Contents

Prelude

PART ONE:MASKS

1. Exiles

2. Drowning

3. Night Noises

4. The Hada-d’in Mozan

5. At Liberty

6. Skurn

7. Chasing the Jackals

8. An Unremarkable Man

9. In Lonely Deeps

10. Crooked and his Great-Grandmother

11. A Little Hard Work

12. Two Yisti Knives

13. Messages

14. Hunted

PART TWO:MUMMERS

15. The Boy in the Mirror

16. Night Fires

17. Bastard Gods

18. Questions with No Answers

19. Voices in the Forest

20. A Piece of the Moon’s House

21. The Deathwatch Chamber

22. A Meeting of the Guild

23. The Dreams of Gods

24. Three Brothers

PART THREE:MACHINES

25. The Gray Man

26. Rising Wind

27. The Players

28. Secrets of the Black Earth

29. Bells

30. The Tanglewife

31. The Dark-Eyed Girl

32. Remembering Simmikin

33. The Crocodile’s Roar

34. Through Immon’s Gate

35. Blessings

36. The False Woman

37. Silence

38. Beneath the Burning Eye

39. City of the Red Sun

40. Offered to Nushash

41. Kinswoman to Death

42. The Raven’s Friend

Prelude

THE OLDER ONES IN THE HOUSEHOLD had hunted the missing boy for an hour without result, but his sister knew where to look.

“Surprise,” she said. “It’s me.”

His dark hose and velvet tunic gray with dust and his face streaked with grime, he looked like a very sad goblin. “Auntie ’Lanna and the other women are all making a great fuss, searching for you,” she said. “I can’t believe they didn’t look here. Don’t they remember anything?”

“Go away.”

“I can’t, now, stupid. Lady Simeon and two of the maids were just behind me—I heard them coming up the corridor.” She set the candle between two paving stones in the floor. “If I go out now they’ll know where you’re hiding.” She grinned, pleased with her maneuver. “So I’m staying, and you can’t make me go.”

“Then be quiet.”

“No. Not unless I want to be. I’m a princess and you can’t give me orders. Only Father’s allowed to do that.” She settled in beside her brother, staring up at the shelves, seldom used now that the new kitchens had been built closer to the great hall. Only a few cracked pots and bowls had been left behind, as well as a half-dozen stoppered jars whose contents were so old that opening them, as Briony had once said, would be an experiment dangerous enough for Chaven of Ulos. (The children had been thrilled to learn that the household’s new physician was a man of many strange and fascinating interests.) “So why are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding. I’m thinking.”

“You’re a liar, Barrick Eddon. When you want to think you go walking on the walls, or you go to Father’s library, or…or you stay in your room like a temple-mantis saying prayers. You come here when you want to hide.”

“Oh? And what makes you so clever, strawhead?”

It was a term he used often when he was irritated with her, as though the differing color of their hair, hers golden-fair, his red as a fox’s back, made some difference—as though it made them any less twins. “I just am. Come, tell me.” Briony waited, then shrugged and changed the subject. “One of the ducks in the moat has just hatched out her eggs. The ducklings are ever so sweet. They go peep-peep-peep and follow their mother everywhere in a little line, as though they were tied to her.”