CHAPTER XII

“Something’s wrong.”

Deyandara looked up wearily. Chieh, the Nabbani woman from Gold Harbour, was scowling across the valley to the rising hill crowned by Dinaz Catairna. Deyandara had been riding in such a pain-numbed daze she hadn’t noticed when cresting the last ridge brought them within sight of it.

It was wrong, the way the very shape of the land had changed. As Lin—cold hells take her for a false and lying traitor—had reported, the south side of the hill had been quarried away into a cliff, and a stone wall topped the ramparts. A square stone tower of three storeys, its roof thatched—easy to set that alight with a fire-arrow—overlooked the wall at the south.

The Grasslander man, whose name sounded like Lug, tugged at Deyandara’s reins, drawing her horse closer. Not the white mare but some stray from the battle they had captured in passing as they raced away. She had woken from her faint to find the two of them shoving and kneading at her dislocated shoulder. Screamed in agony and fainted again. Now it ached mind-numbingly and her left arm was useless, strapped to her chest. Chieh claimed her father had been a surgeon and she knew what she was doing, the arm would be fine given time and rest, but Deyandara didn’t think she trusted that. And her right wrist was tied to her saddle, which meant she was going to pull that arm as well out of joint, at best, if the stupid horse shied at anything and she fell.

A day and a half they had ridden, and there had been no pursuit that Deyandara noticed, though they had dodged and twisted up and down the valleys. Neither had there been any sign of the rest of the Marakander mercenaries, either flying back to the dinaz in defeat or returning victorious with Marnoch’s head on a spear. She ought to be glad of that, at any rate, but it had become hard to rise above the pain to feel anything except a sort of hopelessness.

She was Lord Ketsim’s prize, and he was going to make himself king through her. Red Masks. That plan was a secret from the Red Masks. The Voice of Marakand and her temple certainly wouldn’t want Ketsim setting up as king in his own right.

“The Voice is dead,” she had said with satisfaction, but that was yesterday when rage still bubbled through the pain and exhaustion. “You don’t have a paymaster in Marakand anymore.”

Chieh had shrugged. “There’s always a new high priestess,” she had returned. “Anyway, if there’s no paymaster in the city, all the more reason for the warlord to take the kingdom for himself, right? But I wouldn’t believe that. If the temple meant to cut us off and abandon their plans for the Duina Catairna, they’d recall the Red Masks.”

How had they dared imitate the Red Masks?

If anyone had even looked closely, Chieh had said, laughing, they’d have been done for. Painted imitations of the masked helmets, odds and ends of red changed into just before the battle—Ketsim’s own folk had known nothing of any Red Masks riding with them, which had made their fear that much worse, a good joke on her own comrades, Chieh thought. Deyandara did not find it amusing. There was something shaming in knowing that it was her own belief, the belief of every man and woman there, that had so reduced them to senseless flight, Praitan and Marakander mercenary alike. Even the white mare had panicked, recognizing the look of what had so terrorized her at Marakand’s Eastern Wall. All a ruse to capture her, because Ketsim had known that the rightful queen was with Marnoch and marching south to meet up with the high king.

She was reminded of how it had seemed she was sought in Marakand, and how it had seemed more likely it was Ahjvar, a Praitannec fighting man, who drew their attention, and she only as his companion. Heir to the duina or not, she didn’t feel important enough that the Voice of Marakand should have been dreaming of her, but in Dinaz Catairna, someone certainly had been. Pagel, the soothsayer scout captured not long after Marnoch’s band set out. The Red Masks, said Chieh, didn’t after all kill but carried off all captive wizards to Marakand.

“Ketsim argued them out of taking Pagel, said he had better uses for him that served their Voice,” Chieh said. “They don’t say a thing, so no knowing what they thought, but they let him take the soothsayer. Not that he’s worth much. It takes that liquor the Grasslanders brew up from some root or other to get anything useful out of him. I tried to teach him coin-throwing—my gran did a bit of that—but it was no use. This business of throwing leaves on smouldering coals to get a smoke, it seems to me you might as well play with the dregs of your tea, which my gran did too and admitted she always made it all up. Less coughing if you use tea, and you get a nice drink out of it. Pagel said the queen was with the rebel lords, ‘Not the queen but the bride of the king, the mother of kings,’ he said, which gave Ketsim ideas, if he didn’t have them already. He’s setting up trouble for himself, I think, with Marakand and his sons, but that’s his look-out. Yours too,” she had added, generously. “But there’s years before your sons would be any threat to his. A lot can happen between now and then.” She had eyed Deyandara speculatively. “You’re going to need friends in the hall, as your folk say. I don’t have much liking for Ketsim’s sons.”

Deyandara had managed a nod. She had learned enough sense, she hoped, not to throw away a weapon when one was offered to her.

She tried to make herself take an interest now. Information. She needed to know everything she could, if she were to have any chance of escape, or of survival.

Escape to what? Marnoch, Fairu, Gelyn . . . they were probably all dead behind her, and the oath Lin claimed she had made to Ghu was worth nothing.

But now Chieh said, “Something’s wrong.”

“What?”

Chieh gave her a look that suggested she was half-witted not to see it for herself.

“No banners at the gate.” She spoke to the Grasslander man Lug, and when he nodded, urged her horse ahead, while he waited with Deyandara.

Deyandara shut her eyes for a while and imagined her brothers, all of them, at the head of an army, rushing over the crest of the long ridge to the south. She would fall weeping in Durandau’s arms now, if he came for her. When she opened her eyes again the day seemed colder, grey despite the sun. Nothing moved except some sheep, straying shepherdless along the slope below them.

That seemed wrong. Chieh appeared again, winding back between the snaking dykes that made the approach to the dinaz gate a trap for the attacker. She waved her arm in broad sweeps. Lug grunted—he mostly seemed to grunt, or maybe that was what the Grasslander tongue was meant to sound like—and put the horses into a trot down across the valley bottom, over the stream, and up to meet her.

They talked together anxiously in the speech of the western road. Lug drew out a little pouch on a thong about his neck and kissed it before hiding it away under his shirt again. In reaction, Deyandara’s free hand went to her own amulet, the carved disc of thorn from Andara’s hill, but her bonds wouldn’t let her raise her hand so far.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Trouble,” said Chieh. “Come on. Your lord needs you. Maybe it will make a difference.”

She spoke to Lug again, and they rode forward together, with Deyandara in the middle. Voices carried, as they approached the gate itself, out of the muffling baffles of the dykes. Shouting. Grasslander.

She sat back hard, and the war-trained horse stopped, braced a moment against Lug’s tugging, till he slapped it.

“What kind of trouble?” she demanded.

“You know what I said about Ketsim’s sons? Son trouble.” Chieh frowned. “We’ve only been gone a week, Lug and I. Everything was fine when we left, or my lord would never have sent us. He needs his tent guard about him, with this lot. Someone said there’s fever in the dinaz, too.”

Fever . . .

“What kind of fever?” she asked sharply, and Chieh, native Over-Malagru like herself, with a few faint silvered pock-marks on her cheeks, which were hardly noticeable, the eye distracted by some longer, ritualistic slashes, turned a sour smile on her.

“Your guess is as good as mine, at this point. Is it true there was a curse on this land before we ever came?”

“Yes,” said Deyandara.

“That explains a lot. We should have gone west. I’m going to cut your hand free. You’re going to smile nicely at Ketsim—he’s the man on the steps—like a proper bride rescued from the rebels with her brother’s blessing, and you’re not going to bolt for the gate or shout at any Praitans you see or spit in his face, right? There’s enough here still loyal to Ketsim to make mincemeat of you, and the rest will make mincemeat of you anyway, if you don’t have our protection.”

Deyandara, dry-mouthed, nodded. Chieh was as good as her word, and, Deyandara’s wrist cut free, sheathed her knife and drew her sabre, shouting something as they emerged from between the gates.

From inside, Deyandara would not have recognized the place. The round, dry-stone walled houses with their thatched roofs were Praitan enough, but they were marshalled in rows, occupying only a small area of the scorched and weed-grown ground, and none had any wattle-fenced vegetable-garden or fruiting bushes about it; no hens scratched in the lanes, no children scampered about. Most of it, especially near the gate, was given over to paddocks for horses and camels. They rode down the central lane, turned sharply, and came to another open space where mounted riders on horses and camels milled about the foot of the tower she had seen rising above the walls. Banners—presumably the ones Chieh had missed at the gate—drooped from several spears, long scarves of brilliant orange.

Men and women turned at Chieh’s shout, hostile faces, mostly Grasslanders, a few Nabbani or Praitan, a few Marakanders or tattooed desert folk.

One man stood alone in the doorway of the tower, with spearmen ranged below on the stone stairs. He folded his arms, smiled, and roared something. Deyandara clenched her teeth and swallowed. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t snatch for her reins to wheel the horse away, either. This wasn’t the time. Not yet.

Ketsim—that must be he—had the look of a stout man who’d lost too much weight too quickly, his face sagging, maybe ageing him past his due. His cheeks were marked with parallel slashes that had left scars deep enough to stop his beard growing there, the same deliberate scars that marked Chieh’s face, and Lug’s. His hair and skin and eyes were all light brown like just-turned beech-leaves, but near his head his many long braids had turned white. He wore bears’ teeth clattering in the ends of braids, a bright cloak of Praitannec plaid over a leather jerkin, and no shirt, so that his arms showed the same fleshiness-gone-slack as his face.

“He’s saying that your coming is proof of the alliance with your brother, that the Marakanders are soft and priest-ruled and will never even challenge us.” Chieh kept close at her side. Ketsim kept speaking, against a low undertone of other voices. Deyandara wasn’t the only one there who didn’t speak Grasslander, or the tongue of the western road, or whatever this was. “And he says that now you’ve come, Catairanach will bless him and bless the land and lift her curse from it, they don’t need to fear the fever. . . . Cold hells, I don’t like the sound of that. Now his eldest son—that’s him there, with the beard dyed with henna—is saying that the Praitans have always known the land was cursed, and the Voice of Marakand knew it, and that’s why the temple sent foreigners to do the fighting for them, so the curse would fall on us rather than Marakand, and they could reap the spoils after the land was barren of folk—he’s a fool, what’s here worth fighting for? All Marakand’s ever wanted is an easy route to the iron of the forest kingdoms, and that trade vanished east as soon as you surrendered to us. They won’t be half so easy a conquest. And look, that’s a man of the Marakander temple guard right beside him, smiling, he doesn’t have any idea what’s being said. So Siman, that’s my lord’s son, now he’s saying he’s not keeping good men and women here to die, now that the Red Masks have abandoned Ketsim and gone to their Marakander captain—Old Great Gods, is that what’s set spark in the tinder? He and his brothers are going to fight for the captain from the city, who isn’t afraid to move against the king, but then they’ll go to Marakand and demand what’s owing to them, and go home to the Grass wealthy; they’ve had nothing but ill-luck since the Lake-Lord died, and his father’s a fool for thinking he could ever wear those boots.”

Now both men were shouting at once. Chieh took Deyandara’s reins and said something urgent to Lug, who nodded and forced his way ahead of them. Deyandara was glad enough to have the mercenaries guarding her; there was a lot of jeering at her and jostling of her horse, as if she were somehow an agent of all this. The man from the temple guard gave her an intense look. Scuffling fights broke out, but more closed up with Chieh and Lug, though Praitan voices among even those said things like “That’s one in the eye for old Yvarr, thought he’d snagged her for his dog-loving son, didn’t he?”

That snapped her out of her witless morass. She looked for those faces, committing them to memory, and she let them see her doing so. Traitors.

“Down,” Chieh ordered, and Lug was there to grab her, bustle her up the steps with Chieh at her back, the horses left to others. Ketsim put out a hard arm and crushed her to his side, fingers digging in. He looked down at her, flushed and sweating, now she saw him close to, and grinned, saying something.

“Welcome to Dinaz Catairna, princess,” said Chieh. She gave her lord a nod, stared, and her face seemed to lose its colour.

Camels cried, horses whinnied, men and women shouted, but it didn’t turn into war then and there; they sorted into a rough order behind the orange banners and poured away through the lanes towards the gate, mocked and jeered at by others just as much as Deyandara had been. Ketsim’s loyalists came swarming back then, cheering, brandishing spears, wheeling horses and camels as if they’d won some victory, driven the rebels away, though the son—sons—had taken the banners and by far the great numbers with them.

“That,” said Chieh, her voice unsteady, “was Ketsim being deposed as warlord of the orange banners, and it’s a title his fool sons are going to find he lost his claim to long ago, for all his bragging otherwise, if they ever make it past Marakand alive and ride beneath those rags on the Grass.” Ketsim raised his voice again, a hand in the air, speaking. More cheering. “He says, what’s a chieftain of the Grass compared to the king of a land rich in grazing and the tolls of the great trade roads, and brother by marriage to the high king Over-Malagru. He says, Durandau is marching to your wedding and this new captain it’s said has come from Marakand is nothing but a soft-handed priest, and Durandau will bring you his head as a wedding gift.” Then she laughed, a bit wildly. “How long till you’re a widow, my lady? You remember I’ve stood your friend in this, when you take back your land.”

Deyandara swallowed hard and licked dry lips, still looking up into Ketsim’s fevered face, with the first signs of the rash already burning in his skin. In a day or two he would be covered in stinking, pus-filled boils, if he were blessed by the Old Great Gods. He might live, if he survived for a fortnight, long enough for the scabs to come. If not, it would be the blood breaking free and weeping under his skin, flushing him black, with no blisters oozing to expel the poisons, and he would be dead within a week.

“A friend?” she said. “Maybe. See that you remember to be one, then.” She tried to smile as the Leopard might have.

There was a strange, nightmare quality to the wedding feast, if that was what Ketsim thought it. Two long tables were arrayed down either side of the ground floor of the tower, with a third across the wall opposite the door, the high table for Ketsim, his bride, and the favoured lords of his tent guard, which included Chieh and Lug. Others of that guard, not feasting, stood armed behind him, and held once again the gates of the dinaz, but Chieh and Lug had served well and the celebration was in part theirs. They were chiefs of the queen’s tent guard now, her bench-companions, she was given to understand. Queen, as Ketsim used it, did not mean ruler, but merely the king’s lady. A new banner to replace his orange rags.

Deyandara, bathed under Chieh’s watchful eye, her armour laid aside and fresh clothes found for her somewhere, strange loose embroidered shirt and baggy black trousers, her left arm in a clean linen sling bound across her ribs, ate bread and sipped water they brought from Catairanach’s spring, offering it as though they thought it had some significance to do so, although the mercenaries and their Praitan traitors drank wine. The neck of her shirt was unlaced, the blue plaid shawl Chieh had brought her pinned low on her breast with an admittedly fine brooch of gold and turquoise, Ketsim’s orders again, to show the golden torc. Her hair was combed and her braids coiled around her head, like a married woman’s, not a bride’s loose cascade, and there were no flowers woven into it, but she didn’t argue. The Praitans snickered at that. A widow might wear her hair so at a second marriage; it implied she was no maiden bride, and she blushed for that, ashamed that she could care, with what was to come. Chieh drank far too much. There was an empty place left between Ketsim and Deyandara at the high table, for the goddess, who did not, despite Deyandara’s stilted praying at Ketsim’s order, appear to bless them. Or to save her.

Ketsim told his people that Deyandara had come with her brother’s blessing, that they were now allied with the high king of all Praitan against Marakand, that come morning Durandau would be marching from his camp a mere twenty miles to the southeast to join them; they would quash the rebel lords and drive his traitor sons from the land, with the blessing of Catairanach to strengthen them.

But his sons had ridden out to join some Marakander force in fighting her brother. Durandau wouldn’t be coming, even if Ketsim, trusting in Chieh’s and Lug’s success, had sent some message announcing her capture and this mockery of a wedding. There were Red Masks, real ones, out there. Durandau, and Elissa and Lord Launval the Younger, any of her other brothers who had ridden with the high king, all would be killed by them. Deyandara blinked rapidly and swallowed to stop the tears spilling from her eyes. She wouldn’t let Ketsim think she was weeping for fear of him. He brushed the back of his hand over his moustaches and looked over at her assessingly. The cheering seemed more due to the wine and a desire to believe than to any confidence in him. The Praitan lords murmured together, their eyes on Deyandara as well. A prize for the snatching, the moment the warlord’s grasp faltered. They’d seen the fever and the rash on him as clearly as she had. Lug watched them, narrow-eyed, but staggered out from the hall halfway through the meal, greasy and sweating in the face. He had eaten little and drunk less. As Chieh’s gaze followed him anxiously and Ketsim turned to make what was probably some coarse Grasslander joke about men who couldn’t hold their wine, Deyandara leaned to watch him as well and slid the knife from Catairanach’s place into her sling.

The pox, regardless of whether it would take the mild eastern or the dangerous southern course, began with an aching back and queasy stomach, Deyandara remembered that much, and then the swelling pimples in the mouth. Chieh watched Lug when he returned with a face like death but said nothing, refilling her cup and holding his hand under the table. Deyandara counted a dozen Grasslanders who seemed to be having trouble eating, choosing only the softest foods, picking at them, trying to hide the pain of chewing and swallowing. Others, like Ketsim, already showed a rash.

She was dining with the dead, she thought.

The drinking seemed set to go on and on. Ketsim’s bench-companions, tent guard, or whatever they were called and the Catairnans seemed set on trying to outdo one another. Lug sat slumped on the bench with his eyes shut, not making even a pretence of drinking any longer. Chieh slipped away at some point, leaving Deyandara feeling naked and small. She was gone a long time, came back looking grim and sickened to slide in between Lug and Deyandara again, taking up her earthenware cup and draining it.

“What?” Deyandara was emboldened to ask.

The Five Cities woman turned bleak eyes on her. “The houses,” she said. “They’re full of the dying and the dead. Those damnable traitor sons of his rode off and left them lying.” She murmured in Lug’s ear; he shook his head, looked at Deyandara, shrugged, and left again, came back carrying another jug of wine, which he poured for the warlord with some jest and a desperate grin. Ketsim drained his cup, refilled it, and waved for the jug to be passed on. Servants, a couple of young Praitans who weren’t folk of Dinaz Catairanach that Deyandara recognized, hurried to do so. When they tried to pour for Deyandara, who had long ago emptied her cup of water, Chieh put a hand over it and shook her head. “The lady’s had enough, I think. She has a long night ahead of her and she doesn’t want to sleep through it.” Deyandara cringed under her wink at her lord.

Ketsim rose not long after that, which seemed a sign for all to rise, most stumbling out the door, some helping the servants drag the benches to the walls, where they seemed prepared to sleep, as the boards of the tables and the trestles were carried out of the tower. He took her by the hand and kissed it, then hauled her close and kissed her, while the hall whooped and cheered. He smelt of wine, but he didn’t linger over the kiss, didn’t open his mouth on hers. She had a hard job not to recoil anyhow, thinking of the blisters within his mouth bursting, oozing . . . she managed only to stand unbowed and wooden. He didn’t seem to notice, took her hand again and tugged her away up the stairs. They were followed by raucous, singing Grasslanders, waving torches.

Andara help her, Andara save her, they didn’t—they weren’t—there were stories that the kings of Tiypur long ago had taken new-wed brides to their beds with witnesses, all the night, so that no one could deny the marriage had been consummated. Tiypur was in the west and so was the Great Grass. . . . She should have kicked her horse around and tried to flee so soon as Chieh cut her hand free. Her god Andara was far away, Ketsim beyond any justice of his, and Catairanach wouldn’t care; Catairanach had rejected her, Lin abandoned her, her brother would—her brother would use Ketsim as her husband, if it suited him, and it might, to have a strong king in the west, bound to him, except that Ketsim would die, Ketsim was dying. She knew she couldn’t take the pox again, no one had it more than once. . . . Her breath came in frantic pants and her ears rang; she was going to faint again.

They continued up the stairs through the second storey’s single room, an armoury and dormitory, with pallets and rugs and quilts scattered among baskets of arrows and bundled spears. Lug dodged ahead of them, to push open a trapdoor. They climbed through it and up to the upper floor under the eaves, shedding most of their escort behind them. It still smelt of clean straw from the new thatch. Here the only light was a candle, carried by Chieh. Even Grasslanders wouldn’t be such fools as to bring torches beneath thatch, she thought a bit drunkenly, and when Ketsim released her arm she huddled away to the nearest window and the cool night air. South. It looked south, where the waxing moon silvered the hills. Light bloomed around the room behind her, Chieh lighting more candles.

Ketsim spoke, sounding irritated. Chieh made some soothing reply and asked, “Do you want some help with your shirt, my lady? Your arm—”

“No,” she snapped.

“You could find a good many worse husbands in the hall down below,” Chieh retorted. “Or suffer your sister’s fate, which is what Marakand wanted for you. Be grateful to him.”

“Cattiga was my aunt,” she muttered under her breath, but Lug spoke, Chieh answered, and the trapdoor dropped behind the two tent guard with a slam, leaving her alone with the warlord.

“Deyandara.”

She had to look at him then. The bed was only a pallet on the floor with a strawtick on it, no grander than what his tent guard slept on below. He undid his belt, set boots and sabre aside, and sat, slowly and carefully, patting the blankets beside him.

“Come,” Ketsim said. “Sit. Talk.”

She shook her head. His brows lowered, lips turning down. A powerful man, a lord of a tribe, and he had this day lost that rule, seen his sons turn their backs on him. She shouldn’t be a fool. If she had been going to die in a grand gesture of defiance, she should have done it while there was someone to see. She crossed the room to the bed, shaking a little, and sat where he indicated, shoulders hunched.

“Catairanach,” he said. She waited. He waved a hand in what she realized was frustration. Almost she hoped he would shout for Chieh to come translate again. “Nabbani,” he said.

Catairanach was Nabbani? He wanted her to call Chieh, his Nabbani bench-companion? Foolish. He wanted to know if she spoke Nabbani.

“Colony-Nabbani, yes. A little,” she made haste to add, in case it would be useful not to understand, at some point.

He sighed. “Good, good.” Smiled, carefully and deliberately. “How old?”

“How old—how old am I? Seventeen winters.”

“Ah. Old enough.”

She scowled. “How old are you?”

He laughed then and slapped her back. “Old enough, little girl. Don’t worry. Deyandara is my fourth wife. They all happy till they die. Good husband, I.”

“How did they die?”

He frowned. “Maca, first wife, she die . . .” He frowned. “Baby. Long time since. Both we very young. Better that baby die then, I think, than grow to be this son. I not so—so tired, I kill him, now, ride after. Too much trouble. Sons always trouble. Better to be king of quiet land with good daughters, I think. Lysen had sickness, very long, very bad. I cry long time, brother take clan, I go with warlord, leave sadness behind, great lord. Governor of Serakallash, I was. Serakallashi wife, Adva, died in fighting, little daughter killed too, rebels kill her. She only five, very little, very sweet. Very sad. Not there, I with my lord in mountains. He dies too.”

“I’m not sorry for you,” she muttered in Praitan. “They’re all dead and it won’t do you any good, marrying me. Catairanach says I’ll never be queen.”

“Yes, queen for Catairanach,” he agreed, catching those few words. “We talk of Catairanach. She not come to bless. You call her and she refuse. You true Deyandara, not other girl?”

No humour in his look now. If she were some decoy, she could expect a short wedding night.

“Yes, I’m Deyandara. But—but Catairanach can’t approve a wedding like this. She won’t give her blessing for a wedding by force. Whatever you do on the Grass—”

“Hah, on the Grass your brother cut off—” he grinned and made a gesture that left her in no doubt what was to be cut off, “if he catch. Or you do,” he added. “More likely you, eh, if you good Grasslander woman? But not little Praitan girls. Not Praitan kings. Weak folk, Praitans. Weak gods.”

There was a knife in her sling. It probably wasn’t very sharp.

“Catairanach,” he said again and, his face serious, touched hers with his fingertips. She flinched away. “She curses us,” he said, and touched his own face.

“The pox,” she said.

“Yes. It comes, the burning. I feel it. Very sick. Very tired. They come from villages, they say, Praitans curse us, many die, but Chieh, others, they know it, they say the pox, from the sea, from the desert. Fevers in the dinaz, fevers in my hall. They start to die, my folk, this week, here. But I marry you, goddess blesses, land is good, happy wife, we live. Can be good king, was good lord of Serakallash. You see?”

She shook her head. “It won’t work. Catairanach won’t—” But if he didn’t believe that, he didn’t have any use for her. Beyond the obvious. She drew up her knees, made herself small, and felt she was back on that hillside in the rain, with the brigands—outlaws of the Duina Catairna, her own folk—debating her death at their fire. And no Ghu to come throwing stones at them and cut her free, no Ahjvar . . . her hand went to her throat, the animal heads of the torc and the spot between them his blade had pricked. No Marnoch, waiting, trusting she’d come back. She blinked furiously until the heat of tears faded. Ketsim was watching her. He looked old, older than he maybe was, and tired, as he said. He touched her face again, the dimpled scars of the eastern pox, which had been bad enough for her, down her throat.

“Little leopards,” he said. “A kitten, I think. Soft claws.” Down to circle her nipple with a thumb, cup her breast. She couldn’t breathe. “Go to sleep, little Praitan kitten,” he said. “Too tired, too sick, for a fourth wife tonight. If Deyandara’s goddess has no blessing even now, we all die, I think. Deyandara too, if her king dies. No one else will have her. I say so. Lug knows to do it.”

He fumbled with the blanket, eyelids sagging. After a moment she helped him, covering him like a child before she crept, quietly as she could, to the window.

How soundly did they sleep below? She sat, good arm hugging her knees, waiting. The singing had long died away; would they sleep, or did they keep a watch? If she could get to a horse—no, better to climb the wall. With one arm? Would Catairanach send a fog to hide her again, if she prayed, if she begged?

The trapdoor rose, carefully, without a creak or a thump, and Chieh appeared.

Deyandara raised a face embarrassingly tear-stained, wiped it on her sleeve, and glared defiance.

Chieh went to her lord, knelt and felt his forehead, shook her head and came to Deyandara.

“He’ll sleep the night away, and probably the best thing for him. Barley-spirit in his wine. He’s dying, isn’t he? It is the bloody pox they’ve had here since the winter, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Lug’s taken the fever now,” Chieh said, and sat down beside her. “We’ve been married twenty years.”

Chieh didn’t look old enough for that, but Deyandara didn’t say so. Couldn’t make herself say she was sorry, either, when the man had orders to kill her if Ketsim died.

“My father did inoculations,” said Chieh. “You know about that? You take scabs from someone, best someone with the eastern pox, but even if it’s the southern you can, and—”

“I’ve heard. People die. People who weren’t sick, before.”

“Not very often. Hardly at all. Just—once in a while. My brother did. The only one my father treated who ever did. So he stopped. And I had the southern pox, but not the bleeding strain, and I lived. But I remember watching him. I know how it’s done. When they first talked of disease spreading, six weeks ago, it must have been, I said to Lug, I can fix you so you don’t die of this. You’ll be sick a bit, but you won’t die. And he said, no bloody way was I sticking his leg with someone else’s pus, and I didn’t argue.” She was silent a while. “Those bodies out in the houses—the living are rotting with the dead. You can’t recognize faces. Friends. And the damned Praitans, the servants are sneaking away, and the ones that came over to Ketsim willingly, they’re most of them as safe as you or I. They’ve had it, and still they’re refusing to bury the dead. Saying they won’t touch cursed bodies and they’re not their dead. Treacherous bastards. They’re waiting for us all to die so they can seize the duina themselves. There’s ghosts out there, and the living, all weeping together.”

“Go back to Lug,” said Deyandara. “He needs you. I don’t. I’m not going to leap out the window.”

“You remember who your friends are,” Chieh said. “You’ll be a bone thrown among the dogs without me to look after you, once Ketsim goes to the road.”

“Where’s Pagel?” she asked. “The soothsayer. You said Ketsim kept him.”

Chieh shrugged. “They’re saying the Red Masks took him when they went. He’d have been no use to you anyway; Ketsim was forcing so much of whatever that hellbrew was, into him, that he had the tremors and twitches like an old man. His wits weren’t in any better shape. No great loss.” She stood up. “I wouldn’t betray my lord. He’s been a good friend to me these long years, he’d have been no cruel husband to you, and many a girl’s faced worse than an old man in her bed, but he’s not got many days before the Old Great Gods call him and I’ve got to look to my future. So you remember, girl, you remember tonight. I was your friend.”

“I do remember.” She remembered Fairu, who didn’t like her and had been going to switch horses to lead the supposed Red Masks after himself to save her, and Mag, who would have lured them with her wizardry, knowing it was her death, and Marnoch, most of all Marnoch. And Ghu, and Ahjvar. She touched the animal heads of the torc. Leopards. The pommel of Ahjvar’s sword was a leopard’s head. Chieh crept away again. After a while she tried the trapdoor, setting a candle quavering in the draft on the floor, but there was a bed made up right at the landing of the stairs below, where Chieh sat bathing Lug’s face and chest with water in the light of another candle, singing softly in the Grasslander language, while he tossed and turned in his fever, so she lowered the trap softly as she could and went back to her window.

Maybe she slept, sitting there. She must have, because she grew stiff and her hips ached, and her shoulder. Water flowed around her, cool and clean. She wasn’t surprised to see Catairanach standing by Ketsim’s bed, mist eddying around her feet, water rippling the floor. The goddess turned, a shimmer of blue gown and brown hair that flowed down into the water, became the water, coiling around the room.

“You aren’t meant for him,” the goddess said. “I sent you for the Leopard. Where is he?”

“He went to Marakand to kill the Voice. You told him to.”

“The Voice is dead. He should have come here.”

“I’m not answerable for him,” Deyandara snapped. She should have bitten her tongue. Her fear was worn out, nothing left. “I’m sorry, Catairanach.”

“He will come,” the goddess said. She looked down at the sleeping Grasslander. “He will. He must. I’ve seen it. You didn’t give yourself to this one?”

Didn’t she know? Deyandara felt her face heating. “‘Giving’ wasn’t going to come into it. But no, he’s ill, too ill, he said. He fell asleep. Where were you? Why did you let this happen? How could you abandon your folk this way?” The last came out almost a wail, and she muffled her sudden sob on her arm, because maybe it was a dream, and maybe it wasn’t.

“I have abandoned no one,” the goddess hissed, and for a moment she seemed to tower to the peak of the roof overhead. “Least of all you, last child of Hyllau, foreign-born though you are. The Lady of Marakand is great, and she hampers me in everything I reach to do, she and her wizard slaves. They sing and raise their foreign spells against me so that I barely have strength to leave my waters. She thinks she will come to set words against me in the end, if we do not retake our land, and my spring will be dry and I will be no more—but not yet. Not yet, and not ever, now that her army is fled, carrying hidden disease back to her city. Within her walls, her folk will burn in fevers and die bleeding and rotting in their beds. In Marakand’s streets the pox will make itself a nest and never leave, and the yards will stand empty, the markets and the mines fall silent, the fields grow weeds, and it will be long before she has the strength or the gold or the men to think of conquest again. But this,” a hand flicked dismissively at Ketsim, who moaned and twisted in his blankets, “this is not my doing. I only make the way easy for it, a little, as I can. This is his curse on the blood of Hyllau and through the kings of the land, the land. Our weakness. This is Catairlau’s legacy. We can all be thankful for it at last.”

She dwindled to a human woman again, squatted down, and put a hand on Ketsim’s forehead, as Chieh had done. Whispered something, breathed on him. Not, Deyandara thought, any blessing of healing. She edged away as the goddess crossed, her pace slow as though she waded in water, to join her at the window. The stars were fading, the moon near setting.

“You don’t yet know what it is to be a mother,” Catairanach said at last.

There wasn’t much answer she could make to that. She didn’t know what it was to have a mother, either.

“It is sorrow. To see what you love taken from you by the world, battered and twisted, changed. I tried to keep her with me, within my heart, but a child cannot grow so. He had gone. He was a wanderer, and I knew it, I knew he would not stay, and he did not. I tried, so long, to keep her safe in my waters, years and long years, lives of men, but finally I had to give her out to the world, and the world, the folk, would not understand that she could not be like they were, that she was meant to be different. How could she not be? She was my child, and his. They came to me, again and again, to complain of her, but they would not believe when I told them she was only willful, a little selfish, and what child is not? She only needed them to love her and guide her, and she would have grown straight and true. They were too harsh, too jealous of her. And in the end she would not listen even to me, and so she set her feet on a mistaken path. She was betrayed by the one who should have stood faithful at her side, and he destroyed her.”

“Lady Hyllau—the wife of King Cairangorm, was your daughter?” Deyandara asked stupidly. “Hyllau of the day of the three kings?”

“She wasn’t meant for Cairangorm, but she was beautiful and she wanted to be the king’s wife and the mother of kings. She was young and impatient. She didn’t want to wait.”

“To wait for what?”

“For Cairangorm to die,” Catairanach answered, as if it was of little importance. “She shouldn’t have accepted him, but she did, because he was king, and Catairlau wasn’t. Since she did choose Cairangorm, she could have waited. He was old.”

Hyllau wasn’t meant for Cairangorm, and Deyandara not meant for Ketsim. She shivered. The water of the spring was icy, and the branches of the mountain ashes weaving together overhead looked like flexing claws. Ketsim moaned again and the tower room was back around her.

“That’s—the bards don’t say she was your daughter.”

“Hyllanim her son didn’t like them to sing those songs.”

Deyandara looked at the goddess’s profile, her golden-brown eyes, like pebbles under water in a brook of the peaty hills. If she had been Hyllanim’s grandmother, and Hyllanim was her own great-grandfather . . . that was very far removed. She didn’t feel any kinship to the goddess. It took more than descent to make family. “I’m sorry. But it was a long time ago, and now—now we’re here, with Marakand still ruling us, no matter how ill Ketsim is, and the Red Masks are still out there somewhere, even if they’ve abandoned Ketsim. Marnoch may be dead—”

“He lives.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“You’re not meant for him, either.”

“I don’t—”

“They’ve named you queen, but without my blessing. You wear the leopards of Cairangorm’s house that Hyllanim rejected, but you are not queen of my folk and land, child of Andara’s hills.”

“I don’t—”

“You are meant for the mother of a queen, the mother of a line of kings.”

“Then I had better get out of here, hadn’t I?” She wanted to go home, where her god was kind and thoughtful and—everything a father should have been, but which hers had not. This was like talking to her second brother’s wife, who brought everything back to her gowns and her babies, in that order of importance, no matter what you said, as if she were deaf to any words but her own. “Maybe helping me walk out of here, as you took me out of the dinaz before, when Ketsim was coming to attack it, would get me out where I could find—your queen is going to need a father.”

“She will have one. He carries her now, until the time comes he can give her to you to bear and bring into the world again. But he can’t hear me. He’s denied me, and he cannot hear, and I think—I cannot even see him, but I know he is near, very near. The Lady has him, but she can’t have slain him. The world holds him. It will, it must, till Hyllau is born into it again.”

“What? Catairanach, blessed lady, what do you mean?”

“He won’t hear you. He won’t hear me. But I think there is one he will hear. You will have to deal with that, afterwards, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. You are so lovely, so like her . . . you can win him back. He wasn’t meant for a lover of men. But the Nabbani spirit has already walked in your dreams. He still touches you. Perhaps he sees you, already. Perhaps he will come in time and bring Catairlau with him. If he doesn’t—perhaps you will live long enough to bear a child, but you will be very unlovely to look upon, I fear. I don’t think I can do for you what I did for him. So much of my heart went into him, to cradle her safe . . . I have made myself hollow.” The goddess touched one cool finger to Deyandara’s forehead, her sing-song voice sharpening. “The Nabbani spirit who rides with the Leopard. Call him to you. I will not have the mother of my darling die this way, not have Catairlau come back to you too late. She needs you. Call him.”

“The Nabbani—you mean—you mean Ghu. You’re talking about Ahjvar?”

“They are plotting treachery below. You don’t want to burn as my Hyllau did, and I can do little here but touch your dreams. Red Masks sang silent words over the raising of the walls to keep me out. They brought me in with the water you drank, their little fragment of the marriage ritual.” She laughed. “If Ketsim had drunk the water as he ought to have, he might have found ease from his suffering sooner. Pity they dug their own well down between the dykes.”

The water rose into mist, filling the room, flowing from the windows like smoke, and then it was gone.

Deyandara sank down on her knees by the south window again, eyes shut, shivering and sick.

Through the north window, there was a sudden outbreak of shouting. Below, someone shrieked and was abruptly silent.