The Steel Remains

“Don’t you fucking worry.” The sudden, grim vehemence in his tone jerked her gaze up to where he sat. “I made my father a promise on his deathbed, and I aim to keep it. There’s no fucking way I hand you over to that scum.”

Shocked gratitude stung tears into her eyes. It was like a different man speaking, a different man sitting there on the throne. She’d have fled the city before she gave herself up for questioning, was already at some level in her mind begi

“I . . . thank you, my lord, I have no words to express—”

“Yes, all right.” He gestured it away. “I think we can take all that as read, don’t you? I wouldn’t like to be facing the Citadel’s grubby little inquisitors and their toys, either. The question is, how exactly do we get out from under this without having to roll out the troops. It’s the Prophet’s fucking birthday at the end of the month. Going to be enough breast-beating hysteria in the streets as it is. I don’t need a mob marching on the palace as well.”

“From a legal point of view—”

He shook his head. “Forget the law. It isn’t going to help. They’ll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn’t. They’re clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage. We have to hamstring them before they even get started.” He bridged his hands and brooded. “Basically, Archeth, you have to disappear for a while.”

“And Elith.”

“Oh, all right, yes. Fine. Your northern witch as well. Works out better like that anyway, I suppose. With both of you gone, the whole basis for their grievance collapses.” He nodded slowly, but with building vigor. “Yeah, that’ll work. That will work. We get you out of the city under cover, before nightfall. I’ll have Faileh Rakan put together an escort squad to do it. Meantime, I agree to an emergency session of the mastery and field the Citadel’s demands. We send for you, you’re nowhere to be found. Repeated summons, no result. With a bit of prevaricating—and the Holy fucking Mother knows it’s what the court does best—that gets us to some early hour tonight. By the time it’s clear that you’ve fled, it’s dark and you could be anywhere. I undertake to have the militia out scouring the streets for you at dawn. When they don’t find you, we say we’ve sent out the King’s Reach as well. Might even do it with a few of them I can trust to look in the wrong places and keep their mouths shut about it. Anyway: Rumors of you heading northwest for Trelayne, or maybe into the wastes. Doing all we can, gentlemen, thank you for your time. We’ll keep you posted.” He wagged a finger at Archeth. “Meantime, we stash you . . . where? Any idea where you’ll go?”

And something moved in her head like the oiled components of a fireship hatch mechanism, everything sliding and locking into new configurations. She almost heard the solid clunk as it happened. A fresh excitement shouldered the krin crash aside, picked up the beat in her veins. She cleared her throat.

“I had thought of E

CHAPTER 27

They emerged into vague, greenish gray light and the overarching striation of winter trees. Faint odor of decay on a slack and sickly breeze.

At first, Ringil registered the change with little more than weary mistrust. His time in the Aldrain marches had shown him far worse, and the shift had not been without its advance warnings. The great black road they’d met Risgillen and the others on had been fading for some time now, either aging at some fantastically accelerated rate as they walked it, or rotting through from beneath as they pressed into new territory that would not permit its existence. Jagged cracks started to appear, some broad and deep enough to put an incautious foot in and snap your ankle. Ringil thought he saw human skulls wedged down into them at intervals, but that might have been another marchland hallucination, and he was getting numb to those.

Well, most of them.

JELIM COMES BACK TO HIM ONE MORE TIME, PERHAPS IN A DREAM WHILE they’re camped on the road, perhaps not; in the marches it’s hard to tell. This time Ringil is standing above him with the Ravensfriend across his back, though slanted the wrong way, pommel jutting over his right shoulder. The difference feels bizarre, uncomfortable. Jelim stops a short distance away and looks up without speaking. The face is the same, though stained and mottled with weeping, but he’s dressed in far finer garb than the real Jelim, minor merchant’s son that he was, had ever been able to afford. He stares up at Ringil, meets his eyes, and fresh tears start down his cheeks. Ringil feels a deep aching in his chest at the sight. He wants to speak, but the words are jammed up in his throat.

I’m sorry, Jelim weeps. Gil, I’m so sorry.

And now the pain in Ringil’s chest will not be contained. It rips through him, upward and downward, right up into the muscles of his shoulder, right down to—

I’m sorry, Gil, I’m so sorry. Jelim seems to whisper it endlessly, staring up in horrified fascination. It should have been me.

And the thing that juts from his right shoulder is not the pommel of the Ravensfriend at his back, it’s the end of the impaling spike where they drove it through the final nine inches and locked the mechanism in the base of the cage, and the pain is not an ache in his heart, it’s an oceanic, white-hot shredding, scalding agony that drives up from between his legs and rips through his guts and then across his chest, neatly avoiding his heart so he need not die for days . . .

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

And then he’s screaming, as he realizes where he is, shrieking, for mercy, for Hoiran, for his father, for his mother, for anyone or anything to come and stop the pain. Screaming with such force that it seems it must blow his veins apart, explode his skull, shatter it and let his lifeblood drain out through the ruined mess.

But he knows it won’t.

And he knows that no one will come, that in the long, slow-leaking agony ahead, there will be no rescue of any kind.

HE STAMPED DOWN ON THE MEMORY, BATHED IN SUDDEN SWEAT, HEART hammering. Focused on where he was instead.

Winter trees. Quiet.

He stood and stared up at the stripped branches. Waited for the panic-flush of sweat across his skin to cool, for his heart to slow back down. He breathed in deep, like a man escaped from drowning.

Not real, not real. His pulse throbbed with the rhythm of the words.

No more real than the thousand other phantoms that had haunted him across the Aldrain marches. He had not died.

Jelim had.

A hand clapped him across the back. His pulse kicked up again for one terrified moment, then eased as he registered the touch. Seethlaw’s hand shifted, squeezed intimately at the nape of his neck.

It felt uncomfortably like ownership.

“Nice to be back in the real world, I imagine,” the dwenda murmured, and stepped past him across the tufted, swampy ground. Tiny squelching noises in the stillness with each step the dwenda took. Ringil saw water well up in the boot prints he left.

The other members of the party followed, Risgillen with wrinkled nose and a sour glance cocked up at the trees, Ashgrin as watchful and impassive as he’d been since Ringil met him. Only Pelmarag acknowledged the human, turned as he passed and gave him a wink.

“Where are we?” Ringil asked.

“Journey’s end,” said Pelmarag. “Ha