He did not scream, at first.

That was what Kaelen would remember. They had braced for rage, for the howl of a wounded animal, for the sound of a man tearing his own world apart with his bare hands. What came instead was a silence so deep and so total that for several long seconds nobody dared breathe. Alaric stood in the doorway of the cell with the letter in his hand, perfectly motionless, and the lantern light fell across a face from which every trace of expression had been wiped away. He read it to the end. He folded it, carefully, along its original creases, and tucked it into the breast of his coat. Then he took one slow step forward, and his knees buckled, and he went down on the stone like a man struck from behind.

"My lord!"

Kaelen caught him. He had never been so frightened in his life. The man in his arms was burning, a dry fierce heat that came through the fabric of his coat like the breath of a furnace, and under Kaelen's hands the muscles of his back were rigid as iron. His eyes were open. They were fixed on nothing. And as Kaelen watched, a thin dark tracery crept up from the collar of his shirt, along the line of his jaw, across his cheek, like cracks racing through ice.

"Orsen!" he roared. "Malakor! To me! Now!"

They came running. Orsen first, white-bearded and heavy-footed, with Pell Aldous at his heels, and then Malakor, stumbling, clutching his satchel. They crowded into the narrow cell. Malakor took one look and went the color of bone.

"It is the grief," he whispered. "It is waking the curse. His heart is racing. The fear, the loss, they are feeding it, it has found a door..."

"Can you stop it?" said Orsen.

"I do not know. I have nothing. Nothing that does not require her."

"Then we hold him," said Kaelen.

They did. It took six men. By the time the first wave struck, they had dragged him out into the open court, because the cell was too small and the stone too cold, and laid him on a spread cloak on the broken pavement. They did not chain him. Kaelen would not allow it. He knelt at the head with Alaric's skull cradled in his hands, and Orsen took the shoulders, and Pell and two of the garrison's strongest took the arms and legs. Malakor crouched at his side with a cloth and a bowl of cold water, murmuring in a thin broken voice, wiping the black fluid as it welled from the fissures along his throat.

The sun was high. It poured down across the ruined towers, gold and hard and merciless, and in its light Alaric changed.

It was not like the moon. Kaelen had seen that a dozen times and thought he knew its shape. This was uglier. This was an uncontrolled, tearing, struggling thing, like a bone breaking the wrong way. The claws came first, ripping through the cloak. The jaw lengthened. The skin on his back split open in long dark seams, and he arched with a sound that was not a scream and not a growl but something far worse, a long low hollow moan, the sound of a man being emptied.

"Hold him!"

"I am holding!"

"Alaric." Kaelen bent until his lips nearly touched his lord's ear. "Alaric. Look at me. You know who I am. You know where you are. Do you remember what she said?"

The red eyes flickered.

"She said you are not a monster. She said it a hundred times. She said it to every one of us." His voice shook. "She said, stay alive. She said, do not let him do anything reckless. She is counting on you, my lord. She is waiting."

The body in his arms convulsed. A hoarse rasp tore out of the clenched throat, a word, a ragged scrap of a word. "Val..."

"Yes. Valeria. She is alive. She wrote to you. She is going to need you."

"Val... eria."

"Hold on," said Kaelen, and the tears were pouring unchecked down his cheeks. "Hold on, you stubborn bastard. Hold on for her."

It lasted more than an hour. Afterward none of them could say how. The old sergeant and the lean young Aldous stood shoulder to shoulder with their arms locked around Alaric's thrashing legs, sweat running down their faces. Orsen held the broad shoulders with both hands, grim and silent, muttering in the old northern tongue. At last, in the middle of the second hour, the great body gave a final shuddering heave, and went limp.

No one moved. The sun burned down. A crow croaked somewhere in the ruins.

"He is breathing," whispered Malakor.

He was. Shallow and ragged, but steady. The black fissures were closing. The claws were shrinking back into the ends of fingers that lay curled and slack on the cloak. Kaelen laid the head down very gently, and sat back on his heels, and found that his own hands were shaking so badly he could not hold them still.

"By the old gods," said Orsen, in a cracked voice. He wiped his face with his sleeve. "I thought we had lost him."

"We almost did."

"It is not going to get easier."

"No."

They sat for a moment in silence, the old lord and the captain, side by side on the broken stones, watching the man between them breathe.

*

Alaric woke at dusk.

He lay for a long time without moving. Overhead the sky was the color of a bruise, purple and gold and slate, with a single pale star burning above the broken towers. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean, empty as a gutted house. There was a dull ache in every bone. His mouth tasted of copper. He turned his head, and found Kaelen asleep sitting up beside him, with his chin on his chest and a bandaged arm folded across his knees.

He did not wake him. He lay and looked at the sky, and felt for the thing that should have been there, and found it.

The letter was still in his coat.

He drew it out with a trembling hand. The paper was creased, and stained, and smelled faintly of smoke. He read it again, slowly, word by word, as he would have read a sentence of law. I am not running. I am not hiding. I am going to the one place you cannot reach with a sword. He read the last line, and the next to last, and a thing inside him that had been frozen and silent for twelve hours began, very slowly, to move.

You are the only door I have ever walked through of my own free will.

He closed his eyes. The grief rose up in him like a tide, vast and cold and total, and he let it come. He did not fight it. He lay on his back on the broken stones, with the letter against his chest, and wept without sound. He wept for the woman in the carriage. For the fool he had been, to leave her side. For the six years he had spent hating himself, and the three months he had spent learning not to, and the two weeks that now remained.

When it was over, he lay very still, and let the emptiness settle.

Then, quite slowly, he sat up.

"My lord?" Kaelen had woken. He stared at him, wide-eyed. "You should not..."

"Help me stand."

"You have not eaten. You have not drunk. You nearly..."

"Kaelen." Alaric looked at him. His voice was quiet, and cracked, and absolutely calm. "I am going to the Obsidian Palace."

The captain's face went through a series of expressions. Fear, and relief, and something that looked very much like wild hope. He opened his mouth, closed it, and drew a long breath.

"You are not going to ride in alone, with a sword, and demand she be returned."

"No."

"You are not going to throw yourself at the gates."

"No." A shadow of a smile crossed Alaric's ravaged face. "I promised her I would not. And I find, Kaelen, that I do not wish to die in a ditch. I wish to get her back." He closed his hand over the letter. "She is not running. She has gone to find the weakness in that house. I intend to be standing at the door when she finds it."

"With what?"

"With an army." His eyes lifted. "With Orsen's three garrisons, and Pell's two hundred, and the two hundred I brought from Shadowfall. With every lord who has not yet been frightened into silence. With a thousand villagers who have a pamphlet in their pocket and a reason to remember her name." He drew a breath. "And with the Wine."

"The Wine requires her blood."

"Then we will bring it to her."

*

They held the council in the dusk, in the ruins of the old throne room, with the broken dome a black shadow overhead and a ring of torches burning low. Orsen sat on a fallen pillar, glowering, with his sword across his knees. Pell Aldous stood at his elbow, pale and earnest. Malakor perched on a crate with the red leather book spread open on his lap, his thin face bent over the notes. And in the center of the circle, bound loosely at the wrist and seated on a stool, was Captain Roth.

He looked up as Alaric entered. His face was haggard. He started to rise.

"Sit," said Alaric. He did not say it unkindly. "I have not forgiven you. I am not certain I will. But I have been told, by someone whose judgment I trust more than my own, that you may yet be of use."

"I will do anything, my lord."

"You said that to her. I have decided to take you at your word." He lowered himself carefully onto a block of stone, and felt Kaelen's hand under his elbow. "You have served in the garrison for twenty years. You know the palace?"

"I know the Obsidian Palace better than I know my own house, my lord." Roth drew a long breath. "I was posted there as a young man. Five years in the lower guard. I know the corridors. The servants' stairs. The old drains." His eyes brightened. "There is a way in."

The circle sat up.

"A tunnel," said Roth. "Beneath the north wall, from the old quarry, to the cellars of the kitchens. It was dug in my grandfather's time, to smuggle wine past the excise men. It has not been used in thirty years, and the king's guards have forgotten it. But I have walked it. I could walk it blindfolded."

"How many men?"

"A dozen at a time. No more. It is narrow, and wet, and it floods in spring." His voice shook. "But it comes out in the very heart of the palace. A few hundred paces from the king's apartments."

Silence. Orsen leaned forward, his pale eyes narrow.

"And the letters?" he said. "You wrote to the chancellor every week. You must know a great deal about the court. Who is loyal, and who is afraid."

"I know a great deal." Roth swallowed. "I know that the king has not left the palace in two years. That he sleeps in the old east tower, with six guards at the door. That his physician, Orlan, is the only man he trusts with his body." His voice dropped. "And I know about the ritual."

Alaric went very still.

"Say it."

"It was in the last letter. The one I did not send. I thought it was nonsense, but I kept it." Roth drew a folded paper from inside his coat with unsteady fingers. "It came from the chancellor four days ago. It was meant to be delivered to the king's agent in the south, if the first attempt failed. It speaks of the lesser alignment."

"The lesser what?" said Malakor sharply.

"A second moon. A smaller one." Roth unfolded the paper. His lips moved over the words. "The great alignment, the one you foiled, comes once in a hundred years. But there is another. A lunar eclipse, the old books call it the Blood Moon, a great red darkening of the moon that the old astrologers could calculate to the hour. It is not so strong. But if the caster is at the peak of his power, and the curse in its host has nearly reached the heart, it will serve."

"Fifteen days." Alaric's voice was flat.

"Yes, my lord."

"And the host?"

"If the king cannot take the purifying compound for himself..." Roth's voice shook. "The chancellor writes that the alternative is absorption. If the curse is allowed to complete itself, if it consumes you utterly, my lord, then the king, as the caster, may claim what it leaves behind."

"What does it leave?"

"Everything." Roth lifted his haggard eyes. "Your life. Your strength. Twenty years of vigor. It would pass to him, like water from one cup to another."

The silence in the ruined hall was absolute.

Malakor made a thin choked noise. His book slid from his lap. "That is why he did not kill you," he whispered. "All these years. He did not wish to. He wished to wait. To let it ripen. He has been keeping you alive, my lord, like a farmer fattening a pig."

Alaric said nothing. He sat on the stone, perfectly still, with his hands on his knees, and looked at the torches. Something in his face had hardened. It was a quiet thing. It was not rage, nor despair, but a cold, bright, utterly settled purpose, like a blade drawn at last from its sheath.

"Then we have fifteen days," he said, "and so does he."

"Then we march at dawn," growled Orsen, and he rose, gripping his sword hilt with a hand that did not quite shake. "I have not been so angry in thirty years. It is rather invigorating."

"My two hundred are yours, my lord," said Pell Aldous, in a thin steady voice. He had gone very pale, but his chin was lifted. "And the passes. I can open the eastern road to you without a shot. The garrisons there will not stand against the green banner."

"We will need the villages," said Kaelen quietly. "Every one. If the people line the roads, the king's soldiers will think twice about burning them."

"Then we will ask them." Alaric turned his head, and looked at the ring of grim faces in the torchlight, the old lord and the young one, the captain and the alchemist and the broken man on the stool. "I will not order you. I have no right. I am a traitor, and a beast, and a man with a price on his head. But if any of you will walk beside me into that house, I will be grateful for the rest of whatever time I have."

No one answered at once. Then Roth, from his stool, did a very simple thing. He lifted his bound hands, and pressed them to his chest, and bowed his gray head. And one by one, around the circle, in the flickering dark, the others did the same.

*

The carriage rolled through the gates of the Obsidian Palace at sunset on the second day.

Valeria sat very straight on the padded seat with the gray blanket in her lap and her hands folded. She had not spoken to Orlan since the first hour. He had not tried to speak to her. He sat opposite with his book, turning the pages with a faint dry rustle, glancing up occasionally with an air of mild courteous interest. She had spent the long hours of the journey in silence, watching the world pass through the crack in the shutters, counting the miles, studying the road.

She had learned a good deal.

She knew they had come by the great northern highway, through three fortified towns, each of which had saluted the carriage. She knew the escort numbered at least two hundred. She knew that the horses were changed every six hours, at stations whose exact positions she had memorized by the smell of the water. She knew the six vials in her sleeve were intact. And she knew, from the look on Orlan's face whenever he glanced at the little leather satchel at his side, that it held something he did not wish her to see.

The carriage jolted over a threshold, and stopped.

Orlan closed his book. "We are arrived," he murmured. "I do hope the journey has not been too wearisome. His Majesty was most anxious that you be comfortable."

"I am sure he was."

"If you will allow me." He rose, with a graceful little bow, and opened the door.

The light struck her like a blow.

She stepped down onto a vast courtyard of black polished stone, so smooth that it mirrored the darkening sky. Towers rose on every side, sheer and glassy, their windows blazing with amber light. Banners hung from the parapets, black and silver, motionless in the still air. Hundreds of soldiers stood in silent ranks along the walls. At the far end of the court, up a broad flight of obsidian steps, great doors of carved black wood swung open on a blaze of lamplight.

And in the doorway, framed in gold, stood a tall, white-haired old man in robes of dark red.

He was beautiful. That was the thing she had not been prepared for. In all the long weeks of fear and speculation, in all her thoughts of tyrants and monsters, she had never imagined that Cedric of Frostfell would be beautiful. Seventy years had not bowed his back. They had only refined him, polished him like old ivory, drawn the flesh tight over a fine aristocratic skull and bleached his hair to pure silver. His eyes were a pale, clear gray. His face was lined, but benevolent, with a faint warm smile that touched the corners of his mouth like the smile of a kindly uncle welcoming a child home for the holidays.

He came down the steps slowly, with his hands outstretched.

"My dear," he said. His voice was soft and rich and gentle. "My dear Valeria. At last."