Antiphon

Jin’s knives were already out when Winters turned to face her. Drawing her own, she moved into the first overture. They moved slowly at first, their knives finding the others and clinking in the quiet afternoon. Their feet moved across the snow, breaking it up, as Winters matched her rhythm to Jin’s. Gradually, the seasoned knife fighter raised the tempo until it was at a point where Winters had to work. At its crescendo, their knives sparked and rasped as they danced across the clearing.

After forty minutes, they stopped and Winters bent at the knees to suck in great lungfuls of the cold air. She looked up as she did it and saw that this time, even Jin Li Tam had broken a sweat. The redheaded queen smiled at her.

“You’re getting better, girl.”

She slowed her breathing. “Really?”

Jin nodded. “I’d pit you against any of Rudolfo’s scouts. And your reach is exceptional. Better than most men. Once you’ve hit your full height, you’ll be unstoppable.”

Winters felt herself blushing. “Thank you.” She managed an awkward curtsy. “I have an excellent teacher.”

Jin Li Tam inclined her head, lifting her coat from the rock where she’d put it. “Tomorrow, then?”

Winters nodded.

She watched as Jin Li Tam and her escorts left. Her own guards still stood out of view in the woods, but she had no doubt they’d seen every step she’d taken in the dance, every thrust and slice of the blades. She went to the stump to get her coat and book.

She pulled the heavy furs over her and lifted the gospel. Something seemed different, and she glanced down at it. Opening it, she thumbed through the pages and heard her breath catch.

The dreams, folded so carefully into the pages, were gone.

She kept her back to her watchers, looking quickly around the clearing to see if somehow the pages had defied all logic and loosed themselves. Then, she looked to the snow around the stump. Only her footprints back and forth to it, though that meant little. A well-trained scout could run at top speed in the footprints of another, leaving little to no trace of their passing.

They’re gone. But another page had been left-a note scribbled with a birder’s needle on a bit of rough parchment. She read it without removing it from its place in the book:

Hail Winteria bat Mardic, queen of the Marshfolk, and hail the Homeseeker’s Dream. Someone will come to you each day in this manner. Your dreams will be added to the Book.

She closed the gospel and made her way back up the trail. As the forest swallowed her, she found herself pondering the dreams. Isaak had been there, and she thought that maybe he had even quoted the Book to her, though she didn’t know how that could be possible. None but the Marsh King had ever read the Book. And Tertius, of course. It had been the price he’d extracted to abandon the Great Library at Windwir and risk a hangman’s noose to educate the Marsh King’s daughter.

She thought of the Book and the years spent in the smell of paper, in the guttering light of candles. Mornings spent writing and afternoons spent reading, connecting the various bits that connected. Nights spent seeing the shape of things to come; a home rising for her people.

I am dreaming again.

When she passed Garyt ben Urlin at his post, she watched him stand a bit straighter and she carefully inclined her head to him, mindful of the men who followed her.

Thank you, her hands said upon the side of her coat.

He said nothing, his own hands still upon his spear. But the look in his eye was enough for her. It was something she did not see in the eyes of those around her, something she herself had not felt often in the last year or so.

Still, Garyt had it in his eyes and in the line of his jaw, the way that he stood at the door he guarded.

Hope, Winters thought, is a contagious thing.

And in that moment, she knew what she must do.

Jin Li Tam

Late-morning sun slanted into the windows lining the hall, and Jin Li Tam embraced the warmth and light upon her face. It had already been a full morning.

She’d breakfasted with Winters, practicing the Gypsy subverbal language and discussing the girl’s latest dream in quiet voices. After, she’d met with Aedric briefly while walking Jakob in Ria’s meditation grove. He’d lost two scouts in the caves where the birds were being diverted and had pulled his men back. But still, the bird station had been disrupted. They’d launched a handful of short-distance birds to bear word of that back to the edge of the Prairie Sea. Still, unless Aedric committed resources to actually eliminate the bird station, it would be up and running again. And though Jin Li Tam was certain Ria knew Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts were running these operations and tolerated them in an effort to prove her trustworthiness, she was equally certain that she would not tolerate an act of open aggression, Great Mother or not.

Thinking of Ria refocused her. The Machtvolk queen’s note had been brief and direct, and Jin Li Tam wondered what was planned for her this afternoon. Another school? Not likely-she’d been asked to come alone. And the children at the school were far more interested in Jakob, their Child of Promise. She was merely the means to that end.

An odd place to be.

The doors to Ria’s study were unguarded, and when she knocked, she found the door was ajar. “Come in, Great Mother,” Ria said, rising from behind her desk. Her face was grim, and there were circles under her eyes.

Jin Li Tam forced concern into her voice. “Are you well, Queen Winteria?”

Ria offered a brief smile. “I am very well and very tired,” she said. “And I’ve someone to introduce you to.”

They found their boots and coats waiting for them at the door, and Jin Li Tam followed Ria as they climbed the low hill behind her lodge. They walked without talking and Jin Li Tam savored it, enjoying the sound of the snow and ice crunching beneath their feet, the whisper of the wind through the trees. The air hung heavy with scents of pine and wood smoke and snow, and for a moment she was able to forget about everything but now.

At the top of the hill, a round stone building awaited. She recognized it as a blood shrine, but the guards at the door told her it wasn’t the same as the others she’d seen springing up in the Marshlands.

When they approached, the guards quickly opened the door, and an old man in the long black robes of a priest met them. His sleeves were pushed up past his elbows, and his hands and forearms were covered in blood. He grinned behind a pair of thick spectacles. “My Lady,” he said, “our penitent has taken the mark.”

Ria smiled, and Jin saw genuine joy in it. “Good,” she said. “Brother Aric, this is the Great Mother, Lady Jin Li Tam.”

The priest bent from the waist. “Great Mother,” he said, “I am honored to live so long as to see your coming.”

Something in his voice chilled her. Or was it the way he looked at her? She inclined her head to show respect. “Thank you,” she said.

He straightened himself. “I will hope to meet the Child of Promise before you return to the Ninefold Forest,” he said. “Though I hope this will not be your last visit to our lands.”

She smiled. “I’m sure it won’t be.”

The priest led them through another door, and Jin found herself wanting to retch from the smell of excrement, urine and blood that ambushed her. “I apologize for the smell,” he said. “We had hoped to clean up before you arrived, but we only just now finished.”

Jin Li Tam looked into the dim-lit room, suppressing the strong impulse to gasp at what she saw. She’d certainly seen violence-she’d given as much as she’d received. It had never felt right, but she’d learned from her father that feelings were simply the body’s way of assuring its survival and should be subject to the rule of the higher mind. She’d assumed all violence should feel wrong. But there was a wrongness to what she saw now that turned her stomach over and broke her heart.

He’d been a man once, she knew, strapped to an altar designed to serve also as a cutting table. Now, he was a red mass of twitching, raw meat. His skin, freshly cut in the symbols of House Y’Zir, had been peeled away bit by