“What was the hitch, then?”

“This local god-speaker was the hitch. They hate the God, but they love this Danadhar. Hate is fairly easy to manipulate, but love is more stubborn, more selfless, more trouble all around.”

“You might understand it better if you could bring yourself to feel it.”

“That’s good, coming from you. Bad-tempered, selfish girl.” He delicately tested the sharpness of a bonesaw with his thumb and nodded, satisfied.

“So the mandrakes rallied around this Danadhar?”

“They don’t like being called mandrakes, Ambrosia. They really don’t.”

“So?”

“I see what you mean. Well, some of the mandrakes rallied around Danadhar, and some of them rallied around their new friend, Lightbringer the Adversary. Me, in short. And this slow indecisive civil war is the result. They’re so terribly reluctant to kill each other, you see. And you can’t have a really successful war without a certain amount of killing.”

“I know.”

“Yes, I suppose you do. Meanwhile, your mother isn’t getting any younger, and the sun isn’t getting any healthier. I’d resolved to wait the war out—perhaps assassinate this inconvenient god-speaker—when a mantia told me that you were coming. And I think that brings us up to date.”

A mantia, a spell of foretelling, was, in Ambrosia’s view, a fool’s game . . . but then, in so many ways, for all his cunning, her father was a fool. “So,” she said, “you’re ready to kill me, I take it?”

“Not at all, my dear. Also, a more charitable way to look at it is that I’m giving you the opportunity to keep your mother alive.”

Ambrosia looked at the glassy egg in which shadows, flitting lights, and green-gray brain meat floated. “She won’t thank you for this, Merlin. Believe me. I know her better than you do.”

“You may be right, Ambrosia. I suppose you are right. But I am not doing this to be thanked. Only a fool acts with that motive, and I think you’ll concede that I am not a fool.”

Ambrosia never had, and never would concede this, but it hardly seemed important to say so just then. Merlin puttered around with his shining instruments of darkness for a while longer and said, “Excuse me, my dear. I have to see how that potion is getting along.”

“I give you leave to go,” Ambrosia said in her most regal (I-am-the-Regent-and-you’re-not) tone.

Merlin snickered and ducked into the next room.

Ambrosia put her head back against the scaly wall. She did not think so much as feel. These might be the last sensations she ever had—the last things she saw, heard, smelled. . . .

A fishy, snaky sort of smell. What had he said about the fish-beast?

. . . your blood would almost certainly have poisoned it . . .

She looked down at the scaly arms imprisoning her. Did she feel a long, slow pulse within them, akin to something in the wall?

. . . your blood would almost certainly have poisoned it . . .

If the arms were alive, they could feel pain. They would react. They might react by crushing her. Yes, it would be a very dangerous risk to take, if she weren’t about to die anyway.

. . . your blood . . .

Ambrosia bit her tongue—not metaphorically, but literally, hard enough to draw blood. Then again to ensure a lot of blood. Her mouth filled with it.

She spat the bright, burning blood down on the snaky arms imprisoning her.

The blood of Ambrose, the blood that betrayed their kinship with mandrakes, caused almost anything to burn. Anything but the Ambrosii themselves.

Her heart fell. The blood pooled, fuming, on hollow places in the snakelike arms, but the arms didn’t react. The floor below began to burn as the blood dripped on it, but the arms holding her just went on being arms and went on holding her.

Well, it wasn’t like she had another plan to fall back on. She wasn’t Merlin Ambrosius, adapting to circumstances. She was Ambrosia Viviana, and she made circumstances adapt to her. She spat another mouthful of burning blood on the arms.

Then she saw their surfaces ripple like water. Perhaps the pain impulses had needed to travel all the way to the house’s reptile brain, wherever that was, before there came a reaction. Perhaps the blood just needed to burn through the outer, tougher layers of skin before it could be felt. In any case, the arms were feeling it now.

She spat a third time. There were fuming craters in the snaky arms, and their reptilian muscles began to contract: she could see them move through the holes burned in the skin. For a moment she thought the arms were indeed going to crush her, but they just slid around her and contracted into the wall—trying to retreat from the fiery poison of her blood. She fell to the floor among the flames she had kindled.

But the arms carried the poison with them back into the wall. Now the wall began to ripple as the arms had rippled, expanding and contracting in pain.

Ambrosia jumped up and spat more blood directly on the walls.

Merlin came rushing in. “What have you done, you bad girl?” he screamed, just like he used to do when she was a child.

But she was a child no longer. She would have said, Old man! You have lived long enough! But her tongue hurt too badly to speak. But she was thinking it, and he seemed to read it in her face. In any event, he snatched up the crystal egg containing Nimue and ran away into his workshop.

Ambrosia grabbed a long serrated blade from the workbench and followed him. Behind her the walls continued to convulse and the fire continued to spread across the wooden floor.

Now she could see Merlin, through several arches, well ahead of her and running as fast as he could. But he was also having trouble hanging on to the glass egg; it almost slipped from his hands several times as she watched.

The fire was now running across the floor faster than Merlin or his daughter, and the gigantic snake or snakes forming the walls were writhing in agony. As they contracted, the inner framework of the strange house screamed: beams split and planks tore apart. A gap opened up in front of Merlin. He tried to dance away from it, but the floor was now sloping, funneling him toward the gap. He fell out of sight, still juggling the gigantic crystal egg.

He wasn’t getting away that easy. Ambrosia ran down the slope and jumped into the empty darkness, brandishing her bright, serrated blade like lightning.

CHAPTER TWENTY

End of Deceit

A day and a night gone by, and Aloê at last was ready to act. She and Denynê spent the time hiding in Fungustown. She found a little house with an overrun garden and a fountain, and a little stable in back for Raudhfax. She didn’t think it had been occupied long before it was abandoned—and, anyway, a nightmare or two was a small price to pay for the silence and emptiness of the streets around them.

She listened to Denynê’s story, helped her heal, and wrote messages. These she brought at night to the League of Silent Women—friends of hers for long generations—and they promised to carry them for her.

They finished a lunch of spring fruits from the garden. Aloê asked Denynê, “Are you ready?”

“Let’s get the bastard,” said Denynê tightly. It was probably the first time she had used so crude a word. Aloê laughed and they went out to saddle up Raudhfax.

They rode straight through the city to the domed Chamber of the Graith at the ruins of the eastern wall. Aloê dismounted, helped Denynê down, entrusted Raudhfax to one of the watch-thains on the steps, and then leaped up the steps and into the shadows of the atrium.

Maijarra was there, most senior of all the thains; she stood guard alone at the entrance to the domed chamber.

“Vocate Aloê,” she said, lowering her long spear and gesturing with it. “The summoners await you and your second within.”