She looked around the circle now. “Were they familiar to anyone else?”
Slow nods with downcast eyes. One cleared his voice. “My youngest sister’s son lay among them,” he said.
Others joined in now. One was familiar but not a kinsman. Another was bound-husband to a friend’s granddaughter. Of the half dozen, only two were unknown. But eventually, Winters knew, they would be found out. She turned them now to other matters.
“Had this been simply the attack in the Ninefold Forest Houses it could readily have been the isolated act of a handful,” she said. “But at least a dozen have fallen in nearly as many Houses.” She looked around as the old men nodded. “These were well planned, timed to the moment and careful as a Firstfall Dance on the night of the greenest moon.”
“And under the cover of the Old and Forgotten Ways,” one added.
Forgotten and forbidden, Winters thought. The only blood magick left to them after the Purging had been the voice magicks used for war and coronation. But somehow, those old ways had been restored and employed without the knowledge of council or queen. “I fear discord and division is now sown in our House,” she said. “We must find it and heal it by whatever means necessary. But beyond this, we must also look beyond our borders. We’ve long held our neighbors’ respect through force and fear, but it is not a far leap from sorrow to rage. And Marshers have done these dark deeds-it is not unknown to them; they’ve bodies to show it.”
The oldest spoke up. “How we respond to their rage will speak louder than any War Sermon.”
Winters nodded. “I concur.”
“We should be prepared for war,” another said.
She looked at him. “We are the House of Shadrus. War prepares for us, and ever we meet it as our sorrow commends us to.”
The oldest looked to the other. “To do more than necessary will send a message. Our neighbors, though misguided and affected, may see these attacks as something more than what they are. We would do no less. But that our own Hanric was among the fallen-he they perceived as our king-may soften the edge of their fear.”
But not their wrath, Winters realized. And for all she knew, the assassinations were more than what they were. So shortly on the heels of Windwir, it certainly felt like more.
“What do you propose?” another asked her, and she sighed.
“We find this disease within our body and we eliminate it,” she said. “You are the Twelve, respected and loved by all. Find truth for me among your clans.” She cast her eye to the Wicker Throne. “At dawn, I will lay hold the throne and climb the spire to announce myself. It is earlier than my father wished, but the time for shadows is passed.”
To a man, they nodded.
She nodded as well, and then once more banged the handle of the Firstfall axe against the stone floor to close the council. As the old men stood slowly and filed out, their chief approached her.
“You will be a wise queen,” he told her in a quiet voice, “but I fear for your time upon the throne.”
She took a deep breath, standing. “I fear it, too, Father.”
“I must show you something that I wish to the gods was not so,” he said. “In the tent where my grandson lies.”
He turned and watched the others as they filed out of the hall, up the carved steps and into the narrow corridor that let them into the cold night. When their footfalls were distant, he moved in the same direction and Winters followed.
Without words, they climbed up and into a clouded night that smelled like smoke and imminent snow. The tent stood nearby, guarded by two large men with spears who stood on either side of a guttering lamp. He nodded to them, lifted the lamp and slipped inside. Winters followed.
The six were laid out in banks of snow, their faces hollow and pale, twisted in agony. All were clothed but one-he lay swaddled in oilcloth, stitched into it by Rudolfo’s Physician. Only now, the stitches had been cut away. “My grandson,” he said in a low, mournful whisper.
Winters felt the stab of shame. He’s brought me here because of the cutting of his kin. “It had to be done,” she said, “but I’m sorry for it. They wished to know how he’d died from such superficial wounds.” She vaguely remembered the briefing with Rudolfo’s River Woman and the dark-robed Physician who’d wielded the blade. The others they’d found were also dead-some without a scratch upon them. Their bodies and hearts had simply given out, dropping them dead in midsprint. When they’d asked her permission to cut the others, she’d refused and told them that the findings from one should suffice for all. She remembered that much, but the rest of those early days following Hanric’s death were clouded.
“No,” he said. “Not that.” He stooped and with one liver-spotted hand peeled back the cloth to reveal the naked body of a young tangle-haired man. She watched where the old man pointed and wondered suddenly how she’d not seen this before.
There, upon the chest, slightly smaller than her closed fist, lay a cutting that she did not recognize. She leaned in to see it, the smell of death heavy in her nostrils. “He’s been cut,” she said. The scar was pink and new-healed. And it took a shape that she knew was intentional though she did not recognize it. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
He looked to her, and she saw in the dim light that tears coursed his cheeks, cleansing the mud and ash from them and wetting his gray tangled beard. “Yes,” he said. “It is an abomination.”
He covered the body and went to the next, stooping and pushing the tattered hide vest and filthy wool shirt aside. There, over the heart, the same cut symbol.
Silently, she watched as he did the same with the others, each time careful to replace the clothing. When he finished, he stood and spoke quietly. “Forgotten heritage has found us,” he said, “though few will know it when they see it, for these times are buried in two thousand years of forgetting.” His wet eyes met hers, and she saw something in them that made her stomach lurch. “Few should know it,” he continued. “Better to burn these before someone sees and knows it for what it is.”
He would burn the child of his child to hide this. That he would go to such lengths, so contrary to their custom, confirmed for her what she saw in his eyes.
It was terror there, mingled with his grief, and suddenly she could not hold back her own sorrow. A solitary sob shook her in its fist and released her. She argued back the tears and forced herself to meet his gaze. “What are these markings?” she asked, but at some core part of her she knew. She of all her people was most intimate with the history they’d chosen to forget. Because though her own people no longer wished to know it, the Androfrancines with their digging about in the grave of the Old World had forgotten nothing. And her tutor, the fled scholar Tertius now five years dead, had taught her even that which she had not wished to know. He had no books that he might show her himself, but he’d had the words.
When the old man didn’t answer, Winters asked again. “Tell me,” she said, “what they mean.”
“These,” he said, his voice full of despair, “are the Scars of House Y’Zir, the markings of a servant’s ownership.”
Outside, far and distant, a wolf howled at the rising moon.
Jin Li Tam
Afternoon sunshine slanted through the tall windows of Rudolfo’s study, flooding the room with light and warming the back of Jin Li Tam’s neck where she sat at his desk. She looked up from the papers she’d spent the last four hours reviewing and rubbed her eyes, fighting back the nausea and headaches that took her daily now.