It is almost sunset before the funeral procession reaches the Temple. The bloody western skyline is interrupted by the black hill of the palace. The colored windows of the Temple glow. Full dark takes the streets like spilling ink before the last song echoes in the heights above the great altar and the body of Byrn a Sal, purified by the mourning of his subjects and the prayers of his priesthood, comes out to the pyre. His daughter should light the oil-stinking wood, but she stays still until young Karsen, her father’s friend, comes and takes the torch from her hand.

The term for the night between the funeral of the old prince and the coronation of the new one is gautanna. It is an ancient Inlisc word that means, roughly, the pause at the top of a breath when the lungs are most full. Literally, it translates as the moment of hollowness.

For one night, Kithamar is a city between worlds and between ages. It falls out of its own history, at once the end of something and the beginning of something else. The skeptical among the citizens—and Kithamar has more than its share of the amiably godless—call it tradition and merely a story that says something about the character of the city, its hopes and aspirations, the fears and uncertainties that come in moments of change. That may be true, but there is something profound and eerie about the streets. The rush of the river seems to have words in it. The small magics of Kithamar go as quiet as mice scenting a cat. The clatter of horseshoes against stone echoes differently. The city guard in their blue cloaks make their rounds quietly, or decide that for one night they might as well not make them at all.

Outside the city, the southern track where by daylight teams of oxen haul boats against the current is quiet and deserted apart from one lone, bearded man. He sits at the base of a white birch, his back against the bark. The small glass bead in his hand would be red if there were light enough to see it.

In a thin-walled bedroom above a tailor’s shop in Riverport, a young man lies alone on a mattress. His right hand is bandaged, and the wound beneath the cloth throbs. He watches the moon rise over the rooftops, listening with his heart in his throat for footsteps on the creaking floorboards outside his door.

Under the northernmost of Oldgate’s four bridges, a girl sits, listening to the water. She has a round face, gently curling hair, and a knife held in her fist. She is waiting for a meeting that she dreads as much as she longs for it.

Her name is Alys.

PART ONE

HARVEST