Ah, blessings. May Red Stag keep you ever safe on your path. The relief in the Storm Lantern’s thoughts was clear, and for the first time Barrick realized that Gyir, too, might have been carrying a painful, unwanted burden. Then Gyir abruptly stiffened, becoming as still as a small animal under the shadow of a hawk. Quickly, he said, what day is this? He turned his burning red eyes from Barrick to Ferras Vansen, who both stared back helplessly. Of course, how would you know? Let me think. Gyir laid one hand over the other and then brought them both up to cover his eyes, and for the space of perhaps two dozen heartbeats he sat that way, silent and blind to the world. We have a day, perhaps two, he said abruptly, dropping his hands away from the smooth mask of flesh.

A day until what? Barrick asked. Why?

Until the ceremony of the Earthfather begins, Gyir said. The sacrifice days of the one you call Kernios. Surely you still mark them.

It took Barrick a moment, but then as it dawned on him he turned to Vansen, who had also understood. “The Kerneia,” he said aloud. “Of course. By all the gods, is it Dimene already? How long have we been locked in this stinking place?”

Long enough to see your world and mine end if I have the day wrong, said Gyir. They will come for us when the sacrifice days begin, and I am not yet ready.

He would not say any more, but fell back into silence, shutting his two fellow prisoners out as thoroughly as if he had slammed a heavy door.

It was bad enough to suppose that the Kerneia marked the day of your doom, Ferras Vansen kept thinking, but it was made far worse by being trapped deep beneath the earth with no certain way of knowing what day it was in the world outside. This must be what it had been like to be tied to a tree and left for the wolves, as he had heard some of the old tribes of the March Kingdoms had done to prisoners, stopping the condemned’s ears with mud and blindfolding their eyes so that they could only suffer in darkness, never knowing when the end would come.

Vansen slept only fitfully following Gyir’s announcement, startled out of his thin slumbers every time Prince Barrick twitched in his sleep or some other prisoner growled or whimpered in the crowded cell outside.

Kerneia. Even during his childhood in Daler’s Troth it had been a grim holiday. A small skull had to be carved for each family grave, where it would be set, nestled in flowers, on the first light of dawn as homage to the Earthfather who would take them all someday. Vansen’s own father had never stopped complaining about the laziness of his adopted folk in Daler’s Troth, who made their skull carvings out of soft wood. Back home in the Vuttish Isles, he would declare at least once each year, only stone was acceptable to the Lord of the Black Earth. Still, Ferras Vansen didn’t doubt that with three of his own children gone to their graves and also the resting places of his wife’s parents and grandparents to be adorned, Pedar Vansen must have secretly been grateful he could make his death-tokens in yielding pine instead of the hard granite of the dales.