“Where I am a target of opportunity for anyone creeping up on either side, under cover of darkness? Do your duty, Kem. I shall return soon enough.” He paused, thought over his words, and added, “But your concern is understandable. I must, indeed, be guarded at all times from threats both grand and insignificant. The deputy courier will accompany me. She has a knife.”

64 THE BEAT OF ITS HEART

Instead of heading into the barracks, where the latrine was out back, the haunt took the road under the tower and headed toward the outer courtyard that overlooked the Pall. Elen hustled after, ignoring Kem’s startled exclamation except to call back, “Keep your eyes open.”

So many questions crowded her mind she scarcely noticed the sting of the road through her boots.

She and the haunt emerged from beneath the tower onto a wide terrace paved of holystone. An embankment rose on the northern rim of the terrace as a barrier between the pavement and the shoreline. The road ramped up to the top of the embankment.

Avoiding the road, she climbed the side of the embankment and halted on its flat top. The embankment’s north face pitched steeply down to a ragged shoreline where rocks met the foggy white substance of the Pall. The road turned into a causeway that proceeded north into the darkness, Pall on either side. She recognized this place, remembered it vividly, although it had been about twenty years: the well-kept pavement of the roadbed, the semicircular holystone terrace, the great Vigil tower with its heavy base and a peaked roof so many stories above that it had seemed like a dream to the child she had been that night when she and Ao had made it across the Pall, miraculously both alive although Elen was, arguably, no longer fully human. If she had ever been fully human. The viper hummed inside her, wide awake, stretching as if it wished to slither away into the Pall.

The haunt scrambled up beside her. “Ah,” he said on a gasp. “Can you hear them?”

She listened. The Pall did not lap against the rocks as if it were water, but the shush-shoom kept on at a steady, fluid cadence.

“What makes that sound?” she asked him, although she kept her voice low.

“The beat of its heart.”

“The Pall is alive? A living being?”

He smiled, canting his head to look at her. The moon had set. In the darkness, his face was shadowed. Yet his gaze held a tender sweetness. His presence settled like balm on her restless heart. Even the viper relaxed, as if enchanted.

“Not living as you and I are, or as the prince’s body is. I sense the pulse of currents beneath its surface. I hear a rustle of souls swirling in its shallows. There. Do you see?”

He pointed, his arm a dark line against a darker night.