The plan we had made over the past day had gone smoothly thus far. Max, Voushanti, and I had made a show of my resistance in front of Prince Bayard, enough to make Bayard think me cowardly and not worth keeping for himself. Sila Diaglou had accepted Bayard’s request for a meeting. Now it was up to Max to convince her of our story, and it was up to Max’s spy within Sila’s entourage to provide me a blade. With a weapon and a smattering of luck, I could get out of a warded cell. Outside of a cell, I could use magic to free the others. Somehow. That was the plan. As with most plans, it seemed far less plausible in daylight.
“Forward,” ordered Bayard’s captain upon his return from the gate. “Lower arms.”
He pivoted smartly. We marched briskly past the gate guards, under the raised portcullis, and into the gate tunnel. I resisted the urge to look back at the burned-out tenements where Voushanti and Saverian were to have set up their watchpost by now. Rather I gave thanks that my hands were silkbound and that Max’s hand gripped my arm to prevent my stumbling in the dark. I did not want to touch earth and sense the horrors that had gone on here.
The dark-stained gallows, the judges’ platform, and the prisoners’ cage stood vacant in the outer bailey, like the bones of some vicious monster left to rot in the weak sunlight. As we were hurried across the yard and through the inner gate, I noted the rubble-filled drainage channel. Another grate barred its passage through the inner wall. If I could find no promising venue to key my Danae shifting, I might be forced to use Max’s route to the outside. Naught of this executioner’s yard recalled enough of Renna’s baileys that I could take us from one to the other by Danae magic.
Sweat dribbled down my back. I could not retreat now. They were here—Stearc and Osriel at least. One touch of the blood samples that Saverian had brought had told me that much. But I could get no better sense of their exact location until I was inside.
We proceeded up a narrow ramp, overlooked by the inner wall walk, two flanking towers, and the arrow loops of the blocklike keep. What remained of Fortress Torvo’s conical roofs stated that this small fortress had been here long before the Aurellian invasion, long before Palinur had grown into a great city.
A barren courtyard awaited us, and more Harrower troops—some in the shabby cottes and braies of townsmen or the shapeless tunics of villeins, some in sturdier padded leather jaques with metal plates sewn on arms and breast. But all of them wore orange rags tied about their necks or arms or trailing from their hats. At the head of a wooden stair, two Harrowers opened the iron-bound doors of the keep.
Max released my arm and smoothed the wrinkles his fingers had made in my velvet sleeve. His dark eyes glittered. “Well done, little brother. I doubted you’d balls enough to make it so far without bolting. Are you ready?”
Who could be ready for the things Sila did? I ducked my head, rather than embarrassing myself by choking within his hearing. The priestess wanted me alive. She had some use for me. I had to believe that.
Max grinned and flicked a finger at one of his men, who quickly knelt in front of me with a weighty set of shackles. I lashed out at the soldier’s head with my bound hands and twisted away as if to bolt. But as Max and I had planned, a few wrenched muscles, bruising holds, and snarled curses later, I was well subdued and stumbling up the steps in chains.
Max gripped my arm with one hand. “After you.” Then he added so that none but I could hear, “May Serena Fortuna smile on our first fraternal venture. My spy will use the password brethren.”
Inhaling a last breath of the open air, I stepped inside.
No dais or grand chair marked Sila Diaglou’s barren hall. No tapestries covered the smoke-blackened walls. The old fortress was well suited to a temporary military headquarters—the best-fortified position in the city outside the royal compound itself, plenty of space for bedding down men and animals. Splintered remnants marked where wooden walls had once divided the long chamber into three. Where the roof had leaked at one end of the hall, the rotting roof beams sagged ominously. Harrower fighters drifted in and out of the hall, warming themselves at the cookfires scattered across the cracked stone floor. I doubted the drafty ruin ever got warm.
Leaving our escort at the door, Max led me confidently through the busy chamber, past five or six warriors arguing across a broad table propped up at one corner with stones. A troop of perhaps twenty—a mix of poorly turned out swordsmen, ragged townsmen, and several sturdy women—stood attentively as an officer gave them orders to raze a mill outside the city’s southern gates. Women and boys served out the steaming contents of copper cauldrons to the milling fighters.
At the far end of the hall, a group of ten or fifteen split and moved aside at our approach. Sila Diaglou stood in the center. Warrior’s garb of steel-reinforced leather rested as comfortably on her tall, slender frame as on any man’s, while her flaxen hair, cut short since I had seen her preside over Luviar’s execution, now curled about her pale, imperious face like the fair locks of painted cherubs. Here in the ruddy light of cookfires and torches, the murderous witch appeared little older than Elene.
A tall, elderly woman in shapeless brown leaned on Sila’s right arm. Though the wisps of white hair escaped from her wimple seemed oddly out of place in such a company, the old woman’s narrow eyes gleamed as sharp as an Aurellian poniard. Beside her stood a beardless man with a needle-sharp chin, a small, copper-skinned young woman with great brown eyes, and a soft-looking man with oiled black curls and an ear that was split, gnarled, and bulging like a chestnut canker—Sila’s accomplices in slaughter.
But it was the youngish man on Sila Diaglou’s left who spurred my deepest revulsion. Though he had traded the black gown and cowl of Saint Ophir for gray tunic and black braies and hose, his hairless skull, the solid line of black eyebrows, raised in surprise, and the deep-set eyes and well-drawn mouth, so quick to take on a grin, marked him as Gildas—child stealer, liar, and traitor to all he professed.
“Holy one,” said Max to the priestess, touching his fingers to his forehead in respect, “I bring greetings from His Highness Prince Bayard and a gift to serve as proof of his sincerity and good favor. Have I your leave to tell the tale?”
“Speak, pureblood.” Sky-blue eyes stared coldly from beneath Sila Diaglou’s intelligent brow. Her face, square cut like a faceted gem, was flawed only by the diagonal seams on her cheeks, carved by her own hand on the day she had publicly abjured Arrosa and the rest of the elder gods. As a girl she had pledged service to the goddess of love, so I’d heard, but only a year out of her novitiate, she had claimed Arrosa’s temple corrupted, its priestesses little more than whores for wealthy donors, its rites a mockery rather than a celebration of fertility and renewal. How her indignation had translated to leveling civilization I had yet to comprehend.
Max inclined his head. “Early this morning, I was summoned to my father’s house on urgent family business. Unlikely as it seemed, my brother had arrived, ostensibly to seek my young sister’s contract for a mapping project desired by his master, Prince Osriel. Further questioning revealed that he had, in fact, approached us without the knowledge or permission of his fearsome lord and sought our aid to escape his burdensome contract on the grounds that his master had threatened his immortal soul. Of course, revoking a contract is impossible without the Registry’s consent, which will never be granted in Valen’s case. But I, ever mindful of the gifts that fate lays before us, agreed to allow my foolish brother to plead his case before Prince Bayard.”