More plans. More logistics. More work. More feeling his head ache.

A bigger army, now. Half of Ith seemed to have signed up for the adventure. Kiana Sabryya had brought him a small army just by herself, a lot of them women, which was proving … interesting for the White Isles troops. “They’ve got breasts and they’re wearing swords and armour,” Osen had honestly genuinely actually ended up having to shout at Lord Parale. “Amazing. Just bloody well get over it.” Some people could be very odd. Alleen Durith had a lovely troop of cavalry on beautiful creamy white horses, fast and strong with proud, clever eyes. The best four he gave to Marith, adorned with gold and copper trappings, cheekpieces set with rubies, red feather plumes on their heads. Marith, Osen and Alleen had a glorious day riding them very fast along the coast south of Tyrenae, stopping at every inn they found on the way back. But a larger cavalry contingent was something of a mixed blessing, rather like the inn visits had been. More horses meant more fodder to lug across a mountain range. And these particular horses looked like they’d be a nightmare to keep comfortable en route, being proud and fast and strong and clever and very, very, very highly strung.

So they had something like forty thousand men—men and women—people—argh—forty thousand soldiers and horses and tents and food supplies to get over the mountains. Again, the roar of the forge, the rattle of grain carts. Again, the long hours poring over maps and plans, talking with Osen and Yanis Stansel and his lords. Again, the ringing sound of soldiers training, readying themselves. The women of Tyrenae sat and wove cloth for ten times a hundred tents.

Thalia’s wagon palace on wheels was coming on well, at least. Marith was very pleased with it. All green and gold and silver. The horses that pulled it had pearls plaited into their manes. A bed, a bath tub, a tiny desk, lamps. He and Thalia had a lovely morning choosing a selection of books.

Illyr. It called to him. To rule in Ethalden! To raise again Amrath’s walls, Amrath’s throne! See the silver towers rebuilt, the walls raised in splendour, the glory of Illyr restored. Bury Amrath with honour. Avenge His death. The whole army was alive with it, staring away north with longing, it was the first and last word on every soldier’s lips.

Just a lot of work first …

Marith was reading over a list of troop units one evening when Osen entered his study, with Thalia’s guardsman Brychan behind.

“What is it? I gave orders I was to be left undisturbed.”

Osen looked at him and Marith saw that Osen was afraid.

Osen said very slowly, “My Lord King—Marith—The queen … This man here … he has things he needs to tell you. About the queen.”

I need not fear. What have I to fear in the world? Cold gripped his heart. I’d know. If anything happened to her, he thought. I’d know. She had gone out riding early that morning, to see the Ithish woods all in their richest spring green. Two guards had accompanied her, Tal and Garet. She, too, had nothing to fear.

“What is it?”

“She—” Osen’s eyes fixed on the floor at his feet. Brychan staring around the tent, anywhere but at his king in front of him drawing up his war plans. Brychan’s eyes wide and rolling, young horse’s eyes when a man comes to break it.

“What about the queen?” The air harsh as boiled metal. Trying to keep his voice level. Trying to keep from screaming so loud the men before him were shattered bones on the floor. His hands went to the hilt of his sword on the table. Trying to keep his hands from tearing them apart. “Tell me. What about the queen?”

Osen pushed Brychan forward. “Tell him. As you told me.”

Brychan said faintly, “The queen … My Lord King … You ordered me to guard her. To accompany her. To obey her, do as she ordered me.” The man’s voice shook, but defensive as well inside it. “I did my duty.” “I followed orders.” “You told me to.” “It’s not my fault.”

“Yes,” Marith said. “She is your queen, is she not? You obey her.”

“She is my queen …”

Brychan lapsed into silence. Stared at the floor.

“And?” I don’t understand. The burning pain back at Marith’s eyes.

“Tell him,” Osen said. His voice was cold and strained and taut, like ice cracking underfoot.

Brychan shuffled. “This morning, she wanted to go riding. She loves the woods around here …”

“Yes?”

“My Lord King—I—I swear this is the truth, true as I’m standing here. We were riding, she was ahead of us, she ordered us to go behind her, she was riding, she stopped her horse, like she was waiting. And a … a white deer came out of the woods. To meet her. White as snow. And its antlers, they were huge, they reached out like a tree, like branches. And, My Lord King, I swear, I swear this is true, it had a human face, My Lord. The face of a man.” His hands made a gesture. “It was a … a gestmet, My Lord King. A god.”

Brychan lapsed into silence.

A sick heavy dark.

Marith said, “And what did Thalia—did the queen—what did the queen do?”

Brychan’s voice shrank to a whisper. “She was not afraid. She looked at it. It looked at her. I thought she was going to go towards it. Then she stopped, and made a gesture with her hand to shoo it away. And it went.” The head went up a little, defensive and on surer ground. “And she rode on. And we followed her. She went on, and then rode back.”

Silence.

“Thank you.” Still he kept his voice level. “That will be all. Thank you, Brychan.”

Brychan turned to go. He’d pissed himself. A pool of piss dribbling down to the floor. Marith watched him, trembling. After Brychan had gone he sank down with his head resting in his hands.

“Why did he tell you?” His voice was dry as though he hadn’t spoken since the world was born.

Osen said, “He was afraid. And he is in love with her, of course.” And Osen too looked older when he said it, stone man, remorseless, driving in the pain.

“Why did you tell me?”

Osen the stone man said, “I thought you needed to know.”

“So now I know.” Marith gestured to the doorway. “Leave.”

Osen took three steps, stopped, turned again. “And something else. I have to tell you something else. About her. Something else the man Brychan told me, that solved something that was puzzling me.” His eyes met Marith’s and they were as cruel. His friend. “It is not only … whatever it was he saw, that she has been meeting with. She is betraying you, Marith.”

On the red leather surface of the table, on top of the lists of soldiers, Osen placed a gold necklace set with amber, that had once belonged to Queen Elayne, that Marith had given to Thalia.

“I got this from a girl in Morr Town. She got it from a market seller. He got it from a young woman with a grand lady’s voice and a burned face.”

Drive the knife in. Harder. Harder.

Death! Death! Death!

Confront her.

Betrayer. Like all the rest. Mother, father, brother, friend, wife.

Kill her. Her and Carin both. Killing him, and he had to kill them first.

Gods, yesterday they’d been standing on the tallest tower of Malth Tyrenae, looking at the darkness of their kingdom, and he’d told her he loved her, and she’d told him she loved him. Which she never had before. “To our future,” she’d said.

Put his hand over the necklace. The amber was almost warm under his hand, softer and warmer than metal. The sap of ancient trees. Once, once it had been alive. A living thing.

She had worn it at a feast one night at Malth Elelane. Danced, with the candlelight on her, dressed in white. The gold had glowed against her skin.

Thalia. Thalia my love. The beautiful shining weight of her hair and her hands pushing through it like through dark water. Her slender fingers like branches, her hair rippling like water, a soft scent of roses and honey, cool dark river against his skin. Her hands on his skin, her slender fingers like branches brushing against him, like leaves, like water, like light. Her eyes. Her lips. Saleiot.

He put the necklace into his pocket. Felt it burning there, malign, mocking at him. I killed Carin, he thought. I loved him. He loved me. Yet he betrayed me. Destroyed me. Yet I killed him.

Marith sat alone, with the necklace in his pocket, the lists of troops spread before him on the table. Thinking. Making plans. The shadows crawled on the walls. The red star of the Dragon’s Mouth rose. The Twin Children. The Worm. The Dog.

A good star, the Dog.

Marith went up to his bedchamber. Thalia was sitting by the fire, reading.

His bedchamber? It had been Selerie’s bedchamber. The bed, the chairs, the hangings, the coverlet of blue and silver and seed pearls. Suddenly, surely, the room smelled of rotting flesh.

Thalia started. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She looked nervous, he thought. Afraid of him. Awkward. “You’ve been so busy today,” she said.

“Yes.”

The room smelled of rot. Couldn’t she smell it? The necklace burned in his pocket. The amber looked like the dried crust of pus on Selerie’s wounds. The amber looked like the honey in which they had preserved his father’s corpse. She had sat in Selerie’s tent on Seneth in his ruins, eating apples and cream and honey, licking honey off her perfect lips.

“Come here. What is it? You look terrible.” She held out her arms to him.

She lost the necklace, the catch broke and it fell from her neck, my mother lost a necklace like that once, out riding, not my mother, Elayne, the whore, she lost a necklace like that when the catch broke. A maidservant stole it—so I’ll have every maidservant in Malth Elelane whipped. She gave it to a beggar girl who was burned as a child, because she is such a kind and good and caring woman and her heart was moved with grief.

The man Brychan is mad. I should have him killed. Have his eyes put out. He is lying. If she met with a god in the forest, it was … it was …

Look at her! Even god powers must worship her! The sea and the sky and the rocks and the sea. That’s all. She is radiant and pure and bright with life.

I can’t ask her, he thought. I can’t speak the words.

King Ruin. King of Death. What did I expect?

“What are you reading?” he asked her, trying to find something to say to her. His voice shook on the words.

She flushed. Hesitated. “Marith—”

Held up the book.

The story of Hilanis the Young. He had to bite his tongue, to keep himself from crying out.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said again. “Osen said he was going to get you to go out somewhere with him tonight.

“I wanted to understand the history of the White Isles,” she said. “And of Illyr. Places we’ve been. Will go.” She put the book down. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I wanted to know.”

Gods, all we do is say sorry to each other. Tiptoeing round all the stories. I tell her her birthplace is a corpse’s death rattle. She reads stories of just how vile my bloodline is. We apologize for knowing what everybody knows.

“There’s nothing to understand! It’s a vile story about my vile accursed family. My vile accursed poisonous blood.” His father’s sad cold face, listening, nodding a little, his eyes flicking between his two sons, the queen beside him watching, sighing, sometimes taking her husband’s hand. “Sitting after dinner in the hall, some sycophant who calls himself a poet reciting the great deeds of our ancestors, Ti and me sitting looking at each other. Sitting listening. Me. My blood.” King Ruin. King of Death. Divine demonic cursed filthy blood. “My past. My blood. That’s what you need to know! To understand! My blood! Hilanis who skinned his older brother Tareneth alive to claim his crown, Hilanis who dressed Tareneth’s widow in the skin on their wedding day! What we do to each other. What we are and do. My blood. What I am and can’t escape.”

“Your past?” She stared at him blankly. “Your blood? You—Marith, it’s an old story. About someone who lived and died hundreds of years ago.”

“About my family. About me.”

“Marith.” She stood up, came over to him, she was dressed in green, she looked like forest pools, she looked like light and shadows on a green tree. “Marith, the Asekemlene Emperor of Sorlost is reborn anew each lifetime, the son of a wineseller or a farmer or a crippled beggar or a, Great Tanis, I don’t know, a street whore. It doesn’t matter whose child he is, a great lord’s, a murderer’s, a mad idiot. He is the Emperor, and he is what he is. I don’t know who my parents were. No one can know.”

“Stop it,” Marith said.

Thalia picked up the book. Opened it. Flicked through it.

“I remember,” she said, “the day I chose my lot. I put my hand into a box and picked up a wooden token. I let it go. Picked up another. Drew it out. If I had not put the first lot back again, I would, I don’t know, I would be a lowly Temple priestess like Ausa or Helase. Or, more likely, I would be fifteen years dead. Another girl drew her lot ten days after I did. She is fifteen years dead.”

She tore a handful of pages out of the book. “In a story I once read, a kitchen girl swaps her own fatherless baby with the king’s son, her child grows up to be king. If you found out tomorrow that your father was not your father, that you had no … no Altrersyr demon blood …”

She dropped the pages into the fire. “It would change nothing that has happened. Would it? Nothing about you. About any of this. There. It’s gone.”

The flames leapt up. Licked the parchment. It crumbled away. The fire was bright but the room was darker. Marith cowered away from the flames.

“Come here,” she said. “Please.” Held out her arms to him. Saleiot. So bright with life.

They went over to the bed. The sheets smelled of rotting wounds.

She is betraying you.

I thought you needed to know.

Marith thought: I shouldn’t have come here. I hate this place.