Canticle

courtesans and spies out of play, closing down the bank they had operated for generation upon generation and passing the House Li Tam holdings over to the Order in the days just prior to the Order’s holdings passing to Rudolfo?

Or perhaps there was indeed an outside threat. Perhaps the document that Petronus hadn’t signed was not a Tam forgery but the product of some hidden group within the Order bent on a secret agenda to defend the light at any and all costs.

Seven months ago, with Sethbert’s blood still under his fingernails, Petronus had given himself to the work of finding out.

He put the papers back into the satchel and went again to the window. A reckoning. The feeling was stronger, but the night was quiet. High above, a sliver of blue-green moon shone in the star-speckled sky. Petronus sighed and pulled the rough fabric curtains closed.

He shrugged out of his robe and pulled on his sleeping shirt before crawling into his narrow bed. He pulled the wool blankets up around his neck and lay on his side, watching the fire across the room. The light dancing there was not much comfort to him, but eventually sleep pulled him down into cold but strong arms. The fire continued in his dreams. A burning village, a smoldering city. Blood beneath his fingernails.

He stirred at a sound and sat up quickly when the door to his shack swung open. His fingers curled around the handle of the fishing knife he kept beneath his pillow.

The magick-muffled voice came to him from across the room, but Petronus saw nothing there. “And thus,” it said, “are the sins of P’Andro Whym visited upon his children.”

Petronus smiled and rose to the reckoning with his knife in hand.

Chapter 2

Winters

Winteria bat Mardic looked out over Rudolfo’s gardens from her balcony, wondering how it was that she had come here for a boy.

The noise of her host’s Firstborn Feast filled the cold night, and she imagined the show Hanric gave them on her behalf. It was strange to be the Marsh King, she thought. Queen. Soon enough she would come into her majority and take the Firstfall axe and the Wicker Throne away from Hanric. Her father’s closest friend had trained her for that day along with the Androfrancine scholar they had hired away from those gray-robed thieves. She was nearly ready for the rest of the world to know the truth.

Her people knew the truth and kept her trust. They’d learned the hard way that it was better to keep Marsher business in the Marshlands. But for outside eyes, she was a servant in the Marsh King’s entourage, kept about for nefarious reasons, according to their neighbors in the New World. She had it on good authority that Androfrancine intelligence had once noted her role as that of soothsayer and companion. Under normal circumstances, surrounded by just her tribe, she ruled quietly and served her people by adding her dreams to the Book of Dreaming Kings. In these affairs of state she truly had no place. But she had not come here for Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast, though it was a fine occasion to honor.

She had come here for a boy. Nebios ben Hebda, the Homeseeker. Snow had slowed their journey to the Ninefold Forest, and their entourage had arrived that morning to a quiet but public welcome. Hanric, as her shadow, followed the forms with gruff acquiescence. The Named Lands saw a giant barbarian with bits of wood and bone woven into his long beard and his tangled hair, carrying an enormous axe. That’s what the Marshfolk needed the Named Lands to see to keep them frightened. After the public reception, she’d spent a few hours talking with Rudolfo in a quiet place about the unrest on the Delta and elsewhere in the Named Lands, had lunched with the other servants and then sought out Neb. Rudolfo and Neb were the only two beyond her own people who knew the truth about her. The rest believed the image the Marshers projected, and few drew close enough to learn otherwise. The Marshfolk kept to themselves, and their neighbors preferred it that way. There was a saying, though she didn’t know if it was in use much these days. As welcome as a Marsher at a wedding. For two thousand years, they’d huddled in the north in lands they’d not chosen, biding their time and waiting for the season that would bring about the end of their sorrow in the Named Lands.

Like Rudolfo’s kin, the Marshers had arrived ahead of the other settlers and had chosen their lands well. And like the Foresters, their unusual relationship with the fallen wizard kings cast suspicion upon them and kept them set apart. But unlike Rudolfo’s Gypsies, they had been unable to hold their lands, and the young Androfrancine Order had pushed them farther north, into the marshes and scrub at the base of the Dragon’s Spine so that the militant scholars and archeologists could establish their second fortress in the New World there on the banks of the Second River.

The Named Lands were safer with the Marshfolk contained, according to Pope Windwir, the poet whose name had been given to that fort years later when the library was young and the Order was finding its legs. After all, those protectors of the light reasoned, these were the near-kin of Xhum Y’Zir and his seven sons, the Wizard Kings of the Old World. It didn’t help that many of the hallmarks of the Age of Laughing Madness had never quite bred out of her people despite their pilgrimage from the Churning Wastes so long ago.

Of course, Winters understood this. She was the first queen in their long history-and the first to receive an Androfrancine education of sorts. Her people covered themselves in the ash and mud of the land as a constant reminder of their sorrow. They embraced superstition and mysticism, preferring prophecy and glossolalia to the so- called Androfrancine light; their kings preached those dreams to the Named Lands during times of war, and they still practiced the alchemy of blood magick in a limited fashion.

They were a different people, Winters realized, and her limited understanding of history-both in the New World and the Old World-was that being different did not often bode well unless you were stronger than those peoples considered to be the norm. So they waited, hidden in the north, only riding forth to raid the border towns. They kept kin-clave with none and were even hostile from time to time, depending where the dreams carried them.

But everything had changed last year when Windwir fell and the war they had prayed for and longed for began there on the bone-scattered plains of the fallen city. She’d led her army down from the north with Hanric bearing the axe of her office as her shadow, honoring the dreams and announcing kin-clave with the Gypsies, knowing that somehow Rudolfo’s blade guarded the way to their new home. That change alone was enough.

But then she’d fallen into someone else’s dreams and found herself face-to-face with the promised Homeseeker himself, Nebios ben Hebda, the Androfrancine orphan. And more: She’d grown to know the awkward boy who had seen Windwir fall beneath Xhum Y’Zir’s spell, and she thought she might love him.

And so she had come for a boy. Now she had seen him, and it had frightened her. The feelings he stirred up within her felt larger than her heart could contain, and there was an edge to it that felt sharp enough that it could cut a part of her soul away if she let it.

Maybe it has already? She wasn’t sure. Her own mother had not lived long enough to talk to her daughter about these things. Hanric was the closest thing she had to a father, and he left those matters for her to ascertain through the women among her household. She’d not asked them. She’d not felt it proper.

Still, ever since that day at the edge of the Desolation, she couldn’t help but imagine Neb’s mouth on hers and his hands moving along her hips and sides and shoulders. Even now, she shuddered a bit. After that kiss, their dreams had shifted. They dreamed of the new home Neb would find, of being limb-tangled and naked in a silk- draped bed, staring up at a massive, swollen, brown-and-blue world that filled the sky. Birds sang around them. Water cascaded nearby. Occasionally in those dreams, they kissed again, but most of their dreams were flashes of light, bent images of the world, vast expanses of sand and glass and scrub.

Seeing him today, kissing him today, was even more powerful than the dreams, and a part of her hoped that tonight, after he’d had his fill of the feast, he would find her and kiss her again.

She blushed at the thought of it despite the cold wind on her cheeks.

“You’re a silly girl,” she said to herself and the night. “Not much of a queen at all.”

She turned to let herself back inside the manor when she heard a distant and growing sound carried by a slight breeze. She felt her stomach lurch and her mouth pull downward and twist. Before she could catch herself,