Paths had been cleared through the bodies, and they followed them mutely. It wasn’t long before Feir saw a human arm amid the krul, then a leg that appeared to have be half eaten. The bodies were piled knee-deep on either side of them. Then they began passing krul who’d been killed by magic. There were great craters in the battlefield empty of all but pulverized scraps of meat. Others had been burned or cut in half or shocked. Some had torn their faces to ribbons with their own claws.

The krul began to vary, too. Pure white krul with spiraling rams’ horns led every unit of twelve, and larger ones seven feet tall appeared more rarely still. They walked past an entire platoon of four-legged feline krul the size of horses, with jet-black skin, sparse hair like a rat’s tail, and exaggerated maws like a wolf. Rarer still were those like bears, easily twelve feet tall and with thick fur the color of new blood. As they trekked through the vast battlefield, it seemed every natural animal had found a dark mockery here. Bats, ravens, eagles, fanged horses, horned horses, even dark, red-eyed elephants carrying archers lay in ignominious death.

“The monsters,” Antoninus said quietly. “Was nothing holy to them?”

Feir followed Antoninus’s gaze and saw the krul children. They were most beautiful of all the krul, with balanced features, big child’s eyes, pale skin close to a human shade, and long claws for fingers. These still wore their human clothes. Even the looters hadn’t touched them. Feir almost gagged. They moved on, ever closer to the great black dome.

After a while, Feir felt inured to the horror. There were a thousand thousand permutations of death, krul of every shape and size and sometimes men and often horses, but the magical fixedness of it, the lack of smell, the stillness of the air, lent it a certain unreality, as if the dead were figures carved of wax.

If Jorsin was to be believed, one million one hundred thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine krul lay dead here. Various magi scholars had guessed that between five hundred thousand and a million krul would face them. Against fifty thousand men. The rest of Jorsin’s armies had been drawn away by his own treacherous generals.

Then Jorsin had done all this, with Curoch—the very blade Feir had gone into the Wood to retrieve. Of course, he had only retrieved instructions. Curoch was safe in Ezra’s Wood forever, and thank the gods for that.

“Well, here we are,” Antoninus said as they finally touched the dome of Black Barrow. “Now we can forge our counterfeit Ceur’caelestos and save Lantano Garuwashi and all his men. Indeed, maybe all the south.”

Feir said, “All we have to do is find Ezra’s secret entrance to Black Barrow, find Ezra’s workshop and his gold tools, find seven broken mistarille swords, rediscover a forging technique every present-day Maker says is a myth, find one giant ruby, and avoid detection by a couple of hundred Vürdmeisters plotting gods know what.”

“Oh,” Antoninus said, waggling his great, single kohled eyebrow, “here I thought it was going to take all winter.”

40

A knock sounded on Vi’s door hours later. “It’s Sister Ariel. May I come in?”

“I can’t stop you. There’s no lock on the door,” Vi said.

Sister Ariel came in. She said nothing for a time, staring around the bare room with apparent nostalgia.

“What do you want?” Vi asked.

“A bit nervous about going to the lecture, huh? Or was it your meeting with Elene that’s got you acting more like a tyrant than a tyro?” Sister Ariel said.

“I fucked up,” Vi said, sulking, knowing it, hating it, and sulking anyway. “Now they hate me, like always.”

“They’re twelve years old. They don’t dare hate you.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“I’m not terribly concerned about your feelings, Vi. However, given the difficulties of your case and that I discovered you, and most of all because I couldn’t come up with an excuse quickly enough, I’ve been put in charge of your tutelage.”

Vi groaned.

“My feelings exactly. First of all, this room is entirely inappropriate for you.”

“I get a better room?”

“You get to share a room. You were given a single in deference to your age. That was a mistake. You’re isolated enough as is. As of this afternoon, you’ll have a roommate. In case you’re curious, the room will be only slightly larger than this one.” Vi pitched back onto the bed. “Now, since you are my responsibility, you’ll go to lecture. Now. Elene will have to wait until later.”

Vi didn’t move.

“Do we need to repeat certain lessons we learned on the trail?” Ariel asked.

Vi stood quickly.

“And by the by, lest you being put under my care be seen as a reward, all the punishments that your unfortunate floor monitor imposed will be carried out, as well as a few of my own. Follow.” Ariel left, and Vi had no choice but to follow her like a whipped dog.

The Chantry had been constructed with beauty and practicality as its first considerations. Cost had obviously been no object. Even here, in the tyros’ area, the arched ceilings were ten feet high, incised with a different pattern in every quarter. The tyros occupied the lowest level of the Chantry, though storerooms, archives, and the like lay beneath the water line. Because it was housed entirely within the giant statue of the Seraph, the interior of the Chantry was arranged in circles: living quarters arrayed along the quadrasecting halls, and lecture halls around the outside to take advantage of the sunlight necessary for magic.

Though white marble predominated, the tyros’ floor didn’t feel austere. A castle with so much stone would be cold and dark, but here the floors were warmed to welcome bare feet, and the ceiling itself was luminous. The walls were filled with bright, cheery scenes to comfort girls away from home for the first time: rabbits, unicorns, cats, dogs, horses, and animals Vi had never seen played together. They were drawn fancifully, but exquisitely.

Vi touched a painted pink puppy curled in sleep next to an impossibly friendly lion. Its eyes opened and it licked toward her fingers, its pink tongue pressing against the wall as if it were just on the other side of a glass. Vi yelped and jumped backward, clawing at her belt for a dagger that wasn’t there.

“His name’s Paet,” Sister Ariel said. “He was one of my favorites. He doesn’t wake until noon.”

“What?”

“It’s a timepiece. Watch this,” Sister Ariel said, stopping outside one of the classrooms.

Gently, the ceilings pulsed violet, red, yellow, green, and blue in succession as a bell tolled. Seconds later, several hundred girls between ten and fourteen poured into the halls in a flood of noise and motion. Vi saw more curious glances than frightened ones. Apparently the rumors hadn’t spread to the entire school yet. She folded her arms and scowled.

“Class starts in five minutes. Can you read and write?”

“Of course,” Vi said. Her worthless mother had done that much.

“Good. I’ll collect you at noon. Oh, and Vi? If you have a question during class, raise your hand. Sister Gizadin is a stickler. When called on, stand with your hands behind your back. If you don’t, they’ll think you’re being disrespectful. Oh, and no magic. And remember everything. Lectures are arranged in triads to help with that.”

“Triads?” Vi asked, but Sister Ariel was already gone.

Five minutes later, Vi was seated in a too-small chair at a too-small desk in the front row of a lecture hall. Three walls were unadorned white stone. The east wall, however, was as transparent as glass. The late morning sun poured down, bathing Lake Vestacchi and the snow-capped mountains beyond in light. The lake was the deepest blue Vi had ever seen, and dozens of fishing boats dotted the surface.