Aeldred shook his head a little. "You might walk properly, at least."

Osbert brought a hand down to his marred leg. "A small price. We live a life of battles."

Aeldred was looking at him. "I shall answer for you before the god one day," he said.

"And I shall speak in your defence. You were right, my lord, Burgred and I were wrong. Today is proof, the boy coming, the tribute promised again. Ingemar has kept his oath. It let us do what needed to be done."

"And here you are, unmarried, without kin or heir, on one leg, awake all night by the side of the man who—"

"Who is king of the Anglcyn under Jad, and has kept us alive and together as a people. We make our choices, my lord. And marriage is not for every man. I have not lacked for companionship."

"And heirs?"

Osbert shrugged. "I'll leave my own name, linked—if the god allows—with yours, in the shaping of this land. I have nephews for my own properties." They had had this conversation before.

Aeldred shook his head again. There was more grey in his beard of late, Osbert saw. It showed in the lamplight, as did the circles under his eyes, which were always there after fever. "And I am, as ever when this passes, speaking to you as a servant."

"I am a servant, my lord."

Aeldred smiled wanly. "Shall I say something profane to that?"

"I would be greatly alarmed." Osbert returned the smile.

The king stretched, rubbed at his face, sat up in the bed. "I surrender. And I believe I will eat. Would you also send for… would you ask my lady wife to come to me?"

"It is the middle of the night, my lord."

"You said that already."

Aeldred's gaze was mild but could not be misconstrued. Osbert cleared his throat. "I will have someone send—" "Ask."

"Ask for her."

"Would you be so good as to do it yourself? It is the middle of the night."

A small, ironic movement of the mouth. The king was back among them, there was no doubting it. Osbert bowed, took his cane, and went out.

He looked at his hands in the lamplight after Osbert left. Steady enough. He flexed his fingers. Could smell his own sweat in the bedsheets. A night and a day and this much of another night. More time than he had to yield, the grave closer every day. These fevers were a kind of dying. He felt light-headed now, as always. That was understandable. Also physically aroused, as always, though there was no easy way to explain that. The body's return to itself?

The body was a gift of Jad, a housing in this world for the mind and immortal soul, therefore to be honoured and attended to—though not, on the other hand, over-loved, because that was also a transgression.

Men were shaped, according to the liturgy, in a distant image of the god's own most-chosen form, of all those infinite ones he could assume. Jad was rendered by artists in his mortal guise—whether golden and glorious as the sun, or dark-bearded and careworn—in wood carving, fresco, ivory, marble, bronze, on parchment, in gold, in mosaic on domes or chapel walls. This truth (Livrenne of Mesangues had argued in his Commentaries) only added to the deference properly due to the physical form of man—opening the door to a clerical debate, acrid at times, as to the implications for the form and status of woman.

There had been a period several hundred years ago when such visual renderings of the god had been interdicted by the High Patriarch in Rhodias, under pressure from Sarantium. That particular heresy was now a thing of the past.

Aeldred thought, often, about the works eradicated during that time. He'd been very young when he'd made the journey over sea and land and mountain pass to Rhodias with his father. He remembered some of the holy art they'd seen but also (having been a particular sort of child) those places in sanctuary and palace where the evidence of smashed or painted-over works could be observed.

Waiting now in the lamplit dark of a late-summer night for his wife to come, that he might undress her and make love, the king found himself musing—not for the first time—on the people of the south: people so ancient, so long established, that they had works of art that had been destroyed hundreds of years before these northlands even had towns or walls worthy of the name, let alone a sanctuary of the god that deserved to be called as much.

And then, tracking that thought, you could walk even further back, to the Rhodians of the era before Jad came, who had walked in these lands too, building their walls and cities and arches and temples to pagan gods. Mostly rubble now, since the long retreat, but still reminders of… unattainable glory. All around them here, in this harsh near-wilderness that he was pleased to call a kingdom under Jad.

You could be a proper child of the god, virtuous and devout, even in a wilderness. This was taught, and he knew it in his heart. Indeed, many of the most pious clerics had deliberately withdrawn from those same jaded southern civilizations in Batiara, in Sarantium, to seek the essence of Jad in passionate solitude.

Aeldred wasn't a man like one of those. He knew what he'd found in Rhodias, however ruined it was, and in the lesser Batiaran cities all the way down through the peninsula (Padrino, Varena, Baiana—music in the names).

The king of the Anglcyn would not have denied that his soul (housed in a body that wracked and betrayed him so often) had been marked from childhood during that long-ago journey through the intricate seductions of the south.

He was king of a precarious, dispersed, unlettered people in a winter-shaped, beleaguered land, and he wanted to be more. He wanted them to be more, his Anglcyn of this island. And given three generations of peace, he thought it possible. He had made decisions, for more than twenty-five years, denying his heart and soul sometimes, with that in mind. He would answer to Jad for all of it, not far in the future now.

And he didn't think three generations would be allowed them.

Not in these northern lands, this boneyard of war. He lived his life, fighting through impediments, including these fevers, in defiance of that bitter thought, as if to will it not to be so, envisaging the god, in his chariot under the world, battling through evils every single night, to bring back the sun to the world he had made.

Elswith came before his meal arrived, which was unexpected. She entered without knocking, closed the door behind her, moved forward into lamplight.

"You are recovered, by the god's grace?"

He nodded, looking at her. His wife was a large woman, big-boned, as her warrior father had been, heavier now than when she'd come to marry him—but age and eight confinements could do that to a woman. Her hair was as fair as it had been, though, and unbound now—she had been asleep, after all. She wore a dark green night robe, fastened all the way up the front, a sun disk (always) about her neck, pillowed upon the robe between heavy breasts. No rings, no other adornment. Adornments were a vanity, to be shunned.

She had been asking, for years now, to be released from their marriage and this worldly life, to withdraw to a religious house, become one of the Daughters of Jad, live out her days in holiness, praying for her soul, and his.

He didn't want her to go.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"You sent," she said.

"I told Osbert to say—"

"He did."

Her expression was austere but not unfriendly. They weren't unfriendly with each other, though both knew that was the talk.

She had not moved from where she'd stopped to look down at him in the bed. He remembered his first sight of her, all those years ago. Tall, fair-haired, well-made woman, not yet eighteen when they'd brought her south. He hadn't been much older than that, a year from the battles of Camburn, swift to wed because he needed heirs. There had been a time when they were both young. It seemed, occasionally, a disconcerting recollection.