In the morning we were all consumed with our aches, save Ivy, but not one of us was willing to admit to it; besides, by the time we’d broken our fast with dried fruit cakes, we were busy with other concerns, as one might expect of students abruptly displaced from their studies. We were on the road with the Church’s outriders long since departed and its knights around us, but the university might as well have come with us.

“The world’s gone topsy-turvy, and no mistake,” Radburn said from his saddle, irritated. “Demons are real. Morgan’s been hiding his true nature from us, and also, he’s another species. Humans can now work magic, but we know not how. The Church, which I had supposed to be a peddler of harmless delusions, is in fact planning social revolution following the culmination of centuries of eugenics. What more?”

“Animals talk,” Kelu said dryly from her perch in front of me.

“That I cannot object to,” he said. “When the animals are so well-spoken.” He dipped his head to her, one hand over his heart. And without falling off his horse—I was impressed.

“Did he call you well-spoken?” Seven whispered to Kelu, incredulous.

Kelu flattened her ears and sniffed.

“What I want to know,” Radburn concluded, “is what does it all mean, at the end of the day?”

“It means change,” Chester murmured.

“None of it signifies,” Guy opined. “Change is the law of history. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. Cannons that can shoot balls across continents that magically guide themselves to their targets. Ships that can sail to the moon and bring back pale foreigners with weirdling bodies. Women becoming capable of bringing forth children without men.”

“That hardly sounds fun,” Radburn said.

“I don’t know,” Ivy said. “Men hardly help with the difficult part of the process anyway—”

I listened with only part of my attention, feeling a warm comfort at their nearness, and Eyre’s; how I had missed this when I was sojourning amid depravity and danger in the Archipelago! And yet when Last drew abreast of me, I was not discomfited; he too was part of my comfort, linking me back to Kemses, and through Kemses to Amhric.

“What do you think of all of this?” I asked in the Angel’s Gift, keeping my voice low.

“All of... what?” He glanced at me. “The matter with humans doing magic?” At my nod, he said, “I am relieved to have aid of any kind if we are to meet a demon in battle. And I am curious to meet the human king.”

“King?”

“Of course.” He tilted his head, the sun falling down the tiger’s-eye brilliance of his hair. “If there is magic, there must be a king to rule those magics, lest they attract demons. It is natural law. Where there is too much light, the darkness comes.”

My heart gave a great double-beat, choking my breath in me.

“Lord Locke?” He leaned from the saddle, hand outstretched, but Almond was already stroking my arm and whispering assurances. Between the two of them, I found my equilibrium, though my thoughts remained shattered.

“I had not thought the matter through,” I admitted at last. “That magic implies a hierarchy of powers. I find myself hoping it will not; that the system is specific to the elves, and that humans will develop some other method. They will not take kindly to the concept of an authority chosen by nature, rather than themselves. Our entire history has primed us to despise a monarchy.”

“Perhaps it will not be needed,” Last offered. “The land here is dry. We have all noted it, how little magic there is around us. Even if we cannot draw on it, we should be able to sense it, but we do not.”

“And yet the land is healthy.” Remembering how the lack of magic had seemed to drain the vitality out of the humans and elves I’d seen, I frowned. A swift look off the road showed a world in the grip of harvest’s splendors, a glorious gradient of coppers and browns painting the autumnal trees, faint frost tipping the sleeping grass, and in the distance, the orchards, and the smell of apples crisp and sweet on the wind.

“Is it? I had assumed it was not viable. There are no people. Not on the road, and not near it either.”

...and there weren’t. Perplexed, I said in Lit, “There are no people.”

I had apparently interrupted a conversation. Everyone glanced at me, over their shoulders or past other people’s mounts.

“I beg your pardon?” Ivy said.

“Why have we not been seen?” I asked. “Where are the travelers? I know it’s autumn, but surely commerce does not cease with a little chill.”

“The Vessel is riding,” Chester replied, surprised. At my obvious bafflement, he blew a breath upwards, ruffling his hair. “Didn’t I tell you once, long ago? When we were discussing arrangements for your trip to Far Horizon. When the Church’s officials ride on errantry, their heralds clear the road. Else we would have run someone down by now, at the pace the Vessel is insisting on.”

I had some vague recollection of such a comment, but so much had happened since.... “I see.” To Last, in Angel’s Gift, “The towns are somewhat off the road anyways. But no, the land here is healthy. I can feel it.”

“Most peculiar,” he said. “Healthy land should create magic for the use of its people.”

“Most peculiar,” I agreed.

Guy was questioning Eyre now about the Vessel’s plans. I listened without full attention, choosing instead to reach for the land, sink through the crust of frozen dew and into the moist soil. With every pulse of my heart, I spread further into the surrounding earth, and in every way it was vivifying, dense. The richness of it pearled like beads beneath my skin and liquefied, settling into the skein of my veins. I quivered once, allowing Almond to steady me again, and concentrated....

...and woke, abruptly, my skin prickling.

“Master?” Almond asked.

“Pardon me,” I said to my friends, hiding my distress. “I’ll be back in a moment.” I urged the drake forward, breaking through the heated debate Eyre, Radburn, and Guy were enjoying but hearing it reform behind me as I joined the Vessel. “Milady... a question, if you would.”

“You need not call me ‘milady,’ sir,” she said, glancing at me. She rode her horse easily, like a woman of gentle birth... or perhaps one who’d been trained since youth for the role she was now undertaking. I wondered who she’d been before her investiture; her skin was dark enough to suggest foreign blood, but that was not surprising: the Church knew no political boundaries and elected its highest officials from among its entire body. “I expect no titles from you. Your kind stand outside our laws.”

“I was human until very recently,” I replied. “Permit me my excess of courtesy.”

She smiled, a real smile, one that made her look much younger. “But then who will call me by my name?” My expression must not have been promising, because she schooled her mirth and said more seriously, “What was it you wished, then, sir?”

“I was touching the land....” I paused, wondering if she would know what I meant; she seemed unfazed, so I continued, “And reaching forward, I find... a wrongness. I have heard this is what demon taint feels like.”

“A wrongness.” She nodded. “As good a description as any. You say you were reaching forward?” At my nod, she said, “And what did it feel like to you, beyond wrong?”

“Cold,” I said. My skin stippled. “Old. Grief, a great deal. An exhaustion... for me to touch it, I mean. Like winter. But threaded through with glass knives.”

“You could be more dramatic about it,” Kelu muttered. Behind me, Almond shivered.

“You feel the battlefield, my lord.” The priestess transferred her gaze back to the road before us, winding down into a shallow bend around copses of evergreens and trees turning gold and red. “Where evil is done, great evil, the memory sinks into the world and clings there.”

“Like ghosts?” I said, disturbed.

“It was what gave rise to the idea of them.” She flashed me another of those smiles. “There are no records in the Church’s history of actual ghosts.”

“I thought the saint was forever returning in the texts,” I replied without thinking.

A sagacious nod. “Oh, of course. But those were visitations. Very different from hauntings.”

Was she teasing me? She was. “The battlefield,” I repeated.

“Threnody-Calling-Forward, we name it now. Originally it was known as the Imperial Sward.”

“Was it! Quite a change.”

“It was somewhat less forbidding then, they say.”

“So the closer we ride to this place....”

“The more you will feel it.” She nodded. “It will not be comfortable, my lord. But at very least you can rest at ease: the battlefield is sick with desolation and memory, but it is not a site of active evil anymore.”

I drew in a breath. “That will have to do, then. Thank you, milady.”

“Rose,” she said. At my quizzical look, she said, “My name is Rose. You may use it as pleases you. Someone should.”

“Vessel Rose,” I said, earning a huff of irritation. I tried a grin on her and received a quelling look and counted myself well pleased.

As I let the drake drop back, she added, “We’ll be staying in a town church four nights hence, my lord. Tell your friends. I’m sure they’ll be pleased to hear it.”

“No doubt,” I said, and let her take the lead again.

When I returned to our group, they were still debating the ordering of a society reshaped by magic. I set the drake to gliding alongside Ivy’s mare, which remained unmoved by the drake’s scent. The other horses had the sense to eye him with equine suspicion.

“Ivy?” I ventured. “Have I missed so much?” I glanced at the others. “The conversation seems to be continuing apace, but you seem... distracted. Did Guy offend your sensibilities again?”

She laughed. “Not for want of trying, I think. No, Morgan. Had I been so easily offended I would have lasted not longer than a week at Leigh. I’m fine.” She glanced toward the trees. “It is just that I have been given a great deal to think about. Not bad, just... a very great deal. God and saints, but magic!” She bit her lip, which I observed with worry and what I fear was besotted adoration—how could such an expression be so endearing? But then she knotted her hand in her reins and cautiously reached toward me; the drake sidestepped, putting me close enough to touch fingers to hers. “I am sorry I am not better company.”

“You are always good company. Even when we don’t speak.”

Her shy smile was softer than the Vessel’s, but somehow more intimate. I blushed.

“All of this is a useless exercise without knowing more about what magic does,” Chester said, voice carrying into the silence between us. He turned in his saddle, steadying himself on the cantle, and finished, “How about it, Locke? What exactly does magic do?”

“I... I don’t know precisely,” I admitted.

“How can you not know?” Guy let his horse drop back abreast of Ivy’s. “You were on an island full of magic-wielding elves.”

“I saw very little magic wielded,” I said. “The enchantment performed its effects via magic, but it was the enchantment that was doing the performing. Most elves cannot cast magic anymore, having been trapped by the spell. They call it Dissipation; when the magic one has access to is immediately appropriated by the enchantment to fuel the immortality, and one no longer has any power for anything else.”

“Most elves, you say,” Chester said. “But not all. Yes? What about your sorcerer?”

What about him? “I don’t know,” I said. “He floated a tower. He changed the shape of his body. But he is an exception... is he not?” I glanced at Last, who remained my faithful shadow. Switching to Angel’s Gift, I said, “Have you understood the discussion?”

“Yes,” he said. “Though I would not trust myself to answer in the human tongue. You may tell them that the magic done by the priestess is a very common exemplar of woman’s magic. For a man’s... Lord Sedetnet’s lifting of the tower, that is an uncommon example.”

“Men and women do different magics?” I said, startled. “But why?”

Last shrugged, a liquescent motion across the yoke of his shoulders. “Why are women born with wombs, and men without? We are different, Lord Locke. In magic as well as in form. Men’s magic affects the external world. Women’s magic, the internal. The shapechange, the healing, the magic of the blood... that is a woman’s talent. Men make their swords burn when they strike with them, or fly without wings, or bring storms.”

“Fly... without wings?”

“Of course,” he said. “Women fly with them, if they wish to fly. They make wings for themselves.” He paused. “Am I explaining this well?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am just... surprised, is all. I had no idea there was this stratification within elven society. Does it go all the way through?”

“I don’t understand your meaning?” Last shifted on his horse, hands folded over the pommel. “There have always been roles solely allowed to women, or to men. To be guards, for instance... that is the work of men. If a woman wishes to do it, she must give up her womanhood and live as a man.”

“I... I beg your pardon?”

Last tilted his head. “You did not know? Two of your guards were women, Lord Locke.”

He could not have astonished me more had he sprouted these mythical wings we’d been discussing. I glanced back, but the elves were part of the outriders now, and only Last remained with me as bodyguard. “But how is this accomplished?”

“Morgan?” Guy said dryly. “This is a reminder that we were having a discussion, and are awaiting your contribution to it.”

“We will talk more of this later, I hope,” I said to Last, and switched back to Lit. “I’m afraid this is a topic on which my ignorance is so vast that it’s hard to begin to shed any illumination at all. But to heal, as the priestess does, that is a common example. As apparently is weather-working, and manipulation of the body and the environment.”

Radburn stared at me. “That... covers just about everything. What’s the limit on the power to change things?”

I glanced at Last, who said in painstaking Lit, “The person’s ability.”

“Wonderful,” Radburn said. “We’re back to some people having more power over others, and no way for anyone to change that. And you want to make an equitable society out of this? The notion is ludicrous.”

“People aren’t equal now,” Guy pointed out. “Some are more talented. Some are born with more wealth. Some are more attractive—”

“There is a vast difference between ‘I was born with more money’ and ‘I was born able to call hurricanes,’“ Radburn replied, lip curled.

“Is there?” Guy asked. “The man with more money can buy all the cargo space on the ships going overseas, thereby preventing the man with less from utilizing them just as effectively as the man who stops the ships by anchoring a storm over the harbor.”

“But the man with money depends on others in order to enact his tyrannies—”

“What do you think of all this, sir?” I asked Eyre quietly.

He rode in silence a little while longer, listening to the debate grow more vociferous. At length, he said, “I think the Vessel was right. We’re not ready.”

In his accented Lit, Last offered, “One is never ready for power.”

“No,” Eyre agreed. “But Radburn is correct. This is a sort of power we are ill-equipped to wield, and I think we are due for a great deal of grief as we assimilate the changes.”

“We will make shift,” Chester said, breaking his silence. “We needed parity.”

“Parity?” Radburn asked, confused. “With whom? The Church?”

But Ivy was peering at him, frowning. “With the elves? But no one knows they exist save in folklore.”

“We might not have known the elves were missing,” Chester said to her. “But we felt their absence in our spirits and our understanding of the world nonetheless.”

I glanced at him sharply, but he said nothing more… and the priestess called for a canter, and we settled into the rhythm of riding for the day.