richer.”
“What do you mean?” Nora asked, flabbergasted.
“I’ve heard that he intends to lay claim to another, much larger estate—Lusul.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of Lusul. It used to be his.”
“It was his wife’s estate. He held it through his marriage.”
“Aruendiel has never said anything about claiming it,” Nora said. Then she frowned. “Wait, his niece, Lady Pusieuv—she mentioned Lusul. She wanted him to claim it. As a dowry for her daughters.” The details came back to her now. “There’s an inheritance dispute, right? Lady Pusieuv said that Aruendiel should have kept Lusul all along because—well, his wife was unfaithful.”
“It’s a very rich prize, Lusul,” Perin said. “It’s no surprise that Lord Aruendiel would want to recover it, especially given his reduced circumstances.”
“But he doesn’t want it. He told Lady Pusieuv so.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true.” She shook her head. “If there are rumors going around Semr that Aruendiel plans to claim Lusul, it’s because of Lady Pusieuv. She’s probably telling people he wants it in hopes he’ll change his mind. Although he won’t.”
“Why not?”
He would want nothing to do with anything that reminded him of his wife. “Aruendiel’s very stubborn,” Nora said. “Once he has said no, he will not shift.” She stood up, uncomfortable—why should she feel so disloyal, talking about Aruendiel with Perin?—and pulled her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “I should go feed the ice demon.”
By now, she had already fed the monster almost all of the poems she knew. She had a moment’s panic when it turned its mouth up to her, a deep well waiting to be filled.
Then a verse came into her head. It was from a long poem, and she didn’t know all the lines, but she knew enough. “‘That’s my last duchess painted on the wall’—”
When she returned to the fire, she and Perin divided the last of the dried beef from his kit. Chewing the rank, salty strips of meat made her jaws ache. Nora felt disinclined to speak of Aruendiel again—it seemed uncertain ground—so she asked, after finally swallowing a particularly stringy morsel: “If you don’t want to take a court position in Semr, what would you rather do?”
Perin laughed, a little ruefully. “I’m happy enough serving in the King’s Guard, but my father is right. I can’t stay there forever. There’s not much chance for promotion or spoils these days, unless this Faitoren rebellion turns into a greater war. All the more reason, my father says, to make a good match.”
“You mean, to marry an heiress.”
Perin said nothing, but in the dimness, Nora made out a half nod. Then he said: “You said in Semr that you had had a cruel husband.”
“Yes.” Nora found that she did not much wish to discuss Raclin with Perin, either. “It was not a real marriage,” she added awkwardly. “I mean, he deceived me—I didn’t know what he was really like.”
“This was the Faitoren prince?” So Perin had heard that story in Semr, too. Was he going to press for details? No, he only said: “You deserve a far better husband.” He spoke with surprising warmth.
“I hope so!” Nora said. She laughed, and after a moment Perin laughed with her.
“So you think one ought to know what a husband—or a wife—is like before marriage?” he asked. Nora said yes, very firmly. “It’s not so easy, you know,” Perin said. “My family recently began marriage negotiations for me with Lord Denisk of Kaniskl, for his oldest daughter. I have met her just once. If the negotiations are successful and the marriage takes place, I would probably see her four or five more times before the wedding.”
Nora was surprised to register a pang of disappointment. But her instinct had been right: Men like Perin were always engaged. She said: “I think you should get to know her better. How did you like her when you met her?”
“Pretty, very shy. She wouldn’t talk at all at first, but I played with her puppy and I think she liked me a little better then. She is thirteen years old.”
“You can’t marry a thirteen-year-old!”
“She’d be fourteen or fifteen by the time of the wedding.” Perin sighed, an uncharacteristically gloomy sound. “To be honest, I’d much rather have a wife who is ready to cuddle her own babies, not just a puppy.”
“Then don’t marry a child! I think you should find someone closer to your own age to marry, to have children with. If that’s what you really want, a family,” Nora added, fumbling a little. “It sounds like it.”
“Oh, yes.” Perin’s tone was definite. “Not just to honor my ancestors, either. I like children—preferably a houseful of children, like the one I grew up in.”
Nora had a sudden, vivid mental picture of Perin with his yet-unborn family—roughhousing with the boys, carrying a little girl on his shoulders, holding a wiggling baby with gentle awkwardness. He seemed to cast a circle of light in which everyone was happy and safe; all of them were laughing, including the shadowy woman by the cradle. “You’ll be a good father, whoever you marry,” Nora said.
“The negotiations with Lord Denisk were not going well, the last I heard,” Perin said cheerfully.
The next morning they broke camp well before dawn. Nora groped her way over to Dorneng, hoping that it would be easier to rouse him this morning. Yesterday he’d been almost completely inert.
Today, though, as soon as she put her hand on his shoulder, she could feel that Dorneng was gone. His body was rigid, ungiving. She felt both relieved and somber. Every man’s death diminishes me.
“He had already departed,” Perin said gently when she showed him.
Nora remembered saying almost the same thing herself, the other time. “It was probably a stupid idea to drag him all this way,” she said. “But I couldn’t just leave him.”
“No, I see that,” Perin said. “You are not easily discouraged when you want to help someone.”
“Oh, no, it’s not that—” He was giving her too much credit, but his words made her glow. In silence together they weighted Dorneng’s corpse with stones, so that he would be buried in the marsh with the first thaw of spring.
By the time the stone towers of Maarikok turned pinkish gold in the first light, Nora and Perin were looking up at the castle from the eastern tip of the island. “Hmm,” said Perin. He was no doubt thinking the same thing that Nora was: Higher than we thought. On the island’s northern side, the hill on which the fortress was built reared almost straight out of the marsh.
Perin turned his gaze to the south and took off his helmet. The wind coming across the marshland ruffled his short-cropped hair. Nora admitted to herself that he was better-looking than she’d first thought: well-knit features, a level glance. Watch it, she told herself, recognizing the symptoms: not a crush yet, but a distinct tingle.
Perin held up his hand. “Listen,” he said. “The battle has begun.” She could make out only phantom shouts, a distant clatter. No gunfire, as there would be in her world. “It’s good for us,” he said reassuringly. “It’s a distraction.”
“Right,” she said, nodding. “Well, let’s take a better look.”
They made their way along the northern side of the island, under the cliff. From time to time, Perin glanced back at the ice demon on the sled. “Here?” he asked.
“Not here. Keep going.” The demon’s face was impassive as always, but there was poorly suppressed excitement in the way it shifted its position on the sled. It was looking forward to freedom and, Nora feared, a really satisfying meal after days of nothing but poetry.
Looking up, Nora could see how the demon had been able to climb the cliff on its earlier raids. The stone had split and eroded into jagged protuberances, where an exceptionally enterprising mountain goat—or an ice demon—might be able to find a path.
“Here,” the demon announced suddenly. “This is the way.”
“You’re sure?” Perin asked.
“I forget nothing,” the demon said.
Perin looked at Nora, a trace of skepticism in his glance. “Well, what do you think? Can you manage it?”
“I think so,” she said. Now that they were finally here, the rough wall of stone waiting to be attempted, she
