‘So I shall pray, Olar Ethil. For you.’

‘What of your death, Draconus? You were always one for planning, no matter how many times those plans failed you.’

‘I will,’ he replied, ‘die many deaths.’

‘You have seen them?’

‘No. I have no need for that.’

She looked out upon the water of the spring. Night made it black. Caladan Brood’s sculpture of the Thel Akai still lifted a tormented face to the sky, and would do so for ever. It was aptly named Surrender, and he had forced that sentiment upon the stone itself, refusing all subtlety. She feared Caladan Brood for his honesty and despised him for his talent.

‘I see his mother in his face,’ she said after a time. ‘In his eyes.’

‘Yes.’

‘That must be hard for you.’

‘Yes.’

She pushed her hand into her belly, feeling the skin split, and then the sudden heat of blood and the steady beat of her heart – almost within reach. Instead, her hands closed about the baked clay form of a figurine. She pulled it out. She crouched to wash it clean and then straightened and offered it to Draconus. ‘For your son.’

‘Olar Ethil, he is not yours to protect.’

‘Even so.’

After a moment he nodded and took it from her.

Draconus then squeezed her shoulder and began walking away.

She brushed fingers across her belly but the wound had closed once more. ‘I forgot to ask, what name did you give him?’

Draconus paused and glanced back at her. When he told her, she made a startled sound, and then began laughing.

* * *

Arathan slept fitfully, haunted by dreams of the corpses of children floating on a pool of black water. He saw ropes coming from their bellies, as if each one had been tied to something, but those ropes were severed, the ends hacked and shredded. Staring upon this scene, he felt a sudden certainty – in the way of dreams – that the spring, far beneath the surface, spilled out not water but these drowned babies, and the flow was endless.

When he walked out upon them he felt their soft bodies give under his weight, and with each step he grew somehow heavier, until, with a sound like breaking ice, he plunged through—

Only to awaken, slick with sweat, his chest aching from a breath held overlong against imaginary pressures.

He sat up to see that it was still night. His father was standing near the horses under the strange trees, and it seemed that he stared eastward – into the village or perhaps beyond it. For all Arathan knew, Draconus might be looking upon Kharkanas itself, and the Citadel, and a woman hidden in darkness seated on a throne.

Throne of Night. He settled back into his blanket and stared up at the stars overhead. Their twisted pattern made him think of fevers, when nothing was right with the world and the wrongness was terrifying – tormenting a small boy who was already filled with confused visions of icy cold water and shards of ice and who cried out for a mother who never came and never answered.