He discovered it was too dark to go on working when he couldn't read the documents he was sorting through anymore. He looked up toward the skylights and discovered no light to speak of was coming through them. As though a spell were wearing off, he realized he was hungry and thirsty and desperately needed to ease himself.

He almost tripped three or four times going to the door. Yes, walking around in the dark will do that, he told himself, feeling foolish. He made it out with a sigh of relief, and hurried to the nearest garderobe with another. Feeling better, he walked back to the royal quarters.

Sosia was already eating supper. The servants scrambled to get some for Lanius. "Why didn't you wait?" he asked. "Why didn't someone call me?"

She set down the lamb shank she'd been gnawing. "You are joking, aren't you?" she said. "You know it's worth anyone's life to try to pry you out of the archives. If you hadn't come out until tomorrow night, we would have started worrying."

Lanius laughed. Then he realized she'd meant it. He wanted to laugh again, this time at himself. Somehow, though, he knew his wife would not find it funny. In a small voice, he asked, "Am I really as bad as that?"

"Maybe not quite," Sosia answered. "Maybe we would have started worrying tomorrow afternoon."

This time, Lanius choked off the laugh before it passed his lips. He waited for the servants to bring him a lamb shank and buttered parsnips and bread of his own.

Sosia toyed with a piece of honey cake topped with chopped walnuts so she could stay at the table while he ate. She asked, "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"No," Lanius said around a mouthful of parsnips. "I found the documents from what I think is the right time, but I haven't come across any that talk about a pestilence. Maybe I haven't uncovered them yet, or maybe I need to be looking earlier or later."

"Maybe you should try the temple archives," Sosia said. "When people take sick, they ask priests to pray for them. They think they have a better chance with priests than with doctors or wizards, and a lot of the time they're right."

Lanius got up, hurried around the table, and kissed her. The honey swirled through the cake made her lips sticky and sweet. Right then, he would have kissed her if she'd been gnawing cloves of garlic. "The very thing!" he exclaimed. "I'll do it first thing in the morning. I wish old Ixoreus were still alive. He would know exactly where to look." But the ancient archivist had died several years earlier. His successor wasn't fit to stand in his shadow. Lanius would have to do his own searching. Maybe he would come up with something, though.

Sosia smiled at him. "Some wives get kissed for telling their husbands what big, strong, handsome fellows they are. I get kissed for telling you which dusty old papers to go burrowing through."

"Are you complaining?" Lanius asked.

"Oh, no," she answered quickly. She might have reflected that, if he wasn't kissing her for whatever reason, he was all too likely to be kissing a serving girl instead.

After Lanius finished his supper, they went back to the bedchamber together. Maybe he was still in a good mood because of her suggestion. Maybe the extra cup or two of wine he'd drunk had something to do with things, too. Whatever the reason, their lovemaking had none of the wariness, none of the tension, it had often seen of late – when they'd been making love with each other at all.

She did him an uncommonly large favor at the end, though he never knew it. She didn't say anything like, Why can't it be like this all the time? She let him go to sleep with a smile on his face, and she went to sleep with one on hers, too.

Accompanied by royal guardsmen, the king walked over to the great cathedral the next morning. The guards weren't likely to do him much good with what really worried him – if the plague came to the city of Avornis, chainmail and spears and swords wouldn't hold it away. When Lanius went inside, he found Anser not far from the altar. He didn't think Anser had been praying. He thought Grus' bastard son had been playing a little catch with a green-robed priest. The young cleric hastily tucked away what Lanius was almost sure was a ball.

"Hello, Your Majesty," Anser said cheerfully. Whatever he'd been doing, it didn't embarrass him. "Always good to see you. Do you need me for something, or are you going to dive into the archives?"

He knows me, too, Lanius thought with a certain wry amusement. "It's the archives, I'm afraid, unless you're up on what was going on south of the Stura four hundred years ago."

"That's when we lost the Scepter of Mercy, isn't it?" Anser said.

Lanius nodded. He wouldn't have expected the arch-hallow to know even so much. "It is," he said, and hoped he didn't sound too surprised. "I'm trying to find out if there were any plagues around that time."

"Oh," Anser said, and nodded. Word of the outbreak among the thralls hadn't spread widely, but it had gotten to him.

The ecclesiastical archives resided in a series of descending subbasements under the great cathedral. Most of the time, the papers and parchments dwelt in darkness. When someone went down to search among them, he took a lamp with him and lit torches that waited for fire.

Torchlight was even less satisfactory to read by than the dusty sunlight that illuminated the royal archives. Lanius wondered how anyone ever found anything here, though he'd done it himself. To be fair, these archives were better organized than the ones in the palace, which, as far as the king could see, weren't organized at all. The king suspected that was the late Ixoreus' doing. The royal archives hadn't had such a conscientious keeper for centuries, if ever.

Here were records of prayers for the salvation of the kingdom, prayers for the safe return of the Scepter of Mercy, prayers for… Lanius bent closer and began to read more attentively. He started scribbling notes.

"Something, Your Majesty?" a guard asked. The soldiers had insisted on accompanying him down into the quiet dark, though he wasn't likely to be assailed by anything more ferocious than a termite here.

"Something, yes," Lanius answered abstractedly. He scribbled faster. If he bent too low over the manuscript, his shadow kept him from reading it. If he didn't, he had a hard time making sense of the faded, old-fashioned script.

In the end, he got what he wanted, or hoped he did. When he stood up and stretched, the guard said, "Up now?" He sounded eager, and explained why. "Feels… peculiar down here with all the dark pressing on you."

"Really?" Lanius shrugged. "It doesn't bother me. I didn't even notice, in fact."

"Lucky you," the guard said with a shudder.

"Maybe so," the king replied. "Yes, maybe so."

As the pestilence spread in Cumanus, Grus wondered more and more whether coming to the town by the Stura had been a good idea. He shook his head. That wasn't true – or rather, that wasn't half of what he wondered these days. He wondered exactly how big an idiot he'd been.

Fleeing back to the city of Avornis wouldn't help him, either. By now, the disease was established to the north of him. He wasn't sure it had gotten back to the capital, but he knew it was loose in some of the towns through which he would have to go. And so he stayed in Cumanus, and so he worried.

He stayed healthy. So did Pterocles. If the wizard escaped the disease, it was either good luck or a strong constitution, for he immersed himself in learning all he could about it. That meant studying people who came down with it, trying to cure them, touching them, poking them, prodding them – doing everything he could to catch it except petitioning the Banished One.

Pterocles worked closely with the handful of wizards and witches in Cumanus. A couple of them caught the disease. A witch promptly died. Her body went on an enormous pyre with those of others who'd perished of the pestilence. The yellow-robed high hallow asked Grus to thrust a torch into the pyre. Since the high-ranking priest was there to pray for those who had died, the king didn't see how he could refuse.