The king hardly seemed aware of Oterness. His eyes were focused on the floor at her feet, as if he was unable to meet hers. She threw off her blanket, panicked by his behaviour, and forced herself upright. Emin flinched and shied away when Oterness reached out to take his hand. When she wrapped her fingers about his, she realised he was bone-cold, and trembling.

'I have… I have-' The king's words were awkward and jagged, quite unlike his usual mode of speech, and the effort of saying those four words appeared to have exhausted him.

'Emin, come and sit by the fire,' Oterness said, pulling him towards the armchair. 'You're chilled to the marrow.'

Emin didn't sit, but clasped her fingers tightly within his own and stared into the flames for a few moments, until a sudden shiver ran through his body.

'You're frightening me now, whatever has happened? There have been some awful rumours flying round the city-'

'They're true,' he interjected sharply, 'they're all true.' With a sigh Emin sank down to his knees before the fire, letting his wife's hand slip from his grasp.

'All of them?' Oterness gasped. 'Scree is gone? The Gods destroyed the entire city in punishment? Opess Antern told me every priest in Narkang has been acting strangely, and even the moderates are preaching that a time of punishment has come.'

'The Gods took no hand in the fall of Scree,' Emin whispered in a soft, tentative voice, as though he could hardly believe what he was saying. 'They came too late to help anyone; too late to punish anyone – but that didn't stop their vengeance.'

He took a deep breath, as if summoning his strength to speak of the terrible events. 'The day after the firestorm that destroyed Scree, we spent the day recovering from the fighting and tending to the wounded. The people had gone mad; almost the whole population had become blood-crazed monsters. It was like Thistledell all over again – that village where the survivors destroyed all trace of the village's existence? – but on a city-wide scale.'

He ignored her gasp of horror and went on. 'The next day, Lord Isak led his troops to a new encampment north of the city, abandoning his Devoted allies of the previous night. They had defended the Temple District from the mobs; a foolish last stand, and they only survived when he summoned the Gods to their aid. Somehow that boy invoked the Reapers, and their cruel claws were indiscriminate in their slaughter.

'Afterwards, Isak refused even to meet envoys from the surviving Devoted troops. They had lost all their high-ranking officers; the man in charge, Ortof-Greyl, I think he was called, was a major, their only surviving commander. He wasn't up to the task – he was like a boy alone on his father's boat and lost at sea. I think he kept expecting the Farlan to send him orders, but they never came. We sat there for a whole day, in rain that didn't stop until well into the night, doing nothing, saying nothing. No one bothered to set watches, or pray, or even to cook.'

Emin raised his hand to his face and pressed his long fingers to his temple, as though trying to force out whatever was in his memory. Oterness lowered herself gingerly to kneel down beside him and pulled his hands away, holding them in her own.

'Go on,' she said gently, knowing he had to finish the story.

'The following dawn I was awakened by a headache pounding away at my skull, as if Coran himself had taken his mace to it. The major felt it as well; he and the lower-ranking Devoted officers were all affected. The healers were all occupied with the badly injured, and my mages were insensate after their efforts to get us out of the city. It hurt as badly as any wound I've ever had – but it was only when one of the Devoted chaplains had something burst in his brain that we realised-'

'What was is?' Oterness breathed in horror.

'Apoplexy,' Emin said, clutching his head again, 'a rage beyond anything I'd ever felt before, a hatred filling me up and consuming me.' He looked up, a pleading in his eyes that his wife had never before seen in two decades of marriage. 'It built up throughout the day, and- Oh Gods!' He stopped for a moment, and then continued, the words bitter in his mouth, 'My men didn't stop me. They couldn't stop me.'

'Stop you doing what?'

'The refugees,' he whispered, 'there were thousands who'd not been affected by the madness, camped on the other side of the city. They had only a handful of city militiamen to protect them. Devoted officers are all ordained priests, it's a requirement of their Order, and – fool that I am -I am too. We felt the rage of the Gods running through our veins and we couldn't control it. We didn't even hesitate.'

'Oh Emin, what did you do?' Oterness couldn't hide the horror in her voice even as she drew her husband closer and he sank, sobbing, into her arms.

'We killed them! We killed them all. We felt the Gods walk beside us, the Reapers and more besides, all burning with anger I cannot begin to describe. The refugees were innocents; the militiamen just frightened fools, decent men who would not abandon the defenceless to Fate's cruelties. We left none alive. I can still hear the screams – every night I hear them, and I smell their blood upon me.

'We left the dead for the scavengers and just walked away. I… I don't remember much of the following days. The land around Scree was as dead as the city. We watched the smoke rising from the last of the fires as we walked to the Temple of Death where Lord Isak had made his stand, but the stink drove us away. The whole Temple Plaza was full of corpses, most as unarmed and pathetic as those we'd killed the day before. And, Gods help me, I prayed with the Devoted officers amidst the carnage, and I felt holy – vindicated, even. I didn't see the horror of what had been done; only satisfaction that the first step had been taken.'

'First step?' she asked, trying to hide her fear.

'The first step towards a purer Land.' There was pain in his voice now, and he hugged his royal bride tighter, like a frightened child. 'All these years I've fought the fanatics, and now I find myself the worst among them.'

'That's not true,' Oterness insisted, 'you are not the same as them; you're no coward who interprets holy words according to his own prejudice; who twists the scriptures to use them as tools they were never intended to be. The king of this nation is not such a man. The father of my child is not such a man.'

'My child,' Emin gasped, a flicker of life returning to his eyes as he struggled to straighten himself up. 'How is our child? Are you both well?'

Oterness hugged him. 'We're both well, Emin, we're strong and healthy.'

He stroked a reverential hand over her belly, his eyes widening in wonder as he realised how large she'd grown. 'Oh my child, what is this new Land you will be born into?' he asked, his voice shaking.

'A Land yet to be determined,' Oterness answered gently, 'a Land that you have fought twenty years to forge, Emin, and one you cannot give up on now. I know you, better than those who work in your shadow, even Morghien. You've worked for years to contain these fanatics, and these new reports of priests demanding greater measures are just an escalation of that age-old problem. Your agents are still at work; your networks remain in place. Only yesterday Count Antern brought a letter from one of your spies, sealed with green wax.'

'Green wax?' He sat up a bit straighter. Usual matters of state were sealed with red wax, matters of national security used white, and he encouraged his queen to read both, even in his absence -there might have been other women with lineage equal to that of the former Lady Oterness Bekashay, but her intellect was far beyond that of any of the other potential wives, and her help in governing his kingdom remained invaluable. But the green wax was different; it denoted messages concerned with his war with Azaer, the shadow, and that matter he was determined to spare her.