THE COBBLER LOOKED AROUND, panicked. “No, they can’t be. They can’t. The angel—”

Ann caught Franny’s gaze and grabbed the key, and the two of them ran for the street. The cobbler raced after them, shouting. Franny seized a hammer from the counter and threw it at him, and he groaned and fell to the floor.

They hurried outside. The shouts were louder here; it sounded as if the crusaders had reached the market square.

“Which way’s the castle?” Ann asked.

“Over here.”

They ran through the streets, away from the market. They got lost again almost immediately, finding themselves in a narrow road with three ways leading out. High rooftops blocked their view.

“Which one?” Ann said.

“God, I don’t know. Here—this one goes uphill, at least.”

They ran up the pathway and reached a dead end, hemmed in by the backs of several houses. They turned around, back to the narrow road and the three choices.

Ann took one of the two remaining roads at random. It let them out onto a larger street, one she had never seen before. Someone shouted, sounding very close, and someone else screamed.

They ducked into an alleyway and peered out. A horse and rider trotted past them, hooves striking loud against the cobblestones. A banner flew from the rider’s lance, and he wore a red cross sewn to his tunic. Ten or twelve foot soldiers followed behind him.

As they watched, another group came around a corner. The horse neighed through its headguard, and the two companies clashed together.

The crusaders had more men, Ann saw, and they were better armed. And the soldiers of Languedoc didn’t seem ready for battle, despite all of Trencavel’s preparations. Like Ann they had probably expected the war to start only after the walls had been breached. But she hadn’t heard the walls come down, and she wondered how the crusaders had gotten inside.

The man with the cross leaned down from his horse and swung a sword at his opponent. Ann looked away. She couldn’t stop herself from hearing the sounds of battle, though: cries and groans and screams. One of the crusaders shouted triumphantly, “God wills it!”

Someone started singing. Others joined in, ragged at first and then louder. She looked back. Several men lay dead or dying, and more were hurrying away. The crusaders marched on down the street, still singing lustily. One or two kicked at the dead men as they passed.

Without talking about it she and Franny waited for a long time, until the crusaders had gone out of sight. Then they edged out into the larger street and looked around them.

They could see the castle now, and they headed toward it. Horses neighed from somewhere, and they heard hooves galloping over the cobblestones. Black smoke blossomed a few streets away.

Someone shouted behind them: “There’s two of them, over there!”

They turned and saw another group of men coming around a corner. They began to run.

The men hurried after them. “Why are you running, ladies?” a voice called out. “Why aren’t you safe inside the castle, with your menfolk?”

“Heretic women don’t have menfolk,” someone else said.

“We’ll show them what they’re missing, then!”

Ann looked around frantically. A row of houses, another church way down at the end of the street. Would it give them sanctuary? No, probably turn them over to the crusaders. Anyway, they couldn’t possibly reach it in time.

Then she saw it, a word painted on one of the houses. No, it couldn’t possibly say that. But as she got closer she saw that she’d been right: “Cor,” it said. “Heart,” in the dialect of Languedoc, but it could also mean …

“In here!” she said to Franny.

“What? Why?”

She was panting too hard to answer. Instead she grabbed her and thrust the door open.

“No, wait,” Franny said. “Who lives here?”

She closed the door behind them and leaned against it, breathing heavily. “What is this place?” Franny asked.

“Shhh,” Ann said. “I think it’s—”

A section of the wall rotated around a central hinge. A woman came out from behind it. “Good day, my ladies,” she said. “Would you take some refreshment, for your hearts’ sake?”

“Refreshment!” Franny said. “There’s an army—”

“Hush,” Ann said. “Yes, we would love some refreshment. For our hearts’ sake.”

“We must hurry then,” the woman said. They followed her into the next room, and the wall rotated back.

The woman wore a long white gown; it looked like Maheut’s dress but opposite, like those photo negatives they used to have. Another woman, younger than the first, was cutting up some fruit and setting it on a plate.

The second woman held the plate out to Ann and Franny. Apples, sliced neatly through the middle. It looked like a ritual, or a sacrament. Was she supposed to say something, or do something? Would they throw the two of them out if she got this wrong?

A shout came from behind the wall. “Ann! Franny! Let me in!”

“Is that a friend of yours?” the first woman asked.

It was Jerry. How had he gotten here? Had he followed them?

“Yes,” Ann said. “Could you help him please? Bring him inside?”

“We don’t allow men into our gatherings,” the first woman said.

“I saw you go in there!” Jerry called out. “You have to let me in—they’re coming after me!” He pounded on the wall with his fists but it didn’t move. “Please, they’ll kill me!”

“Can’t you—can’t you make an exception?” Ann said. “You heard him—they’ll kill him if he stays out there.”

“I’m sorry, truly.” The woman did look unhappy, even compassionate, as if she would have let him in if the rules hadn’t made it impossible. “There are no exceptions. If one man finds out about us he’ll tell others, and our safety would be gone.”

“He won’t tell anyone, I promise,” Ann said.

“I know what you’re up to,” Jerry said, quieter now. “Charles told me to follow you, see where you go. You belong to Core, don’t you? Look, I won’t say anything to him, I swear. I’ll tell him you went right to that shoemaker, that the company has nothing to worry about.”

The woman had grown more and more alarmed during this speech. “How does he know about Cor?” she whispered.

“If you don’t let me in I’ll tell them everything,” Jerry said. “Where you went, what you did. They’ll round up everyone you met and—”

There was a terrible sound, a sort of squishy thud, and then Jerry screamed. Ann listened, horrified. Had someone run him through with a sword? Then another sound, a body falling to the ground.

“That’s done for him,” a voice said.

“He was talking to someone, though,” another voice said. “Is there anyone else here?”

“No. Don’t worry about him. He was crazy, terrified.”

“All right.”

They heard footsteps, and the door opening and closing. Then silence.

“You see?” the woman said. “He knew about Cor, he was threatening to tell others. We can never make exceptions, not even for friends. Now, let’s eat.”

How could she sound so unconcerned? Jerry was dead. Ann had worked with him, lived with him, gotten to know him—how could she eat anything now? It reminded her of Kaphtor, where life and death had lain so close together there was not even a breath to separate them.

She looked around her. Bright cushions lay scattered over the floor, covered with pictures of birds and fish and flowers. A third woman was sitting there, a very old woman with wrinkled face. Her mouth had collapsed inward; probably she had few teeth left. But her hair was still beautiful, long, the color of lustrous ivory.

Light came from oil lamps set in niches around the room. There was another niche at the front, larger than the others, with a statue of a woman. Mary, probably, she thought.

The two women sat, and she and Franny joined them. “My name is Azelaïs,” the first woman said. “This is Hélis, and Giraude.” She indicated the young woman, and the old one. “And since you don’t seem to know the ceremony of the apples, I will perform it for you. But you must tell me how you knew the password, but not this ritual.”

Azelaïs took the plate of apples from Hélis. Then she took out a knife from her belt and used it to cut lines between the five seeds of an apple, lines which, when she was finished, joined up in a pentagram. “Thus did Teacher Mara show us, in the long-ago time,” she said. She scored the other apples on the plate, then held them out to Ann and Franny.

Ann had been glad of the ceremony; it gave her time to concentrate, to think about what she was going to say. In the end, though, the only answer she could come up with was the truth.

She took a deep breath. “We’re from very far away, another country. We heard about Cor”—she tried to pronounce it the way Azelaïs had, with a nasal “r” at the end— “and we wanted to join, but we knew nothing else about it.”

“Nothing? Not about Teacher Mara, and the prophecies?”

Mara? Did Azelaïs mean Mary? She glanced at the statue in the niche and noticed for the first time that the woman was black. There were supposed to be statues of Black Madonnas all over Europe, she knew, but Professor Strickland had not talked about them much in history class; they had nothing to do with the current assignment.

Azelaïs followed her gaze. “Yes, that’s her,” she said. “She gave us all our assignments in the long-ago time. And she spoke prophecies, told us about events that came to pass just as she said they would, down through the many years.”

“Meret!” Franny whispered urgently, just as the same thought had occurred to Ann. Had Meret done what she said she would do, had she gathered a group of women around her in Kaphtor and taught them to resist the company? And could a group like that have survived for twenty-five hundred years?

“We heard something about Teacher Mara,” Franny said cautiously. “How accurate her prophecies are.”

“Very accurate,” Hélis said. “More so than any soothsayer we have ever seen, or heard of.”

Meret had to be Mara, then. Who else could have given such accurate predictions of the future? Meret had a computer with her, after all, which could have held all of human history. She thought of the scope of Meret’s achievement and felt a thrill travel through her, starting at her heart and shivering outward.

“But we may have failed in our assignment,” Azelaïs said.

“What do you mean?” Franny said.

“We were supposed to introduce the poetry of the Moors to the people here, in the south of France. Not us, of course, but our sisters in Cor a hundred years ago. And the people of that time took up the Moors’ poetry eagerly, they composed songs that talked about their love for women, of their beauty. We had thought that this would remake the way men think of women, that they would remember her essential nobility before they raped a woman, or hit her, or killed her. And some men did change, some of the nobility, and among the troubadours. But for the most part they stayed the same, they continued to think of women as they always had.”

Someone shouted in the street. Ann stirred uneasily. She had kept the key in her left hand, had held onto it through everything that had happened, and now she felt it digging into her palm. Shouldn’t they be heading back?

But she wanted to talk to Azelaïs, to hear more about Core. And Charles could wait, she thought. He hadn’t trusted them, had sent Jerry to follow them … Jerry. That’s right, Jerry was dead, his body waiting for them just outside the doorway. How could she have forgotten?

She forced herself back to the conversation. “But you did change some things,” she said. “Trencavel, he was always very polite to me, and I was only a servant, someone who worked in the kitchens.”

“Have you noticed that they will call a woman beautiful, but they never say what she looks like?” Azelaïs said. “What color her hair is, or her eyes, or whether she is tall or short or fat or thin? Any of these women can be exchanged for any other.”

Ann hadn’t, but she realized it was true as soon as the other woman mentioned it. She nodded.

“They sing to a statue of a woman,” Azelaïs said. “A woman they created.”

Ann nodded again. She’d heard people talk about putting women on pedestals, but she’d never really understood it; no one before had ever singled her out, made her feel special. Now she got it, though. If you put a woman on a pedestal you didn’t have to deal with her, her messy flesh and blood, who she really was. You could treat her as your own construct, a made-up woman, a receptacle for your fantasies.

“Still, it may not matter, about our assignment,” Hélis said. “Things are changing yet again, in the way that Meret foresaw. The armies coming to attack us, to bring the end of the troubadours, and much else.”

“Her book did not say that the attackers would be so brutal, though. So barbaric,” Azelaïs said.

That’s because they weren’t, as far as Meret knew, Ann thought. We changed it. Wait a minute. Her book?

“She wrote things down for you, in a book?” she asked. “Can we see it?”

“No,” Hélis said. “Only our sisters in Cor can be trusted with her book.”

“Then why not make them our sisters?” Giraude said, speaking for the first time. “They knew the password. And we have already shared the ceremony of the apples.”

Azelaïs looked at them. “Would you like that? To join our gathering? I should tell you first that there are great responsibilities here—it is not all secrets and apples.”

“I’d love to,” Ann said. “But unfortunately we have to leave soon, to go traveling with our master.”

“They can still join,” Giraude said. “At whatever new place they come to. And in the meantime we can show them Mara’s book.”

Did they really have that many sisters, all over the known world, that Giraude could be confident they could find a gathering wherever they went? “Very well,” Azelaïs said.

She rose. For the first time the women’s attention was on something beside Ann and Franny, and Ann fumbled for a pocket and tucked the key inside it. Azelaïs went over to the statue and touched a spot beneath it, and a panel rotated outward, like the door in the wall. Then she bent and took out a huge heavy book, about two inches thick.

It was old, Ann saw, but it did not go as far back as Kaphtoran times: it was written on parchment, not papyrus. They must have copied it again and again through the years, women bent over the pages, working by lamplight …

Azelaïs opened the leather cover to the front page. The title was in Kaphtoran, what the linguists had called Linear A; Ann had never thought to see that writing again. “The Book of Kore,” it said, and underneath that the same thing in the dialect of Languedoc. It was decorated in bright colors with Cretan designs, fish and octopuses swimming through water, reeds growing at the edge.

“Look,” Azelaïs said, whispering reverently.

She flipped through the pages, stopping at a drawing of a city. Enormous buildings loomed up in the background, a combination of the skyscrapers Ann was used to and the structures she had seen in Kaphtor, room piled on room, ziggurating into the air. They were painted in pastel colors, pink and turquoise and butter yellow.

Something stood in front of the buildings, a strange mix of chariot and automobile. “People will ride through vast cities in conveyances like this one, which moves by itself,” Azelaïs said. “And it will be called after the Goddess, car. Like Kore.”

Ann tried not to laugh. She didn’t think that was where the word came from.

“You smile,” Azelaïs said. “But all the world speaks the name of the Goddess. Here.” She turned to another page, finding her way through the book easily. “Here is a list of the towns and cities named after her. Listen. ‘Khartoum, Karnak, Carthage, Corinth …’ And Carcassonne, of course. That is why we are here, in this city—we try to build our temples in these places. And that is where”—she looked up at both of them, her face grave—“this is where you will find our gatherings, when you are ready to become one of us.”

Azelaïs showed them page after page. Drawings snaked around the words; some of them had the fluidity of Kaphtor, but there was also art from other times, Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine. She hurried through the book, not letting Ann read too much of it, but she caught phrases here and there: “He will be killed then, and it would be good to leave this place before the fighting begins …” “Despite being a woman, Queen Mary will cling to a life-denying version of her religion. The sisters in Kore must do these things to bring Elizabeth to the throne …” “The sisters in Kore must work to elect these candidates …”

The next page showed a snake with its tail in its mouth. Within its circle were a few lines in elaborate calligraphy. “The Goddess, by whatever name you call Her, works in harmony with the cycles of the world. She is Mistress of the birth and death and rebirth of seasons, of the waxing and waning moon. And the women and men that we fight see time as a straight line, always moving forward toward some bright future. In this way they seek to cut themselves off from half of the eternal mysteries, from earth and night and death.”

Azelaïs looked at Ann and Franny and then closed the book. She had wanted them to read that, Ann realized. The other woman stood and returned the book to its place.

Ann stood as well. “Thanks for your hospitality, but we have to get back now,” she said. “Our friends must be worried about us.”

Horses clopped past them, out in the street. “It is unsafe for you to go outside, I think,” Azelaïs said. “We will have to keep you here with us, until the fighting is over.”

“No one rang the church bells today,” Hélis said. “What time do you think it is?”

“Time for supper, of course,” Azelaïs said, and the others laughed.

There were more cupboards ranged around the room, Ann saw now, with doors that opened normally. Azelaïs and Hélis stood and took out bread and cheese and dried beef and wine, and set them on platters on the floor. After they had eaten they got down straw pallets and some blankets, blew out the candles, and prepared to go to sleep.

“What about Charles?” Franny whispered to Ann, lying on the floor next to her. “Won’t he wonder where we are?”

“The hell with him,” Ann said. “He sent Jerry to spy on us, after all.”

“Well, but he wanted to know if you were a member of Core. And you are, aren’t you?”

Ann said nothing for a while. “I think I am, actually. Look what the company did here—they got the army to attack Carcassonne, to kill hundreds of people who didn’t have to die. Thousands, maybe. And Core—the sisters of Kore—all they want is for women to be equal to men.” She paused again. “You aren’t going to tell Charles, are you?”

“No,” Franny said.

Ann slept badly, waking several times during the night to hear shouts or screams or horses neighing. When she woke at dawn, though, everything was silent—an uneasy silence, the sound of a city battered into submission.

Soon the other women got up as well, and they had a breakfast of bread and oranges. Hélis ventured outside, coming back to tell them that the streets were empty. “Folks said the soldiers are all in the castle now,” she said. “Keeping watch on their prisoners. And most of the people are hiding—they remember what happened in Béziers.”

“Do they know how the army got into the city?” Azelaïs asked.

Hélis nodded. “They had friends inside, traitors who opened the gates for them. So they never needed to break down the walls.”

“Well,” Azelaïs said to Ann and Franny. “It might be safe for you to go back now. Could you help us with something first, though? We need to move your friend’s body. Someone might stumble upon it otherwise, and want to know what goes on inside this house.”

Jerry—she’d forgotten about him again, damn it. And they needed to move him for another reason; the company might find him with one of their cameras and wonder what he was doing there.

“Of course,” she said.

Azelaïs opened the secret door and they went out into the next room. Jerry lay on his stomach; he’d been stabbed in the back, and his clothes were soaked a deep red with blood. He smelled terrible, and she realized with horror that he’d loosened his bowels as he died.

Hélis opened the front door carefully and peered into the street. “All right,” she said, coming back to them.

Together the four of them lifted Jerry’s body and took it outside. What is it about me, Ann wondered, that people keep dying on my assignments? Am I some kind of jinx, a Typhoid Mary of the timelines? Anachronistic Ann?

“Where were you headed?” Azelaïs asked. “It might be a good idea to leave him there.”

“The market square,” Franny said.

The square turned out to be only a few streets away; they’d gotten more confused than Ann had realized, the day before. They looked around for soldiers and then set Jerry down in the street.

“Goddess show you your path,” Azelaïs said. “I hope you find your sisters in Kore, wherever it is you are going.”

“Thank you.”

“And keep yourselves safe,” Hélis said. “This new commander, Simon de Montfort—who knows what he plans to do? He might kill everyone here, the way he did in Béziers.”

“There’s a prophecy about him, one Mara might not have written down,” Ann said, thinking to encourage them. “It’s said that he will die at the hands of women and children.”

“No, I never heard that. Thank you.”

Azelaïs moved to hug her. She had always hated being hugged, hated anyone breaking through her defenses, but she found to her surprise that she held onto the other woman for a long time. Another mother figure, she thought, but she couldn’t summon up the sarcasm she would have liked.

Azelaïs hugged Franny and they said goodbye. Then she and Franny hurried through the deserted streets to the castle. They heard the sound of marching feet only once, and they hid in an empty house until the soldiers went past.

They said very little. Ann was thinking about the sisters of Kore, and she supposed Franny was as well. Apples, books, knives, statues … Suddenly she laughed.

“Quiet!” Franny said. “Do you want to get us killed? What’s so funny, anyway?”

“That thing with the apple, that Meret taught them. It’s about the core, the core of the apple. It’s a pun, and it took twenty-five hundred years for someone to get it.”