Anskar awoke with a groan. The stench of blood clung to his nostrils. He was sure it wasn’t his own. He was naked beneath a scratchy woolen blanket, and when he moved, he heard the creak of wood.

His eyes came into focus on the underside of an oilskin tarp. He could only see it, he realized, because of the dull glow from a hooded lantern set on the bed of the wagon—for it was Braga’s wagon in which he had come to. There was barely room to move on account of the tools and supplies the blacksmith had brought with her from Sansor, but she had cleared enough space amid the clutter for a bed of straw and a blanket, which it seemed she had surrendered to Anskar.

“Clothes are by your feet,” Braga said. She was seated on an anvil to Anskar’s left. “I fetched them from your room. The blood-drenched ones you were wearing, I put into a sack, along with the bits of that bastard Gann.”

She stared at Anskar through narrowed eyes. Her cheek twitched, and she grimaced and looked away.

“You put Gann in a sack?”

“Four sacks. Good hemp weave, too. Scraped him into them. Whatever it was you did, you did it good.”

“He tried to kill me,” Anskar said. “Did anyone…”

“No one saw, least not to my knowledge. I brought you here, cleaned you up, then went back and cleaned up the mess you’d left on the road. There was blood. Lot of blood. Brains too, and chunks of flesh. Dare say he deserved it, but even so…” Her eyes were dark and inscrutable in the poor light. “They were good sacks. I reckon you owe me.”

Anskar levered himself up onto an elbow. “What did you do with them?”

“The sacks? Took them to the dung heaps on the edge of town. I emptied out Gann’s steaming remains, then shoveled shit on top of them. If I was a poet, I’d say it was poetic justice. But I ain’t a poet, I’m a blacksmith. Threw the sacks and your ruined clothes in the river. Doubt anyone’ll find them anytime soon. Hopefully not before we’re long gone.”

“And Lanuc?” Anskar asked.

“Haven’t seen him. He don’t know. No reason why he should, neither.”

“But he’ll realize Gann is missing.”

Braga hunched her shoulders and stared down at her feet. “Then I expect he’ll ask you about it, sooner or later.”

After that, she withdrew into herself, growing sullen and silent.

Anskar lay back on the straw, though he cast aside the blanket, which made him itch. He felt… He couldn’t quite articulate how he felt. Odd was the best he could manage. He’d expected to at least feel a few aches and pains from being flung to the ground by Gann’s sorcerous ward, but the only pain was in his knuckles, which were raw and smeared with dried blood. He felt a strange sort of tiredness too, deflated, yet with the afterglow of euphoria—the same as when he made love. The Warrior’s Fire he’d snatched from Gann had consumed him. It had driven his actions and narrowed his awareness to almost nothing. He remembered snarling and pounding, gouging and biting, but it was as if he were recalling someone else’s memories—or rather, the sense impressions of some savage beast.

That made a strange kind of sense. Divine gifts had to be earned. They had to be grown into over time, through trials and testing. Yet Anskar had simply wrenched the Warrior’s Fire from Gann. It was no wonder he had lost control.

He could sense the Warrior’s Fire within him still. A seed only, a latency, buried at his core, but a part of him now. A part he had to ignore, because although it was primarily a power of the dawn-tide, the dusk-tide could give it the destructive virulence that made it so lethal.

A niggling voice in his head told him he had already broken his oath by wresting the power from Gann and using it.

Not true, he countered, trying to convince himself. The healing that had enabled him to excise Gann’s power and make it his own was a gift of the Healer that manifested through the dawn-tide. That seemed to imply that the Warrior’s Fire was also a divine gift, albeit one that made use of the dawn and the dusk. But he was fudging the issue, he knew. It was a slippery slope he was on once more.

“How long since you brought me here?” he asked.

Braga shrugged, then pushed down on her thighs to stand, head bowed beneath the tarp. “Some hours. Be dawn soon, I reckon. Now you’re awake, we might as well move the wagon. Farther we are from the scene of the crime, the fewer suspicions we’ll arouse.”

Anskar nodded, and Braga pushed her way through the tarp at the front of the wagon to the driver’s bench.

“But won’t they work out it was me who killed Gann, whatever we do?” he said. “Everyone knew he had a vendetta against me. It was self-defense, but what I did to him…”

“Like I said, if anyone cares, Lanuc will want to speak with you.”

And then Anskar stumbled as Braga flicked the reins and the oxen lumbered forward.

Braga parked the wagon a few streets away, and Anskar sat up front with her to greet the dawn-tide. She showed no reaction as the eldritch currents washed over him. Probably she had seen it before, living so long among the Order’s knights. It felt good to fill his dawn-tide repository. The deflated feeling left him, and he grew stronger and somehow cleaner.

A swift check told him his dusk- and dark-tide repositories were safely contained by their barriers, no more than brooding presences.

Braga clambered down from the wagon, telling Anskar she was going in search of breakfast. He joined her, and they were settled at a table in a busy eatery swollen with early morning diners when Lanuc found them.

Anskar steeled himself as the older knight approached, but to his relief, Lanuc didn’t mention Gann.

“Wolf your food down and meet me and Gisela outside,” he told Anskar. “Just you. They only want me and two others to attend.”

“Attend what?” Anskar asked, smiling his thanks to the server, who set down a steaming mug of tea in front of him and then handed Braga a beer.

“You’ll see soon enough,” Lanuc said. “I’m not happy about it, but if we want supplies and to get on our way without any trouble, then it’s better only a few of us bear the shame.”

He left without saying any more. Braga raised an eyebrow, then tipped back her head and took a long pull of her beer.

Toasted bread, smoked fish, and eggs had sounded so good when Anskar ordered them, but the tension coming off Lanuc had turned his stomach sour.

The Church of the Lady Sylva Kalisia was by far the largest building in Kyuth, but it would have been dwarfed by most of the structures in Sansor. Anskar thought it looked as if it had been thrown together in a hurry with whatever materials were to hand. Mismatched, uncut stones were heaped one on top of another in the manner of a drystone wall. The tower was a lopsided pyramid of weatherworn planks nailed about a skeletal frame. One good gust of wind, Anskar fancied, and it would fall down.

The interior was little better. The floor was hard-packed mud, the walls devoid of plaster, and the underside of the lopsided tower was draped with cobwebs. A stepped stone structure stood in the center of the floorspace, atop it a patinated bronze statue of a striking naked woman with feathered wings extending from her back: Sylva Kalisia.

A large gold-plated chalice sat at the statue’s feet. It was inscribed with swirling script, some of it Skanuric, Anskar thought, but most of it indecipherable to him. Offerings were heaped around the steps of the stone structure: skulls of rodents and birds, coins, locks of hair, scraps of clothing. The air was thick with a musky incense that tickled the back of his throat, and there was a charge to the atmosphere that made his spine crawl.

The church had no seats, but the interior was packed with townsfolk standing around the central figure of the Lady. Anskar recognized the mayor, Frankin Glore, and the priest of the Elder, Brother Stevos.

“We should bring our soldiers through the gates and have them burn this abomination down,” Gisela whispered in Anskar’s ear.

He couldn’t tell if she was joking. Lanuc ground his teeth and shook his head.

As they waited, Anskar ran his eyes over the locals, some of them coughing due to the incense, others watching the flickering shadows on the walls cast by the hundreds of rushlights set on ledges. Brother Stevos bobbed his head and flashed smiles at the worshipers, as if doing so could make everything all right. But there was nothing right about the worship of heathen gods.

At the far end of the church—he took it to be north—Anskar glimpsed a rippling of the shadows, and then a slender, dark figure emerged. Anskar’s first impression was of some demonic entity shadow-stepping into the church. Then, as the figure resolved into a woman, he thought it might be Sylva Kalisia herself.

The locals made claws of their hands and placed them over their breasts. Brother Stevos did the same, at the same time dipping his head in a deferential bow. Lanuc’s jaw clenched. Gisela narrowed her eyes and muttered under her breath.

For it was no demon that had emerged from the shadows at the end of the church, and it was no goddess either. Anskar hadn’t noticed it before, in the gloomy interior, but it was a heavy black veil that had rippled, not the shadows, and the figure, while indeed a woman, was gray-haired and more emaciated than slender. In the reflected glow of the hundreds of rushlights, her eyes blazed like embers. Involuntarily, Anskar touched four fingers and thumb to his chest. Gisela noticed and nodded in approval.

Wreathed in a black gown that fell to her feet, and aided by an effect of the flickering rushlights, the High Priestess glided across the floor, the locals parting for her, until she came to rest upon the lowest step of the central stone structure, where the gifts to the Lady had been left. She stood there a long while, running her eyes over those gathered before her, turning slowly to take in those behind. Anticipation hung heavy in the air, and there was a hungry look in the eyes of many of the worshipers.

The High Priestess lifted the gold-plated chalice from the feet of the statue and raised it above her head.

“The realm of the dead is as nothing to those who serve the goddess,” she said.

Anskar held his breath, feeling as if the High Priestess’s words were intended for him.

“That realm is a limbo for the unbelievers,” she went on. “The abode of necromancers and the source of their unnatural power. But we who serve, we who are carried above that gloomy half-existence in the arms of the Lady, we who are borne aloft by her outstretched wings, we will pass over the realm of the dead in the blink of an eye. For us, it will be merely a bridge into the plentiful pastures and mountainous glory the Lady has prepared for us, her servants. But only if we are united to her.”

She held the chalice out before her. In its depths Anskar saw a bubbling red liquid. Mist or steam poured over the lip of the chalice, pooled at the High Priestess’s feet, and crept out across the floor of the church.

Gisela met Anskar’s eye and gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. He interpreted it as a warning not to participate in whatever was about to happen.

The High Priestess raised the chalice to her mouth and sipped from it; then her tongue snaked out to lick a red smear from her lips. She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the ceiling, smiling rapturously, then shuddered and gave a low moan.

Opening her eyes, she poured a measure of the liquid over the feet of the representation of her goddess atop the stone structure. Crimson cascaded down the steps, an impossible volume of glistening blood-like sludge that coated the entire structure and the gifts at its base. And still the chalice was not empty.

Turning back toward the north of the church, the High Priestess returned to the heavy black veil she had emerged from, turned back to the congregation, and held out the chalice.

The worshipers formed a long line and went before the High Priestess one at a time to drink from the chalice. No matter how many devotees came, how many drank, the chalice remained full to the brim, mist billowing from the surface of whatever liquid it contained.

Anskar saw Mayor Frankin Glore take a long drink, then wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, which seemed to irritate the High Priestess.

Lanuc, Anskar, and Gisela lingered at the back of the line, as if they might somehow be spared. Brother Stevos hung back with them, giving nods of reassurance and smiling like an imbecile. For a priest of the Elder, he struck Anskar as a fool, a man who had blurred right and wrong to justify all manner of atrocities in the name of some misguided sense of tolerance.

Anskar’s attention was drawn away from the priest as Lanuc leaned in to whisper, “I went to see Gann early this morning to persuade him to end this nonsensical blood feud, and was told he hadn’t been seen since late last night.”

Anskar swallowed. He didn’t know what to say.

Lanuc shook his head in irritation. “The last thing our mission to the Kingdom of the Thousand Lakes needs is a blood feud, and while it is traditional for Order knights not to interfere with the ways of the Warrior’s priests, I thought it was at least worth a try. A pity I couldn’t find him.”

“A pity,” Anskar agreed.

Brother Stevos hissed at them to be quiet. “Respect is due to the worshipers and their beliefs,” he whispered.

Lanuc clamped his jaw shut, but Gisela said, “No respect is due to heathens, Brother. As a priest of the Elder, you of all people should know that.”

Slowly, the line went down as those who had drunk from the chalice made their way outside.

And then it was Brother Stevos’s turn to drink, which he did with a little flourish, giving Anskar, Gisela, and Lanuc a nod and a wink before barely wetting his lips with the red liquid. He sighed as if he had just enjoyed a fine wine, and handed the chalice back to the High Priestess.

As he made his way toward the exit, he mouthed to Lanuc, “It’s perfectly all right. Menselas understands.”

The High Priestess held the chalice out toward Lanuc, who visibly stiffened.

“Father,” Gisela warned, but Lanuc took a step forward and accepted the chalice, raising it to his lips.

“Oh, by the Five!” Gisela cursed, and stormed out of the church.

The High Priestess raised an amused eyebrow.

Lanuc grimaced at his daughter’s retreating back and switched his gaze to Anskar, eyes wide in an unspoken question as he wiped the red stain from his lips. “And you?” he seemed to say. “Will you embarrass me too?”

The High Priestess held out the chalice.

“I’ve already made too many compromises,” Anskar said.

He turned his back on the High Priestess and her chalice and strode after Gisela.