Even in the center of his own great house, the fortress that had been given to his family from the gods’ own hands, the blind king Ynnir dina’at sen-Qin, Guardian of the Fireflower, Lord of Winds and Thought, could not simply walk to the Deathwatch Chamber. First the Guard of Elementals must be supplicated, allowed to perform their warlike rites in his honor, and in honor of the one they were protecting—the Salute of the Bone Knife, the Song of the Owl’s Eye (blessedly shorter in these latter days, thanks to an edict by Ynnir’s own grandfather: once the chant would have lasted an entire day), and the Arrow Count. When all these duties were finished and the Guard-Commander of the Elementals had removed his helmet in salute—even without sight, Ynnir always found that part difficult—the king moved on.

The Celebrants of Mother Night did not perform official duties, but they had been allowed to make their camp of suffering outside the Deathwatch Chamber. Merely to move among them, to hear their moaning and weeping and feel the naked misery of their grief, was like walking through biting winds and needle-sharp sleet. Pale Daughter herself, fleeing her lover’s house with an infant godling in her belly, could have felt nothing more chillingly painful.

It was a relief, after a time that felt like days, to pass out of the chambers where the Celebrants shrieked and tore at themselves and into the silence of the final antechamber, to face Zsan-san-sis, the ancient chieftain of the Children of the Emerald Fire. Zsan-san-sis had returned from the underground pools in which he had spent more and more time as he aged; it was a measure of the crisis that he should appoint himself the final guardian of the Deathwatch Chamber when it was only one of his young grandnephews who stood watch outside the Hall of Mirrors itself.

“Moonlight and Sunlight,” said the king.

“And thus roll the days of the Great Defeat unto Time’s sleep,” said the other, completing the ceremonial greeting. “I bid Your Majesty welcome.” His tone seemed even more curt than usual, the glow from inside his ceremonial robe dim and noncommittal, so that his mask was almost invisible in the shadowed hood. The king had always had trouble reading the moods of Zsan-san-sis, as if his own sightlessness and the Emerald Fire chieftain’s silver mask were impediments as real to him as they would be to a mortal. The Children had long favored the queen’s cause, although the old chieftain had been the most conciliatory of his clan. In days past Ynnir had often wondered what would happen when Zsan-san-sis eventually sank to the bottom of his pool and did not surface again, a day when someone less willing to compromise might rise to lead the Emerald Fire Children. Now it no longer seemed to matter.

“How is she today?”

“I have not gone in to her, Majesty. I feel her, but barely—a breath faint as a whisper from Silent Hill.” His thoughts and words both—for they came to the king as a single thing—were clouded with regret and resignation. “Even were we to triumph, Majesty, she could never travel now. She would die before we left our own lands.”