Hyderlin stared at the meal slot in the iron door. The old voice continued.
“I smell earth. You have risen from a grave.”
“What are you —”
“Do not pretend with me, gentle ghost. However faithfully you imitate the living, you know your life has already ended.”
Silence.
“What keeps you walking the ground above instead of lying down where you belong? This life of yours — it finished. You must learn to release what is over.”
Silence.
“Your life carries the smell of blood and iron. You took many lives while you breathed. A great many. And you lost your own life to a brother of the same blood. How pitiful.”
Silence.
“This proud, solitary, kingly-in-her-poverty, beggar-royal-in-her-wealth soul —”
Silence.
“Are you the executed princess?”
Hyderlin forced her lips apart.
“Who are you?”
“Only an old blind person. At birth, I was given the name Tiryasora.”
There was only one blind person in Lotsa with that name. Hyderlin murmured, almost to herself.
“…The blind prophet?”
The voice from the other side of the iron door answered.
“So I have been called.”
The blind prophet Tiryasora was the greatest oracle of this age.
Long ago, the prophet had knelt before the feet of the third prince and addressed him as Majesty. For the crime of presumption, Tiryasora was exiled from Lotsa — and twelve years later, that same third prince had become King Chesaretto, the Knight King, and the exile was formally revoked.
In the years that followed, the prophet Tiryasora had foretold the abundant harvests and the failed ones, the births and the deaths, the coming of the Holy Woman Margarite. The prophet had appeared at the birthday feasts of various lords and whispered to them of what lay ahead for their domains.
And then, some years ago, vanished without explanation.
Hyderlin stood before the prophet she had believed to be long dead and felt simultaneously thrown off balance and brightly, almost dangerously, awake.
“Prophet Tiryasora. Why are you here?”
“The king locked me in this place.”
“The king? When? Why? Tell me —”
Tiryasora answered none of this. Instead, the old voice came through the slot with quiet authority.
“Why do the dead meddle in the affairs of the living? Go back, departed princess. Every step you take upon the earth with a dead body only deepens the hollow place inside you.”
“I cannot go back. The Holy Woman woke me — she brought me back!”
“The Holy Woman… I see. So it came to that after all.”
A long sigh.
Hyderlin pressed in urgently.
“Prophet Tiryasora — I come to you with a question. Can you give me an answer?”
Silence from the other side of the door.
The urgency was becoming desperation. If the blind prophet truly saw far into what had not yet happened, then perhaps the truth Hyderlin had been reaching for all this time was also within reach.
She pressed close against the door.
“Prophet. If you know the future, you must know the past as well. Do you know why my brother had me executed? Why Chesa did what he did to me?”
The old person laughed softly.
“Everyone in the kingdom knows that reason, do they not? The princess attempted to assassinate the queen.”
Hyderlin felt the fury rise in her throat like water.
“That was a false charge. What I want to know is the reason that only Chesa knows. Why did he have me framed? Why did he have me killed? What was it for?”
“I am not omniscient. But the answer to what you are asking — I believe I have it.”
“Then tell me.”
“Not now.”
“I am asking you —”
Hyderlin erupted.
It was the feeling of watching a fish you desperately needed to catch pass through your hands and disappear. The frustration rose to something almost physical.
The prophet who had lived several times longer than Hyderlin answered her with patient gentleness.
“If you do not leave now, you will find yourself in considerable difficulty. Return to the owner of the cursed blade, and go.”
The cursed blade?
“When next we meet — then I will give you the answer to your question.”
Hyderlin came down the stairs in a state of barely contained agitation. Her mind was on fire. She could not think clearly.
She stepped out of the dark stairwell and light struck her directly in the eyes.
“Took longer than I expected.”
Sarg had been waiting at the base of the staircase entrance. Autumn light fell across his silver hair and glittered there, very still.
“I found something remarkable. Let’s go — quickly.”
Sarg re-crimped the broken lock back into a rough approximation of its original position. Hyderlin hauled him along and went clattering down the stairs and out through the back entrance.
Two soldiers were visible in the distance, moving toward the front entrance to the old keep. Sarg and Hyderlin pressed themselves flat against the wall in the shadows and waited until the soldiers disappeared through the gate.
“That was slightly too close.”
Sarg’s murmur prompted a nod from Hyderlin. The considerable difficulty the prophet had warned her of had apparently been this.
The damaged lock nagged at her, but there was nothing to be done about it now.
The two of them made their way back to the guest quarters that had been assigned to them.
Hyderlin pulled every window shut before she said a word.
“The prophet Tiryasora is locked in that tower. I thought the prophet had gone into some mountain retreat — not taken prisoner by Chesa.”
Sarg folded his arms.
“Wait — are you certain? Could it be an impostor?”
“I’m certain. The prophet knew something about me that even Chesa doesn’t know.”
The clarity with which Tiryasora had seen through her to the core of what she was could only belong to a genuine prophet.
Hyderlin paced the room, working her jaw. The frenzy in her would not settle. The dead heart in her chest was hammering as though it meant to tear free, and she was afraid it might.
“The prophet claims to have the answer. Why Chesa framed me. Why he did it — what the real reason was!”
The castle — this vast, cold stone fortress — kept turning up pieces of memory she had tried to keep buried. The old keep especially. And now they were surfacing, one by one, through the floor of her composure.
The tendons cut in her wrist.
You’ll never use that hand again.
Her right hand, nearly crushed.
You won’t be able to hold a sword.
The waterboarding. The cold.
If they want a confession — just confess. Give them what they want.
The whip, which had felt like fire.
I told them everything. I confessed to things I didn’t do. What more do they want from me —
“…The purpose of torture is to extract a confession. I told them everything. I even admitted to things that weren’t true. So why — what more did they want to hear? Why did they keep going?”
For crimes against the crown: attempted assassination of Queen Margarite. Sacrilege. Four counts of arson. Fifty-nine murders.
“Since you are going to the end, we will allow you to do so as a princess.”
Spoken like a favor. Like a mercy.
So this was what her existence had been reduced to — gratitude for a thin royal gown.
Cold rain. Body heat stolen from her. The cold was unbearable.
The silent crowd. The faces turned away or hidden, watching without watching.
The glint of the axe blade.
The coldness of death against her neck.
“Hyderlin!”
Sarg grabbed her wrist, hard and fast. She had been about to wrench free on pure instinct, but then she saw it — the blood on her fingernails, the strips of skin caught beneath them. She had been clawing at her own throat.
She stopped.
“You’re bleeding. Stop.”
Her hand went still.
The scratched skin at her neck was stinging now, prickling in the way of fresh wounds.
Her body was shaking. It had been shaking without her notice, the way a person shakes with fever.
“Hyderlin.”
Sarg touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. He turned her face until she looked at him.
“Move your hand.”
The hand at her throat dropped without resistance. Sarg touched the raw skin on her neck carefully and murmured something — the sound of a prayer, almost musical, low and uninflected. A warmth like breath spread over the scratches.
The present pulled her back in.
No rain. No watching crowd. No executioner raising an axe. What she felt against her neck was not the cold edge of death.
Just a hand. Warmer than most. Like most knights’ hands — rough, with years of callus in the palm.
Something in her eyes was burning.
“Why won’t the wounds close?”
Sarg looked at her with something that was not quite alarm and not quite composure.
“What did they do to you?”
They killed me.
Hyderlin pressed her fist shut until the fingernails bit into her palm. That small sharp pain dragged her fully back into her own body. She turned her face away.
“I need some air. Just for a moment.”
“Hyderlin —”
“Don’t follow me.”
She pressed one hand over her face and went out.
Sarg followed her immediately. She spoke through gritted teeth.
“I told you not to follow me.”
“I don’t feel right leaving you alone.”
“You make me more tired, not less. Please — just stay here —”
She shook him off and kept walking.
She walked with long strides. Stumbling strides. The strides of someone walking toward an execution they had already accepted.
Her right hand, clenched around nothing, hurt at the joints — a deep, interior hurt, as though the bones might be fracturing and folding the way they had once before.
