He was not with me when I stepped off.

Her useless outer eyes blurred with terror and loss. She could barely breathe, as though her chest was bound tight with heavy cords. What have I done wrong?

"Who is this?" asked Prince Sordso, pointing at Illvin.

The bronze-skinned sorcerer pushed his horse up next to the prince's and stared down in surprise at Illvin, who looked back coolly. "I believe it is Ser Illvin dy Arbanos himself, Your Highness—Lord Arhys's bastard brother, the bane of our borders". Sordso's blond eyebrows went up. "The new commander of Porifors! What does he here? Ask him where is the other woman." He gestured at his translator.

The officer rode nearer to Illvin. "You, dy Arbanos! The agreement was for the dowager royina and the daughter of the march of Oby," he said in Ibran. "Where is Lady Cattilara dy Lutez?"

Illvin favored him with a slight, ironic bow. His eyes were icy black. "Gone to join her husband. When, watching last night from the tower,

she felt him die, she flung herself from the parapet and gave her grief to the stones below. She lies now waiting to be buried, when you withdraw as you agreed and we can again reach our graveyards. I come in her place, and to serve Royina Ista as warder and attendant. Since, having seen your armies and their dubious discipline once before, the royina did not desire to bring her handmaidens among you."

The translator's brows drew down, and not only at the oblique trailing insult. He repeated the news to Sordso and the others. The sorceress nudged her rider to bring her closer. "Is this true?" she demanded.

"Look yourselves for what you really seek, then," said Illvin, with a bow in her direction. "I should think Prince Sordso could recognize the remnants of his own sister Umerue from this distance, if she were still... well, alive is not quite the right term, now, is it? If she were still residing within Lady Cattilara behind those walls." The translator jerked in his saddle, though whether in surprise at Illvin's message or at the tongue in which it was spoken, Ista was not sure. Sordso, the bronze-skinned officer, and the sorceress all turned their heads toward Porifors, their expressions growing intent and inward.

"Nothing," breathed Sordso after a moment. "It is gone." The sorceress eyed Illvin. "That one knows too much." "My poor sister-in-law is dead, and the creature you lost is fled beyond your reach," said Illvin. "Shall we get this over with?" At a nod from the prince, two soldiers dismounted. They first took the precaution of checking Illvin for concealed blades in his sash and boots; he suffered their hands with a look of bored displeasure. Tension flowed into his long body when one of the soldiers approached Ista, relaxing only slightly when the man knelt by her white skirts.

"You are to take off your shoes," the translator called to her. "You will walk barefoot and bareheaded into the presence of the August Mother, as befitting a lesser woman and a Quintarian heretic."

Illvin's chin went up and his jaw set. Whatever objections he had been about to voice, though, he closed his teeth upon. It was an interesting subtlety, Ista thought, that they did not also demand Illvin's boots. The disparity only drove home his impotence to protect her.

The man's hot hands pawed at the ribbons Liss had so lately tied around Ista's ankles. She stood rigidly, but did not resist. He pulled the light sandals away from her feet and threw them aside. He stood, backed away, and remounted his horse.

Sordso rode up to her, his eyes searching her from head to foot. He smiled grimly at what he saw—or possibly at what he didn't see. In any case, he did not fear to turn his back on her, for he gestured her sharply to take position directly behind his horse in the procession forming up. Illvin tried to offer her his arm, but the bronze-skinned officer pulled his sword and pointed with it for him to walk behind her. Sordso's hand rose and fell in signal, and they started off across the dry, uneven ground.

Ista was barely conscious of the brass-bright noon through which she stumbled. She groped inside her mind, within an echoing darkness. Called silent curses to the Bastard. Then, silent prayers. Nothing came back.

Were the Jokonan sorcerers doing this? Defeating a god in the realm of matter? Surely these opponents could not overwhelm this god... ?

Not the god's failure, then, but hers; her spirit gates had somehow been shut again, broken and tumbled in, choked with stones of fear, anger, or humiliation, denying the new-dilated passage...

She had made a mistake, some monstrous mistake, somewhere in the past few fleeting minutes. Maybe she had been supposed to give this task, to give the god, to dy Cabon after all. Maybe keeping it for herself had been the great presumption, a huge and fatal presumption. Overweening arrogance, to imagine such a task was given to her. Who would be stupid enough to give such a task to her?

The gods. Twice. It was a puzzle, how beings so vast could be so vastly mistaken. I knew better than to trust them. Yet here I am— again...

Sharp stones bit her feet along the road. The procession turned aside toward the grove, angling through a low space of dark muck that sucked at the horses' hooves and stank of stagnant water and horse piss. They scrambled up a slight rise. She could hear Illvin's long footfalls behind her, and his quickening breath, his uneven puffing revealing more of his debilitation than his face ever would. The grove loomed before her, its shade a blessed relief from the hammering sun overhead.

Ah. Not so blessed after all, nor any relief. They marched up past an aisle of the dead. Laid quite deliberately along the left side of their route, as if made witnesses to this procession, were the bodies of the men of Porifors killed last night in Arhys's sortie. All were stripped naked, their wounds exposed to feed the iridescent green flies that buzzed about them.

She glanced up the row of pale forms, counted. Eight. Eight, of the fourteen who had ridden out against fifteen hundreds. Six must still live somewhere in the Jokonan camp, then, wounded and taken. Foix's muscular body was not among the still forms. Pejar's was.

She looked again, and recalculated: five still live.

There was a ninth here, but not a body. More of a ... pile. A spear was driven into the ground behind the shambles, with Arhys's disfigured head displayed atop the shaft, peering out sightlessly over the Jokonan camp. The once-ravishing eyes had been cut out by whatever fear-maddened soldier had sought revenge upon the emptied form.

Too late. He was gone before you got there, Jokonan. Her bare feet faltered over some root, and she gasped in pain.

Illvin, striding forward, caught her arm before she tripped and fell headlong.

"They bait us. Look away," he instructed through clenched teeth. "Do not faint. Or vomit."

He looked ready to do both, she thought. His countenance was as gray as any of the corpses', though his eyes burned like nothing she had ever seen in a man's face.

"It's not that," she whispered back. "I have lost the god."

His brows flickered in consternation and confusion. The bronze-skinned officer, his sword out, gestured them along toward the far edge of the grove, though he did not force Illvin from her side. Maybe she, too, looked as though she were about to faint.

She thought Illvin's judgment of baiting to be precise. If either of them had still concealed any uncanny power—or any strength at all— that display might well have drawn it out of them, in some furious, futile lashing at their complacent enemies. If she had been either a sorceress or a swordsman, she swore the prince would not have survived the smirk he had cast over his shoulder as she'd stumbled past Arhys's remains. From a failed saint, the Jokonans were quite safe, it seemed.