“And you?” I said. “You will tell Erran where I have gone?”

“I shall not tell him.”

“He will suspect your complicity and he will make you tell him.”

“He will not. But he may detect for himself. The princes are aware of this tunnel, though few of them wish to enter it. It is a thing they designed, who came before us, our ancestors from whom we are degenerated.”

She paused there, no longer fierce or pleading, only remote, as if her spirit had been emptied from her, and her eyes seemed blind. I thought of the nights and noons when we had coupled, when my world had been only Demizdor, and that she had said to me, “One day you will regret me.” Now there was only this beautiful, unknown, unloved stranger, murderess and savior in a single day.

I said, “Maybe you would be safer if you rode with me.”

She said, “Don’t offer me dross. I shall be safe enough here; these are my people.”

And then she talked, quietly and succinctly, of the hours before her kin took her from the krarl, how she had thought me dying or dead, how the braves had raped her and tied her and returned to rape her, how she had lain awaiting death herself, the anguish and the shame and the rage and the fear of it—everything she told me, till she was a lesson I had by heart.

To lose love and find how you have lost it, neither to blame, like sightless children groping in shadow; there is an edge to that like the knife itself.

“Demizdor,” I said, “come with me. We may be friends at least.”

“Oh, but I do not want your friendship. It is your love I want, and yet, I don’t want it. Go, or I shall curse you. It will be a curse that sticks, for women’s curses are more cruel than yours.”

I saw it was past reasoning. I turned and untethered the black horse and mounted up.

When I had trotted him across the stone hall, she called my name, my tribal name, as she had used it earlier.

So I looked back. The tribes say it is unlucky to do so. There was a story Tathra had whispered to me, about a warrior who was enticed into the Black Place by a woman’s spell and half regained his liberty, but the witch uttered his name, and he glanced over his shoulder, and she drew him back by the fox-fire in her eyes.

There was no fire in the eyes of Demizdor. I could barely make her out for the gloom, only the pale face, the one pale hand.

“You are my life,” she said.

And she stepped away into the dark and vanished like smoke.

I did not call after her. I foresaw she would not answer me.

I rode into the tunnel’s mouth and did not look back again.

Part II: The Wolf Hunt

1

ELEVEN NIGHTS, TEN DAYS I traveled that thoroughfare. Judging by the additional passages I had observed leading to the hall of broken pillars, many of the great houses of Eshkorek had secret access to the under-city, and thereby to the ancient tunnel. Kortis’ palace indisputably contained one of these entries. How else should Demizdor have known the place or the trick wall-openings unless she had been familiar with them from elsewhere? Besides, others took the route later, and not via Erran’s cellars.