He thought of the soulcele token shattered on the floor, his memory of being stabbed on the road and subsequent dreamless slumber, this new body. By the gods! He hadn’t been asleep. He’d been dead.
Things were starting to make sense. The previous owner of this body must have died at the hands of the monster he’d seen, and Tyr’s soul, released from the token, had taken up residence, submitting him to the excruciating pain of the injury that had caused her death. “Where’s the demon?” he asked his captors. “It killed— tried to kill me. It killed Ravenkind.”
“King Gavin saved you,” one of the battlers told him, a woman who looked vaguely familiar. “He saved us all.”
King Gavin? he wondered. How long have I been dead?
The next couple of hours passed quickly. Tyr was taken to the Lordover Tern’s gaol and walked forcibly down a corridor while prisoners on both sides hooted and whistled and propositioned him. He was put in a cell that measured roughly one and a half paces by two with stained brick walls. The bed was a canvas hammock whose four corners were tied to a stiff iron bed frame. Dark, wet filth had gathered in the corners of the cell where the floor met the walls. The smell of old human waste and sweat permeated the gaol, causing Tyr and the other prisoners to cough, sometimes in uncontrollable fits.
He was given a dented, tin cup and two buckets, one filled with water and the other empty. He looked down into the water bucket at his reflection. For all his thirty-three years, the only reflection he’d ever known was Sithral Tyr’s narrow, angular face with the black lines and swirls around his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. The face looking back at him now was not only more feminine but wider of jaw, thicker of lips, and rounder of eye. The button nose had a bump at the bridge. The chin was flat and smooth, lacking his whiskers and cleft. He touched the soft, black hair that hung forward and pushed it back over his ears as he gazed into the dark eyes. Who was this woman and how had she died, leaving a body that, with a bit of magic healing, was perfectly serviceable? She hadn’t even been dead long enough to soil her clothes before Tyr’s soul took it over.
He lay on the bed and tentatively explored his new body with slender fingers, trying to force his mind to grasp what his hands were telling him. He was a woman now, and judging from the thickness of his forearms and the hardness of his biceps and legs, a battler. The Tyr he’d always been was male. Could he learn to think of himself as a she? He’d always considered the women of Thendylath pathetic, foolish seductresses. Now he was one of them, but he didn’t feel any less dignified or wise. The notion both disturbed and intrigued him. At least he was alive, by the grace of the gods he thought had forsaken him and, he thought grudgingly, Gavin Kinshield.
He looked up and saw someone peering at him through the little window in the door, a man with black hair and beard and decisive eyes.
“Who’s there?” Tyr asked, sitting up. “What do you want?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” the visitor said. He chuckled and walked away.
Chapter 2
Some hours later, after the sun had set and the gaol was lighted only by a few lamps on the walls in the corridor, roaches and centipedes crawled boldly across the floor and up the walls. Several pairs of footsteps approached, but the bugs didn’t bother to hide. Tyr stood against his cell door, looking out through the square opening. The black-beard returned with two guards and a squat, well-dressed man, who wore his long, white hair braided and tied back into a single tail, and another braid in his gray beard. The old man’s eyebrows were so bushy, he ought to have braided them as well. The guards each held an oil lamp. This new visitor put on a pair of spectacles.
“Who’re you?” Tyr asked.
The black-beard struck the iron door with the underside of his fist hard enough to make it clang. He was dressed in the red and black livery of the Lordover Tern. “Shut your mouth, wench, or I’ll shut it for you. Continue, Chancellor.”
The white-hair unrolled a scroll, and began to read aloud. “I, Feelic Durras, Chancellor to the