There was no denying that. Millick was dead. The man she loved was dead, murdered by the Lord’s son. And now here stood the Lord, and her father babbling about how they were going to live in the Great House, and how she would be taken care of from now on, and the Lord was smiling and nodding, and all she could think about was Millick, to whom she had told everything because he saw that she wasn’t the same any more – Millick, weeping and drunk and feebly trying to put her face back together, on his knees beside her telling her how his cousins had got the story of her confession out of him after a cask of ale, and how they laughed at him and called her a whore to his face, until he was driven to madness. Blind rage, he kept saying, trying to explain himself, how his fists just lashed out unseeing when she came upon him beating Eldin and Orult behind the house, how he punched not knowing whom he punched.

And how Witch Hale got her story all wrong, because Millick had gone in hiding from his cousins and their friends, and Renarr got fevered and had to crawl home in the middle of the night, and Renarr’s jaw was too swollen and she couldn’t get the right words past her broken mouth.

Changes. It was a day of changes all right.

Chapter Thirteen

THIRTEEN

KADASPALA WAS NOT a believer in gods, but he knew that belief could create them. And once made, they bred in kind. He had seen places where discord thrived, where violence spun roots through soil and flesh both, and the only propitiation left to those who dwelt there was the spilling of yet more blood. These were venal gods, the vicious spawn of a stew of wretched emotions and desires. There was no master and no slave: god and mortal fed on each other, like lovers sharing a vile fetish.

He knew that there was power in emotion, and that it could spill out to soak the ground, to stain stone and twist wood; that it could poison children and so renew the malign cycle, generation upon generation. Such people made of their home a god’s lap, and they curled tight within its comforting, familiar confines.

Kadaspala wanted none of it, and yet he was never as immune as he would have liked: even the pronouncement that he stood outside such things was itself an illusion. He was not a believer in gods, but he had his own. They came to him in the simplest of all forms, eschewing even shape and, at times, substance itself. They came to him in a flood, with every moment – indeed, even in his sleep and the dream worlds that haunted it. They howled. They whispered. They caressed. Sometimes, they lied.