that he’d learned Kaitlin was dead: the woman he’d married and who had borne him his two sons on the Isle a’Paeti. Kaitlin had steadfastly refused to come with him to Nessantico. Kaitlin had known of the deep friendship between Karl and Ana; Karl was just as certain that Kaitlin knew that-despite Karl’s reassurances and promises-for Karl, at least, there was more than friendship there.
He had never been able to lie easily to her. He told himself he loved Kaitlin, but he was never really able to lie to himself either.
The night he’d received the horrible letter from Paeti that Kaitlin had fallen ill and died, he’d been devastated. He never quite knew how Ana learned of it, but she came to him that evening. She fed him, she held him, she let him cry and wail and shout and grieve. Most tellingly, she never tried to give him the comfort of faith as she would have with any of her followers. She never mentioned Cenzi, not until he spoke, wiping away the tears with the sleeve of his bashta.. ..
“I envy you,” he said.
They were sitting by the fire she’d started in the hearth. Tea simmered in a pot. The wood was damp; it hissed and sputtered and cracked under the assault of the flames, sending fountains of orange-red ash spiraling up the chimney.
She raised a single eyebrow toward him.
“You believe that Cenzi takes the souls of those who die,” he told her. “You believe that they continue to exist within Him, and that it’s possible you may one day meet them again. I…” Tears threatened him again and he forced them down. “I don’t have that hope.”
“Having faith doesn’t take away the pain,” she told him. “Or very little of it. Nothing can ease the grief and loss we all feel: not faith, not the Ilmodo. Time, perhaps, might manage it, and that only blunts the sorrow.” Folding the sleeve of her robe around her hand, she took the teapot from the crane and poured the brew into their cups. She handed him the jar of honey. “I still remember my matarh. Sometimes it all comes back to me, everything I felt when she died, as if it had just happened yesterday.” Her fingers brushed his cheek; he could feel their softness drag against stubble. “That will happen for you, too, I’m afraid.”
“Then what good is your faith, Ana?”
She smiled, as if she’d been expecting his question. “Faith isn’t a commodity,” she told him. “You don’t buy it because it will do this or that for you. You have belief or you don’t, and belief gives you what it gives you. You don’t have faith, my love-Cenzi knows I’d give it to you if I could. I’ve certainly talked about it enough with you over the years. You Numetodo… you try to wrap the world in reason and logic, and so faith just crumples into dust whenever you touch it because you try to impose rationality on it. You’ll do that with Kaitlin, too-you’ll try to find reasons and logic in her death.” She touched him again. “There’s no reason that she died, Karl. There’s no logic to it. It just happened, and it had nothing to do with you or with your feelings for her or what happened between the two of you.”
“Not even Cenzi’s will?”
She lifted her chin. She smiled at him sadly, the firelight warm and yellow on her face. “Not even that. It’s a rare person who Cenzi cares about enough to change the Fate-Moitidi’s dice roll for them. It was your Kaitlin’s time. That’s all. It’s not your fault, Karl. It’s not.”
That had been nine years ago. He’d traveled back to Paeti to see Kaitlin’s grave and to be with his sons. He’d even brought Nilles and Colin back to Nessantico with him when he’d returned the next year. Nilles had stayed two years with him, Colin four, until they’d reached their majority at sixteen. Both had eventually left the city to return to the Isle. Nilles had already given him a great-daughter-three years old now-that he’d yet to see.
He’d stayed here because his work was in the Holdings, he told anyone who asked. But truthfully, it was because this was where Ana was. There were those who knew that, but they weren’t many and most pretended not to see.
Varina’s hand tightened again on his shoulder and dropped away.
Karl stared at Ana’s wrapped-and-shrouded body on the stone altar and the phalanx of six fire-teni gathered in a circle around it. The corpse was layered in green silk wound with golden metallic thread. The threads glinted in the multicolored light from the stained glass in the temple’s windows; censers fumed around the altar, wreathing sunbeams in fragrant smoke. He could not believe it was Ana bundled and displayed there. He would not believe it. It was someone else. The memory he had of the light, of the concussive roar, of her body torn apart, the blood, the dark dust… It was false. It had to be false. Even the thought was too painful to endure.
Kaitlin’s death, that of his parents, all the others that had passed over the decades: none of them hurt like this. None.
Someone had killed the one person he loved most in the world, had struck down a woman who had struggled more than anyone since Kraljica Marguerite to keep peace within the Holdings, who believed in reconciliation before confrontation, who might have potentially reunited the broken halves of both the Holdings and the Concenzia Faith. There would be no comfort for Karl until he knew who had done this, and until that person was dead. If there was an afterlife as Ana had believed, then Karl would let the murderer’s soul be condemned to care for Ana for eternity. If there were gods, if Cenzi truly existed, if there were justice after death, then that’s what must happen.
He would have faith in that: a grim, dark, and uncompromising faith.
Archigos Kenne patted his hand and whispered more words he couldn’t hear. The Regent Sergei’s shoulder pressed against his to the left. Kraljiki Audric wheezed on the other side of the Regent, his labored breath louder than the chanting of the teni. He heard Varina weeping softly in the pew behind him.
The fire-teni stirred around the green-wrapped body. Their hands moved in the dance of the Ilmodo, their voices lifted in a unison chant that fought against the choir’s ethereal voices. They spread their hands wide as if in benediction, and the fierce blaze of Ilmodo-fire erupted around Ana’s body. The heat of the magical flames washed over them, savage and relentless. There were no sparks, no pyre feeding them: while the Kralji and the ca’-and-cu’ burned in flames fed by wood and oil, the teni burned their own with the Ilmodo-quickly and furiously. The Ilmodo- fire consumed the body in the space of a few breaths, the metallic-green fabric turning black instantly, the heat shimmer so intense that Ana’s body seemed to shake within it. As Karl watched, as his body instinctively leaned back against the fierce assault of the heat, Ana was taken.
The flames died abruptly as the choir ended their song. Cold air rushed back around them, a wind that tousled hair and fluttered cloth. On the altar now, there was nothing but gray ash and a few fragments of bone.
The mortal cage of Ana was gone.
“She is back in Cenzi’s hands now,” Archigos Kenne said to Karl. “He will give her solace.”
And I will give her better than solace. He nodded silently to the Archigos. I will give her revenge.
Allesandra ca’Vorl
“ It was not a sign.”
Fynn slammed his fisted hand hard on the arm of his chair. The servants standing ready along the wall to serve dinner shivered at the sound. The long scar down the right side of his face burned white against his flushed face. “I don’t care what they’re saying. What happened was a terrible accident. Nothing more. It was not a sign.”
“Of course you’re right, Brother,” Allesandra told him soothingly. She paused-a single breath-and gestured to the Magyarian servants: they were taking supper in Allesandra’s rooms within the palais. The servants moved forward, ladling soup into the bowls and pouring wine. Fynn sat at the table’s head; Allesandra at the foot. Archigos Semini and his wife were to Fynn’s right; her son Jan to the left.
Allesandra had heard some of the rumors herself. Hirzg Jan is upset that Fynn has taken the crown, not his daughter… The Hirzg’s soul cannot rest… I heard from one of the servants in the palais that his ghost still walks the halls at night, moaning and crying out as if angry… There were dozens of the tales surging through Brezno, twisted depending on the agenda of those who spoke them, and growing larger and more outrageous each time they were told. Cenzi sends a warning to the Hirzg that the Holdings and the Faith must become one again… The souls of all those the Hirzg killed-the Numetodo, the Nessanticans, the Tennshah-pursue him and will not allow him to rest… They say that when the sealing stone fell, those in the chamber heard the old Hirzg’s voice call out with a curse on
