It was so hard to lose her, he thought. And now the duke. Why does She Who Waits To Take All Back wait so long? Why must the reaping wait until we have grown so used to the world, when the pain will be sharpest for both the dead and their survivors?

Tiamak adjusted himself on the hard carriage seat. He had not become so much of a northerner now that he liked to ride a horse, nor was he large enough to comfortably ride one for long even if he wished. He had a donkey they kept for him in the stables back home, an unpleasant but reasonably steady creature named Scand, but there was no question of Tiamak riding the beast on this trip, where it would struggle every moment to keep up with the horses. Instead, the little man sat beside the driver atop the carriage meant for the king and queen—not that they had used it yet as anything more than a moving cabinet for their clothing and other belongings. Back at the Hayholt, Tiamak only rode Scand when he wished to be outside, and almost always in the company of young Princess Lillia and her pony. The royal granddaughter was nearly as pig-headed as the donkey, but Tiamak loved her in a way he would never have imagined possible, more even than he had loved his sisters’ children, as much as if she had been of his very own flesh.

It was not solely his loyalty to Simon and Miriamele that made it so: Tiamak liked the heir Prince Morgan well enough, but there was something about the little girl that pulled and tugged at his heart, and when she called him “Uncle Timo” he was quite helpless. Even if there had been anything left for him back in the Wran, even if the elders there had begged him to come back and be their chief, Tiamak knew he might not have been able to leave the little girl behind. He wanted to watch Lillia grow, see that clever mind fill with more and more understanding, watch her learn to put that powerful ambition to some higher task than simply forcing her slave-uncle Tiamak to build complex waterwheels for her in the mud of Kynswood streams.

But losing Isgrimnur or missing little Lillia were not the only sources of Tiamak’s discomfort. When the news came to the Hayholt about the duke, Tiamak had just begun his great work. Planning it had been the work of years, but instead of seeing it finally come to fruition he was here, a hundred leagues away from the castle and weeks from returning, knowing his work had all but stopped in his absence.

And I am no longer young, he thought sadly. Who knows how much time I have to complete this sacred task?

It was only a library, most people would say, a collection of books and scrolls, the kind of thing Isgrimnur himself might well have thought a strange waste of space and time, but it was to be the first true open library ever built in the northern lands, and to Tiamak, who as a child had wondered if he might ever own a real book, it meant the world. Conceived to honor Miriamele and Simon’s late son, Prince John Josua, the unfinished library was already precious to Tiamak, who had cared for that young man very much. John Josua had loved books and learning as much as the Wrannaman did, and he had ambitions to make it a great center of scholarship in the young prince’s name.

But until we return from Rimmersgard, I can do nothing to aid the work except send the occasional letter to the master mason and pray for patience—

A sudden gust from the faded blue mountains to the north pimpled Tiamak’s exposed skin, and although the wind had been blowing all day, the strength of this chill surprised him, pushing deep into his very substance, bones and innards. Without even thinking, he made circles of his forefingers and thumbs to repel bad luck, as he had done when he was a child.

If I were back in Village Grove, he thought, I would be certain that She Who Waits To Take All Back had just breathed on my neck, reminding me that she has plans none of us know about.

Which was true, of course, as it always was. He was letting sadness over Isgrimnur make him fretful, jumping at shadows, cringing from sharp breezes.

While Tiamak was trying to gather back together his hopeful thoughts about the library, he heard someone come riding swiftly up behind him. He looked down from his high seat to see one of Eolair’s servants pacing the carriage on a tall, dark horse.

“Your pardon, Lord Tiamak,” the rider said. “The Lord Steward bids me give you this. It came with the dispatches from Erkynland.”

Tiamak looked it over as Eolair’s servant rode away, and his heart lightened a bit. He knew who it was from instantly because of the odd seal pressed into the red wax: instead of a heavy metal stamp or a signet ring, his wife Thelía always pressed a small dried flower into the melted wax. Because she had sent the letter several months back, in Feyever, she had chosen one of the first wildflowers that bloomed in Erkynland every year, a bright yellow bloom called sunlion or sometimes coltsfoot. He knew she would have picked it herself as she gathered herbs and simples in the castle gardens, and it should have warmed him just to see its sunbeam petals, still bright despite its long travels, but he was still feeling the effects of the chill that had surprised him a few moments earlier. He unfolded the letter and began reading, hoping for good news, or at least an absence of anything worrisome. Her opening words were in her usual, conversational tone—Thelía seemed interested only in sharing various workaday matters, a few decisions on the library materials she hoped he would be able to write back about, and a question about wild marjoram and what he knew of its use in his boyhood home in the Wran. But then he reached the final paragraph.

One last thing, my patient husband, a small but odd and interesting tale.

I was called in your absence to practice physick on one of the kitchen workers, an old fellow of Hernystiri blood who had fallen into a fit on the floor of the buttery. I do not know if you know him. His name is Riggan, and he is a thin, gnomish fellow, three score years old or even more, with large, bleary eyes and rough skin. He was not badly hurt, but his command of the Westerling tongue is poor, so I asked Countess Rhona to help me. She asked him in his own speech what had happened, and he said, “I hear the Morriga talking to herself. Every night and I cannot sleep.”

Countess Rhona looked a bit startled, I thought, and told me the Morriga was an ancient Hernystiri goddess of death and battle, no longer worshipped among her people but still feared, still blamed for nightmares and other foul things. Then, before I could ask another question, this Riggan said something else in that tongue, and this is what I thought would interest you. His words were, “She summons us back. She summons us all back. She is the silver-masked Mistress of Tears.” Now I ask you, husband, does that not sound as though the Norns’ Queen Utuk’ku, once a real, living menace to all mankind, has somehow become a demon-fable for kitchen workers? The Sithi friends of the king and queen thought her power was utterly destroyed when the Storm King was defeated, and I pray that is true. If she is now nothing but a legend, a fading nightmare, then I thank our merciful God for preserving us all from her evil.

I did not want to spend long with the man Riggan once he seemed recovered, because he disturbed me more than a little, with his strange face and goggling, fishlike eyes, and it was also disquieting to see calm, wise Countess Rhona look so pale at hearing the name of the Morriga—the ‘mother of all demons’ as Rhona named her. My Aedonite sisters would call this man’s malady the work of the Devil, but my learning has been so shaped by yours, dear Tiamak, that I suppose it instead only the confusion of an illness of his mind with tales he might have heard in childhood. In fact, I deem it proof of what you always say, my wise husband, “Truth and falsehood walk a long way together before they go their separate ways . . .”