Maayala burned, fitfully at first, with a great deal of smoke, then more readily as the fire below her truly caught. Her flesh turned to flame and that flame burned brighter and still brighter, red, then yellow, then purest white. The fire consumed the wood, then the stake itself, and yet Maayala still stood, incandescent, bright as the noonday sun, so bright that Odam and his soldiers were forced to look away, and when they looked away, they realized the flagstones of the courtyard were glowing, too, first red, then yellow, then white, burning, melting to slag, the entire ground sagging around Maayala the Undarkened as she bored into the earth, her heat and light creating the Everburning Well.

It destroyed Odam’s fortress, and, according to the chronicles, nearly destroyed Odam himself. The king barely managed to escape through a sally port as his walls folded inward, malleable as softened butter. The rock didn’t cool for a month, and when it did, the terrified and curious began to come, tentatively, to stare at the amphitheater of melted rock, at the column of light issuing from the Well at its center. Odam himself walked to the very edge of the pit as penance for his sin, staring down into the light until it blinded him.

“Ill-served I have been by these eyes,” he said when he returned. “Without them I can see at last.”

Adare envied the long-dead king his blindness and his clarity both. She could make out little more than shapes through the torrential rain, but she could see enough to know that the walls around the Well were filled to bursting. The Sons of Flame stood closest, but the faithful of Olon pressed up behind their ranks, faces fearfully bright but smeared by the rain to a nightmare of open mouths and eager eyes, all fixed on her, waiting for the promised justice. A justice that was starting to look terrifyingly like sacrifice.

Fulton and Birch were bound at the wrist but able to walk. Behind them half a dozen grim-faced Sons with long spears stood at attention. Before the prisoners, a cleared pathway ran straight into the Everburning Well.

“When the march begins,” Lehav said to the two men, “I suggest you move. One way or the other, you will be fed to the flame. Better not to have a spear in your side when you die.”

“We will walk,” Fulton said, fixing the man with his sunken-eyed stare, “without being prodded like pigs.”

Lehav shrugged. “Bold words are easy at this distance. You might feel more reluctant as you approach the Well.”

“With this rain?” Birch quipped. He seemed to have passed through his anger and reluctance and emerged once more into his customary jocularity. “I’ll jump in your ’Kent-kissing hole just to dry off.”