After rubbing down her horse and turning it out with the others, Hanna walked through the ruins of the palace. Fallen pillars striped the ground. She traced corridors and rooms reduced to outlines on the ground. A strange feeling crawled along her skin, like fire that warmed but did not burn. She had walked here with Bulkezu and his brother Cherbu. In this place Cherbu had discovered the name of the woman whose sorcery had consumed the vast building.

"Liathano," she said softly. She shut her eyes and listened, but all she heard was the hiss of a light rain on the ruins and the grass and the rattle of wind in the distant trees. This was a dead place.

"What happened to the town?" asked Brother Fortunatus, coming up beside her.

She coughed and jumped.

"I beg your pardon!" he said, chuckling a little as he touched fingers to her elbow. "I did not mean to startle you." She offered him a false grin, but he narrowed his eyes. "What ails you, Hanna? Ghosts?"

From this vantage point they could see most of the town below, a skeletal presence rising in the midst of deserted fields and the outraged wreck of a substantial orchard. A number of trees had fallen, most likely torn down by the storm. Dusk-drawn mist drifted along the broken palisade.

"Not ghosts, but memories. Ghosts enough, I suppose, if memories haunt us." She swallowed and found even that trifling movement caught and choked her.

"Memories are the worst ghosts of all." His hand curled around her elbow, and the gesture gave her courage.

"Years ago. The Quman army rode through this place when I was their captive. There are no good memories for me here."

"I'm sorry. Did they burn the town?"

Meadow grass and fescue had swept over the ruins, grown everywhere they could take root. Hawthorn and twining canes of raspberry had found a foothold as well. Nettles thrust up where the last stains of ash mottled the earth. Soon The Fat One would overtake what the princes had built and cover it in flowers, although only a few dusky violets bloomed now.

"It's late in the season for violets," she said, pointing to a spray of delicate petals.

He cocked his head, considered her, then followed where she led. "It's the cloud cover. I fear we'll face a late growing season. And a short one."

"I forgot about the town," she added. "I don't know what happened to the town. After the palace burned, it was still standing. The flames never touched the town. We took shelter there that night, all of us in the king's progress. King Henry stayed in the hall of a prosperous merchant, slept in the man's own bed. How can that all be gone? Where did it go? Did Bulkezu burn it down? I don't remember."

An odd spark of color caught her eye and she knelt and swept aside chaff and dirt and ash and the detritus of years of abandonment to uncover a brass belt buckle shaped in the form of a lion.