For the length of time it took a heart to beat twice, he simply stared at her friend. Then Qanath saw the tumblers of recognition fall into place, and like a switch had been tripped, his face lit up. Letting out a glad bellow, he seized his prince around the neck and dragged him into a crushing embrace. He still had that fearsome knife in hand, but that wasn’t something Havec would be bothered by.

When he released her friend, it was to take him by the shoulders. By the look on his face, he was about to demand to know where he had been and why he hadn’t told anyone he wasn’t dead, but then his eyes found the Queen. His face grew still, and the question he addressed to her friend was as worried as it was brief. What have you done? she gathered, or maybe, What is going on?

Havec grimaced, gesturing through the open doorway. It surprised her when he spoke in Tabbaqeran: “Can I explain indoors? I swear I haven’t brought trouble down on you, Master Wilbrect.”

The man’s eyes lingered dubiously on his queen, then he hitched up his belt and shouted over his shoulder, “Wil! Al! Bec! Havec! Get your arses out here!”

He took a step back from the door, and the people who emerged in response to his shouting did so with such alacrity that they must have been just out of sight all the while. Four teenage boys, who must be his sons, because they all had the same bright orange hair. Two sets of twins, she realized, and even in the midst of her fatigue Qanath found herself imagining what that must have been like. They gathered the horses up, and her party was finally free to stagger in out of the bitter cold.

Their host led them into a large sitting room where a fire had just been started in the hearth. There were only two armchairs, but the rug on the floor was broad and thick and piled high with pillows. A woman appeared at this point, a Moritian as comfortably-padded and red-haired as her man. Qanath had the impression that, unlike her husband, she hadn’t known Havec and was being introduced. She dropped him a curtsy and turned the most shocking shade of pink before quitting the room as if it were a relief.

They were still settling themselves onto his rug and taking off their coats when their host dropped into his chair. Leaning forward in a business-like manner, he switched back into Tabbaqeran. “You say you’ve not brought trouble to my door, my prince, but here you are keeping company with a band of foreign witches.”

Havec made a face, and she would have said he was abashed. “There is trouble, Master Wilbrect, but it’s not my doing, it’s hers.”

“They tell you that? They’re foreigners.”

“Not to me,” the younger man said quietly.

The red-haired Moritian sat back in his seat, looking grim. “That how it is?”

Her friend sighed, but he didn’t seem annoyed. She had never seen him treat another person so respectfully. Whoever this man had been to him, the relationship had meant a lot. “I should back up. After my father had his first heart attack, it got my parents thinking. Mom didn’t think I was suited to the throne and Dad… I’m not sure about him, I think he just realized he’d like to go on living. She wanted to get rid of me, and Dad finally agreed that was for the best.”

“Lake house wasn’t an accident.” It was a statement, and his shuttered eyes had fallen on the queen, standing stiffly upright in one corner glaring at them.

“You knew,” Havec replied.

The man brushed that away. “I wondered. They never used to let you travel by yourself, and why’d she send you off with so few men? Anyway, no one ever took credit for it.”

“I thought it was my uncle.”

The older man snorted. “Why am I not surprised? A boy more determined to think the best of his parents, I never met.”

Her friend laughed sourly. “That boy got what he had coming to him. She cut a deal with a Tabbaqeran bonding-broker: she would deliver me to the border provided he could make me disappear. A deal Talak got the better of, because he auctioned me off to a crowd, he must have made a fortune. Here I am anyway.”

The other man had thrust himself to his feet as if he couldn’t contain his outrage. Slipping back into his native language, he shouted something at the queen, face as red as his hair. She responded with a cutting glance at her son, voice dripping bile. Qanath had no idea what she’d said, but it punctured the red-haired man’s rage. He was left looking back and forth between them with his mouth open, too confused to speak.

“Anyway,” Havec continued, “when my master died, I did the thing people just freed from slavery usually do, probably, and ran for home. Only to find…”

The man grunted. As he dropped back into his chair, he said, “How’d he die? You kill him yourself?” He sounded hopeful, even eager, as if he wanted for this to be true.

Havec didn’t answer immediately, studying him like he was choosing his words. “I did not,” he said eventually. “The man who bought me was… a master of the martial arts, one of the greatest in the Empire. We had a deal: he trained me, so that I could get my revenge, and in exchange I didn’t try to murder him every day for six years like I wanted to. When he died, he made me his heir. That’s why I have all these people following me around: it turns out that’s a big deal to them. They’re here to make sure I don’t forget I’m Tabbaqeran now and grow a bread.”

His mother said something, lip curling, but this time the man replied in Tabbaqeran, and his voice was calm. “Actually, I was thinking he looks more like himself than I’ve ever seen. Between how shy he was and all the pressure you put on him, I wasn’t sure the boy would ever find himself.” When she chose not to respond, he turned his attention back to Havec. “That why you’ve got her tied up, then? Mean to revenge yourself on her?”

Havec scrubbed a weary hand across his face. He told the man what they knew of the plot, the raids along both sides of the border. The alliance with the hedge-witches, the destruction of the Tabbaqeran border town. When he heard the old king was alive again, their host swore. When he learned the Wight of Winter walked his country in the flesh, he went as white as the fog that was the mantle of the god. Qanath paid all of this little attention. She had become so tired by that point that it was difficult to think, and the fire was very hot. None of this was news to her, and she wasn’t sure why they had come here, unless it was in search of warmth.

Sometime later, she found herself in a room that was absolutely full of beds, each with a brightly-colored quilt. Two bunkbeds, which must be the repose of all those boys with their flaming hair. She couldn’t recollect that they had returned from the task of unsaddling the horses, but it was entirely possible they had done so, very noisily, and she just hadn’t taken note. Her stomach was full, and she had no memory of eating breakfast, although there must have been bacon: her mouth still tasted of it. She was too weary to wonder about that, or the doom even now descending on her people, and fell into heavy sleep the instant her head touched the pillow.

We All Fall Down

They ended up sleeping through the whole of the daylight and on into the night. Havec hadn’t meant to waste so much time, but maybe it was for the best. If he had been that tired, what of the others, who didn’t carry a supernatural nurse in their pocket? He had slept in the master bed while his friends availed themselves of the boys’ beds; he had prevailed upon their reluctant hosts to lock his mother in the root cellar with a stack of blankets so her jailors needn’t sleep in spells.

He rose and dressed in darkness, and after chasing Master Wilbrect and Mistress Medda back to their own bed, spent the remains of the night prowling their home restlessly. He wanted to be off, but they didn’t have a plan and that didn’t strike him as a great way to run into the darkness in a crisis. Every time he went past a window, he paused to peer anxiously into the night, but the horrific storm he feared kept failing to arrive.

The others began reappearing a couple hours before dawn, convening in the living room around the fire he’d built up. Hot Priest was the first to arrive, and the sight of his handsome, rather predatory visage shook Havec from his worries. He’d barely had time to begin wondering what might happen now the two of them were alone when Hib appeared. The sorcerer and his thing came next, but Havec had retrieved his mother from the locked cellar beneath the house before the girl woke up.

They ate breakfast standing around the kitchen while he quizzed their host about Lofflied, the Wight of Winter, but Master Wilbrect didn’t have much to tell. This man had taught Havec most everything he knew as a boy: his letters, his numbers, history. Not to mention Tabbaqeran. He was a learned man, as well as a dairy farmer; universities and institutions of scholarly research were the exclusive property of wealthy peoples, and in Moritia, a fondness for pursuits of the mind wasn’t enough on its own to keep someone fed. He was also a kind soul and a wise man, but he just wasn’t a shaman. He had little more to tell them of their foe than Havec recollected himself.

They were on their way while the sky remained dark, only a few of the faintest stars winking out. There was a road to follow now, the ruts of the cart Master Wilbrect hitched up to carry his cheeses to the coast. It was no Imperial highway but the footing was infinitely superior to stumbling through the woods like they had been doing, and they were able to mount up confidently. The storm he expected had yet to commence, and Havec had no idea what to make of that.

They still had no plan. Havec had sent them running east because he feared the coming storm, but it had yet to arrive, and he felt like they were carrying through with the flight for lack of a better idea. They were only some miles outside of Callon by now, it was the obvious destination, but what to do once they were there? His mother was the only one who might have given them a hint but she refused. As the sun rose into an overcast sky, they kept on down the rutted road toward the coast, pushed by the force of momentum.

None of them were prepared to come around a curve in the trail around dawn to find that they had company. The trees and the slope fell away to present them with a fabulous vista across the last remaining land to the distant sea, and Havec was down on the ground: he had hopped down in order to stretch his legs and warm himself and was leading his horse by the reins. An imposing figure stood upon the path before them, gazing upon the scenery as if enjoying the view, a large man in faded old furs, white-haired head proudly raised. His mantle of fog had thinned and hung about him now more like wisps of tattered mist than a solid bank of cloud, undulating in the frigid morning wind. There was no doubt who this was. The instant they perceived him, all of them drew to a halt.

It had already taken note of them and turned. Its eyes went instantly to Havec, and his heart felt as if it had frozen solid in his chest: he was looking into his father’s face, still as bloodless-pale as it had been, but rather more animated. “Grandfather,” it said, and the voice was his father’s but higher, more resonant, as if he were crying down a tube of glass. “Shall I free you from your prison of bone and meat?”

It took him a moment, helped along by the sudden trembling of his body and the way his hands balled into fists, to realize that these words had been addressed to Kebbal and had not belonged to Havec’s father. “Judging by how angry I am,” he growled through his teeth, because he couldn’t have moved his jaw to save his life, “I gather the answer is no, and that you have offended it.”

“Pity.”

“You called Kebbal grandfather. Gods were born of it?”

“That’s how you style the entity tethered to you? It was a figure of speech, no more. ‘Precursor’ lacks reverence.”

“Which you feel.”

“They are more than us,” it replied without passion, a statement of fact. “We are because the nature of the world demands it: if a thing is worthy of awe, a being must exist to revel in it. Even so sordid a thing as the moils of humanity.” It flicked a derisive look at Farait, casting shade on his patron. “In contrast, they preexisted hagila ra’ir, and how it is, is shaped by how they are. Absent them, the world would have evolved into a different place operating according to different rules, and so different gods would have been born.”

“Does that mean you’ll give up on whatever you mean to do and go home if I ask you to?”

His father took several steps closer, and although he was staring directly into Havec’s eyes, he knew that this wasn’t his father and it wasn’t actually looking at him. “If you love this blood-cage, consider all the harm I might do to it. Its allegiances and your allegiances aren’t quite the same, are they? You cannot unleash yourself on me without destroying it, and why should you care what I do? I will promise not to harm a hair on its head, so long as you keep it out of my way.”

Havec opened his mouth to respond and fell to the ground as if his bones had melted. It was so sudden, so unexpected, he didn’t even understand what was happening until he was halfway to the ground. He just had time to think Oh shit before he sat down hard on his ass, legs sprawling. He tipped onto his back, still part of the same uncheckable motion, and he could only hope he didn’t concuss himself. The others were only just turning to him in surprise: no one was catching him. His head struck the soil and bounced, and it hurt, but at least he hadn’t landed on a rock.

“You think you can threaten Kebbal and walk away?” he demanded and found himself a little surprised he was able to talk. The lassitude he felt was so pervasive, even his heart barely fluttered in his chest. “It’s vengeance. You think it won’t make you pay?”

The god looked down upon him briefly, evincing neither satisfaction nor doubt. “If I killed you and unleashed it, it would unmake me with a thought. But we will not get to that point, because it is not willing for you to be harmed.” With a nod of its leonine head, it said respectfully, “Grandfather.” Then it turned around and walked away.

Kebbal, you can’t do this! he shouted inside his head. This is the wrong choice, you have to let me up! But he just kept lying there with all the determination of an overcooked noodle. There wasn’t even a sense of torpor to struggle against: it felt as if his will had been disconnected from his flesh. It ought to have been alarming, but he was too relaxed to be distressed.

The Wight of Winter had vanished amidst the trees, even its foggy mane only visible in patches, when Amril said, “I’m not sure I understand what’s happening.”

“It’s Kebbal.” He was too appalled by the situation to be angry at anyone, even Smooth Guy. “It messes with my body all the time, that’s how it talks to me. Washes away my aches and pains, makes me happy when I’m down.” He recollected the day Farait hit on him in the shrine, when Kebbal tried to promise him that everything was going to be alright and he puked his guts up in the street. “Not always with the intended results, but I had no idea it could do something like this.”

“To be clear. The man whose quest this is, and whom we thought was our most powerful weapon, can’t do anything but flop around.”

“Oh, he’s not going anywhere,” Hair-On-End replied. He raised his arms, wrapping them around an imaginary object and growling to indicate the ferocity of the embrace. “It’s not letting him!”