Ezra shook his head. “No. Perhaps that was our hope once, but another has risen. I speak the truth. You know it yourself. The dreams have changed, and these dreams change the course of the Book of Dreaming Kings. Did you not see the light-feel its heat-as it was consumed?”
She had, and the memory of it still haunted her. But she said nothing.
Ezra continued. “There is no Home to find,” he said again, “but there is one that we may take.”
Take? Winters felt her stomach lurch. He’d said it before, but it hadn’t registered. She suddenly saw Hanric’s cold, dead body naked and scrubbed clean, stretched out upon the snowy ground of the Gypsy King’s Maze. She saw the Marsh Scouts frozen in death, slain by their blood magicks, the mark of House Y’Zir pink upon their skin. She felt truth dawning, and it tasted like cold iron in her mouth. When she spoke, her voice sounded more frightened, more timid, than she wished it. “What do you speak of, old man? If ever you loved my father, tell me plainly.”
When Ezra smiled it was filled with hope. “The Age of the Crimson Empress is at hand,” he said. “It is time for us to receive the mantle of our great heritage and prepare for her coming. You believe that we are called the Marshfolk because we live in these northern, barren wetlands. But I say to you now that it is not so. Once, long ago, before we touched this land in the Firstfall, we were the Machtvolk. The Making People, in service to the Moon Wizard Who Fell.”
“We were slaves,” she said, “to men who shattered the world beneath their boots and spells and blades.”
“No,” he said. “We were the joyful servants not to men but to gods.” He took a step forward. “And we shall be again.”
When he opened the upper portion of his robe, dim light played over the white scars upon his heart, and Winters trembled at the ecstasy upon his face. She dug for words, and the ones she found were familiar but she did not know why. She thought perhaps she’d dreamed them. “Begone, kin-raven,” she said in a voice that rang out strong and clear. “Your message is unwelcome in this House.”
The old man chuckled. “My message is more welcome than you know.”
But Winters persisted, her voice rising in volume until it filled the cavern and echoed over stone and water. “Begone, kin-raven,” she commanded, pulling herself up from the water and facing the old man squarely. “Your message is unwelcome in this House.”
The chuckle became a laugh even as the old man stepped back and back again until shadow took him. The laughter faded, and when it had all vanished, she felt the rage and terror drain out of her as her shoulders slumped.
His words stayed with her as she returned to her pile of clothing and took up the rough cotton towel to dry herself. We were the joyful servants not to men but to gods.
By habit, she slathered on the mud and ash, rubbing it into her skin and hair. When her hands reached her breastbone, she stopped, remembering the old man’s scrawny chest and the bare patch of skin over his heart. The stark white of that scar shone bright as snow in her memory. Not the pink of a fresh cutting but something old and deeply cut.
And shall be again.
She shuddered despite the warmth of the cavern and wished suddenly that she had not teased Neb when he’d asked her to come with him to the Ninefold Forest. Would you take me as your bride, Nebios ben Hebda, she’d asked him, and grant me a Gypsy wedding filled with dancing and music?
I should have said yes, she realized. But even as she thought it, she knew it was not her path to follow.
“We dance to the music that is played us,” Hanric had once told her not so long after her father had died. “And regardless the step or the tune, if we are true we will find joy at the end of it.”
Now the only music she heard was the harp that haunted her dreams, mad Tertius with his fingers flying over the strings as the light consumed two thousand years of dreaming. And the only dance she saw ahead was cold, spinning iron in a hurricane of blood.
Winters did not believe in gods. Tertius had taught her better than that. But in this moment, she wished she did.
She reached for something higher than herself to invoke and found only a campsite beneath the moon and the warm, strong arms of a boy in her dreams.
“Help me be true,” she whispered to that dream.
And still the canticle played on.
Rudolfo
It had been a long while, Rudolfo realized, since he’d mucked a bird coop. Despite the stench, he felt a smile pulling at his face as he imagined what he must look like now, his hands and arms gray with bird droppings.
He’d removed his turban and rolled up his sleeves for the work just an hour earlier, and now he stepped back from it, clucking at the birds in their freshly cleaned cages. Behind him, one of his Gypsy Scouts snored in a makeshift bed while the other kept watch outside.
The others had ridden out for Kendrick Town nearly a week earlier, leaving Rudolfo and two scouts to man the bird station and await word from Petronus-or whoever sat at the end of the line.
A reply had come, certainly, but Rudolfo had not been pleased by it.
I will send for you, the brief note said, but the handwriting was unfamiliar and there were no codes ciphered into it that Rudolfo could read. For all he knew, anyone could’ve sent it, and at this moment, the same anyone could be en route to intercept them.
Had Gregoric been alive, Rudolfo knew what that First Captain would think of this development. Still, he’d followed his instincts and forced himself to patiently wait. Forced himself to trust that whatever Petronus had built here could be trusted with his own life and ultimately, the life of his son.
For the first few days, he’d paced and plotted strategies when he wasn’t tending to the birds that came and went. But after that, he’d grown restless and set himself to whatever work he could find in Petronus’s boat house.
Now, he grinned at the clean cages and the filth that covered him and wondered at how something so foul could bring such delight.
Perhaps, he thought as he scrubbed his hands and forearms in a waiting bucket, it delighted him because the clean cages were a bit of chaos made right.
A low, short whistle reached his ears from outside, and everything fell away with that sound. Rudolfo’s right hand went instinctively to the satchel of powders around his neck as his left hand reached for his scout knife.
The other Gypsy Scout was already on his feet, slapping fistfuls of the white powder at his shoulders and his feet, then raising the palm of his hand to his mouth. As the magicks worked their way into his skin, he faded to shadow and eased open the door.
Rudolfo crouched and waited. His men knew their work better than any, and he knew that letting them do that work was the highest honor he could pay them. Still, he inched the knife out into his hand.
A minute passed.
Wind moved into the room.
Rudolfo felt the lightest of taps upon his arm. Something approaches on the water.
Rudolfo furrowed his brow, found the man’s shoulder and pressed his fingers into it. Something?
There was hesitation in the scout’s fingers. Moves like a boat. But magicked.
Magicked? Rudolfo imagined it might be possible to magick a ship-they rubbed oils into their knives to keep them sharp and hidden, so why couldn’t it be done for a ship? He pushed the speculation aside and forced his attention back to the Gypsy Scout. Take up positions outside, he tapped.
Then, he magicked himself, drew his knives and followed.
In the morning drizzle, Rudolfo picked his way across muddy snow, careful to step into the prints already there. He moved to the shelter of a pine tree and squinted out at the bay.