“Is she well?”

“Well, and delivered of a fine little girl, I am pleased to say. Who I pray to the Lady of Spring shall grow up to look like her mother and not like me, else she will have much to complain of when she is older.”

“I’m glad she is safe. Both safe. Learned Hallana worried me.” In more ways than one. He touched his still-bandaged right hand, reminded of how close he had come to retrieving his sword, in his scarlet madness in that upstairs room.

“Had you time to know her better, she would not have worried you.”

“Ah?”

“She would have terrified you, just like the rest of us. Yet somehow, we all survived her, again. She sent me here, you see. Quite drove me from her bedside. Which many women tend to do to their poor husbands after a childbirth, but not for such reasons.”

“Have you spoken with Learned Lewko?”

“Yes, at length, when I arrived last night.”

Ingrey groped for careful wording. “And on whose behalf did Hallana send you?” It occurred to him belatedly that the divine’s alarming theological argument back in the chamber might well have been intended to impede Ijada’s execution, not speed it.

“Well… well, now, that’s a little hard to say.”

Ingrey considered this. “Why?”

For the first time, Oswin hesitated before he answered. He took Ingrey by the arm and led him away, around the corner of the gallery, well out of earshot of the door where a couple of what looked like more servants from Boar’s Head were just being led inside by a gray-robed dedicat. Oswin leaned on the rail, looking down thoughtfully into the well of the hall; Ingrey matched his pose and waited.

When Oswin resumed, his voice was oddly diffident. “You are a man with much experience in the uncanny and the holy, I understand. The gods speak to you in waking visions, face-to-face.”

“No!” Ingrey began, and stopped. Denial again? “Well… in a way. I have had many bizarre experiences lately. They crowd upon me now. It does not make me deft.”

Oswin sighed. “I cannot imagine growing deft in the face of this. You have to understand. I had never had a direct experience of the holy in my life, for all that I tried to serve my god as seemed best to me, according to my gifts as we are taught. Except for Hallana. She was the only miracle that ever happened to me. The woman seems vastly oversupplied with gods. At one point, I accused her of having stolen my share, and she accused me of marrying her solely to sustain a proper average. The gods walk through her dreams as though strolling in a garden. I just have dreams of running lost through my old seminary, with no clothes, late for an examination of a class I did not know I had, and the like.”

“Taking the examination, or giving it?” Ingrey couldn’t help asking.

“Either, variously.” Oswin’s brow furrowed. “And then there are the ones where I am wandering through a house that is falling apart, and I have no tools to repair… well, anyway.” He took a long breath, and settled into himself. “The night after our new daughter was born, I slept once again with Hallana. We both shared a significant dream. I woke crying out in fear. She was utterly cheery about it. She said it meant we must go at once to Easthome. I asked her if she had run mad, she could not rise and go about yet! She said she could put a pallet in the back of the wagon and rest the whole way. We argued about it all day. The dream came again the next night. She said that cinched the matter. I said she had a duty to the babe, to the children, that she could neither abandon them nor drag them along into danger. She gave way; I gloated. I took to my horse that afternoon. I was ten miles down the road before I realized that I had been neatly foxed.”

“How so?”

“Separated, there was no way for me to continue the argument. Or to stop her. I have no doubt she’s upon the road right now, not more than a day behind me. I wonder if she will have brought the children? I shudder to picture it. If you see her, or her faithful servants, in this town before I do, tell her I have taken rooms for all of us at the Inn of Irises across from the Mother’s Infirmary.”

“Would, um, she be traveling with the same ones I met in Red Dike?”

“Oh, yes, Bernan and Hergi. They would not be separated from her. Bernan was one of her early triumphs in sorcerous healing, you see. Hergi brought him to her in agony from the stones, clawing himself and shrieking of suicide, close to heart failure from the pain, his life and sanity despaired of. Hallana exploded the stones within his body, and he passed them at once—she had him on his feet and smiling in a day. They would follow her into any folly she chose.” Oswin snorted. “I construct the most excellent arguments in the Father’s name that my intellect and deep training can devise, yet with all my reason I cannot move people as she does just by—by standing there breathing. It is entirely unjust.” His tone tried to be incensed, but only managed wistful.

“The dream,” Ingrey reminded him.

“My apologies. I do not normally rattle on like this. Perhaps that explains something about my Hallana… I have laid it before Learned Lewko, now you. There were five people in it: Hallana, me, Lewko, and two young men I had never seen before. Until today. Prince Biast was one of them. I nearly fell off my bench when he walked into the chamber and was named. The other was a stranger fellow still; a giant man with long red hair, who spoke in tongues.”

“Ah,” said Ingrey. “That would be Prince Jokol, no doubt. Tell him to give Fafa a fish for me, when you meet him. In fact, you might catch him now; I just sent him to Lewko. He could still be there.”

Oswin’s eyes widened, and he straightened as though to dash off at once, but then shook his head and continued. “In the dream… I am a man of words, but I scarcely know how to describe it. All the five were god-touched. More, worse: the gods put us on and wore us like gauntlets. We shattered… “

They harry me hard, now, Horseriver had said. So it seemed. “Well, should you determine what it all meant, let me know. Were any others in the dream?” Me or Ijada, for example?

Oswin shook his head. “Just the five. So far. The dream did not seem finished, which upset me yet Hallana took in stride. I both long and fear to sleep, to find out more, but now I have insomnia. Hallana may be willing to run off into the dark, but I want to know where the stepping-stones will be.”

Ingrey smiled grimly at this. “It was lately suggested to me, by a man with longer experience of the gods than I can rightly imagine, that the reason the gods do not show our paths more plainly is that They do not know either. I haven’t decided if I find this reassuring or the reverse. It does hint they do not torment us solely for Their amusement, at least.”

Oswin tapped a hand on the railing. “Hallana and I have argued this point—the foresight of the gods. They are the gods. They must know if anyone does.”

“Perhaps no one does,” said Ingrey easily.

The expression on Oswin’s face was that of a man forced to swallow a vile-tasting medicine of dubious value. “I shall try Lewko, then. Perhaps this Jokol will know something more.”

“I doubt it, but good luck.”

“I trust we will meet again soon.”

“Nothing would startle me, these days.”

“Where might I reach you? Lewko said you were set as a spy upon Earl Horseriver, who also seems somewhat involved in this tangle.”

Ingrey hissed through his teeth. “I suppose it’s fortunate Horseriver already knows that I spy on him, with that sort of loose gossip circulating.”

Oswin shook his head vehemently. “Neither loose nor gossip, and the circle is a tight one. Lewko had something like the dream, too, from what he says.”

Somewhat involved, indeed. “Stay away from Horseriver for the time being. He is dangerous. If you wish to see me, send a message there, but put no matter of import in the writing—assume it will be intercepted and read by hostile eyes before I see it.”