He played music on flutes crafted of bone, and she shuddered to hear him as the music wafted into the air and twined and curled around as if it were a living thing. And she knew, then: He wove with his flute, wove the very illusions that protected him.
Next to him, almost in his shadow, crouched the skinny Eika priest she remembered. Naked except for a loincloth, he rocked back and forth on his heels in time to the melody. A wooden chest sat tucked against his feet, and one of his clawed hands rested protectively on its painted lid.
And there were dogs, packs of dogs all here and there, panting, lying in heaps, tongues lolling and saliva dripping onto the flagstone floor. Beside the holy altar Bloodheart had let a midden grow, a low mound of garbage, rags and trash and bones and old rusting chains piled up against the most sanctified place in the cathedral. She winced to see the holy Hearth defiled in such a fashion, but no doubt Bloodheart pleased himself by desecrating the blessed Hearth of the Lady.
She knelt, laid her sword down on the dusty walk, and with her heart afire with fear and with an implacable burning determination, she slipped out Seeker of Hearts. In a moment she had an arrow free and loosely nocked to the string.
Light streamed down all around her, the blessed Daisan walking through his seven miracles, each one outlined in glass. Light splintered everywhere, rainbows dancing in the air of the nave, yet if she shifted slightly they would vanish only to reappear if she leaned back. She rose again from her crouch, as silent as the breath of morning—or of fate’s unyielding hand.
The memory of the beauty of the cathedral hit her with doubled force. There the biscop had led Mass. There the congregation had gathered, standing, to sing. There Sanglant and his Dragons had knelt, before the altar, that morning in their last brief moments of life before they rode to their deaths.
Voices. She froze, canting her head back to listen. Let Lavastine and his men not come out yet!
Into the cold emptiness of the nave, below, an Eika strode into her line of sight. He wore the distinguishing marks of a princeling, a skirt of mail fashioned of gold and silver links that draped from hips to knees, winking in and out of the light as he walked the floor between shafts of sunlight, and a torso painted with an elaboration of the same swirling cross pattern that graced Bloodheart’s chest. Strangely, he wore a wooden Circle of Unity around his neck.
Alain’s prince! Could it be?