‘They’ll not follow Hunn Raal,’ Scara said.

‘Not knowingly, no.’

The captain shot him a quizzical look then, and a moment later his eyes narrowed. ‘I had best write that letter. Mayhap we shall meet on the north road beyond the gates.’

‘That would delight me, friend.’

Two of the pups fell into a scrap just then, teeth flashing and fur flying.

Lady Hish Tulla sat in the study of her Kharkanas residence, contemplating the missive in her hands. She thought back to the last time she had met the three brothers, and the unease surrounding her imposition upon their grief at their father’s tomb. There had been rain that day and she had sheltered beneath a tree until the clouds had passed. She recalled Anomander’s face, a hardened visage when compared to the one she had known when sharing his bed. Youth was pliable and skin smooth and angles soft as befitted a memory of happier times, but on that day, with the rain still upon his unguarded features, he had seemed older than her.

She was not one for self-regard. Her own reflection always struck her to strange superstition and she was wont to avoid instances when she might catch herself in a mirror or blurred upon contemplative waters: a ghostly shadow of someone just like her, the image seemed, living a life in parallel wherein secrets played out unseen, and all the scenes of her imagination found fruition. Her fear was to discover in herself an unworthy envy for that other life. Most disturbing of all, to her mind, was to meet the gaze of that mysterious woman, and see in those ageing, haunted eyes, her private host of losses.

The missive trembled in her hands. Men such as Anomander deserved to be unchanging, or so she had always believed, and she would hold to that belief as if it could protect the past they had shared. His rumoured transformation within the influence of Mother Dark’s mystical power frightened her. Was there not darkness enough within the body? But it was only the memory that did not change, of the time before the wars, and if these days were spent assailing it, she knew enough to blame none other than herself.

How would she see him this time? What might she say in answering this personal invitation from an old lover, to attend his arm upon the wedding of his brother? His face had hardened, defying even the soft promise of the rain; and now he would appear before her like a man inverted, with no loss of edges, and no yielding of the distance between them.

She feared pity in his gesture and was shamed by her own weakness before it.

Servants were busy downstairs, cleaning the last of the silts and refuse from the flood. The missive she held was days old, and she had not yet responded to it, and this in itself was impolite, and no rising water could excuse her silence. Perhaps, however, he had already forgotten his offer. There had been tumultuous events in the Citadel. As First Son it was likely that he felt besieged by circumstance, sufficient to distract him from even his brother’s wedding. It was not impossible, in fact, to imagine him late upon attendance and seeking naught but forgiveness in Andarist’s eyes. A woman upon Anomander’s arm at such a moment promised embarrassment and little else.

The appointed time was drawing near. She had things to do here in the house. The cellar stores had all been ruined and the sunken room was now a quagmire of bloated, rotting foodstuffs and the small furred bodies of mice that had drowned or died mired in the mud. Furthermore, on the day of the flood her handmaid’s elderly grandmother had died, perhaps of panic, before the rush of the dark waters into her bedchamber, and so there was grief in the damp air of the rooms below, and a distraught maid deserving of consolation.

Instead of attending to all this, however, she sat in her study, dressed not in the habit of the mistress of the house, nor in the regalia of feminine elegance proper to attending a wedding. Instead, she was girded for war. Her armour was clean, the leather supple and burnished lustrous with oil. All bronze rivets were in place and each shone like a polished gem; every buckle and clasp was in working order. The weapon at her side was a fine Iralltan blade, four centuries old and venerated for its honest service. It wore a scabbard of lacquered blackwood banded at the girdle in silver, with a point guard, also of silver, polished on the inside by constant brushing against her calf.

A cloak awaited her on the back of a nearby chair, midnight blue with a high cream-hued collar. The gauntlets on the desk before her were new, black leather banded with iron strips that shifted to scales at the wrists. The cuffs remained stiff but servants had worked the fingers and hands until both were supple.

In the courtyard below, a groom holding the reins of her warhorse awaited her arrival.

There could be insult in this, and she saw once again the hard face of Anomander, and behind it Andarist’s fury. Sighing, she set the invitation down on the desk and then straightened, walking to her cloak. She shrugged it over her shoulders and fixed the clasp at her throat, and then collected the gauntlets and strode into the adjoining room.