Within a short time Snenneq reached the second floor windows, little more than arrow slits that had been filled in with stone shards when the tower was sealed. The troll scooped some of the stones out, letting them clatter onto the cobbled roadway below, then stuck both his feet into the hollow he’d made and rested there for a short while.

“A good night for climbing, this is,” he called down. “I can see much of the village from here.”

“City,” Morgan called back, suddenly conscious of how loud they must be. “You know, I’ve been thinking that maybe this is not such a good idea after all.”

“I cannot hear you speaking, Morgan Prince. Not one word.”

Down at St. Sutrin’s in the city, the bell tolled for compline. Morgan started to lift the drinking skin again, then thought better of it. The best part of his mood was beginning to curl a bit at the edges. If Little Snenneq reached the top, Morgan knew he would have to climb, too, or he would never be able to look him in the face again. What if Astrian and the rest heard that Morgan had challenged Snenneq and then turned coward himself? They would never let him hear the end of it. Astrian would make a dozen new names for him, each more humiliating than the last. It would be worse than the night of battle on the North Road, stuck in the camp with the women and old men, knowing that only a few hundred steps away Erkynlandish soldiers were fighting and dying.

He tossed the drinking skin onto Snenneq’s pack. No more tonight, he told himself—or at least not until the climbing was finished. Still, he found himself praying in a most un-Morgan-like way that Snenneq would give up and come back down.

But nothing like that happened. As the prince watched, stomach growing more and more knotted, the little man made his deliberate way higher and higher, past the arrow-slits of the third story and up the moon-silvered facing of the fourth. Sometimes he hunted long moments for his next handhold—once he even dangled himself by his fingers alone until he could find a place to lodge his foot a cubit or more to one side—but no challenge seemed to hold him back for long. In the middle of his own growing concern, Morgan couldn’t help admiring the troll’s skill. Snenneq might look broad across the middle, even a bit fat, but the husky little fellow was strong, too, and matched his strength with a good eye and soft touch.

Morgan swallowed. It had become obvious to him some time earlier that Snenneq was a much better climber than he had ever been. Now it was becoming just as clear that unless something terrible happened, Snenneq was going to reach the top. Morgan’s palms were damp despite the cool of the night.

You’re a fool, Morgan Prince, he told himself. You’re a drunkard and a fool. Everything your grandparents say is right.

At the highest floor, Snenneq veered a little farther from his course than Morgan expected. The prince realized that the little man was using the stone sills of the black, empty windows to begin the last part of his climb. For a moment, as he crabwalked along the lower part of the window, his fingers digging into the stone facing above, something seemed to reach out of the dark space near his legs and grab at him. Morgan gasped, his heart speeding, but it was only a strange shadow caused by the unevenness of the stones filling the window.

Fool, he scolded himself. This is bad enough without making ghosts up out of the thin air.

Still, it was hard to forget all the childhood stories about Pryrates, about the Red Priest’s hairless head and cruel face and the sound of his boots as he walked through the keep at night. Pryrates’ father had been a demon, some of the stories claimed. He could speak to the dead.

Snenneq had reached the edge of the roof, nothing above him but the shallow dome that covered the top of the tower. The troll pulled himself over the edge—for a moment his legs kicked in the air, like a frog jumping into the water—and then vanished. Morgan stood and stared upward, his heart beating fast again.

Snenneq’s head appeared a few instants later along the edge of the roof, a dark knot silhouetted by moonlight. “I have been tying the rope!” he called down, voice muffled by distance. A moment later Morgan saw a flash of silvery-gray as the coils spun down. The end bounced, swung, and stopped to hang just about the height of the wall. Snenneq called down something else, but this time Morgan could not make it out before the troll disappeared behind the edge of the tower roof.

What had he said? For Morgan to climb up and join him? Or could it have been something else? Perhaps he had said, “It’s not safe. Stay there. I’m coming down.” But if that was the case, where was he?

Morgan waited. And waited. And waited.

The moon slipped into a nest of clouds and hid itself. The kangkang skin, so near, seemed to call to him with a voice of sweet solace. A few more drinks, and he wouldn’t care about any of it. He could stay down here and have a little nap, and eventually someone else would come and take care of things. Snenneq would climb back down, or Qina would return with the guards, or with her father.

Or with my grandparents . . .

He began to pace, and the night seemed to suck much of the drunkenness from his veins, leaving only a sickened chill. How could he sit waiting for someone else to come? He had given his word, the promise of a prince. He had goaded—yes, goaded—the troll into climbing the dangerous tower. Perhaps even now Snenneq was lying there, having slipped or tripped in the dark and hurt himself badly. And what if little Qina had got herself lost in the complicated maze of passageways and alleys at the heart of the ancient keep? Then nobody would be coming, and nobody was going to do anything except Morgan himself. He would have to climb.

Is that what Snenneq’s fortune-telling bones meant, his Black Crevice and his Unnatural Birth? That I’ll never be king because I’m going to fall off a tower and die?

The rope hung down in the moonlight, a line of silver against the dark stone, swaying in an occasional breeze.

Morgan wiped his hands on his clothing, then bent and got some dirt on his palms from between the cobbles and rubbed them until they were mostly dry. It was going to be hard enough to climb without sweaty hands.

•   •   •

Getting to the place where the rope dangled was not as bad as Morgan had feared. The wall had not been refaced in years and the spaces between its stones were wide. Once or twice he had to pull his knife from his belt and scrape out some of the old mortar so that he could dig his fingers or toes in deep enough, but it was not until he reached the top of the wall that he began to understand how much trouble he was in.

The rope hung just a few inches beyond his grasp, but in such a way that he would have to jump slightly outward from the base of the wall to reach it. That meant that if he failed to hang on, he would go straight down to the cobbles below. He was only at the tower’s second story, which was probably not far enough to kill him, but from where he clung beside the tower, the distance looked quite enough to break a leg or an arm or even a pair of each.

Morgan was now deeply regretting the whole foolish adventure. The first part of the climb, easy as it had been, had burned all the jolly kangkang out of his head. That was how it felt, in any case, although when he looked down and the cobbles below him wavered and swam like stones at the bottom of a rippling stream, he wasn’t quite so certain.

At last he found a foothold on the tower itself and swung out on one foot and one handhold as far as he could, so that the rope was only a handspan beyond his reach. He dried his hands, said a prayer to Saint Rhiappa, another to Saint Sutrin, then added one last prayer to Elysia, the mother of the Aedon, wanting all the sympathetic help he could get. Before he could think about it too much, he dug in his toe for leverage, then sprang up and out, grabbing for the rope.