"Cattilara would care as little for my rule as I would care to exert it," said Illvin. "Thank you from us both."

Arhys nodded in wry understanding. "If you—if—if you cannot undertake it in Liviana's name, Porifors's military command must revert to the provincar of Caribastos, to be assigned to a man he judges able to carry out its tasks. I have written him to warn him... well, only that I am ill, and that he may wish to look about him just in case."

"You take care of every duty. No matter how distasteful." Illvin smiled bleakly. "You have always sought to take a father's care of us all.

Is there any doubt which god waits to take you up? But let Him wait a little longer, I say." He glanced aside at Ista.

But no god awaits him, Ista thought. That's what sundered means.

Arhys shrugged. "The days gnaw at me as rats gnaw a corpse. I can feel it now, more and more. I have already overstayed, most grievously. Royina ..." His eyes upon her were uncomfortably penetrating. "Can you release me? Is that why you were tumbled down here?"

Ista hesitated. "I scarcely know what I can do and what I cannot. If I am meant to channel miracles, that one would not be my first choice. Yet it is the nature of miracles that their human conduit may not choose them, except to cry them yes or no. It is only demon sorcery that we may bend to our own wills. No one bends a god."

"And yet," said Illvin thoughtfully, "the Bastard is half a demon himself, they say. I think his nature is not wholly as the rest of his family's. Perhaps his miracles are not either?"

Ista frowned in confusion. "I ... don't know. He seemed just as much beyond me in my dream as his Mother did in my vision of her, nigh on twenty years ago. In any case, I have only tried to rearrange the strength that flows among you three. I have not tried to break the bindings beneath, or force the demon to do so against its mistress's will, though it is clear enough that it would abandon all and fly if it could."

"Try now," said Arhys.

Both Ista and Illvin made simultaneous noises of protest, and glanced at each other.

"Because if you cannot do this, I must also know," said Arhys patiently.

"But—there is no way to test it but to do it. And then I would not know how to undo it."

"I did not suggest that you then seek to undo it."

"I would fear to leave you damned."

"More than I am now?"

Ista looked away, discomfited. She read a soul-deep exhaustion in his face; as if he grew hourly less loath to end his travails, even into the dwindling silence of nothingness. "But—what if this is not the task I was sent for? What if I am wrong in my reasoning—again? I should have been ecstatic if it had been given me to heal you. I do not wish to murder another dy Lutez."

"You did once."

"Yes, but not by sorcery. By drowning. The method would not work on you. You haven't taken a breath in the last fifteen minutes."

"Oh. Yes." He looked embarrassed and made an effort to inhale.

Illvin's eyes had grown wide. "What tale is this?"

Ista glanced at him, gritted her teeth, and said, "Arvol dy Lutez did not die in the Zangre under questioning. Ias and I drowned him by mistake in the course of an attempt among the three of us to call down a miracle for Chalion's sake. The treason accusation was entirely false." Well. That was certainly getting more succinct with practice.

Illvin's mouth hung open for a moment longer. He finally said, "Ah. I always did think that treason charge was oddly handled."

"The rite failed because Arvol's courage failed." She stopped. Then blurted out, "And yet I might have saved the hour even at the last, if I could have called down a miracle of healing. Even as he lay drowned dead at our feet. The Mother, the very goddess of remedy, stood at my right hand, just around some... corner of perception. If my soul had not been so knotted with rage and fear and grief that there was no room in it for any god to enter." Three prior confessions had all evaded this codicil, she realized. She glanced aside again at Illvin. "Or if I had loved him instead of hated him. Or if—I don't know."

Illvin cleared his throat. "Most people fail to work miracles most of the time. Such a dereliction scarcely needs accounting for."

"Mine does. I was called." She brooded, as the wagon creaked along. Now I am called again. But what for? She glanced up at Arhys. "I wonder how our lives would have been different if your father had brought you to court? Maybe we put the wrong dy Lutez in that barrel." Now, there was a vision. "What was he like at twenty, Illvin?"

"Oh, quite as he is now," Illvin responded. "Not as polished or practiced, perhaps. Not as broad in the shoulder." A smile of memory flickered over his mouth. "Not as levelheaded."

"Not as dead," growled Arhys, frowning at his hands, which he was stretching and clenching again. Testing for numbness? For increasing numbness?

"When I was young and beautiful, at court in Cardegoss ..." When Arhys had not yet been married even once. When all things were still possible. Might she then have taken a dy Lutez as a lover after all, and made the false slander true? And yet Fonsa's dark curse had blighted all budding hopes in that court—to what horrors might it have bent that sweet dream, to what disasters drawn Arhys's youthful brilliance? Would it be true or false comfort to suggest to Arhys that Arvol had kept him away for his own safety? She suppressed a shudder. "It was still too late."

Arhys blinked at her, missing the implications, but Illvin grunted a pained laugh. "Imagine you'd met him before you'd married Ias, then, as long as you're spinning might-have-beens," he advised dryly. He cast her an odd look. "All my might-have-beens come out the same either way."

The wagon bumped and rocked, marking a turn off the road. Ista peeked out to discover that they had returned to the walled village, and were stopping in the olive grove again to water the horses. The sun had climbed to noon, and the day was growing very hot.

Ista clambered down for a moment to stretch her half-healed legs and get a drink. Liss still had Lord Illvin's white horse in tow, watering it at the stream. Illvin looked out longingly at it, then abruptly disappeared back inside the wagon. Voices came from behind the canvas, some sort of argument involving Illvin, Goram, and the manservant. Illvin emerged a few minutes later smiling in satisfaction, wearing his groom's leather trousers and the manservant's boots below his light linen robe. The trousers were cinched in around his waist and barely reached his calves, but the boots made up the difference.

Illvin reclaimed his horse and grinned as he mounted it. Appreciation for a body up and moving at will through the bright world again was plain in his face, perhaps the more keenly felt for the fragility of the stolen moment. He let Liss help lengthen his stirrups, spoke a word of thanks, settled in his saddle, and gave Ista a cheery salute.

Goram, Ista was relieved to see, now wore a pair of ill-fitting linen trousers evidently borrowed from the wagon's scanty store, though the hapless manservant was left barefoot. The Daughter's men helped roll up the wagon's canvas sides partway, as the heat of the day was making the suffocating stuffiness a greater trial than the dust of the road. Not, Ista conceded, that Lord Arhys was likely to notice either one. They started off again. Foix disposed four of his men before and two behind the lumbering wagon, and Illvin and Liss rode along at either side, within easy speaking distance.

A few miles from the village they topped the rise, swung right along the slope, and began their drop into the broad valley that Porifors guarded. They rounded a stand of trees; abruptly, Foix flung up a hand. Their little party ground to a halt.