Canticle

course he knew. He had to know. Why else had he sent Neb for her specifically?

She nodded, then slowly pushed her way up to her feet. Neb stood, too, and turned toward the door.

Her hand caught his own. “Thank you for being the one to bear me this message,” she said in a quiet voice.

“I felt I must,” he said.

Their eyes met for a moment; then he watched her look away and compose herself to face her people. “I will speak to my people first,” she said. “I will not speak to Rudolfo until those who loved and served Hanric know of his fall.”

Neb nodded. Then he opened the door and watched her square her shoulders and set her jaw against the task ahead.

A wind of blood to cleanse; cold iron to prune. Neb shuddered, and her premonition took him. It was a woeful feeling that reached beyond the loss of Hanric into the very heart of the Marshfolk. Something dark and brewing, he thought. And the sorrow on Winters’s face betrayed something within her.

She knows, Neb realized.

This woe now was but the first of more to come.

Jin Li Tam

The sky over the Desolation of Windwir was a slate of smeared red, and Jin Li Tam could not tell if it was sunrise or sunset that made it so. The horizons to her east and west gave no clue to the time of day, and the sun was nowhere to be seen. Hazy light washed the forest of bones in blood and turned the placid surface of the nearby Second River black. Tendrils of pink mist crawled the ground, swept in eddies by a cold wind that moved freely among the skeletons, raising a low hum. She shivered from both the chill and the sight of Xhum Y’Zir’s handiwork. Her breath caught in her throat, and she found herself wondering if being here was safe for her baby.

In that moment, Jin Li Tam rested her hand upon her swollen stomach, willing her son to kick, to show some sign of life.

This isn’t right, she realized. They’d buried the dead here, Neb and Petronus, while the war raged on around them. There was no field of bones. The gravediggers had seen to it, she was certain. Who has undone their work?

She heard a distant sound over her shoulder and turned to the northeast. Faintly, she heard the clamor of Third Alarm in the direction of the Ninefold Forest, hundreds of leagues distant, past thick forest, rugged hills and the expansive Prairie Sea that surrounded the Gypsy King’s scattered forest islands. Dark clouds hung ominous and impenetrable in that direction.

I’m needed at home, she thought. But the forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam was uncertain how she’d come to be here in the first place, and now her very feet resisted her efforts to move them homeward. The air grew colder around her, and she realized she was wearing the thin green silk riding skirt and blouse she’d worn that night so long ago when Rudolfo had danced with her in Sethbert’s banquet tent.

A sunrise such as you belongs in the East with me, he’d told her that night. She put her hands on her stomach again and suddenly found that it was flat and firm. When she looked down, she saw that her skirts were black with blood. She felt it, warm and sluggish, as it moved down her legs to pool around her feet.

When she opened her mouth to scream, a giant black raven landed on the cracked cornerstone of a shattered building and cocked its head. Jin Li Tam swallowed her scream and willed the strength of focus her father had brutally trained into his sons and daughters.

A kin-raven. She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but she did. It was larger than any raven she’d seen, and it stared at her, its beak opening and closing. She saw the scarlet thread of war tied to one foot, the green thread of peace on the other. She also saw, by the way it held its head, that its neck had been broken and that its feathers were mottled and singed. One of its eyes was missing. It croaked at her.

“You are extinct,” Jin Li Tam said slowly. “And this is a dream.”

The beak opened, and a tinny, faraway voice leaked out. “And it shall come to pass at the end of days that a wind of blood shall rise for cleansing and cold iron blades shall rise for pruning,” the kin-raven said. “Thus shall the sins of P’Andro Whym be visited upon his children. Thus shall the Throne of the Crimson Empress be established.” The bird stopped, hopped backward on its feet, then forward, cocking its head again and fixing her in its flat black eye. “Fortunate are you among women and highly favored is Jakob, Shepherd of the Light.”

The first wave of pain hit her and she clutched at herself. “Begone, kin-raven,” she said, gritting her teeth against the spasm that gripped her belly. “Your message is unwelcome in this House.” She wasn’t sure where the words came from, but she laid hold of them and said them again, loudly, forcing her feet to carry her toward the bird as she raised her hand. “Begone, kin-raven. Your message is unwelcome in this House.”

Then the kin-raven did something birds should not be able to do, not even in dreams. It smiled. Then it unfurled its wings, and they hung over Windwir’s bones to cast long shadows east and west. “I leave you now,” it said, the metallic voice leaking out from the opened beak. “But soon I shall dine upon your father’s eyes.”

Jin Li Tam lunged forward, the pain growing as she moved, then lost her footing as her slippers found no traction in the puddle of her blood and water.

She screamed her rage and felt hands suddenly upon her, pulling her, shaking her.

“Lady Tam?” The voice was faraway to the northeast. “My lady?” Behind the voice, the clamoring of the alarm went suddenly silent and Jin Li Tam opened her eyes.

“Are we at Third Alarm?” she asked the girl who attended her. She sat up, taking a quick inventory of herself and her surroundings. The pain was real, and she felt wetness beneath the blankets. Holding her breath, she pushed them down and looked. No blood, but her water had indeed broken.

The girl took a step back and nodded. “Yes, Lady. We’ve been at Third Alarm. But the grounds and manor are safe now.”

“We were attacked?” Grimacing against the pain, she carefully moved to the edge of the bed and reached for her nearby robe.

The girl nodded again. “Yes, Lady. The scouts at the door have not offered any details.”

Not yet, they haven’t. She stood, felt the rush of blood to her head, then sat again. She motioned the girl closer. “Help me up.”

The servant offered her hands and leaned back to help Jin up. She pulled on the robe and winced. The girl looked alarmed when she saw the wet bed. “Shall I call the River Woman?”

Jin Li Tam nodded. “Yes. I think it’s started early.”

The girl guided her to the wall by the door, and Jin put her hand against it, resting her weight there while the girl opened it and poked her head out, calling for a scout.

She’d spent most of the last month in bed, and she could feel the weakness in her legs. Her baby had been too quiet, there had been occasional spotting, and the River Woman had doled out powders and ordered bed rest. She’d plowed through at least a hundred books, the ink and paper smelling fresh from the mechoservitors who reproduced them from memory for the new library.

She was a tiger who hated cages.

But the look on Rudolfo’s face each time he saw her, each time they sat and spoke of the son to come, was enough to sustain her.

This, too, shall pass, she told her weak legs and swollen stomach, the waves of nausea and the intense aversion to smells that had never bothered her before. Soon enough, she said to the cage her bedchambers had become.

Until she met the Gypsy King and fell in love with him the night he gave the metal man back his Androfrancine robes, Jin Li Tam had never considered the possibility of motherhood. In those days, she’d been about her father’s business-joining herself to whatever man or woman he chose for her, using her role as a courtesan and occasional consultant to play her part in House Li Tam’s work of guiding the river of politics and strategy in the Named Lands.

Hidden in her father’s library, before the day he donated it to Rudolfo and Isaak’s restoration work, there had been another library-a small room she’d seen only once or twice as a little girl. There, in slim black volumes etched in the coded scripts of House Li Tam, was the secret history of the Named Lands written with the blood and effort of her family. Her father had burned those books the day Rudolfo confronted him, but the river had moved. Her