“Why must you do that, brother?”

“Because… it must be done.”

Taul downed the brandy. “And if you neglect to ring a bell?”

Balniss’s face looked pained. “We must mark time.”

Taul gazed into his glass, rolling the last drop around the base. “If we were a people of superstition, then there would be a way to make propitiation or sacrifice like the nomads do. They offer wild grains to the wind god and salt to the sea god. But as it is, there is nothing I can do.”

Balniss poured more brandy. His eye twitched.

“What is it?” Taul asked.

“What?”

“You always get that look when you have an idea.”

“It’s nothing. You would not agree to it.”

“Tell me!”

Balniss sighed and drank down the last drop of brandy. What could need so much courage? “Have you asked Ryldia about the temple bounty? You could get a child that way.”

Taul scoffed at the suggestion of going to the goddess as a beggar. He shook his head. “We need a girl at this stage. No one would give away a girl, no matter how ill-favored she was.”

“A boy, then?”

Taul considered and nodded reluctantly. A boy might work. He could see to his education and raise him well enough to make an alliance with another house, who then would return the favor and send a boy to consort with one of Ryldia’s nieces. Otherwise, her life would be a long sorrow, watching as others prospered. A boy would give her hope and give her someone to dote over. Especially if the boy was still young and in need of guidance. And then, maybe in time, with rest and care, Ryldia could try again for an heiress.

Taul nodded, the idea taking root. “The boy wouldn’t be over five, I’d think.”

“Usually not.”

“So, it still happens?”

“Yes, of course,” Balniss said. “In the temple, certainly. But in our own sanctuaries?” He shrugged. “The priestesses and diviners never speak of it. And they have a way of handling it so no one ever has all the information about the child’s origin.”

“You don’t know where the child comes from? Of which line? Of which house?”

“No, it’s secret. A child of the goddess has no lineage but the one the adopter gives.”

Taul shook his head. “I don’t think that would be agreeable. The air is thick with tensions between the five high houses.”

“You must do what is best for Ryldia.”

“She will not agree to it. Not if it risks violating Hosmyr law.”

Balniss shook his head and his eyes closed to slits as he downed another dram, his face wrinkling as the alcohol’s fumes rose in his head. “As I said, you must do what is best for Ryldia. For her house.”

Taul considered this.

“Next tenday is the end of autumn,” Balniss said. “That is the time to make a petition. You can arrange it during winter. If a house is to give up a child, it will happen when the mother has had time to consider her options.”

“It sickens me to think some have such an abundance of children to pick which to keep while we wallow in blood here.”

Balniss nodded. “The goddess is fickle.”

Taul could not deny the growing urge to do exactly what Balniss suggested. All that mattered was helping his consort.

His love.

11

Gishna sat in a warm solar surrounded by dark leaved potted plants of a species able to tolerate the deep shadows, yet also capable of holding a deep reservoir of life. The plants kept her alive just another day, another season longer. Stretching her out beyond the reasonable lifespan of a priestess of her time. In her ancestor’s time, twelve hundred years was the prime age to have an heiress, the first child. At that point, the cycles would begin, an endless, though lesser growth toward the Dark.

That was no longer how it was in her time. Instead, she clawed at life, tore at it, desperate to complete the work so that her daughter’s life could be better and longer.

Is that really what she expected? Or was it just to survive the taint?

Just survive, she thought, and nodded to herself. It pricked her conscience to think that was the best she could do for her house. Just to help it cling a little longer.

Another year was ending. Winter didn’t count in Gishna’s mind. The last harvest, the last bell of Autumn, was the end in her mind. Winter was a long, often fickle stretch of veiled stillness. A sigh rattled in her chest. An endless time to reflect on her failures. Hardly the divine rest preached by the ancients. Rest and recover, they’d said. She had too much to do and time could not move fast enough for her. Time needed to pause for herself and accelerate for everyone else. For children and men to grow like southern vines and for women to bear children so she could know what to prune from the garden that was her house—a high house oathed to rule a fifth of Vaidolin.

She sat at a small table, propped up in a wood chair with stiff cushions, and surrounded by diviners in their blue robes, skull glyphs blazing with goddess-light.

Thensil, her chief diviner, Sinnin, the scriptorium’s head scribe, and Sinnin’s assistant, Nathin, were prepared to answer her questions. The summer and autumn reports were not good. Loss and failure filled the kith lined ledger stamped with the wily fox of Ilor’Hosmyr. The ledger didn’t detail the east valley’s struggles to bring forth a better harvest, which was another matter altogether. No, this was a ledger of Mornae procreation.

Her cheek pressed to the paper, eye wide and drying from the effort to see the dark lines. Her long boney finger crept along the page as she silently mouthed the names, embedding them in her memory.

She stopped at a familiar name: Toshtolin.

“A fine bloodline,” she muttered. And if she correctly recalled, it was an ancient offshoot of Hosmyr on both sides, matron and consort. “How did this happen?”

Sinnin stepped closer. “That one did not go as planned, high matron,” he said. “If you recall, the intended consort took the diviner’s oath. The young matron chose the second son. A tender.”

Gishna let out a held breath and coughed. Her frame rattled. In her mind she traveled the genealogical diagrams, from tree to tree, branch to branch, binding and mating across the centuries to that one house. Toshtolin was born of a second daughter’s second daughter. Those had been trying times when the third accord instituted the rules about priestesses and knights, and the temple and Isilayne founded.

“I purposely sent the elder Nevtar boy to bind the taint in that line,” she said. “I need that house!”

Sinnin shrugged. “The Son of Nevtar decided otherwise, and the young matron made her choice before we could propose a better one. Apparently, there was an attraction between her and the second son.”

Gishna turned her head more, cracking her shoulders and neck and suffering the shooting pain. She needed to see the name. Her gauzy vision cleared for a moment and focused long enough to read the name Taul. Marks, dots, and lines followed the name, a shorthand code of the scriptorium. The match still could have been a success if her memory was correct. She strained to remember.

The couple had tried for a child far too early. That was the only explanation. Gishna knew the signs and the pains well enough. She had not listened to her own mother. She had done the opposite of what her own matron mother recommended. It was only with the goddess’s opportune favor that she had birthed Julissa.

Her finger skipped across the page to the Toshtolin matron’s entry, calculating her age.

“So young, that matron,” she said. “A sad business.”