“Yes.” I shifted on the stool, my chains rattling. “It is a Hellene word for excessive pride that leads to folly. Cillian taught it to me.”

“Cillian…” He glanced at his notes again. I suspected it was just for show, and that he had my entire history memorized. Not for the first time, I cursed the fact that gossip was the life-blood of Terre d’Ange, and precious little I had done in my life was hidden from common knowledge. “Cillian mac Tiernan, son of the Lord of the Dalriada. That’s a good place to begin your confession. He is the first man you ensorceled, is he not?”

“I didn’t ensorcel him. He was my friend.”

“It says here-”

“I don’t care what it says!” I sighed. “How did you find me, anyway? The Tatar lands are a long way from Terre d’Ange.”

“Indeed.” The Patriarch nodded gravely. “I received these reports only last autumn, for they were many months on the road. It was in my thoughts to petition the Duke of Vralsturm to fund an expedition to Terre d’Ange in the spring to seek you out. Instead…” A look of awe settled over his features. “Before winter fell, traders from the east brought rumors of war in Ch’in, and a jade-eyed foreign witch who served the Emperor. I did not think there could be two such in the world. So I had these chains forged over the course of the winter, and come spring, I sent Brother Ilya and Brother Leonid eastward to investigate.”

“Yes, I know,” I said bitterly.

“Do you not see that it is a sign from God that they found you so swiftly, so near to this place?” he asked with the inexorable logic of his faith. “You were already on a path toward salvation, Moirin. You just didn’t know it.”

My palms were sweating, and I rubbed them against the prickly woolen fabric of my dress. “Are you so certain you know your God’s will? Mayhap I was sent here for some other purpose.”

“No.” The Patriarch shook his head. “You were not. I am not immune to doubt, but in this, I am certain. There have been other signs that the days of conflict that will accompany Yeshua’s return are nigh. I have sensed it ever since the King of Terre d’Ange had the temerity to raise a whore, an unrepentant whore, to the royal throne.”

I flushed.

He ruffled his notes. “Yes, you knew her intimately, did you not? Take heed from her fate, Moirin mac Fainche, lest God strike you down, too.”

A jolt of unexpected horror ran through me, and I found myself staring at him. “What fate?” I raised my voice. “What fate?”

“You didn’t know.” It was a statement, not a question. The Patriarch of Riva met my gaze without flinching. He didn’t smile, not exactly, but his lips curled and his face took on a satisfied expression I would come to think of as his creamy look, the one that meant he was reveling in the pain he was about to inflict upon me for my own good.

It came and went in the flicker of an eye, but it was there, and already I dreaded the words that would follow it.

He spoke them. “The D’Angeline whore-queen Jehanne de la Courcel died in childbirth over a year ago.”

It hit me like a fist to the belly. I wasn’t aware of toppling from the stool, wasn’t aware of falling. Only that there was cold stone pressed against my cheek, and I couldn’t breathe. I lay curled around my misery and shoved my manacled hands against my stomach, gasping for air, my body punishing itself.

Jehanne! Ah, gods.

All this time.

No.

I wanted to weep, and couldn’t. The grief was too vast, too unanticipated. Not Jehanne, my unlikely rescuer, my mercurial Queen. I dragged a ragged gulp of air into my lungs, expelling it with a low keening sound.

I wanted to believe it was a lie.

I knew it wasn’t.

Chair legs scraped. “You are upset,” Pyotr Rostov said with regret from somewhere above me. “Forgive me, I should have realized it had been a very long time since you had news from your homeland, Moirin. I will leave you to your grief, and we will resume on the morrow.”

He left.

TWENTY-THREE

The days that followed were a blur.

I refused to eat, refused to talk, turning my face to the wall of my cell. There was no thought or strategy behind it, only the profound, endless ache of grief.

Jehanne. My lady Jehanne.

All this time… ah, gods! She had been frightened, so frightened. Frightened of impending motherhood, frightened of childbirth. And I had left her anyway, obeying the call of my bedamned destiny.

If I had stayed, I could have saved her. Raphael de Mereliot and I could have saved her.

It was a thought that haunted me, circling back upon me no matter how hard I sought to avoid it. We had done it before, Raphael and I. Together, with my magic channeling his gift for healing, we had saved a young mother bleeding excessively during the act of giving birth.

I wondered if he had been there at the end.

I suspected he had.

King Daniel would have sent for him. It was true, even without my aid Raphael was a skilled physician. In their own ways, they had both loved her, and Jehanne had loved them, too.

And me.

I tortured myself with imagining it. Jehanne, weakening, her exquisite face drained of blood. Raphael, rubbing his healer’s hands together to generate warmth, laying them on her, trying in vain to staunch the bleeding. King Daniel hovering over the tableau in anguish, all his solemn poise undone.

And all the while, a thing unsaid lying between them.

If Moirin were here…

Folk came and went. The Patriarch tried to coax me into talking. Valentina and Luba took turns trying to coax me into eating, putting spoonfuls of hot broth to my lips. I ignored them, keeping my mouth stubbornly closed. For a mercy, no one tried to force me.

I ached at the unfairness of it. Even if I’d known what would happen, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise. How many more would have died in the war in Ch’in if I hadn’t been able to help free the dragon? Thousands, likely.

Or mayhap there would have been no war; mayhap Emperor Zhu would have surrendered, believing he had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Master Lo and Bao would have failed in their mission. My lovely princess Snow Tiger would have been put to death, and the dragon’s splendid spirit would have died with her, ceasing to exist forevermore.

Black Sleeve and Lord Jiang would have been free to loose the dreadful weapons of the Divine Thunder on the world, and the world would have become a far more terrible place. I couldn’t weigh Jehanne’s life against such a fate.

But oh, gods! It hurt.

If it hadn’t been for Aleksei, I don’t know how long I would have kept my fast. It wasn’t that I sought death, at least not consciously. But I hadn’t much will to live, either. Everything I loved had been taken from me. This last blow was simply more than I could bear.

Every day, Aleksei came and read to me from the Yeshuite scriptures, beginning with the tale of the world’s creation, and Edom the First Man and his wife, the All-Mother, Yeva. At first I ignored him, too, sitting huddled on the hard stone floor of my cell with my manacled arms wrapped around my knees and my face turned toward the wall.

He persisted, hunkering on the wooden stool that he might be closer to my level, reading in a pleasant, melodious voice.

I could ignore him, and I could let the words he spoke wash over me, but I couldn’t ignore the presence of Naamah’s gift in the room between us. Every time his voice faltered, I felt it.

In those brief moments of silence, I felt his gaze on me.

And I felt Naamah’s gift respond within me. It was not desire on my part, not even close. My grief ran too deep. I hadn’t even begun to cope with the shock and pain of being torn away from Bao’s side so unexpectedly, so soon after being reunited with my stubborn peasant-boy and the missing half of my soul, before being struck with the news of Jehanne’s death.