That image was no longer accurate, however. Time had so shrunken and bent the monarch that she didn't recognize him until she was introduced. The color had been bleached from him. If she didn't know better, she would think him an albino. He trembled constantly.

But when she met his gaze, she glimpsed that old strength. It had been drained from his body and fermented, distilled, bittered there behind his eyes. As those pale orbs fastened on her, she felt as small as a barleycorn, and less significant.

"Father," Berimund said. "I introduce to you Muriele Dare, queen of Crotheny, queen mother to Empress Anne I."

Marcomir continued to stare at her.

"I've invited her to hunt with us."

"What do you want here, witch?" the old man asked. His speaking broke the spell; his watery, quavering voice could not match his gaze. "Have you come here to murder me? Is that your intention?"

Muriele sat straighter but did not see any reason to answer such a question.

"Father!" Berimund said. "Do not be so ill-mannered. This lady-"

"Hush, whelp," the king snarled. "I told you I would not see her. Why have you brought her here?"

"You said I could not present her in court," Berimund replied. "You said nothing about hunting."

"That's a hair in my beard," Marcomir snapped. "You understood my intent."

He swung back to Muriele. "But since you are here, let me spell clearly for you. Your shinecrafting daughter is not and will never be queen. She has unleashed horrors that no man should ever see and tilted the world toward doom. I will not be guiled with words; I will not be won with gifts or favors. This is the battle foretold, the great war against evil, the ansuswurth itself, and we-with the holy Church-will stand against your dark lady and your unhulthadiusen, and we will send you all back to the abyss."

As she watched the spittle drip down his chin, Muriele found that she had had enough.

"If I had known," she began, "that Your Majesty was a despicable liar who clothes himself in holy raiment to disguise the greedy, covetous ambition he has nursed for decades, I certainly would never have come here in hopes of a conversation. You are a loathsome thing, Marcomir. A better man would simply admit his avarice for power and control, but like a little child you make up stories to disguise your disgusting nature and in doing so become even more abhorrent. You dress your lords and ladies in homage to your beloved ancestors, but there is more honor in a single one of their rotting bones than in your entire body. Sing your churchish songs and play the harp of saintliness, but I know what you are, and so do you, and nothing you say or do, no host you muster, no war you win, will change that. I traveled to Hansa in hope of finding a man. Instead I find this. How sad and repulsive."

Marcomir had found color for his face somewhere. He trembled more violently than ever.

"My dear sister-in-law," a voice said behind her. "You still have that turn of phrase that so wins the hearts of men."

Only Muriele's anger kept her from screaming as she turned and saw Robert Dare sitting casually on a spotted mare, grinning from ear to ear.

Neil glanced up at the vast ceiling of the chapel and shook his head.

"What's that for, Sir Neil?" Alis asked.

"Why is it so big?"

"You don't find it beautiful?"

Neil traced his gaze up a narrow buttress that must have been twenty kingsyards high. Light colored its lean length, suffused through a dome pierced by a myriad of crystal portals that also illuminated statues of the winged saints, the lords of sky, wind, thunder, the sun, moon, stars, and planets. Many looked as if they actually were flying.

"It is. But it's also distracting. How can one pray properly among so much…so much?"

"The chapel in Eslen is easily as large and ornate."

"I know. I didn't understand that, either."

"It's not so in the islands?"

"No. The chapels are very plain and no bigger than necessary to kneel or be lustrated. I feel lost in a place this big."

"Well, I, for one, feel the need to pray. Will you wait for me?"

"Should we separate?"

"I don't see why not," she said. "If our escort wanted to do us harm, I don't imagine that would be a problem."

"I'll try to find Lier's fane in all of this, then," Neil said. "I'll meet you back here in the center."

Alis nodded and walked off, the whisk-whisk of her skirts echoing in the cavernous place.

Neil strolled past the saints of law and war, wondering if he ought to stop there, but the real need he felt was to find Lier, and so he continued to search, wondering what the saints thought of such ostentation. He supposed it depended on the saint. Some of them might be flattered.

It took a bit of time for him to realize the consistency of the groupings. The saints of sky were above, those of the qualities and affairs of men at eye level. That meant logically that he ought to look for a staircase down.

Once he knew what to search for, it wasn't hard to find. Soon he was in a darker, quieter part of what was rightly a temple rather than a chapel.

There he found the saints beneath the earth and there, at last, the alter of Lier. The saint was carved from marble and shown as a man rising up from a wave, his long hair and beard blending with the foam.

The chapel on Skern had a rough image whittled from an old piece of mast found as driftwood.

Neil knelt, placed two silver coins in the box, and began to sing his prayer:

Foam Father, Wave Strider

You feel our keels and hear our prayers

Grant us passage on your broad back,

Bring us to shore when the storm's upon us, I beg you now Grant passage to my song.

It echoed weirdly through the halls, coming back to him to form odd harmonies. He tried to focus beyond that, to fill his mind with the presence of the saint, with the wild salt spray, with the great eternal thing that was the ocean. And at last he did, as the rhythm of his prayer ebbed and flowed, and he felt the deeps beneath him once again. He prayed for Alis and Muriele, for Queen Anne and his friends, for the dead and the living.

When he was done, he felt better, and humbled. Who was he to disparage what sort of chapel someone chose to build?

Before Muriele could find any words to meet Robert with, Marcomir's voice began rattling in such rapid Hansan that she couldn't have understood him if she was trying to, which she wasn't. She was vaguely aware that Berimund also was shouting. Robert's grin became somehow more wicked.

Marcomir's tone dropped, and he finally switched back to the king's tongue.

"You do not speak to me like that," he said very coldly. "It is a mistake you will regret."

Muriele kept her gaze on Robert as she replied.

"Here is the proof of your hypocrisy," she said. "You claim my daughter to be a witch, and yet you harbor this-this thing at your court. He is a fratricide and an abomination of nature. Cut him; see if he bleeds. Feel his heart; see if it beats. You will find it does not. But then, you already know that, don't you?"

"Oh, dear," Robert began. "I know we've had a bit of a tiff, Muriele, but really-"

"Swiya! Silence!" Marcomir snapped at Robert before turning his full fury on Muriele.

"I ought to kill you like a rabid bitch, right here and now," the king said very quietly. "You twist words, but I know the truth. You speak for her." He came closer. "There will be no truce with evil, no compromise, and no peace. We will destroy your daughter and the heretics who follow her, or we will perish trying. In either case, no peace will ever be made, so I need never explain what happened to you."

"You would not," Muriele said.

"He wouldn't," Berimund replied.

"What do you know, whelp? What makes you so compliant? Have you lain with this mother of witches?"