• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He rose then. “The seamstress will come around tomorrow to fit you for your wedding gown,” he said pleasantly. “It has been a pleasure visiting with you, Muriele. Good afternoon.”

He left her there with Alis, whose flesh was already cold.

PART I

THE WATERS

BENEATH

THE WORLD

On the stony west shore of Roin Ieniesse, Fren MeqLier met Saint Jeroin the Mariner, and in Saint Jeroin’s ship they passed over the western waves through sleet and fog until they came to a bleak shore and a dark forest.

“That is the Wood Beyond the World,” Saint Jeroin told him. “Take care that when you step from the boat, your boot does not strike the water. If you but touch the waves, you will forget everything you have ever known.”

—FROMFRENN REY-EISE: A TALE OF SAINT FRENN TOLD ON SKERN, SACRITOR ROGER BISHOP

The Dark Lady took Alzarez by the hand and pointed at the river.

“Drink from that,” she said, “and you will be like the dead, without memory or sin.”

Then she pointed to a bubbling spring.

“Drink there, and you will know more than any mortal.”

Alzarez looked at both.

“But the river feeds the spring,” he observed.

“Of course,” the Dark Lady replied.

—FROM “SA ALZAREZASFILL,” A HERILANZER FOLKTALE

Ne piberos daz’uturo.

Don’t drink the water.

—FROM A VITELLIAN FUNERARY INSCRIPTION

Here’s my wish;

A man with blood-red lips

With snow-white skin

With blue-black hair

Like a raven’s wing.

That’s my wish.

ANNE DARE murmured the words to the song, a favorite of hers from when she was younger.

She noticed that her fingers were trembling, and for a moment she felt as if they weren’t attached to her but were instead strange worms clinging to her hands.

With blood-red lips…

Anne had seen blood before, plenty of it. But never like this, never with such a striking hue, so brilliant against the snow. It was as if she were viewing the true color for the first time rather than the pale counterfeit she had known her whole life.

At the edges it was watered pink, but at its source, where it pulsed into the cold whiteness, it was a thing of utter beauty.

With snow-white skin

With blue-black hair…

The man had flesh gone gray and straw-colored hair, nothing like the imagined lover of the song. As she watched, his fingers unclenched from the dagger he’d been holding, and he let go the cares of the world. His eyes went round with wonder as they saw something she could not, beyond the lands of fate. Then he sighed a final steaming breath into the snow.

Somewhere—very far away, it seemed—she heard a hoarse cry and the sound of clashing steel, followed by silence. She detected no motion through the dark trunks of the trees except the continuing light fall of snow.

Something chuffed nearby.

In a daze, Anne turned to find a dappled gray horse regarding her curiously. It looked familiar, and she gasped faintly as she recalled it charging toward her. The snow told that it had stamped all around her, but one trail of hoofprints led in from over a hill, the direction from which it must have come. Part of the way, the prints were accompanied by pink speckles.

The horse had blood in its mane, as well.

She stood shakily, feeling pain in her thigh, shin, and ribs. She turned on her feet to take in the whole of her surroundings, searching for a sign that there was anyone else nearby. But there were only the dead man, the horse, and trees stripped to bark by winter’s winds.

Finally she glanced down at herself. She wore a soft red doeskin robe lined with black ermine and beneath that a heavy riding habit. She remembered she’d gotten them back in Dunmrogh.

She remembered the fight there, too, and the death of her first love and first betrayer, Roderick.

She pushed her hand under the hood and felt the curls of her copper hair. It was growing back but was still short from the shearing she’d had in Tero Gallé what seemed like an age ago. So she was missing hours or days, not ninedays, months, or years. But she