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died in the first battle of the Insurgence, bringing me the summons to Barthas Cross and the start of Gerrard’s most ill- fated war.
And now Gerrard was dead. I had surrendered to the Duke of Glimmering, and I was, it seemed, truly blind. And still I remembered nothing of how I had come to be in this place. I remembered nothing after my signet being taken from me in the room of the engine.
For a moment, my heart almost locking immobile in my chest, it occurred to me that I might still be there, but I realized on my next painful, halfpanicked inhale that I could not be. There was no scent of blood.
I took stock of myself as best I could; I did not seem to have taken any hurts. I was naked and knew not what had happened to my clothes. I was lying on cloth— burlap, I thought, something coarse— and as I tried to move, I found there was a manacle around my right ankle. I sat up and felt it: Corambin make, for it had a lock, and the chain was padlocked to a ring in the wall. The blood had been cleaned from my hands. And there must surely have been blood on my face, in my hair. I felt that I had drowned in Gerrard’s blood.
What else had I lost? What might I have done that I now knew nothing of? What might have been done to me? I shut my eyes— a damned pointless gesture— and strove with the darkness in my mind, a perfect match for the darkness in my eyes. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, hoping even for false colors, but there was nothing.
I began to shiver with cold that had no bodily source. How much time had I lost? What time was it now? Without sight, without knowledge of how much time had passed, how could I hope to know? Anyone I asked— assuming I was even given the chance— could lie to me, and how would I be able to tell?
My hands clenched in my hair, and I was struggling with the urge to rip out a double handful, from frustration and fear and the desire to control something, even if only my own pain, when a voice said, “So this is the Margrave of Rothmarlin.”
I reached reflexively, uselessly, for the sword that was not there.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the voice— reedy, nasal, Corambin— said with savagely patent insincerity. I heard footsteps come closer, boot heels against flagstones. “You really can’t see me, then, for I’ve been watching you for five minutes, groping about like a mole. And even Rothmarlin’s legendary cunning does not, I think, stretch that far. You are blind.”
A blind beast, my mother’s voice said calmly in my head, and I straightened my spine as a man might flinch from a blow. She had told me the stories of the usar , the presiding spirits of the Usara, until the winter I was ten, when Intended Hervey had died and the new intended said my mother’s stories were pagan superstitions and were corrupting me; my father, more for the sake of the peace than my morals, had bid her stop. I remembered only bits and pieces of the stories now, but the clearest of those memories were the stories involving the Veddick, who had been beneath the mountains before the usar came and would be there still long after they were gone, blind and hungry and trapped by its own bulk in caverns so deep and dark no man would ever find them. The country people around Rothmarlin called the occasional earth tremors Veddick’s footsteps, though none of them had any idea who “Veddick” was or why his footsteps should shake the ground.
I had gone in fear of the Veddick as a small child, but I had left that fear behind, along with other childish things, when I first rode to war. Had not even thought of it for a wheel or more, but now I remembered my mother’s voice, with its soft Usaran lilt: a blind beast, lost in the darkness beneath the world. It calls out as it walks, but there is none to answer it, for all its kind perished long ago. Blessed Lady, I had feared the Veddick. Had never thought what it would be like to be the Veddick. But now I knew, and I wished with all the painful,