Dust fell through a shaft of colorless light, each mote turning slowly as though the air itself had forgotten how to breathe. Seraphine opened her eyes to the smell of cold ash and wet stone, and for a long moment she could not recall her own name.
The shrine had no windows. The light came from somewhere above, filtered through a crack she could not see, and it fell in a thin pale ribbon onto a floor of cracked slate. Around her rose pillars carved with figures whose faces had been worn smooth by centuries of damp. They might have been saints. They might have been wyrms. The carving had long since surrendered to moss and the patient gnaw of lichen, so that the shapes seemed to be weeping green tears down their own shoulders.
She sat up. Her spine protested, every vertebra clicking into its proper order, and her hands, when she lifted them, were trembling. Her wrists were bound with cord, thin and dark, the kind used for binding prayer-knots in old temples. She tugged. The cord fell away at once, dry and brittle, so old that her motion alone had undone it. The broken lengths lay across her lap like dead worms.
How long had she been here?
The last true memory she possessed was of rain. She had been riding, she thought. Through the Ashenwood, in the hour before dawn, following the broken road that ran beneath the black trees. Someone had been with her. A face she should have known. The memory would not quite resolve. It kept sliding sideways, refusing her, and the harder she reached for it, the colder her fingertips grew.
She pressed her palm flat against the slate beneath her. The stone was cold enough to ache. That was real. The stone was real, and the dust in her hair, and the copper taste at the back of her throat that told her she had bitten her tongue in whatever sleep had held her. She swallowed, and the taste only deepened.
She looked down at her left forearm.
For a breath she thought nothing of it. The brand sat just below the inside of her elbow, nestled against the soft skin where the veins showed blue, and it was the size of a child's palm. A single scale, raised as though something had been laid against her living flesh and pressed inward until the flesh had accepted it. Its color was not paint. It was not ink. It was the deep grey-green of a lake bottom at the hour the stars go out, and at its center, a pulse of light. A slow, deliberate pulse. Warm.
It pulsed again, and at the same instant her heart beat.
She went very still.
She had seen brands before. She had laid her own hand against the branding irons of her father's war camps, had watched the healers mark deserters, had even in her girlhood seen the proud brand of the wyrm-hunters seared into a captain's arm when he came back from the high passes with a tale of a kill. But she had never seen a brand that moved. She had never seen one that answered to a heartbeat.
She raised the arm higher. The light from above caught the edge of the scale and the color shifted, deepening toward black at the rim, then warming again as though something beneath the skin breathed out and in. She brought her other hand close. Without quite deciding to, she pressed her thumb against the center of the scale.
Heat. Not pain, not yet, but heat such as one feels when one has held a hand too long over a brazier, the warning heat that precedes a burn. She snatched her thumb away. The brand dimmed, then resumed its slow pulse.
She sat in the thin light and looked at the place where she had slept. A circle had been drawn on the floor around the slab where she lay, scratched into the slate in some dark pigment that was neither soot nor paint. The circle was broken in three places by gaps wide enough for a man to step through. Inside the circle, at four points, small bowls had been set into hollows in the stone. Two were empty. Two held something that might once have been herbs. They were dust now. The whole place had the look of a rite long concluded and then forgotten by everyone but the dust.
At the head of the slab, where her pillow should have been, lay a single object.
She reached for it slowly. Her fingers closed around metal that was warm, though the stone around it was not. A pendant on a fine chain, the chain so old it had gone the color of dried blood. The pendant itself was a disc no wider than her smallest fingernail, and on its face was engraved a sigil she almost knew. A serpent with its tail in its mouth. A wyrm in its own beginning, a creature that had never stopped devouring.
She lifted the pendant. The chain whispered against itself. The brand on her forearm flared, sudden as a struck match, and the heat rolled up her arm to her shoulder.
She hissed through her teeth and nearly dropped the thing. Her hand shook. The heat subsided as she lowered the pendant away from her body, returning to its slow patient pulse, but the edges of the brand felt tender now, as though she had touched a fresh burn to cloth.
She tried again, deliberately this time, lifting the pendant by the chain so that the disc hung a handsbreadth from her skin. The same flare. The same climbing heat. She swung the pendant gently to the left. The brand seemed to brighten as the disc passed over it. She swung it gently to the right. The heat shifted with the motion, as though there were a thread drawn taut between the two.
She let the pendant fall against her chest. The flare crested and ebbed. After a long moment she felt nothing but the ordinary warmth of her own body under the cold stone air, and the strange second warmth of the brand itself.
She had been dressed for travel. She remembered that much now. Boots still on her feet, caked with the black mud of the Ashenwood. A cloak of undyed wool, travel-stained, pinned at the throat with a silver clasp shaped like a hawk in flight. The cloak was torn at the left shoulder. Beneath it she wore a hunting shirt of soft leather, the kind she had trained in since she was fourteen, and at her hip, in a sheath that should have held a knife, there was only the worn leather and the impression of a shape that had once lain there.
Someone had taken her knife.
She rose to her knees, then to her feet, and the shrine answered her with the small sounds of old places: the creak of stone settling, the patter of distant water, the dry whisper of dust settling where she had lain. Her legs held her, though they did not thank her for the demand. She looked about her properly for the first time.
The shrine was not large. Perhaps twenty paces across, perhaps fewer. The pillars supported a ceiling she could not see, lost in shadow above the reach of the shaft of light. Between the pillars, alcoves had been cut into the walls, and in each alcove stood a figure. Not statues. Not carvings. They were wrapped in linen gone the color of weak tea, bound at neck and ankles with cords, and where their faces should have been, the linen sagged inward as though the bones beneath had long since drawn inward to a point.
Bones, she thought. Not statues. Wrapped bones. The remnants of those who had tended this place, laid in their alcoves by their successors and left to the patience of the stone.
She counted nine alcoves. Nine.
At the far end of the shrine, opposite the slab where she had woken, there was an arch. The arch was hung with a curtain of black cloth so old that the weave had begun to part in places, and through those places she could see a deeper darkness, and the suggestion of stairs going down.
She crossed to the first alcove and looked more closely. The linen wrappings were pinned with small bronze brooches in the shape of leaves. One of them, near the alcove's edge, had come loose. She touched it, then stopped herself. She drew her hand back and made herself a small bow, the formal bow she had been taught as a child for the dead of her own line. She bowed, though she did not know whose bones she bowed to.
Her forearm pulsed. She glanced down. The brand was brighter now than it had been. Its slow beat matched her heart exactly, as though she had been given a second heart in the wrong place.
She moved along the wall to the next alcove. The bones there were larger. A man, then, or a woman grown tall. The linen over the skull was marked with a small dark stain, and on closer look, the stain was in the shape of the same sigil she had seen on the pendant. The serpent with its tail in its mouth. The same wyrm.
She moved to the third alcove. The bones here were smaller. A child, perhaps, or a woman of slight frame. The bronze leaf brooch at the throat was intact. The pendant at her own throat lay quiet against her chest.
The brand flared.
She gasped, and her hand flew to her forearm, and she felt the heat climb her wrist and pool in her palm. The pendant at her throat, the disc had swung on its old chain and now lay against the hollow of her throat, and through the linen of her shirt she could feel it warming in answer.
She held very still. The shrine was quiet. The dust fell. From somewhere far above her, or far below, came a sound so soft it might have been her own breath returning from the stone. A dry whisper. A word, perhaps. Or a name.
The brand beat.
She listened. The sound did not come again. But the dust in the shaft of light had begun to settle in a way that seemed almost deliberate, as though a hand had passed through the air above her and stirred it.
The bones in the alcove before her, the smallest of them, lay with the linen-wrapped hands crossed at the breast. One of the hands, she now saw, was turned outward. The linen over the palm had parted, and the bones of the fingers were arranged in a shape she almost recognized. A pointing. A beckoning. Toward the arch. Toward the curtain of black cloth. Toward the stairs that went down.
She breathed in the smell of cold ash and wet stone, and the warmth of the brand pulsed against her wrist, and she understood, with a certainty older than the shrine itself, that she had not been brought here to be hidden. She had been brought here to be shown something, and the showing had not yet begun.
She lifted the pendant in her hand. The brand brightened. The pendant warmed. The bones in the alcove watched her with their empty linen faces, and somewhere in the dark beyond the curtain, something waited for her to take the first step down.
She took the first step down.
The stairs were narrow and worn into a shallow channel by centuries of feet, the stone beneath her boots dark with moisture that had gathered in the seams. The air changed as she descended. The dry chapel-cold gave way to something warmer, something that moved against her skin like the exhalation of a sleeping animal. The brand on her wrist answered it, and the answering was not the polite warmth of the upper shrine but a slow, deep pulse that climbed to her elbow and settled there like a second heartbeat.
She kept one hand on the wall. The stone was slick with a thin film of mineral water, and when her fingers passed over a carving in the rock, she felt the edges of a letter, then another, then the curve of a sigil. She could not see them in the dark. She traced them only by touch. A name. A date. A word that the stone had been taught to hold.
The pendant in her other hand grew heavier with every step. Not heavier as a stone grows heavier, but heavier as a held breath grows heavier before it is released. She came at last to a landing, and then to a door. The door was not locked. It was not even closed. It stood ajar by the width of a hand, and through that gap came a faint, sourceless light the color of copper.
She pushed the door open.
The room beyond was circular. The ceiling was low and domed, and at the center of the dome was a single opening through which no sky was visible, only the same copper light, steady and without flicker. The floor was black stone, polished to a dull sheen, and inlaid with a pattern she did not at first recognize. Then she did. It was the mark on her wrist, repeated outward in rings, each ring smaller than the last, until at the center the rings became a single dot.
There were no bones here. No linen. No dust. The room had been swept clean by something that was not a broom. In the center of the floor, on the very point of the dot, there was a low stone bench, and on the bench lay a folded cloth and beside it a shallow bowl of water so still it might have been cut from glass.
She crossed the room. She set the pendant down on the cloth. She knelt.
She did not know, until she knelt, how tired she was. The weariness came up through her knees and into her chest, and her hands began to tremble, and the brand on her wrist began to beat so hard she could count the strokes. She pressed her palm flat against the cold stone of the floor. She breathed. She let her eyes fall half-closed.
The copper light did not change. The water in the bowl did not stir. Somewhere, far above her, in the chapel of the bones, a sound like the settling of ancient stone came faintly down the stairs.
Then the room began to breathe with her.
She felt it first in the floor. A vibration, as if a great slow wing had passed somewhere far beneath her. Then in the walls. Then in the air itself, which thickened and grew sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and crushed juniper. The light from the dome dimmed by degrees, and a darker shape gathered in the copper glow, and the shape was an old woman sitting across from her on the other side of the bowl, though there had been no one there a moment before.
The old woman was very small. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her face was a folded thing too, creased upon creased, the color of old beeswax, and her eyes were closed. She did not open them. She did not need to.
"Granddaughter," said Elder Maeven, and her voice was the dry whisper of leaves turning in a cupboard, and the breath beneath it was the breath of deep wells.
Morgana's tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She tried to speak and could not.
"Hush," said Maeven. "There is no need of names here. I know which one you are. I have watched every one of you since the first of your line crept out of the wyrm's mouth with the taste of her mother's blood still on her teeth. Hush now, and look."
Morgana looked. The water in the bowl between them had cleared, or perhaps it had only now become visible to her. It was not still after all. It was moving with a slow, deliberate motion, like the breathing of something vast seen from very far away.
"Look into the water," said Maeven. "Look until the water looks back. That is the door. That is how the old ones opened it. That is how you will open it now."
Morgana looked.
The surface of the water was black, and the black deepened, and the copper light above them was swallowed in it, and then the room was gone, and the bench was gone, and the old woman was still there but she was no longer across the bowl from her. She was beside her, in the dark, small and warm as a baked apple.
"There is a spirit," said Maeven, "bound to your line since before there was a line. The covenant was not made with the Ash Wyrm alone. There was another, older than the Wyrm, older than the kingdom. He is the keeper of the mark. He is the grief of the mark. When your forebears went down into the deep places, he went with them. When they came back up, he came back with them, diminished, diminished, but never gone. He is the shadow that walks behind every Ashvale heir. Tonight, child, you will meet him."
A pause. The dark grew attentive.
"His name is Vyran."
The name fell into the silence like a coal into a pond.
"And he is in pain."
The water shuddered. Morgana saw, far down in it, a light the color of furnace-mouth, and the light was moving, and the moving was not gentle.
"Reach for him," said Maeven. "Reach as you would reach for a wounded bird. Do not be afraid. He will not harm you. Not yet. He is bound to the mark, and the mark is bound to you, and that binding holds even him. Reach."
Morgana reached.
The water broke.
She was standing on a ridge of black glass. Below her was a city burning. The city was not any city she had ever seen. Its spires were too tall and too thin, and its bridges crossed nothing but air and more air, and the fire that was eating it was not red but white, the white of a forge at full heat, and the people in the streets were running with their hands over their ears, and their mouths were open in screams she could not hear.
Above the city, on a ridge of glass just like hers, stood a figure.
He was tall. He was thin. His hair was dark and wild, and his face was the face of a man in his prime, but his eyes were older than the city below him, older than the fire, older than the glass. He wore the tattered remains of a scholar's robe, and over the robe a cuirass of black scales that did not quite fit him, as though it had been made for a larger creature and he had only borrowed it.
He looked at her.
The looking was a weight. She felt it on her shoulders and down her spine. She felt it settle in the brand on her wrist, and the brand answered him, and she understood in that answering that he knew her name and her mother's name and her grandmother's name, and every name that had come before, back to the first one who had crawled out of the wyrm's mouth.
"So," said Vyran.
His voice came from a great distance and from inside her own chest at the same time. It was theatrical and hollow, and it rolled like thunder that has forgotten what it was thundering about. Between his words there were silences that lasted too long.
"So. The little daughter comes at last. I have smelled you on the wind for nine days, child. I have watched you stumble through the upper shrine and paw at the bones of your ancestors as if they were trinkets at a fair. I have watched you press your thumb to the brand as if the brand were a doorbell. Come to summon me, have you? Come to ask a boon?"
Morgana opened her mouth. She had meant to say something. She could not now remember what it was.
He laughed. The laugh was worse than his voice. It was the laugh of a man who had forgotten how laughing was supposed to sound and had reconstructed it from the descriptions in old books.
"You did not come to summon me," he said. "You were sent. Sent by a withered woman who still smells of ash and well-water. Sent to be looked at. Well. Look then."
He raised one arm and swept it outward, and the burning city below them swelled in her vision until she could see the faces of the people in the streets. They were not people. They were dragons. They were running on hind legs, with their wings bound to their backs by chains of pale gold, and the chains were bright, and the gold was the same gold as the chain around the Heart in the upper shrine.
"See," said Vyran. "See what your line made of mine. See what was done in the name of the covenant. They took us in the long night, when the sky was wrong and the young of our kind would not hatch. They came with chains and with pretty words, and they bound us to the Heart, and they made us serve. And when we would not serve, they burned our cities. And when our cities burned, they salted the ground. And when the ground was salted, they taught their children to forget."
His voice broke on the last word. The break was not a small thing. The whole ridge of glass shuddered, and a crack ran through it beneath Morgana's feet.
"Do not pity me," he said, more quietly. "I am not asking for pity. I am showing you the shape of the thing that is bound to you. The mark on your wrist is not a decoration. It is a tally. Every time one of your line used the power of the Heart, a debt was added to the tally. The debt has a name. The name is Vyran. I am the debt made walking."
He lowered his arm. The burning city dimmed but did not go out. In its dimming, she saw other things. A library burning. A woman with a brand like hers on her throat, weeping over a child. A man in a scholar's robe holding a black feather and weeping also. The feather was the size of a forearm.
"I was not always this," said Vyran. "I was a man. I had a name that fit me. I had hands that did not shake. I made a bargain, in my pride, with the Ash Wyrm himself. I thought to outwit him. I was wrong. The bargain ate my name and gave me this instead. I am the herald of the thing your family woke. I am the shadow it casts. I am the grief it has not yet finished. And I have been waiting, child, for an heir who would look me in the face."
He looked at her. She looked back. The crack in the glass widened beneath her.
"Be careful what you promise me," he said. "Be careful what you ask. The last one who asked died in the asking. The one before her died in the promising. The one before that died in the keeping."
He turned away from her, and as he turned, the ridge of glass folded under him like a closing hand, and the burning city rose up and swallowed her sight, and the last thing she saw before the dark took her was the black feather, drifting down through the fire, turning over and over, and the small, precise handwriting along its quill.
The water stilled.
She was kneeling on the black floor of the round room. The bowl was still in front of her. The water in it was clear again, and unbroken. The copper light from above had not changed.
Maeven was gone.
On the folded cloth, where the pendant had lain, there was now a black feather. It was the length of her forearm. Along its quill, in writing so fine it might have been done with a single hair, was a name she could not read and a date she could not parse, and at the tip of the feather, a single drop of something dark and old that was not quite blood.
The brand on her wrist had gone quiet. Not cold. Not still. Quiet in the way a held weapon is quiet, in the way a held breath is quiet, in the way a debt is quiet before it is called due.
She reached for the feather.
She reached for the feather.
Her fingers touched the quill first. It was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature, cold in the way a name spoken in anger is cold, cold in the way the floor of a temple is cold before the god arrives. The writing along it was finer than any scribe in the palace could have managed. She tilted it toward the copper light and tried to read it, and the letters would not stay still on her eye. They rearranged themselves into older shapes, into a tongue she should not have known but did, into a date that might have been a name and a name that might have been a debt. The drop at the tip was black and viscous and smelled of nothing at all, which was wrong because everything in this place smelled of something. Ash, smoke, wet stone, iron, the faint sweetness of old candle grease. The drop smelled of absence. She tucked the feather into the collar of her dress, against the hollow of her throat, and felt it there like a sliver of ice against her pulse.
"Maeven," she said. The round room did not answer. The bowl was empty now, not even water in it, only a fine dust at the bottom that might once have been glass. The folded cloth was empty too. The Oracle had gone, and she had not heard her go, and the door behind the screen of woven reeds was still latched from the inside.
Morgana stood. Her knees did not want to. The brand on her wrist had gone quiet but it had gone heavier, as though something had been added to it, as though a second ring had been slipped over the first. She flexed her hand and the weight of it shifted, and she understood, in the way she understood her own breathing, that the brand would not be quiet for long.
She took up the bowl. She did not know why she took up the bowl. She wrapped it in the folded cloth and tucked it under her arm and stood a moment longer in the center of the room, listening.
The palace beyond the Oracle's chamber was quiet in the way a throat is quiet before a scream.
Then a sound. Small, deliberate. The scrape of a boot on stone, and another, and a held breath.
Morgana's hand went to the knife at her belt before she had finished deciding to do it.
"It's me," said a voice from the dark behind the screen of reeds. "Don't, it's me. It's Mira. Put the knife down, my lady, please, I can't come out if you've got the knife, I'll drop the lamp and we'll both burn."
The voice was low and quick and shaking at the edges. Morgana knew it. She knew it from the kitchens at the back of the great hall, from the clatter of pans at dawn, from the laughter that rose up through the floorboards of the long gallery when the court was at meat. She knew the particular way this voice said my lady, with the second word higher than the first, as though she were always half-amused by the title.
"Come out," Morgana said. She did not put the knife down. She held it low against her thigh, the way her father had taught her to hold a blade when she was six years old and still believed the war was a story.
The reeds parted. A girl stepped into the copper light. She was small and dark and flour-dusted to the elbow, as though she had been pulled mid-bread at the ovens, and she was carrying an unlit lamp in one hand and a long shape wrapped in oilcloth in the other. Her face was white under the flour. Her eyes were too bright.
"Mira," Morgana said. "What are you doing here?"
"Hiding you," Mira said. "Or finding you. Or dying for you. I haven't decided which yet. Please put the knife down. I was told, listen, I was told you were a witch and a traitor and a serpent's bride, and I was told to slip into the Oracle's chamber while the old woman was speaking and put this into your tea." She shifted the oilcloth-wrapped shape. "It is a knife, my lady. A long one. With the Ashvale crest on the hilt. I was told to make it look like the Oracle had done it. I was told that if I did, the crown would settle a farm on my mother in the lowland, and that my mother would never have to wash another sheet for the lords. And I have come here instead to give it to you, because I have not done it, and because I cannot do it, and because the men who told me to do it are coming back at dawn with twenty more behind them."
Morgana did not put the knife down. She looked at Mira. She looked at the flour on her arms and the lamp in her hand and the way she stood with her weight on her back foot, ready to run. She looked at the way her eyes kept flicking to the door.
"Who told you?" Morgana asked.
"Kael," Mira said. "Lord Kael. He came into the kitchens himself, which is the first time a lord has set foot in those rooms in living memory, and he spoke to me alone in the pantry and he did not raise his voice, which is how I knew it was bad. And he told me that the eldest princess had gone mad and was consorting with the Ash Wyrm, and that you must die before dawn, and that if I did not do it, someone less careful would, and that you would suffer. And I said yes, my lord, because I am a coward and because my mother is a laundress and a farm is a fortune. And then I went and stood in the pantry for an hour and thought about it. And then I took the long knife and I took my brother's good boots and I came up through the back stair and I have been hiding in the priests' robings for three hours waiting for you to come out of trance. And I have decided, my lady, that I am not going to do it."
"Why?" Morgana asked. The question came out flatter than she meant it to.
Mira's mouth opened and closed and opened again.
"Because my mother told me once," she said, "that there are worse things than dying for someone, and one of them is living without having tried. And because I have seen you at the high table when you thought no one was looking, and you were not what they say you are. And because," she added, and here her voice cracked for the first time, "because I think my mother would rather have a daughter than a farm. And I think my mother would have told me to choose the daughter. And I think my mother would have been right. And now please, please put the knife down, because I cannot think when you are holding it at me like that, my lady."
Morgana put the knife down.
She slid it back into her belt. The brand on her wrist pulsed once, low, like a second heartbeat, and went quiet again.
"Three hours," Morgana said. "How long until dawn?"
"Four hours," Mira said. "Less. The priests have been lighting the long lamps in the great hall since I came up, and the long lamps are not lit until the king is dead or the king has ordered a hunt. They have lit them for a hunt. Kael is raising the household guard. He has told the king that you have fled to the wyrmwood with the rebel Seraphine, and that the creature must be smoked out at first light. He has told the king that you are the bait. The king, my lady, is weeping in the upper chamber. Ilyana is with him. She will not let him sign the warrant, but she cannot hold him forever. Kael has the council's ear. He has had it since the Oracle went into trance. By dawn there will be fifty men at the gates of the wyrmwood and a hundred more on the road. And he has said, my lady, that if I return to him empty-handed, he will know I have chosen you, and that I will hang from the kitchen gate beside my mother."
She said this last part without flinching. She said it the way she had said everything else, quickly and lightly, as though the words were bread she was handing across a counter.
Morgana looked at the girl. She looked at the flour on her arms and the boots on her feet and the wrapped long knife in her hand. She looked, in the strange way of the Oracle's chamber, at the lines of her. Kitchen girl, yes. Flour to the elbow, yes. But there was something in the set of her shoulders that did not belong to the kitchens. There was something in the way she held the wrapped blade. There was something in the bones of her face, in the particular cast of her brow, that Morgana had seen before, in the long gallery, in the faces of the Ashvale line.
She did not say it. There was no time to say it.
"You have chosen," Morgana said.
"I have chosen," Mira said.
"Then we run," Morgana said.
"Yes, my lady," Mira said. "Where?"
The question hung between them. The round room was silent. The copper light did not flicker. The brand on Morgana's wrist was quiet and heavy, and the feather against her throat was cold, and somewhere beyond the roof of the palace the sky was moving from black to the first grey of false dawn, and somewhere in that grey the Ash Wyrm was waiting, and somewhere in the palace her father was weeping, and somewhere on the stair Kael's men were sharpening their swords.
The wyrmwood, Morgana thought. Seraphine had gone there. The rebel sister, the one who had not come back to court, the one who had chosen the war over the throne, the one who had been hunting wyrms since Morgana was a child and who had once, in a letter Morgana had kept folded in the bottom of a chest for nine years, written that she would die for her, and meant it, and signed it with her own blood.
The wyrmwood, where the Ash Wyrm kept his court. Where the seekers would go first. Where the trap would be set.
But also the only place where the brand on her wrist had ever gone quiet.
"North," Morgana said. "Through the undercrofts, through the orchard, through the river gate. We take the back roads. We do not go to the wyrmwood."
"No, my lady," Mira said.
"We go to my sister," Morgana said. "We go to Seraphine."
Mira unrolled the oilcloth from the long knife. The blade was good Ashvale steel. She held it out to Morgana, hilt first, the way a page holds a sword to a queen.
"Then take this, my lady," she said. "And take me with you. And do not let me think about it, because if I think about it I will turn around and go back to the kitchens and my mother will have her farm and I will have done what I was told and I will have to live with it. So do not let me think about it."
Morgana took the blade. The steel was cold and true. She slid it into her belt beside the kitchen knife, and the two of them looked at each other in the copper glow of the Oracle's chamber, and the dawn was coming, and the king was weeping, and the hunters were sharpening their steel, and somewhere in the north the rebel princess was waiting with a company of her own.
"Follow me," Morgana said. "And stay close."
"Yes, my lady," Mira said.
They went out through the screen of reeds, through the priests' robings where the smell of incense was still strong, down the back stair where the torches had been left to gutter, into the dark of the undercrofts, where the river ran beneath the palace and the rats ran beside the river and the air tasted of stone and old water and the first breath of a country that had not yet decided what it was going to become.
The brand on Morgana's wrist was quiet. The feather against her throat was cold. The steel at her belt was true. And behind her, quick and breathless and unafraid in the way only the truly frightened can be unafraid, Mira followed.
Above them, the long lamps of the great hall burned on. The night moved toward its end.