Chronicles of the Last Days Chapter 3

Chapter 2

D

arna looked out over the Anamat valley from a border shrine tucked high in the mountains. She’d just glimpsed a dragonlet of Anara, or rather, she thought she might have, but she wasn’t quite sure. With dragonlets, you could never be sure. The scene spread out ahead of her was a different matter. It had definitely changed since she’d last seen it, less than a moon-round before. The sea shone in the midday sun, just as it had then, but now it shone all the way up to its new, muddy banks, far inland from where they’d been before. The road into the city was mostly dry, but water encroached on it near the West Gate Market. An inlet ran up to one of the larger villages, where before there’d been only a stream. Boats moored on its banks in what had once been pasturelands, and a few tents stood nearby.

A quarter of the city was up to its ankles in water. “What have I done?” Darna thought aloud.

“

You

haven’t done anything,” Sunna scolded her. Darna hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “It’s the dragons, getting revenge on the Cereans. Look at them.” She waved her hand at the tents and boats. “Crawling all over us.”

“It looks more like revenge on us,” Raina said. “But Sunna’s right. This is Na’s work, and he answers to no priestess, nor princes either. Maybe the other dragons are all going wild. Even if you moved some bits of stone out of place, you didn’t shake the earth; only they can do that.”

Darna couldn’t explain to them why she’d felt her own hand in the shift of the land, even if it had been a dragon’s force behind it. She’d known where the power ran through the earth and she’d helped to do something that she’d known was not quite right. Then she’d called up the dragon, or at least given Salara strength on that last day, the strength to do this. Salara had given her strength, too, but it had a price. She was pretty sure that the cramps in her gut were only the start of it.

The shift of the earth and the rising of the sea were echoes of what had happened when she and her lover had given strength to a wild dragon, strength to shake off the invaders – and to destroy themselves, it seemed.

“We’d better go on, if we want to get to Raina’s place before dark,” Sunna said.

It seemed absurd to worry about how far they had to walk that day when the city was ruined, or at least well on its way to ruin.

“We won’t get there before dark, even if we could keep up a good pace,” Raina said. They’d been traveling slowly so far because of Darna’s cramps. “We could get in by midnight if we pushed through,” Raina said. She was probably eager to get back to her house and her mostly fosterling children.

The three women set out again, Sunna and Raina flanking Darna, guarding her. The view of the city slid behind the trees for a while. The change in the land had been different in Slaradun. Terrifying there, too, except that she’d been beyond terror in Salara’s embrace. Besides, the province had been so bleak and barren to begin with that it felt almost like a mercy to destroy it, like the death of her lover so soon after he had gone mad. He’d said that he didn’t want to live that way, but she wondered if death was what he’d really wanted in the end.

The destruction of Anamat was more than she wanted to see, the end of its lush valley and the jewel of a city on the bay. It was home, as much as any place could be. Darna’s thoughts stalled as the welts on her belly burned and her stomach cramped. She stumbled, unable to keep her eyes on the path as she watched the shining waters lapping at shores they’d never reached before.

By the time the sun was setting, they were barely halfway to the city and still a very long way from Raina’s house, too.

“I’m hungry,” Sunna said, giving voice to what they were all feeling. It had been a long day’s walk, even though they hadn’t traveled as far as they’d wanted to.

“We could stop to eat at South Turning,” Raina suggested, indicating the small town not far ahead.

“What about all those Cereans camped around it?” Darna said. South Turning was the village they’d seen from the border, with the boats pulled up and the tents in its fields. It was a big place, considerably bigger than the town around Slaradun keep had been.

Raina shrugged. “If we’re going to stop for the night, this is the best place, Cereans or no. Could you walk through to dawn?”

Another cramp shot around her guts. “No,” Darna gasped. The pain was exhausting. “We’d better stop there.”

They waited for Darna to recover – again – then went on. A short while later, they reached the town’s dark and quiet streets and made their way to the temple on its central square. They heard no one walking near them, but Sunna kept one hand on the hilt of her sword, and Raina looked tense too. Darna wondered, briefly, if there was any real difference between being a hunted woman and being a prisoner. Sunna was an old friend, and she and Raina had come to keep Darna safe, but they would not let her out of their sights, not even for a moment.

“Put your hood up,” Sunna reminded her. It had fallen down again. Darna drew it up, though she wished she didn’t have to. Covering her hair meant closing off her peripheral vision, and she felt half-blind as they crossed to the temple. She heard the hiss of the others’ in-taken breath, then turned to look.

The temple’s carved columns and gilded murals shone dimly in the moonlight. The gates, closed and barred, were dark. No lamp lighted the porch; no priestess waited in the gatehouse to take offerings. Something shone on the ground. Darna cast a wary glance over her shoulder. The men on the tavern porch across the square didn’t seem to have seen them yet. She bent down to look.

“Phew,” Sunna said, wrinkling her nose.

Sheep’s entrails and blood lay across the temple threshold. Darna backed away.

“We’d better go to the tavern for supper, then,” Raina said faintly.

“I’d like to know where the priestesses are,” Sunna said.

“We can look for them after we eat, if the tavern keeper doesn’t know what happened. I’ll ask her,” Raina said.

“Well, then, the tavern’s the thing,” Sunna said with grim resolution. “Do you know every tavern keeper in the valley?”

Raina shrugged. “No, just most of the ones along this road and a few others. It helps to keep up with what’s happening.”

Darna wondered how Raina managed to keep up with all of that along with her household and the Defenders, but there was no chance to ask; they’d already reached the tavern.

Unlike the temple, bright lamps lit the tavern porch, where a few village men lounged, holding jars of ale in both hands.

“What brings you out on such a night, guildswomen?” one of the men asked.

“Supper and a bed, same as anyone,” Raina replied. “Is Orla here?”

The men looked at one another. “Can’t say. You’ll have to ask in the kitchen.”

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” another of the men said. Darna’s hand was already on the curtain, pulling it aside, and Sunna and Raina were right behind her. She hesitated.

The scene within was not threatening, nor was it what Darna had expected. In ordinary times, the tavern would be full of travelers on their way to the city for Midsummer, a mix of men and women, some children, almost all Theranians. Instead, there were Cereans, Ganateans, and a lone Enomaean, all men of soldiering age or sailors with their various caps and headdresses, wearing pointed boots instead of sandals.

“My woman’s at home; all of them are,” said the first man on the porch.

“We’re three together, and I know Orla,” Raina said. She nudged Darna forward.

Some of the men inside looked up to see who was arriving, but most were preoccupied with discussions amongst themselves.

“I’ll go ask for a private room,” Raina said.

“No.” Darna put a hand on her arm. “I want to stay here. Maybe we can learn something.”

“I can’t understand a word they’re saying,” Sunna complained.

“I don’t speak their language well, but I can catch a word here and there,” Darna said. Curiosity was getting the better of her. She spotted an empty table near the kitchen door and angled her way toward it, weaving between clusters of sailors leaning over their tables, arguing with one another and playing dice. Raina and Sunna followed close behind.

A barmaid darted out from the kitchen and nodded them to the empty table.

“Is Orla here?” Raina asked her.

The barmaid cast a nervous glance toward the kitchen. “She’s gone out. She’ll be back later. If you want to wait for her here?”

“We’d like a private room, to sleep.”

“They’re all taken. We’re full up.”

“When Orla gets back, tell her that Raina’s here. Meanwhile, we’ll have small ale and whatever’s on the fire.”

“Very well.” The maid gave a quick bow and backed into the kitchen, returning moments later with their jars of ale. She set out across the room with a battle-weary expression on her face. Her elbows fended off reaching men. Darna noted that only a few of them made efforts to molest her, really only three of them, but they made up for the rest, who ignored their goings-on. There was one groper at a table by the winter fireplace, another next to the door, and the last one sitting in the middle of the room in a spot the barmaid had to pass often. His hair was especially oily under his silly Cerean cap.

Raina and Sunna sat in silence, and all three of them kept their backs to the wall. The maid returned with bowls of soup and a basket of bread. Sunna handed over a short string of beads, never taking her eyes off the room.

“Don’t worry about them,” the barmaid told her. “Their captain will be along soon to shoo them back to their camp. He says he doesn’t want trouble, not yet.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” Darna said.

“No, it isn’t. We don’t have any lodging, but if you don’t mind the kitchen, there’ll be others sleeping there too, and it’s warm.”

Raina and Sunna looked at each other, communicating something. “Thank you for the offer, and do send Orla to us when she gets back,” Raina said.

The barmaid leaned in close and whispered. “She’s seeing to the priestesses. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

Raina gave a knowing nod. So, the tavern keeper did know where they were gone, and if they weren’t safe, then at least someone was working to get them to safety.

“Hey!” one of the Cereans shouted. He banged his empty jar on the table, sending the barmaid scurrying to refill it. She didn’t stop to talk again as they sopped up their soup. At one point, a tall Ganatean glanced past the three women. He stopped, then doubled back to look again. Darna made a show of being intent on something in her bowl. When she looked up, the Ganatean was gone.

“Do you know that man?” she asked Sunna.

“The one that just left? No. It’s possible that he recognized me from when I was watching the temple gate, but I doubt it.”

“The Aralel isn’t letting foreigners in now, is she?” Raina asked, alarmed.

Sunna shook her head. “No much, but you know the treasurers. If there’s enough offering, they’ll let almost anyone in.” She turned to Darna. “Could he know you?”

It wasn’t likely, but if he’d been one of the Ganateans who’d come to Slaradun, he could have seen her there. “I don’t know. I hope not,” she said. The Ganateans might not know her, but they might also have gotten wind that her uncle was still looking for a red-haired priestess who walked with a stick. She still had the hair, but she’d left the stick behind. No foreigner would recognize her as a priestess, dressed as she was in an old farm woman’s tunic, and they were even less likely to connect her with the bounty offered by the usurper of Tiadun, but it was a big bounty, as these things went. She wished that she was still wearing the Enomaean turban to cover her hair better.

“Where in the ways is Orla?” Raina asked no one in particular as she tore her last piece of bread in two.

Darna’s grasp on the Cerean language wasn’t good, but she caught occasional words and snatches of conversation, including speculation about when they might raid another temple. That last was shushed as all the men at that table looked nervously to the kitchen door.

“We pay these wenches well enough,” one of the Cereans said. “They oughta be glad for it. I’d just as soon come in and take it.”

“Captain says to keep the peace until the others come.”

“Others from home, or from that place… What was it called?”

“Terandun, something like that. They call all their places something-dun, lun, mun, bun,”

“Sun mun dun!” Another one echoed. “Women, all of them, and their puny little armies.” Someone elbowed him, and he stopped.

“Captain.”

The men in the room stood, blocking the view of their captain, who had just entered. Darna had glimpsed him only briefly. He wore gold-woven cloth and had a thick belly. It wasn’t as thick as the belly she’d seen on the captain who had duped her long ago, but fat enough. The face was familiar too. He was older now and wore a small beard, but she would have recognized Giri’s darting eyes anywhere, still as nervous as they’d been the day she’d first seen him scurrying around the city dump, pretending to be a scrappling. Why would he return after what had happened that summer? Then again, who else in Cerea would know Anamat as he did? After all, she’d taught him.

She tipped up her jar to hide her face, though it was empty. Giri had betrayed her to the Cerean king. He’d planned it from before their first meeting and she’d been taken in, fool that she’d been. The Cerean king must have sent Giri to Anamat even then. Why would the king have done that if he didn’t plan to make more use of him? Giri must have valued his power in the Cerean court more than he’d loved his season of freedom in Anamat, if he’d enjoyed it at all. Maybe he hadn’t. He’d been terrified of the dragons, even of dragonlets. It seemed he’d preferred the threat of near-fatal beatings among his countrymen. He’d left no friends in the city that summer; that much was sure. She wondered if Pannen knew that Giri had returned, and that he was the one who’d sent Nira – Darna’s old enemy and Pannen’s old lover – into slavery.

The foreign sailors filed out, leaving an unsettled quiet in their wake. Darna looked up, thinking that the suddenly quiet room would be empty, but Giri was still there, crossing the room, headed straight for them. He saw her. He recognized her. She was sure of it. Or was she?

Sunna put a hand on her arm before she could say anything. Giri turned his gaze away from them and called into the kitchen. One of the barmaids came out and piled counting chips on a table. Giri counted out coins and beads from his pocket. When the account was settled, the barmaid hurried away. Giri tied his coin pouch carefully, then turned to go.

He was almost to the door when he stopped to look back. “Darnasa, they call you?” he said in Cerean.

Darna nodded.

“You still speak my language?”

She shrugged.

“Then hear this. If you make trouble for me or my men, you will pay as you should have paid before, and more. Stay away from the palace.”

“I’ll go where I please,” Darna said. Her Cerean was embarrassingly bad.

Giri twitched his nose. “I have an army at my back now,” he said.

“It’s not your army. You’re still a slave.”

“Stay away from the palace. You’ve been warned.” With that, he swept out.

“What was that about?” Sunna asked as soon as he was gone.

“Old, bad blood between us.”

“Looked like it, but –”

Before any of them could say more, the barmaid hurried back in. “Orla’s back,” she announced. “My apologies, Raina of the Gone Duck Inn. She says you three may sleep in her rooms.”

#

The three women were shown into a room where they found some of the tavern keeper’s softest rugs. As they got ready to sleep, Darna told Sunna and Raina about how she’d run with Giri during her season on the streets of Anamat, when she’d settled under the bridge and scavenged in the scrap heaps. Long ago, she’d seen the scars from where his slave masters had lashed him. Despite that, he’d served the Cerean king all along. He’d duped her into stealing a dragon stone from the palace.

She’d stolen it back from the Cerean merchants, along with the statue Nira had stolen on Giri’s behalf, and perhaps he’d paid a price for that, too. He’d meant to trick her into going with him to Cerea. She hadn’t wanted to become a priestess, but it was a far better fate than life as a Cerean slave, from the evidence she’d seen on Giri’s own back.

“So, he hasn’t forgotten you or forgiven you,” Sunna mused when Darna’s whispered tale was told.

“It doesn’t seem like it. I wonder why he’s returned at all.”

“Does he know about the tribunal?” Raina asked.

“Princes’ successions don’t get challenged often, so people are probably talking about it. Also, he called me Darnasa. He knows. Damn him to his own hells.”

Orla came in then to see that they were well settled. She told Raina that they’d found a place for the priestesses to stay until they could be taken into the city in a few nights’ time, to Ara’s Landing, where half the priestesses in Theranis were seeking sanctuary.

They set out early. Darna’s cramps were not as bad that day, so they reached Raina’s house before midday. Her many children, most of them fosterlings, flooded out to greet her and dragged her inside. Sunna and Darna traveled the last stretch without her, entering the city just before the gates closed for the midday rest.

“We should go straight to the temple,” Sunna said.

“I want to see Myril first. Her place is on the way, and you can go ahead to find out if the Aralel will have me and if the temple’s safe enough.”

“I doubt that it is, but it’s the best we can do for now. All the priestesses are going there.”

“That’s half the trouble,” Darna said. With so many newcomers, there were bound to be some she couldn’t trust.

Sunna grumbled agreement.

A troop of guardsmen tromped up the road from the remains of Merchants’ Wharf, escorting a well-dressed Ganatean to the palace. Sunna and Darna avoided them by ducking into a side alley, then made their way on down the street to Myril’s place.

#

The waters stayed to their new bounds, and the women and men kept coming at all hours of the day and night, wanting to know what their futures held. They asked every healer and soothsayer on the street. Would their fortunes be better in Ganat? Should they sail to Calandria? Should they stay in their houses and villages? Their constant questions sailed through the walls and windows to Myril’s hearing. She didn’t know how to answer them and didn’t want to know.

Her errand to the temple remained undone. It nagged at her, but the thought of asking the Aralel for help made her uneasy. She waited for some other solution, any other solution, to appear before her, at least one that would serve until Lerat found a place for the Chronicles far beyond the governor’s reach. The half-moon came, and at last she felt that she could not delay any longer. She steeled herself for the fray and clamor of the streets and put on her plainest robe. She was about to set out when she heard a familiar voice at the top of the hill. It sounded like Darna. Yes, Darna and Sunna.

She waited but didn’t hear Darna’s footstep, the distinctive tip-tapping of her stick on the cobbles. Then she heard an unfamiliar step on the stair.

“I’ve closed,” she said before the knock came at the door.

“It’s me, Darna. Sunna’s waiting below.”

The voice was right even though the step was wrong. The footfalls on the stair had been steady and strong, not like Darna’s at all. Her gait had always been lopsided, even on days when her leg wasn’t bothering her. Myril opened the door to let her in. Darna’s face had been browned by the sun. She stood taller and wore a bulging pocket at her belt, but her tunic was as shabby as a scrappling’s. None of that explained why she

seemed

so different.

“Where’s your stick? What happened?” Myril asked.

Darna sank onto the seat by the window and leaned out to give Sunna a quick signal. “Why did you take down your sign?” she asked.

“I have other work to do, for the guild, and besides, it’s not safe.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Darna said. “I’ve never seen so many Cereans in my life.”

Before Myril could reply, Sunna came in.

“I’m supposed to take Darna to the temple,” she announced, “but I need to see if it’s safe first, and I don’t want to interrupt the Aralel at her supper. Besides, I’m hungry. I’ll go get some soup from the lady down in the alley and bring it back.”

Myril had been so nervous about her impending meeting with the Aralel that she hadn’t felt like eating, but it was midday, and Darna brightened at the mention of food.

“Here.” Myril handed Sunna her tray of bowls and a pitcher, along with some beads.

“Thanks,” Sunna said. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t let anyone else in.”

“Assassins?” Myril asked, as Sunna clattered away down the stair.

Darna nodded. “They haven’t spotted me yet, but I doubt that Calar’s called them off. And there’s worse. I’ve seen Giri and he knows I’m here, knows who I am, too. He told me to stay away from the palace.”

“Giri? Who’s that?”

“You remember the Cerean scrappling who helped get Nira kidnapped? He’s back.”

“Oh.” Myril put the pieces together. “Do they call him Girizit now? The king’s emissary?”

“Yes, that was always his name, but –” Darna doubled over suddenly, shaking with pain. When she looked up, her face was pale beneath its tan.

“What is this?” Myril demanded.

Darna breathed a few times to steady herself. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you could help.”

Outside, the street was growing quieter as people gathered around their cookfires and went inside for the midday rest. “Did it happen in Slaradun?”

“I think so.” Darna drew a shuddering breath. “It was at the gate, just before it all fell into the sea. You’ve heard about it?”

Myril nodded. “You can tell me how you think it happened after I look. What’s that gold chain?”

“This?” Darna asked, as if she’d forgotten it. She fished a shining amulet out from between her breasts. It shone with its own light. “It was a gift from him, from the prince. It’s one of Salara’s stones.”

“Would owning that have made you keep mistress there?”

Darna shook her head. “I don’t think so, but anyway, there’s no keep to be mistress of, and there’s no prince anymore, so no, it doesn’t. Salara’s gone, too.” Her face contorted again as another wave of pain washed through her.

“Come away from the window,” Myril said. “I’ll see if I can find where your pain is coming from. You’d better take off your tunic.”

Sometimes, Myril felt as if she’d been trying to keep Darna alive since the moment they met long before on their scrappling road to Anamat. In the space of a few days, she’d gone from taking care of her slow-witted but sweet younger sister to taking care of Darna, whose wits were as quick as anyone’s, and who was never sweet. Darna’s recklessness always threatened to carry her too far, except during their years in the temple novitiate, which had only made her feel miserable.

“The hermit priestesses gave me mint and chamomile, but it didn’t help much,” Darna said as she unbuckled her belt. She turned her back to Myril and stood in the darkest corner of the room, facing the bed where patients sometimes slept if their homes were a long walk away and they were weak from the journey to the healers’ street. Darna stripped off the tunic and began to fold it, still facing away. “The pain comes at random; I can’t find a pattern in it,” she said. “It doesn’t last for long. It’s not like ordinary cramps, not even like I’m going to be sick to my stomach. It’s more like something sharp is stabbing me from the inside, then like the blade is twisting slowly ’til it stops just as suddenly as it came. I’m not sure what triggers it. Some days, it doesn’t bother me at all, like this morning, when I was walking, though it did yesterday. Now, though –”

Darna turned. She still had the long, silvery scar along her right leg where her childhood injury had marked her skin, but that was pale and faded. These wounds – if they were wounds at all – were new and they glowed. They made a tracery over her belly. They rippled with dragonfire.

“What is this? How did it happen?”

Darna sat and rested her face in her hands, curled around herself, shutting out the world. She took a few deep, shuddering breaths. “I suppose if I can tell anyone, I can tell you,” she said. “I had Salara inside me. He lifted me up, threw me down on the rocks before his gate. He took Ivanat’s mind away with him – Ivanat was my lover.”

“The prince of Slaradun, I know.”

“Salara took Ivanat’s place in the rite with me. It was the first time Ivanat and I had ever knowingly gone in to the worship of the dragons together, and it fulfilled the prophecy his grandmother gave, which was that the dragon would destroy him. His friend took his life, though. The rite came too late; the Ganateans were already at the gate. Across the seas, Ivanat had learned to believe that the dragons didn’t exist, or that if they did exist, they weren’t important, even though he’d seen Salara.” She stopped and swallowed.

“The scars?” Myril asked, when she seemed to have gathered her breath.

“Salara’s belly against mine. The scales burned me, but it didn’t hurt. That’s not what hurts.”

“May I touch them?” She needed to touch the dragon’s mark to understand what had happened to Darna. It was dangerous, but –

“Don’t go into trance,” Darna said. “I don’t think I can pull you out. I’ve almost forgotten how, and with this, I feel different, not like myself at all sometimes. I’m afraid I might fall right in after you, and then we’d both be lost. I’m not sure you should touch it, really, I mean, this might have something to do with it, but maybe it’s just a worm in my guts from some bad water somewhere along the road.”

“Shush, let me listen.” Myril reached out and tentatively touched her belly. It was smooth between the ridges left by the scales, smooth like metal. Darna had always said that she was Tiada’s child, a child of the dragons, and now she looked as if she was partially one in the flesh as well as in spirit. Myril could feel the heat coming from her belly.

“Don’t go into trance,” Darna repeated.

Myril let her hand drift down across the light ridges. They looked and felt just like dragon scales. She’d never touched dragon scales in the flesh, of course, unless her long-ago dream by the lake in the mountains had been real.

“She’s marked you.”

“Salara has, but Salara’s male now,” Darna said.

“I keep forgetting that. The only dragon I think of as male is Na. Do you think that’s why Salara shook the province into the sea? Because he’s male now?”

Darna shook her head. Something inside her shifted again, some energy. Myril’s hand followed in its wake. It coursed around her belly as she spoke.

“I don’t think it’s because he’s male,” she said. “I think it was because he was strong enough, because we gave him the strength, Ivanat and I. I wish Tiada had done the same and saved herself, but she must have been so faded that she couldn’t.”

“Eppie saw Tiada a half-moon before she died. She hadn’t faded all the way away.”

“

Everyone

could see Salara at the end. Thorat said that even the Ganateans saw him. All of them did.”

“Maybe that will persuade them to let us be,” Myril mused.

Darna shook her head. “Lots of them are still here. I doubt they’ll be driven off by something they pretend isn’t real, no matter how much it should scare them.”

Myril pressed at the points where the pain might be if Darna were carrying a baby in the wrong place, the baby of the prince of Slaradun and of a priestess who might be almost-heir to the throne of Tiadun. If Darna were carrying a baby, which still seemed the likeliest explanation for her pains, then it could be heir to both provinces. It would be a secret to guard closely until she was safe from her uncle’s plots.

Darna did not cry out when those points were pressed, so Myril smoothed her hands across the belly again, hoping to find the strange pulse she’d sensed earlier. There it was, sharp and bright. Darna cringed, though Myril was not pushing down at all, but she relaxed again a moment later.

“It’s in your womb, whatever it is, and it’s alive and growing,” Myril said as the thought formed in her mind.

“A baby?”

Myril had felt many women’s middles early in their pregnancies when their bellies were still flat. She always felt the flicker of life inside them as a steady glow like a glowing coal from an old fire in the morning, but increasing. That energy didn’t flash like this did; it wasn’t hard.

“I should say that it’s a baby, because I can’t think of anything else it might be, but if it is, it’s not an ordinary one. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen or felt anything like it. You should go to the temple infirmary. Maybe Geta will know, if she’s well enough to examine you.” Geta, the elder priestess who oversaw the baking, had seemed impossibly old when Myril and Darna had first come to the temple, but it had been a dozen years since then and she was still in the thick of temple life, though she was growing frail, more so since the day that the waters had risen, or so the rumors said.

“I wish I didn’t have to go to the temple. I know it’s probably safer there, and I need the Aralel’s allegiance, but I hate being trapped in there,” Darna said. “There was a temple in the mountains. I didn’t mind being there, but I was alone, so it was different. It was beautiful; I could have stayed there forever. I wonder if maybe I should have.”

“More beautiful than Ara’s Landing?” Myril asked. As much as she disliked being inside the temple, anyone could see that it was splendid.

Darna nodded.

“I have to go to speak with the Aralel today. That’s where I was about to go when you arrived,” Myril told her. “I could tell her that you’re back in the city.”

Darna shook her head. “I’d like to hear if Sunna thinks it’s safe, first.”

Just then, as if summoned by her name, Sunna appeared at the door with three cooling bowls of soup and a sack of bread balanced on the tray.

“I had to go halfway to the temple to find a pot that wasn’t already empty,” she complained. “It’s as bad as Midsummer.”

“Here’s hoping it won’t get worse,” Darna said.

Myril shivered. The lines on Darna’s belly writhed.

“Put that tunic back on,” Myril said. Naked except for the worn amulet and the glowing pendant between her breasts, Darna looked immeasurably powerful. With the shabby tunic on, she’d looked just like a beggar. It had masked her power, and she needed that mask.

#

Over the soup and bread, they agreed that Myril should tell the Aralel that Darna had arrived in Anamat, unless she felt that she shouldn’t. She left Sunna guarding Darna and set out for the temple just before the end of midday rest, determined to complete her long-delayed errand for the Chronicler at last. She felt too uneasy to try to block the clamor from her ears. Every footfall, voice, and drop of water falling assaulted her as she walked as quickly as she could to the side house.

The bells ending the midday rest rang out just as she reached the half-secret entrance to the temple. Myril paid the Grandmother her tribute, hoping that her visit wouldn’t last long. The temple’s atmosphere was still heavy but not as thick with trance and ritual as it had been when she’d first felt it so many years before. She wondered if Iola could ever be persuaded to leave that charmed sphere behind, to breathe ordinary air on the ordinary streets again.

With so many priestesses from the provinces seeking refuge, the elders’ courtyard was far busier than usual. Myril nodded greetings to those she passed on her way to the Aralel’s porch. The Aralel was not alone. A young priestess – not from Ara’s landing – sat on the bench outside. She looked straight ahead, as if the colonnaded porch were not quite fine enough for her, wrinkling her nose at the view over the elders’ garden with its perfectly laid-out beds of medicinal and ornamental plants.

“You can’t go in,” she said. “The governor said to make sure she isn’t disturbed.”

“I’ll wait, then,” Myril said. She looked away, not that the young priestess was probably going to engage her in conversation anyway.

The young priestess’s robes showed that she was from Conn’s Coop, the temple beside the palace that served the governor and his men, and maybe their foreign guests, too, men who didn’t even pretend to come to worship the dragons. The young priestess seemed to think that Myril was beneath her notice, which suited Myril perfectly. She sat down and listened. Tiagasa was inside. Myril felt a brief flicker of pity for her young attendant priestess, but more than that, she was curious what the governor’s mistress had come for that day.

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