Antiphon

magicks that concealed him. “Your sister isn’t the only one with special guests. Charles and Isaak are here. I’ve left the old gray robe in the wood; he seeks pages missing from your Book and believes the Watcher has them.”

“The Watcher?”

“Lady Tam will tell you more when she can. He’s a metal man the likes of which we’ve never seen. A leftover of the Younger Gods, I’ll wager, dug up from their graveyards beneath the ground. Charles and Isaak believe he’s taken pages from your book. Pages required for their work of saving the light. Lady Tam sent me to inquire what you might know of this matter.”

Winters was certain her face had already betrayed her. Charles and Isaak are here? And inquiring after the missing pages? She turned in the direction that Aedric’s voice last came from and swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “I know of it. It was what the other mechoservitors told me when Garyt took me to them.”

“And these pages-do you say they are critical to save the light as well?”

She thought about this. “I do not know about the light,” she said. “But I know they are the path Home for my people, Captain, and a part of the dream the mechoservitors serve, part of the dream I serve.”

“The one that names your boy, Nebios, Homeseeker?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

She heard Aedric sigh. “Then let’s hope that even Y’Zirite metal men celebrate their so-called Moon Mass.” His voice moved near now, and his face took shape before her, shimmering and faint in the lamplight. “I will do what I can to find these pages.”

The sudden thought of a metal man attending the mass piqued her curiosity. Ria had mentioned a guest who could answer her questions, and she wondered if this might be that guest. She shook away the thought at Aedric’s next words. “Open the door for me, Lady Winteria. It’s time for me to go.”

She did, stepping into the hall and calling out to a servant who was going someplace quickly, her arms full of coats. “When you are finished,” she said, “I would like some tea, please.” She felt the slightest wind on her exposed feet and ankles as Aedric moved away down the hall.

The girl nodded and continued on; Winters went back into her room and closed the door.

She walked to her bed and sat upon it.

Do I still want to go through with this? Charles and Isaak were here now. And Aedric was now involving his Gypsy Scouts. Still, the missing pages were only a part of what compelled her toward action tonight. She’d asked for her voice magicks before she’d even known about the final dream. She’d asked for them once she’d started dreaming again, once she’d seen the wrongness of the path her people were being led down.

She looked to her knives where they hung from their belts on the back of the wooden desk chair. Then, she looked back to the bed. She stood and then crouched down, stretching her hand underneath the mattress until it found the small phial. She held it and stared at it, remembering the last time she’d tasted the sour contents that fueled her announcement of ascension to the Wicker Throne. And later, those contents had let her preach her first War Sermon, compiled of glossolalia and the scattered images of her family’s long Homeward dream.

Walking to the mirror, she saw her dim reflection now within it.

Such a girl now. No, she realized, a woman.

She’d much rather go to this in her ragged trousers and tunic, her hair braided in bones and sticks, her face washed with the ash of desolation, the mud of a land that rejected her people and cast them into sorrow. She’d rather face this moment with the knives that her friend had taught her to dance with.

She placed the phial between her breasts and pushed it to the right, adjusting both breast and phial until the one covered the other. She would have to find a safe moment to drink the magicks.

Then, she would have to find the words that needed to be said to her people and to the woman who had stolen them from her.

Wolves in the fold, Winters thought, and wondered if she would be as strong as the hero Jamael when the time came.

Jin Li Tam

The song rose in a cloudless sky the color of slate and speckled with the few swollen stars that were visible by day. Jin Li Tam held Jakob close, hidden in a sling beneath her fur robes, his tiny face peeking out. It was a cold evening, made colder still by the chills the Y’Zirite hymns brought to her skin. She glanced to Winters where she walked beside her and then to Lynnae on her other side. All three of them had been provided gowns and fur robes. They were walking now on wooden planks that had been hammered together to create a path above ground going muddy from those who’d walked it before.

They’d left the lodge in a large throng of people that she assumed were Ria’s elite. Those who had helped her wrest power from her younger sister, those who had seeded the Y’Zirite resurgence in secret. She and her party walked close to the front, where the Machtvolk queen led the procession, accompanied by a robed figure who had joined them late as they gathered by the front door.

Now, they approached the natural amphitheater and Jin saw the light of a hundred fires and heard the hymn as it built to a crescendo. It was not the song she had first heard, but similar, and the words within it took her back to the war that had raged in her since the meeting with the woman claiming to be her sister.

When the regent bids you come, go with him. The boy will be safe in Y’Zir.

Her child was their messiah somehow, in conjunction with their Crimson Empress. The world’s healing was in their hands, according to the gospels she’d read. And if the magicked woman in her room spoke true, somewhere beyond the Named Lands lay a place bearing the name of their faith-a place she was intended to go to with her son for some purpose yet to be revealed. Initially, she’d been convinced it was a trap. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw that it seemed the direction gravity pulled her toward. Truly, there had been a great conspiracy within the Named Lands, fueled and funded by a branch of her family with help from this Watcher. An enemy greater than these pulled the puppet strings, and the opportunity to get closer to that enemy was nothing to be taken lightly.

And there is no safe place in the Named Lands. Not unless she was prepared to live here with the Machtvolk. The conspiracy had done a good job of assuring that none of the nations of the Named Lands could trust her family or Rudolfo.

The music changed as they drew closer, and they carefully picked their way down a crowded slope, moving slowly. As they went, she felt tentative hands reach out to touch her, and she forced herself not to cringe from it. She brought her arms up over Jakob by instinct.

They reached the bottom of the slope and climbed wooden steps onto a platform where two dozen chairs sat in a ring around a large wooden cutting table. An elaborate system of catch trays was fastened to it, all feeding into a single pipe that fed a silver basin. Nearby, Jin saw a table with silver knives laid out upon it beside a bowl of white powder she assumed must be cutting salts. Over the past several days, she’d heard much about tonight’s mass, but this was an unexpected aspect. Though in hindsight Jin wasn’t sure why she’d not anticipated it.

Someone is going to be cut tonight.

They stood before their chairs. At first, she thought they waited for Ria, but she realized that the Machtvolk queen watched the robed man who joined them. When he sat, Ria did the same, and the rest of them followed.

Jin leaned forward, still unable to see the man’s face, but she noted his hands. They were white and large, laced with scars that reminded her of the marks that her father bore, cut into him by Ria during his time in captivity. Whoever he was, he’d arrived late in the night and had been hidden away quickly. The shimmering forms that she glimpsed from the corner of her eye told her that he was accompanied by magicked scouts.

A handful of her own scouts had accompanied her, and she wondered how the others fared. She’d sent Aedric to Winters, and the fact that he hadn’t returned told her that the girl had confirmed the missing pages and Isaak’s need of them. By now, surely the first captain had reached the caves, gambling that its metal occupant was attending the night’s event.

She looked around the crowd again. If the Watcher was here she could not see him; but there were thousands crowded into this space now, and if he was robed, she might never pick him out.

Still, she kept looking for him even after Ria stood and sipped from a phial she held in her ungloved hand.