• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Resupplied and rehorsed, they continued on along the coast. Small, scallop-winged silhouettes appeared and fluttered against the bedimmed sky, and a chill breeze came off the waves. Far out at sea he made out the lantern on the prow of a lonely ship. Inland, a nightjar churred.

“I’m sorry about your queen,” Brinna said. “I wish I could have met her.”

“I wish you could have, too,” Neil replied. “I wish I could have saved her.”

“You’re thinking if you hadn’t been in our prison, you might have.”

“Maybe.”

“I can’t say. But I couldn’t act until Berimund came, and I wouldn’t have been able to find where she was without him. Neither could you have.”

He nodded but didn’t answer.

“He thought she was safe. He intended to keep her safe.”

“I know,” Neil said. “I don’t blame you.”

“You blame yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have let her come.”

“How would you have stopped her?”

He didn’t have anything to reply to that, so they rode on tacitly for a bit. “It sounds so easy in the stories, riding a horse,” Brinna finally ventured.

“It’s not so bad when you’re used to it,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Parts of me are on fire, and others feel dead,” she said.

“Then let’s rest for a day or so,” he urged. “Let’s get you out of the saddle.”

“We can’t,” she murmured. “We have to reach her before Robert does.”

“Anne?”

“Not Anne. A little girl. She’s in Haundwarpen with a man and a woman. There is music all around them, some terrible, some beautiful, some both.”

“That sounds familiar,” Neil said.

“The man and woman are newly wed. The child is not theirs.”

“There was a composer named Ackenzal,” Neil said. “A favorite of—of the queen’s. She attended the wedding, and I went with her. She and his wife have a girl in their care: Mery, the daughter of Lady Gramme.”

“Yes. And half sister to Anne, yes?”

“So they say.”

“You can guide us when we’re near?”

“What has this to do with mending the law of death?” Neil asked.

“Everything,” she replied. “And if Robert knows that, she is in terrible danger.”

“How should Robert know it?”

“I don’t know. But I see him there.” She paused for a moment. “I know what killed Queen Muriele and Berimund’s wulfbrothars.”

“It nearly killed you, too.”

“Yes. It’s music, horrible and yet somehow lovely. Once you begin listening, it is very difficult to stop. If you hadn’t stopped me, if you hadn’t called that other name, I would be gone now.”

“The name from the ship.”

“Yes,” she whispered. He wished he could turn and see her face. “The ship, when I wasn’t me and you weren’t you.”

“But now we are who we are.”

“Yes,” she replied. “We are who we are.”

He thought she paused, as if meaning to go on, but she didn’t, at least following from that thought.

“I told you I had a higher purpose,” she finally said.

“You did.”

Again she seemed to feud with herself for a moment before going on.

“I once had three sisters,” she said. “We were called by many names, but in Crotheny and Liery we were most often known as the Faiths.”

“As in the stories? The four queens of Tier na Seid?”

“Yes and no. There are many stories. I am what is real.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There were Faiths before me who wore my masks. Many of them, going back to the hard days after Virgenya Dare vanished. We were known as Vhatii then. Time changes tongues and twists names. We have lived, some of us hiding in the open, others secluded in distant places. We’re not real sisters, you understand, but women born with the gift. When we grow old, when our powers fail and even the drugs no longer open our vision, we find our replacements.”

“But what do you do?”

“It’s hard to explain. We are very much creatures of two natures. Here, we are human; we eat and breathe, live and die. But in the Ambhitus, the Not World, we are the sum of all who have gone before us—more and less than human. And we see need. Until recently our visions were rarely specific; we reacted as plants bend toward the sun. But since the law of death has been broken, our visions