Canticle

He could hear Grymlis’s forced smile. “I did listen to you, Father. I listened until you laid down your ring and robe. Beyond that, I listened to myself.”

Petronus blessed his own fallibility and, without protest, set himself to packing his belongings for another journey he was too old to make.

Neb

Neb took the stairs two at a time as the gathering crowd parted before him and the half-squad he led. The events of the night had left him shaken, and he still felt the fear in his belly. He’d seen nothing like it, though he’d watched squads of magicked scouts-had even run with them-in the days since Windwir’s fall. But this was another kind of magick, something dangerous and old. Something that took men far beyond what the River Woman’s powders, ground from the earth, could do.

Blood magick. He’d read stories about the Wizard Kings and the deals they brokered in dark places, boons purchased with blood. Twice now he’d seen it. His first experience still haunted his nightmares, carrying him back to the ridgeline above Windwir where he witnessed the last spell of the world’s last wizard consume Windwir before his eyes. Carefully crafted in seclusion by Xhum Y’Zir to avenge the murder of his seven sons, the Seven Cacophonic Deaths had leveled the city, leaving it-and Neb’s soul-utterly desolated.

Now, he’d seen blood magick at work for a second time.

Certainly, it was on a much smaller scale, but he had seen the Marshers at war alongside Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts. Both were formidable forces, and yet a small group of blood-magicked assassins had penetrated the heart of the Ninefold Forest and murdered Hanric and the Crown Prince of Turam in a hall full of armed men. And those forces had barely repelled them-but not before the assassins had done their work.

He ran the halls until he reached the servants’ quarters near the suite of rooms where Rudolfo’s house steward-Kember-had housed Hanric as a guest of honor. Two Gypsy Scouts guarded the door. “Are the Marsh King’s servants within?” Neb asked.

One of the guards nodded. “They are. We’ve told them nothing.”

Neb swallowed. “Good.” I don’t want to do this, he realized as he stared at the heavy, closed door. How did he tell the girl he loved that the man she considered a father and a friend was dead?

Hanric’s face flashed behind his eyes, and Neb suddenly remembered the off-key, bellowed song the giant Marsher had been singing when the attackers burst into the room. He felt a lump in his throat and knew that his eyes would leak water if he didn’t rein himself in. You are an officer of the Ninefold Forest Houses, he chided himself. You are a man.

He put his hand on the doorknob and looked to the half-squad of men accompanying him. “Wait here.”

Opening the door, Neb slipped in and closed it behind him. The room smelled of damp dirt, and he saw the Marshers gathered in the sitting room with Winters at the center as they talked silently with their hands using a nonverbal language Neb could not read. They were in various states of dishevelment, as was their custom. The ash and dirt they rubbed into their skin and hair gave them a fierce and wild look that caused most to keep their distance. Their willowy queen looked perplexed and curious, but her eyes came alive when she saw him. Their hands dropped as she stood.

“Nebios,” she asked, “what is happening? There are guards at the door who won’t let us leave.”

Neb swallowed again and nodded slowly. “We need to talk,” he said, his eyes shifting to the small group of servants that surrounded her. “And after, Rudolfo bids you join him in his study.” The words felt awkward. “I’ve a half-squad outside to escort you.”

Her eyes narrowed at this, and he wondered what she read on his face. whatever it was, her nostrils flared and her eyes went wide when the gravity of his demeanor took hold of her. She looked to her people and Neb did the same. They looked away from him, shifting uncomfortably in the silence. There was a note of panic in her voice that surprised him, as if she anticipated dark tidings. “What’s happened, Nebios?”

He moved into the room and opened one of the many doors leading into the private bedchambers of the servants’ suite. He held the door for her as she entered. Then he pulled it shut behind them, standing close to her but uncertain of how to speak and how to be.

He opened his mouth, closed it again. And suddenly, knowing it was just the two of them, he lost control of the sob in his throat and the tears in his eyes for just a moment, but it was enough. He saw her lower lip trembling.

She knows something has happened. Tell her. He willed himself to find the words, and when he did, they tumbled out like drunks from a closing tavern. “We’ve been attacked,” he said. “Men under some kind of magicks-blood magick, I think-penetrated the forest, outran the watch birds and killed the crown Prince of Turam at the banquet table.” He choked here, hating himself for not being able to keep his own emotions in check, hating himself for bringing news to her that he knew would bring suffering. “They’ve killed Hanric, too.”

For a moment, Winters looked like a cornered fawn. Her eyes went wild as she looked to and fro; then the air whistled out of her. Neb reached out to her, but she pushed him away and sat heavily on the floor.

Not knowing what else to do, he sat with her. Once again, he tried to draw close, but she resisted and he realized she was whispering words that quickly ran together, words that sounded like glossolalia they had shared before.

But as he listened, the words took shape, and Neb realized she was speaking of a wind of cleansing blood, an iron blade that pruned. And as she spoke, she held herself, rocking back and forth, her eyes narrow and flitting about the room.

After minutes that felt much longer, he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She looked up, her eyes wet and red. There were tracks of white, clean skin where the tears had washed the dirt from her cheeks. When their eyes met, her lower lip quivered again and she let him pull her into his arms. They huddled on the floor and held each other, Neb finally surrendering to the grief that washed them both.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said after a dozen minutes had passed. She disentangled herself from him and leaned back against the wall, looking to the door. “I need to tell my people.”

Neb moved over to sit next to her. “I think you should talk with Rudolfo first.”

She sniffed and nodded. Neb watched her, realizing how little he knew this girl. The dreams were. What were they? They certainly bared their unconscious hopes and fears to one another there, mingled with metaphysics that Neb himself could only embrace at this point without fully understanding. “Earlier, before the alarm sounded, I had a visitation.”

He blinked. “A vision?”

She shook her head. “No, just words. and a sense of foreboding.” Her brow furrowed as she pulled down the memory. “A wind of blood to cleanse,” she said. “And cold iron to prune.”

Until recently, he’d had no reference point for the glossolalia and prophecy that were a part of the Marsh Queen’s daily life. Those concepts were utterly foreign to him. The Androfrancines who had taught him in their orphan school applied reason and science to myth and mysticism. The idea of writing it down and looking to it for some sense of tomorrow seemed completely irrational to him until he experienced it himself.

Xhum Y’Zir’s Age of Laughing Madness had touched him there in the shadow of Windwir’s pyre just over a year before, opening a door inside of him that he wasn’t sure could ever be closed. From the moment of that first hot wind, he’d been unable to form coherent sentences, instead spewing jumbled bits of P’Andro Whym’s Gospels blended with ecstatic utterances and flashing images that words could not contain. It had passed after a short time, but it had changed something inside of him, something as stark as the brown hair now bleached bone-white by the events of that late morning. Later, his dead father had appeared in his dreams, and so had the Marsh girl, Winters, though he didn’t know it until after they met in the Marsher war camp. Since meeting her, he’d lived on the edge of something he had no skill to comprehend. They are connected, this attack and her visitation. Rudolfo would need to know about this.

Thinking of his waiting general, Neb suddenly blushed. He reached a hand up and brushed the tangled strands of her dirty hair out of her face. Her eyes and nose were red now. He cleared his voice. “I think we should go,” he said. “Lord Rudolfo is waiting to speak you about this.”

She looked at Neb. “Does he know that you know about me?”

Neb shrugged. “I’ve never spoken of it.” Then, as an afterthought: “He’s never asked.” But of