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children followed them. The eldest, a
girl with stringy blond hair and missing teeth, threw a stone. A
single look from Mallin prevented any further missiles from being
loosed. The ranger cut quite a figure, Bram realized. Tall and lean
in his long saddle coat, he moved like a man who knew what to do in a
fight. Bram tried to follow his lead, keeping his chin high and his
back straight. This was his first proper mission with Mallin and he
didn’t want to make any mistakes.
    The cliffs were mined with caves.
People came out of them to watch Mallin and Bram pass. A large
bonfire was burning on one of the upper ledges and Argola led them
steadily upward toward it. After two days without sleep, Bram’s
eyeballs ached and his leg muscles protested the climb. Mallin must
have been weary too but you wouldn’t have known it. He seemed
focused and alive.
    â€œAlways one for a pretty hat,
Hew.â€

CHAPTER 19
    A Day in the Marshes
    CHEDD’S CHIN WASN’T looking
good. The cut under his jaw was black and wet-looking and his entire
lower face looked puffy. His hands went to the wound constantly.
“Doesn’t feel right, Eff.â€

CHAPTER 20
    Hailstone
    â€œROBBIE DUN DHOONE has crowned
himself a king.â€

CHAPTER 21
    He Picked Up the Sword and Fought
    THEY BROUGHT HIM in. Pain was like a
wild animal, tearing at the soft sections of his body, pulling him
apart. He did not understand how he could bear it. Anticipating
blacking out, he suspended most forms of thought. They dropped him on
the bed. He blinked at the ceiling and it began to turn like a giant
millwheel, slowly at first as it juddered into motion, then more
quickly as it gained momentum.
    He was dazzled by the sight. It was the
night sky, rendered in perfect moving form, wheeling clockwise as it
should, turning around the pole star. This must be what the Sull had
intended when they carved the constellations into the chamber’s
ceiling, this instant when a world of pain and loss could be soothed
by a world of stars.
    Like sorcerers they paid no heed to
their enchantment. They moved above him, unfastening buckles and
latches, not ungently stripping him of armor and clothes. White hot
pain burst across his rib cage as they peeled off the breastplate. It
had an indentation as big as a fist, and the cartilage of his ribs
had collapsed around it. Words were exchanged. Beautiful Sull words
that sounded like spells.
    He lost time.
    Moonsnake bided in the darkness, her
pale and massive form curled around itself forming a solid disk of
snake. She waited for him now, he’d noticed. At some point in
their acquaintance he had ceased to be extra weight. Let us hunt, she
bid in language so primal he had to translate it into words. Images
and tastes flashed across his eyes and tongue. A deer shivering as it
died. A longbone snapping in two. The sugar-sweet spray of bone
marrow.
    No, he told her. Something, some half
remembered promise to himself, warned him to resist.
    She hissed.
    He opened his eyes. The stars had
stopped turning and the pain returned. Night air descending through
the moonholes chilled him. They were working on his naked body,
stitching flaps of skin together with black thread, smearing
yellow-red ointment on open wounds, bandaging his ribs and wrist. Did
I lose another fight?
    Memories of swordfights floated in his
head. There was no order to them, no way to be sure which one had
occurred most recently, just a procession of beatings and stabbings
and slicing where steel points came at him from all sides. Slowly,
over the course of an hour, one of the memories settled into place.
    â€œAddie.â€

CHAPTER 22
    Morning Star
    LOCAL BELIEF HELD that it was good luck
to enter the city of Morning Star during the few seconds of sunrise
on cloudless days in late winter and early spring when the sun first
appeared in the east and before its rays had a chance to extinguish
the morning star in the west. Angus Lok entered the