Chapter One
They had taken the child as soon as the cord was cut. The queen had not offered payment, although sometimes Lucinda wished she had. It would have reduced what she’d done to a transaction, a terrible one, but a transaction nonetheless. Now it was a sacrifice, one she had never intended to make.
Indeed? It is far more meaningful than your constant offerings of mead.
“You should not have forced me to give my child up.” Lucinda spoke aloud, although she didn’t have to in order for Sophia to hear her. But that was how humans communicated, and whatever else Lucinda was, she was also human.
She sat on the seawall, her hands folded in her lap because she knew better than to touch the stone and risk reading it. She looked out over the ceaselessly churning silver-gray waves of the Neadra Sea, her back to Sophia’s sacred home of Rothwil and all of the busy, bustling acolytes going about their daily chores.
The sun glinted off the water and she closed her eyes. The ache was strong and hadn’t eased during her time at Rothwil. Three months now, almost to the day.
In the morning it had rained, as was natural for springtime, and yet she hadn’t been sure spring would come again, not until now. The rain brought a fresh, clean smell, as if the world were newly washed.
Behind her Aefentid, the harbor-thane, was sweeping the pathway to the lighthouse. She had been sweeping the pathway for more than an hour now, and Lucinda suspected she was keeping an eye on her, worried that she would throw herself off the wall and into the sea.
In the quiet harbor, a few small boats tied to the dock rocked gently in the waves. Near the harbor-thane’s small cottage, the ash and hawthorn trees were coming into leaf, and beyond it the nodding heads of the spring flowers added bright splashes of color to the green expanse of the meadow. Overhead, the blue sky showed not a hint of the earlier clouds and the sun shone down steadily.
I did that, she thought, or perhaps Sophia thought, but it was Lucinda who knew the price that had been paid.
She eyed the boats. She could sail one to the Stone Island, then travel to the queen’s seat in Sumorselde and murder her. Then she would snatch up her child and run away. But first would be the murder.
Sometimes she planned to poison the queen. Sometimes she decided to use the ritual knife she kept in a sheath under her sleeve. Sometimes she plotted it for the dead of night and other times in the full light of morning. Each time, she imagined with bright clarity the sight of her enemy falling beneath her attack.
It might be better to think of her as the mother of our child, not our enemy, Sophia said.
“Please do not say our child,” Lucinda snapped. “You had no part in making the child, only in losing him to the queen.”
Though she wasn’t speaking to Aefentid, the harbor-thane sighed, then stumped over to the seawall, leaning on the broom like a walking stick. Lucinda glanced at her, then away. Aefentid looked the way she had for as long as Lucinda had known her, old in a vague way that meant she might have anywhere from sixty to a hundred winters. The years had already caused most of the damage they were ever going to cause and she had not as yet bowed under their weight.
“It is difficult to think clearly when anger clouds your mind,” Aefentid said, standing at her shoulder and looking at the water. “Being Sophia’s Zoe is powerful; it protects you from the malice of others the way a cloak protects you from the weather. But it cannot protect you from yourself.”
“Please don’t tell me that my anger is damaging to me. My anger is not what—”
“Hold on to it, then,” Aefentid said. “Hold tight to it, if you will. I’m just saying, it’s difficult to think clearly when anger clouds your mind.”
Lucinda shook her head and turned her attention back to the sea.
“I know what you did,” the harbor-thane said gently, “and I know what you want, for any mother would want the same. But even if you succeeded in stealing the child back, you and the child would be hunted for the rest of your lives. You would find no friends or allies to hide you—for it is the queen’s child now. Would you bring death to Rothwil again?”
“I will leave here, I will leave the Stone Island—”
“And go where, on what ship, with what money, to what future?”
It is a dream, like all of your other dreams.
Lucinda turned away from the harbor and jumped down from the seawall. Without thinking she used her hand to steady herself. The crystal in her palm, the symbol of her stone-craft, touched the stone of the seawall, and she saw it all again: her dearest friend sprawled on this wall, dead, her blood staining the stones, flowing into the sea.
She had caused that, she, Lucinda, had brought that to Rothwil. And she could not risk it happening again. She could not kill the queen and take her child back.
But Sophia was wrong. Reuniting with her child was not a dream. There was a way that she could raise her own child that did not involve soldiers hunting her down for the rest of her life. There had to be a way—
You are my right hand, you are Zoe, and there is no way.
The anger flared again but this time Lucinda did not let it fill her mind with images of the queen’s unnatural and painful death. She took a breath and tried to see through the grief, to push it and the anger aside long enough to think.
A raven cawed, a sharp, abrupt sound, and she watched its black shape soar across the sky, releasing the anger as Aefentid suggested, letting it go—just for now, just for this moment—until she made a tiny island of calm in her heart.
From that tiny island of calm arose a memory: Her friend dying on the seawall, another victim of the enemy Lucinda fought. Not so long ago, the god of the underworld had asked, When you saw her fall and didn’t try to save her, what was that? And Lucinda had replied, A coward’s act.
To run away from the queen, as she had, afraid the queen would try to kill her in order to conceal her crime, to seek shelter here on the island of Rothwil, that was a coward’s act. All she had done, all she had submitted to, that was the work of a coward. And Lucinda Land-Stepper, who had stood against her enemy no matter the cost, Lucinda was no coward.
She was Sophia’s right hand. And being Sophia’s right hand had its own power. It would require diplomacy, which Lucinda sorely lacked, but for this purpose she could choose the best words and exhibit patience while saying them. The queen would not reject having the right hand of a god advising her. Having Sophia’s most important acolyte by her side would help prove the queen’s legitimacy to rule. And Lucinda would be able to keep the queen and her child safe from harm, for such was the strength and power of Zoe.
She would be able to watch her child grow to adulthood by taking a role like a much-loved aunt. She might even be considered a second mother, for the queen would not have time to raise the child herself.
“Light—never mind. I will do it.” She walked swiftly down the neatly swept pathway to the tall, wooden tower where the signal-fire in its stone bed was laid ready to summon any passing ship to the sacred island of Rothwil. The harbor-thane didn’t try to stop her. That was good, for Lucinda would not be stopped now.