"What message?"

"A messenger arrived at our camp. He said you needed me. And that the creature needed me too."

"I sent no message."

Partayn stood and shook himself off like a hound. "No reason to deny it, sister. I couldn't ride any farther. I couldn't bear the thought that you might be in some kind of trouble. And besides, now that I've found these beastmen, I want to go back. Quickly. With Jordam, if you can summon him. These Cent Regus might be a great help to us. If they can help me kill the Curse at its root, we'll make the forest safe again, and you can go back to live in Tilianpurth. You, Jordam, and anyone who will help. We'll make it a place where beastmen can heal. We'll give House Cent Regus the help we should have offered in the first place."

The beastchild uttered a stream of cricketlike chirps, offering Partayn the piece of chalk.

Cyndere's voice was low and solemn. "I swear, Partayn. I did not send you such a message."

"I'll find that messenger," he growled. "And I'll give him a thrashing."

"What did he say ... exactly?"

Partayn opened his mouth. Then he stopped. He stared past her toward the sea, stricken by some dawning realization. The wind brushed back his wild hair, and his eyes filled with tears.

He turned and walked to his horse. Dukas, disappointed, draped his tail around himself in a stately pose and watched him ride away.

The beastchild began another drawing. Another outline. A boy. A boy with large worried eyes, a cloth wrapped around his head, and a water flask in his hand.

Cyndere walked down to the edge of the tide pool bed, stepping into a maze of the blackstone teeth. She paused. In the corner of her eye, she saw it again-the glimmering shape of a figure standing beside her.

"I don't know how much longer I can do this," she said, her voice breaking. "Now that Emeriene's gone, I cannot deny it. I can never replace you, Deun. But if I'm going to make this voyage without hurting somebody, I need help. Help with this beastchild. And this house. I can hear the horns of the harbor, but the fog is too heavy out here."

In her mind's eyes she drew the tentative lines of another likeness. But she had no practice drawing this face. Not yet.

With a sharp snap the chalk in the beastchild's grip broke and crumbled into dust. The creature looked at the powder spilling from her hand. Then she looked at the unfinished drawing. She began to pant in frustration, kneeling to try to press the crumbs back together. Unsuccessful, she threw back her head and unleashed a long and mournful howl, unable to repair what was broken, unable to fully realize the image that burned so vividly in her mind.

Partayn pushed his way through the crowded marketplace, followed by frantic guards and surrounded by people who stopped and cheered for him.

He knew that they were happy to have him in charge, even though they were still complaining over their new limitations. He could always win them over with a song.

He reached a guarded door and was welcomed into a grand cavern where an orchestra was rehearsing an anthem.

Lesyl, who directed them, glanced back over her shoulder and let her arms fall to her sides. The music stopped.

The choir looked at Partayn. Partayn looked at Lesyl. Lesyl slowly smiled, then wiped tears from her cheeks and stepped down from the stage. She walked to Partayn with her gaze fixed on the floor. He cleared his throat and glanced from side to side, anxious as if she were the sovereign and he a cornered subject.

"I don't know this song," he said.

"It's ... it's for King Cal-raven."

"Oh," he said. "Oh. I see."

"No, it's not like that at all," she said softly. "It's a song about his vision. His dreams have always inspired me. You know that. For a while I confused that inspiration with ... something else. It was a way to survive. But when we arrived here, I knew that my part of that vision could only come to fruition here. And that my role was bound up with yours." She took his hand. "Come. Listen."

She drew him up the stairs. He raised his hand to the musicians. They beamed back at him as if they knew some kind of secret.

"You sent a messenger for me."

"Did I?" She smiled.

"Your message ... your message ..."

She drew him behind a curtained door into a closet of shelves crowded with instruments. She took his hand and pressed his palm to her belly. "I said that I need you, and so does the child."

Dizzy, he reached out to catch himself and grasped the edge of a shelf, which collapsed. Bright copper horns and a huge round drum crashed down and spilled out under the curtain. They heard the drum keep rolling, and then it thundered down the stairs to crash somewhere below.

Partayn tried to comprehend the joy in her face, the gleam in her eyes. His own vision blurred.

"We've been ... hasty," she whispered. "Haven't we?"

"Yes," he whispered. "Forgive me. Since the Cent Regus prisons, I've found it difficult to control myself around ... around beauty such as yours."

She wrapped her arms around him, knotting her hands together at the small of his back. "I'm going to make it very easy for you-for us-to do the right thing."

"I hope you will." He cleared his throat and felt a smile finally find his face. "Maybe ... maybe a few clumsy opening notes can still become a song."

"You're being hasty again, my love." He heard fear in her voice. "Do you realize the consequences if you choose this? You're inviting a woman from Abascar to be queen of Bel Amica."

"I can't think of a future more beautiful than that. I think the remnant of Abascar may be the best thing that's ever happened to Bel Amica."

26.

SETTING THE TABLE.

ar-balter lay inside a dry, empty cave, looking up at a window lined by long bars.

Imprisoned again. What'd I do this time?

A hand appeared beyond the bars, casting a five-fingered shadow. The hand was as large as the white-haired fire-breather he'd seen on the underground river. Kar-balter whinnied in fear as he realized that this was not a prison at all. This was the hollow belly of a massive stringed instrument-the world's largest perys, he supposed-and its giant string-plucker was about to perform.

A finger lightly touched a string. Its sonorous plung! rang out in waves.

A sharp, wet shock washed across him. He woke to find himself seated on the high guard-walk that surrounded the Royal Sanctuary of Inius Throan. Hagah had come bounding around the curve, a splash for every loping stride, barking at the distant bell tower.

"You blasted hound, you soaked me!" Kar-balter yelled, but his cry was drowned out by another ringing bell, another note reverberating. Then rang the third, and so on, with Hagah barking at each tower in turn as if to say, "Again! Again!"

The feast, thought the guard, rising. Afternoon sunlight illuminated the gleaming clutter of Inius Throan. It seemed the ancient city might forget the passing storm by nightfall.

By the tenth chime, Kar-balter had circled the Sanctuary's outer guard-walk. He saw a figure in the tenth tower's window-a pupil in a candlelit eye.

The king's big secret. And the beastman's still standing guard. What a strange crew we are.

The thirteenth bell sounded, and the tone lingered. The progression felt incomplete, and he tensed, waiting for a fourteenth note to resolve the melody. But there was no fourteenth note. And the suspense burned like an insect bite he couldn't scratch.

"Viscorclaws," he muttered, returning to his assignment of surveying streets around the Sanctuary. "What's the world come to? I guarded King Cal-marcus from grudgers and assassins. Now I'm looking to shoot at twigs and branches."

Captain Tabor Jan wasn't taking any chances. He had sent instructions that bowls of the Bel Amican torch oil should be set around the city wall, where archers could use them to light arrows if any viscorclaws appeared.

A lump of stone on the city wall was waving, just between the third and fourth tower. Kar-balter waved tentatively, then laughed and waved more certainly. It was Em-emyt at that post, barely tall enough to see over the battlement to the rocky gullies of the canyon beyond.

"Just like old times," he laughed. "Except different. You were dead for a bit. I think it helped. You were grouchy and mean. Now you're happy as a geezer with a lapful of grandkids."

To think that there's a river down there that pumps life into a carcass, he thought. In a few years no one will believe it. They'll have cooked up a hundred explanations. They'll say you were only knocked out. "Nothin's scarier than a fellow crawling out from under death's heavy curtain," he sighed.

Satisfied for now, he stepped through a door in the Sanctuary wall and emerged on a balcony overlooking the assembly space inside.

The lowest tiers of the descending floor sparkled with water while a young Bel Amican guard swept rain puddles from the floors. Lacking tables, people had spread canvases, blankets, and leaves in long stretches across each crescent span. They would dine upon the Sanctuary floor, dream of the tables they'd construct, and relish whatever simple bites the cooks had made from the bounty of this overgrown, forgotten kingdom.

"They'd better serve me up a heaping plate," he muttered. "I don't want to go back to the days of looking down at what others have got."

"Do we have any more of the water?"

Say-ressa hurried into the kitchen and stopped as the heat stunned her. She might as well have stepped into an oven.

Pushing through clouds of steam, the healer surveyed the long, stone counters. Emeriene, Luci, Margi, and Raechyl were listening to two streams of instructions from Adryen, who darted about intently and unpredictably, like a dragonfly, and Stasi, who stirred a pot of thick batter like an oarsman rowing upstream. Before each of their helpers, a stone pot shaped by one of the stonemastering sisters was filled with some kind of concoction. Beside them, piles of berries sparkled, wedges of honeycomb glistened, and flat fry cakes were stacked fifty high.

Fires crackled in a broad, low stove, and Batey stood prodding shreds of bird meat around a sizzling pan that spat splashes of grease.

Stirring sauce in a bowl, Adryen marched up to Say-ressa with all the authority of a queen. "A custard of cream from the rock goats' milk." The button-nosed cook, no taller than the young sisters, had to lean back to meet the gaze of the willowy healer. "We whip up the cream with wild blue garlic and a dash of ground hajka peppers. Then we mix oil and peppers into a sauce to pour over the custard, and we serve it with wedges of fried bread. Make sure the bread's made with blue grain. The colors are important."

"Water?" Say-ressa repeated. "The decanter of water you brought up from the river below the house, it's empty. And I've got nothing else to ease our wounded through their pain."

"The king wants that water for the feast," said Adryen, gesturing to three crude stone pitchers sitting in the corner away from the heat and the spattering grease.

"And he asked me to try to make sure that everyone attends the feast. That's going to take some healing magic that my hands have never delivered." Say-ressa stepped aside as two small boys came running through the kitchen, wielding sticks and shouting.

Emeriene flung herself into her sons' path, grabbed their arms, and dragged them aside. "What did I tell you about running through here while we're cooking? Go back to the corner and play with the toys that Luci and Margi made for you."

"But we're hunting a beastman!" shouted Cesyr.

"No, a Seer!" shouted Channy.

"There are no dangerous beastmen here," she snapped. "And the Seers are far away. Go back to your corner." She grabbed Cesyr's chin. "Look at me when I'm talking to you."

"That stove looks like the one Papa jumped in," he said.

Emeriene let go and stepped back. Then she grabbed him by the shirt. "Don't you bring that up within these walls. You hear me? We've left that all behind."

"So if we can't hunt beastmen and Seers, who can we hunt?" asked the younger one.

"Tomorrow you can play outside and pretend those sticks are viscorclaws." The sisterly looked up at the healer with an exasperated apology. "They're upset. An unfamiliar place. And they've seen ... they've seen terrible things."

"I wish I could help," said Say-ressa. "Some wounds are hard to reach." She walked to Batey by the stove. "Would you take me down to the river?"

Batey sprinkled seeds across the sizzling meat and a spicy fragrance thickened the air. "Soon as Adryen says that this bird is cooked enough."

"I can manage," sighed Adryen. "Go ahead."

Batey took a torch and led the healer out through the back of the kitchens, down a steep crooked stair, through winding corridors, muttering as he sought to remember the way.

They walked a long distance, and Say-ressa had time to observe that this passage was not adorned with statues or any other signs that it had been part of Tammos Raak's kingdom.

"It's amazing," Batey mused. "Those sisters. They're making something for the feast, and they say they're following directions from their lost sister, Madi. A recipe from another world."

They moved down another stairway, and she could hear it now. The hair on her arms stood. Dear Robin, if only you could see what I'm seeing. A waterfall under the world.

They stopped abruptly. Cal-raven was climbing the stair.

"Why are you down here? And alone?" asked Batey.

"I hoped to glimpse this white creature ... this thing that defended you on the river."

"It was magnificent," said Batey. "You've never seen anything like it."

"I have," said the king. "As my mother fled from its destruction, she fell into my arms, and the creature watched her die."

Say-ressa felt as if she'd been struck. Batey uttered a fisherman's curse. The rush of the falls filled an awkward quiet. "How fare the wounded?" the king asked.

"They suffer, but I am hopeful. The smoke and ash from the dragon's forest fire has given some a horrible cough. Several needed new bandages for injuries. The captain may be able to join the feast if I give him something to muffle the pain. He can't eat yet, but he can swallow this water. He'll be showing off quite a scar after the brace comes off."

"I should get back," said the king. "The bells-when we hear them again, we assemble."

"We'll gather some water and go back with you," she said. "The water will help with the healing. You should drink some."

He bowed his head and moved past her, ascending.

Margi and Luci, singing the Late Afternoon Verse, entered the royal hall through the two entrances at the back, one on the northeast corner, one on the northwest.

They smiled and waved, for the vast hall was empty. Then they looked at the raised platform between them.

Where choirs will sing, thought Margi.

Where actors will perform, and reports will be given to the king and his council, thought Luci. They descended the five tiers.

Cal-raven had insisted that the hall be arranged in reverse, with the king's table set at the lowest, rain-darkened level instead of on the heights.

At each spread of mats, they arranged plates for the diners, so every company could see one another and look down over the descending tiers to a view of the king and his company.

Seventeen plates were arranged around the king's spread. The girls smoothed the mats, then straightened a special span of cloth prepared for the king himself-a patchwork made from scraps. The travelers had agreed to cut strips from the cloaks they had worn through Fraughtenwood, and Nella Bye had sewn them together so the king would see before him a sign of their gratitude, their bond, their story.