The Shadow of Elysium
Author: Django Wexler
Date: 2015-05-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Adult; Fiction; Epic Fantasy; Short Stories; Magic; High Fantasy; Novella; Military Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: From the author of The Price of Valor, The Shadow Throne, and The Thousand Names comes a new novella set in the world of the Shadow Campaigns -- "a world of dust and bayonets and muskets...and magic."* The wagons travel north across the mountains, carrying cargo of great value: Hamveltai glass and porcelain; Deslandai jewelry in heavy iron strongboxes; fine cloth from the cities of the Old Coast. And Abraham. Bound and tied, guarded day and night, Abraham has been stolen from his village, from the arms of the man he loved. He is being sent to the fortress-city of Elysium to serve a dark and an
Publisher: Penguin

Also by Django Wexler

The Shadow Campaigns Novels

The Thousand Names

The Shadow Throne

The Price of Valor (coming July 7, 2015)

The Forbidden Library Novels

The Forbidden Library

The Mad Apprentice

The Shadow of Elysium

A Shadow Campaigns Novella

Django Wexler

InterMix Books, New York

An imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

THE SHADOW OF ELYSIUM

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2015 by Django Wexler.

Excerpt from The Price of Valor copyright © 2015 by Django Wexler.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19709-1

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / May 2015

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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Contents

Also by Django Wexler

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

A Special Preview of The Price of Valor

About the Author

Author’s Note

This story takes place in the universe of the Shadow Campaigns, at around the same time that The Shadow Throne begins. None of the other Shadow Campaigns books or stories are required reading to enjoy it, but if you’re interested in how Alex ended up in this mess, it’s chronicled in the short story The Penitent Damned, available online.

1

It’s June by the time the little caravan works its way down out of the mountains, six wagons accompanied by as many horsemen. Each wagon is full of trade goods from the Sallonaik, the great blue lake where our journey began. Half are stacked with barrels of salted fish, fat red-eyes and narrow, blue-scaled clipper. The other half carry treasures from the south, painstakingly hauled over the Worldshearts and then sailed across the lake on the long, multi-oared trading galleys of the canton cities. There is Hamveltai glass and porcelain, packed in straw; Deslandai jewelry in heavy iron strongboxes; fine cloth from Vheed and the cities of the Old Coast.

Valuable things, things people want. And me.

I ride in the back of a farm cart, along with some of the strongboxes. I have offered no hint of resistance, but the guards take no chances. Ropes bind my hands together and secure my ankles to the driver’s seat, with just enough slack so I can shift my weight and hang on when the cart tips or shudders.

I might have worked the cord down and over my feet, or scraped it apart on a nail in the bed of a cart like the hero of a romantic story. But then what? Heroes never seemed to have to think that far ahead. Even if I were to evade the half dozen armed, mounted men who surround our party, no small feat for a boy as unskilled in woodscraft as myself, then I would be afoot and alone in a lonely, hostile country. Every night, we heard the howling of the wolves in the woods. And if I were to escape my pursuers and the wolves and slow death by starvation or exposure or any number of other grisly ends, where was there to go?

That I think of escape, in spite of all of this, is a clear sign of my insanity. My demon, perhaps, wrecking the fabric of my mind. Peter is two hundred miles away and getting farther with every weary day. He is strapped to another wagon, headed to another prison.

Even if I broke free, crossed the miles, rescued him from his captors, he would not welcome me. This time, he would probably kill me himself.

***

But one cannot help but hope. So I sit, and wait, and plan. We will not be in the mountains forever. Sooner or later we will reach a wider road, and there will be towns along the way, places to lose myself and evade pursuit. I can read, write, and do sums; there is always a living to be made for someone with such esoteric skills. I will survive.

I sleep in the cart, under a thick wool blanket. Twice a day, the guards let me off my leash to give me a chance to squat in the ditch beside the side of the road or make water. They feed me, hard black bread and sometimes a handful of greasy meat; squirrel, or rabbit, or fat gray mountain birds I’ve never seen before. The outriders travel with rifles at the ready, hoping for a shot at any animal flushed by the noise of the oncoming wagons. When they miss, all we have is bread.

Tullo is a mercenary, a southerner from the League cities. He has lank, dirty red hair and a curly red beard he rarely bothers to trim. Every second or third night, he comes to my cart, already drunk, hands fumbling with the strings of his leather trousers. He joins me under the blanket and I take his cock in my mouth. I feel his fingers grip my hair and I listen to the harsh sound of his breath until he spends himself.

Afterward he lets me take a swallow from his belt skin, which is filled with a clear spirit so harsh it burns my throat, and leaves me an extra measure of bread. I eat it, huddle back under my blanket, and try to sleep.

I will survive.

***

At the base of the mountains, there is a road leading north and south, and a little town. It’s barely bigger than my village by the lake, no more than two dozen log-and-shingle buildings, but the caravan stays well clear. Most of the guards go into town, to buy supplies, while another keeps an eye on me. It might be a good time to begin my escape, but the guard seems attentive, and his rifle is loaded.

When the others return, they direct us to the north road, where another wagon is waiting in a little clearing. It’s larger than my farm cart, with high sides and a gate at the back, pulled by a pair of horses. Sitting on a high box is a big man in a stained crimson robe, a Priest of the Red, and beside him a thin, ugly fellow with a bulbous nose and protruding ears under a mop of dark hair. It is accompanied by another half dozen guards, hard-looking men in forest leathers with rifles and long knives.

The leader of our party, a man named Voryil, has a conversation with the priest while the rest of us wait a little distance away. I can’t quite overhear the conversation, but I catch the occasional word. “Demon,” he says. “Sorcery.” Voryil seems to be arguing some point, but the priest says something that shuts him up. Clearly, Voryil is outranked.

A few minutes later, the guards untie me from the bed of the cart and lead me over to the high-sided wagon, opening the rear gate so I can climb in. There is a girl in rough linens there, curled on her side, asleep or unconscious. She is small, about my age but slight and very thin, and her black hair is limp and matted with filth. She has iron bands around one ankle, secured by a chain to a metal loop in the center of the wagon bed. Before I really understand what’s happening, the guards are strapping a similar band around my leg and locking it into place with a steel pin.

Looking down at my new confinement, I wonder if I have missed my chance to escape after all.

2

I don’t remember my mother, or where I was born. I can remember, barely, arriving in Nestevyo. I was riding behind my father, gripping him hard around the middle. A second horse, following placidly behind us, carried all we had in the way of possessions. Clothes, tools, a few precious books.

We moved into a shack near the water, a few hundred yards from the village proper. I don’t know if my father paid anyone for the right to live there or not. It hadn’t been used in years, perhaps in decades, and there was nothing much left but four ugly walls and a fire pit. I remember the first night, sleeping under the stars, nothing overhead but the skeletal shapes of the rafters.

The next day, my father traded the horses to some of the villagers in exchange for help rebuilding the roof. A pack of them came over, riding in a wagon heaped high with dried grass. They were dour, suspicious men, often with their dour, suspicious sons along, and they stared at my father and me as though we were circus attractions. But they had brought ladders, and they spent all day putting up thin wooden shingles covered with mats of dried grass, fixed in place with an awful-smelling muck that looked like liquid shit. My father, though unused to manual labor, did his best to help, and in the evening he broke open a bottle of spirit he’d brought in our bags and poured each villager a generous measure.

It was as auspicious a beginning to our life in Nestevyo as we could have hoped for. Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that we could never truly be a part of the village. In our old home in the south, where the Mithradacii tide rose high and lasted long, most of the old peoples of the world were erased. It’s easy to forget that north of the Worldshearts there are clans who never knelt to any tyrant, people whose children bear no trace of the blood of the Children of the Sun. The people of Nestevyo were descended from such stock, short and broad shouldered, with hair as black as a crow’s wing. They call us mikadvi, which means “muddy” and is appropriate enough. My father and I both had hair the color of freshly turned earth; we would be unremarkable in the lowland cities, but here in the Murnskai mountains we were as foreign as Khandarai.

My father put food on our table however he could manage. He sold his services as a scribe, or traded them for things we needed. Aside from the village priest, no one in Nestevyo was literate, but there were still occasional things that needed writing down: wills, papers for the provincial government, letters to distant family. This did not bring in enough to either feed us or keep my father busy, so in the meantime he fished, like every other man in the village. The dark waters of the Sallonaik are bountiful, rich enough that even a clumsy pen pusher like my father could coax a fish or two onto his line. The other villagers laughed at his scrabbling efforts, and in spite of the hurt to his pride he laughed with them, and joked at his own expense, and got them to teach him how to do it properly.

At the time, I did not understand what my father gave up to live in Nestevyo. Like any child, I was concerned only with my own affairs.

***

I was nine years old when I first understood that I carried a demon.

I realize now I had felt its touch before that, the cold sensation of scaled skin scraping against the warmth of my heart. At the time, though, I thought nothing of it. It didn’t hurt, exactly, and it always went away soon enough. If I told my father, he no doubt put it down to a chill.

In my ninth year, a villager named Belvetz, for whom my father had done some work copying out letters, gave us a dog. The animal was a runt, the tag end of a litter who would never be useful for work, and normally he would have been tossed into the lake as not worth feeding. Belvetz, who had four sons of his own, suggested that a small dog might make a good pet for a child my age, and so my father brought him home and I acquired a companion. My father named him Sagamet, which is an old Mithradacii word meaning “dirty snow.”

Sagamet was a Murnskai mountain dog, a breed as hardy as the villagers who raise them, thick legged with short, curly hair that sheds water like a duck’s feathers. He was a dark, muddy gray, to match his name, with a few patches of pure black on his haunches. He took to me at once, and I of course loved him with all my heart—no boy of nine can resist the attentions of a friendly dog. Before long he walked at my heel whenever I went out, like an eager shadow, and curled up by my side when I sat down to read.

I did not play with the other children of the village. It was not so much that they hated me, though I suppose they might have and I would never have known it. The differences between us were so vast we knew instinctively they could not be bridged, and neither I nor they ever tried. I was already taller than every other boy my age, with my strange, mud-colored hair. Instead of learning to fish, hunt, and climb like the boys, or even to mend nets and make cloth like the girls, I was devoted to my father’s strange trade of reading and writing. I practiced nearly every day, going through the few books we had over and over whenever the sun was high and the sky was clear. We could not afford to waste candles to give me light to study by, so it was in the evenings that Sagamet and I would venture into the thin woods surrounding the village, or wander up and down the shore of the Sallonaik and investigate its many rocky inlets and pools.

The great lake is so large it has winds and tides, like an ocean, and the shore is covered in rocky columns and tumbled boulders, overgrown with scraggly trees and vines. In some places, these form pools that are connected to the lake when the water is high, but not when it recedes, and sometimes in these pools the lake would leave us treasures. Big fish, trapped by the tide’s retreat, flopping and gasping in the shallow water; one such find could feed us for days. Or bits of detritus, floated in from ships wrecked out in the deep and hung up on the rock. I had once found a man’s shirt, torn and sodden, and a carved bit of wood my father said might have been part of a ship’s rail.

On the day I discovered my demon, I knew the water had been particularly high the night before, and now that the tide had gone out I had hopes of finding either something to play with or something to eat. Sagamet was game for a walk, as always, and we set out up the shore towards a pool I knew, where a short scramble over rocks would let me in to a shallow, sand-floored basin. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, but I had at least a couple of hours before it became too dark to see.

As I walked, I picked up a stick and pretended it was a sword, swinging it around at imaginary foes. I had been reading the Wisdoms, specifically the chapters dealing with the wars against the Demon King, and I imagined myself one of the holy soldiers of the Sworn Church battling the evil sorcerers of the south. Demons rose up before me and were cut down, one after another, while my faithful companion Sagamet ran circles around me and barked excitedly every time my stick clacked against a tree branch.

When I reached the pool, I looked down from the top of the rocks and saw that something was indeed waiting for me. It was a big gray hummock, longer than I was tall, lying motionless in the middle of the pool. From where I stood, I couldn’t see any more than that—it clearly wasn’t a fish, but it looked too smooth to be a rock. It might be, I thought excitedly, a cannon, half buried in the sand. How a cannon could have floated up and into the pool I had no idea, but I was caught up in the idea at once. I clambered down the rocks, Sagamet following sure-footedly behind me until he was low enough to jump into the pool with a great splash.

Wading in the water, which came up to my thighs, I approached the humped thing. The part of its surface that was out of the water was smooth, like it had been polished. I realized with a start that it was moving, very slightly, in and out. Sagamet barked excitedly, splashing back and forth in the water.

I should have turned around and run, then and there. Instead I moved even closer and prodded the thing with my stick.

The books say that the salverre of the Sallonaik is not a true shark, because it breathes air and lacks gills. But it possesses all the other important attributes of a shark, most notably a mouth full of triangular, serrated teeth and a voracious appetite. This one had been stuck in the pool since last night’s high tide, getting angrier and angrier as the water drained away and its hide dried in the unaccustomed sun. The touch of my stick roused it to a fury. Its head, which had been buried in the sand, came up with a spray of water, and it lunged forward by thrashing its long, gray body against the sand. Its teeth snapped closed inches from my foot, and I scrambled back in fright against the rock wall of the pool.

At that moment, Sagamet doubtless saved my life. He charged, barking furiously, hackles raised, and put himself between the salverre and me. The creature lurched toward him, and Sagamet jumped away, then dashed in again, trying to nip at the gray hide. This time the great fish was too quick for him; his barks changed to howls of pain as the jaws closed around his midsection. It thrashed back and forth, dragging the dog through the water, which turned a frothy red.

I forgot my fear at once. I let go of my stick and groped under the water for a rock. When I found one, a jagged chunk of limestone I could barely lift with one hand, I charged the salverre. Sagamet was still howling weakly. The creature opened its mouth as I approached, and he slid free, floating limp in the water in a spreading slick of blood. It came at me, jaws wide, and I brought the rock down on its head with all the strength I could muster.

I must have stunned it. I barely remember what happened next, in the wild tones of a dream. I gathered Sagamet into my arms and ran to the lakeward side of the pool, where there was a small lip of stone I could mount without using my hands. How I got back up onto the high ground without toppling over and cracking my skull, I have no idea. I laid Sagamet down and fell to my knees beside him.

I was sobbing already, from fear and because I could see at a glance that my dog could not be saved. The salverre’s teeth had torn great rents in his flanks, and while his breath still whistled feebly, the pulses of blood from the wound were already slowing. I put my hands on him, and they came away as red as if I’d dipped them in paint. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t have the breath.

Then I felt the cold sensation again, right behind my eyes. Without quite knowing why, I touched Sagamet again, and this time the cold flowed out through my fingers and into his torn body. I could feel him, heart and lungs and guts and brain, as though his body were a beautiful, perfect machine someone had smashed great chunks out of with a hammer. In that moment I could see how it all fit together, and I reached out with the cold and began setting things to rights.

I don’t know how long it took. All I remember is opening my eyes, at the end, to find my dog sitting up and licking the tears from my face.

***

I went home that night, after Sagamet and I washed out the blood in a stream, and told my father what had happened. I did not have wit enough to lie. He listened, indulgently at first and then with cold eyes and furrowed brow.

“You have saved Sagamet, but you may have damned yourself doing it,” he muttered when I was finished. “Listen to me, Abraham. You must never tell anyone else of this. Never, you understand? Until the day you die. This kind of miracle does not come from God. It is sorcery. There is a demon inside you, working through you. I had hoped . . .”

My eyes had gone very wide. My father pulled me to him and wrapped me in his arms.

“It will be all right. We will tell no one, and you will not use this power again. Just . . . don’t say anything. Not even to me, in case someone is listening. Promise me.”

I nodded, my head pressed tight against his shoulder.

The next day, my father told the other villagers I had discovered a salverre in one of the tidal pools. A party of them went out, with spears and ropes, and brought the creature back in triumph. That night we roasted it by the shore and had a feast. The flesh was tougher than I liked, but I ate a second helping, and I brought home a string of guts for Sagamet.

3

The girl sleeps almost all the time. I wonder if she is sick.

The north road is more heavily trafficked than the mountain passes, and we see other wagons or riders once or twice a day. When they are coming from the north, where we are bound, Voryil hails them and asks about conditions on the road.

“Mud,” they say. Always mud.

When southerners think of Murnsk, they picture snowy fields, trees hung with icicles, hungry wolves prowling through silent forests, and rivers frozen solid. But even Murnsk has its summer, however briefly, and we are in the height of it. To either side of the road, the dark green of pine needles has been joined by the brighter emerald of new leaves, while huge, brooding oaks and white birches shed ragged bands of bark. There are flowers everywhere, explosions of blue and red and purple wherever the trees let through a little light, lining the edges of the road as neatly as if they’d been planted there.

With the flowers come the insects, fat droning bees and clouds of butterflies that pass over the wagon like flashing, multicolored jewels. Somewhat less welcome are the biting midges that swarm over exposed skin. With my hands manacled, I cannot even slap at them, so I cover myself with my blanket in spite of the heat of the sun. The girl acquires painful-looking welts on her face and hands but does not seem to notice.

We make very slow progress. The thaw has turned the road into a sea of mud, orange, sticky stuff that clings to the wagon wheels and the legs of the horses. Usually there is solid ground a few inches down, and we can splash along, but the muddy surface conceals deep chuckholes and pools that could swallow a wagon whole. The guards, well versed in this kind of travel, ride ahead and probe the ground with long sticks, steering the vehicles around the worst obstacles. Even so, hardly a day goes by without an hour or two spent dragging a stuck wagon wheel out of a rut.

There are towns along the road, usually where it crosses one of the small west-flowing rivers at a ford or a wooden bridge. The guards stop to buy food, now that the hunting is scarcer, but the wagons never halt until we’re well beyond the crossing. I don’t know if the priest doesn’t trust the townsfolk, or if he is worried a view of some kind of civilization might tempt his prisoners into rashness.

Every day, as the sun sets, the girl opens her eyes and raises her head. She still seems dazed, but she is awake enough to stumble along with the guards when they unchain her legs and take her off the cart to attend to her call of nature. When she returns, they feed her, spooning a thick, creamy broth directly into her mouth. Afterward, she falls asleep again.

I get bread and dried meat, the latter tooth-breakingly tough unless I soak it in my tin cup of water. I watch for a chance to escape, but my hope burns lower now. There are more guards, more miles between us, and iron and steel securing me instead of hemp.

***

Tullo still comes to me, though less frequently. He glances briefly at the sleeping girl, and I wonder if he would rather have her servicing him instead, but he raises no complaint when I bend to my task. The shot of spirit he offers me afterward sets fire to my stomach, but the extra bread is welcome.

***

One night, a fortnight after I was put in irons, something is different. The guards unchain the girl as usual and lead her stumbling into the twilight, laughing at some crude joke. But when they return her, no food is forthcoming for either of us, and she does not return to her sleep. She sits, blinking, against the wall of the wagon, and at last her eyes seem to focus on me.

“Hello?” I say. “Can you understand me?”

She blinks again, swallows, and shakes her head. She has a southerner’s complexion, so I switch from my native Murnskai to Hamveltai. I speak Vordanai as well, though my accent and pronunciation for all the southern languages is atrocious; I learned them from books and snatches of conversations with my father.

“Hello?”

Her eyes widen. When she speaks, her voice is a croak, as though it had not been used for a long time.

“Hello,” she says. “You . . . you can understand me?”

“If you speak slowly,” I say.

“Who are you?” She looks around, still shaking her head as though in a fog. “Where am I?”

“My name is Abraham. I don’t know where we are, exactly. Somewhere on the north road.”

“The north road?”

I wonder how far they have carried her, in her dazed state. “North of the Worldshearts. On the way to Elysium.”

“Murnsk,” she says. There is fear on her face. “I’m in Murnsk?”

I nod. “What’s your name?”

“Alex. Or—” She hesitates, then shakes her head. “Just Alex.”

“Do you know what you’re doing here?”

“I—”

There’s a clack as someone unlocks the rear gate of the wagon. Alex stops. A moment later, a robed figure climbs up onto the wagon bed with us. At first I think it is the priest, but his robes are not red but utterly black. He face is obscured by a mask, a layer of thin cloth set all over with faceted chips of black glass. They glitter in the light of the outriders’ torches, shifting liquidly as he moves.

“Good evening,” he says, in Hamveltai. “I see you’re awake, Alex.”

She has pulled herself away from him, as far as her chains will allow. Her eyes are full of hate. The masked man smiles, black glass shifting and gleaming. He turns to me.

“And you. I am told you can understand this tongue?”

I nod, stiffly.

“Good,” he says. “That will save me the trouble of explaining everything twice. My job is to prepare you as best I can for your new lives. Both of you bear demons.” He catches my expression and sighs. “Please don’t attempt to deny it. Even if your use of sorcery were not well documented, this close I can feel them. I have a demon of my own, you see. My name is Hunter, and I serve the Priests of the Black.”

“My father told me there were no more Priests of the Black,” I object.

“Your father thought there were no more demons, either,” Hunter says. This isn’t true, but I let it pass. “These days we work in secret, but as long as there are supernatural forces loose to continue to corrupt humanity, our task will never end.”

“Why,” Alex says in her scratchy, damaged voice, and coughs. “Why not kill us? If we’re corrupted.”

“That is, you might say, the heart of the matter.” Hunter puts two fingers in the air, like a scholar lecturing a class. “A demon can enter a human in two ways. Either the human can speak the demon’s true name and summon it, or it can make its way to the world on its own and attach itself to some unwary soul, often in childhood. Once it has a host, the demon remains with them for life.”

I will hide him. I remember my father’s hand, fumbling awkwardly with his pen. They will not have my boy.

“Each demon,” Hunter continues, “is a singular being. Many are similar, of course, but each is ultimately unique, with its own unique name. They cannot die—if the host is killed, the demon simply waits for its next chance. We still do not understand exactly under what circumstances they emerge into the world on their own, but we do know that once a particular demon is attached to a human, that demon will not emerge elsewhere.

“Our holy order, therefore, fights the forces of darkness in two ways. First, we strive to eradicate knowledge of the true names of demons wherever they may be found. Second, when a demon does find a human host, we bring that host to Elysium, where the demon can be contained. Imprisoned, if you like. We ensure that the hosts live long lives, to keep the creatures from taking a new victim for as long as possible.”

“So we’re going to be locked up for the rest of our lives,” I say.

“Yes. And when you die, I’m afraid you are already damned. The Wisdoms are quite clear on the subject. But in case you are inspired to attempt anything . . . foolish, let me make two points. First, if you did somehow manage to win your way free, there is nowhere you could go that I could not track you. That is the power of my demon. Once it has your taste, it will never let you go. Second . . .” Hunter smiles again, light gleaming in new patterns on his face. “We take great pains to keep you alive, but we need not keep you whole. A man can live for a long time without hands, or without feet. Or without a tongue. Do you understand?”

I nod, feeling dazed. Alex, who seems to be getting stronger by the minute, sits up a little straighter and says, “If you have a demon, then you’re damned as well, aren’t you? Why would you help do this to us?”

“Because the more of you I lock away, the fewer innocents will suffer eternal torment. I am Ignahta Sempria, Penitent Damned. Though my own soul is condemned to hellfire, I do what I can for the good of others.” Hunter shrugs. “You’re both young. Someday you might aspire to join our ranks, if you work diligently and pass the tests. I suggest you spend the next few weeks contemplating what is the best use you can make of your lives, if you’re guaranteed damnation in the hereafter.”

He turns, in a swirl of black, and hops down from the wagon. Two guards arrive shortly thereafter, with our delayed meal. I can lift the bread to my mouth with my linked hands, but Alex is forced to sit and let them spoon-feed her soup, as carefully as a mother tending to a child.

Within minutes, she is asleep again, slumped against the side of the wagon. I chew the stone-hard dried meat and watch her, thoughtfully.

4

The second time I used my demon, I was fifteen, and just beginning to realize I was in love.

His name was Peter Alivayani, and he was a novice of the Red, sent to Nestevyo to assist our resident priest. In one sense, Peter was the worst possible choice for my affections. In another, my feelings for him were inevitable.

The position of the priest in Nestevyo was a strange one. There was no man more respected, for reverence for the Church ran strong among the villagers. Holy Murnsk had never suffered from the schisms and conflicts that afflicted lesser nations like Vordan, leading them into heresy and disregard of spiritual matters. There was one Church, the Sworn Church of Elysium, and its red- and white-robed priests were the gatekeepers of salvation.

But in spite of this respect, or perhaps in part because of it, the priest was and would always be an outsider. He was not from the village, or any of the villages around the Sallonaik. Elysium’s domain was vast, and a stroke of some functionary’s pen had sent us a man from the western shore, along the Borel Sea, whose accent grated harshly on the ears of the natives.

He was a Priest of the White. When I first arrived in the village, there were two priests, one of the White and one of the Red. The former’s attention was fixed on spiritual matters, while the latter tended to the material needs of the Church—the collection of tithes, the maintenance of Church property, and so on. When I was fourteen, the Priest of the Red completed his term of service and returned to Elysium, and for a time we had only Father Orrelly. He was an old man by then, white haired and bent backed, but with a fine strong voice and an eye for sinful behavior all the village children had learned to mind.

In place of his departed companion, Elysium sent us Peter. He was a novice of the Red, a priest-in-training, and this was his first posting. Managing the business of a remote church like ours was considered good experience for a boy—he was my age—and in the meantime Father Orrelly would continue his spiritual education.

Like his teacher, he was not a part of the village. He assisted Father Orrelly with services, helped the villagers with a bit of basic medicine, and studied books in the stone-walled house attached to the back of the church. The other boys and girls in the village gave him a wide berth, and the adults ignored him. But while Father Orrelly had had years to get used to his solitary life, I think it must have grated on Peter to live in a place where he had no one to talk to except a half-deaf old man. That would explain why he was wandering the day he found me reading in the clearing.

***

As I’d grown up, my relations with the village children had worsened. I was no longer a novelty to be shunned, but a stranger in their midst, and by tormenting me whenever they could they strengthened the bonds of their own community through a mutual enemy. The boys would taunt me when I crossed the village, and if there were no adults about they might push me or hit me to get me to run so they could give chase. The girls made their disdain clear with elaborate gestures, walking around me in wide circles so they wouldn’t have to breath the same air I did, or averting their eyes if they were forced to talk to me.

I didn’t mind, much. I had never had the company of other children, so I did not miss it, though I did not enjoy being pummeled, either. I kept to myself, and unless my father needed me for some errand I stayed away from the village, out in the woods along the rocky shore of the Sallonaik. There was a clearing where a giant old pine had toppled and made a space, and I would bring my books there to read.

My father’s library had expanded over the years. The peddlers who were the town’s main contact with the outside world usually had a worn volume or two on their carts, and they were more likely than most to need my father’s skills. I worked for them too, sometimes, copying out letters and bills, quill scratching eagerly in the knowledge that some new book would soon be mine for the reading. So in addition to the Wisdoms and the bare few histories my father had brought with us, I had read whatever had fallen into my lap: biographies of famous kings, romances of the Borelgai court, religious treatises, and descriptions of journeys to strange lands.

The day Peter found me, it was the last of these that I was enjoying. It was Heart of Khandar, the story of the Vordanai explorer Merric’s doomed attempt to follow the Tsel to its source, beyond the Great Desol. This was the third time I’d read it, and while my Vordanai was still weak, I was able to puzzle through some words that had eluded me before, so I turned each page with a fresh pleasure. I was so absorbed in the task that I didn’t notice when a shadow fell over me.

“Is that interesting?” the intruder said, eventually.

I shot up like a startled cat, terrified the village boys had invaded my hiding place. Peter was sitting on the fallen log, watching me with his chin in his hands. I recognized him, vaguely, from Sunday service, but we had never spoken before. He was taller than me, with wispy blond hair that stood out from his head like a dandelion puff. He wore the robe of his office, a shapeless gray thing with a red stripe near the collar to mark the order of the Church he aspired to join.

For a moment I said nothing, trying to slow the beating of my heart, clutching the book to my chest. Peter frowned.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I scare you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I just . . . didn’t expect anyone to find me here.”

“I imagine not,” he said. “We’re pretty deep in the woods.”

His Murnskai had a different accent than the villagers’ did, a hint of a lilt that I learned later was the mark of the far north, of Elysium. It made him sound like he was always half laughing. I looked at him, still suspicious, and said nothing.

“Do you come here often?” he said, gently, with the air of someone patiently taming a wild animal.

I nodded. “The light is good here, during the day. If it doesn’t rain.”

“I like it,” Peter said, looking around. “It’s peaceful. Nothing ever bothers you? The other boys told me there were wolves in these woods.”

I sighed. “They’re just trying to frighten you. The villagers shot out all the large animals around here ages ago. Sometimes you can hear wolves at night, but they’re up in the hills.”

“That’s good to know.” He looked down at the book again. “So. Is it interesting?”

“Fairly.” I shrugged, for some reason wanting to play it cool. “Captain Merric takes his men up the Tsel, fighting crocodiles and natives and never really sure where he’s going. Only he gets the blue fever and dies, and his men have to go back without ever finding the source. Only ten out of thirty made it back to Ashe-Katarion.”

“You know how it ends?”

“I’ve read it before. We haven’t got that many books, so I read them over a lot.” I flushed a bit, embarrassed. None of the villagers have any books at all, of course, but I thought that a novice from Elysium must find my pretensions at literacy pathetic.

“I used to read a lot,” Peter said with a sigh. “The Great Library at Elysium has thousands of books. Thousands. Some of them are as old as Karis the Savior. None of the novices are allowed in there, though. Here, Father Orrelly only has the Wisdoms, and he barely takes it down from the shelf anymore. He knows it by heart.”

“I read the Wisdoms, too.”

“I bet Captain Merric and Khandar are more interesting, though.”

I wasn’t sure if I should answer that truthfully—he was a priest, after all, or would be—but the look of longing on his face was such that I couldn’t help but nod. Then, moved by an uncharacteristically generous impulse and the odd, fluttering feeling that was just beginning to take root behind by breastbone, I said, “You could borrow this. If you promised to bring it back.”

For a moment Peter lit up, but then his face fell. “I can’t. If Father Orrelly found it, he’d scold me, and he might take it away.”

“Then come back here tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll bring this for you to read, and something else for me.”

“Really?”

I nodded, feeling like a prince dispensing spectacular munificence. Peter’s smile made me feel warm, and slightly buoyant, as though I might float away into the midsummer sky.

***

That was how we met, and how we started spending every sunny day reading in the clearing. At first we always sat in silence, reading, but eventually we began to talk a little as well. Peter told me about his life at Elysium, where he’d grown up from a very young age. Classes with the other novices, theology and languages and sums. Endless chores, rebuilding decaying sections of the crumbling, ancient fortress-city. Meeting boys from everywhere in the world that knew the Savior’s grace, Vordanai and Old Coasters and Deslandai.

In return, I showed him my life in Nestevyo, the paths through the woods with which I’d grown so familiar. I knew where the old mother fox lived with her kits, and a place where there was a hollow tree so big we could both fit inside it together, pressed tight and giggling. In the end, I even agreed to take him to the tidal pools, which I hadn’t returned to since that horrible day six years before.

Perhaps I should not have done that. Those pools have been nothing but evil luck for me.

***

Sagamet had lived another four years, then died from what my father said was probably a trouble with his heart. I had sat by my dog’s side, listening to his labored breathing, and in the back of my mind I’d wondered if I could help him, if I could still call up that cold feeling of the demon under my skin. But I’d promised my father, never again. We buried Sagamet in the stony soil in back of the house, and I’d cried myself to sleep. Going back to the tidal pools made me think of him again, and my eyes were unexpectedly misty as I led the way through the woods to the rocky shore where the natural basins could be found. Peter followed close behind me.

At his request, we bypassed a few of the shallower pools, where I’d once gone to look for fish and strange artifacts. Instead, I took him to a deeper basin, twenty feet across and full to a substantial depth even at low tide. Getting down to it involved a scramble over a series of ledges of protruding shale, edged with unexpectedly sharp points of rock. My hands were scraped and twinging by the time we reached the water’s edge.

I looked at the water dubiously. It was clear enough that I could see the bottom, and there was nothing more dangerous than a couple of trapped fish. Certainly no salverre. But it was too deep to pick the fish out with our hands, and we hadn’t brought poles or spears. Peter knelt and trailed his hand in the water.

“Brr. Not exactly a bath, but it’s warmer than the stream.”

Then, to my astonishment, he shed his robe in a heap. Underneath he had only an undershirt and breeches, and he was soon out of these as well. Before I could say a word, he backed up a few paces for a running start, paused, and jumped out over the water with a yell. He hit with his knees pulled up to his chest, creating a gigantic splash that flicked spray across my face.

I stared. We didn’t swim in Nestevyo. The Sallonaik was deep, dark, and cold, and the villagers who took boats out onto it treated it with an almost superstitious dread. There were worse things than salverre in there, lurking in the depths. I had never been in water deeper than my shins, and watching Peter stroke easily across the tidal pool was as startling as if he’d casually started to fly.

He reached the other side, took hold of the rock, and looked back at me. “Well? Aren’t you coming in? It’s not that cold.’

“I don’t . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t . . . I mean, I don’t know how to . . .”

“You don’t know how to swim?” Peter pushed off from the wall and dove under the surface, skinny pale legs kicking for a moment in the air. I watched with mounting horror until he popped back up with a gasp right in front of me. “It’s shallow enough to stand here. Come on, I’ll show you.”

“I’ll just . . . watch,” I mumbled.

“Come on,” Peter said. “It’s only water.”

Whether it was his mocking smile or the heat of the summer day that convinced me, I couldn’t say. Eventually, though, after much prodding, I left my own clothes in a pile beside his and slid gingerly into the pool. It was cold, but not as cold as the lake; the sun on the rocks had warmed it a little. I had a moment of panic when my feet slipped on the slimy bottom, and Peter caught my hand to steady me.

“Try putting your head under,” he said. “Getting your hair wet feels good.” His dandelion-puff hair hung heavily around his head in thick blond masses.

It took a lot of coaxing, but eventually I managed that. Peter took my hands and convinced me to take my feet off the bottom, kicking so frantically that I beat the water to a froth. He laughed and laughed, and I ducked my face in the water to hide my flushing cheeks. After an hour or so, he had me doing a reasonable dog paddle. I even, breathless with my own daring, followed him out into the center of the pool to tread water over an abyss perhaps eight feet deep.

“Where did you learn to do this?” I said while we were resting.

“At Elysium.”

“I thought Elysium was up the side of a mountain, next to a river of ice that never melts. Wouldn’t you freeze?”

Peter nodded. “There are places where water wells up out the ground, too hot to touch. That’s why Saint Ligamenti built the first fortress there. He was fleeing into the mountains, his men were all freezing to death, and God showed him where there was a spring warmed by an eternal flame. Nowadays it’s all pipes and valves and things. The water goes into these big cisterns to cool, and you can swim in them.” He winked. “If you’re smart enough to get away from the barracks without the priests finding you.”

I laughed. “I thought it was all books and chores.”

“There’s plenty of that, too.” He pushed off the wall, grinning. “Come on. Let’s try to touch the bottom.”

***

When the sun started to slip toward the horizon and the cold waters of the Sallonaik began trickling over the lip of rock separating the pool from the lake, we reluctantly decided it was time to go back to the village. Peter scrambled back onto the rock where we’d left our clothes, and held out a hand to pull me up. We stood for a moment, dripping and shivering but thoroughly happy. It occurred to me, the thought springing from nowhere, that I would like nothing more in the world than for Peter to kiss me.

I turned away from him immediately, fumbling with my clothes. By the time I managed to get dressed, Peter was already climbing the ledges, and I scrambled after him. Our wet hair and damp garments made it cold in the shadow of the trees, so we set a brisk pace on the walk home. We’d come some distance, though, so I had time to think.

It wasn’t that I’d never thought about that sort of thing before—I was a fifteen-year-old boy, after all—but it had always seemed to take place on another world, something I could view via the telescope of my books but never touch. None of the village girls had ever shown the slightest interest in me, and I had long ago written them off entirely. The Borelgai court romances were full of brave knights and their ladyloves, but their affairs seemed to consist almost entirely of pining, jealousy, and tragic or violent deaths. What I felt now—what I had felt for some time, I began to realize—was entirely different.

Before I had decided what I could possibly do about it, we were approaching my shack. This was usually where we separated, me to return to help my father with the evening’s tasks, him to report back to Father Orrelly. Today I saw that our little boat was halfway out of the water, as though my father had been out fishing and had gotten distracted before he’d gotten the chance to pull it entirely onto the rocky beach. It wasn’t until we left the trees behind that I saw the crumpled shape beside the boat, and my throat went tight. All thoughts of Peter were immediately gone from my mind.

“Father!” I said, running the last few yards. He lay on his side beside the boat, one hand stiffened into a claw and tangled in his shirt, his eyes wide and unfocused. His breath was harsh and ragged, and his skin had darkened to an ugly gray. He gave no sign that he noticed my approach, but only kicked his legs feebly.

“Father,” I said, already crying freely. I fell to my knees beside him, groping for his hand. “Father, what’s wrong?”

“It’s his heart,” Peter said. I looked up, my eyes blurry with tears. I had forgotten he was there.

“What should we do?” The Priests of the Red were taught a little bit of healing, I knew. They were often the only recourse of lonely villages, far from the cutters and surgeons of the city. “Help him!”

Peter chewed his lip. “We can take him inside, try and get him warm.”

I nodded, sniffling, and went to take up my father’s legs. Peter took his arms, and somehow we managed to lift him. The world seemed to spin around me. This was my father, the man who had been at the center of my life since I could remember, as unchanging and eternal as the sun and the moon. Now we were carrying him into our shack like a sack of wheat, his head lolling, a spreading stain on his breeches were he’d pissed himself. I nearly dropped his legs several times, and once we had him laid out on his thin pallet, I sat down and started sobbing.

Peter spoke to my father, tried to get him to respond, snapped a finger in front of his eyes. He bent down and put an ear against his chest, then sat up.

“What do we do now?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t think there is anything to do.” Peter shook his head. “Abraham, he’s going to die.”

“No!” I slammed my fists against the earth. “No. There has to be something you can do!”

Peter just shook his head. I closed my eyes and wiped the snot from my nose, breathing hard.

There was nothing he could do. Maybe nothing any doctor could do. But there was something I could do, something I’d sworn never to do again. Deciding to break my solemn promise took me only a moment.

“Get out of here,” I said to Peter.

“What?” He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

I couldn’t let him see what I was going to do. “I mean go. Leave. Please. Leave me with him.”

He shook his head again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Peter—”

The breath rattled in my father’s chest. His hand twitched, weakly. There was no more time. I put Peter out of my mind, put everything out of my mind except my father and the cold feeling of the demon, sliding up out of the depths of my soul and down into my fingers like an old friend coming home.

5

It has to be a drug.

Every day, Alex sleeps soundly, no matter what I do to try and wake her. She only starts to revive as the sun sets, and once the guards spoon-feed her a bowl of soup, she’s unconscious again in moments. I’ve tried to watch them prepare the soup, but I can’t see very much from my chained position.

I start to think about how I can help her.

***

Very little breaks the monotony of the days as the wagons grind north as fast as the roads allow. A week of sunshine dries the mud to hard-baked clay, and we make good progress, but then the rains break and it’s back to probing the muck with sticks.

I now pray for rain. The farther we go, the closer we get to Elysium, and the smaller my chance for escape. Not that I hold out a great deal of hope anymore, but once we reach the fortress-city there will be no chance at all.

So Hunter tells us, anyway. Once or twice a week, Alex’s nightly drugging is put off for a few hours so the Penitent Damned can come and lecture us on the life we can expect once we’re interred in the ancient catacombs. A healthy one, apparently, well cared for but ascetic in terms of physical pleasures. Hunter tells us this will be good for our souls, give us time to contemplate the hereafter, though how this squares with his earlier comments about being predestined to eternal damnation I cannot say. Theology was Peter’s subject, not mine. I wonder if these lectures are official Church policy for incoming prisoners, or if the Penitent is simply indulging himself with a literally captive audience.

I look forward to those days, though, because in the time before Hunter arrives, I have a little while to talk to Alex. It tears my heart to watch her struggling toward awareness, the moment of pain in her eyes as she surfaces from whatever dream had captured her and realizes that reality is still the wagon and the chains.

She tells me a little bit about her life in the League cities, and the small details are what astonish me. Newspapers, for example. I try to imagine a place where paper and printing are so cheap they can be put to a single use and then discarded, and my mind boggles. I counted myself fortunate to have access to a couple of dozen books; in Hamvelt they must have every book in the world.

“Did you know about them?” I ask her. “These Penitent Damned?”

She shakes her head. “The Old Man was always warning me about the Sworn Church, but I don’t even think he really believed there were still Priests of the Black. As far as I knew, I was the only one with . . . a demon, I guess I have to call it now.” Her face went hard, and I decide to change the subject.

“The Old Man—your father?”

“No—I mean, yes, I suppose, in a way. The closest thing I ever had to one. He was my teacher.”

“In a school?” My breath caught trying to imagine it, thinking of the stories Peter told of his days at Elysium.

She chuckled. “No. He was a thief.”

“A . . . thief?”

“The best thief in the world.”

Needless to say, there were no professional thieves in Nestevyo. If something was stolen, it was never long before the culprit was discovered, and the villagers administered a sort of rough justice measured in shared favors, public shaming, and an occasional beating. I listen in awe as she tells me about Metzing, who robbed from the rich and powerful and was successful for so long he became a kind of hero. It fits perfectly into the world of the cheap romances that had provided so much of my reading material.

“Will he come find you?” I blurt out, my mind suddenly abuzz. If someone like that were to help us, then surely—

But I can tell, at once, that it’s the wrong thing to say. Her expression goes cold and hard again.

“He’s dead,” she says. “They killed him, when they took me.”

We sit for a moment, in silence. I am aware of precious seconds ticking past, these rare guarded moments, but I cannot think what to say.

Time runs out before I can decide. Two guards ride forward from the rear of the caravan, with two strangers in tow. By the state of their clothes and horses, these men have been riding hard, and yet they are clearly impatient to be off. The guards make them speak to the Priest of the Red, an exchange of rapid-fire Murnskai.

“What’s going on?” Alex says, straining against her bonds to see. “What are they saying?”

“They’re couriers on their way north with news.”

“What news?”

I listen for a bit, then shrug. “The King of Vordan is dead.”

Alex blinks. I can see whatever they’ve given her fading, her powers of concentration returning. But not fast enough; Hunter comes, with his speeches, and then the laced gruel that sends her back to her poisoned sleep.

***

It is not only sympathy that makes me want to help Alex. I have a slender reed of hope, a castle built on a foundation of sand. My reasoning runs like this:

She has a demon. I have a demon, too, but I am not kept unconscious day and night. It is a great deal of trouble for them, and they would not do it without a reason. Therefore, Alex’s demon is one that, without the drug, might be able to help us escape.

If I can keep her awake long enough for her mind to clear, we have a chance.

She has a chance, anyway. She might flee on her own and leave me to rot, but I don’t think this likely. Though we have only had a few short conversations, I feel like I know her well enough to make this guess, at least.

In any event, I have no other options.

***

I begin caching the extra bread Tullo brings me inside my filthy shirt. After two or three nocturnal rendezvous with the mercenary, I steel myself and make my move.

“Hey,” I tell the guard who brings Alex soup. “Do you want me to do that?”

He looks at me quizzically. But he is thinking about it, which means another guess of mine was correct—the ordinary guards do not know what sort of people they are transporting. Now I need to hope he is lazier than he is dutiful.

“Can you reach her?” he says.

I nod and shuffle across the wagon bed. Stretching my chains to their limit, I can just about put my hands on Alex. I have to stretch to reach her head. The edges of the fetters have chaffed the skin of my wrists into a mass of sores and scabs, and putting pressure on them makes me wince, but I try not to show the pain.

An irony: no matter how I try, I cannot use my demon to soothe my own hurts.

“It’s just that you do this every day, and I imagine you have better things to worry about. Keeping us safe from wolves and so on.” I give him my best guileless smile. “I’m just sitting about here anyway, right?”

Emotions flicker across the guard’s face. He’s not very bright, but even he can see there must be more to my offer than it appears. On the other hand, spooning soup into a sleeping girl isn’t the most pleasant duty, and I’m sure he’d be glad to be rid of it. It might work. It might work—

“No.” Voryil, the leader of the guards, materializes from the darkness outside the wagon. “Feed her yourself, Bokka.”

Bokka looks briefly truculent. “Why should I? If he want to help—”

“He only wants to steal her food for himself,” Voryil says, looking at me. “Leave the wretch alone and see to your work.”

The guard shrugs at me and goes back to his task. I retreat to my corner and eat the hard, moldy bread I’d been saving.

***

The next time dinner is late, and Alex starts to blink and open her eyes, I speak to her in an urgent hiss.

“Alex. Alex, can you hear me?”

She looks up at me blearily. “Wha’?”

“We have to get out of here. We have to escape.” I keep my voice low. There’s no telling when Hunter will arrive. “Could your demon break these chains?”

Alex stares. “Can’t. Too . . . too sleepy. Can’t think straight.”

“But if you were awake?”

Her eyes cross with the effort of will it takes to produce a coherent answer. “Yes. I think so.”

“I . . . I might have a way. But it’s dangerous. It could hurt you badly.” Another pause. “I don’t want to try it unless you’re willing. But if we wait too long, they’ll take us to Elysium.”

The back of the wagon opens with a clunk. Hunter is earlier than usual. But Alex fixes me with her gaze, then glances in the Penitent Damned’s direction, and carefully mouths her words.

I would rather die.

I swallow hard and close my eyes.

***

There are two things I need to do, if this is going to work. First, Alex needs a clear head to break the bonds that hold us to the wagon.

Second, Hunter needs to die. He told us himself that his demon will let him track us wherever we flee. If we leave him alive behind us, we will only be captured again, and he has spoken often of the torments that await the recalcitrant. The lengths the torturers of Elysium can go to while leaving a victim alive and bound to his demon.

If it comes to that, Alex is right. I would rather die. But it would be better to live, and that means killing Hunter. I think I know how to do it.

The mask hides his face, and by day he speaks only Murnskai like the rest of the caravan, but the man’s pride gives him away. It is the Priest of the Red who leads the expedition, who gives the orders, who never hammers a tent peg or pulls a stone from a horse’s hoof. He cannot be Voryil—Hunter is a big man, and the guard leader is skinny as a rail—and I cannot imagine Hunter taking orders from a man like Tullo or the other guards. He must be masquerading as the priest.

And Priests of the Red are trained in medicine . . .

***

My demon waits, slick and cold at the back of my skull. It feels . . . eager. I shiver.

6

My father lived, but he was never the same man afterward.

With the demon flowing through my hands, I could feel his body as I had felt Sagamet’s, in all its intricate complexity and machinelike precision. The damage was obvious, a thrown gear in the clockwork pump of the heart, but it was more than that. I could feel his brain, a great crackling cloud of bottled lightning, and feel the damage spreading there as well. The heart was simple enough; even an ignorant boy like me knew its function, and my demon had no trouble reassembling it. But I dared not turn it loose in the brain, where I understood nothing. I timidly fixed a few obvious gaps, but that was all.

It has haunted me ever since. If I had embraced my demon instead of turning away from it, practiced healing wounds and illness, I might have had the skill my father so desperately needed. Instead, I’d tried to pretend the thing didn’t exist, and now when I needed to command it I was clumsy and useless.

At first, all seemed well. My father’s breathing eased, and color returned to his face. He slept for days, but peacefully. When he woke, though, it became clear there was something terribly wrong with his mind. He could seem almost normal when he was engaged in a familiar task, his fingers handling a pen or mending a pot with all of their old skill, but on closer inspection the sense of the task would be wrong. He would fix pots that weren’t broken and write endless reams of gibberish with apparent satisfaction.

Sometimes he didn’t recognize me or called me by the wrong name. Sometimes he pretended I wasn’t there at all.

The villagers, to my surprise, were sympathetic. Though the children now had another name to shout at me—the mad scribe’s son—the adults were more understanding. There were gifts, dried fish and sacks of grain, and requests for my scholarly skills that were probably more generous than they really ought to have been. I did my best to feed us both, though my father never showed any understanding or gratitude. It was painful to watch him and remember the kind, loving man he had once been. I thought, over and over, of taking my demon to him again and trying to fix what had gone wrong, but the memory of the torn, intricate web of connections inside his skull always stopped me. I could easily make things worse, or kill him, and for all that he had become difficult I still loved him.

In addition to my father, there was Peter to deal with. That day, when I returned to myself, he was gone from our house. He told me later that my hands had glowed with an eldritch light, and he’d taken to his heels at once; all I knew at the time is that he must have seen something that told him of my true nature. I waited, for the first night and the next day, for the angry crowd of villagers outside my door, led by a grim-faced Father Orrelly.

At the very least, I never expected to see Peter again. What sane man would knowingly associate with a demon’s host? And what priest of Elysium would suffer one to live?

***

I no longer had time to read in the clearing. I spent my days either scribing for the village folk, when work was available, or fishing when it was not. My skills in the latter area were woefully inadequate, and I nearly capsized our ragged little boat a half dozen times. A few of the other villagers condescended to show me the very basics of the art, and I usually managed to catch enough for our dinner, though never to supplement our income. When the peddlers came to town, I no longer examined the books they had for sale; instead, in spite of my efforts with pen and rod, I was forced to sell off my father’s painfully acquired library, piece by piece. The coin went to food, patches on the roof, patches in the boat, broken rods, and new pens and ink and all the other little expenses that combine to ambush you when you think you’ve got things sorted out. I held each book for a while, like an old friend, before pressing it into the peddler’s hands for a fistful of copper.

It was a month after my father’s illness when Peter came to see me at our shack. It was morning, and I was pulling our boat down to the water, cursing the awkward, many-times-knotted ropes that scraped painfully against my arm as it slid past. I had my feet in the muck at the water’s edge when I noticed he was there, watching.

I dropped the rope and straightened up. Peter was wearing his red-striped robe of office, as always—I don’t know if the priests had provided him with any other clothes—and his expression was solemn. I’d already played out this meeting in my mind, a dozen times, and I’d determined that if he had come to condemn me as a demon host, I wasn’t going to deny it or try to fight him. My hope was that I could appeal for pity on behalf of my father, who would die without me to care for him. If the Church wanted to take me, perhaps Peter could be convinced to intercede on his behalf.

“I missed you,” Peter said. “In the clearing. I’ve got the last book you lent me, if you want it back.”

“Keep it,” I said, as gruffly as a fifteen-year-old could manage. It was a cheap edition of a Borelgai romance anyway. A peddler wouldn’t give me much for it.

“Have you been avoiding me?” he said.

I shook my head, though I had been, a little. I hadn’t been back to church services in a month. “It’s my father. Ever since . . . ever since then, he needs me to look after him. And I have to find food for us.”

“He was dying. You saved him.”

I nodded. My heart thumped painfully loud.

“He ought to have died. That was the will of God.”

“Can’t my saving him also be the will of God?”

Peter shook his head. “Demons are snares sent to test us. Every human who gives in to a demon’s power strains the immense gift granted to us by the Lord after Karis’ intercession, sparing the world from final judgment so that we might reform.”

“Oh,” I said, letting my eyes fall to the sand. “Right.”

There was a long silence.

“On the other hand,” Peter said, “it’s a tricky theological point. Saint Ligamenti says to help a fellow man in need is the highest virtue to which one can aspire.”

“If a demon lets you help someone,” I said, “do the two sort of cancel out?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says. “We didn’t actually talk much about demons in my classes. Maybe that bit comes later.”

“Have you told anybody?”

He studied me for a long moment, wide brown eyes unreadable. “No.”

I let out a breath, then paused. “Are you afraid of me?”

Peter shook his head again. “No.”

***

Things weren’t exactly like they were before, after that, but they weren’t entirely different, either.

Peter came to see me often. He told Father Orrelly that he was helping me in my time of need, and that was true enough. We would go out to fish together, taking turns with one of us working the rod while the other read aloud. There was something uniquely peaceful about staring at the dark waters of the Sallonaik, broken only by the bobbing wooden float, and hearing Peter’s rich voice tell the story of an expedition down the Tsel or describe strange beasts discovered in the Gantean Islands. The other fishermen gave us strange looks, but we were both outsiders, after all, and our ways were not to be understood.

Even my father seemed to improve, a little. He still often failed to recognize me, but his moods were calmer and flared less often into rage. He seemed to be engaged in some great project, writing and rewriting on the same piece of brown paper until it was nearly black and soggy with ink. I didn’t have the heart to stop him, even if we could hardly afford the expense in stationery.

I will hide him, he wrote, over and over. I will go to the mountains. They will not have my boy.

I was sixteen when I kissed Peter for the first time, after nearly a year of frustration and sticky, furtive nights with my imagination. I approached the subject like a hunter stalking supremely dangerous prey, circling round and round without ever giving away a hint of my true intention. I suspect Peter knew what I was up to, and let it play out because he found it amusing.

So we talked about kissing in general, and the virtues of it, and how it featured heavily in certain dramas we’d read, and then about how I’d heard in general terms about boys who preferred to kiss other boys. Peter allowed that he’d heard of such a thing, too, and even let on that in the boys’ barracks at Elysium there’d been a quiet fraternity of those who’d been interested in the matter. I expressed my fascination, in a purely scholarly sense of course, and wondered if he’d ever been a party to this society, and he hinted that he might have been, once or twice. And I said—

And so on. By the time he reached over and pulled my face to his, my lips were cracked, and my throat was dry with anticipation. He seemed to know what he was doing, which suggested his Elysian adventures had been more extensive then he’d let on. I clung to him like I’d been drowning.

After that, my life was almost happy, for a while.

***

My father died, a little more than two years later. It was quick, and in his sleep. I was glad I hadn’t found him until morning, by which time he was already cold. I didn’t want to confront the temptation to call on my demon once again.

He had never improved enough to answer my questions, but I’d gathered hints, here and there, from his scribbles and his raving. He’d known about my demon, long before I had. He’d come to Nestevyo for my sake, giving up his old life, to keep me a secret. After we buried him, and the other villagers had gone, I fell to my knees and whispered the thanks I’d never been able to tell him while his mind was whole.

By that time my fishing had improved, and my business scribing for the villagers and the occasional traveler was enough that I didn’t need to take the boat out as often. Without my father’s share of the food to pay for, I was comfortable enough. Peter visited as often as his work allowed, which was quite frequently; old Father Orrelly made only occasional demands on his novice’s time.

There was a distant feeling of looming dread, although that may only be in retrospect. I had a vague sense that what I was doing with Peter was wrong, or at least that his superiors would not approve. More importantly, he was approaching the time when he would be frocked as a full-fledged Priest of the Red and sent off to his final posting, which would almost certainly not be in Nestevyo.

I resolved to myself that I would follow him. There was nothing holding me in the village anymore, and I was eighteen, a man with a man’s right. I could go where I liked. Peter would object, but I was certain I could convince him. I had visions of living somewhere more civilized—a cozy little town near the coast, perhaps, houses with clay-tiled roofs and brick chimneys. I could keep scribing, read more, maybe even become a scholar and write books of my own. It was a pleasant fantasy.

Then Father Orrelly died. The village mourned, but it was not unexpected; he was an old man. Peter wrote out a letter to the local Bishop of the White, requesting the assignment of a new priest. A month later, Father Barca arrived.

Father Barca was everything Father Orrelly had never been—bombastic, imperious, rock certain in his faith, and scornful of anyone who did not share his certainty. He was a powerful man in his middle forties, with a thick black beard and tiny, deep-set eyes. Some instinct made him detest Peter on sight. Perhaps Barca sensed his kindness or his love of knowledge. In Barca’s world, kindness was weakness, and the only things worth knowing were written in the Wisdoms.

Our life became a series of stolen moments, time together snatched from under the watchful eye of the priest. I could do as I liked, of course, but Peter was bound to obey his superior, and Barca kept him busy with exercises designed to restore his flagging faith and morals. Peter copied out the Wisdoms, over and over, and burnt each page as a sacred offering. He cleansed himself, holding his hands near the altar candles to the point of pain while he prayed to the Lord for mercy. Barca watched it all with his lip twisted in a smirk, and it was never enough for him. I thought that, a hundred years ago, Barca would have made an excellent inquisitor for the Priests of the Black, forcing heretics to recant with red-hot knives.

I don’t know when the priest started beating Peter savagely for failing to measure up to his standards. Peter kept it concealed from everyone for as long as he could, but one day I found him stumbling to my doorstep, robes in disarray, blood streaming from the back of his skull. When I took him inside and put my arms around him, I could feel the torn flesh beneath his robes. He was crying, sobbing with the pain, and the cold feeling rose unbidden from the back of my mind.

I fought it down and led Peter to my father’s old pallet. I stripped off his robe and cleaned his wounds as best I knew how, wetting several rags with blood. When he recovered a bit, he directed me in binding strips of cloth around the slashes on his back and thighs. The priest, Peter explained dully, had given up on the switch as inefficient and started using his leather belt with its sharp-cornered steel clasp.

“What will you do now?” I asked him when we were done.

“I have to go back.” His voice sounded broken, dead. “What else can I do?”

“But he’ll just do this again!”

“I have to . . . keep him happy. Do my duties better.” He closed his eyes. “It’s not that much longer. Another six months, and I’ll be free of him.”

“What did you do to provoke him this time?”

Peter rested his head on the pillow. His voice was small. “I don’t know.”

I smooth his hair, gently, and rage seethed white-hot in my chest.

***

It wasn’t hard to convince Peter that he should at least spend the night at my house, and apologize to Barca in the morning. Once I was certain he was asleep, I slipped out, padding carefully down the dirt track and into the village.

Winter was finally releasing its grip on the land, and signs of spring were everywhere. The moon was nearly full, and in its silver light I could see the shoots sprouting from the gardens of the village women, the patches of grass and small white flowers that sprang up between the paths, the fluttering of countless moths overhead, and the occasional flap of a bat. Every house I passed was dark and silent. The priest’s dwelling, attached to the rear of the church, was one of the only stone buildings in Nestevyo, though even this holy place had to make do with a mud-and-grass roof. It had a proper wooden door, though, and I was afraid this might stop me. But it opened when I gave it a tug—there were no locks in the village, and it hadn’t been tied shut.

Inside, the priest’s house was no more luxurious than mine, save for the gilt-and-porcelain shrine in one corner that was carried into the church itself on holy days. A copy of the Wisdoms, heavy and silver edged, sat on the little table, and a curtain separated the main room from the sleeping pallets. I pushed through it and found Father Barca sprawled and unconscious, massive, hairy arms akimbo. He slept soundly, and there was a faint smell of spirits in the air.

I bent down, reaching for the rage I’d felt only minutes before. The thought of Peter’s pale, torn skin made it flare up again. He wouldn’t survive another six months with Barca, I was certain. It was one life against another; surely God would understand that.

I called on my demon, and the cold slipped down through my arms and into my fingers. I placed my hands, gently, on Barca’s chest and saw in my mind the clockwork enormity of his body. Even a man like this, even an evil man, is more intricate and complex than the finest creation of any artificer; to see it would be enough to make a heretic believe in the Creator. I let my demon prowl, slowly, through the myriad pathways of the priest’s flesh. Then, exerting my will, I coiled it into a fist and sent it smashing outward, bringing the marvelous structure crashing down around us.

It didn’t take much. Just a few taps, around the heart, before Father Barca’s breath gurgled in his throat and his body spasmed. Killing was easy, so much easier than healing, and I thought I could feel my demon’s glee.

***

There were no marks on the body, no way for anyone to guess that the priest hadn’t died a natural death. Few in the village mourned; his fiery brand of religion had been a poor fit for the practical people of Nestevyo, who were more worried about their next meal than the next life.

But there was one person, of course, who knew. After the villagers brought the news, Peter left my house the next morning without speaking to me. We avoided one another from then on as if by mutual consent. He had to have guessed what had happened, but I hoped he would eventually come to terms with it. I had saved his life, after all, even if he hadn’t asked me to.

I should have known better. Peter had never cared very much for his own life when it came up against the dictates of his conscience.

A month passed without us exchanging more than a glance. Time for a letter to wend its way out to the Church, for them to respond. I thought they would send another priest. Instead, the village awoke one morning to find a black carriage waiting on the road, accompanied by a squad of nervous Imperial soldiers.

I didn’t resist. What would have been the point? They would have shot me down on the spot.

The troops delivered me, sealed in the back of the carriage, into the care of a caravan headed for Elysium. When they finally let me out, blinking against the sun, my breath caught. Peter was with them, bound to a saddle like a prisoner.

One of my guards explained later. The poor, sweet, stupid fool had written a letter to the bishop, confessing everything—me and my demon, our relationship, Father Barca’s death—and begging for absolution. Orders had come back. I was to be taken to Elysium as a demon host, and Peter to the bishop’s dungeons in Raga, to await judgment. Whether the charge was immorality, associating with demons, or conspiracy to murder they didn’t say. Bishops of the Church are not obligated to justify themselves.

Up to that point, I had been resigned to my fate. I had killed a man, after all. Perhaps they were right to imprison me. But when I saw them leading Peter away—Peter, who had done nothing wrong but offer kindness—I felt the rage rising again. They had to wrestle me into the cart, hold me down while they tied my bonds.

I knew I had to find him. That night, I began planning my escape.

7

I do not know if my plan will work, and there is no way to test it beforehand. If I fail, though, what more can they do to me? Kill me on the spot? After what Hunter has told me, I am inclined to agree with Alex that death would be preferable.

I wait until evening, when the convoy has pulled into its nightly camp beside the road. We are passing through an ancient wood, huge trees larger than anything near Nestevyo blotting out the stars. The road is rocky and dry for once, a narrow track cut through the underbrush barely wide enough for the wagons. Here and there it makes wide semicircles where the builders went around a particularly massive pine instead of going to the trouble of chopping it out of the way.

Torches flare in the failing light as the outriders begin setting up their tents. We have perhaps an hour before they come to take Alex and me on our once-a-day sanitary excursion and then give her another dose of the drug.

The Priest of the Red sits on the box at the front of the wagon. His short companion has slipped off to help erect the camp, but the priest watched the men work with benign indifference. He yawns and raises his hands above his head to stretch.

“Sir,” I say, putting as much urgency as I could into my voice. “Father!”

“Eh?” The priest half turns. “Quiet, you.”

“There’s something wrong with the girl.” I point at Alex with my bound hands. “I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“What?” The priest glares at her, but she lies very still, as she always does when the drug has her in its grasp. “Damnation.”

As I had hoped, he began to climb over the back of the box into the bed of the wagon. There is no one in the convoy more suited to give medical attention than a frocked Priest of the Red, so it made sense that he would attend to it himself. Once he is bent over Alex, the sides of the wagon will hide him from the view of the men outside.

All the same, I feel a sudden thrill of doubt. The priest looks like Hunter, sounds like him—as best I can tell, given the black glass mask and the enveloping robe—but I can’t swear they are the same man.

Still. It’s too late to back out now.

The Priest of the Red drops into the box and kneels beside Alex, looking at her closely. When he touches her cheek, she groans and stirs slightly. The drug is wearing off.

“She’s alive,” he says. “What do you think—”

I reach out, as far as my chained hands will allow, and grab him by the arm. My demon flows out through my fingers, cold and gleeful. There is no time to admire the complexity of his form, no time for anything but a frantic descent into his body. He starts to utter a cry, but I stretch out my will and the muscles of his throat seize up. A moment later, I have a hold on his heart, which gives a frantic stutter and then stills forever. The priest falls to the floor of the wagon with a gasp and does not move.

“Wh . . .” Alex’s eyes are half-open, full of uncomprehending terror. It’s painful to watch her try to focus through the haze of the drug.

“I don’t know if this will hurt,” I say. I tear a strip from the priest’s robe, pull her mouth open, and stuff the cloth inside. I can’t afford to have her scream. “If it does, I’m sorry.”

Her eyes go wide. I take her bound hands in mine, and send out my demon once again.

I can feel every part of her, every fiber of muscle and quivering nerve. I search, frantically, for what is wrong with her, and in her blood I find the drug. A nasty, spiky thing, slowing her heart and her lungs, pushing her toward darkness. The strength of it is such that I marvel she wakes up at all.

This is a more delicate operation than the crude murder I had just committed, and I have no idea if my skill is sufficient to the task. Her body is already attempting to pull the drug from her veins, rendering it harmless, and I exert my demon’s power to help it along. Alex moans, muffled by the gag, and her back arches. I can feel her heart slamming in her chest, beating out a fearsome pace. I am hurting her; her hands curl into claws. But it is working. I can feel it working.

***

After a few seconds, or a few minutes, or an hour—I can no longer tell—I am finished. Every trace of the drug that I can find is gone. I open my eyes, pulling my demon back, and see that Alex is lying still, eyes closed, a fine sheen of sweat covering her face and dampening her filthy shirt. Her breath comes in gasps at first, but slows and steadies as I watch.

“Alex?” I say very quietly. “Can you hear me?”

She nods and opens her eyes. I reach across and pull the gag from her mouth, and she coughs and spits onto the wagon bed.

“What . . .” Her voice is a rasp. “What did you do?”

“I healed you. With my demon. They’ve been drugging you.”

Alex seems to take this in stride. She points at the Red Priest. “What about him?”

“He’s dead,” I say. “My demon can . . . do that, too.”

“Ah.” She sits up, leaning against the side of the wagon. “I take it we’re escaping, then?”

“If you can get us out of these chains.”

“Give me a moment.” She closes her eyes again, breathing deeply.

“Was it very painful?”

She gives a jerky nod.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be. We do what we have to do.” Alex opens her eyes and stares at me intently for a moment. “Okay. Let me try.”

At first, nothing happens, and I wonder if this has all been for nothing. Then something stirs around her arms. Worms of darkness work their way out of her skin, wrapping around her, over and over, until her arms wear cloaks of solid shadow as high as the elbow. The shadow stuff twists and writhes, like water on the boil, and mounds up around the iron shackles at her wrists. A moment later, there is a clank as they fall away, solid metal sliced neatly apart.

“Hold your hands out, and stay still,” she says. I comply, fascinated, and a lance of solid darkness slashes out and parts my own bonds as though they were made of soft cheese. Next she cuts the anklets that bind me to the wagon bed, then her own. The touch of air on the lacerated skin is enough to make me scream, and my joints pop and groan in protest as I stretch for the first time in weeks.

“God almighty,” Alex says, “that feels good.”

At first I think she means being able to move freely, but I realize she is reveling in her magic. Her demon boils around her, flapping the edges of her clothes as though she stood in a strong wind. In the near darkness, she cuts a terrifying silhouette, and I wonder for a moment at what I have unleashed. But I push the thought from my mind. We do what we have to do.

“Now what?” she says.

I stare at her, then shake my head, a grin springing unbidden to my lips.

“I have no idea,” I say. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“Fair enough,” Alex says. “I can’t say planning ahead was ever my strong suit.”

There’s a clunk as someone unlocks the rear gate of the wagon. One of the guards pulls it down, and it takes him a moment to process the scene. His mouth begins to open in a shout of surprise.

Alex’s demon moves faster than thought. A spear of solid shadow catches the man in the throat, bursting through his flesh as easily as it cut the iron manacles. His shout is drowned in blood, and he collapses forward, clawing at the wound. Alex stares at him, breathing hard.

“Nine,” she says under her breath.

“What?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

Alex unstraps the rifle from the still-twitching guard and tosses it to me. With practiced motions, she slashes his belt with a knife made of solid darkness and gathers his things, handing them over one by one. Balls and powder, a knife, a canteen, a belt pouch with a few coins.

“If you haven’t got any better ideas,” she says, “then I suggest we run.”

I look from the dead priest to the dying guard, then to this strange, hard girl in whose hands I realize I’ve placed my life. I nod.

Alex hops down from the wagon and leads the way into the darkness, moving without a sound. I follow, rifle over my shoulder, feeling clumsy by comparison.

8

The mercenary who called himself Tullo watched the commotion from a distance. The guards had discovered the bodies and the missing prisoners, and a furious shouting match was in progress. The issues in question seemed to be what to do next and, more importantly, who was to blame. Consensus in the latter point seemed to be settling on the dead men.

Tullo turned away and walked back among the wagons. His own personal bag was strapped to the side of one the fish haulers; he undid the straps, then shifted his few personal effects out of the way. Another flap, cunningly stitched so as to be nearly invisible, gave access to a hidden space. From this he removed a long black cloak, which he swung about his shoulders, and a piece of folded black cloth, heavy and glittering with fragments of obsidian.

When he pulled the formfitting black mask into place, glass clicking and clattering, he was Hunter once again. And just in time, too. Voryil, commander of the guards and the only one who knew about the Penitent Damned’s presence in the entourage, hurried into the narrow alley between the two wagons, wearing a very nervous expression.

“Ah,” he said. “You’ve heard what happened, sir?”

“I have,” Hunter said, shedding Tullo’s southern accent like an old coat. “This is very unfortunate.”

“The drug must have lost its effectiveness.” Voryil’s tone was very slightly accusatory. On the one hand, it had been Hunter’s responsibility to make sure the girl’s power was contained. On the other hand, one did not live a long and healthy life by throwing failure in the face of the Penitent Damned, no matter how justifiably. “Alex was able to access her power and break her bonds. She killed Erik. As for Father Omorte . . . there seems to be some confusion.”

The boy, Hunter suspected. I should have been more careful.

Voryil coughed. “Ah . . . what would you like us to do, sir? Shall we go after them?”

Hunter shook his head, glass clicking. “No. We cannot match the girl’s power with what we have here. We press on to Elysium. I will make my report to the pontifex.”

Voryil looked uncomfortable, perhaps wondering how he would be represented in that report. “They can’t have gotten far, and she may still be weak. It will be nearly a month to Elysium and back—by then they’ll have gotten away clean.”

Hunter smiled under the mask. “That will not be a problem.”

His demon filled his mind, and two trails appeared, like glowing ribbons in the air. They snaked off to the east, into the woods.

Tracks could be covered. Dogs could be fooled. But Hunter’s demon placed its barbs into his targets’ very souls, and they were not easy to shake off. And I’ve had plenty of time to get my hooks into these two.

“No, Voryil,” he said aloud. “That will not be a problem.”

Two weeks to reach Elysium, explain things to the pontifex, and two more weeks to return with a team of Penitents powerful enough to overcome the girl’s formidable demon.

Only a month’s head start. It hardly seems fair.

He only hoped they knew how to survive in the woods. It would be a pity if they starved to death before the chase has even begun.

Read on for a special preview of The Price of Valor, coming July 7, 2015, from Roc.

Prologue

Ignahta Sempria

Such pretty country, to be soaked in blood.

South of the city of Desland, the valley of the river Velt flattened out into a rolling carpet of fields, gridded by neat hedgerows and punctuated by tiny orderly hamlets, each with its tall-spired church tipped by a golden double circle. The river itself traced out a series of lazy curves, as though exhausted by its frantic descent from the highlands, and it flashed like molten silver in the warm autumn sun. Here and there, lone hills rose from the endless flat farmland like islands jutting out of the sea, crowned with gnarled, ancient trees, the last remaining strongholds of the great forests that had covered this land before the arrival of men.

Atop one of those hills, at the edge of one of those primeval woods, a man sat cross-legged on a boulder and stared down at the plain below. He was a young man, barely out of boyhood, with nut- brown hair and a wispy mustache. Dressed in leathers and homespun, he could have been mistaken for a native, the son of a peasant farmer come to trap or gather wood in the old forest.

In fact, he was a very long way from home, and he had no interest in firewood or game. His name was Wren. In his saddlebags, carefully folded and secured inside a lockbox, he carried a velvet mask sewn with a layer of glittering, clicking obsidian. It marked him as a servant of an order out of legend, one that was supposedly a hundred years dead: the Priests of the Black, fell agents of the Elysian Church, its spies and inquisitors.

Even within the hidden fraternity who carried out the will of the Black Priests, Wren was of a special breed. He had spoken the true name of a demon, and would play host to the creature until the end of his days. When his death came, he would be condemned to eternal torment for daring to traffic with the supernatural. He had accepted this burden, and the certainty of this ultimate fate, to serve the Church and save others from suffering similar punishment. He was one of the Ignahta Sempria, the Penitent Damned.

***

Wren stared down at the plain, across the miles, to a place where many campfires had lately burned like fireflies. At that distance, most men would have seen nothing but the fields and the rivers, but Wren’s demon was with him. He could feel it in his eyes, a tight feeling like someone twisting knotted cords around his skull, and it sharpened his vision to excruciating precision. Tiny men in blue milled and marched and formed ranks, teams of horses were harnessed to cannon, and cavalrymen checked their saddles and mounted. An army, preparing for battle.

The brush beside him rustled. With his demon’s strength wholly poured into his eyes, Wren’s hearing was no better than a normal man’s, and only the discipline of long training kept him from starting at the sound. Instead he let out a long breath and forced himself to relax, letting his demon return to its resting state. Between blinks, the clarity of his vision faded, though it still would have put any hawk to shame. Sound rushed back in, every tiny rustle and animal noise of the forest now as obvious as a fanfare. He could hear the heartbeats of the two men who now stood beside him, and their breathing was as loud as the rasp of a bellows.

“The Vordanai are breaking camp,” he said. He spoke in Murnskai, the native tongue of those raised in the fortress-temple of Elysium. “But not to retreat. Vhalnich will offer battle to di Pfalen.”

“Bold,” said the man on his left.

He was much older than Wren, well into middle age, with a bald dome of skull sticking up from a ring of black and gray. His name, the only one that Wren had ever heard anyone use, was the Liar. Like Wren, he was dressed in simple peasant garb, but his hands might have invited comment: his nails were each at least an inch long, and painted with gleaming white resin.

“Di Pfalen has the numbers,” Wren said. “He has broken his force into three columns to attempt to cut off Vhalnich’s escape.”

The Liar snorted. “I might not be so confident in his place, given Vhalnich’s reputation.”

Wren shrugged. The Liar liked to pass himself off as an expert in military matters, as in everything else, but the basic situation was simple enough. The revolution that had broken out after the death of King Farus VIII had shocked the civilized world, placing a sacred monarch in thrall to a mere elected parliament. With due encouragement from Elysium, the great powers of the west—Borel, Murnsk, and the Free Cities League—had gone to war to restore the rightful order. But declaration of war was one thing, and action another. Seafaring Borel preferred the slow weapons of blockade and economic warfare, while vast, backward Imperial Murnsk could take months to assemble her armies.

The League, on the other hand, was not a nation but a bickering, fractious collection of semi-independent polities. Vheed, Norel, and the more distant cities had sent only token contingents or empty promises to the supposedly common cause. Only Hamvelt and its close allies had leapt at the chance to defeat their longtime rival. So it was here, to familiar plains between Essyle and Desland, where the ever-shifting border between Vordan and the League ran, that the Vordanai had sent their newly minted hero. Janus bet Vhalnich. Conqueror of Khandar, vanquisher of the Last Duke, savior of Vordan. Heretic. Sorcerer.

“We will observe the result,” the Liar said. “If Vhalnich falls, or is taken, our task is simplified. If not . . .”

The third man grunted. He stood with his arms crossed over his massive chest, more than a head taller than either of his companions. His craggy face was made ferocious by a thick, unkempt black beard like wild thornbush, and his small dark eyes glared out ferociously from deep, sunken sockets. While he was dressed like the other two, no one would ever take him for a simple laborer. Quite aside from his enormous frame, the air of menace he projected was unmistakable. His name was Twist. Wren had rarely heard him speak more than a single word at a time, and often he was not even that voluble.

“Either way,” Wren said, “we’ll need to get closer.” They were still a solid day’s ride from the place that would soon become a battlefield.

The Liar nodded. “We will seek another vantage. Ready the horses.”

Wren got to his feet, legs aching from too long spent absolutely still, and suppressed a frown. The Penitent Damned had no formal hierarchy among themselves, no ranks or chain of command apart from their shared obedience to the Pontifex of the Black. On the rare occasions when they did not work alone, their orders made it explicit who was to lead. The Liar was an agent of many years’ standing, and this was Wren’s first mission outside Murnsk, so it made sense that the older man was in charge. But Wren occasionally suspected the Liar of harboring a taste for idleness and worldly pleasures that was inappropriate for his position, and it led him to treat Wren like a servant instead of an equal. It was something to raise with the pontifex on their return.

They had six horses, enough to carry their gear and provide remounts if they needed a burst of speed. Wren went through the familiar ritual of preparing saddles and tack, loading the camp supplies, and fixing each animal with his supernatural senses for a few moments, listening to their breathing and heartbeats. Satisfied that nothing was amiss, he led them one by to the edge of the woods. Last in line was Twist’s mount, a huge, stocky gelding matched to the big man’s weight.

Twist took the reins from him with another grunt and heaved himself gracelessly into the saddle, provoking a snort of complaint from the animal. The Liar mounted more skillfully, a testament to half a lifetime spent in the saddle in the service of the order. Wren paused in front of his favorite mare, staring out to the north.

“Wren?” the Liar said. “Is something wrong?”

Wren closed his eyes and let the demon rush to his ears. The sounds that had been barely a shiver in the air a moment ago were now loud and distinct, low crumps and rumbles like distant thunder. In between, he could even hear the faint skirl of drums.

“Wren?” the Liar repeated, words booming in Wren’s ears like the voice of God.

Wren opened his eyes and let the demon slither away inside his skull.

“It’s begun,” he said.

Part One

Chapter One

Winter

“Keep it up! They’re giving way!” Winter Ihernglass shouted.

The air was thick with acrid smoke, slashed by the brief brilliant flares of muzzle flashes. Musketry roared around Winter like a continuous crackling peal of thunder, and she had no way of knowing whether her soldiers could hear her. Her world had contracted to this small section of the line, where a dozen young women of the Girls’ Own stood behind the shot-torn hedgerow, each going through the drill of loading her musket: ramming the ball home, priming the pan, and bringing the weapon back up to firing position.

The Hamveltai were unseen in the murk, visible only by the flash of their own muskets. But they were weakening—Winter could feel it—the return fire becoming more scattered and sporadic. Just a minute more. She walked along the line, shouting herself hoarse and slashing the air with her sword, while the constant din of the muskets rattled the teeth in her skull.

Ahead, she saw one of the casualty teams, made up of girls too young or too small to carry a musket. They worked in threes and fours, running up to the hedge whenever a soldier went down and dragging her back a few paces to assess the injury. As Winter watched, the team ahead of her abandoned a woman who’d taken a ball high in the chest and leaked a wide swath of blood into the muddy earth, and went back to retrieve a plump, matronly woman who’d fallen on her side, clutching a shattered hand. As they got her to her feet, one of the smaller girls suddenly doubled over, clutching at her gut with both hands. One of her companions looked her over, shook her head, and left her where she fell.

Brass Balls of the Beast. It was a scene Winter had witnessed before, but she couldn’t get over how quickly girls who’d been selling flowers in Vordan not three months earlier had adapted to the brutal necessities of the battlefield. She thrust away a pang of guilt. There wasn’t time for that. No time for anything but survival.

Winter hurried past the casualty team, stepping quickly around the dying girl, and continued down the line looking for Bobby. The young woman, who’d been a corporal in Winter’s company on Janus’ Khandarai campaign, now sported white lieutenant’s stripes on her shoulder. A knot of women were gathered behind a dense spot in the hedge, loading awkwardly while crouched and then standing to loose another shot into the thickening bank of smoke.

“Bobby!” Winter said, grabbing her arm and pulling her close enough to hear over the din. “Go to Jane, tell her to move in!”

Bobby’s pale skin was already grimed with powder residue. Like Winter, she was one of the few in the Girls’ Own to have an honest-to-goodness regulation uniform; unlike Winter’s, hers was no longer tailored to conceal the truth of her gender from prying eyes. When Janus had created the all-female Fifth Volunteer Battalion from the ragtag group of volunteers Winter and Jane had led into battle at Midvale, Bobby had elected to discard her disguise. She had been the one who’d taken the nickname “Girls’ Own”—a play on the name old royal regiments, the King’s Own, and the Boy’s Own Guide series of books for children—and turned it from mockery into a badge of honor. Next to Winter and Jane, she was probably the most respected officer in the battalion.

She was also—cursed, enchanted, Winter didn’t know what to call it—by the Khandarai naath that had saved her life. Winter knew that the scars of her wounds had healed, not in puckered skin, but as smooth, glittering stuff like living marble.

Bobby saluted to acknowledge the order, handed her musket to the nearest soldier, and hurried off to the right, bent double to keep her head from sticking above the hedge. For all the good that will do. A hedgerow might deflect a musket ball, but mostly it was good for hiding behind, and that only mattered against aimed fire. Nobody was aiming now; if not for their muzzle flashes and the accompanying noise, Winter wouldn’t have been able to say whether the enemy was still there. She turned back in the other direction, keeping her eyes open for any signs of wavering or incipient panic, and was pleased to find her soldiers still firmly committed to their bloody work. The Hamveltai were laying down a hot, heavy fire, but for the moment the Girls’ Own seemed to be standing up to the pressure.

As she moved toward the left, she could hear the deeper growl of artillery underneath the musketry. The hedge led to a small hamlet in that direction, no more than a dozen buildings, which was defended by a battalion of volunteers and half a battery of guns. Something was on fire—she could see the glow, even through the smoke—but the noise indicated the men there were still fighting hard.

On the right side of the line, the hedge took a dogleg forward a hundred yards before ending at a wide dirt path. Jane was waiting on the far side of that angle with another four companies, hunkered down and silent up until now, waiting to execute the trap. Winter didn’t want her troops going toe-to-toe with a battalion of regulars longer than they had to.

Reaching the center of her line, Winter pressed herself against the hedge between a pair of soldiers and listened. A couple of minutes for Bobby to run to Jane, a couple of minutes to get ready . . .

A chorus of hoarse battle cries, identifiably feminine even through the rattle and bang musketry, rolled out of the smoke on the right. All along the line, Winter’s soldiers echoed the cheer, which was followed in quick succession by a blaze of new firing. More flashes stabbed through the smoke, at right angles to the Hamveltai position, as Jane led her troops in a charge with fixed bayonets that took the enemy line end-on. As Winter had guessed, that convinced them that their position was untenable, and before another minute had passed there was no more shooting to her front. Along the hedgerow, the women of the Girls’ Own were cheering themselves hoarse.

“Make sure those muskets are loaded!” Winter shouted, over the celebration. “They’ll be back.”

“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” Jane said. “Bastards were so surprised they didn’t even have a chance to shoot back.”

“Nicely done,” Winter said. Though rumors of the infamous female regiment had no doubt spread through the enemy camps by now, the League soldiers were always startled when they came to actual face-to-face contact with the Girls’ Own. Winter was happy to use their hesitation to her advantage, if it meant keeping her troops alive. “Any prisoners?”

“A few dozen,” Jane said. “Plenty of wounded out there, but we didn’t take any that couldn’t walk.”

They were squatting in the muddy dirt, a few yards back from the hedge. With the lull in the fighting, some of the Girls’ Own were helping the casualty teams, carrying the wounded to a temporary station in the rear and dragging corpses clear of the firing line. Winter had cautioned them not to go too far. It was too easy to get caught up helping a wounded comrade and forget that the battle wasn’t over yet.

To the left, artillery still growled, but the musketry had died away, indicating that the attack on the hamlet had tapered off while the League cannoneers continued the argument with their Vordanai counterparts at long range. The smoke was beginning to drift apart, torn into scraps by the late-morning breeze. Looking at the sun, Winter thought it was still at least an hour before noon; she already felt as if they’d been there for days. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and returned her mind to the matter at hand.

“See if any of the men you took speak Vordanai. I’d love to know what else they’ve got out there.”

“You think they’ll try it again?”

“I think they’ve got to. They want to push through here to take Janus from behind.” It felt odd to her to casually refer to the general of the army—much less a count of Vordan—by his first name, but it had become a universal practice among the troops he commanded, as a demonstration of their affection for their strange commander. “They tried a narrow swing around the hamlet, and ran into us. So what’s next?”

Jane shrugged. “You’re the soldier.”

Winter grimaced, but it was true, in a sense. While there were times when she still felt like a fraud—it was hard not to, when everyone but a select few thought she was a man—it was hard to deny that she had more military experience than anyone else in the Girls’ Own, with the possible exception of her ex-corporals Graff and Folsom. For that matter, she had more combat experience than almost anyone in Janus’ Army of the East, which was an awkward conglomeration of old Royal Army troops and scratch battalions of revolutionary volunteers.

Jane’s experience was of a different sort. They’d been lovers, long ago, at Mrs. Wilmore’s Prison for Young Ladies, before Jane had been dragged away into involuntary marriage to a brutal farmer and Winter had escaped to join the army. While Winter had spent three years in Khandar, lying low, Jane had escaped from servitude, freed the rest of the girls from the Prison, and brought them to Vordan City. There they’d fought criminal, tax farmers, and anyone else who got in their way, forming the core of the Leatherbacks and striving to provide a rough justice to the Docks. When Winter and Jane had been reunited in the chaos of the revolution—with a helping hand, Winter guessed, from Janus bet Vhalnich—Jane’s girls joined the fight to save the city from Orlanko.

Now they made up almost half the Girls’ Own, and Jane herself had accepted an officer’s rank, but she didn’t pretend to know anything much about tactics. Winter scratched a rough line in the earth with the toe of her boot. “If I were them, I’d feel us out to the right. If they’ve got another couple of battalions, they could throw one against us here and push another one down the road to get behind us.”

“And if we run for it, they can surround the town,” Jane said. She looked to the south, where only the occasional hedge broke the endless, open country. A lone wood-topped hill, miles distant, loomed like a distant gray monolith. “If they get us with horsemen in the open . . .”

Winter nodded. Jane might not have had a military education, but she had good instincts. The Girls’ Own were brave, dedicated troops, but they didn’t have the training to form square and stand off cavalry in the open. The volunteers that made up most of the rest of the force Janus had left to blunt the League advance were the same. They had only one regiment of “Royals”—professional soldiers of the old Royal Army—and a retreat under those circumstances could easily become a rout.

“I’ll send Bobby to Colonel de Ferre,” Winter said. “If he brings up the reserve before they get here, we can give them another nasty surprise. They’ve got to get sick of banging their heads against this wall eventually.”

Jane nodded and got to her feet. “I’ll get some of the girls out past the smoke to give us a bit of warning.”

Winter stood a bit more slowly, her legs already aching. Her throat felt suddenly thick, in a way that had nothing to do with having spent the morning shouting at the top of her lungs.

“Be careful,” she said.

Jane smiled, her familiar, mischievous smile, and gave a slapdash salute. Winter fought a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around her. Instead she nodded, stiffly, and watched Jane stride back toward the front line.

A passionate embrace between the commander of a battalion and his chief subordinate might have been a bit unorthodox, by old army standards, but Winter wasn’t sure it would have made a difference if she’d given in to the temptation. Caution was an old, ingrained habit, though, and she tried to impress the importance of it on Jane. They lived in a weird fog of half-truths and lies—the fact that Captain Ihernglass was sleeping with Lieutenant “Mad Jane” Verity was an open secret, at least among the Girls’ Own, who gossiped as badly as the old Colonials had. But only a small cadre among them, Jane’s former Leatherback girls, knew the secret of Winter’s gender. So far, they’d kept her confidence—Jane’s girls were nothing if not loyal—but having that knowledge so widely spread made Winter intensely nervous.

Bobby hurried over and snapped a crisp salute. One of her sleeves was red with blood.

“Jane said you wanted to see me, sir?” she said.

“Are you all right?” A foolish question, Winter thought. Bobby was the one soldier on the field who was virtually guaranteed to live through the day’s fighting, thanks to the ongoing legacy of her experience in Khandar.

“What?” Bobby caught sight of the blood and shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing. I was helping with the wounded.”

Winter nodded. “I need you to ride to Colonel de Ferre. Tell him we need reinforcements here, at least a battalion, to extend the line on the right. We haven’t got the strength to stretch that far, and if they get around us this whole position could come unstuck.”

“Yes, sir!”

Bobby saluted again and hurried rearward. There was a small aid post there, where the battalion cutters did what they could for the casualties until they could be taken for proper care. Beside it was a string of horses, kept ready for couriers and other emergencies. Winter watched her mount up, then turned back to the front.

The corpses of the fallen had been removed from the line, and the injured helped to the rear. Now small parties vaulted the hedgerow, cautiously, and searched among the dissipating smoke for enemy wounded. Any who seemed likely to survive were taken prisoner and sent through the line for treatment.

The enemy were Hamveltai regulars, called yellowjackets for their lemon-colored coats, striped with black and worn over black trousers. They wore tall black shakos with gold devices on the front and long red plumes fluttering from the peak, the very image of professional soldiers. The contrast with the Vordanai, whose only uniform was a loose blue jacket worn over whatever each soldier had brought along, could not have been greater. But neat uniforms did not seem to provide any special protection from musket balls.

They were treated gently—orders on that subject had come down from Janus himself. The reasoning was not humanitarian, but brutally practical. The League commanders had made noises about treating Vordanai volunteers as partisans or bandits rather than soldiers due honorable captivity if captured, and the best defense against any abuses was for the Vordanai army to gather its own stock of prisoners against whom it could threaten retaliation, if necessary. That went double for the Girls’ Own, who had no idea what to expect if they fell into enemy hands. Winter knew there was a quiet trend among her soldiers to carry small daggers in the inner pockets of their uniforms, to be used for self-destruction in the last resort. It wasn’t something she encouraged, but she couldn’t blame them for wanting the reassurance.

A certain amount of looting went along with the gathering of captives. Officially, they were only supposed to scavenge ammunition, food, and other military supplies, but Winter noted quite a few of the search parties returning with insignia, plumes, and other trophies. Another practice to which she felt she had to turn a blind eye. She didn’t want her troops turning into ghouls, cutting off fingers to get at the rings, but pride in a hard-fought victory was something to encourage.

An outburst of laughter caught her attention. Over on the left, a knot of young women surrounded the stocky figure of Lieutenant Drake Graff, who was attempting to demonstrate the proper way to level a musket. It was hard to be sure under his thick beard, but Winter thought he was blushing. Another woman in a makeshift lieutenant’s uniform was looking on, and Winter walked over to stand beside her.

“Sir,” Cyte said, her salute almost as crisp as Bobby’s.

Winter nodded her acknowledgment. “How is it?”

“We missed the worst on this side,” Cyte said. “Anna got nicked by a splinter and bled a fair bit, but she’ll be all right. No casualties in our company otherwise.”

No wonder they’re in the mood for laughing, Winter thought, as another round of giggles came from the cluster around Graff. Cyte, following Winter’s gaze, heaved a sigh.

“They like to tease him,” she said. “I’ve tried to get them to stop, but . . .”

Winter shook her head. “Don’t bother. You won’t be able to.” Soldiers would have their fun, regardless of what their officers wanted. “Just make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.”

“What’s out of hand?” Cyte said. “Last week a gang of them found out where he was having a bath in the river and jumped in with him. They like to see him blush.”

Winter had to work to stifle a giggle of her own, picturing the gruff, hard-bitten Graff frantically averting his eyes and muttering through his beard. When Janus had offered her the services of her former corporals to fill out her new regiment, Winter tried to make it clear to them what they were getting into. Folsom had fit right in, his quiet assurance off the battlefield and foulmouthed tirades on it provoking something like awe among his troops. Bobby, of course, had not been a problem. Graff had taken the longest to decide, grumbling about the impropriety of it all before finally agreeing on the grounds that someone had to take care of things. For an old soldier, he was surprisingly straitlaced, a fact that his women had discovered and exploited with gusto.

Cyte was another matter altogether. Winter had been surprised to find the University student among her early volunteers. She’d been among the revolutionaries whom the speeches of Danton Aurenne had mobilized, and she and Winter had fought together to free the prisoners of the Vendre. After the victory of the revolution and the ascent of the Deputies-General to power, Winter had expected Cyte to take up a marginally safer life in politics. Instead she’d turned up not long after the declaration of war, with a copy of the Regulations and Drill of the Royal Army of Vordan under one arm and a quiet determination to master the military life that Winter found strangely familiar. Winter had quickly made her a staff lieutenant—recruited as it was mostly from the young women of the South Bank, the Girls’ Own was desperately short of people with the basic education to perform an officer’s duties.

“Someone’s coming,” Cyte said.

She pointed out across the field, where a lone figure was indeed sprinting through the remaining haze of smoke, headed for the hedgerow. Winter recognized Chris, one of Jane’s Leatherback leaders, now wearing a sergeant’s pips. Chris saw her at the same time, and headed in her direction, coming up hard against the hedge.

“Winter!” she said without even an attempt at a salute. Military niceties were not the strong point of Jane’s old cadre. “The yellowjackets are back.”

“Hell,” Winter said, looking over her shoulder. No sign yet of Bobby, much less of troops marching to their relief. “How many?”

“Looks like two groups,” Chris said. “They’re lining up just that way, on the other side of that little rise.”

Two battalions, Winter translated, deploying into line for the attack. “One of them out by the road?”

Chris nodded, gulping air.

Winter grimaced. “Where’s Jane?”

Chris pointed, and Winter hurried back along the line. Jane was helping hoist the returning scouts over the hedgerow, and Winter grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her aside.

“You’ve heard?” Jane said.

Winter nodded. “Bobby’s not back yet. De Ferre must be balking.”

“Bastard.” Jane smacked a fist against her palm. “Want me to go talk some sense into him?”

“I’ll send Folsom,” Winter said. “I need you here.”

“You want to try and hold them off?”

Winter gritted her teeth. If we fall back, the whole line could come unstuck. But to stand and fight, against these odds, would mean serious losses even if the line held. And if it breaks, they might run us all down.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

Jane looked at her, an odd light in her green eyes. “You’re in charge here,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

Django Wexler was born in San Francisco and raised in Westchester. He currently works for Microsoft in Seattle, Washington.

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