The following morning did not find us in charity with one another, however. I was saddling the drake, which had gone hunting before dawn, when I heard Ivy say, “Oh, but this is outside of enough!”

I met Chester’s eyes over the back of the drake, then turned to see what had pricked forth Ivy’s ire. She was standing, hands on her hips, facing down Carrington who was avoiding her gaze by making a study of the straps and buckles on her mount’s tack. None of which needed the tightening, if I was any judge.

“I am talking to you so there’s no use pretending otherwise,” Ivy said. “You can’t honestly let this continue.”

“What’s this now?” I asked when it became clear that no one wanted to throw themselves on the pyre.

“She’ll slow us down! Or rip herself open on her own horse. It’s ridiculous. It can be fixed!”

Eyre had drawn nigh now, concern drawing his voice taut. “Mary? Are you hurt? You didn’t say anything—”

“I’m fine.”

“She’s bleeding,” Ivy said, scowling.

“All women bleed,” Carrington said with frosty dignity.

“Not that way. You’re bleeding from saddle sores, for God’s sake, and I can make them go away!”

“Mary!” Eyre was distressed now. “Is this true?”

Carrington drew away from us, putting her back to her horse’s side. “There’s no call to make such a fuss over it.”

“There is if it slows us down,” Chester said. “Ivy’s right. If you’re galled, you need to be healed.”

“Besides,” Kelu said, “I’m not the only thing that’s attracted to the smell of blood.”

Carrington paled. “I won’t be ensorcelled.”

“Or touched by demon powers, yes, we know,” Ivy said. “But I’m not an elf, you’ll note.” Her exasperation faded. “Please, just… let me fix it. It’s hard to watch someone suffering and not make an attempt at the healing. Especially when doing so involves the evocation of something precious and wonderful. And you’ve never experienced it! You will not think it demon-brought when you feel it, I assure you.”

“Many foul things feel fair,” Carrington said. She grabbed the pommel of her saddle and dragged herself astride with a wince she hid from nearly everyone; I saw it only because my time among the elves had sensitized me to even the faintest sign of pain. “I can go on.”

Ivy began to protest but I quelled her with a touch to the shoulder. “Very well. But if you delay us, we will treat you.”

“I won’t delay you.”

I left her to Eyre, who walked to her horse’s shoulder to begin a whispered, impassioned discussion. Ivy, trailing me, said, “You should have let me.”

“If it’s as bad as you say, she’ll have no choice but to accept treatment soon enough,” I said. “Perhaps she’ll be more grateful for it then.”

“Or more resentful because you had to save her,” Kelu muttered.

“The genet speaks truth,” Last said once I’d mounted. “Delay does no good, perhaps much harm.”

“The elves forced much upon me against my will.” I wound a hand in the mane of the drake. “I won’t force anyone else, unless we have no choice at all.”

I led again, guiding us blindly toward the source that pulsed its distress and sickness; as if I was returning to what I was before the Archipelago, when my life had been circumscribed by pains I didn’t understand. If Carrington suffered, she did admirable work hiding it from us, and we ran abreast of the chill wind as it streamed past our beasts’ hot flanks. I slowed us near midday, and we dismounted to eat, stretch, let the mounts rest. Then we resumed our labors, and rode hard until sunset, when I allowed us to fall back to a gentler pace as we sought a good campsite.

“Master,” Almond said, hesitant. “Is it true that all women bleed?”

Of all the topics she had brought to me, this one caught me the furthest off my guard. I wrenched my attention from scanning the horizon for some small rent or hummock that might make us a good place to stop for the night and was trying to formulate some answer when Kelu stepped into the breach. “All natural female creatures do. That doesn’t count elves or us.”

“Elves are natural,” I said.

“Elven women don’t bleed,” Kelu said.

“What?” Ivy nudged her mount over until it was trotting alongside the drake. “What do you mean they don’t bleed?”

“They don’t.” Kelu shrugged, a movement I felt against my back. “I was around Amoret’s humans enough to notice the difference.”

“But how can they have children without bleeding?” Ivy asked, perplexed.

“They don’t,” Kelu said.

“Not often, at least,” Almond added, apologetic, for Ivy looked stunned.

Amhric spoke little during our discussions, when we had them. When he chose to make his contributions, everyone grew still, as if sighting something rare and precious that might flee if approached. “Immortality made us infertile.”

“Probably for the best,” Eyre said. “Or you would have overrun your islands soon enough. No one dying, and yet the population being replaced at the same rate as before it could no longer die? A recipe for disaster.”

“Yet who would trade that for no children?” Ivy asked.

“Children are a burden.”

Carrington’s intrusion into the discussion was so unexpected that she garnered a silence similar to the ones that surrounded Amhric’s speeches.

“Children are not a burden,” Ivy replied, irritated. And then, self-consciously, “At least, they can be, but they’re a joyful burden.”

“And you would know this how?” Carrington squinted at her. “You are here, aren’t you? Did you leave some precious bundle of joy behind to gallivant off to fight demons?”

Ivy flushed. “I’m not yet married.”

“Exactly. Because such adventures come to those without the burdens of parenthood.”

“Fathers fight wars,” Eyre said after a moment.

“Fathers do, yes. Mothers don’t.”

“Female elves do.” Last startled them into quiet.

“Magic makes equals of all of us,” Chester said, nodding. “Ivy’s skills are as needful as mine.”

“And neither of you up to a sorcerer,” Last said.

“Puts us in our place, doesn’t it,” Ivy muttered, but she was smiling a little.

“Do you think,” Almond said after a moment, “if we bled, we might have children? Real ones, like humans do. Not like we were made, out of the blood of the Fount, and fully grown.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It would take a sorcery beyond any we know to change you, though.” When her ears drooped, I squeezed her. “But we will seek an answer for the genets as well. There must be one.”

Kelu snorted. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

That evening Carrington accepted her meal in silence, then bedded down far enough from the fire that I thought she would suffer unnecessarily from the cold. Because I said nothing, Chester and Ivy left off. It was Eyre who joined me after the others had lain down to sleep until their watches.

“Morgan....”

I shook my head, just enough to stay him. “You don’t have to apologize for her.”

“I do when you allowed her to come because of me.” He snorted at my expression. “Oh, it’s obvious to anyone with a working brain, yes. It was a generous gesture, my student. I appreciate it. But I fear Chester is right. She will slow us down soon enough. And her loyalties are... divided.”

“Fortunately, there’s no one to betray us to for miles around.” When he huffed an unwilling laugh, I said, “I’m not so sure her loyalties are as divided as you believe.”

“You are offering her too much kindness, I’m afraid.”

I shook my head and took my spectacles off, turned them so that the dim firelight caught their fractured edges, red and orange darting down the cracks. “I begin to believe I was wrong about these.”

“Ah?”

I offered them to him, and he examined them with the same meticulous interest he’d shown when I first broke them. “I thought they revealed magical potential. Your peers, Roland and Powlett, were holes to me... darknesses where I had seen light in others. But when they attacked me I drew on them, and there was magic there to be drawn.”

“Was there? Interesting. Perhaps all things that live give off magic?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But if living gives off magic, why then do some creatures glow more than others? Or if some living things give off more magic, why are smaller creatures, like the genets, so bright?” I shook my head. “No. I begin to wonder if perhaps what these indicate is... benevolence toward my cause.”

Eyre’s brows shot up.

“You glow powerfully,” I said. “More than your small store of magic should explain. So do those who love me. Last glows more now that he has accepted me as his prince. Those things are leading, but not conclusive. It wasn’t until I realized that Carrington has always glowed, just a little, that I wondered if what the spectacles reveal is allegiance. If so, perhaps she is my experimental case.”

“Does she still glow, then?”

I nodded.

Eyre sighed, drew his knees up and rested his arms on them, leaning forward a little. He’d always been a thin man, but our journey had whittled the remaining nonessentials from him, left him with hollows beneath his eyes and new muscle along his arms. He still looked the professor, but one could imagine him bearing arms. “There are women now at Leigh, though they’re rare. Your Ivy... she has had to live with being a minority among the student body, but there was never any question of her being allowed to apply. Mary was the second woman to attend any university in Evertrue, and she had to fight to prove women were even capable of higher learning.”

“She doesn’t seem that old,” I said.

“She’s not. But it wasn’t very long ago that we held the belief. She has spent her life in the pursuit of this quest, and it has changed her. For the better in some ways. But in less positive ways as well.”

“As would we all change, were we so beleaguered,” I said. “I don’t hold her attitudes against her, sir. Though I’m grateful that Ivy has had a somewhat easier time of it.”

“Somewhat.” Eyre shook his head. “So long as there are children to raise, someone must do the raising. Perhaps it doesn’t matter who undertakes which role, in the end, though some will argue that women are more natural nurturers. But nothing will change that the roles will always need filling.”

“Unless there are no children,” I murmured.

“Unless. But that, I judge, would truly be a demon-wrought fate,” Eyre said. “Children remind us to promise ourselves to the future. They remind us why the future is worth the promise.” I glanced at him, and he laughed, quiet. “Fine words from a childless bachelor, you are thinking. And perhaps I have regretted that. But all of my students have been my children, for a short time. And I have loved them all for that.”

I smoothed my hand over my thigh. “And would you be immortal, if you could be?”

Eyre twitched. “Hard question. Who longs to die? But I find I fear the prospect of immortality just as much as I fear dying. Death may bring us the specter of the unknown... but it would at least be new. To live on and on, without possibility of reprieve, and to reach a point where all the world’s wonders are old and stale....” He trailed off, then shook his head. “No. I could not want that either.”

After he left, I fingered the ring on its chain and wondered again how I could offer Ivy a life without children. She said she could pay that price now, but it was easy to make promises when confronted with death and an uncertain future. If we survived to make good on our vows, would she come to regret the sterility of our union?

Or was a promise made when confronted with death more likely to be a true one, because it exposed our priorities to us?

Some days, I wished myself less capable of debate.

In the morning, Carrington was fevered.

“I didn’t know saddle sores could lead to serious illness,” I said as Eyre checked her brow.

“Any rip in your skin can lead to serious illness if untreated,” Chester said, bringing water in one of the foldable cups. He handed it to Eyre then scowled up at me. “We’re losing time.”

“We are,” I agreed. “But she’s one of us, and we won’t abandon her.”

“Then this is Ivy’s work, if she will oblige us.”

Amhric moved past me and sat at Carrington’s shoulder. With gentle hands he drew her head into his lap and took the damp cloth from Eyre. When Ivy hesitated, he said, “Come. I can help.”

Ivy crouched alongside the Carrington’s restless body. “I’ve healed small things before,” she confessed to him, shy. “Nothing like this, though.”

“The land has little to give,” Amhric says. “But your friends have power, if yours will not suffice.” He lifted his golden gaze to the rest of us. “I have no ability to compel, nor would I wish to did I have it. Will you contribute if it becomes needful?”

Chester shifted beside me, but nodded. Last said, “My king, whatever is needful.”

“Can we...?” Almond asked.

Amhric shook his head. “Alas, I cannot take from you without unraveling all that holds you together. But if you wish, sit by me and help me with the towels.” When she’d joined him, he nodded to Ivy. “Proceed. Slowly, but have faith. You are capable of this, and if you run to the end of your strength, I will augment it.”

Ivy drew in a long breath and nodded once, then rested her hands on Carrington’s thighs. Closing her eyes, she drew on her small flame, and I could sense it wavering as she guided it toward the other woman’s body. The moment of connection was a revelation; Ivy gasped in and frowned in concentration, and the magic flowed more naturally. Carrington absorbed it like dry earth beneath rain, and needed more of it than Ivy could give... and so Amhric drew on us all, and I saw the master talent at work. He did not merely take what he found; he pulled a little from each of us, a tug here, a touch there, and never more than that person could give. When he drew it from us, it interwove with the threads he drew from the others, so that we felt each other: a taste, a comforting brush, a sense of communion.

He’d told me long ago that the king balanced the magics of the world. He’d failed to communicate that the balance involved this warm closeness that brought us more in harmony with one another. It was nothing less than prayer. Was this feeling what Winifred had created with the Church? Had that been part of the angelic purpose?

“There,” Amhric said softly. He touched her knee, drew her back from her trance.  “There, Ivy. You are done.”

“Oh!” Ivy sat back, covered her face with her hands and stifled a sob. Hers was not the only wet face. The rest of us did not speak. Could not.

Carrington shifted against Amhric’s lap, blinked and opened confused eyes. Seeing it, Eyre crouched alongside her and took her hand. “Mary? How do you feel?”

“What... what am I doing on the ground? I feel....” She stopped, looked up and saw Amhric.

“Still think they’re demons?” Ivy asked, brushing tears from her cheeks.

Carrington said nothing, pushing herself upright. She touched her knee, just a flutter of fingertips. “You... did that?”

“With everyone’s help,” Ivy said.

“Yes,” Carrington murmured. “Yes, I remember that somehow.” She looked directly at Chester. “You don’t trust me at all.”

“Not hard to divine,” Chester said, but his voice was husky.

“Your touch was like licorice. I don’t like licorice.” Carrington laughed, covered her brow with a hand, started shaking. Then she was crying, and while Eyre propped her up on one side it was Ivy who embraced the other.

“Maybe I was wrong,” she said at last, wiping her eyes.

Chester hesitated, then said, “Maybe I was too.”

“Can you ride?” Kelu asked. “The day’s not getting any younger.”

“I can ride, yes.” She squared her shoulders, sighed out. “You could have left me behind.”

“We’re not villains from a lending library novel,” Ivy said tartly, but she helped the other woman up. “There. All better. Your clothes, I’m afraid, I can’t affect. Maybe one of the men?”

“Can mend my clothes!” Carrington shook her head. “I haven’t lost every practical art chasing academia. I can take care of it myself when next we stop.” She drew in a deep breath. “Thank you. All of you.”

After we’d mounted and resumed our ride, Kelu said, “I didn’t think she’d come around.”

“I have my moments of wisdom, I like to think.”

“The problem is that they’re moments.”

I laughed. “I’ll say it before Almond can: Kelu!”

Almond said, “Maybe wisdom is like happiness that way. It never comes in anything but moments.”

“Don’t excuse him,” Kelu said. “It’ll go to his head.”

“Don’t concern yourself on that count,” I said. “I know how little I know, most days. And every day, I know less.”

“You never did say where we were going.”

This was the first time Carrington had tried to begin a discussion, and the hesitancy of her voice betrayed just how rarely she spoke so. A woman admitted to the university when women weren’t: she must have trained herself to never confess her doubts, show weakness. Academia had been her Archipelago; I sympathized strongly with her, imagining the forces that had created her.

“We are chasing the sorcerer,” I replied. “Our goal is to stop him from summoning demons.”

“You know where he’ll go? Is there a place where demon-summoning is done, then, noted in some elven document?”

I detected none of her prior hostility in her tone: she had the mien of a scholar attempting to understand something that puzzled and interested her. So I replied, “There are no such documents, no, and there is no map leading us to where he goes, save the one in me.” Anticipating her next question, I said, “The feeling you had when you woke that connected you to each of us. You recall it?”

She looked at us, a quick moving glance. “I still feel it, a little.”

I nodded. “I feel a wrongness in the land. An old and desperate sickness. That is where we are going.” I pointed. “Somewhere there. Not quite in the mountains, but in their high skirts.”

I had been anticipating skepticism, or confusion. The light that sprang into her eyes made no sense at all. She twisted toward Eyre and said, “John! Mother’s Stand!”

He tilted his head. “I hadn’t thought of it... but I wouldn’t have. You’re the one familiar with the legends.”

“The legends of what?” I asked.

“North of Vigil there is said to be a place where the barren queen made her pilgrimage to make a request of a spirit to grant her a son, begotten without dishonor and without the aid of a man—”

“And the witch set her a task,” I said, remembering a desperate day in a cage spent telling folk stories to genets. “Which involved the unquiet dead, and much misadventure, and the number of tasks varies depending on the version of the story....” I stopped, stunned. “You mean to tell me there is physical evidence proving the tale of the Maiden Queen and the Witch? One that predates the birth of King Eddard’s miracle child?”

“I don’t know that it predates it,” Carrington said. “But yes. I found a map that seemed to indicate that Mother’s Stand was a real place, and spent three years researching it. One of my goals in being assigned to Vigil was to mount an expedition to see if I could find the passage to the Stand.”

“Do you remember where it is?” I asked, breathless. If she said no....

Carrington grimaced. “I remember the map, lord prince. That is no guarantee, though. You know maps. Their worth is entirely dependent on the skill of the mapmaker, and historical mapmakers were not known for their accuracy.”

“But you could guess,” I said. “And I could corroborate your guesses with the landsense.”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Then please,” I said. “Tell me where you think we should be going.”

“North is good. Beyond that... there should be a stream, a little to the west. That was the first landmark.”

“Then we shall seek a stream. And I thank you, Doctor.”

She was still wary of me, just a touch. “You’re welcome, lord prince.”

“Call him Morgan,” Eyre said. “He hasn’t graduated yet.”

I snorted, but at her inquisitive look, said, “Morgan is fine, yes.”

“Why is it called Mother’s Stand?” Almond ventured. “Please?”

“In some of the versions of the folk story,” Carrington said, “the Mother fails in her aims. She is overcome by the tasks set her by the witch, and dies in their attempt. One of the things I wanted to discover was whether the Mother’s Stand was a shrine… or a tomb.”

“Maybe it will be both,” Chester murmured.

A chill traveled my spine, pricking gooseflesh up my back. I urged the drake back into a lope. “Time is wasting.”