But now Nezeru wanted to talk. She knew so many things that proved him wrong, but why should she even argue with him? Surely it would be better to denounce him and have done with it. She knew that any feeling of confusion as strong as this must be a sort of dark magic. But all she could think of were more questions.

“You know a lot about the Skalijar,” she said. “Why is that?”

He gave her an irritated look. “I told you all. I have moved through this part of the world for years. I have also been farther to the south than you can even imagine—well into the lands of mortals. I have been in their cities.”

“You have? How?”

The edge of his mouth curled—was he fighting a smile? “Well, do not forget, Sacrifice Nezeru, I am a mortal. Nobody was likely to be very surprised to see another Rimmersman.”

More questions fought for release, but even she was surprised at the first one that escaped. “What are they like? The mortal cities?”

He shrugged. “Loud. Dirty—in fact, you would think them filthy. People build higgledy-piggledy, wherever they choose. People do what they want, and when they get in each others’ way, they argue.”

Nezeru could not imagine this. “How can such a thing be? It must be dreadful! Why would their rulers let them behave so?”

“Two possibilities, Sacrifice. One is that their rulers are not as strong and clever as ours. Another is that they do not fear freedom as much as ours do.”

“You make a joke. That is not freedom, to fight with other people, to do what you wish! That is chaos.”

“Well, perhaps that is the difference, then. Mortals feel more comfortable with the freedom of chaos than the freedom of obedience.”

Now she felt certain that he was inventing things that could not be true, and it made her angry. “You knew that man,” she said suddenly. “He knew you.”

Jarnulf showed her a blank face. “What man are you talking about?”

“The one-eyed man of the Skalijar who tried to kill Makho. He saw you, and he recognized you.”

“I doubt that. But if he did, it is no mystery. I have been traveling the borderlands for years. I have had encounters with such people before. I have killed some of them, but others no doubt lived to remember me.”

Nezeru shook her head. “I do not believe you, mortal. That was not the look he gave you. That was not what was in his face—the sight of an old enemy. He was surprised to see you, but he recognized you.”

“None of that disproves what I have said.”

From high up the slope, Kemme turned and began to make his way back toward them, a huge pile of logs cradled in an improvised sling over his back.

“Just tell me the truth,” Nezeru said, and was aware of a kind of desperation in her need to know, although she could not say why. “Did you know that one-eyed man?”

He turned to look at her as he shouldered his burden of wood, and to her astonishment, he smiled broadly, like a man who had just been given high praise or rich reward. “I never saw him before this day.”

He was lying, of course, and not only that, he knew that she knew he was lying—he had as much as told her so with that easy, self-satisfied grin. It should have sent her running to Makho, but it did not. Instead, it filled her with a curious agitation she had never known, so unexpected and so unusual that for long moments she could not even make sense of what it was. Only as she followed his lean form back toward the cave where Makho and Saomeji waited, did she begin to understand it.

This man—this mortal man, she thought wonderingly. No, this traitor. Why does he fascinate me so?

37 Two Bedroom Conversations

It was a warm night. The upper floors of the Hayholt’s royal residence were full of hot damp air that had the sparking feel of imminent thunder. The servants had been dismissed to the outer room and now the queen sat naked at her mirror, brushing her hair.

“God reminds us that these bodies are only loaned to us, to clothe our spirits while we walk the sinful earth,” she said suddenly.

Simon was huddled in the bed already, wearing a night shirt despite the heat. He had been thinking about Urmsheim again (perhaps because these days it no longer came to him in dreams), thinking on those long ago days when he and Jiriki and Binabik and the others had climbed to the Uduntree. Beneath it all lay the deeper memory of the dragon’s icy blue stare, the agonizing splash of its hot, black blood. Thinking of it again, he shivered. “I’m sorry. What are you talking about, wife?”

“This,” she said, cupping her breasts with her hands. “This fading, falling body.”

“I think you are beautiful,” he said.

“You are kind to say so.”

“What do you mean, kind? Do you call me a liar, woman?” He laughed. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you. Do you think me that shallow, now that I am old too? Come to bed.”

“Not yet.” She continued brushing. Miriamele kept her hair long now, but a part of Simon missed the days when she had been less careful, less formal, when she had cut her hair short to hide her identity, like someone out of a story.

God’s Blood, have we truly become old? he wondered. I do not feel old. I feel the same, but . . . weathered. Like a ship that has plowed the same waves for many years. The rigging is slack, the sails have holes, but the bottom is still seaworthy. He laughed again.

“What is funny?” Her voice had the brittle sound he knew too well.

“Just . . . I just thought that I am glad our bottoms are still seaworthy.”

Miriamele gave him a sharp look over her shoulder, then glanced down at her own pale, vulnerable body. “Do you mock me, husband?”

“Never. Oh, dear one, not in a thousand, thousand years. Come to bed.”

“I will. But do not think you will paw me tonight and paddle my cheek and make me forgive you. I am angry, Simon.”

He sighed. “Still?”

“What do you mean, still? You act as if this were a lark, a game. We are sending our only heir—our only grandson!—away into the wild woods. Into danger.”

“We are all sent into danger,” he said, and was quite pleased with himself for the idea. “And we will all fail in the end. That is God’s will. It does no good to struggle against it.”

“You are punishing your grandson because I will not let you go marching off to look for the Sithi.” She stared directly at her own reflection. She would not meet his eye. “I thought we were equals, husband. I have learned the truth.”

“What? What nonsense is this? You know as well as I do that the boy needs seasoning. He has lived only for himself.”

“And getting him killed will improve that?”

Simon slapped his hands on the bedclothes in frustration. “I do not wish to see him harmed, may God preserve us, I wish to see him grown. What will happen when we die if he does not change? The whole of the High Ward in the hands of a selfish boy—a boy who does not want to be a man, except when it comes to drinking and wenching. For the love of the Aedon, Miriamele, he climbed Hjeldin’s Tower on a drunken wager! What if he had fallen and dashed out his brains on the cobblestones? Would you still say he was better off here than going out into the world?”

“Do not invent things to try to shame me, Simon. You have never been kind to him.”

Simon closed his eyes, fighting against the weary anger that he had thought was behind them tonight. “Come to bed. You will take ill, sitting uncovered like that.”