Carrion Throne of the Mireborn King: The Leech Lords Garden

Brine splashed against Aelis's cheek, warm and wrong, carrying the iron tang of something not quite blood. She pressed deeper into the shadows behind a rack of glass-stoppered bottles, watching her hand leave a dark smear on the stone as she steadied herself against the wall. The vivarium stretched before them in tiers of copper and glass, a cathedral of rot disguised as devotion. Every surface wept condensation. The air tasted of salt and copper and the sweet decay of things grown too long in stagnant water.

Ysolde crouched beside her, one calloused finger pressed to her lips, her other hand resting on the pommel of the rust-eaten sword she had not drawn since the Mireborn rose from the canals. The ferrywoman's face was unreadable in the green-tinged gloom, but her eyes moved with the patience of someone accustomed to waiting in ditches while worse things passed overhead.

The largest of the brine-tanks dominated the far wall, a cylinder of murky glass taller than Aelis stood, its contents suspended in pale suspension. Lungs, Aelis realized. Two of them, grafted to a sternum that belonged to no single body, floating in nutritive muck that caught the lantern-light and threw it back in oily rainbows. Nearby, a kidney pulsed in its bath of preservative. Tendons coiled in a rack like cured rope.

Ysolde touched her wrist. Two fingers. Two visitors somewhere ahead.

Aelis returned the pressure. One finger. One she already knew.

Brannoc's voice drifted from beyond a hanging curtain of bladder-membrane, that wet-paper translucence that passed for windows in the marsh-priest's holdings. He spoke in the low, ceremonial cadence of a man who had rehearsed his courtesies until they became indistinguishable from cruelty.

"You understand," he was saying, "that what I offer is not a transaction but a consecration. The Crown does not purchase. The Crown is fed."

A second voice answered, flattened by whatever apparatus covered the speaker's face. The accent was hard to place, a metallic rasp that turned vowels into clipped, procedural sounds.

"The writ specifies the last Vorath tongue. Intact. Vocal cords attached. The Crown has shown patience, Steward. It will not show patience forever."

Brannoc laughed, a soft, bubbling sound. "Patience. What a charming fiction. The Crown hungers. It has always hungered. I merely arrange the menu."

Aelis felt the heat rise in her throat, the old, familiar burn. The last Vorath tongue. She had spent three years learning to unknot her throat before each recitation of the family rites, had trained herself to speak around the absence of what had been taken from her sister. The thought that Brannoc spoke of tongues the way a cook spoke of cuts made her want to drive her scribe's knife into the soft place beneath his jaw.

Ysolde's hand closed around her forearm. Hard. A warning and a restraint in the same grip.

The ferrywoman's mouth moved against Aelis's ear, breath damp, voice barely a vibration in the bones.

"Hold. Listen. We came for the ledger. We find the ledger after we know what he sells."

Aelis nodded once. The ledger. The book of accounts that recorded every graft, every tax in flesh, every name surrendered to the Hungering Crown. Somewhere in this stinking cathedral, Brannoc kept proof that could burn his house down. They had not come for vengeance. Ysolde had been very clear about that, the night they poled the skiff through the drowned causeway, her rough voice cutting through the fog.

Vengeance is a luxury, the ferrywoman had said. Proof is a weapon.

The bladder-curtain stirred as someone moved behind. Aelis caught the silhouette of Brannoc's envoy, tall and thin, the mask catching light in dull bronze. The figure's head turned slightly, scanning the room with the methodical sweep of someone trained to count exits before counting people.

Then Brannoc stepped into view.

He was smaller than Aelis remembered. The years, or perhaps the certainty of his position, had softened him. He wore vestments of stitched leather and copper threading, a pectoral of dried leeches in a cage of wire that swung when he moved. His face was kindly. That was the worst part. He looked like an uncle. He looked like a man who might offer you tea and a seat by the fire.

"The Crown will have what it is owed," the masked envoy said, and there was something beneath the words, a tremor or a suppressed hunger that made the flat voice wobble. "The writ names the Vorath heir by lineage. Both are accounted for. The younger persists. The elder is already in the reliquary."

Aelis's breath stopped.

The elder. Maren. The word landed in her chest like a hook.

Ysolde's grip tightened. Aelis could feel the ferrywoman's pulse through the leather bracer, faster than her face allowed. They had both believed Maren dead since the night the canals rose. They had both made their peace with that absence, or tried to.

Brannoc spread his hands, the gesture expansive and avuncular. "The reliquary is a courtesy, not a gift. The elder Vorath remains in a state of... preservation. The Crown will receive her intact when the writ is fulfilled."

"And the younger?"

"In time. The younger is more difficult. She has friends among the riverfolk. She has a guardian who remembers old oaths." Brannoc's gaze drifted toward the curtain, almost playful. "She is also, I am told, remarkably stubborn. I do not yet have her tongue in my hand."

Aelis tasted bile. She had bitten the inside of her cheek without noticing, and now the copper spread across her tongue, mingling with the brine-air until she could not tell one metallic taste from another.

The masked envoy shifted. "The writ also names the seal. The Vorath seal. You assured the Crown's steward that it was recovered."

"It was recovered." Brannoc's voice cooled by one precise degree. "And it was lost again. To the younger, as it happens. She has a talent for collecting things that do not belong to her."

"Then retrieve it."

"I intend to."

"When?"

Brannoc smiled. It was a small smile, contained, the smile of a man who had learned that patience was its own kind of cruelty. "When I am ready. The seal is useless without the heir to wield it. The heir is useless without the tongue to speak the words that open what the seal was made to seal. I will bring you both, envoy. Or I will bring you the tongue and the seal, and the Crown can do without the rest of the girl. But I will not deliver scraps. The Crown deserves a full course, or I have failed in my stewardship."

The envoy's head tilted, that mechanical assessment. "The Crown does not eat scraps. The Crown does not negotiate."

"Then the Crown will wait." Brannoc bowed, shallow, correct. "As it has waited before."

The silence that followed was not empty. It was the silence of two predators measuring the distance between themselves. Aelis could feel the tension in the room like a pressure change before a storm, the way the air thickened and tasted of metal.

Ysolde tugged her sleeve. Two fingers pointed toward a side passage half-hidden by hanging moss and tubing. A door of corroded copper set into stone. The ledger, if there was a ledger, would be in the sanctum beyond.

They moved.

Aelis kept her shoulders narrow, her breathing shallow. The floor was slick with condensation and something thicker that she refused to identify. Each step released a faint squelch that sounded, in the green stillness, loud enough to wake the dead. Ysolde moved differently, weight distributed across the balls of her feet, her sword-hand loose at her side, her eyes never resting on a single point for more than a heartbeat.

The copper door was unlatched. Ysolde pressed her ear to it and held up one finger. Wait.

Voices heard from within. Low. A single speaker, chanting in the wet liturgical of the swamp-priests, the words slurred and rhythmic, a maintenance hymn for things grown in brine. The voice faded, then ceased. Footsteps, receding.

Ysolde eased the door open.

Beyond was a smaller chamber, lined not with tanks but with shelves of leather-bound ledgers, each spine stamped with a year in the swamp-calendar. A central table held a spread of surgical tools laid out on a cloth of waxed linen. The smell here was different. Cleaner, but worse for it. The sharp, sweet reek of preservative alcohols, the mineral tang of alums, the undertone of old blood that no amount of washing could entirely purge.

Aelis moved to the shelves. Her fingers traced the spines. Seventeen years of flesh-tax, if Brannoc had been honest in his record-keeping. She doubted he had been, but the lies would be in the entries, not the dates. A scribe-mage's work to parse them. Her work.

Ysolde took position by the door, her sword finally drawn, the blade dark with tarnish but true in the edge. The ferrywoman's face was composed, her body ready, her mouth set in the particular grimness of someone who had expected to die in service of the Vorath name and was mildly inconvenienced to find herself doing so in a vivarium rather than on a battlefield.

Aelis pulled the most recent ledger from the shelf and opened it.

The first page was a dedication, in Brannoc's own flowing script, to the Hungering Crown, in words that made her stomach turn. She turned the page. Names, dates, descriptions of what was taken and from whom. A boy of nine, tongue. A woman of forty, both hands. A man of indeterminate age, face entire, for a festival that required a mask.

She turned more pages. Then she stopped.

A name she recognized.

Not her own. Not Maren's. The name was written in a clerk's hand, the letters cramped and hurried, as though the scribe had wanted to finish the entry and leave the room.

Ysolde Drowned. Knight of the Old Household. Status: Presumed Dead. Recovery: Unsuccessful. Crown's Displeasure: Noted.

Aelis looked up. Ysolde had not moved from the door. The ferrywoman's face had not changed, but her knuckles, wrapped around the sword's grip, had gone white as bone.

She knew. Of course she knew. She had known for years that Brannoc had sent hunters after her, that her name appeared on lists, that the writ that would have dragged her back to the vivarium had been delayed only by her own disappearance into the drowned roads.

Aelis turned back to the page. Beneath Ysolde's name, another entry, in Brannoc's hand this time, the letters larger, more deliberate, as though he had wanted someone to find it eventually.

The Younger Vorath. Aelis Vorath. Tongue, intact. Vocal cords, intact. Mind, intact. Recover when convenient. The seal follows the tongue. The tongue follows the heir. The heir follows the road home.

Aelis closed the ledger. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the leather cover until the trembling passed into the wood of the table.

A sound from beyond the door. Not footsteps. A scraping, wet and deliberate, like something dragging itself across stone.

Ysolde's blade came up. Her eyes found Aelis's across the chamber.

The ferrywoman's mouth formed two words, silent but unmistakable.

Get out.

The scrape came again, closer now, accompanied by a breathing that was not breath but the wet, peristaltic sound of something working its way through a membrane. Aelis was already moving. The ledger went into her satchel. The map went after it. She left the lantern burning because the light would tell whoever was coming exactly where she had been, and a few seconds' warning was worth more than secrecy.

Ysolde did not follow. The ferrywoman planted herself in the doorway, her sword angled across the frame, and for one breath Aelis thought she meant to hold the corridor alone. Then she barked, low and sharp: "Roof. Chimney. Move."

There was no chimney. Aelis opened her mouth to say so and saw, in the stuttering lantern-glow, a second doorway behind a tapestry that had not been there a moment ago. The wall had changed. The drowned roads rearranged themselves for travelers who knew the passwords, and Ysolde had spoken one.

Aelis did not look back. She pulled the tapestry aside and stepped through into a passage that smelled of resin and old smoke. The fabric fell closed behind her like a lid on a coffin.

She ran.

The passage twisted. It narrowed until her shoulders brushed damp stone on either side, then opened into a low-roofed vault where water dripped from a crack in the ceiling and pooled on a floor of broken tiles. Ahead, a circle of grey light. A grate. Beyond the grate, the alley behind the wayhouse, the rain, and the sound of boots.

Many boots.

Aelis pressed herself flat against the wall beside the grate and tried to quiet her breathing. Through the rusted lattice she could see six, eight, a dozen figures in the leech-lord's livery moving in a slow cordon around the building. They carried no torches. They did not need them. Their eyes, where the masks did not cover them, gleamed with a pale, marshy luminescence that suggested something other than human sight was at work.

One of them stopped. Turned. The mask's eyeholes, twin pits of black glass, swept across the grate, across the alley, across the wall behind which Aelis stood.

The figure did not move. It listened. Aelis became aware, with a horror that started at the base of her spine and climbed, that she could hear the man's thoughts.

Not words. Not quite. A pressure, a leaning-in of attention, as though the air between them had become a membrane and something on the other side was tasting its elasticity. The Hungering Voice, Brannoc's congregation, had begun to pray.

Aelis set her teeth. She had been taught, in the old household, that the Voice could not hear a Vorath who did not wish to be heard. She had not been taught how. She had not, until this moment, believed it mattered.

She stopped wanting to be heard.

The pressure snapped. The masked figure lost interest, turned, rejoined its cordon. Aelis exhaled through her nose, slow, controlled, and felt the sweat on her temples turn cold.

She could not stay here. The cordon would tighten. Ysolde would buy her what minutes she could, and the ferrywoman's minutes, Aelis understood, were numbered in blood. She looked up. The ceiling of the vault was higher here than it had been in the passage, and the crack through which the water dripped widened, near the apex, into a fissure that swallowed the lampless dark above.

Climb. In the dark. With the hunt below.

She climbed.

Her fingers found holds in mortar that crumbled at the touch. Her boots scraped for purchase on stone that wept with condensation. Once, a brick came away in her hand and she had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out as it bounced off the floor below. The masked figures did not react. Perhaps the Voice's attention had shifted. Perhaps they simply did not care. The Hungering had patience.

The fissure took her. She turned sideways, exhaled, and slid into a gap so narrow her ribs compressed and the satchel's strap bit into her collarbone. Stone ground against the back of her neck. Water, cold as a drowned hand, ran into her ear.

She stopped moving. She had to. The gap ahead was choked with rubble, and the gap behind was blocked by her own body. She hung in the dark like a pressed leaf, and she waited for the stone to take her.

It did not. She had been younger, once, and she had been hungry, and she had climbed worse for less.

She worked herself upward by inches. The rubble yielded. The gap widened. A draft touched her face, carrying the smell of rain and distant marsh, and she followed it, hand over hand, until she emerged onto a rooftop of cracked slate that overlooked the wayhouse and three streets beyond it. Below, the cordon had completed its circle. Two figures were dragging something out of the front door. A body. Not Ysolde's size. Not Ysolde's shape.

Aelis's stomach turned.

She could not see the face. The rain had thickened, and the masked figures moved with the unhurried coordination of men who had already won. They loaded the body onto a handcart already occupied by a second, smaller shape, and a third figure came out of the wayhouse carrying, with grotesque delicacy, a bundle that Aelis did not let herself identify.

Then Ysolde was in the doorway.

She had been hurt. She favored her left side, and her sword, when it came up, was red to the hilt. The ferrywoman surveyed the cordon with the calm, professional appraisal of a woman counting the cost of a battle she had already decided to lose. Then she smiled. It was the first smile Aelis had ever seen on her face, and it was the smile of someone remembering, with pleasure, how to die correctly.

She stepped forward. The cordon closed. The rain took them.

Aelis watched until she could not watch. Then she looked away, and the looking away was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she had done many hard things.

She climbed down the far side of the roof. She found a gutter. She found a wall. She found, at the bottom of a lane she did not recognize, a canal where the drowned road began and the rain fell like a curtain.

She sat on a piling with her back to a bollard and her hands in her lap and she did not think about Ysolde, because thinking about Ysolde would make her stop, and she could not stop.

The ledger in her satchel pressed against her hip. She took it out. She turned the pages until she found the entry Brannoc had written for her, and she read it again.

The Younger Vorath. Aelis Vorath. Tongue, intact. Vocal cords, intact. Mind, intact. Recover when convenient. The seal follows the tongue. The tongue follows the heir. The heir follows the road home.

She closed the ledger. She opened it again. She took the charcoal stub from her pocket, and beneath Brannoc's neat hand, in the margins, in her own cramped scribe's hand, she wrote:

Recovered. Tongue, silent. Vocal cords, sworn. Mind, open. The seal follows nothing. The heir follows no road home.

She shut the book. The rain had stopped. The canal water lay still and black, and in its surface she saw, for one dislocating instant, a face that was not hers.

It was hers. It was older. It was kind, and tired, and a little amused, and it belonged to a woman who had been dead for ten years.

"Aelis," the reflection said, and the voice was the voice from the wayhouse, the voice of the Hungering congregation, but shaped into something gentler, something that sounded, against all reason, like an answer. "Aelis, listen to me."

Aelis did not listen. She had been taught not to listen. She had been taught, by her mother, that the drowned speak to drown. She turned away from the canal and stood, and the motion broke the image, and the water was only water again.

She began to walk. She did not know where. The drowned roads would take her, or they would not. She had the ledger, and the seal, and the knowledge that Ysolde was gone, and somewhere in the marsh, in a chamber she could already smell in her imagination, Brannoc the Leech-Lord was smiling because his hunters had finally found what he had sent them to find.

Aelis walked. The rain began again, softly, as though it had only been waiting for her to move.

The canal-house smelled of brine and old rope. Vaela stood with her back to the wall, her fen-blade held low, her breath shallow, listening to the drip of the pipes behind the plaster. Somewhere below her, in the stews and the stamped chambers, Brannoc was hunting.

She had been in the house for three hours. She had climbed in through the salt-window in the cloakroom and found the place deserted, the furniture still heavy with silt, the hearths cold, the family crest hanging crooked above a sideboard whose drawers had been emptied out. She had not expected the house to be empty. She had expected traps, wardens, perhaps a brace of marshals dozing in the back kitchen. Instead she had found nothing but the slow drip of the pipes, the faint salt-rotten smell of the swamp pressing in through the seams, and her own pulse, much too loud, in her ears.

She waited. She had learned to wait. She had spent ten years learning to wait in rooms that did not want her, breathing air that tasted of other people's kitchens, listening for the step that would betray the watcher at the door. The trick was to make the waiting feel like a choice. The trick was to believe, for as long as the waiting lasted, that she had chosen to be here.

A door opened below her. Footsteps on the flagged hall, heavy and deliberate, the unhurried gait of someone who owned the house and the road and the weather outside it. The footsteps stopped. A chair was drawn out, set down again. The strike of a flint. The smell of lamp-oil, faint but unmistakable, drifting up through the floorboards.

Vaela did not move. Her hand whitened on the fen-blade's grip. The blade was a thin, black, slightly curved thing, tapering to a point so fine it would pass between the plates of a scale with only a thought of pressure. She had carried it since her consecration. It had opened letters for her, and throats, and the small, sealed envelopes in which the Crown kept its most private appetites.

She listened. The footsteps did not come up the stairs. The lamp burned. Somewhere in the house a pipe coughed, and the cough was followed by the thin, sweet, unmistakable smell of gas from the swamp, the marshlight that the Crown's feeders burned to keep their stores quiet.

She had been sent here to wait for the heir. She had been told that the heir would come to the canal-house, because the heir always came to the canal-house, because the heir had been born in the canal-house, and the drowned roads remembered their own. She had been told to be patient. She had been told that the heir was young and proud and would make a mistake before the third night.

The heir had not come.

The lamp burned on, below her. Vaela breathed through her mouth, and the air tasted of salt and lamp-oil and the faint, sweet thread of marshlight. She had been in the house for three hours. She had been told to wait three nights.

She decided to wait one more hour, and then to go down, and then to kill whoever was sitting in the chair.

The hour did not pass. The house settled around her, and the pipes ticked, and the lamp burned. She became aware, gradually, that she was not alone in the upstairs corridor. She had been aware of it for some time. She had been waiting for the awareness to become certainty.

It did. A floorboard, three paces behind her, gave a sound so small that only someone who had been trained to listen for the exact weight of a human foot on old timber would have caught it. Vaela turned. The fen-blade came up. The corridor was narrow, and dark, and at its far end a figure stood very still, watching her with the patient, slightly amused attention of a cat at a mouse-hole.

"So," said Brannoc the Leech-Lord. "The little inquisitor has come to call."

He was smaller than she had expected. His robes were the dark, wet green of the deeper canals, and they moved when he moved and did not move when he stood still. His face was the color of old tallow, and his eyes were the pale, unreadable gray of the marsh at dusk. He held no weapon. He held only his own hands, folded at his waist, the fingers interlaced with the ease of long practice.

"I was not told," Vaela said, "that you would be here."

"You were not told many things, child. You were told to wait. You have waited very prettily. Now you may stop."

She did not lower the blade. "I was sent here to take the heir."

"You were sent here to serve me. The heir is incidental." He took a step forward. She took a step back. The corridor was very narrow, and her shoulders brushed the damp plaster. "Put the blade down, Vaela Korr. It will not help you, and it will offend me, and I do not enjoy being offended in my own house."

"You are not in your own house. This is the Vorath canal-house."

"It was. It is mine now, by writ of the Crown and by the older writ of the swamp. Put the blade down."

She did not put the blade down. She raised it, instead, into the high guard, the point aimed at the hollow of his throat, and she set her feet in the killing stance and waited for him to come to her.

He smiled. The smile was the worst thing about him, worse than the robes, worse than the eyes. It was the smile of a man who had never in his life been refused anything of consequence.

"You have been very well trained," he said, conversationally, as though they were meeting over wine. "The writ of flesh, the consecration, the long fasts, the fen-blade. You have been trained to kill heirs and to bring their seals back to the Crown. You have been trained to believe that the seal is the point. Have you ever asked yourself, child, why the Crown wants the seal so badly?"

"To complete the binding," she said. "To seal the pact."

"To seal the pact. Yes. That is what they told you. That is what they told you because it is true, and because truth is the most useful lie of all. Put the blade down, and I will tell you what the seal is for, and why the heir must bring it to me, and why you were sent to wait in this house and not, as you were told, in the ambush at the wayhouse."

"You were at the wayhouse."

"I was at the wayhouse. I was not in the ambush. I was elsewhere in the wayhouse, in a small room behind the kitchens, waiting for the heir to arrive. The heir did not arrive. The heir is, I am told, more cautious than her mother. The ambush was a courtesy to my friends in the Crown. The heir was always to be mine."

"I serve the Crown."

"You serve me, child. You have always served me. You were chosen for the writ of flesh because your mother owed me a debt she could not pay, and the debt passed to you, and the writ is the receipt. Put the blade down."

She did not put the blade down. She lunged.

The lunge was correct. The lunge was the lunge she had drilled a thousand times in the cold stone yards of the marsh-convents, against straw men and live ones, against the older students and the younger, against the masters who tested her twice a year with the weighted staves. The point of the fen-blade took Brannoc in the center of the chest, between the second and third ribs, and the blade sank two inches into the wet green robe, and the robe did not bleed.

The robe split. From inside the robe, something small and wet and very pale fell out onto the floorboards with a soft, heavy sound. It was a hand. It was Brannoc's hand, severed at the wrist, the fingers still curled around a small bone whistle that had not been blown. The hand twitched once, and then was still.

Brannoc, or what had been standing where Brannoc had been, was gone. The robe slumped, emptied, the shoulders collapsing inward like a tent whose poles had been cut. The corridor was empty except for Vaela and the hand and the whistle, and a smell of vinegar and river-mud.

"Decoy skin," Vaela said, to no one. "Of course. Decoy skin."

She knelt. The whistle was small, of bone, blackened at the mouthpiece. She did not touch it. She had been trained, at length, about objects left behind by swamp-priests. She stood, and she backed away from the robe and the hand, and she kept the fen-blade up, and she listened.

She heard, very faintly, the sound of water running somewhere in the walls of the house. She heard, very faintly, the sound of breathing that was not her own.

"You are still in the house," she said.

"I am in the house," said Brannoc's voice, from everywhere and nowhere, from the walls and the pipes and the flagged hall below. "I am in the house the way the swamp is in the house. Put it down, Vaela. I would rather not have to peel you out of that pretty coat."

She did not put it down. She turned, and ran, and the corridor spat her out onto the landing, and the landing spat her out onto the stairs, and she took the stairs three at a time, and the fen-blade sang in her hand, and she reached the flagged hall, and the door to the street was shut, and when she touched the latch she found that the latch was warm, and wet, and that it pulsed, faintly, under her fingers, with the slow, proprietary rhythm of a heart that was not her own.

She stepped back. The hall was very quiet. The lamp was burning in the room she had not yet entered, the one whose door she had been avoiding for three hours, and the light under the door was steady and smelled of marshlight.

"Open the door," said Brannoc, from inside the room. "Open the door, child, and see what I have been keeping for you."

She opened the door.

Inside the room, on a long low table of stained oak, the body of Ysolde lay on its back, dressed in her own clothes, her hands folded on her chest, her eyes closed, her face composed in the particular, slightly annoyed peace of a woman who has been laid out by someone who did not love her. Beside the body, on a smaller table, a clay bowl held a thin, gray stew that smelled of canal water and sage. Beside the bowl, a single taper burned, and the flame of the taper was the color of the marsh at dusk.

"She died well," said Brannoc, from somewhere in the walls. "She died as she lived, refusing to tell me anything of consequence. I have kept her for you, because I thought you might want to say goodbye. You may have the hour. After the hour, child, you will put down the fen-blade, and you will kneel, and you will tell me where the heir has gone. Then I will let you live, for as long as you are useful, and when you are no longer useful I will feed you to the Crown, and the Crown will remember you, and the remembering will be enough."

Vaela stood in the doorway. The fen-blade was steady in her hand. Ysolde's face was very still. The taper burned, and the smell of marshlight filled the room.

She did not kneel.

She stepped forward, into the room, and with three precise, economical strokes of the fen-blade she cut the taper, the bowl, and the rope that had been looped, very gently, around the body and the table and the chair behind the door. The stew spilled. The taper guttered and went out. The rope slithered to the floor. The room was suddenly, sharply dark, and the smell of the marsh receded, and the air that came in through the high, salt-stiffened windows smelled only of canal water and rain.

"Child," said Brannoc, from very close behind her, so close that she could feel the wet green of his robe against her shoulder blades. "Child, what are you doing."

She turned. In the dark, his face was a pale smear. She brought the fen-blade up, and across, in a single, committed arc, and she cut, not at his throat, but at the brine-tank that ran, she knew, along the inside of the east wall of every Vorath house in the drowned roads, the great cistern of salt water that kept the houses from rotting and the swamp from climbing. The fen-blade bit into the copper. The copper groaned, and then screamed, and then gave way, and a wall of cold, salt, black water took Brannoc off his feet and took the room off its foundations and took the house, all at once, into the canal outside.

The flood was immense. It filled the room in a single breath. It swept the table and the body and the chair against the far wall. It swept Brannoc against the window. The window gave. Brannoc went through it, still clutching something in his hand, and the canal took him, and the house shuddered, and the ceilings began to come down.

Vaela did not go through the window. She went through the door, and up the stairs, and onto the roof, and the roof held her for as long as she needed it to hold her. She stood on the ridge-tile, with the rain in her face and the canal boiling black below her, and she watched the house settle, and sink, and become, once again, part of the drowned roads.

Ysolde was gone. Brannoc was gone. The heir was somewhere in the marsh, with the seal and the ledger and the shard in her chest that was, at this very moment, cracking, slowly, along the seam where the seal had been set.

Aelis felt it go. She felt it as a small, sharp, private pain, just to the left of her sternum, and then a warmth, and then a wetness, and when she looked down at her shirt she saw, against the gray of the cloth, a single round dark stain that was not rain.

She touched it. The blood was black. It smelled, faintly, of the drowned roads.

She walked on. The canal lay still beside her, and in its surface, for a single breath, a face looked up at her that was older and kinder and very tired, and then the face was gone, and the water was only water, and Aelis Vorath walked on, alone, into the marsh, with the seal and the ledger and the black drop on her shirt, and the drowned roads opening, one by one, before her.