even with its troubadours and joglars and a woman ruling them.
THE ONE VIVID EXCEPTION was having, without the least shadow of any possible doubt, the worst night of his life.
In the first place, there were the noises. Even at the edge of the woods, the sounds of the night forest kept making their way to Luth’s pricked ears, triggering waves of panic that succeeded each other in a seemingly endless progression.
Secondly there was Vanne. Or, not exactly Vanne, but his absence, for the other coran assigned to guard duty kept wilfully abandoning Luth, his designated partner, and making his own way down the rope to check on the two clerics in the sailboat, then going off into the forest itself to listen for the return of their fellows, or for other less happy possibilities. Either of these forays would leave Luth alone for long moments at a time to cope with sounds and ambiguous shiftings in the shadows of the plateau or at the edges of the trees, with no one to turn to for reassurance.
The truth was, Luth said to himself—and he would have sworn to it as an oath in any temple of the goddess—that he really wasn’t a coward, though he knew every man here would think him one from tonight onward. He wasn’t though: put him on a crag above Castle Baude in a thunderstorm, with thieves on the slopes making off with the baron’s sheep, and Luth would be fierce in pursuit of them, sure-footed and deft among the rocks, and not at all bad with his bow or blade when he caught up with the bandits. He’d done that, he’d done it last summer, with Giresse and Hirnan. He’d killed a man that night with a bowshot in darkness, and it was he who had led the other two back down the treacherous slopes to safety with the flock.
Not that they were likely to remember that, or bother to remind the others of it, after tonight. If any of them lived through tonight. If they ever left this island. If they—
What was that?
Luth wheeled, his heart lurching like a small boat hit by a crossing wave, in time to see Vanne making his way back onto the plateau from yet another survey of the woods. The other coran gave him a curious glance in the shadows but said nothing. They were not to speak, Luth knew. He found their own enforced silence almost as stressful as the noises of the night forest.
Because they weren’t just noises, and this wasn’t just night-time. These were the sounds of Rian’s Island, which was holy, and the eight of them were here without proper consecration, without any claim of right—only a drunken ex-priest’s mangling of the words of ritual—and they had laid violent hands on two of the goddess’s truly anointed before they’d even landed.
Luth’s problem, very simply, was that he was a believer in the powers of the goddess, profoundly so. If that could really be called a problem. He’d had a religious, superstitious grandmother who’d worshipped both Rian and Corannos along with a variety of hearth spirits and seasonal ones, and who’d known just enough about magic and folk spells to leave the grandson she’d reared helplessly prey to the terrors of precisely the sort of place where they were now. Had he not been so anxious not to lose face among the other corans and his baron and the big, capable, grimly sardonic northern mercenary Mallin had brought to lead and train them, Luth would certainly have found a way to back out of the mission when he was named for it.
He should have, he thought dismally. Whatever status that withdrawal would have cost him was nothing as compared to how he’d be diminished and mocked because of what had happened tonight. Who would ever have thought that simple piety, a prayer of thanks to holy Rian herself, could get a person into so much trouble? How should a high country man know how bizarrely far sound—a murmured prayer!—could carry at sea? And Hirnan had hurt him with that pincer-like grip of his. The oldest coran was a big man, almost as big as the bearded northerner, and his fingers had been like claws of iron. Hirnan should have known better, Luth thought, trying to summon some sense of outrage at how unfair all of this was turning out to be.
He jumped sideways again, stumbled, and almost fell. He was grappling for his sword when he realized that it was Vanne who had come up to him. He tried, with minimal success, to turn the motion into one of alertly prudent caution. Vanne, his face blandly expressionless, gestured and Luth bent his head towards him.
‘I’m going down to check on them again,’ the other coran said, as Luth had despairingly known he would. ‘Remember, a corfe whistle if you need me. I’ll do the same.’ Mutely, trying to keep his own expression from shaping a forlorn plea, Luth nodded.
Moving easily, Vanne negotiated the plateau, grasped the rope and slipped over the side. Luth watched the line jerk for a few moments and then go slack as Vanne reached the rocks at the bottom. He walked over to the tree that Maffour had tied the rope to and knelt to run a practised eye over the knot. It was fine, Luth judged, it would continue to hold.
He straightened and stepped back. And bumped into something.
His heart lurching, he spun around. As he did, as he saw what had come, all the flowing blood in his veins seemed to dry up and change to arid powder. He pursed his lips and tried to whistle. Like a corfe.
No sound came out. His lips were dry, as bone, as dust, as death. He opened his mouth to scream but closed it silently and quite suddenly as a curved, jewelled, inordinately long dagger was lifted and held to his throat.
The figures on the plateau were robed in silk and satin, dyed crimson and silver, as for a ceremony. They were mostly women, at least eight of them, but there were two men besides. It was a woman, though, who held the crescent-shaped blade to his throat. He could tell from the swell of her body beneath her robe, even though she was masked. They were all masked. And the masks, every one of them, were of predatory animals and birds. Wolf and hunting cat, owl and hawk, and a silver-feathered corfe with golden eyes that glittered in the moonlight.
‘Come,’ said the priestess with the blade to Luth of Castle Baude, her voice cold and remote, the voice of a goddess at night. A goddess of the Hunt, in her violated sanctuary. She wore a wolf mask, Luth saw, and then he also realized that the ends of the gloves on her hands were shaped like the claws of a wolf. ‘Did you truly think you would not be found and known?’ she said.
No, Luth wanted frantically to say. No, I never thought we could do this. I was sure we would be caught.
He said nothing. The capacity for speech seemed to have left him, silence lying like a weight of stones on his chest. In terror, his brain going numb, Luth felt the blade caress his throat almost lovingly. The priestess gestured with a clawed hand; in response, Luth’s feet, as if of their own will, led him stumbling into the night forest of Rian. There were scented priestesses of the goddess all about him as he went, women masked like so many creatures of prey, clad in soft robes of silver and red amid the darkness of the trees, with the pale moon lost to sight, like hope.
COMING BACK THROUGH the forest, Blaise felt the same rippling sensation as before through the soles of his boots, as if the earth here on the island had an actual pulse, a beating heart. They went faster now, having done what they had come to do, aware that the priestess by the garden might be missed and found at any time. Blaise had dropped back to let Hirnan, carrying the unconscious poet, guide them once more, with a sense of direction seemingly unerring in the darkness of the woods.
They left the forest path and began to twist their way north again through the densely surrounding trees, small branches and leaves crackling underfoot as they went. No moonlight fell here, but they had their night vision now, and they had been this way before. Blaise recognized an ancient, contorted oak, an anomalous sight in a strand of pine and cedar.
Shortly afterwards they came out of the woods onto the plateau. The moon was high overhead, and Maffour’s rope was still tied around the tree, their pathway down to the sea and escape.
But neither Vanne nor Luth was anywhere to be seen.
His pulse prickling with a first premonitory sense of disaster, Blaise strode quickly to the edge of the plateau and looked down.
The sailboat was gone, and the two bound clerics with it. Their own skiff was still there, though, and Vanne’s body was lying in it.
Beside Blaise, Maffour swore violently and made his way swiftly