These days, couriers came south to Cumanus only reluctantly. King Grus had trouble blaming them. He offered extra pay to the men who did ride into danger. Some remained reluctant. Grus forced no one to this duty, and punished no one who refused it. The couriers who would not undertake it could still serve Avornis in other ways, ways less dangerous to them.

One of the riders who did brave the journey brought Grus a letter from Lanius. The older king wondered what the younger had to say. Only one way to find out – he broke the seal on the letter. Sometimes chatty court gossip filled Lanius' letters. Sometimes it was the doings of the animal trainer the other king had hired. And sometimes Lanius would go on about things he'd fished out of the archives. Those letters could be interesting or anything but.

This was one of those letters. Grus saw as much at a glance. He went through it, thankful that Lanius wrote in a large, round hand. The other king was considerate enough to remember that he needed to read things from farther away than he had when he was younger.

By the time Grus got through the first half of the parchment, his face bore a thoughtful frown. He sent a servant to bring Pterocles to his room in the city governor's palace. When the wizard got there, his face wore a frown, too – an unhappy one. "You interrupted a spell, Your Majesty," he said irritably.

"I'm sorry," Grus said, "but I'm not very sorry, if you know what I mean. Here. Tell me what you make of this." He held out the letter he'd just gotten from Lanius.

Pterocles took it with poor grace. He was about Lanius' age himself – maybe even younger – and had no trouble reading it at the normal distance. He hadn't gone far before the frown disappeared from his face. A little later, one of his eyebrows rose. He raced through the rest of the letter. "I suppose, up in the heavens, Olor's beard collects all kinds of crumbs and scraps," he said.

Grus gave him a quizzical look. "I'm sure you're going somewhere with that, but I can't for the life of me imagine where."

"I am, Your Majesty," Pterocles assured him. "The god can't even comb out what gets stuck in there, because things that touch him turn holy themselves. And so nothing ever gets thrown away or discarded. If it's in his beard, it's in there for good."

"Queen Quelea has even more mercy than I thought," Grus said.

Pterocles ignored that sally. "Our archives are just like Olor's beard," he said. "If something gets in there, it's in there for good. And every once in a while we can fish something out, dust it off, and maybe – just maybe – use it again."

"This does sound like the same illness to you, then?" Grus said. "It did to me. Maybe the Banished One got lazy."

Pterocles stared, blinked, and started to laugh. "I can just imagine him going through his keep down there in the mountains. 'Mm,' he'd say. T had pretty good luck with this plague a few hundred years ago. They won't remember it, those miserable mayfly mortals. Why don't I haul it out again and see how they like it?' "

Grus laughed, too, in tones somewhere between admiration and horror. Pterocles had caught the Banished One's way of thinking almost blasphemously well. The exiled god often mocked men for their short lives when he came to them in dreams. He might well believe a disease not seen for centuries was forgotten. And so it would have been, but for Lanius.

"I didn't read the whole letter," the king said. "What did they do about the pestilence, all those years ago? What could they do about it? Anything? Or do we know what's biting us without being able to bite back?"

"He's passed on the spell the wizards were using then," Pterocles answered. "Whoever thought of it had nerve. It uses the law of similarity in a way I wouldn't try unless I was desperate." His laugh was grim. "Of course, if I watched people dying all around me, I expect I'd get desperate pretty fast."

"Can you use it? Can other wizards use it? Will it work again?" Grus asked.

"I can use it. So can others. It's not hard to cast – I can see that at a glance," Pterocles said. "It's not hard to cast like that, anyway. You don't have to be a senior sorcerer to be able to get the incantation right. But it's going to be wearing on the wizards who use it. And you don't want to make a mistake about which direction the spell runs in. You'd be very unhappy if you did, and so would your patients." He explained what he meant, and showed Grus the end of the letter to give him more detail.

The king read that part. He had no sorcerous talent to speak of, and no sorcerous knowledge, either, except the bits and pieces he'd picked up from talking with Pterocles and other wizards and witches over the years. He wasn't sure he would understand, but he had no trouble at all. The problem was nothing if not obvious.

"Well," he said, "you don't want to do that, do you?"

"Now that you mention it," Pterocles said, "no."

If the plague came to the city of Avornis, Lanius realized he was one of the people likeliest to catch it. Couriers seemed intimately involved in spreading it, and couriers from infected parts of the kingdom kept bringing word of its progress up to the capital. And to whom were they bringing that word? Why, to him. He was the king, the man who most needed to know what was going on elsewhere in Avornis.

That meant other people in the palace were also among the likeliest to come down sick. And it meant – or might mean – he'd been wrong about what he told Sosia. Maybe getting Crex and Pitta away from the city for a while was a good idea after all. He waited for Pterocles' letter. When it came back from the south, it said, Getting them away from the capital will not hurt, and may do some good. Lanius wished the wizard would have said something stronger than that, but it was plenty to persuade him – and Sosia, too.

He wondered if he'd made a mistake waiting for Pterocles' response. If the children had gotten out of the city sooner.. Three days after Crex and Pitta left the palace, Sosia came up to him with a worried look on her face. "Mother's not feeling well," she said.

"What's wrong?" Lanius hoped dread didn't clog his throat too much. People had any number of ways of falling sick. Queen Estrilda wasn't a young woman. If she didn't feel well, that didn't necessarily mean anything. So he told himself, grasping at straws like a harness maker or a farmer. In some ways, all men were very much alike.

"She has a fever," Sosia answered. "She says the light hurts her eyes, and she has some… some bumps on her face."

"Bumps," Lanius echoed tonelessly. His wife nodded. He knew – and Sosia obviously did, too – the pestilence showed itself with fever and with blisters. Not quite apropos of nothing, he said, "I wish Pterocles weren't down in the south."

"I said that before," Sosia replied – a handful of words with a world of worry in them.

Lanius had been so proud of himself when he sent Grus his letter along with Sosia's. He'd uncovered what might be a cure for the plague, and wasn't that wonderful? Wasn't he wonderful for being so clever?

Now he would have to test that cure, if it was a cure, on someone who mattered to him very much – -and who mattered even more to his wife, and to the other king, and possibly even to his brother-in-law. He sighed and said, "I'd better send for Aedon." Aedon was the leading wizard in the city of Avornis after Pterocles – a long way after Pterocles, unfortunately.

A servant went hotfooting it out of the palace to bring him back. He came within the hour. He was closer to Grus' age than to Lanius' – a stately man with a neat gray beard and with the pink skin and mild smile of a kindly grandfather. "How may I serve you, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"The plague is in the city," Lanius said bluntly. "You will have heard of it?"

"Yes," Aedon admitted. "But how do you know this to be the case?"