Adica had a serious face but such a pleasant expression that the words she said next shocked Liath, so agreeably were they spoken. “Yet if she threatens you and your people, then you must do whatever it takes to stop her. Can’t you kill her?”

“Even if I had the power, I just can’t,” she whispered, “It would be unnatural.”

As Anne reached the steps leading to the lower dais, her four companions stepped aside. Only the skopos could set foot on the ivory steps leading to the Holy Mother’s seat. When she set her foot on the highest step, she turned to look back over the crowd. Liath saw clearly the resemblance in her stern features to that of her grandfather’s death mask, rendered in stone in the chapel at Autun. None could mistake her who had seen Taillefer’s recumbent statue. Here, in flesh, stood his missing heir, child of the son born and raised in secrecy to spare the infant boy a potentially fatal contest for the imperial throne.

With Anne as skopos, sovereign over the holy church, who would truly be more powerful? Henry, or Anne?

“Is killing unnatural when we hunt deer to feed ourselves? Is killing unnatural when we seek to protect our children from that which would harm them? Is killing unnatural when we fight off our enemies who wish to burn our villages and enslave us?”

“That’s not what I meant.” The hall had fallen into such a profound silence, waiting for Anne to take her seat, that Liath had a crazy notion that she had gone deaf. But her voice still worked. “She is my mother.”

“Your mother? But you have a heart of fire.”

Adica touched Liath over her heart and closed her eyes. Lips pursed, expression intent, she swayed her head from side to side as though seeking, listening. Her eyes popped open, but her irises had rolled back in her head, leaving only the whites visible. A thin line of drool dribbled down her chin.

She spoke in a hoarse whisper not at all like the easy tone she had used before, as though her inner sight had made a voice for itself out of smoke and ash. “Child of Flame, look inside yourself. She is not your mother.”

The ring on Liath’s hand flared with a blinding blue light. Cold stung her finger, shooting up her arm until it stabbed into her heart.

She screamed.

She heard their booming voices, far away, calling her “child.”

She knew it for truth, because truth hurts far more than a lie.

“Did Alain send you, to protect me?” she cried when she could speak again. “To guide me?” She understood the trap of Mok now, the obstacle laid before her: the trap of false obligation. She had believed blindly, without trusting in her own judgment and wisdom and instinct. “If I am not the heir of Taillefer, then I am free of his shadow and of his burden. I am free to act as I must.”

She pulled off the ring and thrust it into Adica’s hands. “I pray you, Sister, keep this for him in return for the help he gave me. Let it protect him, when he is in danger, as he has protected me. If he ever needs me, I will come to him.”

“Where are you going?”

Liath let her wings of flame flower into life, but she was sorry to see the other woman step back in awe. “To the sphere of Aturna, the Red Mage, who rules with wisdom’s scepter. To find my mother.”

Without the ring to bind her to Mok’s realm, Liath rose easily on a draft of wind cloudy with incense as, below her, Anne took her seat in the throne of the Holy Mother and grasped the jeweled scepter wielded by the skopos of the church of the Unities.

3

SILENCE and stillness startled Alain awake. He was lying in the dirt with Adica’s weight pinning his left arm to the ground and Sorrow licking his ear. Jagged pebbles stung his rump. He groaned, shifting to pull out from under Adica, and sat up, rubbing his hand. It hurt to touch it, still, but once he chafed the prickling needles out of it, he could close it into a firm fist. The snake’s poison had neither killed nor crippled him, but he still had that faint ringing in his ears.

Dust motes floated in a shaft of daylight that cut through a cave’s mouth. His staff, their empty provision sacks, and Adica’s pack with her holy regalia all sat on the earth nearby. Rage whined in the dim recesses of the cave, scratching at the rock face that closed off the back. Laoina, with her spear, was poking at the rock wall as though to flush out snakes. Adica slept, hands clenched. Sorrow sniffed Adica’s ear, then flopped down beside the Hallowed One and rested his huge black head on his forelegs. Doleful eyes regarded him. He rubbed Sorrow’s head with his knuckles, and he grunted contentedly. Rage yipped, padding over to get a pat as well.

“Where are we?” Alain asked, picking up his staff. He tested the height of the cave’s opening and measured the tumbled boulders. They could climb out, but it would be difficult to hoist the hounds out.