climbing its banks.

Shirtless, roughly-shaved—and that was his little knife tossed into the moss—wet-haired, and goose-bumped. “You missed breakfast, Ahj, what there was of it,” Ghu said over his shoulder. “Soap, there, on that rock. Wash off one layer of grime at least and make the devil happy.”

“We can’t go on avoiding settled areas much longer, can we?” Ahjvar asked. “Soldiers? City guard, that sort of thing?”

Better lost in the wilderness forever?

“Checkpoints on the road, on gates, yes. Probably more than usual, with the fighting the Denanbaki warned of. We’ll need to dodge all that. We don’t have papers.”

“At some point there’ll be people.”

He did not want people. It had been a relief, like a weight taken away, when the Denanbaki left them.

“Yes, Ahj.”

“Let me look at that brand.”

Ghu rose and mutely turned his back. The slave-mark was old and silvery white against the skin of his left shoulder.

Ahjvar traced the outline, a round-cornered rectangle long as his thumb, three fingers wide. Not too distorted. Born into slavery, but at least they hadn’t set the iron to the little child’s flesh. This had been done when he was nearly full-grown, or it would not be still as legible as it was on the man. He had never given it much thought. The old burn was puckered and hard beneath his fingertips. Daro Clan, it said within, in ornate and searing calligraphy even the blind could read.

“How do they cancel it for a freedman?”

“A second brand set near it. And papers, too. There’s always papers. Everyone in the empire needs papers, if they travel even so far as the next town.”

“Another brand. Great Gods be merciful.” Ahjvar flattened his hand, hiding the scar. Dripping black hair brushed his fingers. Ghu usually hacked it off before it grew long enough to reach his shoulders. “Papers I can forge, if I have the wording and the pattern of the seal. Well, and ink and paper and brushes too, but—”

“Yes. Ahjvar, don’t do that unless you mean it. It’s, it’s very hard not to notice. I try, but—gods, don’t do that. Please.”

He had, unthinking, drawn his hand down, thumb tracing the spine.

Ghu turned against his hand, solemn, watching him. His eyes were not dark brown but black, truly black, night and deep water. Not men, nor gods, Ahjvar had said, what seemed very long ago. It had always been women who drew him, women he had tangled, in the long dark years, with his memory of that waking, of Miara dead, so that he never forgot, ever, what he had become, and desire died stillborn. Mad. Unclean. A horror in the world. He had grown to be sickened by almost any human touch at all, however casual, knowing what he was, what his hands had done, but Ghu had never—he had never feared Ghu near him, his mere presence a refuge and a stillness that he had craved before he ever recognized that deep enfolding calm as what kept him from trying too hard to drive the boy away.

This, though . . .

Ghu was . . . Ghu. Only Ghu. Water-chilled skin warming to skin.

The chiming of the brook over stones sounded very loud.

He still tried to kill the ghosts of his past in the night. His mouth was dry. The knife had bitten flesh. An edge fit to shave with. It could have been Ghu.

“Children,” Yeh-Lin sang out, from the camp farther upstream. “Someone come gut these fish for me. I did not come back to Nabban to be your cook, but if I must, I expect help.”

“Can you cook?” Ahjvar called over his shoulder. He retreated a step, dropping his hand in something like relief.

“Can I cook? Champion of the Duina Catairna, I grew up in a one-room hut in a village of Solan, on the southern banks of the Wild Sister where she grows tame and broad among the canals. I was a virtuous maiden planning to marry the son of a woman whose hut was across the village paddies from ours, until a banner-lord’s son murdered him thinking thus to make me his mistress. Which is when I ran away to what they call now the Old Capital, to seek my fortune, as they say. Can I cook? If there is anything to cook, I can cook it. I can also butcher a pig, heckle hemp, spin, weave, milk a buffalo, drive an ox, and handle a boat. You’d be surprised. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy it or that you get out of gutting fish.”

Ghu caught Ahjvar, hand on the back of his neck. “Later,” he said on a breath, and left him.

“Do you darn?” he heard Ghu asking Yeh-Lin with easy interest in his voice. “Because we have quite a bit of mending that no one ever seems to get around to doing.”

“Not unless you have your pet assassin put a knife to my throat do I do any kind of sewing.”

“Could arrange that.”

“Do you want another war with me, Nabban?”

“Not this morning. You caught fish. Did you find my fish-hooks? I thought them lost.”

“I learnt to tickle trout in the kingdoms of the north. These are not trout, but I caught them just the same. And look—cresses. Greens! And eggs! I found a duck’s nest, and do not look at me like that; it was not a full clutch and she wasn’t setting yet. I took only three, which is one each, if you don’t insist the dogs have their share, and left her with a blessing that nothing else would disturb her nest. The world returns to life. Don’t stand there dripping and shivering at me. Hang that shirt by the fire—at least it will smell of fresher smoke then—and wrap up in a blanket or something. Dead king, you with the knives, come and earn your keep!”

Ahjvar ignored her, stripped and waded into the deep pool below the rocks instead. Ice cold and numbing, and when he did trudge barefoot back to the fire, his knife reclaimed, and the few bits of ragged clothing he thought he could spare for the afternoon washed, after a fashion, and dripping in one hand, the fish were sizzling on skewers and the eggs just boiled in the tea. Taking the time to wash, even in ice-water, had its merits.

“Unmerciful Great Gods,” Yeh-Lin said, eyeing his chest as she passed him tea in a cracked earthenware cup. “Has everyone you ever met in the past century tried to take a slice out of you?”

“Yes,” he growled, and pulled his coat on shirtless to hide the scars, for all that probably undid the good of ever having washed. It reeked of camels.

“Perhaps they weren’t entirely to blame.” She rubbed a fist over her ribcage. “So, here we are. Home, I suppose. Now what?”

“I . . . go to find my gods,” Ghu said.

And what then? What point asking? If the gods claimed Ghu and took him from the world, there was little Ahjvar could do.

Die, he supposed. At last.

Ghu said he did not know this forest, these valleys, and yet, when they set out again, he led them with the assurance of familiarity. Unknown birds whistled and carolled overhead and flashed away, half-seen flecks of colour. Small deer no bigger than a goat broke cover and darted across their path, crashing through brush and vanishing. A leopard, dapples fading into dappled light, stood and stared with burning yellow eyes. The dogs froze, flattened themselves to the ground. Ahjvar reached slowly for the crossbow, but Ghu, in the lead, held back a hand, not looking around.

“Go on,” he said softly, and the leopard blinked and paced on her way, not a rustle of leaves to betray her as she vanished from sight.

“Reminds me of someone . . .” Yeh-Lin remarked.

By evening, they were smelling smoke and seeing signs of human activity, stumps of felled trees—saplings, mostly—and trampled patches along the brook where the tightly coiled new fern fronds had been gathered. The ground was marshy here, flooding as the brook rose, carrying meltwater from the mountain snows. They spread out away from the watercourse, the dogs slinking and silent, not a sound from Ghu or Yeh-Lin either. Ahjvar paused to span and load the crossbow, worked his way ahead of the others again. No sign of any outlying sentries. A rooster crowed. If it was a village, there should be fields.

No fields, but, abruptly, a lean-to of poles built against the trunk of a pine, roofed with bark thoughtlessly stripped to kill that same sheltering pine. Ahjvar knelt slowly, shielded by a tall stand of some thick, winter-yellowed grasses. More huts were scattered about, no order to them, built against trees or freestanding, with just one communal fire in the centre. An old woman in a ragged gown sat on her haunches, turning the stone of a quern and tugging at a naked little child, leashed with a rope about the middle, whenever he tried to crawl away. Another woman milked a goat. Lean swine rooted around the shelters, churning the ground to muck with their tusks. Women worked at the fire, chopping fish into chunks for a steaming pot. Children, more women young and old, a handful of old men, were away on the other side of the encampment, grubbing up roots and trying to turn the soil around new-felled trees with spades and hoes. The smallest ones worked in the rough furrows, dragging baskets, planting and tramping down some brown tubers. Hardly any adult men, and they all looked half-starved; all wore little more than knee-length gowns and maybe a headscarf or a shawl. The naked child began to wail and was cuffed to a snivelling silence.

The ones in the field straightened up, watching, with a sort of sullen blankness, three newcomers, two women and a man. Better clothed—loose trousers, sandals, jackets, though all of brown or undyed cloth. One woman had a spear over her shoulder, the other a short, single-edged sword slung from a scarf knotted into a baldric of sorts, the man an axe.

“Nothin’ for the pot tonight,” the man called as they crossed the field, paying no heed to what had just been planted, and the older of the two women laughed and mimed a thrust at a child with her spear when the boy wasn’t fast enough to get out of her way. What game had they hoped to take, trampling and kicking along as they did and with only a single spear between them? The younger woman yelled in what sounded indignation, spotting the swine, and began shouting at the nearest children to get them out of her hut, though one only was poking its head in a doorway. She ran at them herself, beating with the flat of her blade, kicking snouts with her heel, and the creatures scattered, squealing and grunting. Her comrades flung themselves down by the fire, made no move to help the women preparing the food.

Gods, but Ghu could move like a cat when he wished. A touch on Ahjvar’s shoulder, a shadow in the corner of his eye. He had heard nothing. No sign of Yeh-Lin or the dogs at all.

“Fugitives from the fighting?” Ahjvar guessed, hardly more than a whisper.

“Likely. I know her.” Ghu raised his chin at the young woman, now picking her way, grumbling, around the stumps and muddy patches towards the stream. She was pregnant, enough to show but not yet heavy and slow.

“Send one of the kids for water,” the other hunting woman shouted, but the young one retorted, “Snares,” and kept on her way, scowling.

“Friend?”

“No.”

“Who is she?” Deserter, adrift from the fighting, would be his guess.

“Meli. One of the girls from my lord’s estate. A household slave’s daughter. They were training her for a silk-weaver.”

“Not your lord.”

“No, Ahj.”

“Good. Remember that. Don’t say it.” A conversation they had had years ago, he was certain.

“No, Ahj.”

“Will she know anything useful?”

“How she came here may be good to know.”

“Yes, then?”

“Yes,” Ghu said, “if you think we can get away without a hunt raised for us, after, and without harming her.”

Ahjvar retreated into the trees, eased off the bow and returned the bolt to the quiver. Ghu trailed him, around through the forest, down towards the water again, moving quickly, but his quarry turned their way, leaving the muddy ford where the animals watered and following a path along the bank upstream. Ahjvar shed his pack and slipped through brush still winter-bare, into a stand of some gnarled, broad-leafed evergreens, and rose to pull the woman down, hand over mouth, arms pinned to her sides, when she bent to glower at an empty sinew snare. He dragged her, kicking and twisting, back to clearer ground. Ghu plucked her chopping blade away and shoved it through his own belt. Still too close to the camp. Ahjvar gagged her with her dirty scarf, heaved her over his shoulder and set off upstream, until he found a place they could cross, keeping dry on stones. Ghu, with both packs, followed. She didn’t weigh all that much more than a child and hung limp, as if resigned to her fate. He wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking she was.

With distance and the sound of the water roaring down a narrow, rocky defile to cloak any shouting, he set her at the foot of a tree and pulled the cloth from her mouth, a knife in his hand for a wordless warning.

Ghu stood looking down on them both and asked, “Who are they?”

The woman cowered back against the tree, licked her lips.

“What’s left of Taza village, aren’t they?” she muttered. “A Zhung man, aren’t you? You should know.”

“But I don’t. And I’m no one’s man. What happened to Taza?”

“Burnt, wasn’t it?”

“Where are all the men?”

“Soldiers took them, didn’t they? You lot. General Zhung Musan’s soldiers. Labourers for the town, they said, but they won’t come home. They never come home.”

“What’s Taza?” Ahjvar asked, speaking Praitannec.

“A Daro manor,” Ghu answered, “south of Dernang.”

“They’re slaves?”

“Taza? No, serfs.”

“Same thing.”

“No,” said Ghu. “More like Grasslander bondfolk. They’re not owned outright—they can’t be sold. They’re folk of the clan and have a name.”

“The land’s not their own.”

“The land is the gods’,” Ghu said. “Neither do your folk own the land they hold under their lords.”

“They can leave it. The lords can’t wilfully take it from them. They can choose to pass their tenure of it to another. They can choose their heirs. They’re free. These aren’t.”

“No.”

“These people are starving.”

“Yes. My—Daro Korat was not so hard a lord. A philosopher, Ahj. He did not starve them. But their lives aren’t their own, you’re right. No rights, except not to be sold, no rights but to their own souls. Not even to live, if they offend their lord. And many lords do starve them, taking all, time and labour and all that the land will give.” Ghu turned back to the woman. “Who are the other two with you, Meli?”

“How d’you know my name? I’ve seen you before. You’re one of the assassins they sent in to spy on Lord Sia, looking for the prince.” But she frowned in doubt.

“No. Who are the other two?”

“Osion and Toi. I don’t know about her. She’s a pig. She’s from the town. Freewoman, I think, at least she claims the Daro name. Lai Toi’s a soldier. A deserter. But he’s a pig too, and what I’d pay to see his head along the road with the rest—” Her voice took on a whine. “If I help you take him, will you let me go, my master?”

“Not your master. Tell me about Lord Sia and the prince.”

“I don’t know anything. They said the prince was in Alwu and came over to Sia, but what does it matter? They’re all dead, you killed them all—there’s only us left and it’s not my fault, Toi made me come with him, him and Osion, into the forest to starve, but we found these witless dirt-grubbers and it’s better than being taken as a rebel. Show them a blade and they roll over like a dog. Look, it’s Toi you want, isn’t it? He’s the deserter—he’s the real soldier—I’m just a woman. You can let me go, or take me with you, you don’t have to give me to your lord. I can—” She licked her lips again, plucked at the neck of her jacket, glanced up at Ahjvar and cringed, tried to smile, straightening her back, thrusting out her breasts.

“Lord Daro Sia, Meli?”

“I only went with him because everybody did. I was afraid. I never spoke against the empress. I never did.”

Ghu dropped down to his heels, face-to-face with her. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

She frowned, squinted, rubbed her nose.

“We’re not imperial assassins. We’re not the empress’s men. It was a long time ago.”

“Mother be damned, you’re one of Horsemaster Yuro’s boys. From the stables. The simpleton. Ghu. You’ve grown.”

“Boys do.”

“You talk more than you used to.”

Ghu shrugged. “Lord Sia, Meli. You said rebels. He fought his father, the empress, who? What prince? What’s been happening here?”

“What’s it to you? Everyone thought you were dead, fallen in the river at last. You never ran away on your own, not you—caravaneers stole you, did they? I can guess what for. You always did have pretty eyes.” A glance up at Ahjvar again. “That doesn’t look so bad, better than Toi. You his, horseboy? Does he like women, too?”

“He’s mine,” Ghu said serenely. “And no, he does not. Not at all.” The corner of his mouth lifted, meeting Ahjvar’s eyes. Ahjvar kept a king’s guard’s impassive face. “Tell me about Daro Sia and the prince, Meli.”

“Stupid horseboy.” Contempt soured her voice. “You always were slow. Who cares about Sia? He’s dead and he never was anything to you so don’t pretend you care. Toi’ll kill the both of you. He’s a real soldier. And I can’t be bullied by some half-witted—” She flung herself forward and clawed at him, but Ghu was simply not there, rising and stepping aside. Ahjvar jerked her back, struck her face.

“Do that again and I will take your hand off,” he told her, pushing her against the tree, her arm hauled up over her head. He scored a line over the skin of her wrist. “Right—there.” She whimpered as the blood beaded in the knife’s wake.

“No, Ahj,” Ghu said gently. Just that.

Old Great Gods have mercy, what was he doing? The rage that boiled in him—it was her contempt for Ghu far more than the futile and childish attack that had ignited his temper. He had barely checked himself from putting the knife in her back.

“Sit down, Meli.”

She sat, shivering, her wrist to her mouth.

“Tell us about Lord Sia and the prince.”

“There’s a war. There’s been war ever since the old emperor died. War in the south forever, but you know that.” That was meant to be a sneer, but Ahjvar couldn’t see why. “Last spring they took all the boys from the villages for the army, not just the usual conscription levy. And Prince Dan tried to make himself a king down in Shihpan. So there was fighting everywhere. And I don’t know, some of the provinces were for Prince Dan and some for the emperor, and the headhunters from Dar-Lathi were going to come and kill us all, they said. They said the rebel prince freed the slaves if they’d fight for him. And then the emperor got killed—not the old one that died but the new one. The gods killed him, struck him down for murdering the prophet that said the princess was the daughter of the Old Great Gods and brought the prophet back to life, too. And nobody knew who was emperor any more, but the princess said she was the empress and a goddess too, and she sent for our master to come take oath to her. The Kho’anzi didn’t go. He was sick. A fever in his joints.” She glanced up at Ahjvar, cringed. “He didn’t want to go. Everyone knew that. Everyone knows the Kho’anzi is a Traditionalist at heart and thinks the gods will come back someday and overturn Min-Jan’s laws, make everyone free, which is what Prince Dan was doing, and the empress says the gods are dead and she’s the only goddess of the land, so he wouldn’t go to her, would he? There’s a prophecy going around the markets that the heir of the gods will break the emperors and make the land new. Mad old woman’s talk, and the magistrates arrest them, of course, and flog them for madness, which doesn’t make sense, if the empress is a goddess, because that’s what she’s done, isn’t it? Broke the emperors. But Lord Sia thought it was true and it didn’t mean the empress. He said he would be the sword of the gods in Choa. He thought Prince Dan might be the heir of the gods. So Lord Sia wanted to raise Choa and declare for Prince Dan, and Lord Korat said he was waiting and praying for a sign from the gods, that’s what he said. They argued about it, him and Sia. Yelling. I had a friend served in Lord Sia’s apartments. He heard. The Kho’anzi and Lord Sia fought about what the gods wanted.”

Then a rush, bitter. “And the old man wouldn’t. Our lord could say the gods meant all folk to be free someday, like in the long ago before Yeh-Lin, but he wouldn’t see anything changed now. He had to keep everything as it was, because the gods set him over us all and he had to keep us safe, all Choa Province safe, as if he ever could, and he said Prince Dan wasn’t the one the gods wanted us to wait for, and he was going to lose his war, and it wasn’t the empress either. So Lord Sia called all the folk of the castle one night without his father knowing, and said, who would fight for him and not be a slave, a lot of Traditionalist rubbish about how everyone was born free in the eyes of the gods. And we all went with him, well, a lot of us. Some. All of us who were children with him, and others, too. All fools together. We took Dernang, and the village serfs rose because he said he’d give them the lands they worked for their own and they believed him, and half the soldiers of the province and some of the young Daro lords and ladies too, from the other families of the clan, even banner-lords, and we said we’d have Prince Dan as emperor. We fought the Kho’anzi’s officers and the soldiers that wouldn’t come in with us, but the old lord wouldn’t fight. Locked himself up in the castle and prayed, I expect,” she said in disgust. “So we had the town and we took the courier-stations, and some banner-ranked from Shihpan took the border-posts in the south—Shihpan’s all for Prince Dan—and General Lord Zhung Musan came up with an army through Numiya and there was fighting. Numiya was for the emperor in the summer, so now it’s for the empress. Zhung Musan’s the empress’s man. There was a lot of fighting. We were all penned up in Dernang in the end and the old lord closed up the castle—”

“Where was Prince Dan? In Dernang?”

“Stupid, how would I know? Dan was in Alwu. There was some big battle over there and he killed some Tua general, a lady from Numiya, I forget her name. We got a lot of soldiers from that, men of the general’s that escaped, and rebels, slaves and serfs from Numiya, useless rabble, mostly, Toi says.” She sniffed. “He should know; he was one of them, an imperial, before he decided he was through with fighting for anyone. They say the prince came into Choa with a picked band to help Sia but I don’t believe it. Why would he? And sometimes they said he was in Shihpan and sometimes they said he was still over in Alwu, so they didn’t really know, did they? And if he did he was too late. Or he got killed before he ever got to Dernang. I heard that. Whatever. So imperial wizards blew open the gates. They had fire-powder. Smoke everywhere. Toi and Osion and I got away with a couple of others. They’re dead. I thought we were going to die too, but we found this lot and they feed us. We protect them, Toi says. We hunt for them, see? The whole town’s full of soldiers and there’s all tents in the horsemarket, and they patrol all the roads in the daylight, but soldiers don’t like the night and they don’t come into the forest. Scared of demons.”

“Most of the demons of Nabban died in Yeh-Lin’s day. What happened to Lord Sia?”

“Killed in the fighting, killed himself, I don’t know. He’s dead, anyway. I saw his head along the road. But that was lucky for him. They’d have sent him to the Golden City, otherwise, I guess.” She hunched herself up. “Stupid fool. I believed him, didn’t I? I—we all did. Sia talked and it was like he was a priest of the shrines, like he’d come from sitting at Father Nabban’s feet to set all right. He killed us all. The gods don’t care. Maybe the ones that say they’re dead are right.”

“No,” Ghu said.

“The castle held out for a while, but they took it not long ago. The old lord surrendered to them at last, himself to die for Lord Sia’s crimes and his family allowed to renounce their name and go to live quiet in exile in Bitha or the colonies or somewhere. He went out to the general and let him put chains on him, and had his banner-lords march out with him and lay down their swords. That’s what they say. General Musan lied, though. He sacked the castle, once he had the lord and his banner-lords. Don’t know who survived that—I snuck as far as Waterfield market a few days ago and saw one of the girls from the kitchen-gardens there, with a man she called her husband. She said both the ladies, our lord’s daughters—their husbands died with Sia—both the ladies and Sia’s wife barricaded the keep and killed themselves rather than be taken by General Musan’s men, and poisoned their children, and it’s only then the house-master opened the door of the keep itself. The general had said they could have all the women once he had the old lord in his hands—”

“Even in this gods-forsaking land that’s against every—” Ahjvar began.

“Who cares about that? But they already had our master then without an arrow wasted, old fool, and he’s back in the keep in his chains, they say. They’ll be sending him to the empress in Lord Sia’s place.” Her eyes shifted between Ghu and Ahjvar. “You understand, horseboy? Everyone’s dead. The empress’s armies’ll come up the rivers once the floods ebb and that’ll be the end of Prince Dan’s rebels in Shihpan and wherever, if he’s dead or if he isn’t. Don’t know why you’d come back, anyway. Go away with your caravan man.”

“Things I need to do,” Ghu said. “You think the Kho’anzi is still prisoner, or have they sent him to the empress already?”

She shrugged. “How should I know? Nothing to me, anyway. Except I think it’s Sia’s baby, not Toi’s. I went with him one night. We all did, us girls from the manor. He said we were all men and women alike, all the same before the gods. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to make it lord of Daro Clan once the old lord dies. Toi’ll probably drown it. Babies cry too much and we might have to run away, he says, if the emperor’s soldiers do come into the forest.”

Nasty little wretch. This land was sick. Poisoned with itself.

“Would the Northron take me, too, with his caravan? I always liked you, Ghu. I did. I wasn’t one of the ones that threw things. I didn’t hit you. I didn’t call names, not worse than anyone else. And you can’t blame me if I did. You were only a dirty brat in the stables and acting like you couldn’t understand plain speech half the time, such a stupid little staring thing. But I did like you. You remember that.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. I could lose the baby; it wouldn’t be a bother to your master, tell him. Osion gave me something, I just haven’t . . . not yet. It’s so far along. She said I might bleed too much. But I will. I’ll show you which huts are ours. You can kill Toi and Osion too. It’ll be easy when they’re asleep.”

“No,” Ahjvar said, and, “Not his master. You don’t listen, do you?” while Ghu was saying, “He’s not Northron.”

Ghu settled down on his heels again, looking up at Ahjvar. No words. Troubled.

“No,” Ahjvar said in Praitannec. “She’s stupid and treacherous. Too dangerous to trust her.”

“Pity her, though.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, try. But no, there’s nothing to trust in her, as she is now, and too much danger in doing so. She’ll sell us wherever she sees a passing advantage.”

He was going to have to kill her. Ghu would ask him, as quietly as he said, pity her. And he himself would care no more than he would wringing a hen’s neck for supper. There was something wrong with him.

She watched Ghu, trying again to smile. “I did like you. I thought you had pretty eyes. I had to come when all the house-children went looking for you. They’d have thought I was demon-touched too if I didn’t. But it was just in fun. Nobody meant anything. You know that. You know what children are like. You can’t blame me for that now. We were just playing.”

“Oh, yes.” Ghu sighed. “Meli, there’s no truth or trust in you. You know this. I’m not putting my friends in your hands. You’re not coming with us, but you shouldn’t go back to the camp.”

Her face twisted to a sneer. “Like you can stop me going where I want.”

Too stupid to live, Ahjvar thought.

“We could stop you, but we won’t. Don’t go back to the camp. The village folk are going to realize that what makes you masters over them is habit, nothing more. They’re going to realize they have far more weapons than the three of you do. You can’t say that you’re all the same before the gods, and then make yourselves lords over a village of slaves through fear of an axe. If he keeps on as he is, Toi will die in the night, and soon, as you said, but not at our hands. Go to Waterfield or go west, take the road to Bitha. You’re a silk-weaver; you have work you can do.”

“And end up some man’s whore again? That’s all the likes of you and me ever will be, horseboy, if we’re not in some safe place with a master to hold his hand over us, and I can go whoring here, get taken and be burnt on the face for a runaway here too, just as easy as trying to get to Bitha. All foreigners there anyway. Better than what’ll come to you, coming back speaking words the Northron puts in your mouth.”

Ahjvar felt the devil before he saw her, behind him, coming around the tree. A prickling on the back of his neck, like a wind risen up.

“Put her to sleep for a while,” Ghu said. “Give us time to get away.”

“Leave her for the leopard,” Ahjvar muttered and caught the woman by the hair to prevent her, when she would have looked around.

“I can do better than sleep.” Yeh-Lin pushed Ahjvar aside, kneeling down to take Meli’s head between her hands. The woman stiffened and then sagged, not in sleep, but relaxing to the verge of it. Yeh-Lin leaned close. “Dreams,” she murmured. “Hush, be still. You were checking the snares. You wandered from the stream. You were lost. Do you see it? Do you remember? You were afraid. A noise. An animal. You didn’t see it, but you heard it snarl. You smelt it. You ran. A branch scratched you. Your wrist hurts. There were thorns. You’re out of breath now. You’ve sat down to catch your breath. You’re not quite sure where you are, all alone in the forest.”

Meli put her wrist to her mouth, chest heaving. Her head turned and Yeh-Lin let her move, looking this way, that. She didn’t seem to see Ghu, still standing before her.

Yeh-Lin looked up at him, touched the woman again. “It’s getting dark now. Night’s almost on us. You hate this hiding in the forest, don’t you, Meli? You’re going to leave it. You’re going to run away from them, tomorrow, when they go hunting, yes, you’ll stay behind and then you’ll leave them, because you hate the trees and the wild animals, the cold and the wet, you hate it all. You’re going to go away, far from here. But now you’re going to try to find your way back. You remember now, you crossed the stream, you’re all turned around. Your legs are all wet from wading. You need to cross the stream again and get back to your camp before all the light goes.”

Ahjvar could feel it himself, a haze of memory, running, cold wet skin, trees and shadows and fear not to be admitted aloud to the others—fear was the core of it, her fear of him shifted aside to the forest, to threats unseen, and her anger, her contempt for Ghu slid over to lodge with thoughts of her comrades, the emotions still there, but turned away, leaving nothing but shadows where he and Ghu had been. Ahjvar shook his head and stepped out of Meli’s line of sight as she surged up and floundered off, heading, in a dodging, uncertain way, for the brook. Ghu dropped her blade at the foot of the tree.

“Tidy,” Yeh-Lin said, and rubbed her hands in the moss as if to clean them. “Well, now, it is getting dark, but I don’t think we want to camp here, do we?”

“No. The highway.” Ghu slung Ahjvar’s pack to him. “We go towards the town, for now.”

They came out of the forest into a landscape of more tended woods, open and barrenly rocky between coppiced stands of charcoal works and the high lord’s timber lands, and then the land dropped away from the plateau in a crumbling escarpment, down into terraced fields and orchards standing leafless, limbless. Ahjvar had thought at first it was only spring pruning, trees pollarded for some farmer’s purpose he didn’t know, until the wind brought the lingering scent of old burning that even rain could not dispel. Skeletons of hacked and fire-ravaged fruit-trees, acre after acre. Wanton destruction. Malice. The moon, just waning from its third quarter, was rising, and the stone-paved highway gleamed like pale water. The roadside clay was churned to muck by the passage of feet and hooves, bridges thrown down and replaced with rough work of newly felled timbers. The winter-flattened weeds of the ditches were trampled and torn to a morass. Beyond the road, easterly and south, the land was flat, flooded fields reflecting moonlight. A stretch of the river lay in that distance, marked by a line of trees rising from the water, a darkness against the gleam and the stars. Walking up the road they passed one village of a couple of dozen close-huddled huts on the edge of the river’s broad interval just above the flooding, sleeping and lightless, another that was nothing but scattered stone and burnt posts, and on a small hill like an island east of it, the raw remains of a wooden stockade and the buildings it had enclosed, a fortified manor house, some vassal of the Daro lord. Taza, Ghu said, where the runaway serfs in the forest had come from. There had been graves, as well, hasty and too shallow, not single graves but pits and trenches of them, wet earth clumped and hummocked, and the furtive scurryings of scavenging rats that the dogs took off chasing, until Ghu called them back.

The smell of rotting flesh. Creatures larger than rats had been unearthing the dead. More than once they came on a disarticulated long bone dragged away and gnawed not quite clean enough. The empress’s general may have taken Dernang, but there had been hard fighting before he ever came to its walls.

Deep night when they saw the walls of Dernang looming before them, with the mountains dark beyond to the north. With those walls a blackness like the mountains against the night sky, the faint tang of death grew heavy and foul. Not ruined trees, these rising poles that flanked the highway on either side. Stakes. Heads.

“We need to get off the road,” Ahjvar pointed out, but he didn’t much like the open fields either. “You said we weren’t going into the town. What are we doing here?”

“Looking,” Ghu said, his voice faint.

“Why?” Yeh-Lin demanded.

He didn’t answer.

They were all inhuman in the night, set just high enough to look down on even a rider. Shapes only, and stench, mostly from the scatter of leavings dropped by crows about the skulls, rotting and half bared. Ghu found one worth looking at. Featureless, not just because of the night. Hair lifted and stirred in a rising wind.

“You know him?” He didn’t see how anyone could.

“Her,” Ghu said distantly. “Sujin. From the stables. Why Meli and not her, to survive? But I thought she’d be here, if Lord Sia was.” It was that soft, distant, soul-wandering voice that always chilled Ahjvar.

“A friend?”

Ghu only shrugged.

“There are torches burning at the gate,” Yeh-Lin observed. “Pre­sumably there are guards. Shall we perhaps not stand here talking?”

“I need to see Lord Sia.”

“Why?”

“To know he’s here.”

“Does it matter?” Yeh-Lin asked.

“To know what Meli said is truth—yes, it matters,” Ghu said wearily. “We need them.”

“Who?” Ahjvar demanded, as Ghu, both dogs sticking close and subdued, tails low, walked on.

“Choa. We need Choa Province. We need this rebel prince, maybe, if he’s still alive and free, if he will serve the gods. We need the Daros.”

With Daro Clan burned into his shoulder, as one might notch a sheep’s ear?

“No,” Ahjvar said.

“If Sia is dead, we need the Kho’anzi.”

“I’ll kill him for you. Both of them, if the young one isn’t dead already.”

“No, Ahj.”

“We were going to the mountain to find your gods.”

“This, first.”

“What,” Yeh-Lin asked, “do we need Choa Province for? It’s hardly a good base, and poor besides. Barely grows enough grain to feed itself.”

Better to ask, who is we? was Ahjvar’s thought. Ghu had found another head worth standing before.

This one . . . the soul was gone, though they may not have intended that. He had heard of chaining a ghost into the world as some ancient punishment long ago, in Nabban or Pirakul, he didn’t remember which. A necromancer’s blasphemy made perverted justice. He hadn’t thought it was literal, but this was a higher post with a crossbar below the smashed skull—even in the night the misshaping of some great blow was plain—and body parts wrapped in chains swinging from it. Yeh-Lin gagged and wrapped her scarf over her face.

“This one, they hated,” she observed. “Prince Dan? Lord Daro Sia?”

“Could be anyone,” Ahjvar muttered, but he didn’t believe it.

“Sia,” Ghu said. He knelt down with a hand splayed against the mud of the roadside, head bowed. Not grief. Thinking. Or listening.

Abruptly, Ghu surged to his feet again. “The castle, Ahj. Come.”

“Why?”

“Need to talk to someone,” Ghu said.

“It’s held by the general who did this. You can’t—”

“Now, while we still have the dark.”

A mist was rising from the chill ditches, tendrils of fog snaking over the terraces, wrapping their legs, clasping like white arms across the road.

“We are three—” But Ghu, the dogs at his heels, was already lost in the dark fields and the rising blindness of the fog.

“Well,” said Yeh-Lin.

Ahjvar’s hands were fisted. Nothing to hit.

“If we don’t follow, will he turn back?” Yeh-Lin asked.

He spun on her, didn’t raise his hand, but she froze where she was. “Do I put faith in him, or not?”

“The boy is hardly infallible.”

Ahjvar turned away again and leapt the ditch, catching up with Ghu in a few long strides.

The fog rose to engulf them like an incoming tide.