Canticle

Even as she said it, there arose a clamor beyond the tent. It was as if a thousand voices gathered just outside, raising up in a shout all at once, and then a frightened-looking girl entered the tent, a baby clutched in her arms. Behind her, an old man followed with upraised hands, singing loudly in an ecstatic burst of glossolalia. Around them, snow flurried as magicked skirmishers swept into the tent around them, forming an unseen wall between the audience and the infant.

Erlund’s general-Lysias, Petronus remembered-plunged forward and called out a name that was lost in the gasps and cries that filled the tent. Invisible hands pressed him back. And the loudest cry sounded from the front of the room, where Jin Li Tam clung to the podium with ice in her eyes and a snarl upon her lips. “Release my child,” she said, “and I will spare your life.”

The Machtvolk Queen laughed, and Petronus felt the chill of it along his spine. “You are in no position to command me in this matter, Great Mother. Your boy’s life lies in the hands of the Last Son of P’Andro Whym.”

Jin Li Tam cleared the platform in one leap, and Petronus watched as a wall of force caught her up and held her, invisible hands grasping at her arms and legs as she bucked and twisted. Petronus heard a disembodied voice. “Don’t struggle, Great Mother. We hold you for your own good.”

The girl holding Jakob sobbed now and clutched at him as the old man stretched out his hands to take him from her. Jin Li Tam shrieked her rage then, and when soldiers suddenly surged forward, unseen wind knocked them back and down. Then, Jakob rose up in the prophet’s arms for all in the room to see. “Behold,” the old man said, “the Child of Promise.”

It was Petronus’s first close look at the child. He was gray and smaller than he should be, his eyes squeezed shut against the light. He hung motionless in the old man’s hands, his head rolling to the side.

The older Winteria looked to Petronus and drew a knife and a ring from a pocket beneath her armor. He looked at them and blinked. How did she come by those?

He’d not seen either since that day he’d dropped them onto the floor of the tent and left to wash Sethbert’s blood from his hands.

“You know these, then?”

He nodded. “I do.”

She placed the ring upon the table. “I’ve told you that the child’s life is in your hands. Do you believe me?”

He studied the line of her jaw, measured the certainty in her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you.”

“Rise, then, Last Son, take up your ring and face your reckoning.”

He stood, his eyes never leaving the infant, and took up the ring. It was still brown with dried blood that he felt peeling away as he shoved it onto his finger.

He walked around the table to stand before her. She smiled at him. “You called this council of kin-clave for the matter of your guilt in the death of Sethbert as King of Windwir and Holy See of the Androfrancine Order. I charge you with more than this, Petronus, Last Son of P’Andro Whym. I charge you with two thousand years of blasphemy and bullying. I charge you with regicide and deicide.” She paused and looked out over the others in the room. “I charge you with home-stealing and light-hoarding.”

He looked to the baby and then back to the woman. “Who are you to make these charges?”

“I am the Bond-Servant of House Y’Zir, sent to prepare for the advent of the Crimson Empress. I am the Machtvolk Queen Winteria bat Mardic, the Home-Taker.”

“I do not recognize your authority in this matter,” he said, nodding toward Winters. “Winteria bat Mardic is the ascended queen of the Marshfolk.”

“You do not have to. My authority is in this moment and this knife.” She smiled. “And things are not as they seem. My little sister and I may share a name, but make no mistake that our father’s throne is mine by right of birth.”

He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Jin Li Tam’s hands were moving. Do not play into her hand, she said in the Whymer subverbal. There must be another way.

He nodded so that she would know he understood her message, but he had no intention of changing course now. She held the knife in the same way he had, hidden beneath his robes, while he waited for the right moment. This is my reckoning, he thought.

“What do you require of me?” he asked.

She smiled. “I require a plea of you, Last Son.”

Petronus looked at the infant. “And if I give you what you require the child will be unharmed?”

She laughed. “What you give, you give for Jakob and for us all.” If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought love shone out from her eyes. “What you give, you give even for yourself.”

His eyes narrowed. Some part of him wanted to flee now, and his bladder suddenly demanded release. He remembered the place where he had stood when it was Sethbert, remembered the look in the dethroned Overseer’s eyes when he realized the knife had cut his throat, and he felt remorse again for the price he’d exacted-the price he had paid-in order to euthanize the Order and its backward dreaming.

It had been the right thing to do, he realized, even as now he knew this was the right thing.

“Then I offer my plea,” Petronus said. “I am guilty.”

The woman smiled.

He did not think he would feel the knife, but he did. It was a dull ripping with sudden cold against his open throat. He felt his knees buckle and saw his own blood.

Thus shall the sins of P’Andro Whym be visited upon his children.

He saw Esarov moving around the table, his face twisted in rage. He saw Erlund’s stunned look and the ecstasy upon his spymaster’s face. And he saw the baby, held high like a standard, so that his shadow passed over Petronus.

A wind of blood to cleanse; a blade of cold iron to prune.

He heard the cries of those who bore witness, he heard air bubbling through his wound, and above it all Petronus heard the Child of Promise raise up his voice and wail as if with great sorrow.

Then, the Last Son of P’Andro Whym smiled at his reckoning and embraced the light that reached for him.

Jin Li Tam

Jin Li Tam tore her eyes away from Petronus’s twitching form at the sound of her child’s cry. Her body and mind flooded with emotion as the weight of the day’s events finally broke her.

It had begun with the bird. Weeks late, a reply from Rae Li Tam had arrived before dawn, pushed into her fumbling hands by the captain of the watch. She’d read it by firelight and wept.

The note was brief, but she recognized the handwriting as her sister’s, and the triple-coded response was in the standard script of House Li Tam. There is no cure. I grieve with you, Sister.

Beyond those terse words, there’d been no further information and no word from Rudolfo, either, in weeks now. She’d kept the messages going out to him in the hopes that one would find him. None had-or if they had, he’d not responded.

She’d carried the note with her in her pocket and had spent the day crying in her tent when she wasn’t presiding over the kin-clave.

Still, she’d steeled herself for her duties, though the weight of that knowledge crushed her. Rae Li Tam was perhaps the best apothecary in the New World, and if she said there was no cure, Jin Li Tam believed her. Not even the promise of Sanctorum Lux could hold her despair at bay.

So she had hidden her sorrow and faced her day.

And now, the tent stank of blood and mud and ash as Petronus kicked his last on the canvas floor. Her son wailed-great sobs that made his tiny body convulse in the gnarled and filthy hands of Ezra the Marsh Prophet. In his short time with her, Jin Li Tam had never heard him cry so forlornly, and it went deeper than any scout knife.

The so-called Machtvolk Queen glanced at her and then knelt over Petronus, flipping him over. “Do not despair, Great Mother. Salvation is upon us all.”

Then, she opened the old man’s blood-soaked robe, baring his pale chest.

Jin Li Tam willed herself to struggle, but somewhere between her brain and her body, the message fell flat and she hung limply in the arms that held her.