ground. The floodlights highlighted tousled wings and assorted backs as they ebbed away from us. Serein and I were left alone.
The sea of fog breached the far wall and poured down, slipping toward us at ground level.
“That’s it,” the Swordsman murmured. “Is that it? Am I out?”
He gradually got to his feet, shoulders bowed, head lowered.
“Serein,” I said. “It comes to us all in the end.”
He looked at me resentfully, but I couldn’t tell whether he was sighing from overexertion or bitterness. “Once I’ve left the Circle I won’t want to see you again,” he admitted. “Don’t visit me, Jant-I don’t want you to see me grow old.” He put a hand to his throat, rubbed it, and gazed at his red palm. The blood flow had practically stopped, but he was sticky with it chin to waist.
He looked up to the hulking empty stands. “It’s the fear that takes it out of you.” He rested his hand on my shoulder for a second. Then he picked up his rapier, broke it over his knee, and walked off the field.
CHAPTER TWO
I climbed the spiral staircase to my tower room. The murals on its walls became more lurid and grotesque toward the top. I don’t remember painting them; I must have been really stoned.
“Hello, lover,” I said, emerging from the doorway.
Tern was waiting in the lower part of the round split-level room, her hands on her hips. Anger spiced her voice. “Look at you! All windswept! God, you look like a juggler from the Hacilith festival! Out of those flea-bitten mountain clothes and into a suit…Here, wear this one; it’s elegant.” She gave me a light and unusually demure kiss on the cheek. I looked around our untidy apartment that my wife had colonized with architectural drawings, cosmetics, rolls of fabric and an enormous wardrobe inside which I am sure a Rhydanne couple could live quite happily.
My carefully stacked letters slid into each other under Tern’s discarded dresses. All my specific piles of correspondence had formed one mass like the Paperlands and reeked of her expensive perfume. She saw my look of horror and said, “I tidied up your mess.”
“That was my filing system! The letters I’ve read go on the table, noteworthy letters on the floor under the desk. The ones I haven’t read are on the fireplace next to the pine cones…Where have they gone?”
My alphabetized books were spattered with used matches and sealing wax. Shed feathers littered my collection of old broadsheets. Tern’s gowns covered the chaise longue where I like to lounge; dress patterns were taped on the posts of our bed. Her underclothes were scattered in mounds. She had even disturbed the dusty table on which stood my precious distilling apparatus, although I had reassembled the glass retorts and condenser solely for the production of barley sugars.
Tern wore a bustier of chartreuse-green satin; its pleated sleeves wreathed her small black wings. At her throat, her wide jet heirloom necklace looked like a collar. “This is all the rage,” she purred. “Well, I say it is.”
“How do I unfasten it?” Her bare shoulders made her all the more tempting. I tried to undo her hair but her usual loose dark waves were pulled back into a complicated chignon.
My wife’s town was reduced to brick shards and ashy rubble by the Great Fire of 2015. Of her black stone manor house only one single outside wall still stood. Slug-trail slicks of molten glass hardened from its pointed arched windows; lead roofs lay in solidified pools. The stumps of scrubby trees in her woodland were burned flat to the ground. Every building and foundry in Wrought was destroyed, none of her possessions escaped the flames. Wrought was her birthplace and the scene of our honeymoon; Tern now aspired to rebuild it completely. Luckily, her designer fashions sold well on the Hacilith cat-walks and as far as she was concerned Wrenn joining the Circle was an opportunity for trendsetting. She caressed my wings as I peeled off my tight trousers and changed clothes. Long wings are considered the most attractive, and as feathers need a lot of preening, Awians look after their high-maintenance bodies with care.
“I didn’t see the duel,” Tern said. “I needed the time to get ready. I heard from Rayne that the Challenger gave Serein a good nick to remember him by.”
“It was a first-blood duel,” I said. “Those were the rules, so Wrenn had to.”
“I hear that Wrenn is scrumptious,” she commented. I shrugged. I seated myself in front of the mirror and let her brush my black hair that reaches to my waist, removing all the tangles caused by flying. It was agony. When she finished I crossed feathers through it like windmill sails and underlined my eyes.
“Listen.” Tern raised a finger at the clatter of coaches vying for space in the courtyard far below. “I hear some ladies inviting themselves to his reception. Those can’t be reporters or they would never have managed to sneak past Tawny at the gate.”
“We have an hour. I’ve been on my own in Scree for weeks. I want you.”
Tern pulled away-so as not to ruin the painstaking work of art she has made of herself. I gave her the full benefit of my cat-eyed look that she found so exotic. “We should clear a space to sit down…Perhaps lie down.”
“Come and join the clamor,” she said.
Tern, you and your diamond self-sufficiency.
Unlike the stately homes of Awia, the Castle’s sarsen outer bastions were thick, sturdy and unassailable. The Castle’s purpose was defense of the entire Fourlands; it protected every manor, growing gatehouses and curtain walls while they bloomed balconies and arched dance halls, ornate turrets and painted bartizans.
The ground around the Castle was thrown into immense earth-works to ward off Insects. A channel of the Moren River was directed into a double moat around its man-made hill. The twin exterior walls that ran around the Castle’s eight sides were strengthened by huge cylindrical smooth stone-faced towers decorated with crenellations and with shallow pointed roofs. Along the walls flags rustled and furled; the heraldry of the Fourlands’ current sixteen manors and two townships. Fifty pennants flew under the Castle’s sun, each with the sign that an Eszai had chosen for his or her position.
The Emperor’s palace fitted inside the Castle like the flesh in a nutshell. Its marble towers stretched up from inside the impenetrable curtain wall. The Throne Room spire was the tallest; farmers who worked the demesne saw the sun glint on its pinnacle and they knew the Emperor occupied his throne beneath.
As Tern and I walked from our austere tower we saw only glimpses through the cold fog; its attendant hush muted every sound, drawing all the luster from the palace. We saw lights shining behind sash windows and the oculus ovals made to look like portholes of the Mare’s Run wing where Mist had her rooms. A stone-balustraded balcony ran along the length of its top floor, like the gallery on a ship. The Mare’s Run was built between the outer walls and the palace five hundred years ago; it filled some of the space where gardens used to be. Several other buildings were shaped to fit into the western side of the gap: the dining hall and a theater with its scalloped bronze dome topped by a white wood lantern-turret.
I did not take the rooms owing to me as Messenger in the palace’s Carillon Court when I joined the Circle. I preferred to move into the unused apartment at the top of the Northwest Tower on the outer wall because I found it easy to launch myself from its height. My window gave a view for a hundred kilometers of the river, the playing fields and white goalposts; red dock stalks sticking up from the green rough ground of Binnard meadow. Tern has never persuaded me to move back into the palace.
Tern shivered and I reached out with a wing to give her a pat on the shoulder. Tern’s wings are much smaller than mine, as are those of all Awians, because although they are the only winged people, they are flightless. I am the sole person ever to be able to fly. As I am half Rhydanne my light, long-limbed build and mountainlander’s fitness, when added to Awian ancestry on my father’s side, gave me my ability.
Hand in hand Tern and I walked down an enclosed passage over a flying buttress that spanned from the outside wall to the palace. It was a narrow, vertiginous bridge that soared over the roof of the Great Hall, stretching thin and tenuous in the air. Below us, we could only see the glow of lamps in niches outside the hall and on four stone steps that rose to double doors with opulent paneling. The deeply carved decoration inside its triangular pediment was even more ornate: two flamboyant white Awian eagles flanked the Castle’s sun
