“I… none that I know of. Do you not know who is your next heir after me?”

“The matter shifts, over time, in ways I do not control. You might have died in Darthaca. Fara might have conceived a son.” Wencel’s mouth twisted. “Others might be born or die. I learned long ago not to exhaust myself grappling problems that time will carry away on its tide.” He walked back and forth once across the chamber, as if to shake the tension out of his body. Ingrey wished he might dare do the same.

At the end of his circuit, Wencel turned again. “It seems we are to be saddled with each other for a little, will or nil. How if you enter my service?”

Ingrey rocked back. He had a thousand questions, to which Wencel, and possibly Wencel alone, held the answers. Close attendance upon the earl must reveal something more. And if I say no, how long do I get to live? He temporized. “I owe Lord Hetwar much. I would not lightly leave his house, nor would he lightly release me, I think.”

Wencel shrugged. “How if I begged you of him? He would not lightly refuse Princess Fara’s husband such a favor.”

No, but I might beseech Hetwar to evade or delay. “If Hetwar gives his leave, then.”

“A nice loyalty. I cannot fault it, who would have a like one from you.”

“I admit, your offer interests me strangely.”

Wencel’s dry smile acknowledged all the possible meanings of those ambiguous words. “I have no doubt of it.” He sighed and walked to the chamber door, indicating this interview was drawing to its end. Obediently, Ingrey followed him.

“Tell me one thing more tonight, though,” Ingrey said as he reached the portal.

Earl Horseriver raised his brows in curious permission.

“What happened to Wencel? The boy I knew?”

Horseriver touched his forehead. “His memories still exist, lost in a sea of such.”

“But Wencel does not? He is destroyed?”

The earl shrugged. “Where is the fourteen-year-old Ingrey, then, if not there”—he gestured to Ingrey’s head in turn—”in like disarray? They are both victims of a common enemy. If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time.” He gestured Ingrey out. “Farewell. Find me tomorrow, if you will.”

There seemed something terribly wrong with Wencel’s argument, but in his present dizzied state Ingrey could not finger what. In a few moments he found himself in the street again, blinking in the sunset light. It somehow surprised him that Easthome was still standing. It felt as though the city ought to have been churned to rubble during the small eternity he’d spent within, not one stone left upon another.

As I have been?

Gaps. Silences. Things not mentioned. For a man so sick with a surfeit of time, why was Wencel so anxious now? What drove him out of his reclusive routine, and into, apparently, such unaccustomed action? For Ingrey read him as a man pressed, and silently furious to be so.

He shook his aching head and turned for the sealmaster’s palace.

He was halfway to Hetwar’s when the reaction set in, turning his knees to tallow. A low abutment along a house wall flanking the street made a good enough bench, and he sank down upon it, bracing his hands on his thighs and his back against the day-warmed stone. He blinked and breathed deeply against his dizziness. It felt peculiarly like the aftermath of one of his wolf-fits, tumbling back into a stream of time he had temporarily exited; like falling back to earth after a dream of flight. Except that it was his mind, and not his body this time, that had ascended into that state where response flowed without thinking in some desperate dance for survival.

A passing matron paused and stared at him as he wrapped his arms around himself and rocked but, perhaps taking in his sex, age, and cutlery, passed on without daring to inquire into his well-being. In time, the trembling in his body ran its course, and his mind began to move again.

That was real, Wencel’s tale. Five gods.

Horseriver’s tale, he amended this thought. How much of Wencel lived on in that slight and crooked body was hard to say.

His second thought was a flash of envy. To live forever! How could a man not achieve happiness, with so many chances to flee old errors, to make it right? To build up wealth and power and knowledge? The envy faded upon reflection. Horseriver had paid for his many lives with many deaths, it seemed, and the spell gave him no respite from any horror entailed. Burning is a painful death. I do not recommend it, Wencel had once remarked, and Ingrey had thought him joking. In retrospect, the tone seemed more the judgment of a connoisseur.

Would surety of his own survival make a man more brave in battle? It was true that many of Wencel’s ancestors… rephrase, that Earl Horseriver had many times died not-peacefully. Or would the knowing of how much pain a death could inflict make one more afraid? Two of the most grotesque endings, Ingrey had just relived body and mind along with Horseriver, and the mere memories shook him near to vomiting. More ghostly suggestions of other such fates spun outward in repetition like a man’s image caught between two mirrors, and the thought of them going on past counting made his stomach clench again.

Realization of the other cost came to him then, not one Horseriver had held up before his mind’s eye, but still leaking in around all of the searing visions. Ingrey had no child, had scarcely considered the possibility, but the dream of a son inspired in him a fierce vague sense of protectiveness nonetheless. Rooted, perhaps, in his own child-mind’s hunger for a father’s regard, bolstered by his happier memories of Lord Ingalef, Ingrey at least had some notion of what a father ought to be.

What must it have been like for Horseriver, watching son after son grow, knowing their fates? Making them, knowing? Did he warn them of what was to befall them, as he had just warned Ingrey? Or did he take them by ambush? Some of each? At what ages? What differences to Horseriver, to his heirs, between taking a bewildered child, a frightened youth, or an outraged mind come to full maturity, with a life, choices, perhaps a bride and children of his own? Whatever the differences, Horseriver had had time to cycle through them all.

And not just bodies and wives. Where did the souls go of all those spell-seized sons? Bound into the whole, digested but not wholly destroyed… it seemed the spell stole not only lives, but eternities. Carrying them along in broken pieces to the next generation, the next century, a jumbled, melting accumulation. Had Horseriver—the thought gave Ingrey more pause than all that had gone before—had Horseriver himself ever slain an especially beloved child before his own foreseen death, to spare that soul before it could be bound into this horror?

I think that may have happened a time or two, as well. In four centuries of lives frequently shortened by violence, there had surely been opportunity for every variation on the theme.

Dangerous, powerful, magical, immortal… and mad. Or nearly so. Wencel’s brittle glibness took on a new tone, in retrospect. His baffling actions, wrenching back and forth between spurts of energy and withdrawal, still bewildered Ingrey, but Ingrey no longer reached for the reasons of ordinary men to explain them. He still did not understand Wencel, but the depth of his own misapprehension was at least revealed to him. Look to souls, Ingrey, Ijada had said. Indeed.

How many more iterations before Wencel lost even his present fragile function, and became so deranged as no longer to pass as lucid at all? As the spell spun on, it might look to the outside eye perhaps like some family disease, one blood relative after another struck down by dementia in youth, or middle age.