But never, she realized with a start, to know how Lynnae held up beneath the power of the River Woman’s potion. She started to rise from her chair to go and ask just that, then chuckled at herself and sat back down. She needed to let Lynnae do her work.

And I have work of my own, Jin Li Tam thought.

She bent her attention back to the papers and reread Rudolfo’s last message, sent under code by bird from Caldus Bay.

Buried into an imaginary list of supplies available for the library by caravan from the high docks of Caldus Bay was first one message and then another, coded skillfully with each twist and smudge of the pen. P guarded by Gray; attacked, survived and fled, the first said; and as disturbing as that news was, the second message brought her hope. Are you and the boy well?

He is warming to me again.

Her family’s role in the course of Rudolfo’s life, in the murder of everyone he’d cared for-his family, his closest friend-had killed his love for her in its cradle. It was the last betrayal, betrothed suddenly to the forty-second daughter of the man who’d poured suffering and loss into the river of his life, changing its path. Still, her father’s will was woven skillfully into the man he’d shaped both for the world and for his daughter. And when she’d told him about the child she carried, she’d seen in his eyes that her father had used Rudolfo’s greatest strength against him.

Once, she’d asked a Gypsy Scout to tell her about his king, and she heard his reply echoing now these many months later. He always knows the right path and always takes it. Faced with the prospect of an heir, he’d proven himself truly her father’s work.

There was a knock at the door; Jin Li Tam looked up. “Yes?”

The door opened, and the House Steward, Kember, looked in. “Second Captain Philemus has a bird from the Fifth March Scout. The envoy from Turam is in the Prairie Sea. They will bring them in-they should be here late tomorrow.”

“Good,” she said. “Is there more news from Pylos or their eastern neighbor?” Last she’d heard, the young heir of Meirov’s crown lay in state for public viewing. And on the Delta, Erlund’s death was fueling the civil war that raged.

The elderly man cleared his throat. “They bury the boy day after tomorrow. We were not invited to attend.”

Of course not. “They suspect us,” she said. “Our kin-clave with them is strained by these events.”

He nodded once. “Yes. And our man on the Delta has heard that Erlund is not truly dead but that a body double was killed. He believes the Overseer is in hiding, but he’s uncertain where. There have been strange goings-on. They lost nearly a squad of Scouts north of Caldus Bay on the Whymer Road.”

“That’s curious,” she said. “What word from Aedric?”

“They are pursuing the metal man into the Wastes. Isaak believes that it was lying when it denied knowing anything about Sanctorum Lux.”

Her eyes narrowed at this. “Metal men don’t lie,” she said under her breath.

But they can. She remembered Isaak in the rain, his metal body exposed to the weather because Pope Resolute could not see the soul that had emerged within the Order’s mechanical creation, Mechoservitor Number Three. He’d ordered the metal man to remove his Androfrancine robes, offended that the machine went clothed as if he were human. When asked about the spell the metal man had recited to destroy Windwir, Isaak had lied to the Pope, claiming it had been damaged beyond recovery.

Now, Isaak rode with Neb and Aedric and the squad of Gypsy Scouts they led in pursuit.

Finally, she asked the question she’d wanted to ask first. “Is there further word from Rudolfo?”

“No,” he said. “They wait in Caldus Bay.”

She glanced down to the papers, suddenly uncomfortable with having asked. They’d just had word yesterday. But something hadn’t set well the moment Rudolfo committed himself to seeking her father. No good can come of it, she knew. Though for their boy to survive, he had to do this.

“Very well,” she said. “Keep me apprised on the envoy’s progress.”

He inclined his head. “Yes, Lady.” Then, he slipped through the door, pulling it closed behind him.

Jin Li Tam stood and stretched, listening to her joints crack. Her muscles ached from this morning’s workout-she’d danced with her knives for the first time in months, and she could feel it in her body. She turned and looked out the high windows. Below, shrouded white now, lay the Whymer Maze. Rudolfo had mentioned once that he’d hoped to build a larger one on the hill where the new library now sprawled, but the one below stretched out a goodly ways from the house-and there, at its center, rested Hanric, shadow of the Marsh Queen. The sun had dropped behind the trees so that the light was soft and graying. Shadows lifted up within the maze, and she wondered about the girl-queen Winters and the work she had ahead.

Moments that will shape her destiny, she thought. And another thought stuck her just as suddenly. So sudden that she flinched. Like Rudolfo.

It wasn’t possible. She ciphered, working the datum as her father had taught her, and the answer rattled her.

These are the work of House Li Tam, she knew. Well crafted and carefully laid, she could see the threads now-even reaching into the Marshlands-and her heart sank within her breast. The thread went back past the blood-magicked Marsh assassinations. It went back to.

She said it aloud because she simply couldn’t stop herself. “Windwir,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

It was a grief she’d carried along with her child, teeth that chewed upon her as she puzzled out her own part in her father’s dark work.

She stood at the window for a long while, until the light had left the sky and the lamp had guttered low. Her father had done all of this, perhaps his father before him. An elaborate cutting on the skin of the world, a Whymer Maze drawn in blood and loss that surgically removed the Androfrancine Order and now used its salted blade to cut even deeper. But why? For a long while she stood there, pondering this.

Then, Jin Li Tam sat down to her chair, turned up the lamp, and went back to her unfinished work.

Neb

They rode in silence, low in the saddles and pushing their horses as hard as the magicks would let them. Behind them, pack horses kept up without effort, led by the scouts bringing up the rear. The hooves struck the wide, flat stones of the Whymer Road, but instead of sparks and a drum-pounded gallop, they offered the slightest of coughs as the magicks bent sound around them even in the same way that the scout magicks bent light. The landscape whipped past quickly too as their enhanced strength carried them across the rocky terrain.

Neb clung to the saddle and leaned forward, letting the cold wind wash over his back as it spilled over him. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the scout ahead, but the scenery kept pulling his attention away. There was a beauty in the shattered lands they rode through, and it tugged at his heart.

And these are just the far edges of it. Deeper into the Wastes, glass mountain ranges cast bloody shadows over forests of bone. And near these dead cities, expanses of white, coarse, glass where sea salt, left behind when the water boiled away, had fused with the sand to make razor-edged dunes that the wind moaned over. At night, creatures hunted there by the light of a blue-green moon. Indescribable leftovers of an age long past, driven mad by Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths.

He’d seen it in his dreams and had no doubt now that it awaited him somewhere ahead.

But for now, the landscape was simple rock and sand and scrub. Outcroppings of granite shaped by years of wind and dark straggly brush that squatted low to the ground. It looked nothing like his imaginings.