Her eyes narrowed at this, and he wondered what she read on his face. whatever it was, her nostrils flared and her eyes went wide when the gravity of his demeanor took hold of her. She looked to her people and Neb did the same. They looked away from him, shifting uncomfortably in the silence. There was a note of panic in her voice that surprised him, as if she anticipated dark tidings. “What’s happened, Nebios?”
He moved into the room and opened one of the many doors leading into the private bedchambers of the servants’ suite. He held the door for her as she entered. Then he pulled it shut behind them, standing close to her but uncertain of how to speak and how to be.
He opened his mouth, closed it again. And suddenly, knowing it was just the two of them, he lost control of the sob in his throat and the tears in his eyes for just a moment, but it was enough. He saw her lower lip trembling.
She knows something has happened. Tell her. He willed himself to find the words, and when he did, they tumbled out like drunks from a closing tavern. “We’ve been attacked,” he said. “Men under some kind of magicks-blood magick, I think-penetrated the forest, outran the watch birds and killed the crown Prince of Turam at the banquet table.” He choked here, hating himself for not being able to keep his own emotions in check, hating himself for bringing news to her that he knew would bring suffering. “They’ve killed Hanric, too.”
For a moment, Winters looked like a cornered fawn. Her eyes went wild as she looked to and fro; then the air whistled out of her. Neb reached out to her, but she pushed him away and sat heavily on the floor.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat with her. Once again, he tried to draw close, but she resisted and he realized she was whispering words that quickly ran together, words that sounded like glossolalia they had shared before.
But as he listened, the words took shape, and Neb realized she was speaking of a wind of cleansing blood, an iron blade that pruned. And as she spoke, she held herself, rocking back and forth, her eyes narrow and flitting about the room.
After minutes that felt much longer, he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She looked up, her eyes wet and red. There were tracks of white, clean skin where the tears had washed the dirt from her cheeks. When their eyes met, her lower lip quivered again and she let him pull her into his arms. They huddled on the floor and held each other, Neb finally surrendering to the grief that washed them both.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said after a dozen minutes had passed. She disentangled herself from him and leaned back against the wall, looking to the door. “I need to tell my people.”
Neb moved over to sit next to her. “I think you should talk with Rudolfo first.”
She sniffed and nodded. Neb watched her, realizing how little he knew this girl. The dreams were. What were they? They certainly bared their unconscious hopes and fears to one another there, mingled with metaphysics that Neb himself could only embrace at this point without fully understanding. “Earlier, before the alarm sounded, I had a visitation.”
He blinked. “A vision?”
She shook her head. “No, just words. and a sense of foreboding.” Her brow furrowed as she pulled down the memory. “A wind of blood to cleanse,” she said. “And cold iron to prune.”
Until recently, he’d had no reference point for the glossolalia and prophecy that were a part of the Marsh Queen’s daily life. Those concepts were utterly foreign to him. The Androfrancines who had taught him in their orphan school applied reason and science to myth and mysticism. The idea of writing it down and looking to it for some sense of tomorrow seemed completely irrational to him until he experienced it himself.
Xhum Y’Zir’s Age of Laughing Madness had touched him there in the shadow of Windwir’s pyre just over a year before, opening a door inside of him that he wasn’t sure could ever be closed. From the moment of that first hot wind, he’d been unable to form coherent sentences, instead spewing jumbled bits of P’Andro Whym’s Gospels blended with ecstatic utterances and flashing images that words could not contain. It had passed after a short time, but it had changed something inside of him, something as stark as the brown hair now bleached bone-white by the events of that late morning. Later, his dead father had appeared in his dreams, and so had the Marsh girl, Winters, though he didn’t know it until after they met in the Marsher war camp. Since meeting her, he’d lived on the edge of something he had no skill to comprehend. They are connected, this attack and her visitation. Rudolfo would need to know about this.
Thinking of his waiting general, Neb suddenly blushed. He reached a hand up and brushed the tangled strands of her dirty hair out of her face. Her eyes and nose were red now. He cleared his voice. “I think we should go,” he said. “Lord Rudolfo is waiting to speak you about this.”
She looked at Neb. “Does he know that you know about me?”
Neb shrugged. “I’ve never spoken of it.” Then, as an afterthought: “He’s never asked.” But of course he knew. He had to know. Why else had he sent Neb for her specifically?
She nodded, then slowly pushed her way up to her feet. Neb stood, too, and turned toward the door.
Her hand caught his own. “Thank you for being the one to bear me this message,” she said in a quiet voice.
“I felt I must,” he said.
Their eyes met for a moment; then he watched her look away and compose herself to face her people. “I will speak to my people first,” she said. “I will not speak to Rudolfo until those who loved and served Hanric know of his fall.”
Neb nodded. Then he opened the door and watched her square her shoulders and set her jaw against the task ahead.
A wind of blood to cleanse; cold iron to prune. Neb shuddered, and her premonition took him. It was a woeful feeling that reached beyond the loss of Hanric into the very heart of the Marshfolk. Something dark and brewing, he thought. And the sorrow on Winters’s face betrayed something within her.
She knows, Neb realized.
This woe now was but the first of more to come.
Jin Li Tam
The sky over the Desolation of Windwir was a slate of smeared red, and Jin Li Tam could not tell if it was sunrise or sunset that made it so. The horizons to her east and west gave no clue to the time of day, and the sun was nowhere to be seen. Hazy light washed the forest of bones in blood and turned the placid surface of the nearby Second River black. Tendrils of pink mist crawled the ground, swept in eddies by a cold wind that moved freely among the skeletons, raising a low hum. She shivered from both the chill and the sight of Xhum Y’Zir’s handiwork. Her breath caught in her throat, and she found herself wondering if being here was safe for her baby.
In that moment, Jin Li Tam rested her hand upon her swollen stomach, willing her son to kick, to show some sign of life.
This isn’t right, she realized. They’d buried the dead here, Neb and Petronus, while the war raged on around them. There was no field of bones. The gravediggers had seen to it, she was certain. Who has undone their work?
She heard a distant sound over her shoulder and turned to the northeast. Faintly, she heard the clamor of Third Alarm in the direction of the Ninefold Forest, hundreds of leagues distant, past thick forest, rugged hills and the expansive Prairie Sea that surrounded the Gypsy King’s scattered forest islands. Dark clouds hung ominous and impenetrable in that direction.
I’m needed at home, she thought. But the forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam was uncertain how she’d come to be here in the first place, and now her very feet resisted her efforts to move them homeward. The air grew colder around her, and she realized she was wearing the thin green silk riding skirt and blouse she’d worn that night so long ago when Rudolfo had danced with her in Sethbert’s banquet tent.