[The Temple of Fiends, thirty-seven days before Midsummer]

The skeleton charging them collapsed, its bones wrapped in blue fire. Will's vision swam as he spun back to the battle in the center of the temple, where Bao and Arik circled Coneria's traitor knight, landing blows when they could and springing away before he could retaliate. It amazed Will that Garland could still fight, even sluggishly; Mina had already struck him twice with lightning.

Arik's club caught Garland in the back of the head, sending blood spattering from the front of the horned helmet. By the time the sword swung around, Arik had darted out of range, and Bao's foot slammed into the backs of Garland's knees, where his polyens offered no protection. Garland roared and managed to nick her thigh with his blade as he stumbled.

Will was almost glad of the minor injury; it distracted the part of him that could not bear to see bloodshed without attempting to stem it. Shaking off his exhaustion—how many undead had he purified?—he hurried over to her and pressed both hands against the wound. White light saturated her blood and then evaporated as her flesh knitted back together.

"Get back!" shouted Mina. Will turned to see Garland charging him, but he had no time to react before flames enveloped the black armor. Bao grabbed Will's arm and pulled him aside as the mass of burning metal lurched toward them, howling.

Arik's club smashed into Garland's ruined face and came away trailing fire and blood. In a series of horrible sounds and smells, Garland crumpled on the stone floor in the midst of the ashes of his cape. He was still twitching when Mina put her sword through the gap above his gorget.

Arik wheezed. "That was—"

"Unnatural." Bao smoothed the torn fabric over her thigh. "He was completely deranged."

"I was goin' t'say that was my kill."

"This conversation stops now." Kneeling beside the smoking corpse, Bao wrenched the helmet off and frowned at the ruin of Garland's face. "It's a terrible pity," she said as she rose. "He was a hero even when I was young."

Minds could break, Will knew, and magic had no dominion over them. Even spells that appeared to twist their victims' thoughts only projected illusions into the air, rendering the spells' effects less predictable than their names suggested. For all its inherent mystery, magic, once it left the hands of its caster, had all the ethereality of a hammer.

At the moment, he felt as if all his hammers were balanced precariously on their handles. Bao's free hand caught him after the first wobble.

"You're not in your clinic anymore," she said. "It isn't safe to push yourself so hard."

Will took careful breaths until the spots left his vision. "Next time I'll let the ghouls eat us."

"You should at least smile when you do that. You're unnerving when you try to make jokes." After a quick pat to test his stability, Bao let him stand on his own. "If no one else is falling over, let's find the princess."

"She must be back there." Mina tilted her head toward the far end of the room, which lay beyond the light of Garland's candelabra, and added, "Do you think Arik's scarier with or without the cloak?"

Arik had doffed the thing the moment the party was out of sight of Coneria and had not touched it since, though he subjected his companions to repeated variations on "Heh, did y'see that kid's face?" A bit of arranging would allow him to cover his face while displaying the bright scars on his throat, but Will suspected that the cloak would disappear before Arik had another chance to experiment with it.

Bao's twitch suggested that she had glimpsed a future filled with royal panic. "I think Arik will be keeping his distance."

As Arik began to argue, Mina focused a small fire spell in her hand and made her way across the room, flicking flames onto unlit wicks as she went. Bats fled in a leathery flurry as the light spread first over crumbling stones, then over twin rows of columns, and finally over a polished black altar, on which slumped a very pale girl who didn't look much older than Will.

"Your highness?" said Mina as the rest of the party moved to catch up with her.

The princess's head snapped up to stare at them with wide, bruise-ringed eyes. Her gown had been torn, exposing one of her shoulders where the cornsilk tangles of her hair didn't fall, and ropes bound her wrists to either side of the altar. Otherwise she seemed mostly unharmed, if unsteady. A circlet sat askew on her head; it appeared to be made of finger bones held together with human hair.

"You're safe now," said Bao, as Mina knelt to cut the ropes. "He's dead."

The only response was incredulous head-shaking. When Bao held out the helmet as proof, the princess went rigid, then burst into tears and threw her arms around the startled Mina.

"Shh." Mina removed the bone circlet and set her hand on the princess's shoulder. "Are you hurt?"

Taking deep, shaky breaths, the princess—Sara? Will had never been good at keeping up with the royal family—straightened and wiped her face with the remains of her sleeves. The redness in her eyes made her irises appear a piercingly bright green.

It took Will a moment to realize that she was trying to speak, and had likely been trying to scream during the fight. At his request, Bao brought him his sack, from which he withdrew a bottle of relaxant and a rag. The princess flinched as he daubed the potion over her throat, but the startled noise she made assured Will that he had been right in suspecting that a mute spell had paralyzed her vocal folds.

Mina tried again: "Did he hurt you?"

"I—he—he made me play the lute." Sara seemed to be having trouble adjusting to the sound of her own voice. She bit her lip and sniffled before continuing, "He'd untie my hands, and then he'd stand there and make me play it until my fingers hurt, and then he'd scream and tell me I wasn't doing it right, and when I cried he hit me." Blinking back further tears, she clasped her hands together in her lap and stared at them. "The others who came, he—he made that... that..."

She flinched as Mina held the circlet out to her and asked, "Do you want to bury it?" Sara squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. "Do you want to burn it?" When Sara shook her head again, Mina bent down and slid the grisly thing away into the shadows. "Then just forget about it. It's all right now."

For several seconds the princess kept her eyes closed and her hands clenched, during which time Will realized that he hadn't heard Arik say anything inappropriate yet. A quick survey of the visible portion of the room determined that both he and Bao had slipped away.

Concern over Arik's unsupervised activities was balanced out by the certainty that Bao would catch him, and both those thoughts diminished in the face of Will's growing need to eat something. He fished an apple from his sack, considered, and approached the altar with the fruit held out on his palm. "Are you hungry?"

When Sara opened her eyes and nodded, he set the apple in her cupped hands, then retrieved another for himself and sat down beside her. The princess swallowed a small mouthful before asking, "Are you the Light Warriors?"

"Apparently," said Mina, at the same time that Will said, "Oh, is that what we're called?"

They glanced at each other and shrugged.

Sara took another bite of her apple, then a deep breath. "The lute," she said, then hesitated. She took another breath. "Garland stole it when he kidnapped me. It's very valuable; it's been in my family for two thousand years, but it shows no signs of aging."

"Valuable?" Arik peered around a shadowed column. "Let's hear about that 'valuable' part, yeah? Everythin' else around here is junk, junk, an' more junk." To make his point, he tossed out something that proved, once it stopped rolling and clanging, to be a dented iron helmet.

Bao appeared from behind him and reproachfully picked up the helmet. "A little respect for the dead wouldn't hurt, you know."

"Don't recall gettin' much respect when I was dead." Before Bao had finished correcting him on points of both respect and actual deadness, he approached the altar and loomed over Sara with too much eagerness to be menacing. "Right. Valuable?"

Aside from a startle when the helmet clattered to the floor, Sara seemed to have settled now into a regal calm, perhaps having decided that nothing could compare to several days spent staring into the abyss that was Garland. She returned Arik's look without a hint of trepidation. "It's in a chest behind the altar. I think he kept it locked."

"Not a problem," he replied, striding off into the shadows with his club hefted. The splintering crash of wood against metal followed.

"You never learned how to pick locks, did you?" Bao called over the noise.

Abruptly the banging ceased, and the new silence was broken by the creak of hinges. Arik returned a moment later holding his quarry by its fretted neck, as if it were a strangled chicken. "What the hell is this?"

"A lute," said Mina.

"Goddammit."

While Bao rescued the instrument from his irritation, Sara said, unfazed, "You should keep it. If you're the Light Warriors of legend, then we have been guarding it all this time only to give it to you."

"Then we're finished here." Bao slung the lute over her shoulder and inclined her head toward the exit. "Let's get you home."

"Wait." Mina sat beside the princess and set a gentle hand on her arm. "She's still injured."

During the hike to the temple, Will had seen Mina cast curative spells only twice, and neither had been for anything more serious than a shallow cut. When he started toward the princess to see if he was needed, Bao caught the hood of his robe and whispered, "Let her."

"But—"

"You look like you're one spell away from passing out."

This point Will conceded. He watched as Mina removed her gloves and began to fuss over the abrasions on the princess's wrists, applying white magic with her fingers as if it were a salve. Her thumb continued to stroke Sara's palm even after the light had faded.

Arik made the broken panting sound that he had begun substituting for laughter. "Bad as Desh. Y'remember Desh, yeah?"

"I do. What ever happened to him?"

"Swung with the rest of us." Arik didn't emphasize the final word, but Bao flinched at it regardless. If he noticed, he didn't react; his attention was focused on Mina's mending work, which had moved on to Sara's eyes. Hints of bruises remained after the magic evaporated, but Will supposed that the discoloration might have been from exhaustion. She took much longer than should have been necessary to heal the princess's split lower lip.

When Sara stood, holding on to Mina's arm for support, the party discovered that she was barefoot. After a brief discussion, during which Bao pointed out that she was carrying both a large helmet and a musical instrument, the princess found herself taking a piggyback ride on Arik as the party emerged into the sunlight and headed south.

Once they were safely out of range of even the most persistent undead, Will paced himself at Bao's side and asked, "What did you mean about Desh?"

She peered down at him thoughtfully. "How old are you?"

"Almost fourteen."

Her lips quirked upward. "I'll tell you when you're older."

[The Melmond marshes, three days before Midsummer]

At Sarda's suggestion, they waited until nightfall to depart. The marshes, dark and treacherous under a thin crescent moon, posed no navigational challenges for Mina, and she seemed eager to scout ahead of the rest of the party, out of range of any conversation. When the horizon began to lighten, she slowed, and the rest of the party caught up with her as the red sun dragged itself out of the sea.

By daylight her skin was the waxy green-gray of a corpse.

Even with her cape and hat to shield her from the sun, Mina couldn't move faster than a crawl. Bao erected a tent around her and sent Arik off to see about gathering dry brush for a fire, leaving Will to his own devices. He updated his potions inventory, fretted, and turned his attention to the first page of Sarda's journal.

The text fluctuated between the personal and the technical, with notes about a trial-and-error approach to animal husbandry scrawled in the margins of lectures about magical theory. About a quarter of the way through, organization prevailed, and all subsequent entries revolved around difficulties in farming; Will guessed that Sarda had begun to keep multiple journals. Several pages later, Sarda had written, "Decay is natural, but this is decay without rebirth. In the south the fires burn even after they have consumed. In the north, no calm follows the storm."

Every page that followed catalogued the rot. Will read bits of it out loud to Bao as she set up the other tent, until she cut him off with a faintly irritable "I can see that."

He hesitated, then closed the journal and said, "We have another problem."

"When don't we?" Bao set down the rope she was tying and sighed. "I apologize. I'm a bit on edge."

Rejecting absurd responses like "Don't worry" and "It's all right," Will picked up his inventory sheet. "We'll be going even deeper into the Earth Cave this time, and we used more healing potions on the last trip than I have left. We'll have to go back to Melmond to get more. I can't get the ingredients I need from the marshes."

Bao abandoned the half-skeleton of the tent and sat down opposite him. "And we won't be able to count on Mina for healing."

Will nodded. While they had earlier waited, too agitated to sleep, for the sun to set, he and Bao had read through the section of the journal relevant to vampirism. One of the more upsetting anecdotes involved Melmond's wizard, who survived the attack on his clinic because the vampire, acting on some animal whim, opted to infect rather than devour him. When he later turned up half-mad in the town square, his robe stained with blood and his flesh branded with the shapes of the clinic's holy items, he had raved before he was slain: "It is gone, it is gone; God has forsaken; it no longer burns."

Already Mina's white magic had diminished to a pale, powerless sheen that transpired as soon as it appeared. Will hoped that her indifference to religion would spare her at least the madness.

"We can't take her back to town, either," Bao added, picking at something on her sandal. "If she lost control of herself in Melmond, I..." Whatever she had been scratching lost her interest; her fingers dug into the ruined earth and came away with a handful of dust, which crumbled in her fist. "Why don't I know what to do?"

Because no one knew what to do, Will thought, but he hadn't managed to put that into less bleak terms before Arik returned, bearing withered firewood, and said, "We get t'eat a chicken, yeah?"

Bao's head snapped up. As Arik repeated his query about the poultry, she rose and gave him the sort of look Will applied to innovative potion formulas. "Arik," she said, too intently to have intended the word as a greeting.

"Hell no."

"I haven't even asked—"

"Don't matter." Arik stooped and began making a bed for the fire. "You got that look."

"Just listen to me. This is serious."

He snorted. "What ain't, lately?"

Closing her eyes, Bao flared as her nostrils as she took a series of deep, controlled breaths. "Listen," she said. "Someone needs to run back to Melmond for supplies. We don't have enough to survive another trip into the Earth Cave."

"Yeah?" Arik stood. "Make Will do it."

Bao crossed her arms. "I am not sending a thirteen-year-old boy alone through the marshes."

Will would have preferred a reason that had more to do with his magical abilities, but Arik had already moved on to a new tactic: "So how come you don't go?"

"Because you don't have a decade of training in non-lethal combat." Cutting off an argument that "non-lethal" meant not aiming for the face, she set her hand on his arm and said, "Arik, please. I can't leave Will alone with her. If you leave soon, you can be back before nightfall tomorrow. We'll send you with potions." She locked eyes with him for a moment, then let her hand fall. "You can have a chicken."

Arik sighed. "Yeah, all right. Better be the fat one."

Over his objections, Bao took the chicken to Mina's tent first, shook her out of her torpor, and fed her the blood. Even in the protective shadow of the tent, Mina was too groggy to do more than swallow. Her breath stank of rot.

"There's no sense in wasting it," Bao said as Arik grouchily cleaned the bird. "I don't want her to wake up hungry, and this saves you some work, doesn't it?"

Arik removed a handful of organs with unnecessary force. "Like t'see your face when we all wake up vampired."

"According to this—" Will held up Sarda's journal— "that happens only with a direct bite. Whatever causes the infection can't survive in dead blood or open air."

"An' how's he know?"

Sarda's later accounts of vampire slaying were interspersed with notes about the properties of vampiric bodies, most notably the discovery that hair shed by a vampire turned to ash when the creature itself was destroyed. Earlier entries contained nothing so academic. When the first vampires began to plague Melmond, Sarda recorded pages of mangled emotional reactions, broken up by gaps in the journal's binding. "I came here because I did not want to watch the world die" had been etched so deeply into one of the missing pages that it left ghosts two leaves deep.

Eventually the writing became less faded, the commentary pithier, and the eulogies terser. The last full page contained only a handful of names and the observation that beheading alone was enough to destroy a vampire, though it was exceedingly difficult to behead one that had not first been paralyzed with a stake to the heart.

"I think he knows," said Bao. "If there were any such thing as second-hand vampirism, Sarda would have eaten us."

Mumbling something about sages and tricky bastards, Arik jammed a skewer through the chicken. Will scooted back to give him space. If even the chance to cook proper meat couldn't soothe Arik's nerves, the only safe place to be was out of range of the knives and dried peppers. Will tore a blank page from his own journal and began a shopping list.

Over the clatter of various spice jars, Arik said, "Ought t'start takin' along some of them pirates. Let them run the damn errands."

"That wouldn't be fair to them," Bao replied. "They've been a good crew; they haven't even complained much about Melmond. After this is over—"

Assuming they all survived, Will thought. Arik gave voice to it: "Yeah, if we ain't all dead."

"We're not going to die." Sometimes Bao sounded like a high wizard, as if she expected her words to make reality apologize and rush off to reshape itself. "After this is over, we should let them choose where we go to recover."

"Hmph." After a short pause, filled with little gusts of breath and the scraping of flint against steel, Arik seemed to have lost interest in pessimism. "Well, Pravoka ain't too bad."

"Actually," said Bao, "I think they'll want Elfland. They liked the elves."

Before leaving Coneria, Will had seen elves only rarely and in passing, as they never came to his clinic. In Elfland he learned why: their pulses were slower, their blood green, and their reactions to medicines distinct from those of humans. Will spent the party's entire sojourn in the city scribbling notes in the clinic, until Bao carried him forcibly to the inn and told him that she would not have him passing out from exhaustion in the Marsh Cave. She later confiscated the potions Will had bought, ignoring his protests that he didn't intend to test all of them on himself.

"Think we got somethin' wrong with our pirates," Arik muttered.

The conversation could only degenerate from there, so Will blocked it out and set about translating his labels into pictographs. By the time the bird was cooked, he had translated his list into variously literal symbols, applied the same to a set of potion samples, and packed everything carefully into Arik's knapsack. He asked Arik to repeat his instructions until Arik jammed a large piece of chicken into Will's mouth, but a scalded tongue was better than leaving room for improvisation.

"You don't want to sleep first?" Bao said as Arik rose and slung the sack over his shoulder.

He shrugged. "Slept yesterday while you was up worryin'."

As he turned to go, she hurried to her feet and set her hand on his shoulder. "Be careful."

"You be careful. I ain't the one with the vampire."

She remained standing, squinting into the low sun, until he faded into the landscape. When she sat again, she said nothing and cut the rest of her food into tattered ribbons.

"He'll be fine," said Will.

"Of course. That's why he's half-mute and Mina's undead." Causation and the remains of a thigh suffered together in silence. "You go ahead and sleep first. I wouldn't be able to."

Out of habit Will headed for the tent he shared with Mina, only to catch himself mid-way and turn, with some reluctance, toward Bao's. As much as he doubted the wisdom of sequestering himself with a vampire who might, chicken or no, wake up hungry, he had grown up with certain ideas of personal boundaries, and he understood nearly half the jokes Mina made about the party's sleeping arrangements. Bao and Arik were tangible in their absence; Will felt like an intruder even on his own bedroll. He fell asleep curled small in the corner.

Shrieking woke him. Will leapt up and ran, stumbling, out of the tent, leaving his robe behind.

Not far from his tent the last of the twilight illuminated Bao, who had, with difficulty, pinned Mina to the ground. For a wrenching second Will thought that Mina had succumbed to the curse, but when she tore one of her hands free, she brought it up to gouge at her own face. Her eyes rolled up inside their lids.

Will had to shout to be heard: "She's losing her magic?"

Mina screamed like a dying rabbit and drove her knee into Bao's gut. Wincing, Bao shifted her weight to restrain Mina's legs and managed a winded affirmation.

"What can we do?"

"Keep her from killing herself."

As much as his hands ached to mend, to soothe pain and siphon poison, he remembered how Mina had jerked away when he tried to heal her. His gentlest light became fire, melting the flesh it sought to knit together. This was the rot, ineluctable and implacable, corrupting any efforts at salvage. Sarda had written of corn that sloughed to nothing at harvest, grown in fields that sank deeper into bogs with each tilling.

Mina's cries split the air. Flexing his hands, Will hovered as near as he could without coming into range of her thrashing limbs and said, uselessly, "Watch out for her teeth." He didn't blame Bao for failing to respond.

Overhead the moon rose like a slow bubble in a darkening pool. Will stared at it and clutched his sleeves, fighting the impulse to scratch open his arm and create a problem that he could solve. His hands itched.

When the screams suddenly muffled, he turned his attention back to Bao, who had wrestled Mina face-down in the ruined earth and pinioned her arms behind her back. The spasms subsided, leaving Mina retching and whimpering. Half-breathless herself, Bao murmured gentle lies: "It's all right. It's all right. Let it go. You don't need it."

After what felt to Will like far longer than the angle of the moon indicated, Mina drew an empty, rattling breath to croak, "It's gone."

Bao released her after a moment's hesitation. Rejecting Bao's proffered hand, Mina wobbled upright and then stood unsteadily, her clothing caked with dirt and her eyes strangely bright and blank in the starlight. Like a cat's, Will thought. He tried not to connect them to the twin gleams that had heralded the party's failure to sneak up on the Earth Cave's vampire.

"Are you hurt?" asked Bao, and Will hurried over to inspect her, ignoring the corpse-stench that clung to her from her contact with Mina. He slathered enough magic on a small bruise to seal a spurting artery.

In the corner of his vision, he watched Mina's hair undulate around her shoulders despite the lack of any breeze. Her mouth twisted into something halfway between a sneer and a scowl, then fell flat as she turned away. "I don't want to talk."

Bao sighed quietly and wiped the excess glow from her arm, rubbing it between her fingers until it faded. Restless, Will glanced around until his gaze fell on Mina's hat, which had landed upside-down in the ashes during the earlier scuffle. He had started to move for it when Mina let out a sharp hiss.

Her teeth glinted bone-white and jagged. "Did you hear that?"

A cackle burst from the desiccated bracken around the campsite. Before Will could react, the sound echoed out in a line, overlapping itself in waves.

"Hyenas." Bao had already dropped into a fighting stance. "Will, stay behind me!"

Shadows flickered over Mina's back, divorced from the influence of the moonlight. She strode forward, arms spread, and said, "Don't breathe."

Will had seen her cast bane spells before, but the poison cloud that began to spread from her hands now was so dense that it appeared viscous. She severed the magic and stepped back, head cocked in confusion, as the glob of darkness oozed forward like a levitating slug. "Huh," Mina said, and Will caught himself before he began to worry; it wasn't as if the toxins could damage dead lungs.

When the spell reached the thicket, the cackling dissolved into sticky coughs and shrill gurgles. The hyenas, like every other creature managing to eke out an existence in the marshes, seldom succumbed to poison, but discomfort tended to scatter them. They preferred prey well past the point of fighting back, and they no longer minded the taste of decay.

So Will felt no shame about hiding behind Bao when what should have become the sound of a fast retreat remained a cacophony of wet hacks and unsteady but advancing steps. The hyenas' eyes shone yellow as they staggered through the bracken.

"Shit." Mina drew back alongside Bao and raised her hands again. A rusty glow seeped through her gloves.

Bao stopped her with a sharp command: "Don't. You're likely to blast us all to pieces." With a nod at Will, she added, "Cover me."

Her first kick launched the nearest hyena backward and filled the air with the crack of bone. A growl rippled through the beasts' ranks, and their slaver-coated teeth gleamed as they turned collectively toward Bao. Careful to avoid hitting Mina, Will sent an experimental arc of purification magic into their midst and discovered that the hyenas' behavior could not be attributed to undeath.

A hiss tore itself from Mina's mouth. The hyenas froze silently in place, eyes wide and tongues lolling. "Stop it!" she barked in a voice that vibrated in Will's bones. "Get out of here. Get out!"

The beasts darted abruptly back into the night, leaving their wounded companion whimpering where it had fallen. When Mina approached, it flattened its ears and yowled, tipping its head back to expose its throat. She locked eyes with it for several seconds, then curled back her lips and pounced. A horrible, ecstatic trill rose from one of their throats.

"Holy God," Bao breathed.

They had only two chickens left. Will found it impossible to concentrate on anything else.

The hyena's body hit the ground and rolled once, its throat black. Mina remained hunched, her shoulders shaking, her hair coiling over her face. In the absolute silence that had fallen over the marshes, Will could hear the whisper of liquid dripping over leather.

"How did you do that?" When Mina didn't answer, Bao rounded on Will. "How did she do that?"

Before he could confess his ignorance, Mina laughed brittlely and swayed to her feet. "That won't be in the book," she said, folding her arms together against her chest. Blood streaked her chin. "I doubt Sarda asked the other vampires for demonstrations before he killed them."

Arik was not there to point out that vampires were, in point of fact, already dead, so Mina wiped her mouth and continued uninterrupted: "I don't know how, either. I felt drunk. I still feel drunk. There's something inside them that's dying, just like the earth, and I—" She turned her head away; her hair whipped out of proportion with her movements and out of touch with gravity. "Everything's dying but me."

When she remained silent for several seconds, Bao retrieved Mina's hat from where it had fallen and brushed the dirt from it. Mina accepted it wordlessly.

"We'll fix this," said Bao. Will wished that he had never noticed the inverse relationship between the firmness of her tone and the level of her control.

Mina turned her hat over in her hands, her gloves glistening in wet patches where the moonlight struck. "I don't think you want me keeping watch," she said dully. "I'll be back before dawn." Without waiting for a response, she vanished silently into the dark. The lack of any paired gleams in the shadows suggested that she had not looked back.

A stinking breeze stirred the ashes. Bao knelt beside the dead hyena and, after a long silence, asked, "Did you see her teeth?"

In flashes only, but Will had seen enough to know that they came to irregular points, giving her a mouth like the rim of a broken bottle. He nodded.

Bao sighed and rubbed her temples. "We'll be damned lucky if we get three days."

"I don't want to talk about that." Will's voice sounded childish to his own ears, but an unseasonable chill had suffused the air and reminded him how of far he was from home. He wanted a fire even as he doubted a fire would help.

His shivering must have been apparent; Bao left the corpse and began stacking together tinder with some of the leftover firewood. After a few tries, the spark from her flint caught, and she blew gently on the nascent flame. Will sat beside her and hugged his knees to his chest.

"If you're cold," said Bao, "you should get your robe."

Will shrugged. The night hung precariously around him, and some part of him was convinced that the fire was the only light left in the world, and the crackling of wood the only sound. If he moved, he risked shattering what little shielded him from the void.

Bao didn't seem inclined to move, either, and he wondered if Mina's affliction had seeped into the other Orbs, or perhaps triggered sympathy pains. Decay crept through him, consumption without comprehension, leaving behind scraps that were no longer alive but could not pass on into death. Turning his head slowly enough to keep the world balanced, Will peered at the hyena's corpse and found he could not remember whether Sarda had written about non-humanoid vampires.

"It's dead." Bao snapped a dry twig and drew Will's attention back. "We should still burn it."

Her voice broke the spell, and the void was only sky. Will tensed his muscles until he was certain that no rot had taken hold inside him. After a steadying breath, he asked, "You're not going to make us eat it, are you?"

"No." She strained for levity. "Arik took the spices."

In the firelight, Will could read the exhaustion in her face and body. Her lower eyelids would have appeared bruised by day. "You should sleep," he said. "I can keep watch."

"I can't sleep." But she did rise and head for her tent, returning a moment later with Will's robe. She draped it over his shoulders and settled cross-legged beside him. Neither made a move for the hyena. When the fire began to dwindle, Bao fed it another log, which she poked methodically with a long stick.

"Shh," she said, though Will hadn't spoken. "It'll be dawn soon."

[Pravoka, twenty-four days before Midsummer]

Bao relaxed against the ship's railing, her hair loose around her shoulders and her uniform tugged open far enough to expose the white cloth that she used to wrap her chest. Even in the moonlight, her cheeks and nose were visibly flushed.

When Will approached, she grinned at him and slurred, "Hey, there. Arik's lookin' for more rum. You like rum?"

"You're drunk" didn't strike him as a productive statement, so he tried, "Isn't your order supposed to abstain?"

"Just the young ones. Once your belt's black, what you abstain from is between you an' your conscience. Right now, my conscience ain't sayin' much."

That her diction kept sliding closer to Arik's distressed him. Abandoning tact, Will asked, "Do you really think it's a good idea to be drinking right now?"

"You worried about the crew?" Bao snorted. "They took over Pravoka just on noise. You saw Bikke, how he crumpled like somebody who's takin' off that fake eye patch now and thinkin' it's time to go home and be a baker like Mom wanted. They're all like that. They're just glad they still got a ship to crew."

One of the crew in question scurried past and did something inscrutable to one of the sails. As far as Will could tell, he didn't seem perturbed by the change in management, but Will's expertise lay in reading bodies rather than the personalities that animated them.

Bao waved and got a salute in return. "See?" she said to Will. "They're decent." Before he could reply, she gave him an earnest frown and added, "Arik's decent, too, deep down. Or maybe I'm the one ain't changed."

The ship listed gently. Will used the excuse to break eye contact as he steadied himself.

With no sign of expecting a response, Bao turned to rest her forearms on the rail and stare out over the darkened water. "Couldn't take it back now if I wanted," she said with a low sigh. "No sense dwellin' on it, and anyway they wouldn't've chose me if I was goin' to choose wrong. I told you that, right?"

"Told me what?"

She smiled askance. "That it was just me. Orbs didn't want nobody but me." She laced her fingers together. "I still wonder if I'm bein' punished."

Bao remained quiet for so long that Will turned to slip away. He hesitated when she said, "Anyway, he's decent," but she seemed to be addressing the ocean, her eyes misty.

Deciding that an intoxicated Arik was more than he wished to deal with, Will crossed the deck to the relative safety of the captain's cabin. Another of the sailors waved to him on the way; Will recognized him as the one who had suffered five cracked ribs, all courtesy of Bao's foot. He had been an easier post-battle patient than any of the group that Mina blasted with a confusion spell. Trying to disinfect and close scimitar wounds on men who still saw the world through a veil of fanged illusions was a professional challenge that Will did not care to face again.

Faint music carried through the cabin door. Will lifted the latch as unobtrusively as he could and slipped inside, where he found Mina sitting alone on the bed, strumming the lute. When she heard Will approach, she nodded at him and continued playing.

Music had never been part of Will's curriculum, but he liked the tune and waited until the strings were still to say, "I didn't know you played."

Mina smiled. "Well, those lessons in high culture were good for something."

Will's experience with high culture was limited to the knowledge that a finishing school existed near his clinic and that groups of identically dressed girls with books on their heads sometimes emerged from it. On one occasion a girl of about his age had waved furtively to him over the fence and offered to give him a kiss in exchange for a bottle of wine. When Will declined, she threw a shoe at his head.

"It's the whole red mage philosophy," Mina said, brushing a loose lock of hair back over her shoulder. "You go into it knowing you'll be mixing magic lessons with vigorous outdoor exercise, but most people are a little surprised when they find out about the sewing and calligraphy."

Will frowned and helped himself to Bikke's old armchair. "Doesn't that spread you a little thin?"

"Being a red mage isn't about specializing, though most of us develop a preference. It's about being able to handle whatever life throws at you. My order's motto is 'Multis pedibus sto.'"

Most of what Will knew about academic language was that it failed to interest him as much as cataloguing potions. "You do something with a lot of feet?"

"Stand on them." Mina stretched out the hand that had been strumming the lute, calling enough white magic into it to make her palm glisten. "See? I can't do any of those complicated spells that black mages lock themselves away to study, but I can heal my own scrapes and I don't get winded after a few minutes of running."

"And the calligraphy?"

"Damned if I know. Mine's terrible."

She reached for a canteen on the stand beside her and made a face as she sipped the contents. Will supposed that he was the only Light Warrior who would wake up tomorrow without a headache.

"I'm not usually this chatty," said Mina, unnecessarily. She had shared more about herself in the last ten minutes than she had in the entire week that the party had spent waiting for the Conerian bridge to be finished. "You have this, I don't know, face that makes me think it's all right to tell you things. Is that a professional skill, or did I lose track of the rum?"

Considering that she seemed to be having some trouble focusing her eyes, Will guessed the latter. He shrugged politely.

She took another drink and said, "Go on, ask me another question."

Something important came to mind. "Why aren't you allowed back in Crescent Lake?"

"Ha. All right." Mina smiled crookedly and capped the canteen. "I exaggerated a little; they're not exactly setting a guard for me at the gate. Anyway, you know how... Actually, I suppose you're too young for people to be lying to you about being married. Point is, sometimes they turn out to be married to governors." She shrugged and went back to playing the lute. "It was a dead town, anyway. Nothing but old men sitting around waiting."

Will sat listening a while longer, until his eyelids grew heavy. As he rose to head for his makeshift bed in the corner, the deck rocked beneath him, and shouts burst outside the door.

The lute-playing stopped. Mina sighed and, with some swaying, got to her feet. Will moved to support her, but she shook him off, staggered to the exit, and peered outside. "It's one of those eye-things," she said, raising a hand that had already begun to glow a dim red.

Before Will could stop her, she shot a bolt of dark magic outside and smiled with satisfaction. "And now it's not a very fast—damn. Well, it wears off."

Will maneuvered around her enough to see one of the sailors writhing in protracted displeasure as he was doused with vitreous humor. His efforts to avoid it played out in slow motion long after he was already drenched.

"Is anyone hurt?" Will called as the deflated remains of the monster splatted on the deck. Apart from the spell's victim, who yowled in sostenuto irritation, the sailors collectively replied that they could kill twenty more of the things before breakfast. Will wondered where Bao and Arik had gone, and whether it was normal for pirates to be so upbeat.

"I should finish the rum now," said Mina, wandering back to the bed, "so that doesn't happen again."

Will fell asleep to the sound of fumbled chords.

The next morning, as he investigated the effects of sea water on traditionally freshwater potions, Bao approached him with careful, deliberate dignity and asked, "Do you have anything for a hangover?" When Will shook his head, she frowned. "You're not being prudish, are you?"

"Hardly. My order makes wine. There are just some things you can't fix with spells and herbs."

She rubbed her forehead and sighed. "I hope Arik enjoyed himself last night," she muttered as she crept back toward the darkness of the berth, "because that will never happen again."

[The Melmond marshes, two days before Midsummer]

True to her word, Mina returned as soon as the darkness on the horizon began to diffuse. Will smelled her before he caught sight of her feral-swift shadow and glinting eyes; during the short summer night, the whiff of decay that clung to her had putrefied into the same stench that pervaded the Earth Cave.

Beside him, Bao stirred from where she had dozed off sitting up, and wrinkled her nose. Mina ignored them both as she darted, cape fluttering crazily in the moonlight, into her tent.

"I hope she hasn't fed again," Bao said quietly. "How much blood is in a hyena?"

Despite his exhaustion, Will perked up at the chance to be useful. Slotting the formula into place in his head, he asked, "How much did it weigh?"

Bao stared at him for a moment before rubbing her forehead. "Never mind. I forgot you might know."

When the sun finally appeared, she slouched with relief and gave Will an apologetic look, saying, "I have to sleep. Will you be all right?"

Day and night had fallen out of step; Will's body wasn't sure what dawn meant anymore but seemed prepared to accept wakefulness. He glanced at Mina's tent, which was bathed in paralyzing sunlight. "I think so."

Left alone, Will opened Sarda's journal and found himself facing an echo of "I came here because I did not want to watch the world die." He abandoned the book in favor of his potions inventory and the increasingly pessimistic notes he had made about the local flora. Even if he couldn't brew the medicines necessary for surviving the Earth Cave, he had empty vials and emptier hours to fill.

By midday he had made half a dozen attempts at doing something constructive with the withered vegetation, only one of which resulted in a concoction that didn't smell completely vile. It did, however, melt the twig that Will used to stir it. He resolved not to tell Bao.

Sarda's journal contained a fair number of blank pages near the back, he discovered. Exhaustion precluded any serious internal debate. With only a slight transgressive twinge, Will began ineloquently to describe the change in Mina's magic and her dominion over the hyenas. He tried not to wonder whether the vampire in the Earth Cave had exhibited similar powers.

He was counting his potions for the eighteenth time when heavy footsteps and clattering glass alerted him to Arik's return.

Bao shot out of her tent in a blue-and-brown blur. As much as Will suspected that it would be polite to stand back while she half-tackled Arik in greeting, he didn't want to hear his vials crushed under the force of affection. He hurried over to claim the sack, started to ask whether Arik needed any medical treatment, and decided that the man wasn't behaving as if he were in any acute physical distress.

Arik's hand caught his wrist. "Oh, no, y'don't. Got some of m'own stuff in there, too." Whatever he said next was muffled by Bao's mouth, so Will opted to back quietly away until they disengaged.

When Bao released him, Arik clapped her fondly on the back before saying, "So, yeah, did your damn shoppin'. And picked up a little—" he pulled from his sack a length of hemp strung with white bulbs— "garlic." After knotting the rope around his waist, he set his arms defiantly akimbo. "Smell that, yeah? No vampire gets my blood."

"Arik," Bao began, but he had the advantage of momentum.

"Got me this, too," he said, producing a glass bottle sealed with a cork and filled with transparent liquid. Will couldn't think of any colorless potions, but Arik pre-emptively answered his question: "Holy water."

With a long sigh, Bao gestured back the way he had come. "You can't possibly have gotten it blessed here, not with the Clinic destroyed. Someone just sold you a bottle of well water."

"Sold?" At Bao's look, Arik amended, "Yeah, sold, right. But we got our own blessin' right here."

It took Will a moment to realize that the statement was directed at him. "Sorry, I can't bless anything. I'm just a novice, remember?"

"That don't matter." Arik held the bottle of entirely secular water in front of Will's face and sloshed it. "Just go on and, y'know, ask God real nice."

The rustle of paper saved him. "Listen," said Bao, glaring over the top of Sarda's journal. "'Tradition notwithstanding, garlic produces no adverse effects upon the vampire.'" Her finger flitted down the page, and she added, "'The efficacy of blessed water is less certain, but—"

"I'm wearin' the damn garlic," Arik snapped.

Bao set down the journal, then rose up on her toes to whisper in his ear.

Arik's fingers nimbly unknotted his new belt. "I'm wearin' the garlic later."

They ducked together into their tent, whereupon Will hastily relocated to the opposite end of the camp. After rooting around in his pile of cork stoppers, he found a pair suitable for plugging his ears.

He didn't look up from his potions work until the sun had sunk more than halfway down the western sky. Finding Arik out of the tent, fully if sloppily clothed and contentedly whittling little blocks of wood, persuaded Will to pop the corks out. As Will watched, he lifted one of the finished products, bored a hole in it with his knife, and threaded a piece of twine through it.

"If you wanted a pretty necklace," said Bao, sidling up to him, "you should have asked me back in Elfland."

"You're a right jester, ain't you?" Arik added another heart to the twine without glancing up at her. "I'm makin' m'self a holy relic. For t'ward off vampires, see?"

"Mmm." Bao inclined her head at the other tent. "Have you checked whether the vampire is warded by it?"

Will set down his potions to watch.

After sliding a few more beads into place, Arik made his way to the tent and expressed his hope that Mina was awake, along with his intention to induce a state of wakefulness if necessary. With his free hand he lifted the flap, in the shadow of which shone a pair of yellow slits. Nothing else of Mina's face was visible between the brim of her hat and her cape.

Her voice came out as something halfway between a croak and a hiss: "What is it?"

Arik's fist shot out to within inches of her face, the necklace chattering from his fingers. Her eyes narrowed with languid irritation.

"Aw, shit." Arik shook the beads again. "Get back, foul beast! I re—re—what the hell—"

"Rebuke," Will supplied.

"Right, rebuke you! With a relic! Burnin' with holy... rebuke!"

Mina blew the nearest bead out of her face with a burst of reeking breath. As Arik jumped back, she blinked and said, "You woke me up for this?"

Arik rattled the necklace sullenly. "Ain't like y'can sleep, anyway."

"It's called torpor, you stupid bastard."

The flap dropped back into place.

Will woke in the dark to the sound of Arik's snoring, uncertain when he'd fallen asleep and how he'd ended up inside a tent. When he slipped out, mindful of Arik's splayed limbs, he found the sun gone and Bao packing up the other tent. Vials gleamed around an open sack; on reflection, Will decided that he had passed out on top of his potions.

"You push yourself too hard," she said. "Arik, too. We need more rest, but we're running out of time."

A foul wind stirred around Will, bearing the scent of exhumed corpses, as Mina flitted in front of him. The yellow glint in her eyes could no longer pass for reflected light. Her voice came from the bottom of her throat, carried on breath that made him gag: "I could be there before moonrise."

Bao stopped packing to shake her head. "Don't. Stay with us unless it's so close to dawn you have to run ahead."

As Will knelt to pack his possessions, a reeking hiss compelled him to filter his breath through his sleeve. Mina paced in flickers at the corners of his eyes, vanishing between blinks, until Bao went to wake Arik. Will thought better of complaining that he felt sick.

Shadows fluttered past him. "I need some air," Mina said, and Will, engrossed in a quick check of his potions, nodded. As he tied his sack closed, he recalled that she no longer needed anything of the sort.

He found her standing blade-straight atop a barren knoll just outside the camp. Despite the night's stillness, her robes and hair undulated, their shadows out of sync with the moonlight. Her eyes gleamed gold as she fixed her stare on him.

"I can hear them," she said, inclining her head toward the southern hills. "They want me to run with them."

Her voice was distant and her cadence unnatural. Steeling himself, Will climbed up beside her. "You won't, of course."

"Right." Mina averted her gaze, letting strands of hair curl over her face. For a dizzy moment, Will imagined that they turned to ink and spread over her body, melting her. "They would never let me come back."

From the distance came the wild laughter of hyenas. Will shivered. "We should go," he said. "I'm sure Arik is—"

Mina's hand shot out, quick and pale as light on water, and caught his robe. His heartbeat stuttered. "It's not just them," she whispered, her breath cool and rotten. "I hear him, too, under the earth. I can scarcely feel the Orb anymore."

Her mouth was much too close to Will's throat. "Don't listen to him," he said, shaking her off as politely as he could. Although he knew, logically, that she could still close the gap in a blink, his survival instinct demanded that he back away a step before asking, "What's he saying?"

She stared down at him, her expression hidden in darkness and eyeshine, and finally said, "He's trying to seduce me."

Will's imagination excused itself. "Um?"

"Well, it's not working." The shadows shifted enough to show her wry smile. "He's evil and undead, and that's three marks against him upfront."

"Three?"

"He."

"Oh," said Will, as several small mysteries resolved themselves.

Mina's drew breath for a half-annoyed, half-amused sigh, but all the levity had already drained from her tone when she said, "And he's promising me things that I—I can't even describe them. The earth is sinking around me, and everything is dying—not dead, just dying forever—and when they pray for oblivion, I force their bones to dance." Her eyes closed, leaving her face a blank expanse of shadows. "And I don't hate it."

A foul breeze tugged at her hat; tendrils of hair curled up to hold it in place. Will resisted the urge to back away farther as he said, "It's not your fault."

Her eyes hung in the dark like a pair of lanterns. "Yes, it is. Why do you think the vampire bit me?"

Because she had been nearest, Will thought, and the only one still fighting. When he tried to answer aloud, Mina cut him off: "I'm selfish. If I weren't, I would have made you kill me as soon as we knew. The entire world is damned if we're wrong. And I don't even care anymore. I just don't want to die." She turned her face away. "It's devouring me, and I still want to scream when I think about losing it."

"Mina, none of this is your fault." The writhing darkness did not respond. "Any one of us could—"

Her hair twisted into coils. "Why the hell didn't you kill me?"

"You're our friend," Will said, and her shoulders hunched. After a long silence, she straightened and turned.

"I'm sorry." Mina's eyelids drooped as her hair began to slacken. "I just—I don't know. I'm no good at this." She took enough of a breath to sigh. "Give me a moment. You won't tell them about this, will you?"

Will's master took issues of confidentiality so seriously that he had on occasion butted heads with the high wizard. "Of course not."

A thin smile twitched her lips. "Just a moment," she said quietly, turning her back to him. Her posture suggested that she had wrapped her arms around herself.

When Mina returned with him to camp, the desperation in her face had been tucked away somewhere less embarrassing, and she picked a fight with Arik over who had to carry the chicken sack. In the distance the hyenas cackled.