Chapter One
Lucinda, for many years called Land-Stepper for her wandering ways, knelt within the rune she’d drawn and called to mind the precise wording of the spell she would need to use to summon Night Star, Feorbana, the Destroyer, Life-Taker.
It’s the only way you can stop her, Sowunmi had said. Sowunmi, sometimes called Simon, a former knight in her dead lover’s retinue, stood beside her, his boots carefully out of the rune.
He was a Kigan warrior with the dark coloring common to the Kiga, in contrast to the light coloring of the Sige among whom they were living. She herself had an Edel mother and looked nothing like the Sige, either. That didn’t mean she understood him any better than she did the Sige.
She took the seax, the ritual dagger, from her sleeve and added what would become another scar to the palm of her hand. The Sige gods didn’t demand human sacrifice but, it must be said, they liked blood.
In her other palm nestled an amber stone, the symbol of her stone-craft, a gift she loved and hated, despised and relied upon. Amber was the stone of the god Sophia, to whom Lucinda had once been united, but that seemed a long time ago.
Sowunmi’s boots moved restlessly. She was taking too much time. Still, she hesitated. It wasn’t the kind of thing she could undo if she decided she didn’t like it. And if it allowed Night Star a peek into her innermost thoughts, she and Sowunmi would be doomed.
But what other choice did she have? They’d tried everything else they could think of to stop Night Star and nothing had worked.
She closed her eyes and said it: “Night Star, I have heard you. Night Star, hear me.” The third recitation of a god’s name was the important one, the one that brought the spell into being. Sowunmi hissed in an impatient breath and she said in a rush, “Night Star, I will do as you ask.”
She opened her eyes. A cloud scudded across the sun, turning day into night, and a cold wind sighed through the market square, winding around Lucinda, pushing against the tall stone tower in which Night Star would have imprisoned her if Lucinda hadn’t performed a bit of trickery to avoid it.
Beside her Sowunmi stopped moving, stood perfectly still.
For a moment she could see nothing but a dark expanse all around her, the desert of eternity that Night Star would bring to the world, all of the worlds, if Lucinda and Sowunmi didn’t stop her.
Then with a crack like the sound of thunder, the cloud moved past and the sun came out and the street was alive with folk.
Sowunmi said, “What happened?”
Lucinda rose to her feet and scuffed at the outline of the rune to blur it and disrupt its power. “Night Star accepted my pledge.” She tried to sound as if she’d expected nothing less; she strived even to seem indifferent. But she’d bound up her fate with Night Star’s and she couldn’t turn back now.
Her hands trembled as she wiped the blood away with a cloth from her pack. When the wound didn’t stop bleeding, Sowunmi helped her tie the cloth around her palm. He held her hand between his for a time and when he released it, the trembling had stopped.
He eyed the sky. “Was that the sign? That she accepted your pledge?”
Wordlessly, she held up her other hand. Where there’d been an amber stone was now a clear one that glittered coldly, not unlike a star in the sky. A diamond, such as the Nathwa far to the north mined and used to adorn their clothing. Rare, though not as prized among the North Sige as colored stones.
The breath whistled in through Sowunmi’s teeth. Some word verged on his lips, attempting to escape, but he bit down and made no remark.
She prodded the diamond with her fingertip and felt a spark of connection that made her pull her finger back. Agreeing to this . . . partnership? . . . was bad enough without seeking any kind of intimate union with Night Star.
Lucinda had taken this step the way an outlaw might run through water to put the hounds off the scent. She was trying to survive the pursuit. She didn’t want to try to make friends with the hound.
“Will you please say something further?” he asked, the tension of his jaw slackening only enough to let the words through.
“I’m still me, Sowunmi,” she said.
He didn’t look entirely reassured by her statement. Sowunmi liked to see evidence.
“The pilgrims are arriving,” he said.
She lifted her bandaged hand to block the sun from her eyes. “I see.” The throngs were building around the watchtower where she and Sowunmi had hoped to find a sorcerer who could help them stop Night Star. But the only magic here was Night Star’s: she’d enchanted the tower as a trap, a prison for Lucinda, but Lucinda had been dealing with gods for a long time now and in her wariness, she had arranged to have one of her acolytes—the one she persisted in thinking of as the stone girl—spring the trap.
Now the girl was in the trap and Lucinda wasn’t. Given the girl was a callous and unrepentant murderer, Lucinda didn’t find the situation too upsetting.
Sowunmi was the one who’d come up with the idea to create a pilgrimage that would hide their movements through the Sige lands. His ploy had proved wildly successful—too successful. Now they had hundreds of pilgrims to deal with.
“What should we do about them?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s next. Night Star accepted me or seems to have accepted me. But I don’t know if there will be trials.” What she meant was she felt the pilgrims were largely his problem.
“Do you—” He frowned. “Can she hear what we’re saying?”
She smiled, the first genuine smile she’d felt like sharing in some time, and made a gesture to include the folk in the street around them. “Anyone can hear what we’re saying.”
“You know what I mean.”
She did. “Probably. My point is that she’s not the only one we may need to worry about. What if another god has sent an acolyte to report on what we’re doing?”
“What are we doing?” Sowunmi asked.
She was bleeding through the bandage. She took it off and stowed it in her pack; she didn’t want anyone but especially not a sorcerer to have access to her blood. She herself had used a spell that called like to like in order to see justice visited upon her brother, but she had no interest in allowing someone else to use such a spell against her.
She concentrated for a moment and turned her hand to stone, then shook the stone away and squeezed her newly healed hand into a fist.
“I hate it when you do that,” he said.
“Which is why I let you bandage it.” She looked up at him, at his dark eyes in a face he had erased all expression from long years before. “I’m sorry, you were asking . . . ?”
“Are we any nearer our goal?”
Our goal was to find Night Star’s weakness, if such a thing existed, and use it to destroy her. A task that had grown even more perilous now that Lucinda had fallen in with Night Star’s wish to use the Creator to balance her power. But whatever Night Star thought, Lucinda was not the Creator or even a creator. She was just Lucinda Land-Stepper, a wanderer who’d found out too late that most of the evil in the world was perpetrated by those with good intentions.
Because Lucinda was not, could not be, the Creator, could only pretend to fulfill that role, destroying Night Star might well destroy Lucinda, too.
“We’re nearer in the sense that we’re not farther,” she said.
“Only in your mind would that be considered progress. What now?”
“I need to get away from here, to decide what must be done next. She is very present all around us and I’m having trouble thinking my own thoughts.”
“I suppose we can manage that. But I would like us to do something about your acolyte before we leave the city.”
“My acolyte?” It took Lucinda a moment to remember. Then she knew he meant the stone girl trapped in the tower. Lucinda had used her powers of stone-craft, augmented by the immanence she’d accumulated over the past months to transform the girl into living stone, to prevent her from hurting anyone else. “All I know how to do is release her from my service. That’s the same as killing her.”
“I don’t like the idea of her trapped in that tower,” Sowunmi said. “I sense that it will disturb my sleep.”
In one of their recent conversations, he’d talked about “unpalatable compromises” and she suspected that leaving the girl in the tower would be another.
“I doubt very much that releasing her will be as simple as knocking down the bricked-in doorway,” Lucinda said, “but if you must try, then at least ask one of the pilgrims to do it. The tower may be enchanted against you the way it was against me.”
“I won’t ask a pilgrim to do something I don’t dare do,” he said, and then: “I don’t mean that as criticism of you or what you did.”
“I didn’t take it as such,” she said. “You know I believe that’s a foolish way to think. A Sige way. Or perhaps I should say a Kigan way. We’ll need to be nearer the tower if you insist on trying.”
“I’ll need a pickaxe or something like that,” he said. “One of the pilgrims might have brought a tool I can use.”
“The blacksmith must be nearby,” she said. “Don’t you hear him?”
They followed the ringing sound of steel being hammered into shape and found the blacksmith on the other side of the once-public barn, which had under Brihtnoth’s reign been closed as a public good and reserved for the lord’s use and whim.
The barn was falling into disrepair, the main door sagging drunkenly off its hinges, several of the boards warping badly enough to allow the weather inside.
The blacksmith’s croft looked more prosperous; the thatched roof didn’t show bare patches and the weeds had been kept down.
The blacksmith was of a size with Sowunmi, but North Sige in coloring: very pale as if the sunlight had never touched his skin. His bright red hair was tied back from his face.
Sowunmi shuffled his boots against the gravel in the clearing surrounding the blacksmith’s anvil and he glanced up and lowered his hammer.
“Good day,” Sowunmi said and the blacksmith narrowed his eyes at them, then made a gesture of courtesy towards Lucinda that might mean he suspected she was a woman of substance or else knew she was a god—possessed the immanence of a god, anyway.
“Eamund,” he said, raising his voice slightly, and a young boy near the forge dropped the bellows and came at a run. “Run in and bring these folk something to drink.”
Lucinda began to speak—she didn’t want this to turn into an overly long negotiation—but Sowunmi elbowed her in the ribs and she remained silent.
Sowunmi made a go-ahead gesture, rolling his hand, and the blacksmith nodded and brought the hammer down on the horseshoe he was working, each strike throwing up sparks that reminded her of Ligberend, the smith-god whom she had killed, each hammer blow an accusation she hadn’t expected.
She turned away, seeking relief, and by then the boy had returned with a bottle of mead and two cups on a wooden plate, which he carried to them with such immense concentration his tongue hung out of the corner of his mouth.
His relief was palpable when Lucinda and Sowunmi took the cups and Lucinda poured the mead. He gave the blacksmith an anxious look but the blacksmith’s back was to them as he finished working on the horseshoe.
Lucinda said, “Thank you, that was very refreshing,” and handed her cup back. He collected Sowunmi’s, too, but now carried the used cups in his hand, the tray and bottle of mead tucked under his arm as he trotted back inside the croft.
The blacksmith dunked the shoe into a pail of water, which sizzled and blew up a cloud of steam. He said, “Sometimes I talk to Ligberend.”
Why had they come? Why had she said, The blacksmith must be nearby? Why hadn’t she let Sowunmi go among the pilgrims and locate a pickaxe that way?
“Sometimes I talk to Guthhafoc,” Sowunmi countered, his hand going to the hilt of his sword. Ligberend’s sword, as it happened.
“Does he talk back?” the smith asked, wiping his brow on his sleeve.
“Not usually,” Sowunmi said. “Not to me, at any rate.”
“Ligberend talks back to me.” The smith’s gaze settled on Lucinda’s face, his bright green eyes daring her to contradict him, and it was all she could do to hold it and not flinch away. Ligberend had gotten what he deserved for what he’d done, and she didn’t feel guilty for it, exactly. She just wished it hadn’t needed to have been done. And it wouldn’t have needed to be done if he’d been her friend in the world and not only in her heart.
“Or did, sometimes. He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
“The sin is not in you,” Sowunmi said.
“And who are you to absolve a man?”
“He’s no temple-thane,” Lucinda said. “He means Ligberend is dead.”
The green gaze left her face to seek the truth from Sowunmi’s, and perhaps he found it there because he sighed and said, “Brihtnoth, too?”
“Brihtnoth, too,” Sowunmi confirmed.
“Good riddance to him,” the smith said. “But I’ll surely miss Ligberend.”
He didn’t accuse—how could he? He didn’t know anything to accuse her of. And yet she felt it in her belly, as if he’d said, You killed him, you murderer.
She wasn’t a murderer, or not in her opinion and not according to the Orlog, the law of the universe, but she felt it, the smith’s unsaid accusation, the crime that he would believe to be true of her if someone told him what had happened, and it made her dizzy, as if she were looking at herself from the wrong way round, looking at a Lucinda who was the opposite of what she knew herself to be.
“We have to get the girl out,” she said. “The girl in the tower, we have to get her out.”