She took a breath. “Do you call Makho a failure, then?”

He laughed. She envied him the lightness she heard. “No, never. The queen and my master did well when they chose him. He is like a knife of finest blackstone, so sharp that he can cut the air itself and make it bleed.”

“When you say your master, you mean Akhenabi.” The Lord of Song’s bottomless black eyes and wrinkled mask now lurked at the edges of many of her dreams. “Are you saying that he chose this Queen’s Hand?”

He ignored her question. “The Lord of Song is more than my master. He will be the savior of our people.” Saomeji spoke so flatly it almost sounded as though he didn’t believe it, that he was speaking by rote, but there was a gleam in his alien golden eyes that she didn’t recognize. “You interested him, hand-sister. I could tell.”

His words touched something that had been disturbing her since Bitter Moon Castle. Emboldened by the distance between themselves and the rest of their comrades, she turned and asked him, “Why did your master let me go?”

The Singer’s look was carefully blank. “This hand of Talons was ordered by the queen, and sworn to her and her alone. How could my master have interfered?”

This was ground far more dangerous than the slope they climbed, but now that she had started Nezeru felt a sort of heedless freedom, as though this night and this high place were both outside the bounds of what was ordinary. Another part of her was horrified by such risky behavior, but nothing had seemed quite the same since Makho had used the hebi-kei on her. “You surely know better than that, Singer Saomeji. Chieftain Makho was the queen’s choice to lead this hand. Makho wished me sent back to Nakkiga for punishment. Why would Akhenabi thwart him of his will?”

Saomeji did not speak for a while, and they climbed in almost complete silence. For a Singer, he was well trained in stealth.

“Do you know anything of my master, hand-sister?” Saomeji said at last. “Beyond the stories children tell each other?”

“I know he is one of the very oldest,” she said carefully. “One of the first Landborn, after our ships found their way here. I know that he has the queen’s ear, and her trust. I know that he is feared in every land, by people who have never looked on his face or heard his voice.” And by me, too, she thought. How I wish I had never seen him so closely!

Saomeji shook his head. “You know very little, then, young Nezeru. We are of an age, you and I, but I know more than you—much more.” He looked straight ahead, as though describing a picture only he could see. “I have walked the deep places below Nakkiga, the ancient depths where our people no longer go, and I have seen things there that would send you into madness . . . but still I am as a child to Akhenabi and his closest kin. We all are. The old ones, the masked ones, are subtle beyond our understanding. What are we, who have lived but a few hundred turns of the seasons, to those who have passed a thousand winters—or ten thousand?” He opened his eyes, fixing her with his honey-yellow stare. “My master saw something in you. What that was I cannot say, nor even guess. As well might a snail try to understand the reasons of the foot that crushes him or spares him. Because we are small, Nezeru. We are small, you and I and even Makho, and our span is scarcely longer than that of the mortals who swarm the land and destroy our peace—a few centuries, then we are dust. The Queen does not die, and her chosen ones do not die either, although eventually all the rest of our kind find their ending. How can you and I judge the thoughts of those who have seen the very form of the world shift—seen mountains rise, seas dry?”

You like the sound of your own voice, Nezeru thought. That is a failing most of your secretive order does not share. But she only said, “So I cannot hope to understand the reason your master spared me because I have never seen a mountain grow?”

“If you like.” Saomeji was amused again, and for some reason that frightened her. He could be no more privileged in his birth than she was—another halfblood, but with the added defect of the golden eyes of their traitorous Zida’ya cousins—so what gave this mongrel Singer such confidence? “It is not a failure of your youth but a failure of knowledge and imagination,” he went on. “There are great matters in train, greater than you or I can know—or perhaps even guess at. But if Makho’s anger has brought you despair, I bring you something that should melt that unhappiness like sun on shallow snow. And it is this—the most powerful of our folk see some purpose in you, Sacrifice Nezeru. Lord Akhenabi does not make mistakes.” He walked a few more paces in silence, then said, “Look up.”

The wind had risen as they neared the top of the ridge, and for a moment she thought she had misheard him above its noise. “Look up?”

“There. You see the stars hung in the sky like the lanterns above Black Water Field? My lord Akhenabi sees the very paths they travel, where they have been and where they will be. In my scant time in the Order of Song I have learned the way their movement pulls on those of us below, the way their light brings life to darkness, but my master even sees the darkness between them. Not the absence of their light, understand, but the darkness itself—he reads it like a book.”

She looked up at the teeming stars. “I do not understand you.”

She could hear the amusement in his voice. “I do not always understand myself, hand-sister. When I studied the Great Songs and the Lesser Songs in the order-house, it was as though a fire was lit in my thoughts. That fire still burns. Sometimes it warms me. Sometimes I feel it will consume me, blazing until I am only ash, floating up into those dark places where the stars do not hold sway.”

Nezeru was beginning to think that this halfblood Singer was not merely subtle but actually mad, as damaged in his own way as she was by her own cowardice and failure. Was it true, then? Were all halfbloods corrupted by their birth?

Before either of them could speak again, Ibi-Khai appeared on the path ahead of them. “Dawn will be here soon,” he announced. The Echo had pulled back his hood; his long black hair swirled around his narrow face. “Makho and Kemme have found a way down to the plain below.” Ibi-Khai was clearly waiting for them to catch up, which meant no more unsettling private conversation with Saomeji. Nezeru felt relieved. “Make haste!” Ibi-Khai urged them. “We will stop there until the daystar is gone.”

“The Queen watches over us,” replied Saomeji.

“Our lives are hers,” said Ibi-Khai, making the sign of fealty. “No praise of her is too great.”

Jarnulf had rested as long as he dared. His injuries were minor—a few deep cuts, a long but shallow weal across his scalp, some scratches and scrapes. He had no idea if the three dead Norns had been a wide patrol out of Bitter Moon Castle or a scouting party for a larger force, but although this southern end of Moon’s Reach Valley had been a good place for an improvised ambush, it was a bad spot for evading a determined hunting party of Sacrifices. Large troops of Hikeda’ya often brought the terrible white hounds from Nakkiga’s kennels to guard the camp during the day, when the Cloud Children did not like to travel. With luck he might elude upright pursuers in the forested hills above the valley, but Jarnulf knew he had no such chance against a pack of Nakkiga hounds.

He also knew he could not make his way straight over the highest hills from where he stood now because of the icy, windscraped rocks of the steep crest. He would have more choices at the far end of the valley, including a pass low enough that he could climb it without suffering too badly, and if necessary could actually escape through into Hikeda’ya lands where it would be easier to hide, at least long enough to allow a wide troop to pass him on their way south. Normally Jarnulf would not have ventured so near to one of the border fortresses, but he could not rid his thoughts of the corpse-giant’s dire words. If the creature had been truthful and the masked queen really was alive, then had it also spoken the truth about the Hikeda’ya planning to attack the lands of men once again? What would his solitary quest mean then—a dead Sacrifice here, a dead Sacrifice there—when thousands more of them marched south to kill mortal men and women?