But Aleksander was fast enough that I soon had a st.i.tch in my side and heard the echo of Galadon's insults from my youth. "Are you glued to the path? How in Verdonne's name will you ever outrun a demon if you have stone feet?"

I cleared my mind and commanded the blood to service my legs and my side and my lungs, and soon I could see him again ... and at least three fires in the trees. I bellowed with all the breath I could muster, "Hear me, Ezzarians," as if they all could hear my desire. "Shengar! Take shelter!" I ran to each fire and made sure they heard, then took back to the game trail. Which way? I had to stop and silence my breathing so I could hear, desperately wishing for the increased acuity melydda had once provided me. Fool! I was not helpless. I still had senses that would be of use. Quickly I pa.s.sed the back of my hand before my eyes and shifted into the realm of my extra senses. All I needed was to see enchantment.

When I looked again, the trees of that forest were woven with silver threads, as if the G.o.ddess of the moor, had dropped her nets to catch what magical birds might nest there. I had forgotten how beautiful were the weavings, and my damaged sight could catch only the merest hint of them, like looking at a rainbow through a smoked gla.s.s. But I had no time to savor it. Ahead of me the roiling purple and green ugliness of the demon enchantment was disappearing over a rise, and I took off through the trees, trying to keep my blazing brand from starting any other fires.

I heard screams and ran faster yet, soon arriving at a rocky grotto where two men and three women had plastered themselves against the stone walls, pressing five or six children behind them. The shengar crouched low, bawling at them across the clearing, shy of the fire that burned innocently to its right.

But the fire wasn't big enough, and he was beginning to edge around it to get at the terrified people. "Here!" I said, stepping in between the shengar and the peo- ple, holding my pitiful torch so that two fires blocked its path. "You don't want to do this. Listen to my voice. Leave these good people alone." He screamed at me with fangs bared and muscles taut, ready to spring, and the children behind me wailed in shrill terror. "Keep them quiet and still," I said over my shoulder. I waved my burning branch, and the cat shied backward slightly. "Think, Zander. You don't want to do this." One of the men got the idea and stepped to the campfire to grab a stick of his own. Aleksander bawled harshly at the man, and I was afraid he was going to leap the small fire and take the man before he could get his branch burning well enough.

"Begone from here," I said, waving the torch at Aleksander again. "Stay in control."

The cat backed away a little more, and I stepped toward it, waving the branch until it slunk into the trees and disappeared. Bending over to ease the cramps in my legs, I caught a glimpse of the man standing over the fire. "Garen," I blurted out. He was the miller's son from my home village, a close friend who perennially won any contest of strength. After a year in the world as a Searcher, he'd come home to take over the mill when his father died ... about two days before the Derzhi invasion.

He stared squinting across the fire. "Thank-" His eyes widened and glazed out of focus. "Come," he said, waving to the others, "let's get the children inside."

I had disappeared from his sight as surely as if my body had become transparent. I turned and ran after the cat with the weight of lead in my gut.

The next group of storytellers had already set a ring of fire about themselves, and the next, and soon I began to find the fires deserted. Perhaps the word had spread. About the time I decided I couldn't run another step, I heard a triumphant scream up a small rise just ahead of me. My feet sped forward on their own, and I had to grab a tree to stop myself running right into a place I didn't want to be. Aleksander had found himself a yearling buck, and he lay in the moonlit glade happily gnawing on its belly. His muzzle and the snow were bright with blood.

I sank down by the tree. My chest was on fire. My legs cramped into knots that made me want to howl. If the shen-gar decided that a wretched slave was a better meal than the fallen buck, I could not have moved one handspan to prevent him. Galadon's surety that I could regain my strength and stamina with only a few weeks of decent food and physical training seemed only slightly less laughable than his surety that submitting to the five days of Warden's testing would restore my power.

I pulled my torn cloak about me and doused my smoldering branch in the snow. While I watched the shengar sate his hunger, I leaned my head against the tree and tried to map out in my mind the route we had run. It was impossible. How were we ever going to find our way back to the settlement?

Shouts from the way we'd come woke me from a drowse. The shengar was still gnawing on a haunch bone, showing no sign of reverting back to the Prince's true form. Soon, if all went as before. Its ears p.r.i.c.ked at the closing sounds. I pulled up my hood and stood up, stretching out my cramps and moving around behind the tree.

"This way! See the tracks!"

The shengar dropped the bone and a low rumble of disturbance came from his chest. It wasn't a good idea to interrupt a shengar at its feeding. I slipped a short way down the hill thinking to intercept the hunters, but I hadn't counted on them being mounted. Three riders galloped past, and the shengar roared.

"There!" shouted one of the riders. A woman. "Take it."

"Get behind, so it can't run," called a man.

"Wait!" I cried, chasing after them. Panic muted my senses so I didn't notice the tremor the voices set up in my skin. "Don't!" I crested the rise just in time to see one of the mounted hunters let fly a spear. It fell short, just in front of the furious, blood-streaked cat. "He's human," I cried hoa.r.s.ely, terrified they couldn't hear me over the pounding of blood in my ears. I grabbed the stirrup of the nearest rider. "You mustn't hurt him. He's enchanted."

"Human?" It was the woman. "Oh, sweet Valdis, this is the supplicant!"

"I've got him!" cried the hunter from across the glade, as the cat screamed in pain. "Finish him with your sword, Daffyd."

I ran to the shengar, who lay sprawled in a pool of blood with a spear protruding from its side. I couldn't tell which blood was the cat's and which was the buck's.

"My lord, can you hear me?" I pressed fingers to the beast's breast and it snarled feebly, trying to nip them off, telling me what I wanted to know.

"We'll take care of you," I said. "No Derzhi warrior was ever taken with a single spear. Is that not true?"

The riders had dismounted and come up behind me.

"Does he live?" asked the woman.

"Yes," I said, "but sorely wounded. Bleeding badly. Is there a healer who could help him?"

"None that know of shengars."

"He will change . . . soon." A blast of hot air rippled through the glade, and the shengar growled . . . then moaned... and the image wavered. As the two images battled for supremacy, Aleksander cried out in anguish and the people behind me gasped in horrified astonishment. I had no attention to spare for them.

"Soon, soon, my lord," I said, moving back slightly so I would not touch him during his change. "Hold on to my voice. We'll help you as soon as the change is over."

For a moment I thought him dead, he lay so limp and cold in the bloodstained snow. I ripped off my cloak and my shirt, then, hoping I wasn't going to make things worse, I eased out the spear, pressing my wadded shirt to the gushing wound in Aleksander's belly. I used his leather belt to hold the shirt in place, then wrapped him in my cloak, using the edge of it to wipe the blood from his face. "He needs a healer," 1 said. "If you could take him on your horses ..."

But they did not answer, and, in an instant, I realized what I had done. I was wearing only a slave tunic with my breeches, and the crossed circle on my shoulder would be glaring at them. They would see that I was Ezzarian and know what I was, and perhaps, like Garen, they would know my name.

"I ask only that you care for him as Ezzarians have always cared for those who come as supplicants," I said, hoping they would listen to what I said even if they would not acknowledge hearing it. Then I took the offensive in my own war and looked up ... into the faces of my wife, the Queen of Ezzaria, and her husband, who had once been my dearest friend.

Chapter 24.

The moon was sinking toward the horizon, leaving the forest dark and haunted as I trudged down the hill. Ysanne and Rhys and their companion Daffyd, a man unknown to me, had made a litter for Aleksander and taken him away. I tried to help, to ease Aleksander, to speed their departure, but I might have been only a moon shadow for all the notice they took of me. Even in that first moment of revelation their eyes had betrayed nothing, as if the ground beneath my feet was all they could see. I knew how it was done. G.o.ds have mercy, I had done it in the past, never understanding the horror it was for the one unseen, the utter desolation of the spirit to be told so explicitly that one did not exist, that flesh and blood were not enough, and that there was no remedy for it.

At least I had their tracks to follow. Only once did I depart from the horse- scented path, to light a branch in the smoldering coals of an abandoned moon fire. The small torch helped me see the tracks and droppings, and helped to keep a bit of warmth in my hands and face. The first real clothes I'd had in forever, and I'd already lost half of them. I laughed aloud as I walked.

Aleksander would think it a good joke. The humor echoed hollow in the silent trees.

The years had touched Ysanne with magnificence. Even in the torchlight I could see with what artistry time had sculpted her girlish softness into true beauty. I longed to look in her eyes to see whether or not the garden of her spirit still flourished behind her wall of stillness. So few had ever been permitted to see it. Her Serene Majesty ... the brittle iron of her girlhood now tempered by time and adversity. She was born to be queen.

Her family had lived in a village some twenty leagues from my own. Ysanne had been taken into Queen Tarya's house to train when she was five and found to have an astonishing level of melydda. Too young to be so far from home, to live in a huge house with fifty courtiers and a busy woman older than her grandmother. Queen Tarya was set in her ways and forced Ysanne to train exactly as she herself had done fifty years in the past, not allowing the girl's brilliance to move her along faster or skip any step, but rather making her take every step twice over. Tarya never let her so much as demonstrate the marvelous variations of her talent she discovered as she grew. Because her awestruck parents would not dispute the Queen, Ysanne had no choice.

For ten years she bottled up loneliness and fury, determined not to yield, sure the old woman was trying to make her quit or crush her spirit. But on Ysanne's fifteenth birthday, Queen Tarya smiled and embraced her and told her that she was the most powerful Aife ever born in Ezzaria, and that the rai- kirah would not prevail as long as her talent was fed by the fire within her.

'Then, why did you never allow me to use it?" Ysanne had asked in mystification. "Why did you bury me in the old ways all these years?"

The Queen had laughed at her and said that her talent needed little schooling.

But her patience ... that was a different matter. No Aife could afford to be impatient.

Only after I had known her a very long time did Ysanne tell me of that day.

She wasn't one to admit that anyone ever found her wanting.

To be an Aife, a portal-maker, was the most difficult of all Ezzarian callings.

To weave one's own being into the soul of another so completely as to shape a physical reality was hard enough when the person was healthy and whole of mind. But to do such a thing to a subject who hosted a demon-a person perhaps mad, perhaps vicious, perhaps vi- olent-was intricate and dangerous work. Wardens were more celebrated, as warriors so often are, but no Warden could have taken one step into a battle, much less have had the confidence and freedom to do what was necessary, without absolute, unshakable trust in his Aife. If the portal closed behind him, he would be trapped forever in another person's soul, and without the solidity of the Aife's shaping, he would tumble into an abyss of madness where no rescuer could ever find him.

Mentors like Galadon had a network of colleagues throughout Ezzaria, all of them watching for the right pairing for their students. Warden and Aife, Searcher and Comforter, Scholar and Spellmaker, all of our skills were honed to work in pairings, except for the Weaver, of course, who always worked alone. The Searcher's skill at discovering demons lurking in the heart of madness or cruelty was worth little without a Comforter to envelope the victim in enchantment. And the touch of the Comforter that spun the thread of power back to the Aife had no security without the physical skills of the Searcher to protect him. Though all were working toward the same purpose, our talents needed to balance like the roles in some complex dance figure, where your life and your sanity might depend on the footwork of your partner as it blended with your own. The announcement of a new pairing was in every way equal to a birth or a death or a marriage. This is not to say that every pair married. In fact, it was more common not to marry. But the intimacy of Warden and Aife was extraordinary. It was hard to imagine being married to one woman while walking souls with another.

I was fortunate that Galadon lived in my own village, and I didn't have to leave home as so many Ezzarian students did. Though my preparation was rigorous and consuming, my parents and my sister had sheltered me with warm and loving normalcy. Having lived and trained in one small village, I was intimidated when Galadon told me that he'd found me a pairing with Queen Tarya's protegee. A girl celebrated for her extraordinary skills. A girl rumored to be cold and difficult. A girl destined to be queen. A girl so lovely that my youthful urges, suppressed by unending schooling, burst forth full-blown and came near exploding me into bits the moment I laid eyes on her.

Galadon took care of that problem quickly, of course, by plunging me into a course of training that made everything thus far look like nursery coddling.

Somedays I would see her only for a brief moment, when the candlelight of the temple reflected on her face as she concentrated on her portal-making. I would stand stupidly and wonder how the small cleft in the smooth line of her chin would feel were I to run my finger across its tantalizing irregularity or how it would be to brush away the little wrinkle of intensity between her brows, until Galadon would say, "Begin now, imbecile! Demons do not wait upon gaping jackdaws." And I would close my eyes and sigh at the remembrance of her loveliness as if Galadon couldn't see me do it, then I would say the words and shift the reality that would take me into her creation.

It was in the portal that I got to know her. There I could hear the voice of her mind without being distracted by the sight of her body. We argued everlastingly at first. She was very sure of herself, and though I was a shy and gawky fifteen-year-old in the matters of women and life, I had no such reservations about my apt.i.tude in the realms of enchantment and combat.

Ten years with Galadon had seen to that. Just as with Tarya, you came to believe in yourself or you gave it up. Galadon claimed that the two years we trained together aged him fifty, but we knew better. He gloried in our perfection and our strength and our triumph. When we returned victorious from our first battle-forcing the demon from a Suzaini woman who was on the verge of murdering her children-Galadon toasted us and said there was no pairing ever made that was our equal. We scarcely heard him, for when we opened our eyes and saw each other in the flesh while our blood still thundered with enchantment and danger and victory, there was room for nothing else in the universe.

By that time I had discovered the fiery core within the alabaster G.o.ddess, the tender pa.s.sion that could breathe life into a dead man, the quiet wit that could sharpen a diamond's edge, the devotion that had been waiting all her life for a loving hand to claim it. Her soul was a fifth season, of richer hue than autumn, bursting with more life than spring, hidden away, ready to transform the world with such glory as it had never seen. She had permitted me to glimpse it... and she had promised that I could spend my life exploring it.

I shivered in the predawn blackness as I walked out of the forest and down the path to the village. It had all'been so long ago.

There were lights in the windows of the guest cottage and a cl.u.s.ter of people outside the door. I debated whether to walk back into the forest until they were gone, but I decided that it didn't really matter. No reason to stay out in the cold when the worst had already come to pa.s.s. I hadn't died from it. I wasn't bleeding. I would survive.

The fifteen or twenty people did not part when I approached, but somehow in their movements-one man leaned toward a friend to speak, one man drew a cloak about himself, a woman gathered two children close against the cold-a way was left for me to pa.s.s where I would not touch any of them. When I walked in the door, the healer didn't even turn around to see who came.

Aleksander looked dreadful, his skin almost transparent, his lips colorless, and his cheeks and eyes sunken. The woman had cleaned him and bandaged him, and from the implements on the table-needles, silk thread, packets of herbs, a small brazier, an a.s.sortment of small stones and bits of metal-I gathered that she had st.i.tched the wound and used an enchantment for healing such a thing. I ignored the healer, who was washing her hands and packing the implements and the blood-soaked rags into a basket so they could be cleaned and purified, and sat down by the bed.

"Sleep well, my lord. Have no ill dreams tonight." He didn't move, of course.

Unlikely he could hear me. "I'll wake up every few hours and give you water and check your bandages." The healer poked up the fire, then took a few things from the bedside table, leaving a packet of herbs and a damp cloth behind. The door closed softly behind her.

I drew a small basin of washing water and carefully cleaned the dried blood from my hands and the slave tunic. Once I had disposed of the cleaning water and hung the tunic in the rafters to dry, I rolled up in a blanket on the floor by the fire, wondering vaguely what I was going to do for a shirt or a cloak. The Ezzarians certainly weren't going to provide me any. But at some time during the next long day, while I wandered in and out of sleep, the shirt and cloak I had used to wrap Aleksander appeared on the table, clean, dry, and folded.

Perhaps they thought they were Alek-sander's. I put them on, gave Aleksander some tea made with the herbs left by the healer, and went back to sleep.

The healer came frequently to check on the Prince, who alternated between wild delirium and death-like stillness. I watched what the woman did to ease him and did the saine in the hours when she was not there. In the evening I fixed myself something to eat, then went back to sleep. I was still good at sleeping. There didn't seem to be much else to do.

It was sometime deep in that night-the moon was hanging huge and low over the western peaks-when I heard footsteps outside the guest house. I was halfway on my way to sleep again, but postponed it for a bit to see if the healer found any more change in our patient. I thought it odd she would come so late. But the dark figure carried no lamp and lit none, and rather than going to Aleksander, came to stand over me. I was poised to roll out of the way, when the person crouched down and touched my shoulder.

"Seyonne." It was a man's whisper.

"He does not exist," I said.

'Then, how else am I to explain the vision I had in the forest? Was it perhaps a spot too much of winter ale?"

I sat up astonished and smiling. "Have you not yet learned about winter ale, Rhys-na-varain? Or has your head grown porous with age and ease, and all your hard lessons leaked out of it?"

He crouched down and found my hands in the dark, clasping them firmly with his own powerful fists ... until his thick fingers met the slave rings. Then he pulled back as if the rings were still hot from the smith's fire.

"Gaenad zi," I said. My own training would not be denied, however much I wished it. I was required to warn him that I was unclean.

"Curse the law," he said with quiet ferocity. "I cannot maintain such madness when you walk into Dael Ezzar alive. I saw you fall, Seyonne. You were surrounded. Eight Derzhi or more. I saw the sword go in and the blood on your shirt. I couldn't risk the few-"

"There was nothing to be done. We lost. I'm glad you survived it. Truly glad." I hoped he would go on to something else.

"I know I swore to bring help or die ... and I did come back. Daffyd could tell you. He was in the party guarding Queen Tarya, but I made them leave her to come and make spells like you wanted. To get you. But I saw you fall...."

"It would have done no good for you to die, too."

"I still dream of that day."

"I should teach you how not to dream. I learned it early."

"Ah, curse it all, Seyonne. What were we thinking in those days-that we could fight an empire alone?"

"We saw no alternative. We couldn't surrender."

"We were fools. There's always a way."

He sat down on the floor beside me. Though I could see the outline of his familiar bulk, I couldn't make out his face. But when I reached for the poker to stir the fire, he stayed my hand. "Let it be." His words were a plea for understanding. To talk in the dark was not the same as seeing me.

"I'm glad you've come," I said. "You'll never know how glad. Tell me... tell me anything. About this place-Dael Ezzar-'New Ezzaria.' How did you find it? Tell me who survived, who wards, anything." The craving in me was monstrous, but I didn't know whether it was hunger to be satisfied or pain to be blunted with a balm of words. "First, I've got to tell you...." "About Ysanne and you. I heard it already. When the Prince told me of the fish-eyed consort, I knew it could be no one else. I'm happy for it."

"There were so few left... we couldn't let her power go wasting ... and we'd known each other so long.... Once we were paired."

"It's all right. I prayed she lived ... and if she lived, I knew she would marry. I hoped it would be someone worthy of her." One who would give her music, as I had not. "Who better than you? Someone closer than a brother? Don't speak of her, if it troubles you."

"Oh, demon fire, Seyonne, we believed you were dead. And it wasn't right away. I finally persuaded Galadon to pa.s.s me through my testing. Did you know the old dragon still breathes fire?"

"I heard it from the boy Llyr." He was silent for a moment. "We a.s.sumed it was Llyr who'd told you how to find us. What else did he tell?" "Nothing else.

He was careful-and we had no time." "A slave to the Derzhi... for all these years. How do you bear it?"

"It was not how I planned to spend my life." There was so much I wanted to hear from him, but I knew our time was short. So I swept desire aside and broached the subject of most importance. "What did Ysanne think of Aleksander's story?"

"You know there's no one can speak her mind." "But she sees the danger?

How we've misread the prophecies? These Khelid . . . Rhys, I could see the Gai Kyallet in this Khelid Kastavan. I have no power-not a sc.r.a.p-but I could see it.

Never, in a hundred encounters, did I ever see a demon so powerful. We've always suspected there was a Demon Lord, and my every instinct tells me that I have seen such a being. I am convinced that this Kastavan plans to cast his own body aside and live on in the heir to the Empire."

"Impossible. How could you know? You're saying the demon is directing these Khelid."

I hadn't thought of it in that way. "It's the only answer for what they're doing with the Prince. And I saw his eyes. To let demon-infested warriors take control of the Empire ... we can't allow it. With all the resources of the Empire, with all the horrors they'll be able to devise, they'll be strong enough that fifty Wardens could never clean them out. You've got to take them on now before they're entrenched. I believe you can use Aleksander's-"

"Wait. It's not... you've got..." Rhys was stammering and waving his hands in the dark, and I felt him shift away a bit. "Are you sure you have no power, Seyonne? None at all?"

"The Rites are very thorough. Believe me. I tried everything."

"You've got to get away from this Derzhi, Seyonne. He's damaged beyond repairing. Ysanne says the rai-kirah have made themselves a proper nest inside him. You mustn't be close when they take him. We'll give you a horse.

You can be off before-"

"Get away?" I was completely taken aback. Of all people, I would have expected Rhys to take action, to see the danger and set out to remedy it in his usual hotheaded way. I thought I would have to convince him to be careful.

And for him to think I would ... or could ... run away. "Rhys, do you understand what I am? This mark on my shoulder proclaims that I am chattel, and this one on my face declares that it is the Derzhi royal house that owns me as you own your boots. There is not a place in the Empire where these marks would not be recognized. But beyond that small matter... why would I have to fear Aleksander being taken by a demon in the midst of an Ezzarian settlement? Even if you can't heal him right away, you can protect him."