“I apologize, Your Highness,” Vansen said, “but you must calm yourself, for your own sake if nothing else. We cannot afford to bring down the guards, or start a fight with other prisoners. You may punish me for my crime as you wish if we make it home to Southmarch again. You may even have me put to death for it, if it pleases you…”

“Death?” said Barrick, and in an instant the flailing child was gone, his place taken by someone who looked like him but was eerily self-possessed. Barrick’s anger, hot a moment before, had suddenly turned icy. “You’re a fool if you think you’re going to get off that easily. If the impossible occurs and we return to Southmarch alive, I’m going to tell my sister how you feel about her and then order you to join her bodyguard, so you have to look at her every day and know that she is looking back at you with disgust, that she and all the other ladies of the court are marveling together at the sight of the most arrogantly foolish and pitiful idiot who ever lived.”

The prince turned away from him. Gyir seemed lost in his own secret thoughts. Ferras Vansen had no choice but to sit silently, holding his stomach as though he had been kicked.

22

A Meeting of the Guild

As a marriage gift, Silvergleam gave to Pale Daughter a box of wood, carved with the shapes of birds, and in it she put all that she could remember of her family and old home. When she opened the box, its music soothed her heart. But her father Thunder could not make music to cool the burning of his own anger. He called out to his brothers that he was afflicted, dying, that his heart was a smoldering stone in his chest. They came to him and he told them of the theft of his daughter, his dove.

—from One Hundred Considerations
out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

“I DON’T LIKE IT,” OPAL SAID. “No good can come of telling everyone.”

“I’m afraid this once I can’t agree with you.” Chert looked around the front room. Evidence of the distractions of the last days were everywhere—tools uncleaned, dust on the tabletop, unwashed bowls and cups. “I am no hero, old girl. I’ve come to the limit of what I can do.”

“No hero—is that what you say? You certainly have been acting like you thought you were one.”

“Not by choice. In all seriousness, my love, you must know that.”

She sniffed. “I’ll put the kettle on. Did you know the flue is blocked? We’ll be lucky if the smoke doesn’t kill us.”

Chert sighed and sank deeper in his chair. “I’ll see to the flue later. One thing at a time.”

He had been so tired that when the ringing began he did not at first realize what it was. Half in dream, he imagined it as the bells of the guildhall, that the great building was floating away on some underground river, being sucked down into the darkness below Funderling Town…