Bridge of Thorns "It is claimed most ettins now live in the underground city of First Deep, far behind the Shadowline in what once was West Vutland, but before the days of the Great Plague they are said to have lived at least as far south as the Eliuin Mountains of Syan, and in the Settish and Perikalese mountains as well." -from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand" I AM THE WORST SPY THE GODSEVER MADE,Matt Tinwright had to admit. The first time someone asks me what I'm doing here I shall scream like a little girl and swoon.
He had never been in this part of the royal residence as far as he knew; with its unfamiliar, echoing halls and ancient floor-to-ceiling tapestries full of staring beasts it might as well have been an ogre's cave in the deep forest, carpeted in the bones of unwary travelers. Doom seemed to lurk around every corner.
The gods curse you, Avin Brone, he thought for perhaps the hundredth time. You are a monster, not a man.
Tinwright had only risked a venture into this frightening territory because most of the household were out on the castle walls looking at some devilry the fairies had begun across the water. He had wanted to go and see for himself, of course, but knew he could not afford to miss this opportunity. So far Brone had scorned all information Tinwright had brought him, dismissing a list of mirrors to be found around the residence as "blithering nonsense" and threatening to have the poet skinned and made into a hat. While even Tinwright did not believe he was likely to wind up in a milliner's workroom, he had no doubt that the Count of Landsend was losing his patience: every word of the man's last shouting denunciation had shivered him to the very center of his bones.
But now he had been wandering the residence halls for over an hour. He had been forced to tell several curious servants that he was lost, making up false errands to explain his presence, and each time his feeling of dread had increased. What if he was caught? What if they brought him to Hendon Tolly and he had to look into those horrible, piercing eyes and try to lie? He would never manage. Matthias Tinwright had learned long before that although he could write poems about heroes like Caylor, describe in stirring words how they stood before the direst foes with faith in their hearts and a smile on their lips, he was no hero himself.
No, I will tell my captors everything, he promised himself, long before the first red-hot iron nears my skin. I will tell them Brone made me do it. I will beg for my life.
Gods help me, how did I find myself in this evil trap?
Tinwright walked beneath an arch and paused, staring up at the faces lining the walls. He was in the royal portrait gallery-but how had he strayed so far? The kings and queens looked down on him, some smiling but most dour and forbidding, as if disturbed to find this callow interloper in their midst. The earliest, brought from Connord with Anglin and painted in the crude style of the early Trigonate era, seemed no more human than the beasts from the tapestries, all staring eyes and stiff, mask-like features…
Now, suddenly, he could hear voices in the passage outside the hall. Tinwright looked around in panic. He was caught in the middle of a large room-by the time he reached the far side and the door the speakers would see him. Did he dare hope it was only more servants and try to brazen out yet another encounter? The voices, getting nearer by the moment, sounded loud and authoritative. His heart raced even faster.
There. The wall was open just across from him-a stairwell. He dashed across the stone flags and up onto the bottommost step just as the men he had heard swept into the room, their voices suddenly growing and echoing beneath the tall ceiling. Tinwright crouched, shrinking back against the stairs so that he could not be seen, although it meant he himself could not see who had entered.
"… Have found something in one of the old works-Phayallos, I believe-that refers to such things. He called them Greater Tiles because of their size, and believed that they were-how did he put it?-'Windows and Doorways, although few can cross their thresholds.' " Tinwright could almost recognize the voice-he was certain he had heard it before, hoarse with age, breathy but sharp-edged.
"Which tells us little we don't already know," said the other. Tinwright shrank even farther back into the shadows of the stairwell and held his breath in fear. The second voice belonged to Hendon Tolly. "Look at all these cow-eyed fools!" Tolly was obviously speaking of the Eddon portraits. "Generations of kings no better than shepherds, content to tend their little pasturage."
"They are your ancestors, too, Lord Tolly," the other man observed respectfully.
To Tinwright's continuing horror, the pair had stopped in the middle of the great chamber, not far from where he crouched. Why did I hide? Idiot! There's no way to pretend innocence now if they catch me!
"Yes, but not my ideal," said Tolly. "Great Syan to the south has been weak for a century, beautiful to see but rotten inside. Brenland and the rest are little more than peasant villages with walls around them. With only a little determination we could have ruled all of Eion." Tinwright could hear him spit. "But things will change." A deeper tone entered his voice-something cold and harsh. "You will not fail me, will you, Okros?"
"No, Lord Tolly, fear not! We have solved most of the riddles already, except for the damnable Godstone. I begin to believe it doesn't exist."
"Didn't you say this Godstone was not absolutely necessary?"
"Yes, my lord, as best I can tell, but I still would like to have it before we attempt…" The physician cleared his throat. "Please remember, these are very complicated matters, sire-not like readying a siege engine. Not a matter of simple engineering."
"I know that. Do not treat me like a fool." The dangerous chill in Hendon Tolly's voice deepened.
"Never, my lord!" Tinwright had seen Okros Dioketian around the residence, a brisk, unsmiling man who seemed always a little contemptuous of those around him, though he masked it with etiquette. But he did not sound contemptuous now-he sounded terrified of his master. Tinwright could sympathize. "No, my lord, I say it only to remind you that there is much still to do. I am laboring all hours of the day and night to…"
"You said we must employ the charm at Midsummer or miss our chance. Is that not right?"
"Yes… yes, I did say…"
"Then we cannot wait any longer. You must show me how it is all to be done, and soon. If you cannot… then I will find another scholar."
Okros did not speak for some time, moments in which he had clearly struggled to master his shaking voice. He had not been entirely successful. "Of course, Lord Tolly. I… I think I have pieced together most of the ritual now-yes, almost all! I merely have to deduce what some of the words mean, since Phayallos and the other ancient scholars are not always in agreement. For instance, there is one who says most emphatically that for the charm to be successful, 'the Tile must be clouded with blood.' "
Hendon Tolly laughed. "I do not think we should have any trouble with that-a few less mouths to feed in this gods-blasted anthill of a city would be welcome." His voice grew fainter as he began walking again. Tinwright said a silent prayer of thanks to Zosim that he would not have to crouch in hiding much longer: his back and buttocks were beginning to ache.
"But I cannot help wondering what that means-'clouded'?" Okros sounded like he was following after. "I have checked three translations and they all say something like it. Clouded, fogged, never smeared or anointed. It is a mirror, lord. How do you cloud a mirror with blood?"
"Oh, gods," said Tolly in evident frustration, "slit a few virgin throats I suppose. Isn't that what those ancients always want? Sacrifices? Surely even in this blighted city we can find a few virgins-there are always children, after all."
Even as the horror of what Tolly was saying sank in, it abruptly became clear to Tinwright that the voices were coming back toward him once more-that Hendon Tolly had reversed his direction and was approaching the staircase where Tinwright was hiding. Without even taking the time to stand up, he turned and began to scramble up the staircase on his hands and knees. When he got to the first turn he pulled himself upright and hurried on, trying to match speed to stealth. He could still dimly hear Tolly and the physician arguing below him, but only a word here and there: to his measureless relief, they did not seem to be following him up the stairs.
"… Phantoms… lands that do not…" Okros was faint as wind around the castle's turrets. "… we cannot chance the…"
"… Gods themselves…" Tolly was laughing again, his voice rising in glee. "The whole world will fall to its knees, shrieking…!"
As he reached the top Tinwright tumbled out of the doorway and onto the landing above, his fear no longer just that of being caught. Something in Hendon Tolly's voice had changed-those last words had sounded like the cry of something not quite human.
For a long time he stood by the stairwell, trying to breathe silently as he listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but he no longer heard even the voices. Still, Okros and the Lord Protector might only have moved to the next room. He would wait a long while to make sure it was safe to go down. Tolly terrified him at the best of times, but to hear the man talk so blithely of blood sacrif ice-and that laugh, that terrible laugh…! No, he would stay until nightfall if necessary just to make sure he avoided the master of Southmarch Castle.
At last, feeling the need to stretch his legs but not yet ready to venture downstairs, he took a quiet walk along the upstairs hall, past the open doors of storerooms now being cleared out to provide more accommodations for highborn refugees. At the far end of the hall a window faced south across the garden toward the gate of the inner keep. In fact, from the small mullioned window Tinwright could see all the way to the stretch of bay where the causeway had once joined mainland Southmarch and the island castle. The far shore looked strange somehow. Tinwright stared at it for a long moment before he remembered the fearful conversations he had heard during the morning, courtiers whispering that after a long, quiet time the fairies were up to some devilry.
"Strange noises," some had said, saying they had been wakened in the dark of night. "Chanting, and singing." "Fog," others had claimed, "a great fog rising up everywhere. Not a natural one, either."
Tinwright saw that a vast cloud of mist did indeed lie along the bay front on the mainland side, and at first he thought the dark, slowly moving shapes in the murk were plumes of black smoke, that the fairy folk had lit huge bonfires on the beach, but though mist itself eddied in the wind, the dark tendrils did not. Something… something was growing out of the mist. But what? And why?
Tinwright shook his head, unable to make sense of it. After several quiet months it had almost become possible to forget that the Qar were still there, malicious and secret as a fever. Was the long, fretful peace over?
Trapped between the fairies and the Tollys, he thought. Might as well slit my throat now.
Matt Tinwright decided he had hidden long enough-it was probably as safe to go down now as it would ever be. Avin Brone would want to know what he had heard here. Tinwright also had a responsibility to another, equally frightening authority.
"She is most unsatisfactory, this girl," his mother proclaimed. "I bring her good food from the marketplace and she turns up her nose at it. Does not the book say, "The poor must be sausaged?"
Solaced, he almost told her-but what was the point? Trying to tell his mother anything was like talking to a statue of Queen Ealga in the castle gardens. A very loud statue. "Are you not eating?" he asked the patient.
Elan M'Cory was propped up in the bed. Her color had come back but she still had the sagging look of a child's rag doll. Tinwright did his best to ignore a flash of annoyance that the young noblewoman was still in bed. She wasn't well. She had been poisoned-albeit lovingly. She would be well when she was well. "I eat what I can," Elan said quietly. "It's just… I don't mean to be ungrateful, but some of the things she brings back…" She gave a limp shudder. "The bread has beetles in it."
"Not beetles, only ordinary wholesome weevils." Anamesiya Tinwright clicked her tongue in disgust. "Not as though they were alive and walking around, either. Baked in-a bit crunchy, like a nice roasted pine nut."
Elan's shoulders quivered and she brought her hand to her mouth. "Of course, Mother, I'm sure it's perfectly good, but Lady M'Cory is used to a different sort of fare. Look, here is a Brenlandish two-crab piece-no, a pair of them." He had been writing love notes for a court that, with summer approaching and the Qar still beyond the gates but quiet, had been full of a sort of fatal giddiness. Also, Brone had given him a silver starfish for his information about Okros and Hendon Tolly and had barely shouted at him at all, so Matt Tinwright was feeling unusually well-fixed. "Find Elan some nice bread made with good flour. No weevils. And a piece of fruit."
His mother snorted. "Good luck to you. Fruit? You've been living with the nobs too long, boy. Do you know how many people are sleeping in the streets? How hungry they all are? You'd be lucky to find a single wormy apple left in all Southmarch."
Elan looked beseechingly at him.
"Well, just try to get her something nice to eat, Mother-the best you can come up with for those two coppers. I'll sit with Lady M'Cory until you come back."
"Oh? What about me? What kind of son sends his mother off like a Kracian pilgrim without so much as a crab for herself?"
Tinwright did his best not to roll his eyes. He pulled another coin from his pocket. "Very well. Buy yourself a mug of beer, Mother. It will be good for your blood."
She looked hard at him. "Beer? Are you mad, boy? Zakkas' Ale is good enough for me. I'll put this in the gods' offering bowl to take a little of the stink of your sinful life off my hands." Then, before he could even try to snatch his copper back from its journey to oblivion, she was out the door and gone.
He turned to the bed. Elan's eyes were closed.
"Do you sleep?"
"No. I don't know," she said without opening them. "Sometimes I wonder if I did not truly die when I took the poison, and all this is but a phantom of my expiring thought. If it is the true world around me, why can't I care? Why do I only want it all to go away and let me fall again into dreamless darkness?"
He sat on the end of the bed and wished he dared to take her hand. Despite the fact that he had saved her from Hendon Tolly and that she belonged to no one now if not to him, Tinwright felt that in some way Elan had become more distant than ever. "If your expiring thought can manufacture a gargoyle like my mother out of pure imagination, then you are a more skilled poet than I will ever be."
She smiled a little and opened her eyes, but still would not look at him directly. Somewhere in the upper stories he could hear a baby crying. "You are droll, Master Tinwright, but you do your mother wrong. She is a good woman… in her way. She has done her best to keep me comfortable, although we do not always see eye to eye on what is best for me." She made an unpleased face. "And she pinches pennies most severely. The dried fish she brings… I cannot even tell you what it smells like. It must be caught where the residence privies drain into the lagoons."
Tinwright could not help laughing. "You heard her. She saves money so that she can sneak her extra coins into the offering bowls whenever she gets the chance. For a woman so holy, she seems to feel the gods are as stupid as unruly children and must be reminded constantly of her devotion."
Elan's face changed. "Maybe she is right and we are wrong-certainly the gods do not seem to be paying much attention to their mortal children. I would not dare to call the gods foolish or stupid, Master Tinwright, but I must say I have long wondered if they are too distracted to keep order here."
The idea was interesting. Tinwright felt a sudden urge to consider it-to think of what could take the gods' attention away from their human creations, leaving men to suffer and wonder without guidance. He might even make a poem of it.
Something like "The Wandering Gods," he thought. No, perhaps "The Sleeping Gods"…
The door banged open so suddenly that Tinwright jumped and Elan let out a cry of surprise. Anamesiya Tinwright pushed the door shut again behind her with an even louder thump, then fell to her knees on the board floor and began to pray loudly to the Trigon. The infant upstairs, startled by the loud noises, began to cry again.
"What is it?" Tinwright knew, with a sinking heart, that it must be something bad: his mother usually spent more time preparing a clean place to kneel than she actually did praying. "Mother, talk to me!"
She looked up; he was shocked to see her familiar, bony features so pale. "I had hoped you would find time to repent of all your wickedness before the end," she said in a hoarse voice. "My poor, straying son!"
"What are you talking about?"
"The end, the end. I have seen it coming! Demons sent to destroy us because we've angered the gods." She bowed her head once more in prayer and would not be interrupted no matter how many questions he asked.
"I'll go and see what this is about," he told Elan.
Tinwright made sure the door was locked behind him, then went out into the street. At first he followed the anxious throngs who seemed headed to the edge of the harbor, the nearest part of the city's outer walls, but after a moment he turned against the flow and struck out toward Market Road Bridge, which crossed the canal between the lagoons. If it was something happening across the water in Southmarch Town, he would be able to see it just as well from the outwall behind The Badger's Boots, a tavern near the end of North Lagoon where Tinwright had spent many a night with Hewney and the others. The alleyway that ran behind the place was not well known, which was why he and his drinking companions had found it a good place to take tavern whores.
As he walked east he listened to fragments of conversation from the people who passed him. Most of them had only heard rumors and were on their way to see what was happening for themselves. Some were terrified, babbling prayers and shouting imprecations, but others seemed only slightly more concerned than if they had been on their way to the Zosimia festivities.
"A sign!" many said. "The earth itself is against us!"
"We'll throw them back," others cried. "They'll learn what Southmarch men are like!" Some of the arguments became fistfights, especially if those who disagreed were drunk. The sun behind the high clouds had scarcely passed noon, but far more people than usual seemed to have started their drinking early.
Was this what it was like when the gods fought their great war? Matt Tinwright wondered. Did some mortals go to the battlefield only to watch it happen, caring not that the world might end?
It was another strange, interesting thought-the second in one day that might make a poem. For a moment he almost forgot that whatever he was on his way to look at had reduced his dragon of a mother to raw terror.
But what could it be? All I saw was mist and smoke. And why should that frighten so many?
He slipped past the Boots, which was even louder than normal with the sound of argument and lamentation. For a moment he strongly considered just going inside and drinking up the rest of the money Brone had given him-after all, if the world was ending, might it not be better to sleep through it all? As far as he knew, nothing in the Book of the Trigon actually forbade being drunk on the Day of Fate.
Ah, but what if he had to wait a long time for judgment? At a moment of universal catastrophe there would doubtless be huge crowds wanting to be judged, as when the king gave away grain in times of famine. Not even drunk, then-by that time I'll be sobered up, with a dry mouth and throbbing skull. Gods-it was bad enough to face Brone's bellowing with a clear head: how much worse to stand before Perin himself, lord of the storms, whose very hammer was a thunderclap!
When he reached the alley behind the tavern Tinwright made his way up the hill to the base of the looming wall, then inched his way along the top of the berm toward the abandoned guardpost. To his surprise, he found that at least a dozen other locals had apparently had the same idea. One of them, a grim-faced young man wearing a leather apron, even leaned down to help Tinwright up the broken steps so that he could join them.
They had an unimpeded view of the north end of mainland Southmarch. Most of the activity, though, seemed to be happening at the mainland city's nearest end, on the beach beside the remains of the ruined causeway. The murk Matt Tinwright had seen earlier had spread and he could see glimmers in its depths, flashes of light that looked less like the flicker of flames than the steady glow of smelted metal. But what he had thought were pillars of weirdly frozen black smoke were not smoke at all.
Monstrous black trees had sprouted from of the murk, their branches like gnarled fingers, as though a dozen giant hands reached out of the mist toward the city walls on the far side of the narrow stretch of bay. The clawlike limbs were bent almost sideways, clearly growing out over the water and toward the castle where Tinwright and the others watched in stunned, frightened silence.
"What are those gods-cursed things?" someone asked at last. A young man who should have been too old to cry began to do it anyway, deep, wracking noises like a consumptive cough.
"No," was all Matt Tinwright could say as he stared across the water. The things, the trees or whatever they were, had doubled or even tripled in size since he'd seen them from the residence window. But nothing in the world grew that fast! "It can't be true." But it was true, of course.
No one spoke after that, except to pray.
The fog was unsettling enough-it came from everywhere and nowhere, making the world outside their prison as daunting as the dim, lifeless fields surrounding the great castle of Kernios in the tales Utta had been told as a girl-but it was the noises that made her most uncomfortable: deep groans and creaks shivered her bones, as though some vast ship a thousand times bigger than any human vessel was sailing past their window, mere inches away but invisible behind the thick, cold mist.
"What is that dreadful sound?" Utta began to pace again. "Have they built some kind of-what are those things called… siege engines? One of those monstrous towers to bring against castle walls? But why would the fairies be pushing it back and forth along the beach all night? The noise gave me such terrible dreams!" In one, her family, years lost to her, had stood at the rail of a long, gray boat begging her to come aboard and join them, but even in the dream Utta had known from the dullness of their eyes that they were all dead, that they were inviting her to join them in a voyage to the underworld. She had woken up with her heart beating so swiftly that for a moment she had feared she was truly dying.
"Sister, you are sending me mad with your walking back and forth!" Merolanna complained. When they had first been prisoned in this abandoned merchant's house facing Brenn's Bay the older woman had spent days cleaning, as though each fleck of dust she wiped away lifted them a little farther beyond the power of the fairies and their dark mistress. But the opposite was true, of course: the more the duchess cleaned, the harder it was to ignore the fact that when the tidying was done they would still be prisoners. And now that the place was as neat as Merolanna could make it the older woman seemed to have fallen into a torpor of misery. She scarcely got out of the chair most days, although she seemed to have strength enough to complain about Utta pacing or making what Merolanna considered to be an undue amount of noise.
Blessed Zoria give us both strength, Utta prayed. It is our predicament that makes us pick at each other this way.
Not only had they so far avoided execution, but they had been housed in a spacious building with three floors and had been given the materials to make quite acceptable meals. Still, there was no doubt they were prisoners: two silent guards, strange and threatening as demons out of a temple carving, stood always outside the door. Another waited on the roof, as Utta had discovered one day to her horror when she had decided to take advantage of a little sun to lay out some clothes to dry. The unnatural creature had jumped down onto the balcony as she emerged with a bundle of damp things clutched to her breast, frightening her so badly she had thought she would fall down dead.
This fairy had been different than the other guards-less like a man and more like some kind of shaved ape or smooth lizard, with claws protruding through the ends of his gloved fingers, a misshapen nose and mouth like a dog's muzzle, and amber eyes that had no pupil. The fairy guard had grunted so angrily and waved his leaf-shaped knife at her so vigorously that Utta had not even bothered to show him the harmless chore she had planned, but instead had simply scuttled back inside.
What do these creatures think we are going to do? she had wondered that day as she staggered back down the stairs to the main living chamber. Leap from the balcony and fly away? And would he have killed me to stop me doing so?
She felt uncomfortably certain he would have.
"Why do they hold us?" Utta demanded as the unsettling noises continued. "If that woman in black hates our kind so much-their queen or whatever she is-why doesn't she simply kill us and have done with it?"
Merolanna made the sign of the Three on her bosom. "Don't say such things! Perhaps she intends to ransom us. Ordinarily I would say no, never, but I would give much to be back in my own bed, and to see little Eilis and the others. I am frightened, Sister."
Utta was frightened too, but she didn't think they were being saved for ransom. What could the bloodthirsty Qar possibly want in trade for a dowager duchess and a Zorian nun?
Somebody knocked on the doorway of the main chamber, then the door swung open. It was the strange half fairy, half man who called himself Kayyin.
"What do you want?" Merolanna sounded angry, but Utta knew it was a cover for her fear at this unexpected arrival. "Does your mistress want to be sure we're suffering? Tell her the house could be draftier-but only just."
He smiled, one of the few expressions that made him look almost entirely human. "At least she cares enough to imprison you. She thinks so little of me that I am allowed to run free, like a lizard on the wall."
"What is going on out there, Kayyin?" Utta asked him. "There have been the most terrible noises all morning but we can't see anything except this fog."
Kayyin shrugged. "Do you truly want to see? It is a grim thing. This is a grim time."
"What do you mean? Yes, we want to see!"
"Come," he said with the air of one surrendering to folly. "I will show you."
They followed his silky progress up the stairs and out onto the balcony on the highest floor, which Utta had shunned ever since the reptilian guard had driven her away. The fog still billowed here, but from this height they could see how low it hung, like a down comforter thrown haphazardly onto a bed. The creaking noises seemed even louder here, and for a moment Utta was so taken by the view-the great cloud of mist, and beyond it the bay and the distant towers of Southmarch Castle, her unreachable home-that she forgot about the monstrous guard. Then he swung down from the roof above them and dropped onto the balcony.
Merolanna shrieked in surprise and terror and might have fallen to the ground had Utta not supported her. The guard waved his wide short sword and snarled-it was hard to tell if he spoke a strange language or simply made threatening noises. His teeth were as long and sharp as a wolf 's.
Kayyin, though, was unmoved. "Begone, Snout. Tell your mistress I brought these ladies out for some air. If she wants to kill me for that, she may. Otherwise, take your leave."
The thing stared at him with brightly furious eyes, but there was more to its expression than simply that of an angry animal.
What are these creatures, Utta could not help wondering, these… fairies? Did the gods make them? Are they demons or do they have souls as we do?
The creature snorted what sounded like a warning, then it scrambled back up to the roof as swiftly as it had descended and was gone from sight.
"Oh, that gave me a dreadful turn!" Merolanna detached herself from Utta's grasp, fanning her face with her hands. "What was that horror?"
Kayyin seemed amused. "A disciple of the Virtuous Warriors clan-cousins of mine, in fact. But he knows I am not to be touched, and my shadow seems to cover you two as well." He sounded as if he hadn't been completely certain the creature would obey him, which made Utta wonder how close they'd just come to being sent back… or worse.
"How could you call such a monstrosity your cousin?" Merolanna was still fanning determinedly, as though trying to disperse not just air but also the unpleasant memory. "You are nothing like it, Kayyin. You are almost like… like one of us."
"But I was shaped to be so, Duchess." Kayyin bowed his head. "My master knew I would be long among your kind, so he gave me a gift of changing to make me… it is hard to explain… soft like bread dough, so that I could take on the semblance of that which was around me. So I remained for years-a poor copy, but sufficient-until I was awakened again."
"Awakened to do what? " It was the first Utta had ever heard of all this. She had thought Kayyin merely an accident of nature or congress between the tribes of fairy and man.
Kayyin shook his sleek head. Now that Utta's attention had been drawn, she could not help thinking that there was indeed something strange about him, a lack of distinctive characteristics. She could never remember what he looked like when he was not around. "I do not know the answer myself," he said. "My king wished to prevent war between your race and mine if he could, but I do not think I have done much to make that so. It is a puzzle, to be honest." He cocked his head. "Ah, there-do you hear? It is beginning again."
He moved toward the balcony railing and Utta moved with him. She could hear it now, too-the deep, creaking sounds that had plagued them all day. Beneath their balcony, hidden deep in the roiling fogs, a dull light flared and abated but never quite died, as though down on the hidden beach below someone had lit a massive bonfire of blue and yellow flames.
"What is it? What are your people doing?"
"I am not certain they are my people anymore," said Kayyin with an odd, sad smile. "But it is the work of my lady's eremites, of course. They are building the Bridge of Thorns."
"Blessed gods!" murmured Merolanna. Utta turned to see a vast black something appear slowly out of the murk, like the tentacle of some awesome sea creature. In the moments before wind swirled the mists back around it again, she could make little sense of it. A plant, she realized at last-some kind of monstrous black vine as big around as a peasant's cot and covered with thorns long as swords. A breeze from the invisible bay tugged at the mist again; this time she could see not just the nearest branch but several more in the foggy depths, all twining upward. The terrible rumbling, screeching noise, so low and loud that it made the very timbers of the balcony they stood on quiver in sympathy, was the sound of the thing growing-growing up from the shore beneath them, stretching out like greedy fingers toward Southmarch Castle on the far side of the water.
"The Bridge of Thorns…" she said slowly.
"But what is it?" Merolanna demanded. "It makes me sick just to see it. What is it?"
"They… they will use it to attack the castle," Utta told her, fully grasping it all only as she said it. "They will climb the branches like siege ladders, across the bay and over the castle walls. They will clamber over it like ants and kill everyone. Isn't that right?"
"Yes," Kayyin said. He might have been a little sad about it. "I expect she will indeed kill everyone she finds. I have never seen her so angry."
"Oh!" said the duchess. For a moment Utta was afraid the older woman would fall again. "Oh, you monster! How can you… just speak of it, as though… as though…" She turned and stumbled back into the room. A moment later Utta heard her make her way slowly down the stairs.
"I should go with her," Utta said, hesitating. "Is there nothing anyone can do to talk your mistress out of this terrible attack?"
"She is not my mistress, which is a small part of the problem-instead, the king is my master, and if there is one thing Yasammez hates it is disloyalty, especially from family."
"Family?"
"Did I never tell you? Lady Yasammez is my mother. The birth was years and years ago and we have been long estranged." His bland face reflected nothing deeper than the interest of someone with a mildly diverting tale to tell, but Utta could not help feeling there was a great deal more behind his words-there must be. "I am by no means the only child she ever had, but I am almost certainly the last one living."
"But you said once you thought she would execute you one day. How could a mother do such a thing to her child?"
"My people are not like your people-but even among our people, Lady Yasammez is a strange and singular case. The love she bears is not for her own offspring, but for her sister's. And though she carries the Fireflower, unlike all others in our history, she carries it alone."
Utta could only shake her head in confusion. "I do not understand any of this. What is a Fireflower?"
"The Fireflower. There is only one. It is our great lord Crooked's gift to the Firstborn, because of the love he felt for one living woman-Summu, my mother's mother. And it is the legacy of the children he bore with her." He saw her expression and paused. "Ah, of course, your people know Crooked by a different name-Kupilas, the Healer."
In other circumstances Utta would have dismissed his words as the babble of a madman, and certainly there was a quality in Kayyin's dull, unexcited tones that made him seem deranged, but she had met the terrifying Yasammez; that, and watching the thorny results of the great magics the dark woman had put into effect made it hard to dismiss such things out of hand. "You are saying… that your mother Yasammez was fathered by a god? "
"That is your word, not mine-but yes. In those distant days the ones you call gods were the powerful masters, but your people and mine served them and were sometimes bedded by them. And at times true friendship and even love ripened between the great ones and their short-lived minions. Loving or not, though, some of the unions resulted in those you call demigods and demigoddesses, in heroes and monsters."
"But Kupilas…?"
"What Crooked truly felt for Summu no one can know, since they both are gone now, but I do not think it would be wrong to call it love. And the children that they made together were like no others-they became the rulers of my race. All whom Crooked fathered had the gift called the Fireflower-a flame of immortality like the gods themselves carried. In Yassamez and her twin Yasudra it burned fiercely indeed, and it still burns in Yasammez, because she has never surrendered it to another. In fact, none of Summu's three firstborn children-my mother, Yasudra my mother's twin, and Ayann their brother-allowed their gifts to be diluted.
"Yasammez has kept her own Fireflower through the lonely centuries, and it has made her the longest-lived and perhaps most powerful of our folk. Yasudra and Ayann did not keep it to themselves as she did, but instead passed it to the children they made together-the kings and queens of my folk. Thus the Fireflower was kept pure in their blood…"
"Wait, Kayyin. Are you saying that your first king and queen were brother and sister?"
"Yes, and all the royal line since then have descended from that single pair as well, from Yasudra and Ayann, with each generation maintaining the purity of the Fireflower."
Utta had to think about this strange idea for little while before she could speak again. "So… do you have this Fireflower too?"
He laughed, seemingly without anger. "No, no. My mother Yasammez has never diminished her own gift by sharing it, which is why she has lived so long. None of her children have been allowed the Fireflower. Instead she has made it the duty of her endless life to watch over her sister Yasudra's line. And now her sister's descendant, our queen Saqri, is dying. In revenge, Yasammez planned to go to war to destroy your kind, but my master the king forced a bargain called the Pact of the Glass. Apparently, though, that bargain has now failed, so Yasammez is free again to make war against your hated people."
"Hated? But why? You said revenge. Why is she so anxious to destroy us?"
"Why?" Kayyin's expression was impossible for Utta to read. "Because it is you humans-and most particularly, the humans of Southmarch-who are murdering our queen."