Gweith didn't die, nor did anyone else. No one was stricken with palsy or dropsy or fever in the days that followed. Neither were the clerics, though many of them did complain of blistered hands and muscle pains.

Men began taking axes to the wood.

At about that same time, in the way of such things, where an idea, a notion, reaches the world in many places at once, the same forest in the Anglcyn lands was entered into by men in search of urgently needed wood.

They brought their axes to the trees west of Esferth and farther south, beyond Retherly, towards where the young king had ordered a new shipyard and burh to be built. A growing kingdom needed lumber, there was no getting around it. At a certain point, in the name of Jad, you couldn't let old women's tales stop you from doing what had to be done.

None of the first woodcutters on that side of the wood died either, except for those suffering the usual accidents attendant upon sharp blades and falling trees and carelessness. It began, it continued. The world does not stay the way it was, ever.

Years after all of this, a great many years, actually, an Anglcyn charcoal burner at what had become the south-eastern edge of a considerably reduced forest came upon something curious. It was a hammer—an Erling battle hammer—lying in the grass by a small pond.

The odd thing was that the hammer's head, clearly ancient, gleamed as if newly forged, unrusted, and the wood of the shaft was smooth. When the charcoal burner picked it up he swore he heard a sound, something between a note of music and a cry.

Actions ripple, in so many ways, and for so long.

Kendra would remember the days before and during the fair that year as the most disconnected she'd known. Intensity of joy, intensity of fear.

The fyrd had been home for two nights, after riding in loud triumph through the wide-open gates of Esferth amid shouts and cheering and music playing. The city was thronged with merchants. There could not have been a better time for Aeldred to achieve such a victory over the Erlings. Slain in numbers, driven away, no losses at all for the Anglcyn.

If you didn't count a prince, gone into the godwood.

Riding up the main street from the gates, a screaming, colourful crowd on either side, her father had waved, smiled gravely, let the people see a king calmly aware of achievement, and as calmly set on repeating it as often as necessary. Let his subjects know this, and let all who were here from abroad carry word back to their homes.

Kendra, with her mother and sister and brother (the one brother here), in front of the great hall, had looked at her father as he'd dismounted, and she'd known—right then—that he was dissembling.

Athelbert outweighed sixty Erlings killed, by so much.

There had been sea-raids for a hundred years, and they would not stop with this one. But the king of the Anglcyn had only two sons who'd survived infancy, and the older was gone now into a deadly place, and the younger (they all knew) had never wanted to be a king.

Truth be told, it was Judit, thought Kendra, beside her red-haired sister on the steps, who ought to have been a boy at birth, and now a man. Judit could have sat a throne, incisive and confident in the fierce brightness of her spirit. She could have wielded a sword (she did wield swords!), commanded the fyrd, drunk ale and wine and mead all night and walked steadily away from a trestle table at dawn when all those who had been with her lay snoring amid cups. Judit knew this, too, Kendra thought; she knew she could have done these things.

Instead, she was going off this winter, escorted by most of the court, to marry a thirteen-year-old boy and live among the people of Rheden to bind them close: for that is what young women in royal families were born to do.

Things went awry sometimes, Kendra thought, and there was no one to give her a good answer why Jad had made the world that way.

They'd feasted that night, heard music, watched jugglers and tumblers perform. The rituals of victory. Theirs were lives on display, to be seen.

More of the same at sunrise. At chapel to pray, then she and Judit (dutiful just now, more shaken than she'd want to admit by what Athelbert had done) had made a point of walking through the thronged, roped-off marketplace three separate times (to be seen), fingering fabrics and brooches. They'd made Gareth come with them the third time. He'd been quiet, extremely so. Judit bought a jewelled knife and a gelding from Al-Rassan.

Kendra bought some fabrics. She made her way through the duties of the day with difficulty, then after the evening rites she went looking for someone. She had questions that needed answering.

Ceinion of Llywerth had not been at the royal chapel for the sundown services. There were a small number of Cyngael merchants here for the fair (they'd come along the same coastal path he had, or been granted passage through the Rheden Wall). She found the cleric with his own people at a chapel on the eastern side of Esferth, leading the rites there.

He had just finished when Aeldred's younger daughter arrived, with one of her women in attendance. They waited until the cleric was done talking with some of the merchants, and then Kendra had her woman withdraw and she sat down with the grey-haired cleric towards the front of the old chapel, near the disk. It needed polishing, she noticed. She'd tell someone tomorrow.

Ceinion's eyes, she thought, were curiously like her father's. Alert, and just as unsettling when you had something you wanted to hide. She wasn't here to hide. She wouldn't be here if she were hiding.

"Princess?" he said calmly, and waited.

"I am afraid," she said.

He nodded. His face was kind, smooth-shaven, less lined than was usual for a man his age. He was small and trimly formed, not a laden-table, wine-cup cleric like the other one here, from Ferrieres. Her father had told them some time ago, before the first visit, that this man was one of the most learned scholars in the world, that the Patriarch in Rhodias sought his views on clashes of doctrine. In some ways it was hard to credit—the Cyngael lived so cut off from the world.

"Many of my people are greatly afraid just now," he said. "You are generous to share it with us. Your father has been very good, sending a ship to Arberth, messengers to the Rheden Wall. We can only hope—"

"No," she said. "That isn't it." She looked at him. "I knew when Alun ab Owyn entered the wood with my brother and the Erling."

A silence. She had shaken him, she saw. He made the sign of the disk. That was all right; she'd have done the same. "You… you see spirits?"

He was very direct. She shook her head. "Well, once I did. One of them. A few nights ago. That isn't what I… from the time you came across the river, the other morning? When we were lying on the grass?" She heard herself sounding like a child. This was so difficult.

He nodded.

"Well, from that time, I… I can't explain this well, but I knew… ab Owyn. The prince. I could… read things in him? Know where he was."

"Dear Jad," whispered the high cleric of the Cyngael. "What is it that is coming among us?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

He was looking at her, but not with eyes that spoke denunciation or disbelief. "Strange things are happening," he said.

"Not just… to me?" She was extremely determined not to cry. "Not just to you, child. To him. And… others."

"Others?"

He nodded. Hesitated, then moved a hand sideways, back and forth. He wasn't going to say. Clerics, she thought, were good at not telling what they didn't want to tell. But he'd already said something, and she'd needed to know it, so much. She wasn't alone, or going mad.