Josalind.

The voice touched her sleepy thoughts—firm, insistent. She stirred enough to feel the sun on her face, a touch of breeze kissed by mountain frost, the teasing smell of clay-roasted trout.

You have to hide it.

She rolled over with a moan. Spit and spray—was it too bloody much to ask to sleep past sunrise? All four of them, always digging, poking, nagging. The broken witch iron manacle that bound her wrist smothered the worst of it, dulled their roar to a whisper, but even a whisper could spoil the glory of a good sleep.

Only . . . she didn’t recognize this voice as one of theirs. It didn’t burn with Kyvros the Elder’s anger, rouse shivers like Koglar’s weary moan, or rattle her brain with Mygalor’s stormy bluster. Her hand instinctively felt for the pouch at her belt, where a stone of blue quartz shot through with silver rested—the Heart of Sovaris. The new voice certainly didn’t cut with Sovaris’s shrill insistence.

The skull, Josalind, they’re coming for it.

Her eyes flew open. No, not them at all. Even when the Four whispered, even when she couldn’t make sense of their ranting, she felt the nettles of their madness, their torment. This voice spoke only with kindness. She’d never known the Four to be kind, even when she’d been a wee lass and their cries had still been distant enough to feel gentle.

Josalind reached out to this strange new voice but found nothing. Whatever presence she thought she might have felt had fled, like the last foggy bit of a dream. Maybe that’s all it had been.

Ryn.

How could she have forgotten? Josalind had seen the damned fool off in the middle of the night with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, squeezing his hand before Oma carried him off. His fleeting look of disappointment suggested he’d hoped for something more intimate from her. Maybe she should have just slapped him. He had it coming, considering how talking herself hoarse had done nothing to sway him.

Still, she couldn’t deny a measure of relief in seeing Ryn rouse himself to do something. He’d barely spoken, barely slept, barely ate, barely seemed alive since Sarenepra. She could only trust that Oma would save Ryn from himself if need be. But what would save him from the Sword? 

Something hard and round lay under Josalind’s palm, numbing her flesh with bitter cold. Xang’s skull. Irsta had given up her haversack so the thing could be hidden away, but that unholy chill easily cut through the leather. Josalind sat up, rubbed at her eyes, and spread the sack open to reveal . . . a giant egg. At least, that’s what it looked like. A giant egg with a shell that gleamed with a silken luster, shot through with crimson swirls. The shell was in fact the shape-shifting cryptwood sword Blood Thorn—Horgrim’s sword. His sacred trust as a warden of the goddess Fraia. Josalind touched the network of swollen spider veins, black and bile green, that now spoiled the cryptwood’s surface.

A shadow fell over her. “They’re spreading, aren’t they?” Kara said.

Josalind gave one of the foul veins a tentative poke. “Quicker than yesterday.”

Kara eased down on her knees and sat back on her ankles. “Grace Above, Xang will rot his way through the cryptwood within a week.”

“I need to bind him with a sacrament of blood, like I did before,” Josalind said.

“You did that by the grace of the Four,” Kara said. “Before you defied and thwarted them.” Her dark hand touched the witch iron manacle on Josalind’s wrist. “Take this off now to attempt such a thing and you’ll be at their mercy again.”

“They don’t want Xang to be heard any more than we do,” Josalind said. “They’ll understand the need—they won’t fight me.”

“Don’t make the mistake of underestimating them,” Kara said. “They understand nothing but their need for vengeance.”

Josalind looked sharp into those clear gray eyes. “Don’t tell me what to do—I know them better than you or anyone else ever will.”

Kara withdrew her hand and swept her tight-curling raven tresses back over her shoulder. “I’m not disputing that, but we need to be careful—that’s all I’m saying.”

The woman’s measured calm only served to rouse Josalind’s hackles. It left her feeling like a moody child being managed. She bit back the angry barb that sprang to mind, damned if she’d let her temper plunge her into that trap.

Kara fondled that round flat thing she wore under the collar of her blouse. Her shoulders slumped as if the weight of the world had just fallen on her. Josalind realized how bleary-eyed and worn the herald looked—Kara hadn’t slept decent again. The observation roused a wave of guilt in Josalind for being so prickly.

It had come as a shock when Ryn said Kara was sixty-three years old. Josalind had suspected thirty-five, maybe—which to a lass of nineteen already bordered on cronehood even if Kara still had the looks (and the curves Josalind didn’t) to catch a man’s eye. But today, Kara looked her years. Not even the grace of her goddess Fraia could stave off the toll of grief.

“We have to be careful,” Kara repeated, softly. “There aren’t enough of us left to take risks.”

Josalind’s attention strayed to the form that rested by the lakeshore on a pallet of scavenged driftwood, wrapped in a stone giant’s spare toga and dressed with fresh-cut flowers. Horgrim’s body. Fraia’s grace kept decay at bay, but that wasn’t the issue. Kara had said a warden was to be buried at home in Sevrenia, laid to rest with their cryptwood sword in the Grove of the Blessed Oak. From their shared grave, a new oak would grow. From the heart of that tree a new sword would come, for the one found worthy to wield it. The cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Josalind had denied Horgrim this when she’d used Blood Thorn to cast Xang’s spirit back into the Pit and bind his skull. Not that she’d a choice in the matter. If she hadn’t, Horgrim would have died in vain. Mordyth Ral would have had to gorge itself even more for the power to slay the demigod, leaving Ryn to suffer the death of every life it took. He already suffered enough.

She’d done the right thing, for the right reasons. And yet, she felt she’d wronged Kara by doing so. 

Josalind’s fingers drifted over the egg shape of that cryptwood prison. The morning sun washed it with gentle warmth, but the skull within still radiated that bitter cold. “You never did tell me what happened to your husband . . . Rijak, wasn’t it?”

Kara gave a curt nod.  “I was about your age when we married. No thought of serving Our Goddess then, that was always my elder sister’s path.”  

The herald had never mentioned a sister before. Of course, Josalind had never given her the chance. “What happened?” she asked.

Kara reached into her collar and pulled out the gold chain which bore a man’s wedding bangle of hammered gold.  “Like all men of the townships, Rijak was part of the local militia.” Her attention fixed on how the sun sparkled from the bangle. “A year after we’d married, his commander betrayed the entire company, led them into an ambush.” Tears of sorrow turned angry. “That commander was Horgrim’s father.”

Josalind looked at her with horror. “His father?”

“He renounced Sevren’s Path and earned the Great Deceiver’s trust with the lives of two-hundred-and-thirty-five good men and women.” Kara tucked the bangle away. “If ever I meet that traitor, he will get the justice he’s earned.” A ragged sigh made her shudder. “But that will change nothing. I’ve loved two men in my life and now I’ve lost them both.”

Josalind swallowed past the sudden ache that grated her throat. Here she was, too pathetic to bring herself to even admit how she felt for just one man. She took Kara’s hand and squeezed it with earnest. “What can I do?”

Kara looked her square. “If you truly love him, then love him, and let him love you.”

Josalind looked away, unable to bear the intensity. The herald had a way of making a body feel naked with a look at the best of times. “It isn’t that easy.”

“It’s not supposed to be. But letting the chance slip away is worse.”

Josalind knew how a wild-caught songbird must feel, trapped in a gilded cage, beating itself in vain against the wire. She and Ryn had enjoyed one glorious night those weeks ago, to smother for a while the torments they both endured. Her heart couldn’t bear the pain of risking more—not after the abuses she’d suffered from the Four, not with the unknowns that still lay ahead. “For glory’s sake, haven’t we things enough to worry us right now?” She cracked her knuckles on Xang’s skull with nervous energy. “We’ve got bigger fish to land.”

“Indeed, we do.” Kara squared her shoulders. “How do you plan to go about landing them?”

“I mean to take the skull back to Gostemere before Xang gets free of his muzzle and shouts for his father’s demons. Then the Earthborn can work their spell and we can put an end to the Great Deceiver once and for all.” 

“As simple as that,” Kara said.

Josalind bristled, certain those four words dripped with sarcasm, even if she could hear none. 

“Are you so certain we can trust the Earthborn?” Kara continued. “They do want to see the Four reborn through you.”

“Not all of them.”

“But enough.”

“They expected me to cooperate the first time,” Josalind said. “I think they need me to, and I won’t. They don’t need the Four reborn now, anyway. Not with Xang’s skull to work the spell and Ryn to finish the job with Mordyth Ral.”

“And you’re so sure of this because?”

 Josalind huffed and glared at her. Kara met her ire with calm repose. Josalind drew the skull’s sack shut, slung it over her shoulder, and rose. “Well then, how about we ask.”

They headed into the cool shadows of the forest. Nesting birds chattered in the treetops but all below kept silent. A sea of sleepy fern girded the trunks of ancient hardwoods. Dust motes danced in the odd beam of sunlight. Even the forest floor conspired to maintain the solemn hush with a layer of springy loam that smothered their footsteps.

Before long, the forest opened upon a stony clearing, where crumbling bedrock humped out of the earth. 

There they found a martichora and a great dragon with plates and scales in dull earth tones to match the bedrock. Irsta and Kreevax. One the size of a warhorse, the other with a wingspan that could shade an acre. In his full glory, Kreevax appeared cut from black diamond and glittering crystal, with translucent wings like smoked glass, but he had demonstrated this knack for changing color. More than that, even shifting his form enough to trick a casual eye into believing him to be just another weathered crag with the vague shape of a dragon if he hunkered down and held still.

Something had martichora and dragon alike crouched with noses to the ground, though Josalind couldn’t see what past their bulk.

A sandstone giant four yards tall looked on. Not really made of stone, but Josalind couldn’t help thinking so given the dolusk’s thick, armored hide. Grist could bleed like any man, even if his blood ran green and stank of rotten eggs. He sat on a boulder, that thick staff of blackened iron cradled in the crook of his arm, topped by the red and gold heart of Kyvros the Elder. The god’s heart pulsed faintly with a restless inner fire.

Grist dipped the staff in salute as the two women approached. “Trouble look for us, mistress,” he said to Josalind, in a voice as gritty as his name. Grist’s limited grasp of Islari Common and his size suggested he was some simple-minded brute, but that wasn’t true.

Josalind still hadn’t grown accustomed to the respect, even reverence, with which Grist addressed her. Our Lady Josalind, the Earthborn called her, Our Lady Savior. The Vessel of the Four.

Funny how such “blessed favor” came dressed as a curse.  

Josalind heard a furious growl, followed by a long-winded outburst in some guttural language she didn’t understand. Then she smelled that unique mix of stale skunk and rotting vegetables—the musk of a grenlich male.

Josalind and Kara came around to see that Irsta had a grenlich pinned face down, with her weight bearing down on his shoulders and her leathery wings outspread for balance as he beat his own bat-like appendages against the gritty earth in a vain effort to escape. The grenlich must have stood seven feet tall or more, all lean sinew with a hide stretched so tight over his gaunt frame Josalind expected the flesh to split and tear. A member of the very same clan of grenlich which she and Ryn had fought before, up north.

“Any others?” Kara asked, with the curtness of an officer addressing her troops on the battlefield.

“This be the only one fluttering around,” Kreevax said in that hissing slur. The dragon tossed his craggy head back and impaled the sky with three curved horns. “He flew too close and saw too much.” 

The skull, Josalind, they’re coming for it.

She shuddered at the memory of that voice at the edge of sleep, caught by a phantom chill that had no cause, and hugged herself. She couldn’t dismiss that new voice as just a dream. “Then why didn’t you just kill him?” She hadn’t gotten used to that—the cold murder of creatures who thought and felt. It didn’t matter what cause they served. Necessity offered little comfort.

“We thought you might glean something useful, blessed-child,” Irsta said.

Kara knelt before the grenlich’s bestial head and rested her hand on his brow. He spat and tried to yank away, ropy muscles bunching and straining in a vain effort to throw Irsta off. Kara dug in her fingers and pinned his skull to the ground, brow furrowed in concentration.

“He’s from the third skyship—the one that got away with the rest of Xang’s bones,” she said after a moment.

Josalind cast a nervous glance at what she could see of the sky past the treetops. The threat of that third skyship and their certainty that Xang’s followers wouldn’t so easily give up his skull had kept them hiding here rather than risk revealing themselves as easy targets in the sky. Another reason why she and Kara had argued that Ryn should have stayed put. “Are they close?” 

“No,” Kara said. “This one’s been flying through the night, and it can fly much faster than a skyship can sail. But if he doesn’t return, it will draw attention.”

“What about others?”

Kara rose to face her. “I don’t know—he isn’t aware of any other scouts in the area, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Josalind hugged herself tighter. Grenlich were not the only servants of the Keshauk sorcerer priests. Kara had explained how they, like any sorcerer, could summon and constrain a demon to a form as innocuous as a horsefly or a bird. But they used demons too in their natural incorporeal forms—smoke and shadow that could trick the eye and turn invisible. Kara could likely smell any demon in any form that strayed too close, but that didn’t mean they could stop it from fleeing back to its masters to report their position.

“That be all, then?” Irsta asked. When Kara nodded, Irsta grabbed the grenlich’s head and snapped his neck with a quick twist.

Josalind flinched away from the sickening sound. Kara bore it without a speck of emotion. As hard as iron she seemed, but of course, iron could be brittle, too, and Horgrim’s death was still far too fresh. “We need to be gone as soon as Ryn returns,” the herald said.

Josalind thrust out her chin. “To Gostemere.”

Kara looked to Grist. “If we return to Gostemere, will the Earthborn force Josalind to consummate the ritual for the Four’s rebirth?”

Josalind couldn’t help but shiver at the blunt way the herald said that word, consummate. As if it involved any kind of mundane coupling, or even something so uninspired as rape. There was nothing mundane about having your own heart carved out to make way for the heart stones of four gods.

Grist shifted his seating, looking decidedly uncomfortable even if his face was too rigid for easy expression. “Some honor her wish,” Grist said. “Others be . . .”  He grimaced and spoke in his own language to Kreevax. To Josalind, it sounded like rocks being tapped and rubbed together.

“He says others will remain fixed in their belief that a greater need, a greater good, must still be served by Josalind’s sacrifice,” the dragon said. 

“But don’t they need me to cooperate?” Josalind asked.

“Cooperation can be coerced,” Kreevax said.

“Hmmm,” Kara said. “Wouldn’t that divide the Earthborn?”

 Grist’s beady yellow eyes remained fixed on Josalind in a way that left her feeling like that bird in a cage all over again. He spoke further in the dolusk tongue.

“Never have the races of Earthborn warred with each other,” Kreevax translated. “But now, war they might. You are the spark that could start that fire. Better if you never return.”

Grist’s words hit like hammer blows. All Josalind had ever wanted was to get the Four out of her head so she could finally have peace. But that was before she’d learned what the cost would be. Before Ryn had become another pawn in their end game as the Sword Bearer.

She had to make it right. Somehow make all of it right. But how could she, when her only power had ever come from the lingering spooks of four mad gods intent on forcing her to serve their agenda? Their badgering had been bad enough when three of them had still been muffled in Gostemere.

Josalind touched the pouch that hung from her belt. Sovaris’s heart stirred at the touch and throbbed to match the rhythm of Kyvros’s heart as it pulsed on Grist’s staff. Now Josalind would have to test her will and sanity against two, the worst two. Kara was right—without the witch iron manacle, Josalind would be at their mercy like never before.

She stepped up to Grist. “Do you believe what others in Gostemere seem to think—that rebirthing the gods through me will straighten something twisted in Nature and save the Earthborn from going extinct?”

Grist worked those bucket-sized fists around the half of his staff as he struggled to find the words. “Our fading began when gods fell.”

“Then why?” Josalind asked. “Why won’t you have me sacrificed?”

Grist rose to his full height with the rasp of harness leather scraping stone. Josalind, who barely came to mid-thigh on him, found herself staring at the hemline of the simple toga he wore. There was an earthy smell to him, mixed with the dusty clean of beach sand on a hot summer’s day. It made her think of home and those rare times she’d found happiness, wandering the seashore alone where there was no one to whisper “witch” or “lunatic.”

 Grist spoke in his native tongue and Kreevax translated:

“You care not to be sacrificed, mistress—if that is your wish, that is all that matters. In ages past, the Earthborn were friend to mankind. We protected. We taught. We respected life. We brought about our own doom when we heeded the Mother Goddess Fraia to give Vulheris the knowledge to forge Mordyth Ral. Better it is, to let ourselves fade into myth then betray the last of what we were with another desperate gamble.” Grist knelt on one knee and leaned forward till their brows nearly touched. “Protect you, I will.”

Josalind touched Grist’s hard slab of a cheek and just nodded, to overcome to speak.

Kreevax spoke for himself. “We both will.” He gave a snort. “Been bored for too many centuries to count in Gostemere.” He stretched out his wings and cast sudden shade over the clearing. “The dullness of the place bites my bones with rust.”

Kara stepped close and rested her hand on Josalind’s arm. “If you can’t risk Gostemere, sweet, there’s only one other option.”

Josalind sighed. “Sevrenia.” The homeland of Kara’s people. The Four had been so insistent all along that it would be a mistake to take the Sword and Xang’s skull there, that it would only bring a new age of misery and darkness. But how could she trust anything they said? “Fine, once Ryn gets back, provided he hasn’t gotten his fool arse captured, we—”

“Hoy now, what be this?” Irsta asked. She’d hooked with her index claw a fine chain that had been hidden under the collar of the grenlich’s tunic. 

Kara hissed and lunged out to grab it. She snapped the chain with a quick yank before raising it high. It bore an oval brass pendant that contained what appeared to be a glass eye, green and slit vertical like a serpent’s.

Josalind jumped back with a squeal when that eye blinked at her. “What is that?”

Kara cupped the pendant and drove her thumbnail into the eye. It burst with a spurt of goo like a squashed bug. “This is a snoop.” She cast it away and wiped her fingers clean on her trousers without any apparent thought to it, leaving dark green smears on the brown fabric.

“A snoop?” Josalind said. “What in Five Hells is a snoop?”

“Someone, likely a sorcerer on that last skyship, may have heard everything we just said,” Kara said. “Would have seen it, too, if not for that grenlich being face down in the dirt.” She cast a withering stare at Irsta. “Never take a prisoner without stripping them naked. That goes for anyone serving the Clerisy, too. Is that understood?”

The young martichora bowed her head. “Yes, Herald.”

Josalind clenched the strap of the skull’s haversack. “But . . . but that means they could already be on their way.”

“Indeed,” Kara said. “And given up our position to their nearest agents.”

Josalind couldn’t shake that strange new voice she’d heard on the edge of sleep. Its urgency left her twitchy, even more so now. 

“We have to hide the skull,” she said.