Elan M’Cory stopped fighting against the guards who held her arms. “You’re a monster, Hendon—a goblin! A demon!”
Tinwright could only stare. The world seemed to be falling in on top of him.
“Nonsense, my dear.” Hendon was at her side in a moment, then pressed her cheek with the blade of the jade-handled knife as the guards held her. He pushed a little too hard and a thread of shining red appeared. “Our friend the poet will do everything I say because he will not want to see harm come to a single hair on your lovely head. Did he not go to great lengths already to hide you from me?”
Tinwright felt as though his insides had turned to sand and cold water. “Oh, gods help us, how… how did you find her?”
“Oh, the gods will be helping you soon enough, never fear.” Hendon Tolly’s glee was mounting by the instant. “I have had you followed every time you left the castle, little poet. You may have thought yourself clever with your twisting courses, but all you have done is make my soldiers tired and angry—you fooled no one. Honestly, did you really think to hide a noblewoman of Summerfield in your sister’s hovel?”
Tinwright turned to catch Elan’s eye. “I’m sorry. I never thought ...”
“Enough.” Tolly lingered a moment to sniff at her hair and face like a cat at a fleck of carrion. “Ah, I hope he does what he says, my dear,” he whispered loud enough for Matt Tinwright to hear. “I pray no harm must come to you. I want you back, you see. I have missed marking your white skin and I have missed the sounds of your suffering. It is like a sickness, this longing of mine. ...”
“Do nothing that he wants, Matt!” Elan called to Tinwright. “I was already a dead woman when we met—I was a corpse from the first time he touched me ...!”
“But our poet is not made of such cruel stuff,” Tolly said. “He will do what he is told. He will help me perform the ritual in place of poor, foolish old Brother Okros. He will sacrifice the child.” Tolly came to Tinwright then and touched the king’s child on the forehead with his dusty white finger, leaving a mark. “Because if he does not, he will watch me take the skin off his beloved Elan before he dies.”
She heard something moving around in the dark—a dark too deep for even her strong Funderling eyes—and sat up.
“The Tortoise ...” a small voice was whispering. “Then the Knot… and the Owl… the Last Hour of the Ancestor, which deep in the ancient days was the door to his house… the signs are so clear that surely even a fool could see them ... but why ... ?”
“Who’s there?” Opal cried.
A moment of silence passed before the answer came. “It’s me, Mama Opal.”
“Flint? What are you doing, boy?” She elbowed herself up out of the narrow cot and felt for the warmstone. When it was in her hand it began to glow a faint pink, enough to let her see around the room. To her dismay, Flint stood before her dressed not in his nightshirt but in daytime clothes and boots, a cloth sack in his hands.
“What in the name of stone and stonecutting are you doing? What is that sack for?”
“I was only putting some food in it. Some bread and a few dried winter mushrooms.”
“What… ? Oh, I see—you’re going somewhere, or at least you think you are.” She sprang out of bed and put herself between him and the door to the monks’ dormitory where they slept. “But I won’t let you.”
Flint looked at her, his expression calm but solemn. “I have to, Mama Opal. Please let me go.”
“Go where? Why do you do this to us, boy? To me? Haven’t we been good to you?”
He flinched as if something hurt him, surprising her. “Yes. You have been better to me than anyone else ever has! I’m not running away, Mama Opal, or getting into trouble. I’ve just realized that there’s something I must do. It… came to me.”
“What came to you?”
“I… I can’t tell you. Because I don’t entirely know. But I know where it starts, and this is it. I must go.”
Opal was close to despair, her anger melting away as fear supplanted it. “But where? This is foolishness, child! Where could you go? There’s a war outside! The southerners might come down on us any moment with swords and spears. You’ll be killed!” She came toward him, her hands now clasped before her breast. “Don’t say such things, my rabbit. You’re not going anywhere. Come back to bed. Sleep—it will all look different in the morning. You had a dream, that’s all, and it seems very real.”
“No.” His voice was not cold, but neither was it comforting. “No, Mama Opal. This is the dream. And I am beginning to wake.”
“Why couldn’t Chert be here… ?” Flint was taller than she was now, but it didn’t matter: the thought of trying to restrain him had never seriously crossed her mind. She threw her arms around him. “Please, my sweet boy, my son, don’t do it. Don’t go. I’ve already had to see your… to see my husband off on another bootless errand. ...” Tears spilled down her cheeks.
The boy put his arms around her in an awkward embrace. “I’m sorry, Mama Opal, but I have to.”
She leaned back a little and looked keenly, sufferingly at his face. “You’re not like anyone else, are you? It’s no use trying to make you something you’re not.” She laughed, a bitter, heartbroken sound. “I’ll never see you again. The Elders gave you to me only to snatch you away again—a sort of joke.”
“You will see me again.” The confusion had left his voice. “I promise that. And you have done so much more than you know. You have saved me.”
She stepped away from the door. “Go on, then. I’ve never been able to stop either you or Chert from doing what you must. Can you really not tell me where you go?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Not yet. But I will know soon. Be brave, Mama.”
She had long ago set down the warmstone; deprived of her hand and its coursing blood, its light had by now all but faded. Only the faintest rosy glow touched Flint as he opened the door into the hallway and stepped out into the echoing darkness.
Through the last several days Qinnitan had heard the fighting only distantly, as though somewhere in the endless, rocky deeps two ghost armies were fighting and re-fighting some ancient battle. When they passed through large caverns, the screams and shouts came to her unexpectedly, carried on the confused currents of air that drifted through the labyrinthine tunnels, and for a terrifying moment it seemed that soldiers were dying only yards away, around the next bend. She could not help thinking of the covered colonnades around the marketplace where she had run as a child, where in certain places you could hear the whispered bickering of merchants halfway around the square.
How had that little girl—barefoot and laughing, chasing her neighbors through the bazaar—become this pathetic thing, a caged creature that would never again see the sunlight, like the birds the copper miners carried down into the darkness with them?
The gods are punishing me—but I did nothing. It filled her with fury. I am innocent of any wrong and so was poor Pigeon! It is the gods themselves who have done this to me!
Qinnitan moved closer to the hardwood bars of her prison and pressed her face against them. She could dimly see the northern king’s cage a few yards away, swaying on the shoulders of a half dozen bearers just as hers did. The feet of the men carrying the cages crunched on the path of broken stone the autarch’s slaves had prepared. Sulepis had commanded a wider road be built down into the earth despite all his haste, simply so that he and his men could travel more comfortably. Qinnitan had seen some of the tons and tons of stone being carried out past her. It numbed her thoughts, this willingness to put a thousand men to work for days, killing dozens in the process, for a path that would be used once.