“I need her,” Gavin said.

Almost instantly, the Lady of Faeries appeared.

“If we could hide,” Gavin said to the Lady of Illusions, “we might avoid some fights we would surely lose.”

She nodded. “This is both subtle and good,” she said. “And we can use this ugly darkness against our enemy.”

Then Tamsin and Tapio stood together for so long that the last tail of the army passed them, marching east into the twilight, lit by mage lights and will-o’-wisps. They stood like statues, and then, together, they faded into a more-than-twilight obscurity and were gone, not suddenly but very slowly, like the colour bleaching from wool in a tub of laundry.

When Syr Ydrik and his hunters rode by on their tall war elk, they saw nothing of the magister or the irk queen, and a dozen veteran rangers passed east and could find no trace of the army they had so lately left.

Gavin kept the column moving all through the night, through exhaustion and near mutiny, to fresh water and another strong camp. He dismounted, took a message from the latest imperial messenger bird, wrote out a long response about the battle just fought, and directed the Abbess Miriam to take command of the peasants of the North Albin and begin digging trenches. And as he rode east, he looked at the stars, and wondered if the same stars were rising over his brother and the company.

He scratched the scales that now covered most of the left side of his body, and wished the Red Knight would appear. Or send a messenger bird, or something.

“Where the hell are you?” he asked the eldritch sky.

Part I: Maneuvers and Evasions

Part I

Maneuvers and Evasions

Chapter One

Chapter One

Harndon—Queen Desiderata of Alba

The same sky, still unstained by the line of new volcanoes belching ash in the north, hung over Harndon. The queen had come home to her capital, flushed with victory and new motherhood, cradling her son, Constantine, in her arms, to the thin cheers of her hungry and plague-infected people.

Harndon looked like a woman beaten by a drunken spouse; signs hung awry, there were burns and smoke damage everywhere, and no one smiled, or sang. The city seemed empty of children, and too quiet. The center of the city, the “palace” as it was known, rich stone houses packed close in around the Episcopal Palace, was a gutted ruin. A spring and summer of civil unrest and war had decimated the city’s nobles and left its mark on merchant and guildsmen alike.

And where the Knights of Saint Thomas had reopened their hospital, there was a line of anxious women, all with silent children. The only sound was coughing. There was a fashion growing for women to carry black linen handkerchiefs, to hide signs of the plague; men and women were wearing hoods, and some wore linen over their faces, too.