not damage you. So you can take your time and teach each other that which gives you pleasure.”
“Oh, Cylene,” Lenares said, and tears began to run down her cheeks. This was what she needed to hear, had wanted explained to her in the town square at Mensaya. More than explanations, she just wanted to hear someone say it was allowable for her to find joy with Torve. “What gives a man pleasure?”
Her sister giggled and enfolded Lenares in a hug. “It’s one thing to give a man pleasure, and I know all about that, but it’s another to love him with your body. So I am on my own voyage of discovery. Be sure I will share my findings with you, if you promise to put them into practice.”
“I will,” Lenares said. “If we pass through this fortress alive.”
Cylene shuddered in her arms.
And so we come to the sharp end of the adventure, Noetos told himself grimly as the travellers approached the fortress of Andratan.
The fortress hunkered on the landscape like an immense animal, asleep for the moment. High above them the single light winked like a half-lidded eye ready to spring open at the slightest sign of disturbance. There’ll be more than a slight sign, Noetos thought, fighting down waves of uneasiness.
Arathé clung to his left arm, muttering wordlessly to herself. A headache, she’d claimed, only a headache. But they had been on this journey long enough to mistrust purely natural events. She has a conduit to Husk, who may well now be in the possession of a god. What will happen if that possession is challenged? Where might the god seek to go next?
Noetos desperately wanted to run. Run down the path leading away from the door looming over them, run to the shore, commandeer a boat, any sort of boat, and put out to sea. He’d hated the sea his whole life, but now it seemed his family’s only place of safety.
Irrational, he told himself. It didn’t matter where his daughter hid, she could be reached through the magical connection to Husk. On the ocean, in the favelas of Malayu, or under her blankets in Fisher House at home in Fossa, it was all the same—she could be found anywhere. As could Anomer, through his sister. Duon, who shared a similar connection. And, through his daughter, Noetos himself.
His children knew this, yet they were determined to go on. How could he do any less? Yet these thoughts did nothing to dampen his incipient terror.
A hundred paces from the door Noetos turned and held his arms up, palms forward, then motioned the travellers behind the last piece of cover: a few low, wind-battered bushes.
“We should have a strategy for this,” he said in a voice that sounded disappointingly weak to his ears. Fearful. “Otherwise we are doomed to react to the plans of others.”
He took a deep breath. With this moment in mind he had wooed and won Cyclamere to his cause. The blunt Padouki, his former tutor, stepped forward at the fisherman’s signal. His face was marble, showing none of the uncertainty Noetos himself felt.
“I yield to the Swordmaster of Roudhos,” Noetos said.
“The Duke of Roudhos and I have discussed our approach many times in recent days,” said Cyclamere in clipped tones. “And, as you know, I have spent time with each of you, discussing your strengths in preparation for the inevitable confrontation in this fortress.”
He discussed their weaknesses too, at some length, Noetos added mentally. But he does not mention them now. Not a word, not a hint of the negative immediately before a battle: his tutor had repeated the lesson enough times to make it a mantra.
“We have two powerful magicians at our disposal,” the old warrior continued. “The children of Noetos have ably demonstrated their ability to protect us, as Captain Duon of Elamaq and the Duke of Roudhos himself will attest to, after vanquishing the Neherians in the Summer Palace at Raceme.”
Good, remind them of past glories. Not that Raceme was in any way glorious.
“They contained the attack of the gods at Lake Woe, and at Corata Pit fought off Umu herself. Anomer and Arathé have demonstrated the ability to draw power from everything around them, which I have been told is the mark of a superior magician.”
Told by the Undying Man, who is no longer with us, Noetos thought; who may, in fact, be one of our adversaries. Certainly mine.
“In addition, they have pioneered the technique of distributing physical injury amongst their