•   •   •

Led by islander guides, they climbed most of the way to the top of the mountain before darkness fell. The villagers who led them were surprised to see the strangers making such fast time, but of course they knew nothing of the training all Queen’s Talons received; the nights and days of endless hardship that built upon their natural hardiness and made each of them, even the Whisperer and the Singer, fit and fierce as beasts. When it was too dark to continue, or at least too dark for the mortal guides, Makho commanded them to make camp for the night.

As she made a comfortable place for herself against a hummock of grassy ground in a spot shielded from the worst of the wind, Makho appeared. “I have been looking for you.” But he barely looked at her. “I will couple with you tonight. Await me.”

He did as he had promised, coming to her when the moon was high. Nezeru did not feel flattered but neither could she complain: one of the burdens of her mixed blood was that she was available to pureblood men, because it was the duty of all Hikeda’ya to help the race grow so that they would become numerous enough to destroy the queen’s enemies and bring harmony to a world badly in need of it. It was even more necessary because pure-blooded women had not made many children with halfblood males—although not, some of the noblemen complained, for lack of trying.

Makho made her take off all her clothing before he mounted her. Nezeru did not feel cold, and she certainly was not encumbered by modesty, but she wished he had not ordered it so. A part of her feared being watched by one of the others, especially Saomeji, although she could not say precisely why. If there had been any enjoyment for her in the act it would have been soured by that discomfort, but in any case, enjoyment was never in view.

Her mother Tzoja had once called this intimate connection of two people “lovemaking,” which Nezeru thought as soft and silly a mortal idea as she had ever heard—as soft and silly as her mother herself could be. Tzoja had also tried to comfort Nezeru after she had been disciplined by her father, even when Nezeru herself tried to shrug off the embraces and the pointless apologies. There was nothing of love in what she did with Makho, Nezeru knew, only duty, but that was more than enough. The Hikeda’ya were few now. Their mortal enemies were many and bred like pink frogs, spawning in their thousands every year: soon the world would be full of them and the People and even the Garden itself would be forgotten as if neither had ever existed.

Certainly there was nothing unduly affectionate in Makho’s treatment of her. His coupling, like his body, was as hard and smooth as witchwood. When he finished it was in utter silence, and when he rolled off her, it was as though Nezeru herself had suddenly disappeared, even as she lay in the moon’s blue-white light with his fluids and her own sweat drying on her skin. But she felt she had the right to ask him at least one question.

“What bones?”

He looked at her. His voice told her he had all but forgotten her presence already. “Bones?”

“You told the mortals we came to see the bones.”

Makho turned away from her. “The queen sent us to find the bones of Hakatri.”

For a moment she could not say why the name sounded so familiar. Then, suddenly and shockingly, it came to her. “Hakatri? Do you truly mean the brother of Ineluki the Storm King?”

“Is there another?” This time Makho’s scorn was unhidden, and he would answer no more questions.

8 A Meeting on Lantern Bridge

The last days of Marris-month blew by on cold Frostmarch winds as the royal progress made its way north across the plains of Rimmersgard toward Elvritshalla. The journey seemed inchingly slow to Morgan, since the great procession stopped at the landholdings of some of the most powerful nobles and also in some of the larger cities, like high, windy Naarved. Each time they did, his grandparents explained the reasons for the visit, anxious for Morgan to learn their statecraft; but each stop seemed so much like all the rest, full of speeches and dull ceremonies, that he lost track. The broad, unfamiliar landscapes and wide sky that had first engrossed him became ordinary and dull as the journey dragged on and on. Even the fair faces of young Rimmersgard women began to lose interest for him. As Marris passed and Avrel blew in, Morgan spent more and more time lost in his own brooding thoughts.

Often, lulled into near-sleep by the monotony of the spare northern landscapes, he found himself thinking of his dead father, something he had done his best to avoid during the journey, though not all the memories were unhappy ones. A solitary evergreen in an empty waste, bent and shaped by the wind, reminded him of the carefully crafted shapes in the Hedge Garden back home, and that brought back to him the day when his father had lifted a much smaller Morgan up onto his shoulders so he could see those hedge animals more closely. From his new vantage they had all seemed more plant than beast, the eyes and mouths so carefully shaped from boxwood branches dissolving into mere whorls of green, but instead of disappointment, child-Morgan had felt exalted. The view from atop his father’s shoulders made him feel as though he had suddenly become a man, a tall man. Seeing not just the tops of the hedge animals, but over the garden wall into other parts of the Inner Bailey, had given him an exciting sensation of power and possibility.

Someday I will be this big, he had thought. Someday I will be able to go anywhere.

“Take me outside, Papa!” he had demanded. “Take me out. I want to see if I’m as tall as the castle walls!”

His father had laughed, enjoying his excitement, and then carried him to the massive old Festival Oak at the garden’s far end to let him feel its centuried bark, so covered with cracks and bumps that the young Morgan could imagine it was a dragon’s armored skin.

But that had been before Prince John Josua had lost interest in his wife and young son, before he had become so immersed in his old books and his writing that he scarcely joined Morgan and his mother even for meals. Even when he was with them in those later days, he had seemed always to be thinking about something or somewhere quite different.

It was hard to mourn the way his grandparents did, with careful conversations and quiet ceremonies. Morgan felt his father had left him years before he died.

Now that they had reached the hilltop, Simon and the rest of the mounted company could look down the river’s course and see almost the whole of the Drorshull Valley. Even several days into Avrel, snow was still piled so thickly that in many places everything but village and farmstead roofs were buried; even the church spires that marked out each settlement seemed to be standing on tiptoe.

“Look,” said Morgan, pointing. “Is that it?”

The royal progress had been following the course of the river for several chilly days, through cold rains and painful flights of gravelly sleet, but it seemed they had finally reached their destination—a huge, walled city at the far end of the valley, where the Gratuvask split into two channels. Set on the peak at its center was a keep surrounded by four stocky towers, each crowned with a steep, conical roof.