Robin McKinley e-sampler

Robin McKinley Sampler

http://www.penguin.com/robinmckinley

Robin McKinley “Pretty much perfect.”

-Neil Gaiman, on Sunshine Q Robin McKinley is the Newbery award winning, New York Times bestselling author of such highly acclaimed fantasy novels as The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, Spindle’s End, The Outlaws of Sherwood, Chalice, and the modern vampire masterpiece Sunshine, an urban fantasy set in a shattered world. Her books combine enchanting world-building with epic storytelling that exemplify the best of the genre.

Learn more about Robin McKinley, and gain access to a limited time sampler of Sunshine, Chalice, and Robin’s newest novel, the much-anticipated Pegasus.

Robin’s Website: http://www.robinmckinley.com Robin’s Blog: http://robinmckinleysblog.com Robin’s Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/robinmckinley Robin’s Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/robinmckinley Destination Elsewhere: http://destination-elsewhere.ning.com

On sale November 2, 2010!

Because of a thousand-year-old alliance between humans and pagasi, Princess Sylviianel is ceremonially bound to Ebon, her own Pegasus, on her twelfth birthday. The two species coexist peacefully, despite the language barriers separating them. Humans and pegasi both rely on specially-trained Speaker magicians as the only means of real communication.

But its different for Sylvi and Ebon. They can understand each other. They quickly grow close-so close that their bond becomes a threat to the status quo-and possibly to the future safety of their two nations.

New York Times bestselling Robin McKinley weaves an unforgettable tale of unbreakable friendship, mythical creatures and courtly drama destined to become a classic.

chapter 1

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.

This had been a part of the treaty between the pegasi and the human invaders nearly a thousand years ago, shortly after humans had first struggled through the mountain passes beyond the wild lands and discovered a beautiful green country they knew immediately they wanted to live in.

The beautiful green country was at that time badly overrun by ladons and wyverns, taralians and norindours, which ate almost everything (including each other) but liked pegasi best. The pegasi were a peaceful people and no match, despite their greater intelligence, for the single-minded ferocity of their enemies, and over the years their numbers had declined. But they were tied to these mountains and valleys by particular qualities in the soil and the grasses that grew in the soil, which allowed their wings to grow strong enough to bear them in the air. They had ignored the situation as without remedy for some generations, but the current pegasus king knew he was looking at a very bleak future for his people when the first human soldiers straggled, gasping, through the Dravalu Pass and collapsed on the greensward under the Singing Yew, which was old even then.

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They sat up quickly when seven pegasi circled the meadow above the pass and flew down to investigate. The journal of that company’s second commander still exists in the palace library: a small, worn, round-cornered, hand-bound book, slightly bowed to the shape of the pocket it was carried in. He reported the historic meeting: We had but just come through thee final rocky gate, and had sett ourselves down in thee shade of a strange great tree, which had short soft spikes or needles all along its branches, and no leaves; when swift-moving shadows fled briefly between us and thee sunne, but against thee wind. We looked up in haste, for rocs are not unheard of, and I had raised my hand to give thee signal for thee archers to string their bows. We saw at once that these were no rocs, but still I held up my hand, for they were nothing else we knew either; and they clearly had seen us, and did approach.

But these creatures are nothing like rocs except they do also possess wings; they are like nothing I have ever seen, except perhaps by some great artist’s creative power. They are a little like horses, but yet far more fine than any horse, even a queen’s palfrey; they are a little like deer, except that deer are rough and clumsy beside them; and their wings are huge, huger than eagles’, and when thee lowering sunne struck through their primaries, for as they cantered toward us they left their wings unfurled, thee light was broken as if by prisms, and they were haloed in all thee colours of thee rainbow. Several of my folk came to their knees, as if

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we were in thee presence of gods; and while I told them to stand and be steadfast, I did tell them gently, for I understood their awe.

The pegasi were happy to make a treaty with the humans, who were the first possibility of rescue the pegasi had had, and the humans, dazzled by the pegasi’s beauty and serenity, were happy to make a treaty with them, for the right to share their mountainous land; the wide plateaus, which ran like lakes around the mountaintop islands, were lush and fertile, and many of the island crests were full of gems and ores.

The discussions as to the terms of the treaty had had to be held almost exclusively through the human magicians and the pegasi shamans, however, who were the only ones able to learn enough of the other’s language to understand and make themselves understood, and that was a check to enthusiasm on both sides. “Is it not, then, a language, as we understand language?” wrote the second commander, whose name was Viktur. “Does it encompass some invisible touch unavailable to humans, as a meeting of our hands in greeting, or a kiss between dear friends? What can we not grasp of it, and why cannot our magicians explain this lack to us?”

Sylvi’s tutor, Ahathin, had brought Sylvi to the library while they were studying this portion of the annals. Ordinary people needed a sheaf of special permissions to look at anything half so old, frail and precious as the second commander’s journal; Ahathin, as the princess’ tutor, had merely made the request, and when the two of them appeared at the library door, the head librarian himself bowed, saying, “Princess, Worthy Magician,” and led them to the table where the journal already lay waiting for them—with an honour guard of the Queen’s Own

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Lightbearers standing on either side of the table. The queen was the library’s governor. Sylvi looked at them thoughtfully. They were wearing their swords, but they were also wearing hai, to indicate that they could not hear anything she and Ahathin said to each other. There were two kinds of hai: the ceremonial and the invested. The ceremonial ones just hung over your ears and looked silly; invested hai had been dedicated by a magician and really stopped the wearer’s hearing. You couldn’t tell by looking at them which kind they were. Sylvi had often wondered how hai-wearing guards were going to protect anything if they couldn’t hear anyone coming. Was there a protocol for when an honour guard wearing ceremonial hai could stop pretending they couldn’t hear?

Sylvi tried to concentrate on what she was reading. She liked reading better since Ahathin had become her tutor; she would still rather be outdoors with her hawk and her pony, but it was thrilling, in a creepy, echo-of-centuries way, to be looking at Viktur’s own journal.

She was allowed to touch it only while wearing the gloves the librarian had given her, and there were furthermore these odd little wooden paddles for turning the pages. But she had—carefully, carefully— turned all the pages over, back to the very beginning, to look at Viktur’s signature on the flyleaf: Viktur, Gara of Stormdown, Captain of the White Fellowship, who do follow Balsin, Gara of Mereland, All Commander of His Companies. Most of the curly handwriting was still surprisingly black and sharp against the pale brown flyleaf. A tiny faded arrow, almost invisible, had been drawn just before Balsin, and the word King written in above, and the Gara of Mereland following had been struck out. “Gara?” said Sylvi.

“Lord,” said Ahathin. “A gara is below a prince and above a baron.

It is a rank no longer much in use.”

“Then Viktur was pretty important,” said Sylvi. “Balsin was only a gara to begin with.”

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“Viktur was important. Some commentators say that Balsin would not have made king if Viktur had not supported him—that perhaps Balsin would not have been able to put a strong enough company together to come this far through the wild lands, nor to drive our foes out of it once they arrived. That perhaps our country would not have been created, were it not for Viktur.”

“Stormdown and Mereland—they’re here.”

“The original Stormdown and Mereland are in Tinadin, which is Winwarren now, where Balsin and Viktur originally were from. They’d won a famous victory for their king—who now wanted to be rid of them before Balsin started having fancies about being king of Tinadin.

Everyone is very clear that Balsin was very ambitious; and, of course, he had the Sword. It was apparently worth it to their king—whose name was Argen or possibly Argun—to lose half his army to be rid of Balsin. Argen married the daughter of the king Balsin defeated, so presumably he thought he could afford it.”

Sylvi cautiously turned the pages back to Viktur’s first sight of the pegasi, and then on to the second marker. There was something that looked like the remains of a grubby fingerprint on one corner of the page she was looking at, and what might be a bloodstain on the bottom edge of the little book. “. . . and why cannot our magicians explain this lack to us?” She stopped, startled, and reread the entire sentence, and then looked up at Ahathin. “That’s not—I haven’t seen that before, that last,” and gingerly she touched the brittle old page. Even through the thin glove she could feel the roughness of the paper: modern paper was smooth—paper-making was one of the things the pegasi had taught their allies, and for special occasions or particularly important records, pegasus-made paper was still preferred.

Mostly she did her studying in the room off her bedroom in the main part of the palace, where she now spent several (long) hours every 5

day with Ahathin. The copy of the First Annals she was reading was the copy several generations of royal children had read, and included several games of tic-tac-toe on the end papers, imperfectly erased, played by her next-elder and next-next-elder brothers, who were only eleven months apart in age, and a poem her father had written about an owl when he had been a few years younger than she was now. (It began: The Owl flys at night. To give the mice a fright. It soars and swoops. The mice go oops.) Her eldest brother, and heir to the throne, had never written in his school-books.

She looked up at Ahathin, who stood beside her. There was only one chair at the table. She wanted to stand up herself, or drag another chair from another table so that Ahathin could sit down, but she knew she mustn’t. The single chair and the presence of the honour guard with their hai meant that this was a formal occasion. Princesses sat down. Lesser mortals did not. This included tutors—even tutors who were also magicians, and members of the Guild of Magicians. She didn’t like formal occasions. They made her feel even smaller and mousier than she usually felt.

She also didn’t like it that the familiar, beat-up—almost friendly, if a school-book was ever friendly—copy of the annals that she knew had a missing phrase; she didn’t like it that Ahathin was making such a fuss about her reading the missing phrase. She especially didn’t like it when her own binding was so near—her binding to her pegasus.

Ahathin was small and round and almost bald and wore spectacles and a harmless expression, but he was still a magician. He looked no less small, round and harmless than he ever had right now as she stared at him, but for the first time she thought: Looking harmless is his disguise.

She had known Ahathin all her life. She could remember him sitting on the floor to play with her when she was tiny—she could remember

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looking dubiously at her first set of speaking tiles, with human letters and words on one side and the gestures you were supposed to use with the pegasi on the other, and Ahathin patiently explaining them to her.

She ’d learnt to sign “hello, friend” from Ahathin.

She ’d known him all her life, and suddenly she didn’t know him at all.

She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stayed where it was.

Ahathin nodded. “It’s not in any of the copies of the annals I’ve looked in—there are quite a few.”

“Why?” At his most harmless, he said mildly, “I don’t know.”

She looked back at the journal. “Does my father know? Does ­Danacor?”

Ahathin nodded again. “Certainly the king knows. And the heir. I asked your father if I might show this to you.”

“Why?” Ahathin said nothing. This meant he wanted her to answer her own question. But sometimes, if she said something unexpected, she got an unexpected response. “Why can’t magicians explain what it is about the pegasi language that the rest of us can’t learn it?”

Ahathin nodded as if this were an acceptable question. “It is a curious skill, speaking to pegasi, and not even all magicians can do it—do you know this?”

Fascinated, Sylvi shook her head.

“We are well into our apprenticeship before it is taught at all, and many of us will already have been sent home to be carpenters or shepherds, for we will not make magicians. And indeed there is little enough of teaching about it, to begin with. Imagine learning to swim by being thrown into a lake in perfect darkness, never having seen water before. Those who do not drown are then taught; the best of

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them may then go on to become Speakers. But that is the moment when as many as half of us are sent away, although by that time an apprentice has learnt enough that if he—or she—wishes he can set up as a village spell-caster somewhere.”

Imagine learning to swim by being thrown into a lake in perfect darkness, never having seen water before. “But the pegasi—they—they are so light.

They—they fly. Drowning in a dark sea—I—it doesn’t sound like anything to do with pegasi.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Ahathin. “It does not at all.”

Sylvi knew the rest of the official story of the making of the treaty.

She was obliged to be able to parrot a brief accurate version of it as part of her training as daughter of the king. She was obliged to be able to parrot a number of historical titbits on command (although why this was considered a necessary attribute in a princess she had no idea, her father sprang questions at her occasionally so that she did need to was not in doubt) but this was one of the few of her history lessons that were live pictures in her head instead of dry words in her memory.

The first beginnings of the treaty had been almost insurmountably difficult; not only was there the obstacle of their spoken languages, of which neither side could learn the other’s, but the pegasi did not have an alphabet as humans understood it. Instead they had a complex and demanding art form of which various kinds of marks on paper were only a part. . . . The human magicians translated its name into human sounds as ssshasssha and said it meant “recollection,” and that it appeared to include or address all the senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, feeling—although how this was accomplished the magicians were uncertain. There were pegasus bards and story-tellers in some manner, presumably, as there were human bards and story-tellers; there were also pegasi . . . they didn’t know. This was the first time the humans heard about the Caves, and the sculptors; but none of this 8

assisted the drawing up of a document that humans understood as legal and binding.

“Did we not both want this union very badly,” wrote the second commander, “such impedimenta as there manifestly are would have stopped us utterly and our company would be homeless again; and I am grateful hourly that thee pegasi want us, for already I love this sweet green land, and would not willingly leave it.”

This sweet green land was probably the most famous phrase of the second commander’s journal; it was one of those phrases everyone used, like sick as a denwirl owl or mad as a mudge. One of the first songs Sylvi had ever learnt to sing herself, when she was still so small she couldn’t say her rrr’s yet, was an old folk ballad about a wandering tinker whose refrain was: On the road to nowhere through this sweet green land. The second commander seemed almost to be standing at her elbow as she read the old phrase as he had put it down the first time.

Both sides at last declared themselves satisfied with the final draft of the treaty. “The pegasi ask for little,” wrote the second commander.

They wish their lives—and their Caves, which appear to bee thee chief manifestation of their recollection. But thee Caves lie many days’ journey farther into thee mountains that steeply rise from these lush and fruitful plateaus we humans desire; Gandam says he is middling sure human feet could not take us there besides, and we have not wings. Balsin laughs and says, Good: that he wants all human forces to bend themselves to thee palace he already has in his mind’s eye to build upon thee greatest of these plateaus. It is his own consort, Badilla, who has begun to measure thee landscape for this building; she was trained for such work in thee old countrie, 9

although Balsin says he married her for her beauty. My own Sinsi says she wishes only to finish thee job of securing our new land from its enemies; that what she most wants is to see her belly growing too large for its battle leathers, and a safe place where our babies may play.

The first song Sylvi could ever remember hearing was about the pegasi. Her nurse used to sing it to her when she was a baby, and would then “fly” her around the room. The tradition was that Viktur’s wife, Sinsi, had written it for their children, although no one knew for sure.

Oh hush your crying Your friends come flying In the plumes of their wings The south wind sings The treaty was written by human scribes and depicted or portrayed by some makers and devisers among the pegasi upon thick supple paper made by the pegasi: “Balsin would have it bee parchment, but thee pegasi demurred, that they did not use thee skins of beasts for such or any purpose, and proffered their finest made paper instead, which is very beautiful, with a gloss to it not unlike thee flank of a peg­asus, and faint glints of colour from thee petals of flowers. Dorogin did not like this however, and said there was magic pressed into its fibres, but Gandam held his hands over it and said thee only magic was that of craftsmanship, and as Gandam was thee senior, Dorogin must needs give way; 10

and Balsin looked at Gandam and nodded, and Dorogin looked as if he had swallowed a toad.

Sylvi gave a little hiccup of laughter; the toad wasn’t in the schoolroom copy of the annals either. But reading of Gandam in the beginning always made her sad, because of what happened to him after.

She ’d never liked Dorogin; he was one of those people who always wanted everything his way.

The signing of the treaty was interrupted by an incursion of their enemies, taralians tearing at them from the ground, ladons, wyverns and norindours soaring overhead to dive and slash from above: “It is a new sort of fighting we must learn,” wrote the second commander,“for we have but rarely known aerial enemies ere now.” But learn it they did; and drove off the attackers with arrows and spears, and any of the winged company who fell to the ground were dispatched with sword and brand.

“Balsin is the worthiest commander of this and perhaps any age, so I do believe,” wrote Viktur. “And it is my honour to serve him. But it has seemed to me in this battle that he is something almost more than human, and that none and nothing can stand against thee Sword he carries, which he won from its dark guardian many years ago, when he was but a young man, as if for this day.”

Balsin called for the treaty to be signed during a lull in the battle: “It will hearten us,” he said, which was another of those phrases the citizens of the country he founded were still saying almost a thousand years later. There was a seal that had been struck by Balsin’s greatgrandson which the sovereign still used, which said It will hearten us around the edge, coiled around a heart with a sword through it, which Sylvi thought looked more disheartening, but it was used for things like trade agreements and mutual defence accords, so presumably it looked friendly to delegates and ambassadors.

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And so a table was set up, and Balsin and Viktur and some of the most senior of the company commanders and their aides and ­adjutants and Gandam and Dorogin and another magician named Kond stood on one side, and the pegasus king, Fralialal, and several pegasi with him, stood on the other side, and the gleaming paper with the treaty written upon it lay between them. The pegasi had agreed to signing, once the concept had been explained to them; the treaty was also ratified by pegasus convention in an exchange of tokens. Viktur wrote, “Balsin had chosen thee opal he had long worne as not merely thee most valuable thing any of us carried—save perhaps thee Sword—but as thee greatest heirloom of his own family. Thee chain it did hang upon however was of a length for a human throat not that of a pegasus, and because Balsin knew of thee pegasi’s aversion to leather, we had had some dismay in how to make up thee difference, for our army was much blessed with spare straps but little else of that nature. My Sinsi it was who first unbound her hair and offered thee ribbon that had held it, which was of red silk, and perhaps not too low a thing for such a purpose; and then several more of our folk did thee same, both man and woman, and Gandam did plait them together and perhaps he did say some words over them, to make them more fine and stalwart.

Sinsi said ruefully, holding her long hair in both hands as thee wind tugged at it, I do not like leather strings in my hair, but it is that or that I shall cut it off; and as I did protest she laughed and said, then it must be thee leather, alas—and she then made a noise more 12

suitable to a common soldier than a blood and commission bearer.

But at thee ceremonie thee pegasus queen did come to her, and to those others who had given up their hairribbons, and offered to them instead ribbons of shining filaments in plaits so daintily coloured that our dull human eyes saw them change hue as thee light upon them did change; and Sinsi and thee others did twist them through their hair, and were happy indeed. One of these would truly have been token enough, but thee peg­asus king set something else round our Balsin’s neck—although when I say thee king did, in truth there were three, for while their wings are powerful beyond our imagining, thee hands of thee pegasi are but tiny claws at thee leading bend of thee wing where some birds do seem to have thumbe and first finger, and these hands have little strength nor flexibility; it is a wonder thee pegasi do with them as much as they do, for their weaving is a wonder and an astonishment.

Thee thing thee king gave was little to behold at thee first: a plain brown cord strung with large wooden beads of a paler brown. We understood by then however that thee pegasi by choice lead simple lives and I think none of us feared that thee pegasi sought to insult us, or did not honour thee treaty; perhaps thee beads were made of a wood significant to them, as Gandam wears an ear-ring that looks like rusty iron.

As Balsin had had some trouble making up thee length of chain for thee neck of a pegasus, thee pegasi had perhaps ill judged thee smallness of thee human 13

throat, and thee necklace of beads lay more upon Balsin’s stomach than his breast. He looked down at thee beads as if mildly puzzled, and I, standing near, thought only that he wondered at thee plainness of thee gift; but then he held his hand in such a way as to forbear thee sunlight which did fall upon them, and I caught my breath for then I saw thee marvel of them: these beads do shine with their own light, as if they were scooped out of thee margin of thee sunne—or rather of thee moon, for it is a soft and kindly light.

All of this was in Sylvi’s school-book copy of the annals—as the necklace, the treaty and the Sword hung upon the wall of the Great Hall of the palace—but she read on. She couldn’t remember ever not knowing the story of the treaty and the Alliance; by the time she could read about it for herself it was already familiar, as were the Sword and the tokens in her life outside the schoolroom. But books from a printing press were in anonymous black type and bound in plain fabric and board; this little leather-bound book, soft and slippery with use and age, and the extra effort needed to decipher the second commander’s handwriting—and his occasionally curious spelling—made her feel as if she were reading the story for the first time.

She remembered Ahathin standing, and the guards.“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up. “It’s different, reading it here. I’ll stop now.”

“Good that it’s different. Don’t stop.”

She went on looking at him. “Then you have to sit down.”

He blinked at her, amused. “As the Lady Sylviianel wills. Er—if the Lady Sylviianel permits, I will leave her to consult with the librarian on another matter.”

Sylvi looked at the guards, who were staring expressionlessly over 14

her head. She wasn’t going to get them to sit down. “You couldn’t take them with you?”

“Certainly not. They remain to attend you.”

Sylvi sighed. “Then the Lady Sylviianel grants the Worthy Magician’s request.” And she went back to the second commander’s ­journal.

Then was thee signing.

Thee pegasus king signed first: with thee inked tips of his first three primaries, which do make a graceful, precise arc across thee bottom of thee page, like thee brushstrokes of a master painter. Afterward he raised his wing, and thee black ink had bledde farther into thee pale feathers, for he is of a creamy golden colour, and he held this up as if thee stain were itself an emblem of our Alliance, while thee gold-bound opal that was Balsin’s token gleamed at his breast.

There was a mural in the Great Hall, next to the treaty itself and opposite the wall where the Sword hung, of King Fralialal holding his black-edged wing up over the paper he has just signed. The human figures, the other pegasi, the landscape and all else fade into the ­background: only the pale gold pegasus, the stain on his wing, and the shining whiteness of the treaty stand out—and of these it is the wing that draws the human onlooker’s eye, that makes the wingless human shoulder blades itch. At night, by candle- and lamplight, it was easy to imagine that his one raised foreleg was in preparation for stepping down off the wall. When Sylvi was younger, and more allencompassingly awed of the Great Hall, she had got so far as to hear the sound his hoofs made as he took his first steps on the floor— and the rustle of his wings.

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Our leader had chosen to mark his witness second, as it is thee pegasi who welcome us to their land, and their king did offer ours—whom I must now learn to call king, for thee first king of our new land is he—one of his own feathers for this purpose, once he understood that we use quills to hold ink: and it was of great interest to all us humans who watched, thee elegant way thee pegasus king drew his bent wing through his teeth and plucked out a feather as gracefully as a dancer moves through a dance, or a warrior draws a sword from its sheath. We cannot refrain from looking stiff and clumsy beside thee pegasi, and I saw at last thee wisdom of our king in declaring that we should attend thee signing of thee treaty in our armour and with our swords at our sides, despite thee look of peril and chanciness this gives us, and all of us well aware of thee scouts posted all round us, for these appurtenances of war gave us dignity where we had no beauty.

But as our king bent down to sign this first and needful manifestation of his kingship, a breeze arose, and ruffled thee hair of thee humans and thee manes of thee pegasi, and blew across thee slender cut tip of thee feather penne, and thee finest spray of ink fanned over thee bright, exquisite paper, crossing thee pegasus king’s signature with a maculate crescent as beautiful as we are not, as if thee local windgods were blessing our compact. Our king laughed, and said, quietly, that only those of us standing close enough to see what had happened could hear him, It is a pity to spoil it as we ourselves spoil thee panorama, and then bent again and 16

signed, neatly, where thee keystone of thee arch would be, were it of stones and not ink-spots. His is not commonly a tidy signature, and thee story has gone round that he signed against his will; but it is not that and I have countered thee tale wherever I have heard it. And indeed, loyal friend as I have ever been to Balsin from thee days when we were keeping thee king’s peace in thee backmost of beyond with three soldiers and a lame dog, I never liked our king so well as I did at that moment, for I understood that he too understood that to save their lives, thee pegasi have invited uncouth ruffians to dine at their high table, off their finest damask, with golden goblets and plates of silver.

Sylvi, at this point in the story, who often felt like an uncouth ­ruffian on those occasions when she was commanded to put on her princess manners and her princess dress and sit at court or table with her parents, always felt a pang for those first humans learning to live beside the pegasi. She sighed and stretched and pushed herself away from the table and its slight, precious burden. She didn’t want to read any more; after this there was too much war, and Gandam began to go mad. She very, very carefully closed the little book, and looked round for her worthy magician.

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chapter 2

Eight hundred years before, the pegasi marched (and flew) with their new allies to engage the forces assembled against them, but they were not much good at fighting. They are astonishingly nimble in the air and can splinter an enemy’s wing with a well-aimed kick, and a blow from a pegasus wing can break a norindour’s back; but they are too small and too lightweight for close work. And, as Balsin said after the first battle, while no one could doubt their courage, they aren’t devious enough. It was the human swords and spears, arrows and maces, with help from human magicians’ wiles, which won the war. The ladons and wyverns were killed or driven right away, and those who fled perhaps went in search of their larger and even more dangerous cousins, the dragons; if so it was a long search, for they were not seen again for generations. A few taralians and norindours fled into the wild lands beyond what Balsin declared were his kingdom’s boundaries, and there they were allowed to remain, so long as they caused no trouble beyond the theft of an occasional sheep; although the striped pelt of an unusually large taralian was a highly-regarded heirloom in a number of baronial families, and the sharply-bent wings of the norindour appeared

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on a number of family crests, as indicating courage and ferocity in all forms of struggle and combat.

While this was not in the original treaty, the humans’ superiority at warfare came slowly to be reflected in all relations between the two species, but the pegasi, mild and courteous, never gave any indication that they resented this. By Sylvi’s day, the ruler of the pegasi had for many generations been expected to do ritualised homage to the ruler of the humans on feast days, and to attend the royal court, with a suitable entourage of attendant pegasi, often enough to be seen as a regular presence. Some human rulers were greater sticklers about frequency than others, just as some pegasi rulers appeared to enjoy the visits, or appeared not to, more than others. But it was quickly noted that the more often the pegasi visited the human palace, and the more of them who did so, and the longer they stayed, the more the country ruled by the human monarch appeared to thrive.

Balsin himself had predicted something of the kind. Viktur wrote, Balsin does strongly hold that we do hold our sweet green land by favour and sanction of thee pegasi, and as it is, so far as we do know, thee only land that do so hold pegasi, in some manner and disposition do thee pegasi hold thee land. Gandam agreed to this with great solemnity and declared that Balsin showed great wisdom for a warrior-king; and Balsin laughed and said that Gandam was an old worrymonger and that magicians see spears when warrior-kings see blades of grass.

Gandam, who commonly did laugh at Balsin’s teasing did not in this instance but said instead, king, this land

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is beautiful but strange and we as yet understand it little; and forget not thee story of thee six blind men and thee Oliphant. Then did Balsin understand that Gandam spoke in all seriousness, and said, very well, I shall make it easy for those who come after us to remember that we hold our mandate from thee pegasi: and he with Badilla did create thee emblem of thee crowned pegasus which do appear upon thee banner that do goe with him on every occasion when thee king do ride out over his lands, in war or in peace, and which withal appears at thee peak of the arch into thee Great Hall where hangs thee Sword, and in divers places about thee palace.

But Balsin’s coat of arms showed only the Sword and the palace and the Singing Yew. Furthermore the human sovereign, and certain of the sovereign’s extended family, were each assigned an individual pegasus, as a kind of ceremonial companion, as if such blunt discrete pairings might ease or soften the lack of communication between the two peoples. Most of these couples saw, and expected to see, each other rarely: those humans who did not live within the Wall might not see their pegasi from one year to the next. For the sovereign’s immediate family it was different: those pegasi were often at the palace, and something like a relationship sometimes grew up between human and pegasus. There was genuine friendship between Sylvi’s father and his pegasus, who was the king of his people, and, it was said, they could almost understand each other, even without the services of the human king’s Speaker.

Some form of Speaker—of translator—had been obviously neces-

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sary from the beginning; the human magicians and pegasus shamans were the only ones who could speak across the species boundary at all.

Even the sign-language, as it was developed, was unreliable and prone to misinterpretation, because of the enormous differences in anatomy between the two peoples. At first it had merely been that anyone on either side who seemed to have some talent for it learnt what they could, and the numbers of magicians and shamans were about equal.

But the magicians seemed slowly to take the charge over, echoing—or perhaps going some way to causing—the tendency that in all things the humans should be superior and the pegasi should defer. The idea of the bound pairs had been Gandam’s; the idea of the Speakers, magicians specially trained to enable what communication there was between human and pegasus, was Dorogin’s. It had been Dorogin’s idea also that the sovereign, the sovereign’s consort and the sovereign’s children should each have an individual Speaker as each was bound to a pegasus.

The binding was done when both human and pegasus were children; when possible the human ruler’s children were assigned the ­pegasus ruler’s children. This was supposed to promote friendship between the two races, although the children did not always cooperate.

The royal human child and its pegasus were introduced to each other for the first time on the human child’s twelfth birthday. At this time several of the royal magicians would create a spell of binding between the two which was supposed to enable them some communication with each other. The spell of binding was specific, between that one human child and that one pegasus child; occasionally it worked, and there was a real connection between the two—emotional if mostly wordless—and more often it did not. Who beyond the immediate royal family was selected to be bound to a pegasus was an erratic process; the children of anyone who had grown close to or performed a

21

significant service to the sovereign might be added to the list as the children of third or fourth cousins who never came to the palace might drop off it. It was the greatest honour of the human sovereign’s court for someone’s child to be nominated for binding, but it was a slightly tricky honour, because it bound the child to the sovereign and court life as well.

When a royal marriage could be predicted sufficiently in advance, the future consort might be bound to a member of the pegasus royal family, but these forecasts had a habit of going wrong. What often happened was that some adult human became a member of a royal or noble family by marriage, and thereupon was assigned a pegasus; but while the binding spell was just as punctiliously made, there were no records that these late pairings ever learnt to empathise, or to communicate beyond the few words of gesture-language common to anyone who cared to learn them. One of Sylvi’s uncles, brother-in-law to the king, was famous for saying that he had more fellow feeling for his boots, which were comfortable, protected his feet and didn’t make him feel like a hulking clumsy oaf.

The usual ritual and binding spell were delayed, however, till the human child’s twelfth birthday because it was a strong spell and might be too great a burden for anyone younger. Very occasionally the human child nonetheless became sick or ill, or fainted, and had to be carried away, and missed the banquet afterward, although there was a folk-tale that these bindings were often the most successful. While there was no record of any pegasus being made ill by the human binding magic, pegasus children were never bound before they were better than half grown—and, crucially, capable of the long flight from the pegasus country to the human palace. The pegasi’s life span was slightly longer than human, but they came to their full growth slightly sooner. It sometimes happened that there was no suitable pegasus for an eligible 22

twelve-year-old human; usually some slightly less suitable pegasus was found in these cases, because of the likelihood that if the binding was put off more than a year or two there was no hope of its becoming a strong one. And, perhaps because of the continuing weakness of shared language, this shared empathy was greatly desired for the good of the Alliance.

It was several generations before Dorogin’s idea of the individual Speakers became traditional, but for many generations now every important bound pair had had a magician assigned when they were bound, to aid their connection. The magician neither took part in the binding ceremony nor was officially presented, because the need for such a facilitator was considered shameful, a proof of continued failure of one of the pivotal aspects of the Alliance the human domain was built on. The guild of Speaker magicians was however the most revered of all the magicians’ guilds—and the most inscrutable. Among the Speakers themselves the posting to a royal pair was hotly sought after.

Sylvi was the fourth child of the king and the first girl, and while her parents had been glad to see her, with three older brothers, she was not considered important to the country’s welfare. She was pleased about this, as soon as she was old enough to begin to understand what it meant, because she was much more interested in horses and dogs and hawks and stealing sweetmeats when the cook’s back was turned than she was in being a princess. She had a vague notion that there were lots of available horses and dogs and hawks—and sweetmeats— partly on account of her being a princess, but she believed that the connection was not all that close (her cousins, who didn’t live at the palace, had lots of horses and dogs and hawks and sweetmeats too), and that being king chiefly meant that her father looked tired all the time and was always either talking to or reading something from someone who wanted something from him.

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Her cousins’ fathers weren’t quite so always reading and talking. Her favourite uncle—the one who had more in common with his boots than his pegasus—was a farmer, and while, he said, he mostly told other people what to do, sometimes he harnessed up a pair of his own horses and ploughed one of his own fields.“So I’ll remember what I’m asking,” he said. He and his wife, one of the queen’s sisters, had each a bound pegasus, but they usually only saw them on trips to the palace:“Can you imagine a Speakers’ Guild magician living on a farm?” But both pegasi occasionally visited. “It’s a funny thing, the animals like ’em,” said her uncle, whose name was Rulf. “ They always insist on sleeping outside— we’ve got a perfectly good room at the end of the house with doors that open out under that big old oak tree. But they sleep outdoors. In bad weather they may sleep in the barn. And wherever they are, the animals drift that way. The cows and the horses are all at whatever end of their pasture to be nearer the pegasi, and the outside dogs are usually curled up with them, like the house dogs sleep on our bed.”

He told all that part of the story easily and often; but once, when he and his family were visiting the palace, and he and Sylvi had been riding through the park together by themselves, a flight of pegasi came over them. The palace horses were all very accustomed to this, and Sylvi’s pony only raised his head and looked—longingly, Sylvi always thought, as she longingly looked as well—and the king’s hounds accompanying her stopped chasing rabbit smells and sat down, and Sylvi was sure she heard a tiny whine as they too stared up. But Rulf ’s horse reared and bounced and neighed and it was a moment before Rulf managed to quiet him again.

“It’s a mixed blessing, though, seeing ’em flying, isn’t it?” he said to his niece. “First time Hon”—his eldest son—“saw ours coming in at home, the sunset was behind ’em, the sky purple and blue and red and

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gold, and their wings going on forever, the way they do, gold and red like the sky, and their necks arched and their legs all held up fancy as a dancer’s and their manes and tails finer than the lace your dad had for his coronation robe—Hon was just on a year old, and he burst into tears, cried and cried and cried, and wouldn’t stop. Never cried, Hon. Never afraid of anything. Never cried. Cried, seeing pegasi flying for the first time.” Rulf ’s horse gave a last forlorn little whicker.

At the palace the pegasi had their own private annex in their own private grove of trees—and with their own private and exclusive latrine; pegasus dung was much prized by the royal gardeners. The annex was merely one long narrow room with three walls and a bit of framing on the fourth; trees served to screen the fact that the long fourth wall of the annex was almost entirely absent. The trees also served as a windbreak, although the annex was in the lee of the palace. Sylvi had never seen the annex—humans did not trespass there without a good reason—but she had said to her father, “Don’t they get cold?”

Her father smiled. “Feathers are very warm. You sleep in a featherbed: imagine you could wrap it around you like giving yourself a hug.”

The king rarely had time to ride out with his dogs and his hawks, and he rarely ate sweetmeats. He had told his daughter (she had asked) that he didn’t much care for them, though he remembered he ’d liked them when he was younger. Sylvi was glad she ’d never be king and lose her taste for sweetmeats. The king admitted that he would ride out oftener with his dogs, his hawks and his daughter, if he were able to, but he was not. Here he looked at the pile of paper on his desk, and sighed; as if the sigh were a signal, a dog or three materialised from in or behind or under some piece of furniture, and laid their heads on his knees.

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The queen had given Sylvi her first riding lessons, had put the first elderly and benign hawk on her fist, had consulted with Diamon, the master-at-arms, about her first practise sword and her first little bow.

The queen, before she was queen, had been colonel of her own regiment of Lightbearers; she had spent several years killing taralians, plus a few norindours and the occasional rare ladon, in the west in and around Orthumber and Stormdown, and had been known as something of a firebrand. She still took charge of a practise class occasionally when the master-at-arms was short-handed. The queen’s classes were always very popular because she had a habit of organising her students into a serviceable unit and taking them out to do some work: this might be anything from rescuing half a village stranded by a mudslide to hunting taralian or ornbear, and even when it was hard, dirty and boring—or hard, dirty, boring and dangerous—the students came back smiling and gratified.

Sylvi had been present one evening when Burn, one of the master-atarms’ agents, asked to speak to the queen. That day the queen had taken her class quite a distance into the countryside in response to a report from a village of several sightings of a taralian; they’d found the taralian, dispatched it, and ridden home again, although they’d been gone twelve hours and everyone but the queen was reeling in the saddle (said the horsegirl who’d been sent with the message that the queen would be late for supper) by the time they dismounted in the horseyard. The queen was in the middle of explaining that she had wanted to be sure everyone was safe and sound, including the horses, and that no bruised soles or incipient saddle sores were overlooked because the humans were too tired to focus their eyes. “Children,” she said fondly. “They’re a sharp group, though; it would be worth trying to keep them together, and perhaps move them on a bit, especially since it looks like—”

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At that moment Burn had been announced. After asking if he might speak to the queen alone and being told that she was tired and wanted her supper and that she was sure he could say whatever it was to the king as well as herself, he hemmed and blithered, and it became plain that what he was not happy about was the queen’s choice of a practical exercise. After a few minutes of failing to find a tactful way of saying what he wanted to say, he finally declared that it was perhaps unwise to put a group of second-years into the peril of taralian hunting, which was a more suitable activity for seasoned soldiers. . . .

The queen said, “Burn, I forgive your shocking impertinence because I appreciate that you are concerned about your youngsters, but do you really suppose that a seasoned soldier such as myself cannot see the strengths and weaknesses of the troop she leads in the first half hour of their company? Not to mention that I’ve crossed swords with most of them in the practise yards. Ask one of them when I announced that we were going to look for that taralian. I suggest you go and ask right now.”

Burn, looking rather grey, left hastily. “Fool,” said the queen grimly, as soon as the door had closed behind him.“Is he the best Diamon can find? It will not do our young soldiers any favours to report to a clucking hen. How does Burn suppose seasoned soldiers happen? Magic?”

“My dear,” said the king, “he is a good administrator, which, as you know, Diamon is not. We need administrators almost as much as we need commanders who know the strengths and weaknesses of their troop within the first half hour spent in their company.”

The queen sighed. “Cory, forgive me. I just . . . we are having too many taralian sightings. And more of them farther inside the boundaries.”

“And the occasional norindour. I daresay that the increased num-

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bers of boars and ornbears are not significant beyond the dangerous nuisance they present. I don’t like it either. And I don’t like the paperwork that goes with it.”

“Take Burn away from the army and add him to your army of ­private secretaries. And take a troop out chasing taralians. It’ll cheer you up.”

The king shook his head. “I’m an administrator myself, not a soldier. It’s why I know Burn is a good one.”

“You have made yourself an administrator,” said the queen.

“I have tried to make myself what the country most needs,” said the king. “But it is lucky for both the country and myself that it needs a king who is a good administrator. You are the soldier, my darling, and I have it in my mind to send you out to investigate the rumour of a roc in Contary.”

“A roc?” said the queen. “In Contary?”

And then Sylvi, to her enormous shame and frustration, sneezed, and her parents noticed she was there. “Oh, gods and dev—I mean, Sylvi, my love, you do understand that this conversation is to remain strictly within these four walls?” said the queen.

“Yes,” said Sylvi. “A roc? I didn’t think there were any rocs any more.”

“Officially there aren’t,” said the king. “In practise there’s a sighting once or twice a decade. This is the second one in two years, which is not reassuring.”

“It may not be true,” said the queen. “I would go so far as to say it is in the greatest degree unlikely to be true.”

“Someone can mistake a roc?” said Sylvi, who had studied rocs and the tactics of battle with something the size of one of Rulf ’s barns, and as clever—and devious—as a human. “They’re—er—kind of large.”

“You’d be surprised,” said the queen. “You’re a little young to be fac28

ing up to your responsibilities as a princess, but you might as well begin to prepare yourself for being surprised at what people do. I give you even odds that this roc is a blanket, laid out to be aired before it’s put away for the summer, which the wind stole. And if I’m going to Contary anyway, perhaps I could swing round past Pristin. We haven’t heard from Shelden all this year, have we?”

“You could take me with you,” said Sylvi, knowing the answer would be no. “My godsmother Criss lives in Pristin.”

“Criss is coming to your binding,” said the queen. “You can see her then. You have to get a little bigger before you start riding messenger for the king.”

“You are the queen,” said the king, “not the king’s messenger.”

“To Shelden I’m a rustic bumpkin,” said the queen.“He never misses an opportunity to ask me how my family back in Orthumber are.”

“Danny was riding with you when he was eleven,” said Sylvi. Danacor was Sylvi’s oldest brother, and the king’s heir. “He told me so.”

“I said bigger, not older,” said the queen. “Your day will come.”

Sylvi had mixed feelings about her binding. She looked forward to her birthday because her parents always made something exciting happen on that day, and the food was always amazing. But this birthday she was going to have to go through with the magicians’ ritual, and be bound to her pegasus, and the food would be at a banquet, and maybe she ’d be one of the ones who fainted. She ’d never been comfortable with magicians’ work. Some of the smaller charms could be comforting, and a few years ago when she ’d had a very bad season of nightmares, Ahathin had made a charm for her that had finally let her sleep without waking screaming a few hours later. And everyone, herself included, knew how to make the basic ill-deflect charm, although you needed some charm string from a magician first. But quite ordinary rituals made her feel peculiar.

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She thought the pegasi very beautiful, and their faces looked very wise, and being bound to one might be rather exciting—but they were also perhaps too beautiful and too wise (if you could understand them), and having one around that was supposed to be hers would not make her feel Alliance-embodying empathy, but smaller, grubbier, and more awkward. And she didn’t like most magicians—except Ahathin— any better than she liked their queasy magic, and there were always too many magicians around when it was anything to do with the pegasi.

She ’d been drilled and drilled in the sign-language since she had been a baby, and could still remember trying to make her fingers behave at the same time she was trying to say her first words. The language of sign and gesture that all humans who had regular contact with pegasi and pegasi who had regular contact with humans were expected to learn was complicated, and the complexity seemed only to add a greater variety of ways for communication to go wrong, beginning with the immutable fact that the pegasus execution of any sign was critically different from the human. Pegasi had mobile ears and long flexible necks and tails, but their hands were small, and had no wrists; and furthermore the number of their fingers was variable, which was the cause of another crucial difference between humans and pegasi. Viktur had described it: “Their mode of enumeration seemed to us at first most strange. Where we, having each of us ten fingers, do count most easily by tens, they cannot, for the number of their fingers on each hand does vary, being four, five or six; wherefore, having each of them four legs, they do count by fours.”

All of this damped any enthusiasm you might initially have had (thought Sylvi) and perhaps that’s what made concentrating on learning sign so difficult. It was worse than maths. (She was rather good at maths, but her brothers complained about it, so she thought she ought

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to. She could even count in fours, but no one seemed to expect her to, so she stopped trying.) It wasn’t that she was bad at languages; she ’d learnt enough Chaugh to be polite to the Chaugh ambassador’s horrible daughter, who was both taller and older than Sylvi—although the taller didn’t take much, thought Sylvi sadly—and who never ignored a chance to remind Sylvi of both these facts.“Oh, how funny that skirt looks on you,” she ’d said at their last meeting.“But then you’re still very young and your legs are so short.”

“Imagine her on the point of your sword,” the queen advised her daughter. “I have got through a number of state banquets that way.”

Sylvi had seen her father once, about a year ago, alone with the pegasus king, Lrrianay, signing awkwardly but determinedly and at some length, accompanied by a ragged murmur of words, punctuated by a few pegasi whuffles, choffs and hums, both of them utterly intent on each other and no Speaker in sight. They came to the end of whatever they were saying. Her father’s hands had dropped as if they were too heavy to hold up any longer, and he was wearing a look half thoughtful and half exhausted. As she watched, he put a hand out to the back of a chair as if to steady himself—very much the way Sylvi put out a hand for a chair or a table or a tall dog’s back when there was magicians’ magic in the air. Lrrianay had turned his head to preen a feather or two back into place, which Sylvi had long suspected was a pegasus thinking-about-something gesture.

And the king’s Speaker, Fazuur, had burst into the king’s private office. Not even the king’s Speaker entered the king’s private office without being announced.

“Fazuur,” said the king calmly, “if you would be so good as to wait a moment. Pendle will tell you.” Pendle was the footman on king’s-door duty that day.

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Fazuur came to a shuddering halt, bowed stiffly and left the room again only very slightly slower than he ’d arrived. Sylvi stood riveted, thinking about what she ’d just seen—both her father and Lrrianay, and the way her father had put his hand out, and the precipitate arrival of Fazuur. He ’d come through the door not like a man late for a meeting, even a man late for an important meeting, but like a man desperate to avert catastrophe.

Sylvi herself had been announced, but casually; Pendle had opened the door and said, “Your daughter, my king,” and waved her through without waiting for a response—which was usual; she would not be troubling her father during his (official) working hours without cause.

She had seen him and Lrrianay “speaking” before, without Fazuur present, but she thought she had never seen them speaking so intently.

Her father was now looking at her with mild surprise: he hadn’t heard her announced. “What is it, love?” She jerked herself back to attention.“I—oh—it’s just a note from the head librarian about something Ahathin wants me to read.”

The king smiled. “Ahathin likes frightening the librarians, I think.

Let me see. Well. You appear to be studying the beginning of the ­Alliance.” He made a quick hand-sign at Lrrianay, who bowed his head, holding it down for a second or two in the respectful-acknow­ledgement gesture.

“Ahathin says every human should study the roots of the Alliance.

That if it were up to him every human would. The head librarian says it’s—it’s impertinent to want to understand everything, that what is important is to understand what comes of the things that have happened.” She made the Alliance gesture at Lrrianay, and drew her hand out to one side, which should mean “topic of conversation” or “studying.”

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“They’re both right,” said the king.

Sylvi sighed inaudibly. That was exactly the sort of thing her father always said.

“But you can give this to the head librarian.” On the neat scrap of paper the librarian had sent he quickly drew the stylised replica of Balsin’s signature on the treaty of Alliance, which had been the official mark of the reigning monarch ever since. She ’d never really thought about this before; she ’d seen the mark, over and over again, all her life, and she knew what it was and where it came from. But she looked at it now as if she were seeing it as an older, wiser Sylvi, a Sylvi who had studied the Alliance and who understood what had happened as a result. And she thought of Fazuur, waiting in the anteroom. . . .

She looked up and found both her father’s and Lrrianay’s eyes on her. She bowed to the pegasus king and he bowed back. She hesitated; she had what she had come for—she should go. But she was very curious about what she had just seen. “I thought, after the binding, aren’t you supposed to start talking in your head too, the way the pegasi do, not just hands and mouth?”

She made a brave attempt to sign some of this for Lrrianay—it was considered rude to have a human conversation in front of a pegasus without making the attempt at inclusion, even if there were no Speaker present—but while she knew the signs for the binding and for the pegasi’s silent-speech, she didn’t know how to put them together. This could be her own ignorance, but it was also every human’s experience of the muddle of sounds, words, gesture and sign that was the means by which human and pegasus attempted, and mostly failed, to communicate with each other. You could never quite say what you wanted to; your mind seemed to slip from you, like a sled on a snow-slope, and the language seemed to writhe away from you like a small wild animal you had inadvertently caught: let it go, or it might bite.

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“The silent-speech is in the annals,” said Sylvi’s father. “In practise, no. Has Ahathin told you we don’t know for sure how much the ­peg­asi use silent-speech among themselves? We’re guessing—our magicians are guessing. The pegasi may also be using some subtle form of sign and gesture we’re too dull to pick up.” Her father’s hands were moving as he spoke, and he paused and murmured something, and there was a murmur—an answering murmur—from Lrrianay.

“After your binding there’s a . . . a sense of someone else there, that you didn’t have before, like knowing there’s someone else in a dark room with you. Anything else . . . it’s rather like weather. Every now and then you have a clear blue day and you can see a long way. Mostly it’s overcast and stormy—and the rain runs in your eyes and you can’t see a thing. That makes our Speakers a kind of . . . waterproof, perhaps.” He smiled at her.

She took her cue, bowed to each king in turn and left. She ’d never heard her father say anything sceptical about the Speakers before. . . .

And the way Fazuur had bolted into the room, as if a taralian were after him . . .

But everything about the pegasi, and about dealing with them, was rather daunting. It was enough—it was more than enough—that they flew, that they were every human’s secret fantasy, alive and breathing.

And then they were so beautiful—it was impossible to get away from the fact of their astonishing beauty in any thoughts or contact with them, any more than you could forget that they could fly, and then you couldn’t help feeling that they must be grand and noble and so on because they looked it.

After the binding itself there were some silly sentences you had to say to your pegasus: “Welcome, Excellent Friend, into this our Court, and the Court of our Fathers and Mothers, and welcome too into our heart this glorious day, that we may be the best of companions for 34

many long years” and so on. “Who wrote this stuff?” she ’d said to her father, outraged, after she ’d read the script for the first time.

“No one knows,” said her father. “Perhaps it—er—sounded better then, whenever then was.”

“If no one knows who wrote it, and it wasn’t Balsin or Gandam or Fralialal, why can’t we change it?”

“Because, my love, you have to choose your battles, and that one isn’t worth engaging.”

She ’d had her mouth open to ask who would care, but she shut it again. There would be people who cared. Great-aunt Moira would care. Senator Barnum would care. Sylvi sighed. It had been sheeting rain on her next-elder brother, Garren’s, twelfth birthday, and the drumming of the rain on the roof of the Inner Great Court was so heavy and loud no one could hear him speak. She had been very little then, and didn’t remember it very well, but she would be relieved if her glorious day was wet too. She was afraid she ’d either laugh or forget her lines.

And besides, no pegasus was going to be her heart’s best companion, even with the binding, because how could you be best companions with someone you couldn’t talk to? Except through a magician? What was there to be a companion about? When pegasi came to court, or to a banquet, or some other organised human thing, you had to do things differently because they didn’t sit down and they didn’t eat human food. You couldn’t share your lessons with them because they didn’t read or write like humans. They had sigils and pictograms—they were supposed to have some record of the treaty of Alliance, besides Balsin’s opal, which Lrrianay still wore on important occasions—but mostly they told stories. And they also had the Caves. Sylvi didn’t understand the Caves very well, although Ahathin had tried to explain ssshasssha to her. The Caves sounded like a sort of large three-dimensional his35

tory in painting and sculpture. Which might be kind of interesting, but so far as she knew humans never went there.

Sylvi thought she could feel pretty bound to someone who was reading books and taking notes across a table from her, even if they were doing it in a different language (even if when they were released from their lessons they could go outdoors and fly), but she didn’t know how she ’d feel about someone reciting a long story. What humans heard of the oral pegasus language was rather shushing and whuffly, and she suspected that listening to a lot of it would put her to sleep, like the sound of the stream outside her window when she stayed with her Orthumber cousins. And she supposed they’d be telling it to a ­shaman—she wasn’t sure who taught pegasi children—royal humans were usually taught by magicians as soon as they outgrew their first tutors and governesses, so perhaps royal pegasi were taught by shamans. But the pegasus shamans rarely came over the border to human Balsinland, and never stayed long.

It might be an advantage that it was a different language, if they were telling their lessons out loud (if it didn’t put her to sleep); then she couldn’t be distracted listening to the story. But no one ever suggested putting human and pegasus children together for their lessons, and Sylvi wasn’t going to say anything that might make Senator Barnum notice her. She thought about it occasionally—it would be nice not always to be alone, or alone with grown-ups. She was the youngest of the palace children; even her parents’ aides’ children were older than she was. The only time she shared lessons was when she was visiting her cousins, and then they all managed to get out of most of them on the grounds that a visiting princess needed better entertainment than ­normal boring old lessons.

But there was no getting out of learning her lines for her binding.

And so she learnt them. And she bore with being fitted for a new dress 36

for the ceremony, which included the garment-maker having to put the hem up even shorter than he ’d already put it up, because Sylvi was even shorter than he ’d realised. That’s what measuring sticks are for, thought Sylvi resentfully, but she didn’t say it out loud; and the hem fell to her ankles instead of puddling around her feet on the day.

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chapter 3

On the day, her mother came to help her get dressed. Her next-elder and next-elder-after-that brothers had already been in to say “best birthday ever,” which you said anyway but you said it specially emphatically if it was someone’s binding day. Emphatic from Garren or Farley was a bit like being whapped by the master-at-arms with the flat of your wooden practise sword, but they didn’t stay long. When they’d shown an inclination to linger to tell Sylvi stories of all the terrible things that had happened on various binding days over the centuries, the queen had suggested that they might help the housefolk carry the long tables for the banquet into the Outer Court, thus leaving more of the housefolk free to get on with things that needed tact or skill.

Their pegasi had come with them. Poih, Garren’s pegasus, had given her a salute she ’d never seen before, with the wings swept forward and the tips of the first few primaries interlinked, and the tiny alula-hands clasped. Even doing it discreetly took up a lot of room: pegasi wings were necessarily enormous. Sylvi was sure it was more than she deserved, and made her new long complicated binding-ritual bow back, because it was the fanciest one she knew.

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Oyry, Farley’s pegasus, had just barely, or not quite, brushed the back of each of her hands with a wingtip, which was a salute she knew, and knew to be a great honour: not only did it just or not quite defy the ban on physical contact between pegasus and human, it was a reference to the longing humans had for wings and pegasi for strong human hands. Then he smiled a pegasus smile at her, which involved ears going in different directions and a wrinkled nose which did not expose the teeth. She ’d been startled, and startled into wondering if perhaps she ’d underestimated her brothers’ pegasi. It was a point of honour as a much-patronised little sister to underestimate her brothers. But it was so hard to guess anything about any pegasus, and she wondered uneasily what Oyry or Poih might know about her pegasus, who was, presumably, their little sister. And then they went after their human princes, leaving Sylvi alone with her mother and her mother’s pegasus, Hirishy.

Hirishy was small even for a pegasus, and timid, without any of the usual pegasus grand manner; she was not the pegasus queen but only her half sister. Sylvi’s father hadn’t been expected to marry her mother; he was supposed to marry Fandora. Fandora was the eldest child of Baron Sarronay, whose family was one of the oldest, wealthiest and best-connected in Balsinland, and the Sarronays had more than a few royal consorts in their family tree already. The royal council, who determined how far the net of binding should be cast each generation, with an eye to history and the volatility of human affections, decided to bind pegasi to as many of the marriageable young female cousins as possible. But the royal pegasus family of that generation was not large enough for all the human cousins, and so two or three of the leastprobable queen candidates had been given third cousins or half sisters.

Eliona had been considered the least-probable candidate of all: she was known to be married to her regiment.

39

But there was a scandal too. Sylvi only knew because Farley told her: once King Corone IV had become engaged to Lady Eliona, ­Fthoom, who even then was the most powerful member of all the magicians’ guilds, had suggested that the future queen be bound to another, more suitable, pegasus—“Which there wasn’t one, of course, and he knew it,” said Farley with relish: Fthoom was not popular with any of Sylvi’s family. “And the king said no, of course not, no one has ever been re-bound, and he would not offer such an insult to our allies. And that’s when”—Farley’s voice sank to a near whisper—“that’s when Fthoom suggested our mother shouldn’t be queen!”

Sylvi listened to this with her mouth a little open. She ’d been afraid of Fthoom her entire life and considered her father braver than a soldier facing a taralian with a broken stick for standing up to him. “He said that?”

“Oh, not in so many words—not even Fthoom would dare. But it was pretty clear what he meant. And Dad said that as a way of covering up the total failure of the guild of forecasters to predict who would be queen—because you know the forecasters sweated like anything over who got which pegasus—it was a pretty poor showing.”

Sylvi went cold with fear and then hot with admiration. She had seen Fthoom with her father often, and Fthoom was a big man and her father a small one, but there was never any doubt who was the king, despite the fact that Fthoom invariably came to the palace wearing the magician’s spiral and his grandest, most vivid magician’s robes, and her father was usually dressed in something soft and dark and floppy. “Farley, how do you know this?”

Farley said airily, “Oh, everyone knows that story. And the only people who won’t tell it are Mum and Dad. I bet even Ahathin would tell you.”

Sylvi had not dared ask Ahathin, but she had asked Danacor. Her 40

eldest brother was hopelessly solemn and dutiful and responsible, but he didn’t like Fthoom any better than any of the rest of them did.“Oh, that old story,” he said. “Yes, it’s true enough, but—” He hesitated, and Sylvi held her breath, because Danacor, as the king’s heir, knew all the best stories, and occasionally was still young enough to tell them.“The real scandal is that Hirishy was bound to Mum in the first place. When it’s just sovereign-heir to sovereign-heir, like Thowara and me, it’s easy.

But when it’s half a dozen girls, five of whom will be farmers or soldiers and the sixth will marry the king, you’re supposed to try to make some attempt to match personalities. By the time Mum was twelve she already had her first war-horse, you know? And they bound her to Hirishy?”

Sylvi was troubled by this story. She liked Hirishy—liked her, not the way she liked Thowara or Lrrianay, but almost as she might like another human. She had once been trying to say something to her, something about the way families behaved and how you loved them even when you wanted to kill them—it had been a day when her brothers had been especially exasperating—which was a lot more complicated than she was used to saying in her own language, let alone to a pegasus. She had no idea why she had been trying to do something so bizarre, and so doomed to failure. But there was something about the way Hirishy seemed to listen. It drew Sylvi on. She ’d stumbled to the end of her signing and stopped, feeling a fool . . . and Hirishy had put her nose to Sylvi’s temple, like a kiss from her mother, and left her.

Sylvi had slowly put her hand to the place Hirishy’s nose had touched. That had been almost as strange as what had gone before: you didn’t touch the pegasi, and they didn’t touch you. She thought it was probably a good rule; if it weren’t positively forbidden, the urge to stroke the shining glossy pegasi would probably be overwhelming.

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She was sure that a pegasus flank would make the sleekest silkhound feel as rough as straw; but the pegasi were a people, like humans, and must be treated with respect. (And you mustn’t ever, ever ride a peg­ asus, which was the first thing that every human child, royal or not, on meeting or even seeing its first pegasus, wanted to do.) Sylvi had been very young when she had realised you had to be more careful of the pegasi because the humans were dominant: because the pegasi came to the human king’s court, and the pegasus king stood behind the human king’s shoulder. But Hirishy had touched her.

She had in fact three times touched Hirishy. She didn’t remember the first time: her mother had told her about it. She had grabbed a handful of Hirishy’s forelock when Hirishy had bent a little too low over the baby lying on the queen’s bed, and rubbed her face against Hirishy’s velvet nose. “You were too little to understand about kissing, but kissing is still clearly what you were doing!” The queen, both laughing and horrified, rescued Hirishy—but not before Hirishy had kissed the princess back.

And it had been Hirishy who’d come to stand beside her the day that Sylvi had slipped and fallen on the Little Court steps when she was supposed to be processing with the rest of her family. It had been one of the first occasions when Sylvi had been deemed old enough— and in her case, more crucially, big enough—and sensible enough to be in the royal procession. And then she had managed to trip—by catching her foot on a bulge of hastily taken-up hem—and fall. She landed hard and painfully, but was up again so quickly that her mother only glanced at her and the ceremony wasn’t quite spoilt—Sylvi hoped.

She knew she was walking stiffly, because what she wanted to do was limp, but she told herself it wouldn’t show under the heavy robe she was wearing. If it had been less heavy, there wouldn’t have been a bulge to catch her foot.

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But when they’d come to the end of the court and turned to stand in the great arched doorway, while the magicians chanted and waved their incense around and the royal family wasn’t the centre of attention for a moment, Hirishy had slipped from behind the queen and stood beside Sylvi, and, after a moment, as if accidentally, as if she were merely shifting her position, put her nose in Sylvi’s hand. And Sylvi had relaxed, as if her mother had put her arm around her, and as soon as she relaxed, the hurt began to ebb, so that when the ceremony had been over with and her mother had put her arm around her and asked her if she was all right, Sylvi said truthfully, “Yes, I’m fine now.”

But Hirishy was different from the other pegasi—and not different in a way that was well-matched to a professional soldier. As Eliona, daughter of Baron Soral of Powring in Orthumber and colonel of the Lightbearers, she hadn’t had her own Speaker, and neither Hirishy nor the pegasus bound to her second-in-command had ever gone out with her company as they patrolled borders, escorted ambassadors through the wild lands, chased rumours of ladons and dispatched taralians and norindours. But she ’d had a Speaker assigned the moment the news of her engagement to Corone was announced—and two years later, shortly after Danacor was born, and on very dubious precedent, her Speaker was changed.

Sylvi’s translation of the adult conversations she ’d overheard about this was that her mother’s first Speaker, having discovered that his enviable achievement was in fact career ruin, was daring enough to believe he might yet succeed elsewhere if he were given the chance. He was transferred out, on the grounds that pregnancy had altered the queen’s aura in a way that another Speaker might better take advantage of, and Minial came instead. And while Hirishy was apparently even more untranslatable than most pegasi, Minial treated her with absolute respect—and patience. Sylvi liked her for that. Minial was 43

one of the rare female magicians, but she was tall and imposing, and looked good in processions. She was also easy to have around, without that pressingness, Sylvi had once called it, that most magicians had, that feeling that there was no space for you when a magician was in the room.

Hirishy came wafting in after Sylvi’s mother, her mane and tail already plaited, flowers woven snugly up among her primaries, and a wide blue ribbon around her creamy shoulders with wreaths of blue and yellow embroidery on it, and a little embroidered bag dangling from it like a pendant jewel. There was a word for the embroidered neck-bands the pegasi made, but Sylvi couldn’t think of it. Hirishy went and stood at the window, looking out toward the long curly trails and clusters of people moving toward the Outer Great Court for the ceremony. Sylvi was trying to ignore them. Sylvi looked at Hirishy’s wings and thought the flowers must itch, like a scratchy collar. Like the scratchy collar she was wearing, heavy with gold thread and heavier yet with gems. They were only lapis lazuli and storm agate, but they weighed just as much as sapphires and rubies. She sighed.

There wasn’t any chance of rain. The sky was blue and clear, and the housefolk would be laying out the banquet without one hesitating glance overhead. She saw Hirishy look at the sky, and grinned to herself. There are fewer shadowy corners to hide in on a bright day.

Her mother was twisting a fine enamelled chain through Sylvi’s hair, plaiting as she went, and muttering to herself. The chain hung in a loop round Sylvi’s temples and over her forehead, and then the tail wound through her plait and ended with a teardrop of aquamarine.

Only the reigning sovereign ever wore a crown, and Sylvi’s father very rarely did so, but chains and flowers were common. The queen was wearing a garnet chain for her daughter’s binding, with diamonds at her temples. “You don’t have to do that,” said Sylvi, trying not to laugh; 44

what her mother was muttering as she plaited was more suited to the practise yard than her daughter’s bedroom just before her binding.

“One of them could.”

“Them” were the half-dozen beautifully-dressed ladies waiting in the corridor to escort the queen and her daughter to the Outer Great Court, only one of whom was also a soldier.

“Well, you won’t believe me,” said the queen, “but I would like to.

You’re the only daughter I’m going to dress for her binding; your father has had three sons to dress for theirs. And if I can plait my own hair—if I can plait a mane, for the gods’ sake, I ought to be able to plait your hair.”

“Did you find the roc?” Sylvi said suddenly.

“Roc?” said her mother, but Sylvi knew she was bluffing.

“Yes,” said Sylvi. “In Contary. Father sent you to look.”

The chain twitched as the queen tweaked it. “No.” She was still bluffing. “But?” said Sylvi.

The queen sighed. “You’re as bad as your father. He always knows when I’m not telling him everything. My official report says ‘the evidence was inconclusive.’ Which is true. But I’m privately certain— which is what I told your father and Danny—that a roc had been through Contary.”

“Oh.” The wild lands around Balsinland were uncomfortably full of large, fierce, and often half-magical creatures, but only the taralians, who were the least magical, made a regular nuisance of themselves in Balsinland. Norindours were unusual, ladons rare, and the last wyvern sighting had been in Sylvi’s great-grandfather’s day.

But rocs, with their savage intelligence and relentless ferocity, were another category of hazard altogether. Rocs, it was believed, belonged to another world. No one knew why they occasionally emerged into this one; when they did, catastrophe followed.

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“Yes. Oh.” The queen patted Sylvi’s hair. “There. Almost as good as one of the ladies could have done.”

Sylvi was distracted by this, and only half noticed the sudden hush in the hall. And then her Speaker arrived.

She had been braced for this. Or rather, she hadn’t been braced for it at all: she ’d been trying to brace herself for it, and failing. She didn’t like magicians. They gave her the creeps. The idea of having one who was assigned to her—who was now going to be around all the time, because your Speaker tended to lurk in your vicinity even when your pegasus wasn’t there—was the worst thing about this whole rite of passage. Pegasi were a little scary and she knew she ’d mess up what she was supposed to do with hers, if not today then tomorrow or the day after or the next ceremonial occasion or something, but this was different. She didn’t like magicians—save Ahathin and Minial—and she was afraid of them—even Ahathin and Minial. She ’d wasted a little time hoping that since she was only a fourth child they wouldn’t bother to give her one, but she knew better. She was a princess being bound to a pegasus, and she ’d have to have a Speaker.

She heard the clatter of the Speaker sticks before she turned around to see who it was—if it was anyone she ’d ever seen before. The Speakers’ Guild had a tendency to be secretive.

“Sylvi—” began her mother, and Sylvi turned around and bowed in all the same gesture, putting off for another few seconds meeting him, whoever he was. She heard the Speaker sticks clatter again, as he bowed too.

She straightened up slowly.

It was Ahathin. Her tutor. Little round bald Ahathin with his spectacles sliding down his nose, the way they always did slide down his nose, although she was used to seeing him trying to juggle several rolls of parchment and an armful of books while pushing up his glasses, 46

and she ’d never seen him wearing Speaker sticks. She hadn’t known he was a Speaker. She took another look at the sticks, to make sure she wasn’t imagining things, as her heart, or maybe her stomach, seemed to take a great leap of relief.

He stood up from his bow, pushed his spectacles up his nose, awkwardly shook his sticks so they’d lie flat, and said, “My lady, I am your least servant.”

“Oh!” she said. “Ahathin.”

“Sylvi,” said her mother sharply.

You met your Speaker in private, right before the binding ceremony, and you weren’t supposed to know who he was until that moment ( just as you weren’t supposed to know anything about your pegasus).

It was still an enormously formal occasion and you had more words you were supposed to have memorised to say. Sylvi had memorised them, but the shock of discovering that her Speaker was almost the only magician she ’d ever met who didn’t make her flesh crawl was so great she forgot them.

“Sir Magician—Worthy—sir—” But she couldn’t remember any more, so instead she said what she was thinking: “I am so glad it’s you.”

“Oh, Sylvi,” said her mother.

Ahathin’s face twitched, but he said placidly, “Yes, your father seemed to think that might be your reaction.”

The guild chose a Speaker, not the king. A king could request, and in order to have done a favour for the king, the magicians might listen to a request for a specific Speaker for an unimportant royal. But being her tutor was one thing; being her Speaker was a much closer, more demanding, and longer-lasting appointment—and tied him visibly and humblingly to a mere fourth child. The first child of one of the more important barons would be a much better placement. “Do you mind?” she said.

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“Sylvi!” said the queen for the third time, sounding rather despairing.

Ahathin’s placid expression was growing somewhat fixed. He glanced at the queen and said, “Saving your grace’s presence, I would say that the king asked me a similar question before he approached the selection committee. I replied that I did not consider Lady Sylvi a lesser royal because she is the fourth child, and that I would be inexpressibly honoured if I were chosen to be her Speaker. The king indicated that he believed my lady Sylvi would not lay an undue charge upon her Speaker and indeed might be happy if he continued to spend most of his time in the library. And that he, the king, would entertain hopes in such an instance that it might possibly encourage my lady Sylvi to spend more time there.”

Sylvi thought this deeply unfair, since it seemed to her that she spent a great deal of time there already. Wasn’t she always bringing him authorisation slips from the head librarian? And hadn’t he started asking her horrible trick questions based on what he knew she was reading? . . . Although she wasn’t sure if they were horrible trick questions or not, since he was usually asking her what she thought about things, and if she hadn’t read enough yet to have any thoughts, he said, well, let me know when you do, so then she had to. Sometimes he even asked her questions when there were other people around—and when she had protested (later, in private) he shook his head and said,“You’re a princess. You’re going to need to be able to think on your feet, later if not sooner.”

Even so. She had her mouth all open to protest when it occurred to her that she was pushing her mother rather hard. She made an enormous effort and said,“Sir Magician, Worthy Sir, I thank and welcome you, and I—I—” “Look forward to a long and fruitful dialogue,” said Ahathin helpfully.

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“Yes—oh, yes—yes. And we—we three—pegasus, magician and p-princess, shall be as the sun, moon and stars, and all shall look upon us and find us—uh—wonderful.”

“A light upon their path,” said her mother, “and a thing of wonder. I hope you’ve memorised the binding better.” Her mother had heard her say it over just yesterday, but that had been sitting swinging her legs on a chair in the queen’s office, with no one else present, and no surprises.

“I—I think so,” said Sylvi, a little ashamed.“It’s just that it’s Ahathin.

I’ve been so dread—” She stopped. He was still a magician, and she was being fearfully impolite. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“There are tales of much worse, my queen, my lady,” said Ahathin.

“Razolon, who was king six hundred years ago, is said to have spoken but one word to his first Speaker: you! Whereupon he ran him through with his sword.”

“Why?” said Sylvi, fascinated.

“He believed—with some justice—that the magicians were ­plotting that he should not come to the throne. He was a rather—er—­ precocious twelve.”

“The occasion you might tell of,” said the queen, “which I believe you might remember for yourself, is when my husband’s second brother was bound. Do you know this story?” she said to Sylvi. Sylvi shook her head. “Well, ask your uncle some time to tell it to you. The version I heard is that there had been an episode of the throwing-up sickness, and that the youngest prince was the worst affected, but it was such a terrible omen to put off a binding they decided to go through with it. And when his Speaker arrived, your uncle bowed and—threw up all over his Speaker’s shoes. But I believe the ritual of binding went perfectly.”

“It did,” said Ahathin. “I was one of the incense-bearers. Although 49

the curious informality of the newly-assigned Speaker-to-the-Bound’s footgear was somewhat remarked upon.”

The queen laughed. “And thirty years later, Mindo is good friends with Ned, I believe, although he is rarely needed to Speak. We will therefore take the present informality as a good omen—you feel welcomed by your princess, I hope?”

“I do indeed, your grace.”

“Good.” The queen frowned at Sylvi. “And now we must go, or we’ll be late.”

50

New in paperback September 16, 2010!

Mirasol is a beekeeper, a honey-gatherer, with an ability to speak to the “earthlines�, the sentient parts of Willowlands, where she lives. The concerns of Master, Chalice, and Circle, who govern Willowlands, have nothing to do with her, until the current Master and Chalice die in a fire and leave no heirs to take their places. The Master’s closest relative has been a priest of Fire for the past seven years; he is not quite human anymore. And then the Circle comes to Marisol and tells her that she is the new Chalice, and it will be up to her to bind the land and its people with a Master, the touch of whose hand can burn human flesh to the bone. . . .

B

ecause she was Chalice she stood at the front door with the Grand Seneschal, the Overlord’s agent and the Prelate, all of whom were carefully ignoring her. But she was Chalice, and it was from her hand the Master would take the welcome cup.

From the front door of the House, at the top of the magnificent curling sweep of stair, she could see over the heads of the crowd. The rest of the Circle stood stiffly and formally at the foot of the stair with the first Houseman and the head gardener, but nearly the entire citizenry of the demesne seemed to have found an excuse to be somewhere in or near the House or lining the long drive from the gates today.

Their new Master was coming home: the Master thought lost or irrecoverable. The Master who, as younger brother of the previous Master, had been sent off to the priests of Fire, to get rid of him. Third and fourth brothers of Masters were often similarly disposed of, but the solitary brother of an unmarried Master without other Heir should not have been dealt with so summarily.

So the Master had been told. But the two brothers hated each

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other, and the younger one was given to the priests of Fire. That had been seven years ago.

A little over six years later the Master died, still without other Heir. The Grand Seneschal had sent immediately to the priests of Fire to say that there was urgent need of the younger brother of the Master of Willowlands, for the Master had died without having produced a son. Such a request—a plea—had never been made before. Once someone has gone to the Elemental priests, they do not return.

But a demesne must have its Master. And a change of family, of bloodline, in any demesne, upsets all, often for generations, till the new family has settled into its charge. The nearest other living relative of the old Master of Willowlands was a fourth cousin who had already married someone unsuitable and had three children by her. The priests of Fire said they would see what they could do, but they promised nothing. The younger brother of the old Master had just crossed into the third level, and by the third level Elemental priests can no longer live among ordinary humans.

But six weeks ago the Grand Seneschal had received another message from the priests of Fire: that the Master of Willowlands was coming home. It would not be an easy Mastership, and the priests were not sure it was even possible, but the Master himself felt the responsibility to his demesne, and he was determined to try.

Mirasol—straining her eyes toward the gate, partly as a way to ignore the three men who were ignoring her—remembered the younger brother: his strength of purpose, his feeling of obligation

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to the demesne, his feeling for the demesne. It was what the brothers had quarrelled about. The elder brother had loved the power of the Mastership, not its duties, and he was not the least willing to bear lectures on his behaviour from his younger brother. She wasn’t surprised the younger brother was coming home, even from the third level of the priesthood of Fire.

She had dreamed of the message to the Grand Seneschal the night before it arrived: she had felt the fire and smelt the burning.

She knew the Master would come. She knew too that the smell of burning was a warning, but she did not know of what. Might the demesne itself burn, or its new Master?

She could see only a little way down the drive as it curved toward the gates half a league distant. But she could see when people better placed than she for first sight of the arrival stiffened and stared. The three men standing with her drew themselves to attention.

She could hear carriage wheels now.

It will be all right, she told herself. It must be all right. She settled her shoulders with a tiny, invisible shake, and fractionally raised her chin.

Six horses drew the coach: four of them coal-black, clinkerblack, two of them ashy grey. The coach itself was also black, but black was always fashionable among the great and grand and would draw no comment. But the curtains at these windows were drawn closed, and they too were black. A light flickered behind them, red and wavering, like firelight.

Again she smelt burning, but she did not know if she imagined it.

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The welcoming of a new Master was a time of rejoicing. The ceremony of investiture was the official occasion, and after the rites were done there was an enormous banquet with musicians and dancing for everyone who belonged to the demesne—and for anyone else from any other demesne who wished to join in the festivities at the price of some enthusiastic contribution to toasts and cheers and acclamations. But the informal arrival of a Master should still be a happy moment. And she knew she was not the only person present who felt that the brothers had been born in the wrong order: it was the younger who would have made the better Master from the beginning.

But no one clapped or called. No one smiled. It was as if everyone was holding their breath.

The coach stopped in front of the House, where the gravel had been raked in a perfect circle, a symbol of good luck. Any coach wheels and any horses’ hooves would have broken the circle, splintered the careful spiral; that it should be so broken was a part of the welcome, like opening and pouring out the contents of a bottle of wine. There was no reason for her to feel uneasy, watching the horses dance as they halted, kicking pebbles every way, to feel that something fragile and vital was being destroyed.

The body of the coach rocked on its wheels, and little spurts of gravel pattered out from under them.

Then the door opened.

Perhaps she imagined the cloud of darkness like smoke that billowed out; no one else reacted, and she bit down on her own gulp of astonishment. And of sudden fear. She remembered the younger brother. She had not known him—it was not for such a one as she

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had been to know the Master’s family—but she had known a good deal of him. She had known more of him than of the Master, before the Master sent him away, because he was the one who rode or walked round the demesne, seeing that the fields and woods grew and throve, and the temples and places of power were serene and well tended. He was not tall and handsome and flashing-eyed like his older brother, but there was kindness and grace in him, and intelligence in his unremarkable brown eyes.

She knew little of the Elemental priests, nothing of their initiations, and only folk-tales of what the priesthoods did and were capable of. She knew that Fire frightened her worst, more than Earth or Air. And the Fire priests themselves had said that Willowlands’ new Master could no longer live among ordinary humans.

As the coach door swung back, one of the House servants jumped forward as if suddenly recalling himself, and lowered the steps. Two figures climbed carefully down. They both wore black capes with hoods that hid their faces, but they carried themselves and moved and looked around as anyone might. As any ordinary human might.

There was a collective letting-out of breath. Talisman, the tallest of the minor Circle, seemed suddenly shorter; Sunbrightener, who was the fattest, seemed fatter.

That was until the third figure climbed down from the coach.

He too wore a black cape with a hood, but the cape bulged and seethed weirdly around him, and he let himself carefully down the steps as if he did not know or could not remember how to use his feet for such an activity. The two figures who had climbed down first reached their hands to help him, holding him at the elbows

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and under the arms, but she felt, looking on, that their hands did not grasp quite where elbows and armpits should be.

He half limped, half rolled up the steps toward the House’s front door with his helpers still on his either side. She seemed to hear a distant roar, like a fire caught in a sudden updraft. She wanted to glance at the faces of the other people, the people who had come here this morning to catch a first glimpse of their new Master, wanted to see if they looked frightened or appalled. But she couldn’t drag her own gaze away from the great roiling black loom of the third figure coming toward her.

She felt the three men standing beside her struggling not to step back and away as she stepped forward. She had been clutching the welcome cup against her body so tightly that her stomach ached where the extravagantly ornamented brim had bitten into her. The roughness of the intricate overlay on the cup’s bowl gave her suddenly cold stiff fingers better purchase as she moved her hands to their proper places on its stem.

She was Chalice, and hers the first greeting.

The top step was a wide smooth half-moon of white stone before the door. There was plenty of space for her and him and his two aides, as well as the three men behind her, and the doorkeepers back farther yet, flanking the doorposts. She raised her cup, grateful that the weight of it prevented her hands from shaking, and looked down. Three faces turned up toward her, two of them brown and ordinary and worried-looking.

The third face was black, as black as the coal-coloured horses that drew the black coach, and its—his—eyes were red, flickering like fire around the black pupils. She recognised nothing in that

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face from her memories of the younger brother of the dead Master. She looked at him steadily, willing herself to see something— anything—that she could welcome as Master, and in the final seconds it took him to climb the last step, she saw what she needed to see: comprehension. He knew her for Chalice and knew she was there to welcome him, because he came as Master.

When he stood with her on the top step he gave a little shudder, or ripple, and his two aides dropped their hands and stepped back. As they let go of him she saw that they wore gloves. Her mouth was dry, as dry as if she had been eating ash, and she was slow to say the two important words: “Welcome, Master.”

She was slow, but he was slower. He should reach immediately to take the cup from her, hold it briefly over his head for everyone to see that he accepted it, taste its contents and hand it back to her. It was possible that he would thank her, but it was not necessary.

But he only stood, looking at her. The hood shadowed his shadow-dark face; she thought she was glad of it. He twitched, a tiny spasm, once, twice. Perhaps he was trying to raise his hands.

The third time he succeeded, the sleeves of the cape juddering back as if blown by a wind, and she saw that he too wore gloves, long heavy ones, laced snugly to the elbows.

She could not give any Chalice cup to gloved hands. She looked back into his face—into the shadows where his face was.

She did not know what to do. She thought she must have imagined the comprehension she had seen there a moment earlier; she could read no expression on that black face now.

Clumsily he raised his left hand and drew the fingers through

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the laces of the glove on his right. The cords fell away in uneven shards, as if charred. Slowly he peeled the glove away from his arm—and the heat of his flesh raged out at her. The air between them was almost too hot to breathe. Even more clumsily he raised his naked right hand, the fingertips glowing like embers, to touch the cup. She held her ground while the fingers of that fiery hand curled round the bowl of the cup inches from her face. The enamelled metal of the goblet grew uncomfortably warm against her skin and steam rose from the liquid within it.

The weight of the cup did not change and she supported it as he stood with his hand around it. He looked at it and back at her.

“What . . . do you give . . . me to drink?” His voice was as eerie as his appearance, but perfectly intelligible.

Her answer to this question had been in no record she had consulted about the rite of welcome; but then no one had ever welcomed a third-level Elemental priest as Master either. She had held her own against the preferences of the Prelate and the Grand Seneschal only because she was, in the end, Chalice, and they could not order her to give him the earthed wine customary for a welcome cup. But she had not expected to have to announce publicly her departure from tradition: only the Master himself would taste the contents of his welcome cup. She felt as if she were being wayward, unreasonable and oblivious all over again when she had to reply, “Water—plain water from the Ladywell— and a spoonful of honey, Master.”

She was sure—she was almost sure—she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him

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begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did not—or could not—bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink; and also saw a tiny rivulet run down by the side of his mouth and hiss off his chin, briefly leaving a fire-red tracing thread behind it.

He let her draw the cup back toward her again with his hand still around it. She looked again into his face and saw, though she could not have explained how she saw, that he was tired, tired almost to death; and so she knew that it was only weariness that made him clumsier still, that when he lifted his hand away from the cup, he was not able to do it cleanly, and his hand dropped a little, and glanced—only barely, fleetingly glanced—off the back of her hand, where it seared the thin flesh to the bone.

At the time it almost didn’t matter. She found that she had been half expecting something like it to happen, and did not flinch when it did. She lowered the goblet only a little bit hastily, and tucked the weight of it against her body again so that she could drop her wounded hand to her side and let the long sleeve of her robe cover the burn. This made it throb worse than if she could have held it up, but that couldn’t be helped. No one farther away than the three men behind her awaiting their turn—and possibly the Master’s two aides—would have seen anything, and she wished to keep it that way.

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But the three men waiting just behind her would have seen.

The Grand Seneschal might have kept his mouth shut for his own good—it was he who had negotiated with the priests of Fire in the first place, and he who had received the news that the priests did not believe what he was asking could be done. She didn’t know the Prelate well enough to guess after his motives, beyond a growing suspicion he had few of his own and preferred to borrow them from some stronger character. But the Overlord’s agent would have every reason to tell the tale—and doubtless had. While it would upset the balance of the entire country if one of the demesnes were realloted, the process of the reallotment would hugely increase this Overlord’s power, and bind the new Master to the Overlord with a political gratitude it would take generations of Masters and Overlords to bring into equilibrium again. And their current Overlord was a little too fond of political power— she among others believed—without such temptations as a Master who might burn his subjects by the touch of his hand.

By the end of the first day of the new Master’s return, the people she met were looking first at her right hand. Gossip travels as fast as fire. By then she had dressed and bandaged it, so there was nothing to see but the bandage; but that was enough.

And there was no way to shrug off what had happened as an accident. Of course it had been an accident: no Master could remain Master who deliberately harmed any of his people. What had happened to her should be viewed as no worse or more significant than if one of his coach horses had shied and trodden on one of the onlookers: an unfortunate mishap. That’s all. But of course it was not, for it was not an accident that should have

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been able to happen. If the new Master were not a priest of Fire.

If the new Master were still human.

“It is nothing,” she said to the people she caught looking at her hand. “It is nothing.” Sometimes she tried to smile. She’d smiled at Sama, when she’d asked for lint and salve; Sama was a Housewoman with a round, happy face and three children, and she and her children were excellent customers for Mirasol’s honey. “I was clumsy. It is no more than if I brushed my hand against a dish just out of the oven.”

“It don’t look like nothing,” said Sama, whose round face was not happy today. “And oven burns hurt.”

“Of course they hurt,” Mirasol said briskly, trying to be competent with one hand and failing. “But we bear them because we are clumsy—and because we still like our food cooked.”

Sama’s face closed a little more, but she did reach out to help Mirasol with her bandage.

“It is not as though we had had a chance to practise our roles,” Mirasol said, trying to make a joke, but she realised as soon as the words were out of her mouth they were a mistake. Usually a new Master was well known to the demesne; usually the Chalice’s welcome cup to the Master entering his House as Master for the first time was a formality only.

Usually a new Master was human.

“But—” Sama began.

“He is our Master,” said Mirasol firmly.

There was an uncomfortable pause while Sama finished tying up the bandage. When she was done she raised her eyes to Mirasol’s and said, “As Chalice wills.”

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Mirasol almost blurted out, It’s not what I will! It is what has happened!

A few months ago she would have spoken so, spoken before she thought, a few months ago when her Chalicehood was still so new that every reminder of it was like a burn. But she was Chalice now, and all things had changed, herself most of all.

Before the Chalice had chosen her, Sama would have argued with her; would have held her own opinion against Mirasol’s. She would not argue with her Chalice; it was her duty to accept the Chalice’s ruling.

Mirasol hoped she was right.

She told herself it would have been worse if it had been an ordinary accident like a coach horse blundering into the audience, because that would so clearly have been a bad omen. The new Master was a priest of Fire, and adjustments had to be made.

That’s all. That’s all. She could not help the bandage on her hand, but once she realised there was no point in trying to hide it, she used that hand freely, as if it did not hurt her. She had to hope that the fixed expression on her face that this usage provoked— because it did hurt a great deal—only looked like the Chalice’s professional mask.

But if their new Master believed he could be Master, then she wanted him to have his chance. In the first place this was only her duty: the Master was the Master, but no Master could maintain his land without his Chalice. But in the second place she wanted this Master to grasp and hold because these first six months of her abrupt and lonely Chalicehood had been almost beyond her strength. She did not think she would be able to

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bear—to contain—the tumult if Willowlands were given a new, outblood Master; and she did not think this or any demesne could survive an outblood Master and a second disastrously new, inexperienced and untrained Chalice together.

It was bad enough as it was. Willowlands was restless, hurt and unhappy: half mad with it, she sometimes thought, delirious as a child with a bad fever. Whether this was a result of being Masterless for seven months or from the seven years preceding the previous Master’s death it was impossible for her to say. But she knew it was also because she, the new Chalice, was herself rough and raw from having had no teaching. She thought of her Chalicehood in wild metaphors: like a blind woman asked to paint a portrait; like a scullery-maid dragged out of her kitchen, given a plough with no horse and told to raise six hectares of barley by sundown. And yet if she lost her fragile balance as a result of an outblood Master and the Chalice passed to someone else, there was no vanity in her bleak awareness that this would be a catastrophe.

She had learnt enough to begin piecing together ways to calm a little of the appalling strain and distress the deaths of the last Master and Chalice had caused. But she had learnt by precarious methods: feverishly reading the old books, following her nose through the footnotes and annotations, leaning hardest on the advice of the oftenest-cited manuscripts, when she could find them, when the House library or the old Chalice’s rooms contained copies of them, guessing miserably from scraps and fragments when she could not find what she needed. The changeover from Master to Master and Chalice to Chalice should never happen—had never

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happened—as it had just happened here; most of the information and guidance she needed simply didn’t exist.

And she had only barely begun. She still had far more questions than answers, far more unknowing than knowing, about everything to do with Chalice work. And yet she was all there was. The people rarely came to her with their individual problems and disturbances, but while this meant she was not yet well accepted as Chalice, which was in itself unsettling to the land and its people, she had as much and more than she could do merely responding to the most savage ruptures in the fabric of the demesne. And she felt as if she were using embroidery silks to mend plaster and lath. No, she thought, that’s not it. It’s more like putting out fires: like harvesttime after a dry summer. And they were in a drought that might destroy all.

Sometimes the demesne’s disquiet manifested as literal tremors of the ground, when the trees shook as if in a high wind, plates flew off shelves, and fences didn’t merely fall down but burst apart. Usually she could hear these in her mind if they were too far away for her feet to feel them. Sometimes the Grand Seneschal sent her a message. (She tried to tell herself this was an indication of some measure of approval, but she feared it was only that as Seneschal he knew what she, who was Second of the entire Circle, second to the Master himself, ought to be capable of. The Grand Seneschal was only Third: but she never remembered this when he was glaring at her, or when another of his brusquely worded messages arrived.) The rest of the Circle were little use.

The violence of the deaths seven months ago had damaged and

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disrupted all their abilities as it had damaged and disrupted everything to do with the demesne; only the Grand Seneschal had pulled himself together again to take the full weight of his place in the demesne framework.

Once, only a few days before the homecoming of the new Master, a farmer, Faine, had come thundering up to her cottage on the back of one of his work-horses, still wearing its ordinary harness and looking as wretched and confused as its master. She’d heard the commotion and come outdoors—even her bees had scattered out of the way of these tumultuous visitors. She knew Faine; he was almost a neighbour. Possibly he had come to her because she was Chalice; much likelier he had come to her because of all the Circle she was nearest.

“Can you come now?” he said breathlessly.

She thought his eyes weren’t focusing on her face: perhaps seeing the thing that he had left behind him. “There’s a great cut opening in one of my fields,” he said. “I’ve left my brothers getting the beasts away—it’s big enough for one to fall in. And it’s growing.” He was speaking as if past her, as if looking at someone standing behind her. He was old enough, she thought, to remember the Chalice before the last one—she who had been Chalice to the father of the new Master and his brother.

That Chalice had been much loved; Mirasol’s father had consulted her once about a stand of trees that did not thrive as they should. “There was something wrong about the air around them,” he’d said. “You could smell it as soon as you stood among ’em. I tried Oakstaff first, but he hadn’t the time for the likes

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of me—but Chalice herself came.” Mirasol knew of her own experience that these trees were now among the finest in what had been her father’s woodright.

That Chalice would have known what to do. But that Chalice had never had to grapple with her demesne in the conditions Mirasol faced.

“A moment,” she said, and flew back indoors. A tremor so ferocious it had ripped the mundane ground apart? She had no idea what she should do, but she had to try to do something. She snatched up the cup of balance, three of the Chalice stones that worked well with it, a handful of herbs, and thrust two pots of honey in the pockets of her cloak. She hesitated over her book of basic incantations; but basic incantations did not include crevasses opening in fields, and watching her fumble uselessly through a book would be good for neither Faine and his brothers nor herself. Her best hope was that the earthlines might tell her something she could use.

The journey to Faine’s farm was so uncomfortable, holding on to the hip strap till her fingers were sore to keep herself from being jolted off by the big horse’s bone-breaking trot, that she managed to avoid thinking about what she could do when they arrived. She didn’t know what she could do. She might as well think about her sore fingers and bruised seatbones.

It was worse than she imagined and, she thought, glancing at Faine’s face, worse than it had been when he had left to fetch help. A great ragged cleft had torn its way through the flat grassy pastureland; the red-brown gash looked eerily like a wound in flesh. Part of the awfulness of it was that the rest of the scene

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seemed so normal: the sun shone, the birds sang in the trees. The end near them was perhaps only two hands’-breadth across, but Mirasol could see it widened swiftly farther down the field. As she slid stiffly off the horse and her feet touched the ground, the ground shivered, like a horse’s skin shedding flies; the tuft of grass at the end of the trench rocked wildly and then parted with a sound like tearing cloth, and the trench was suddenly a hand’s-breadth longer. The birdsong faltered, and then took up again. Mirasol barely noticed; she was listening to the earthlines.

Two passed through Faine’s field, and they were weeping like children.

She looked around, and broke a small twig off an oak tree, thanking the tree for its help. She always preferred to find something she could use at the location itself, and she liked oak for Chalice work. She brushed her fingers over its leaves and murmured a few words of dedication. The now-familiar ritual was a little soothing—but what next?

Two men and a woman had seen them coming, and met them at the edge of the injured field, but the keening of the earthlines in Mirasol’s ears was so loud it was almost impossible to hear human speech. “. . . the rest of them out,” one man was saying. “. . . Daisy’s calf ran in the wrong direction, and Daisy followed,” said the other man. “They’re . . .”

And then, as if the moaning of the earthlines was a curtain and they had parted it for her, Mirasol could hear the frightened bellowing of the trapped cow.

“Get a rope,” Mirasol heard her own voice saying. “Two ropes.

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You may have to drag them out. Your horse has a yokemate, I assume? Fetch him. How has this—rift—opened? Does it stretch from one end, or out from the middle?”

“The far end,” quavered the woman. “It began there. Where Daisy is.”

“Good,” said Mirasol’s voice again. “That makes it easier.” It does? thought Mirasol. The earthlines whimpered. “Where is your spring?” Every farm in Willowlands had a spring; she hoped this one would be a strong one, and near at hand. “Bring me a flask of the water—freshly drawn—as quick as you can.”

The woman turned and ran.

Mirasol walked to the edge of the field, took a deep breath, and climbed the fence. She was immediately deafened by the lament of the earthlines. It was not only the two in the field who spoke; the earthlines in the entire quadrant echoed their distress.

She walked slowly along the length of the cleft; would she notice in time, she thought, if it decided to widen suddenly? She fished the cup of balance out of her pocket and rubbed her fingers over it; it was very difficult keeping her own balance between the strange space where the earthlines moved and spoke and the fact that if the crack opened under her feet in the mundane world, she’d fall into it. She tried to listen through the earthlines’ misery for any sign or guide: What was the cut doing here? Why was it here in this field rather than in some other field? Why was it here at all?

Broken, wept the earthlines. Broken, broken.

Some of the groaning, she thought, was the ground itself, splitting, tearing itself from itself.

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She was staring into the far end, where it was deepest—probably the height of two tall men, she guessed, easily enough to imprison a cow and her calf—when the woman came with a flask of icy spring water, and shortly after her one of Faine’s brothers with a pair of horses.

Mirasol mixed her cup: water, the spring water this field would know, herbs for distress of mind and body and one for deep dangerous wounds that they will not fester; some of this year’s spring honey, because spring was the season of joy for the future, and some honey tasting strongly of handflowers. Handflowers were lavender-pink, and inside they were striped red in such a way that they resembled the fingers and thumbs of two hands held cupped together. It was considered lucky to drink rainwater from the cups of handflowers—and anyone who regularly did then saw all things so clearly that they could not be deceived. I will not deceive you, said Mirasol silently to the earthlines. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m here and I’m listening; and there is still joy in this world. She stirred the mixture with the oak twig.

Last she dropped in the three small stones, which were for light in darkness, for compassion and for love.

“Someone will have to climb down there with them, you know, to put the ropes around them,” she said.

The man nodded. “I know. I’ll go.” His face was pinched with worry and fear; he met her eyes, briefly, as if forgetting himself, and immediately looked away.

“Drink this first,” Mirasol said, and offered him her cup. “Just a sip—you only need a sip.” The Chalice stones clinked faintly against the side of the cup as he drank.

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She turned away without waiting to see if her mixture had had any effect; she didn’t have a second choice if it didn’t. She knelt, and then lay down flat, just above where the unhappy cow bawled and thrashed. It was not a graceful procedure—what might the Chalice who had cured her father’s trees have done about a trapped cow? Cows and sheep did get caught in natural cuts and hollows sometimes—but there was nothing natural about this one. She spilled several drops from her cup on the bits of cow that happened to be under them when they fell. At least once the sweet water landed on her nose—which was where she was aiming—and Mirasol saw the vast pink tongue reach up to lick it off. The calf, being smaller, and trying to hide under its mother, was harder, but she splashed it a few times.

And then she stood up, as if what she wanted and hoped would happen was going to happen.

The cow stopped bellowing.

“Go down now,” she said. “Get ready. I’ll start at the far end: that’ll give you a few minutes.” She didn’t add, I have no idea how long the effect will last. I have no idea why it worked. If it worked. Maybe the cow just likes the taste of honey.

I have no idea if anything else will work.

She turned away, and began again the long walk—it felt twice as long this second time—to the far end of the grotesque crack in the ground. The high dreadful keening of the earthlines had diminished to a woebegone rumble; a rumble that seemed to be turning toward her—looking for her—looking for help, as Faine had done. She knew the usual conjurations to quiet an earth tremor—often a mere murmur of silence and peace, quiet and calm

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was enough, like singing a lullaby to a fretful child—but these seemed hardly appropriate for an earthquake that had torn a hole in the landscape. But she found herself humming an old lullaby her mother had sung to her: Sleep, my little love, sleep, my little one.

Sleep is sweet and love is sweeter, but honey is sweetest of all.

There were several ritual ways a Chalice could hold her cup; she chose the one—only practical on the slender, stemmed Chalice vessels—that allowed her to weave the fingers of her two hands together around it while her crossed thumbs held the other side: connection, joining, linkage. She tried several phrases from the incantation book she had left behind, but none of them suited her; none of them felt right, none of them settled to the work before her. She felt the earthlines listening—listening but waiting. Waiting to hear the thing that would reassure them, that would knit them together, that would call them home.

She reached the end of the crack and paused. It had, she noticed with some small relief, stopped growing. But when she turned and looked back along the length of it, it seemed leagues long; the two big work-horses as small as mice in the distance; the heavy ropes hanging off their harness and disappearing into the crack were barely visible threads.

“Please,” she said clearly, aloud, as if she spoke to a person.

“Please be as you were. I will try to help you.” She hesitated, and pulled out the handflower honey and added a little more to the mixture in her cup. The water was faintly gold against the silver cup; the small stones in the bottom shone like gems. She did not want gold and silver and gems; she wanted ordinary things, commonplace things. Trees and birdsong and sunlight, and unfractured

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earth. “Let the earth knit together again, like—like darning a sock.

Here are the threads to mend you with.” And she threw a few drops from her cup into the trench. She saw them twinkle in the air as if they were tiny filaments; the pit was quite shallow here, and she could see tiny spots of darkness where they landed. Her fingers were sticky with honey. Absentmindedly she put one in her mouth; the taste of the herbs was clear and sharp, but the honey’s complex sweetness seemed to carry mysteries.

There was a sudden sharp new tremor under her feet. Her heart leaped into her throat and she froze. The jolt loosened the dirt on the sides of the trench, and it pattered down. Quite a lot of it pattered down, till the trench was barely a trench at all, little more than a slight hollow.

“Here are the threads to mend you with,” she said again, having no better spell or command to offer, and she tossed more drops from her cup into the wound in the earth.

The trench began to fill up.

She walked slowly back toward the deep end, murmuring to the earth and the earthlines, tossing sweet mysterious drops into the shadows of the ravine. The earth under her feet still shook, but the shaking now seemed more like that of something shaking itself back together again after a shock or an unbalancing blow: like the turning sock in the hands of the darner.

The crevasse was disappearing.

There was a shout ahead of her, and she saw the horses take the strain; and then they sank into their harness and began to pull. The ropes went taut—tauter; the horses began to move.

“And would you please let Daisy and her calf, and the man in

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there with them, climb out safely,” said Mirasol, and flung more water and herbs and honey. The stones rattled; there was not much of her mixture left.

She saw the head of the cow emerge from the darkness; then her muddy body and finally her lashing tail. She staggered and stood, head low and feet braced. The horses halted, and someone moved to release her. The horses stepped forward again, but the second rope came easily, and a tiny, equally muddy version of Daisy popped out, like a terrier from a hole; and then someone— Faine—was lying by the crack, and reaching his arms into it, and there came the man who had gone into the trench to tie the ropes around Daisy and her calf, and he was the muddiest of all.

“Thank you,” said Mirasol. “You can finish now, please,” and she emptied the last dregs of her cup into the closing crack, catching the stones in her other hand. Perhaps she should not have run forward so quickly and eagerly; when the last of it closed, it closed with a tremor so violent that one of the horses stumbled and whinnied, and the man at their heads fell down.

But it closed. The field was a field again, with nothing to show for what had happened but a slender ragged ridge where the ravine had been, where the grass now grew at peculiar angles. Daisy turned abruptly, and began vigorously to lick her calf. Faine still had an arm around his muddy brother, and Mirasol realised he was laughing.

The words then came to Mirasol; perhaps she had read them somewhere, or perhaps the earthlines had whispered them to her after all. She said them softly, but Faine and his family turned and stood motionless, listening with the earthlines: Lie thou there, thou

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earth. Stiller than starlight, stiller than silence, stiller than darkness, stiller than death.

She thought of that day as she plucked at the fraying, grubby margins of the bandage on her hand. She changed the dressing every day, but wrapped it up again in the same cloth (which she had finally learnt to do one-handed). She should change it; a grimy bandage did not reflect well on the dignity of the Chalice.

She sighed. A grimy bandage on the hand of a beekeeper would make no difference.

She wondered what Faine had said of the occasion. And she thought: nothing. He will have said nothing. It should not have happened; in a demesne not teetering on the edge of disintegration it would not have happened. It was less important to acknowledge that the Chalice had dragged them all back fractionally from that edge than it was to pretend that they were not that close to it in the first place. But this was, she thought sadly, extremely hard on the Chalice.

She recognised that she wanted this Master to succeed for reasons that were also to do with herself, Mirasol, within the Chalice, whose only apprenticeships had concerned bees and woodscraft. She wanted him to succeed because she knew how difficult accepting the Chalice had been for her—and how difficult it was for her now to put out fires and drag back from edges and be ignored. She wanted her Master’s help—help because she was Chalice but also because she was Mirasol. Help to put their

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demesne back together so that the earthlines would never again cry, Broken, broken. Help to lead Willowlands home. But she recognised the exhaustion in the Master’s strange eyes because she knew it in herself. And as the weeks passed after the new Master’s arrival, she recognised something else in his eyes, though she had a harder time putting a name to it.

When she had been a woodskeeper, things like Chalice and Master—and Grand Seneschal, Prelate, and Overlord’s agent— were impossibly beyond her. Even when everyone in the demesne knew that their former Master was out of control and his Chalice pulled in his cataclysmic wake, the ordinary folk, herself included, felt only anxiety and fear. There was no task or duty a beekeeper or woodskeeper could take on that would change the situation. The isolation of the Chalice was certainly on account of all the Chalice needed to know that no one else knew, all the tasks the Chalice needed to perform that no one else could perform; but she had never minded hard work, and her father’s woodright and her mother’s beehives had always been attentively kept because she would rather be doing something than not. It wasn’t the work of the Chalice she minded. It was the vast unfathomable burden of its responsibility. She still felt the Chalice was incomprehensibly beyond her—even wished that it were incomprehensibly beyond her, so she could give up.

In despair, perhaps, but because she had no choice. She felt that something of this same despair was in the Master’s eyes now, and perhaps only she could read it there.

And perhaps it was her duty to report it to the Grand Seneschal, or the Overlord’s agent. Because even above the Chalice’s

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duty to the Master was the Chalice’s duty to the demesne. But she would not report it, any more than she would report herself.

She was not a good Chalice, but she was all they had. The Chalice had come to her, and it remained with her: and as Chalice, her judgement was for the new Master. She clung to this thought sometimes, when her mind blundered like a shying horse among all the shadowy, threatening-looking things she didn’t understand, or like a bee caught indoors, bumping into walls and windows, looking blindly for a way out of this bewildering and inexplicable new landscape. Despair was a private weakness she could not afford to indulge.

But when she remembered that day at Faine’s farm—or those many, many other days that she’d put out a fire or darned a sock or propped up a fallen fence—she didn’t remember that she had succeeded. She remembered that she had had no idea what she was doing, and no idea why it worked. It did not feel to her, remembering, like an indication that she was learning her job, evidence that she was, after all, fit to be Chalice. It felt like something she had got away with, that she might not get away with again.

But there was something more that troubled her, something that troubled her most of all about the accident on the day of the Master’s return—the accident that everyone believed was a sinister portent to begin the new Master’s reign. She wondered if anyone but herself knew, or would remember, that it was a capital offence to injure a Chalice, even for a Master. She especially wondered if the Overlord’s agent knew of this old law. In the early, barbaric days of the demesnes, at least one Master had been put to death for it.

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She’d read about the execution in one of the oldest records available to her. Some of the Willowlands Chalice records were unique, she just didn’t know which ones; and this one was obviously a copy, although there was no telling if any other copies still existed. Perhaps no one else knew that the law had ever been enforced. Most of the cruellest laws were no longer put into practise, but there were unpleasant traces of those old ways still. And the presumption remained that a law that had once been used, however rarely or long ago, was stronger than even a recent law which had never been anything but words in someone’s mouth or written on a page. Much worse was the lingering belief that a law with blood on it was somehow live. Forever.

She was reasonably sure that no one could move against a Master for harming a Chalice unless the Chalice agreed to bear witness. But that would only place her in the trouble she wished to keep him out of, because perjury about a capital crime was also a capital offence, and the Overlord’s agent had seen what happened.

There was so much she didn’t know.

And then the wound refused to heal. This didn’t surprise her; it was in a bad place, and she could not keep the hand still when she was in public, and so she forgot to keep it still when she was alone. It was also difficult to do even the most ordinary tasks with only one hand, especially when your mind was elsewhere—and, Mirasol thought grimly, my mind is always elsewhere.

Since the new Master had come, she had spent additional hours nearly every day at the House or one of the points of the Circle, holding a cup for this or that meeting or conference or rite. Since

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no one had ever tried to reclaim an Elemental priest for Master, there were no records of how that should be done either, and it was not surprising there were many discussions about it, and attempts to adapt the traditional bonds between Master and demesne, and repeated official visits to various important bloodright sites to reinforce, or recover, those bonds—to recover the demesne itself.

Some of this was also the natural result of a new Master and his Circle learning to work together; some of it, Mirasol hoped, was that the other Circle members were taking up their tasks again. But she began to suspect that there were more of these meetings and visits, and her presence was more often required for the most minor of them, than would have been the case if her hand had not been burnt offering the cup of welcome in the first moments of the Master’s coming.

And she became increasingly aware that the Circle, as it was now constituted, was not learning to work together. And that Willowlands remained still far from whole.

Every day her mind swam and struggled while her face and body demonstrated serenity and control. She went home exhausted every night, with the Master’s exhaustion haunting her.

What a pair, she thought sadly. Poor Willowlands. Furthermore she had even less time to pursue her studies—and she urgently needed to continue her studies. She had grown accustomed to sleeping badly as a result of not being able to turn her thoughts off; now she slept worse on account of the pain in her hand. She lay awake in the dark, thinking about what she could be learning if she sat up and lit a candle, and too bone-weary to fumble for her tinder-box.

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Now available in paperback!

There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years. Sunshine just needed a spot where she could be alone with her thoughts for a minute. But then the vampires found her . . . Now, chained and imprisoned in a once-beautiful decaying mansion, alone but for the vampire, Constantine, shackled next to her, Sunshine realizes that she must call on her own hidden strength if she is to survive. But Constantine is not what she expected of a vampire, and soon Sunshine discovers that it is he who needs her, more than either of them know.

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I

t was a dumb thing to do but it ­wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the rest of my life.

Monday eve­n ing is our movie eve­n ing because we are celebrating having lived through another week. Sunday night we lock up at eleven or midnight and crawl home to die, and Monday (barring a few national holidays) is our day off. Ruby comes in on Mondays with her warrior cohort and attacks the coffee­house with an assortment of ­h igh-­tech blasting gear that would whack Godzilla into submission: those ­single-­track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters. Thanks to Ruby, Charlie’s Coffee­house is probably the only place in Old Town where you are safe from the local cockroaches, which are approximately the size of chipmunks. You can hear them clicking when they canter across the cobblestones outside.

We’d begun the tradition of Monday eve­ning movies seven years ago when I started slouching out of bed at four a.m. to get the bread going. Our first customers arrive at ­six-­thirty and they want our Cinnamon Rolls as Big as Your Head and I am the one who makes them. I put the dough on to rise overnight and it is huge and puffy and waiting when I get there at ­four-­thirty. By the time Charlie arrives at six to brew coffee and open the till (and, most of the year, start dragging the outdoor tables down the alley and out to the front),

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you can smell them baking. One of Ruby’s lesser minions arrives at about five for the daily ­sweep- and ­mop-­up. Except on Tuesdays, when the coffee­house is gleaming and I am giving myself tendonitis trying to persuade stiff, surly, ­thirty-­hour-­refrigerated dough that it’s time to loosen up.

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe. He gave me enough of a raise when I finished school (high school diploma by the skin of my teeth and the intercession of my subversive En­glish teacher) and began working for him full time that I could afford my own place, and, even more important, he talked Mom into letting me have it.

But getting up at four a.m. six days a week does put a cramp on your social life (although as Mom pointed out every time she was in a bad mood, if I still lived at home I could get up at ­four-­t wenty). At first Monday eve­n ing was just us, Mom and Charlie and Billy and Kenny and me, and sometimes one or two of the stalwarts from the coffee­house. But over the years Monday eve­nings had evolved, and now it was pretty much any of the coffee­house staff who wanted to turn up, plus a few of the customers who had become friends. (As Billy and Kenny got older the standard of movies improved too. The first Monday eve­n ing that featured a movie that ­wasn’t rated “suitable for all ages” we opened a bottle of champagne.)

Charlie, who ­doesn’t know how to sit still and likes do-­it-­yourselfing at home on his days off, had gradually knocked most of the walls down on the ground floor, so the increasing mob could mill around comfortably. But that was just ­it—my entire life existed in relation to the coffee­house. My only friends ­were staff and regulars. I started seeing Mel because he was single and not ­bad-­looking and the weekday assistant cook at the coffee­house, with that interesting ­bad-­boy aura from driving a motorcycle and having a few too many tattoos, and no known serious drawbacks. (Baz had been single and not ­bad-­looking too, but there’d always been something a little off about him, which resolved itself when Charlie found him with his hand in the till.) I was happy in the bakery. I just sometimes felt when I got out of it I would like to get a little farther out.

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Mom had been in one of her bad moods that par­tic­u­lar week, sharp and short with everyone but the customers, not that she saw them much any more, she was in the office doing the paperwork and giving hell to any of our suppliers who didn’t behave. I’d been having car trouble and was complaining about the garage bill to anyone who’d listen. No doubt Mom heard the story more than once, but then I heard her weekly stories about her hairdresser more than once too (she and Mary and Liz all used Lina, I think so they could get together after and discuss her love life, which was pretty fascinating).

But Sunday eve­ning she overheard me telling Kyoko, who had been out sick and was catching up after five days away, and Mom lost it.

She shouted that if I lived at home I ­wouldn’t need a car at all, and she was worried about me because I looked tired all the time, and when was I going to stop dreaming my life away and marry Mel and have some kids? Supposing that Mel and I wanted to get married, which hadn’t been discussed. I wondered how Mom would take the appearance at the wedding of the remnants of Mel’s old motorcycle ­gang—which is to say the ones that ­were still alive—with their hair and their Rocs and Griffins (even Mel still had an old Griffin for special occasions, although it hemorrhaged oil) and their attitude problems. They never showed up in force at the coffee­house, but she’d notice them at the kind of wedding she’d expect me to have.

The obvious answer to the question of children was, who was going to look after the baby while I got up at four a.m. to make cinnamon rolls? Mel worked as appalling hours as I did, especially since he’d been promoted to head cook when Charlie had been ­forced—by a mutiny of all ­hands—to accept that he could either delegate something or drop dead of exhaustion. So ­house­husbandry ­wasn’t the answer. But in fact I knew my family would have got round this.

When one of our waitresses got pregnant and the boyfriend left town and her own family threw her out, Mom and Charlie took her in and we all babysat in shifts, in and out of the coffee­house. (We’d only just got rid of Mom’s sister Evie and her four kids, who’d stayed for almost two years, and one mom and one baby seemed like pie in the sky in comparison. Especially after Evie, who is professionally

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helpless.) Barry was in second grade now, and Emmy was married to Henry. Henry was one of our regulars, and Emmy still waitressed for us. The coffee­house is like that.

I liked living alone. I liked the silence—and nothing moving but me. I lived upstairs in a big old ­ex-­farm­house at the edge of a federal park, with my landlady on the ground floor. When I’d gone round to look at the place the old ­lady—very tall, very straight, and a level stare that went right through ­you—had looked at me and said she didn’t like renting to Young People (she said this like you might say Dog Vomit) because they kept bad hours and made noise. I liked her immediately. I explained humbly that indeed I did keep bad hours because I had to get up at four a.m. to make cinnamon rolls for Charlie’s Coffee­house, whereupon she stopped scowling magisterially and invited me in.

It had taken three months after graduation for Mom to begin to consider my moving out, and that was with Charlie working on her.

I was still reading the ­apartments-­for-­rent ads in the paper surreptitiously and making the phone calls when Mom was out of earshot.

Most of them in my price range ­were dire. This apartment, up on the third floor at the barn end of the long rambling ­house, was perfect, and the old lady must have seen I meant it when I said so. I could feel my face light up when she opened the door at the top of the second flight of stairs, and the sunshine seemed to pour in from every direction. The living room balcony, cut down from the old hayloft platform but now overlooking the garden, still has no curtains.

By the time we signed the lease my future landlady and I ­were on our way to becoming fast friends, if you can be fast friends with someone who merely by the way she carries herself makes you feel like a troll. Maybe I was just curious: there was so obviously some mystery about her; even her name was odd. I wrote the check to Miss Yolande. No Smith or Jones or ­Fitzalan-­Howard or anything.

Just Miss Yolande. But she was always pleasant to me, and she ­wasn’t wholly without human weakness: I brought her stuff from the coffee­ house and she ate it. I have that dominant ­feed-­people gene that I think you have to have to survive in the ­small-­restaurant business.

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You sure aren’t doing it for the money or the hours. At first it was now and ­then—I didn’t want her to notice I was trying to feed her up—but she was always so pleased it got to be a regular thing. Whereupon she lowered the ­rent—which I have to admit was a godssend, since by then I’d found out what running a car was going to ­cost—and told me to lose the “Miss.”

Yolande had said soon after I moved in that I was welcome in the garden any time I liked too, it was just her and me (and the peanut-­ butter-­baited electric deer fence), and occasionally her niece and the niece’s three little girls. The little girls and I got along because they ­were good eaters and they thought it was the most exciting thing in the world to come in to the coffee­house and be allowed behind the counter. Well, I could remember what that felt like, when Mom was first working for Charlie. But that’s the coffee­house in action again: it tends to sweep out and engulf people. I think only Yolande has ever held out against this irresistible force, but then I do bring her white bakery bags almost every day.

Usually I could let Mom’s temper roll off me. But there’d been too much of it lately. Coffee­house disasters are often hardest on Mom, because she does the money and the admin, and for example actually follows up people’s references when they apply for jobs, which Charlie never bothers with, but she isn’t one for bearing trials quietly. That spring there’d been expensive repairs when it turned out the roof had been leaking for months and a ­whole corner of the ceiling in the main kitchen fell down one afternoon, one of our ­baking-­goods suppliers went bust and we hadn’t found another one we liked as well, and two of our wait staff and another one of the kitchen staff quit without warning. Plus Kenny had entered high school the previous autumn and he was goofing off and getting high instead of studying. He ­wasn’t goofing off and getting high any more than I had done, but he had no gift for keeping a low profile. He was also very ­bright—both my half brothers ­were—and Mom and Charlie had high hopes for them. I’d always suspected that Charlie had pulled me off waitressing, which had bored me silly, and given me a real function in the kitchen to straighten me out. I had been only sixteen, so I was young for it, but he’d been letting me help him from

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time to time out back so he knew I could do it, the question was whether I would. Sudden scary responsibility had worked with me.

But Kenny ­wasn’t going to get a law degree by learning to make cinnamon rolls, and he didn’t need to feed people the way Charlie or I did either.

Anyway Kenny hadn’t come home till dawn that Sunday morning— his curfew was midnight on Saturday ­nights—and there had been hell to pay. There had been hell to pay all that day for all of us, and I went home that night smarting and cranky and my one night a week of twelve hours’ sleep hadn’t worked its usual rehabilitation. I took my tea and toast and Immortal Death (a favorite comfort book since under-­the-­covers-­with-­flashlight reading at the age of eleven or twelve) back to bed when I finally woke up at nearly noon, and even that really spartan scene when the heroine escapes the Dark Other who’s been pursuing her for three hundred pages by calling on her demon heritage (finally) and turning herself into a waterfall didn’t cheer me up. I spent most of the afternoon house­cleaning, which is my other standard answer to a bad mood, and that didn’t work either. Maybe I was worried about Kenny too. I’d been lucky during my brief tearaway spell; he might not be. Also I take the quality of my flour very seriously, and I didn’t think much of our latest trial ­baking-­supply company.

When I arrived at Charlie and Mom’s ­house that eve­ning for Monday movies the tension was so thick it was like walking into a blanket. Charlie was popping corn and trying to pretend everything was fine. Kenny was sulking, which probably meant he was still hung over, because Kenny didn’t sulk, and Billy was being hyper to make up for it, which of course didn’t. Mary and Danny and Liz and Mel ­were there, and Consuela, Mom’s latest assistant, who was beginning to look like the best piece of luck we’d had all year, and about half a dozen of our local regulars. Emmy and Barry ­were there too, as they often ­were when Henry was away, and Mel was playing with Barry, which gave Mom a chance to roll her eyes at me and glare, which I knew meant “see how good he is with ­children—it’s time he had some of his own.” Yes. And in another fourteen years

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this hypothetical kid would be starting high school and learning better, more advanced, adolescent ways of how to screw up and make ­g rown-­ups crazy.

I loved every one of these people. And I ­couldn’t take another minute of their company. Popcorn and a movie would make us all feel better, and it was a working day tomorrow, and you have only so much brain left over to worry with if you run a family restaurant.

The Kenny crisis would go away like every other crisis had always gone away, worn down and eventually buried by an accumulation of order slips, till receipts, and shared stories of the amazing things the public gets up to.

But the thought of sitting for two ­hours—even with Mel’s arm around ­me—and a bottomless supply of excellent popcorn (Charlie ­couldn’t stop feeding people just because it was his day off) ­wasn’t enough on that par­tic­u­lar Monday. So I said I’d had a headache all day (which was true) and on second thought I would go home to bed, and I was sorry. I was out the door again not five minutes after I’d gone in.

Mel followed me. One of the things we’d had almost from the beginning was an ability not to talk about everything. These people who want to talk about their feelings all the time, and want you to talk about yours, make me nuts. Besides, Mel knows my mother. There’s nothing to discuss. If my mom is the lightning bolt, I’m the tallest tree on the plain. That’s the way it is.

There are two very distinct sides to Mel. There’s the ­wild-­boy side, the motorcycle tough. He’s cleaned up his act, but it’s still there.

And then there’s this strange vast serenity that seems to come from the fact that he ­doesn’t feel he has to prove anything. The blend of anarchic thug and tranquil ­self-­possession makes him curiously restful to be around, like walking proof that oil and water can mix. It’s also great on those days that everyone ­else in the coffee­house is screaming.

It was Monday, so he smelled of gasoline and paint rather than garlic and onions. He was absentmindedly rubbing the oak tree tattoo on his shoulder. He was a ­tattoo-­rubber when he was thinking

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about something ­else, which meant that what­ever he was cooking or working on could get pretty liberally dispersed about his person on ruminative days.

“She’ll sheer, day or so,” he said. “I was thinking, maybe I’ll talk to Kenny.”

“Do it,” I said. “It would be nice if he lived long enough to find out he doesn’t want to be a lawyer.” Kenny wanted to get into Other law, which is the dancing-on-the-edge-of-the-muttering-volcano branch of law, but a lawyer is still a lawyer.

Mel grunted. He probably had more reason than me to believe that lawyers are large botulism bacteria in t­ hree-­piece suits.

“Enjoy the movie,” I said.

“I know the real reason you’re blowing, sweetheart,” Mel said.

“Billy’s turn to rent the movie,” I said. “And I hate westerns.”

Mel laughed, kissed me, and went back indoors, closing the door gently behind him.

I stood restlessly on the sidewalk. I might have tried the library’s ­new-­novels shelf, a dependable recourse in times of trouble, but Monday eve­ning was early closing. Alternatively I could go for a walk. I didn’t feel like reading: I didn’t feel like looking at other people’s imaginary lives in flat black and white from out ­here in my only too unimaginary life. It was getting a little late for solitary walking, even around Old Town, and besides, I didn’t want a walk either. I just didn’t know what I did want.

I wandered down the block and climbed into my fresh-­f rom-­the-­ mechanics car and turned the key. I listened to the nice healthy purr of the engine and out of nowhere decided it might be fun to go for a drive. I ­wasn’t a going for a drive sort of person usually. But I thought of the lake.

When my mother had still been married to my father we’d had a summer cabin out there, along with hundreds of other people.

After my parents split up I used to take the bus out there occasionally to see my gran. I didn’t know where my gran ­l ived—it ­wasn’t at the cabin—but I would get a note or a phone call now and then suggesting that she hadn’t seen me for a while, and we could meet at the lake. My mother, who would have loved to forbid these visits—

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when Mom goes off someone, she goes off comprehensively, and when she went off my dad she went off his entire family, excepting me, whom she equally passionately demanded to ­keep— didn’t, but the result of her ­not-­very-­successfully restrained unease and disapproval made those trips out to the lake more of an adventure than they might otherwise have been, at least in the beginning. In the beginning I had kept hoping that my gran would do something really dramatic, which I was sure she was capable of, but she never did.

It ­wasn’t till after I’d stopped hoping . . . ​but that was later, and not at all what I had had in mind. And then when I was ten she disappeared.

When I was ten the Voodoo Wars started. They ­were of course nothing about voodoo, but they ­were about a lot of bad stuff, and some of the worst of them in our area happened around the lake. A lot of the cabins got burned down or leveled one way or another, and there ­were a few places around the lake where you still didn’t go if you didn’t want to have bad dreams or worse for months afterward. Mostly because of those bad spots (although also because there simply ­weren’t as many people to have vacation homes anywhere any more) after the Wars ­were over and most of the mess cleared up, the lake never really caught on again. The wilderness was taking over—which was a good thing because it meant that it could. There ­were a lot of places now where nothing was ever going to grow again.

It was pretty funny really, the only people who ever went out there regularly ­were the Supergreens, to see how the wilderness was getting on, and if as the urban populations of things like raccoons and foxes and rabbits and deer moved back out of town again, they started to look and behave like raccoons and foxes and rabbits and deer had used to look and behave. Supergreens also counted things like osprey and pine marten and some weird marsh grass that was another endangered species although not so interesting to look at, none of which seemed to care about bad human magic, or maybe the bad spots didn’t give ospreys and pine martens and marsh grass bad dreams. I went out there occasionally with ­Mel—we saw ospreys pretty often and pine martens once or twice, but all marsh

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grass looks like all other marsh grass to ­me—but I hadn’t been there after dark since I was a kid.

The road that went to what had been my parents’ cabin was passable, if only just. I got out there and went and sat on the porch and looked at the lake. My parents’ cabin was the only one still standing in this area, possibly because it had belonged to my father, whose name meant something even during the Voodoo Wars. There was a bad spot off to the east, but it was far enough away not to trouble me, though I could feel it was there.

I sat on the sagging porch, swinging my legs and feeling the troubles of the day draining out of me like water. The lake was beautiful: almost flat calm, the gentlest lapping against the shore, and silver with moonlight. I’d had many good times ­here: first with my parents, when they ­were still happy together, and later on with my gran. As I sat there I began to feel that if I sat there long enough I could get to the bottom of what was making me so cranky lately, find out if it was anything worse than ­poor-­quality flour and a somewhat errant little brother.

I never heard them coming. Of course you don’t, when they’re vampires.

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I had kind of a lot of theoretical knowledge about the Others, from reading what I could pull off the globenet about ­them—fabulously, I have to say, embellished by my addiction to novels like Immortal Death and Blood ­Chalice—but I didn’t have much practical ’fo. After the Voodoo Wars, New Arcadia went from being a parochial backwater to number eight on the national top ten of cities to live in, simply because most of it was still standing. Our new rank brought its own problems. One of these was an increased sucker population.

We ­were still pretty clean. But no place on this planet is truly free of Others, including those Darkest Others, vampires.

It is technically illegal to be a vampire. Every now and then some poor stupid or unlucky person gets made a sucker as part of some kind of warning or revenge, and rather than being taken in by the vampire community (if community is the right word) that created

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him or her, they are dumped somewhere that they will be found by ordinary humans before the sun gets them the next morning. And then they have to spend the rest of their, so to speak, lives, in a kind of half prison, half asylum, under doctors’ orders—and of course under guard. I’d heard, although I had no idea if it was true, that these miserable ­ex-­people are ­executed—drugged senseless and then staked, beheaded, and ­burned—when they reached what would have been their normal life expectancy if they’d been alive in the usual way.

One of the origins of the Voodoo Wars was that the vampires, tired of being the only ones of the Big Three, ­major-­league Other Folk coherently and comprehensively legislated against, created a lot of vampires that they left for us humans to look after, and then or­ga­nized ­them—somehow—into a ­wide-­scale breakout. Vampirism doesn’t generally do a lot for your ­personality—that is, a lot of good— and the vampires had chosen as many really nice people as possible to turn, to emphasize their disenchantment with the present system. Membership in the Supergreens, for example, plummeted by something like forty percent during the Voodoo Wars, and a couple of big national charities had to shut down for a few years.

It’s not that any of the Others are really pop­u­lar, or that it had only been the vampires against us during the Wars. But a big point about vampires is that they are the only ones that ­can’t hide what they are: let a little sunlight touch them and they burst into flames.

Very final flames. Exposure and destruction in one neat package.

Weres are only in danger once a month, and there are drugs that will hold the Change from happening. The drugs are illegal, but then so are coke and ­horse and hypes and rats’-­brains and trippers. If you want the ­anti-­Change drugs you can get them. (And most Weres do. Being a ­Were isn’t as bad as being a vampire, but it’s bad enough.)

And a lot of demons look perfectly normal. Most demons have some funny habit or other but unless you live with one and catch it eating garden fertilizer or old combox components or growing scaly wings and floating six inches above the bed after it falls asleep, you’d never know. And some demons are pretty nice, although it’s not something you want to count on. (I’m talking about the Big Three, which

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everyone does, but “demon” is a pretty ­catch-­all term really, and it can often turn out to mean what the law enforcement official on the other end of it wants it to mean at the time.)

The rest of the Others don’t cause much trouble, at least not officially. It is pretty cool to be suspected of being a fallen angel, and everyone knows someone with sprite or peri blood. Mary, at the coffee­house, for example. Everyone wants her to pour their coffee because coffee poured by Mary is always hot. She ­doesn’t know where this comes from, but she ­doesn’t deny it’s some kind of Other blood. So long as Mary sticks to being a waitress at a coffee­house, the government turns a blind eye to this sort of thing.

But if anyone ever manages to distill a drug that lets a vampire go out in daylight they’ll be worth more money in a month than the present total of all bank balances held by everyone on the global council. There are a lot of scientists and backyard bozos out there trying for that ­jackpot—on both sides of the line. The smart money is on the ­black-­market guys, but it’s conceivable that the guys in the white hats will get there first. It’s a more and more open secret that the suckers in the asylums are being experimented o ­ n—for their own good, of course. That’s another result of the Voodoo Wars. The global council claims to want to “cure” vampirism. The legit scientists probably aren’t starting with autopyrocy, however. (At least I don’t think they are. Our June holiday Monday is for Hiroshi Gutterman who managed to destroy a lot of vampires ­single-­handedly, but probably not by being a Naga demon and closing his ­sun-­proof hood at an opportune moment, because aside from not wanting to think about even a ­f ull-­blood Naga having a hood big enough, there are no plausible rumors that either the suckers or the scientists are raising cobras for experiments with their skins.)

There are a lot of vampires out there. Nobody knows how many, but a lot. And the clever ­ones—at least the clever and lucky ones— tend to wind up wealthy. Really old suckers are almost always really wealthy suckers. Any time there isn’t any other news for a while you can pretty well count on another big article all over the globenet debating how much of the world’s money is really in sucker hands, and those articles are an automatic pickup for every national and

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local paper. Maybe ­we’re all just paranoid. But there’s another peculiarity about vampires. They don’t, you know, breed. Oh, they make new ­vampires—but they make them out of ­pre-­existing people.

Weres and demons and so on can have kids with ordinary humans as well as with each other, and often do. At least some of the time it’s because the parents love each other, and love softens the edges of xenophobia. There are amazing stories about vampire sex and vampire orgies (there would be) but there’s never been even a half-­ believable myth about the birth of a vampire or h ­ alf-­vampire baby.

(Speaking of sucker sex, the most pop­u­lar story concerns the fact that since vampires aren’t alive, all their lifelike activities are under their voluntary control. This includes the obvious ones like walking, talking, and biting people, but it also includes the ones that are involuntary in the living: like the flow of their blood. One of the first stories that any teenager just waking up to carnal possibilities hears about male vampires is that they can keep it up indefinitely. I personally stopped blushing after I had my first lover, and discovered that absolutely the last thing I would want in a boyfriend is a permanent ­hard-­on.)

So the suckers are right, humans do hate them in a ­single-­mindedly committed way that is unlike our attitude to any of the other major categories of Others. But it’s hardly surprising. Vampires hold maybe ­one-­fifth of the world’s capital and they’re a race incontestably apart.

Humans don’t like ghouls and lamias either, but the rest of the undead don’t last long, they’re not very bright, and if one bites you, every city hospital emergency room has the antidote (supposing there’s enough of you left for you to run away with). The global council periodically tries to set up “talks” with vampire leaders in which they offer an end to persecution and legal restriction and an inexhaustible supply of pigs’ blood in exchange for a promise that the vampires will stop preying on people. In the first place this ­doesn’t work because while vampires tend to hunt in packs, the vampire population as a ­whole is a series of little fiefdoms, and alliances are brief and rare and usually only exist for the purpose of destroying some mutually intolerable other sucker fiefdom. In the second place the bigger the gang and the more powerful the master vampire, the less he or she

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moves around, and leaving headquarters to sit on bogus human global council “talks” is just not sheer. And third, pigs’ blood isn’t too pop­u­lar with vampires. It’s probably like being offered Cava when you’ve been drinking Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin all your life.

(The coffee­house has a beer and wine license, but Charlie has a soft spot for champagne. Charlie’s was once on a globenet survey of restaurants, listed as the only coffee­house anybody had ever heard of that serves champagne by the glass. You might be surprised how many people like bubbly with their meatloaf or even their cream cheese on pumpernickel.)

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed. Some people adore soap operas.

Some people are neurotic about sports. I follow stories about the Others. Also, we know more about the Others at the ­coffeehouse—if we want ­to—because several of our regulars work for ­SOF—Special Other Forces. Also known as sucker cops, since, as I say, it’s chiefly the suckers they worry about. Mom shuts them up when she catches them talking shop on our premises, but they know they always have an audience in me. I ­wouldn’t trust any cop any farther than I could throw our Prometheus, the shining black monster that dominates the kitchen at Charlie’s and is the apple of Mel’s eye (you understand the connection between motorcycles and cooking when you’ve seen an ­industrial-­strength stove at full blast), but I liked Pat and Jesse.

Our SOFs say that nobody and nothing will ever enable suckers to go out in daylight, and a good thing too, because daylight is the only thing that is preventing them from taking over the other ­four-­fifths of the world economy and starting human ranching as the next hot growth area for venture capitalists. But then SOFs are professionally paranoid, and they don’t have a lot of faith in the guys in lab coats, whether they’re wearing black hats or white ones.

There are stories about “good” vampires like there are stories about the loathly lady who after a hearty meal of raw ­horse and hunting hound and maybe the odd huntsman or archer, followed by an exciting night in the arms of her chosen knight, turns into the kindest and most beautiful lady the world has ever seen; but according to our SOFs no human has ever met a good vampire, or at least has never returned to say so, which kind of tells its own tale, ­doesn’t it?

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And the way I see it, the ­horse and the hounds and the huntsman are still dead, and you have to wonder about the psychology of the chosen knight who goes along with all the carnage and the fun and frolic in bed on some dubious grounds of “honor.”

Vampires kill people and suck their blood. Or rather the other way around. They like their meat alive and frightened, and they like to play with it a while before they finish it off. Another story about vampires is that the one domestic pet a vampire may keep is a cat, because vampires understand the way cats’ minds work. During the worst of the Voodoo Wars anyone who lived alone with a cat was under suspicion of being a vampire. There ­were stories that in a few places where the Wars ­were the worst, solitary people with cats who didn’t burst into flames in daylight ­were torched. I hoped it ­wasn’t true, but it might have been. There are always cats around Charlie’s, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly. There are always more of them at the full moon too, which goes to show that not every ­Were ­chooses—or, more likely in Old Town, can ­afford—to go the drug route.

So when I swam back to consciousness, the fact that I was still alive and in one piece ­wasn’t reassuring. I was propped against something at the edge of a ring of firelight. Vampires can see in the dark and they don’t cook their food, but they seem to like playing with fire, maybe the way some humans get off on joyriding stolen cars or playing l­ast-­across on a busy railtrack.

I came out of it feeling wretchedly sick and shaky, and of course scared out of my mind. They’d put some kind of Breath over me. I knew that vampires don’t have to stoop to blunt instruments or something on a handkerchief clapped over your face. They can just breathe on you and you are out cold. It isn’t something they can all do, but nearly all vampires hunt in packs since the Wars, and being the Breather to a gang had become an important sign of status (according to globenet reports). They can all move utterly silently, however, and, over short distances, faster than ­anything—well, faster than anything alive—as well. So even if the Breath went wrong somehow they’d catch you anyway, if they wanted to catch you.

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“She’s coming out of it,” said a voice.

I’d never met a vampire before, nor heard one speak, except on TV, where they run the voice through some kind of antiglamor technology so no one listening will march out of their ­house and start looking for the speaker. I ­can’t imagine that a vampire would want everyone listening to its voice to leap out of their chairs and start seeking it, but I don’t know how vampires (or cats, or loathly ladies) think, and maybe it would want to do this. And there is, of course, a story, because there is always a story, that a master vampire can tune its voice so that maybe only one specific person of all the possibly millions of people who hear a broadcast (and a sucker interview is always a big draw) will jump out of their chair, ­etc. I don’t think I believe this, but I’m just as glad of the antiglamor tech. But what­ever ­else it does, it makes their voices sound funny. Not human, but not human in a clattery, mechanical, microchip way.

So in theory I suppose I shouldn’t have known these guys ­were vampires. But I did. If you’ve been kidnapped by the Darkest Others, you know it.

In the first place, there’s the smell. It’s not at all a ­butcher-­shop smell, as you might expect, although it does have that metallic blood tang to it. But meat in a butcher’s shop is dead. I know this is a contradiction in terms, but vampires smell of live blood. And something ­else. I don’t know what the something ­else is; it’s not any animal, vegetable, or mineral in my experience. It’s not attractive or disgusting, although it does make your heart race. That’s in the genes, I suppose. Your body knows it’s prey even if your brain is fuddled by the Breath or trying not to pay attention. It’s the smell of vampire, and your ­fight-­or-­fl ight instincts take over.

There aren’t many stories of those instincts actually getting you away though. At that moment I c­ ouldn’t think of any.

And vampires don’t move like humans. I’m told that young ones can “pass” (after dark) if they want to, and a pop­u­lar way of playing chicken among humans is to go somewhere there’s a rumor of vampires and see if you can spot one. I knew Kenny and his buddies had done this a few times. I did it when I was their age. It’s not enormously dangerous if you stay in a group and don’t go into the no-­man’s-land

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around the big cities. ­We’re a ­medium-­sized city and, as I say, ­we’re pretty clean. It’s still a dumb and dangerous thing to ­do—dumber than my driving out to the lake should have been.

The vampires around the bonfire ­weren’t bothering not to move like vampires.

Also, I said that the antiglam tech makes sucker voices sound funny on TV and radio and the globenet. They sound even funnier in person. Funny peculiar. Funny awful.

Maybe there’s something about the Breath. I woke up, as I say, sick and wretched and scared, but I should have been freaked completely past thought and I ­wasn’t. I knew this was the end of the road. Suckers don’t snatch people and then decide they’re not very hungry after all and let them go. I was dinner, and when I was finished being dinner, I was dead. But it was like: okay, that’s the way it goes, bad luck, damn. Like the way you might feel if your vacation got canceled at the last minute, or you’d spent all day making a fabulous birthday cake for your boyfriend and tripped over the threshold bringing it in and it landed upside down on the dog. Damn.

But that’s all.

I lay there, breathing, listening to my heart race, but feeling this weird numb composure. We ­were still by the lake. From where I ­half-­lay I could see it through the trees. It was still a beautiful serene moonlit eve­n ing.

“Do we take her over immediately?” This was the one who had noticed I was awake. It was a little apart from the others, and was sitting up straight on a tree stump or a ­rock—I ­couldn’t see ­which— as if keeping watch.

“Yeah. Bo says so. But he says we have to dress her up first.” This one sounded as if it was in charge. Maybe it was the Breather.

“Dress her up? What is this, a party?”

“I thought we had the party while . . .” said a third one. Several of them laughed. Their laughter made the hair on my arms stand on end. I ­couldn’t distinguish any individual shapes but that of the watcher. I ­couldn’t see how many of them there ­were. I thought I was listening to male voices but I ­wasn’t sure. That’s how weird sucker voices are.

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“Bo says our . . . ​guest is ­old-­fashioned. Ladies should wear dresses.”

I could feel them looking at me, feel the glint of their eyes in the firelight. I didn’t look back. Even when you already know you’re toast you don’t look in vampires’ eyes.

“She’s a lady, huh.”

“Don’t matter. She’ll look enough like one in a dress.” They all laughed again at this. I may have whimpered. One of the vampires separated itself from the boneless dark slithery blur of vampires and came toward me. My heart was going to lunge out of my mouth but I lay still. I was, strangely, beginning to feel my way into the numbness—as if, if I could, I would find the center of me again. As if being able to think clearly and calmly held any possibility of doing me any good. I wondered if this was how it felt when you woke up in the morning on the day you knew you ­were going to be executed.

One of the things you need to understand is that I’m not a brave person. I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can produce character references. But that’s something ­else. I’m not brave. Mel is brave. His oldest friend told me some stories about him once I could barely stand to listen to, about dispatch riding during the Wars, and Mel’d been pissed off when he found out, although he hadn’t denied they happened. Mom is brave: she left my dad with no money, no job, no ­prospects—her own parents had dumped her when she married my dad, and her younger sisters didn’t find her again till she resurfaced years later at ­Charlie’s—and a ­six-­year-­old daughter. Charlie is brave: he started a coffee­house by talking his bank into giving him a loan on his ­house back in the days when you only saw rats, cockroaches, derelicts, and Charlie himself on the streets of Old Town.

I’m not brave. I make cinnamon rolls. I read a lot. My idea of excitement is Mel popping a wheelie driving away from a stoplight with me on pillion.

The vampire was standing right next to me. I didn’t think I’d seen it walk that far. I’d seen it stand up and become one vampire out of a group of vampires. Then it was standing next to me. It. He.

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I looked at his hand as he held something out to me. “Put it on.” I reluctantly extended my own hand and accepted what it was. He didn’t seem any more eager to touch me than I was to touch him; the thing he was offering glided from his hand to mine. He moved away. I tried to watch, but I ­couldn’t differentiate him from the shadows. He was just not there.

I stood up slowly and turned my back on all of them. You might not think you could turn your back on a lot of vampires, but do you want to watch while they check the rope for kinks and the security of the noose and the lever on the trap door or do you maybe want to close your eyes? I turned my back. I pulled my T-shirt off over my head and dropped the dress down over me. The shoulder straps barely covered my bra straps and my neck and shoulders and most of my back and breast ­were left bare. Buffet dining. Very funny. I took my jeans off underneath the long loose skirt. I still had my back to them. I was hoping that vampires ­weren’t very interested in a meal that was apparently going to someone ­else. I didn’t like having my back to them but I kept telling myself it didn’t matter (there are guards to grab you if the lever still jams on the first attempt and you try to dive off the scaffold). I was very carefully clumsy and awkward about taking my jeans off, and in the pro­cess tucked my little jackknife up under my bra. It was only something to do to make me feel I hadn’t just given up. What are you going to do with a two-­and­a-half-­inch folding blade against a lot of vampires?

I’d had to take my sneakers off to get out of my jeans, and I looked at them dubiously. The dress was silky and slinky and it didn’t go with sneakers, but I didn’t like going barefoot either.

“That’ll do,” said the one who had given me the dress. He reappeared from the shadows. “Let’s go.”

And he reached out and took my arm.

Physically I only flinched; internally it was revolution. The numbness faltered and the panic broke through. My head throbbed and swam; if it hadn’t been for those tight, terrifying fingers around my upper arms I would have fallen. A second vampire had me by the other arm. I hadn’t seen it approach, but at that moment I ­couldn’t see anything, feel anything but panic. It didn’t matter that they had

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to have touched me ­before—when they caught me, when they put me under the dark, when they brought me to wherever we ­were—I hadn’t been conscious for that. I was conscious now.

But the ­numbness—the weird detached composure, what­ever it ­was—pulled itself together. It was the oddest sensation. The numbness and the panic crashed through my spasming body, and the numbness won. My brain stuttered like a cold engine and reluctantly fired again.

The vampires had dragged me several blind steps while this was going on. The numbness now noted dispassionately that they ­were wearing gloves. As if this suddenly made it all right the panic subsided. One of my feet hurt; I’d already managed to stub it on something, invisible in the dark.

The material of the gloves felt rather like leather. The skin of what animal, I thought.

“You sure are a quiet one,” the second vampire said to me. “Aren’t you going to beg for your life or anything?” It laughed. He laughed.

“Shut up,” said the first vampire.

I didn’t know why I knew this, since I ­couldn’t see or hear them, but I knew the other vampires ­were following, except for one or two who ­were flitting through the trees ahead of us. Maybe I didn’t know it. Maybe I was imagining things.

We didn’t go far, and we went slowly. For what­ever reason the two vampires holding me let me pick my shaky, barefoot, human way across bad ground in the dark. It must have seemed slower than a crawl to them. There was still a moon, but that light through the leaves only confused matters further for me. I didn’t think this was an area I was familiar with, even if I could see it. I thought I could feel a bad spot not too far away, farther into the trees. I wondered if vampires felt bad spots the way humans did. Everyone wondered if vampires had anything to do with the presence of bad spots, but bad spots ­were mysterious; the Voodoo Wars had produced bad spots, and vampires had been the chief enemy in the Wars, but even the globenet didn’t seem to know any more. Everyone in the area knew about the presence of bad spots around the lake, whether they went hiking out there or not, but there’s never any gossip about

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sucker activity. Vampires tend to prefer cities: the higher density of human population, presumably.

The only noises ­were the ones I made, and a little hush of water, and the stirring of the leaves in the air off the lake. The shoreline was more rock than marsh, and when we crossed a ragged little stream the cold water against my feet was a shock: I’m alive, it said.

The rational numbness now pointed out that vampires could, apparently, cross running water under at least some circumstances.

Perhaps the size of the stream was important. I observed that my two guards had stepped across it bank to bank. Perhaps they didn’t want to get their shoes wet, as they had the luxury of shoes. It would be bad business for the electric moat companies if it became known that running water didn’t stop suckers.

I could feel the . . . ​what? . . . ​increasing. Oppression, tension, suspense, foreboding. I of course was feeling all these things. But we ­were coming closer to wherever we ­were going, and my escorts didn’t like the situation either. I told myself I was imagining this, but the impression remained.

We came out of the trees and paused. There was enough moonlight to make me blink; or perhaps it was the surprise of coming to a clear area. Somehow you don’t think of suckers coming out under the sky in a big open space, even at night.

There had been a few really grand ­houses on the lake. I’d seen pictures of them in magazines but I’d never visited one. They had been abandoned with the rest during the Wars and ­were presumably either burned or blasted or derelict now. But I was looking up a long, ­once-­landscaped slope to an enormous mansion at the head of it.

Even in the moonlight I could see how shabby it was; it was missing some of its shingles and shutters, and I could see at least one broken window. But it was still standing. Where we ­were would once have been a lawn of smooth perfect green, and I could see scars in the earth near the ­house that must have been garden paths and flower beds. There was a boat­house whose roof had fallen in near us where we stood at the shore. The bad spot was near ­here; behind the ­house, not far. I was surprised there was a building still relatively in one piece this close to a bad spot; there was a lot I didn’t know about the Wars.

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I felt I would have been content to go on not knowing.

“Time to get it over with,” said Bo’s lieutenant.

They started walking up the slope toward the ­house. The others had melted out of the trees (wherever they’d been meanwhile) and ­were straggling behind the three of us, my two jailers and me. My sense that none of them was happy became stronger. I wondered if their willingness to walk through the woods at fumbling human speed had anything to do with this. I looked up at the sky, wondering, almost calmly, if this was the last time I would see it. I glanced down and to either side. The footing was nearly as bad ­here as it had been among the trees. There was something odd . . . ​I thought about my parents’ old cabin and the cabins and cottages (or rather the remains of them) around it. In the ten years since the Wars had been officially ended saplings and scrub had grown up pretty thoroughly around all of them. They should have done the same around this ­house. I thought: it’s been cleared. Recently. That’s why the ground is so uneven. I looked again to either side: now that I was looking it was obvious that the forest had been hacked back too. The big ­house was sitting, all by itself, in the middle of a wide expanse of land that had been roughly but thoroughly stripped of anything that might cause a shadow.

This shouldn’t have made my situation any worse, but I was suddenly shuddering, and I hadn’t been before.

The ­house was plainly our destination. I stumbled, and stumbled again. I was not doing it deliberately as some kind of hopeless delaying tactic; I was merely losing my ability to hold myself together.

Something about that cleared space, about what this meant about . . . ​ what­ever was waiting for me. Something about the reluctance of my escort. About the fact that therefore what­ever it was that waited was more terrible than they w ­ ere.

My jailers merely tightened their hold and ­frog-­marched me when I wobbled. Suckers are very strong; they may not have noticed that they ­were now bearing nearly all my weight as my knees gave and my feet lost their purchase on the ragged ground.

They dragged me up the last few stairs to the wide, ­once-­elegant porch; the treads creaked under my weight as I missed my footing,

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while the vampires flowed up on either side of us with no more sound than they had made ranging through the woods. One of them opened the front door and stood aside for the prisoner and her guards to go in first. We entered a big, dark, empty hall; some moonlight spilled in through open doors on either side of us, enough that my eyes could vaguely make out the extent of it. It was probably bigger than the ­whole ground floor of Mom and Charlie’s ­house. At the far end a staircase swirled up in a semicircle, disappearing into the murk overhead.

We turned left and went through a ­half-­open door.

This had to be a ballroom; it was even bigger than the front hall had been. There was no furniture that I could see, but there was a muddle ­overhead—its shadow had wrenched my panicky attention toward ­it—that looked rather like a vast chandelier, although I would have expected anything like that to have been looted years ago. It seemed like acres of floor as we crossed it. There was another muddle leaning up against the wall in front of ­us—a possibly human-­bodyshaped muddle, I thought, confused. Another prisoner? Another live dinner? Was waiting to be eaten in company going to be any less horrible than waiting alone? Where was the “old-­fashioned guest” who liked dresses rather than jeans and sneakers? Oh, dear gods and angels, let this be over quickly, I cannot bear much more. . . . ​ The muddle was someone sitting ­cross-­legged, head bowed, forearms on knees. I didn’t realize till it raised its head with a liquid, inhuman motion that it was another vampire.

I jerked backward. I didn’t mean to; I knew I ­wasn’t going to get away: I ­couldn’t help it. The vampire on my ­left—the one who had asked me why I didn’t beg for my ­life—laughed again. “There’s some life in you after all, girlie. I was wondering. Bo ­wouldn’t like it if it turned out we caught a blanker. He wants his guest in a good mood.”

Bo’s lieutenant said again, “Shut up.”

One of the other vampires drifted up to us and handed its lieutenant something. They passed it between them as if it had been no more than a handkerchief, but it . . . ​clanked.

Bo’s lieutenant said, “Hold her.” He dropped my arm and picked up my foot, as casually as a carpenter picking up a hammer. I would

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have fallen, but the other vampire held me fast. Something cold closed around my ankle, and when he dropped my foot again it fell to the floor hard enough to bruise the sole, because of the new weight. I was wearing a metal shackle, and trailing a chain. The vampire who had brought the thing to Bo’s lieutenant stretched out the end of the chain and clipped it into a ring in the wall.

“How many days has it been, Connie?” said Bo’s lieutenant softly.

“Ten? Twelve? Twenty? She’s young and smooth and warm. Totally flash. Bo told us to bring you a nice one. She’s all for you. We ­haven’t touched her.”

I thought of the gloves.

He was backing away slowly as he spoke, as if the ­cross-­legged vampire might jump at him. The vampire holding me seemed to be idly watching Bo’s lieutenant, and then with a sudden, spine-­unhinging hisssss let go of me and sprang after him and the others, who ­were dissolving back into the shadows, as if afraid to be left behind.

I fell down, and, for a moment, ­half-­stunned, ­couldn’t move.

The vampire gang was, in the sudden way of vampires, now on the other side of the big room, by the door. I thought it was Bo’s lieutenant ­who—I didn’t see ­how—made some sort of gesture, and the chandelier burst alight. “You’ll want to check out what you’re getting,” he said, and now that he was leaving his voice sounded strong and scornful. “Bo didn’t want you to think we’d try anything nomad. And, so okay, so you don’t need the light. But it’s more fun if she can see you too, isn’t it?”

The vampire who had dropped me said, “Hey, her feet are already ­bleeding—if you like feet.” He giggled, a h ­ igh-­pitched goblin screech.

Then they ­were gone.

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I think I must have fainted again. When I came to myself I was stiff all over, as if I had been lying on the floor for a long time. I both remembered and tried not to let myself quite remember what had happened. This lasted for maybe ten seconds. I was still alive, so I ­wasn’t dead yet. If it wanted me awake and struggling, to continue to appear to be unconscious was a good idea. I lay facing the door the

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gang had left by; which meant that the ­cross-­legged vampire was behind me. . . . ​Don’t think about it.

I was up on my knees, halfway to my feet, and scrambling for the door before I finished thinking this, even though I knew you ­couldn’t run away from a vampire. I had forgotten that I was chained to the wall. I hit the end of my chain and fell again. I cried out, as much from fear as pain. I lay sprawled where I struck, waiting for it to be over.

Nothing happened.

Again I thought, Please, gods and angels, let it be over.

Nothing happened.

Despairingly I sat up, hitched myself around to face what was behind me.

It was looking at me. He was looking at me.

The chandelier was set with candles, not electric bulbs, so the light it shed was softer and less definite. Even so he looked bad. His eyes (no: don’t look in their eyes) ­were a kind of ­g ray-­g reen, like stagnant bog water, and his skin was the color of old ­mushrooms—the sort of mushrooms you find screwed up in a paper bag in the back of the fridge and try to decide if they’re worth saving or if you should throw them out now and get it over with. His hair was black, but lank and dull. He would have been tall if he stood up. His shoulders ­were broad, and his hands and wrists, drooping over his knees, looked huge. He wore no shirt, and his feet, like mine, ­were bare. This seemed curiously indecent, that he should be half naked. I didn’t like it. . . . ​Oh, right, I thought, good one. The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you’re fussing that he’s tied you to the track with the wrong kind of rope. There was a long angry weal across one of the vampire’s forearms. Overall he looked . . . ​spidery. Predatory. Alien. Nothing human except that he was more or less the right shape.

He was thin, thin to emaciated, the cheekbones and ribs looking like they ­were about to split the ­old-­mushroom skin. It didn’t matter.

The ­still-­burning vitality in that body was visible even to my eyes.

He would be fine again once he’d had dinner.

My teeth chattered. I pulled my knees up under my chin and

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wrapped my arms around them. We sat like this for several minutes, the vampire motionless, while I chattered and trembled and tried not to moan. Tried not to beg uselessly for my life. Watched him watching me. I didn’t look into his eyes again. At first I looked at his left ear, but that was too close to those ­eyes—how could something the color of swamp water be that compelling?—so I looked at his bony left shoulder instead. I could still see him staring at me. Or feel him staring.

“Speak,” he said at last. “Remind me that you are a rational creature.” The words had long pauses between them, as if he found it difficult to speak, or as if he had to recall the words one at a time; and his voice was rough, as if some time recently he had damaged it by prolonged shouting. Perhaps he found it awkward to speak to his dinner. If he ­wasn’t careful he’d go off me, like Alice after she’d been introduced to the pudding. I should be so lucky.

I flinched at the first sound of his voice, both because he had spoken at all, and also because his voice sounded as alien as the rest of him looked, as if the chest that produced it was made out of some strange material that did not reflect sound the same way that ordinary—that is to say, ­live—flesh did. His voice sounded much odder— eerier, ­d irer—than the voices of the vampires who had brought me ­here. You could ­half-­imagine that Bo’s gang had once been human.

You ­couldn’t imagine that this one ever had.

As I flinched I ­squeaked—a kind of unh? First I thought rather deliriously about Alice and her pudding, and then the meaning of his words began to penetrate. Remind him I was a rational creature! I ­wasn’t at all sure I still was one. I tried to pull my scattered wits together, come up with a topic other than Lewis ­Carroll. . . . ​“I—oh— they called you Connie,” I said at random, after I had been silent too long. “Is that your name?”

He made a noise like a cough or a growl, or something ­else I didn’t have a name for, some vampire thing. “You know enough not to look in my eyes,” he said. “But you do not know not to ask me my name?” The words came closer together this time, and there was definitely a question mark at the end. He was asking me.

“Oh—no—oh—I don’t ­k now—I don’t know that much about

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vam—er,” I gabbled, remembering halfway through the word he had not himself used the word vampire. He’d said “me” and “my.”

Perhaps you didn’t say vampire like you didn’t ask one’s name. I tried to think of everything Pat and Jesse and the others had told me over the years, and considered the likelihood that the SOF view of vampires was probably rather different from the vampires’ own view and of limited use to me now. And that having Immortal Death very nearly memorized was no use at all. “Pardon me,” I said, with as much dignity as I could pretend to, which ­wasn’t much. “I—er—what would you like me to talk about?”

There was another of his pauses, and then he said, “Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have ­power—even human names. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

My mouth dropped open. “Tell you—” Who am I, Scheherazade?

I felt a sudden hysterical rush of outrage. It was bad enough that I was going to be eaten (or rather, ­drunk—my mind would revert to Alice), but I had to talk first? “I—I am the baker at Charlie’s Coffee­ house, in town. Charlie married my mom when I was ten, just before t­ he—er.” I managed not to say “before the Voodoo Wars,” which I thought might be a sensitive subject. “They have two sons, Kenny and Billy. They’re nice kids.” Well, Billy was still a nice kid. Kenny was a teenager. Oh, hell. I ­wasn’t supposed to be using names. Oh, too bad. There are more than one Charlie and Kenny and Billy in the world. “We all work at the coffee­house although my brothers are still in school. My boyfriend works there too. He rules the kitchen now that Charlie has kind of become the maitre d’ and the wine steward, if you want to talk about a coffee­house having a maitre d’ and a wine steward.” Okay, I thought, I remembered not to say Mel’s name.

But it was hard to remember what my life was. It seemed a very long time ago, all of it, now, to­n ight, chained to a wall in a deserted ballroom on the far side of the lake, talking to a vampire. “I live in an apartment across town from the coffee­house, upstairs from ­Y—from the old lady who owns the ­house. I love it there, there are all these trees, but my windows get a lot ­of—er.” This time what

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I ­wasn’t saying was “sunlight,” which I thought might also be a touchy topic. “I’ve always liked fooling around in the kitchen. One of my first memories is holding a wooden spoon and crying till my mom let me stir something. Before she married Charlie, my mom used to tease me, say I was going to grow up to be a cook, other kids played softball and joined the drama club, all I ever did was hang around the coffee­house kitchen, so, she said, she might as well marry one, a cook, since he kept ­asking—Charlie kept ­asking—she said she was finally saying yes, because she wanted to make it easy for me. That was our joke. She met him by working for him. She was a waitress. She likes feeding ­people—like Charlie and me and ­M— like Charlie and me and the cook. She thinks the answer to just about everything is a good nourishing meal, but she ­doesn’t much like cooking, and now she mostly manages the rest of us, works out the schedule so everyone gets enough hours and nobody gets too many very often, which is sort of the Olympic triathalon version of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time, only she has to do it every week, and she also does the books and the ordering. Um. It’s just as well she’s back there because a lot of people don’t come to us for nourishing meals, they come for a slab of something chocolate and a glass of champagne, or ­M—er, or our ­a ll-­day breakfast which is eggs and bacon and sausages and baked beans and pancakes and hash browns and toast, and a cinnamon roll till they run out, which they usually do by about nine, but there are muffins all day, and then a free wheelbarrow ­r ide to the bus stop after. Er. That’s a joke. A wheelbarrow ­r ide over our cobblestones would be no favor anyway.

“I have to get up at four a.m. to start the cinnamon rolls—cinnamon rolls as big as your head, it’s a Charlie’s ­specialty—but I don’t mind. I love working with yeast and flour and sugar and I love the smell of bread baking. ­M—I mean, my boyfriend, says he wanted to ask me out because he saw me the first time when I was up to my elbows in bread dough and covered with flour. He says that for most guys it’s supposed to be great legs or a girl being a great ­dancer—I ­can’t dance at ­all—or at least a good personality or something high-minded like that, but for him it was definitely watching me thump into that bread dough. . . .”

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