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It was only the two of them, alone in their croft. Agnes bustled about, heating water for the bath and laying out her best linens at the table, showing us to a neat bedchamber with whitewashed walls, a child’s chest-of-drawers and a bed with a lovingly hand-sewn quilt atop it. I brushed my hand over the counterpane, wondering, but asked no questions.

We had our baths, Joscelin and I alike, and he lent a hand hauling water and emptying the tub. I watched the muscles bunch and gather in his forearms, remembering the first time I’d seen him perform simple menial chores. We had been slaves together, he and I, sold into bondage in a Skaldi steading. It seemed a long time ago.

Afterward we dined with Jacques and Agnes Ecot, seated at the table in their cozy, rustic kitchen. Lamplight glowed warm on dishes of broad beans and ham, a puree of turnips, a pitcher of water drawn cold from the well. It should have been homely and charming, and yet a pall of sadness hung over that home, and I was oddly uneasy.

“It’s no business of mine,” Agnes murmured, pushing the food on her plate without eating. “But it is passing strange to find a fine lord and lady in the back hills of Siovale.”

“Not so strange.” Joscelin smiled at her. “My father is the Chevalier Millard Verreuil. Do you know of him? Our estates are near.”

“Oh, yes!” Her face lit up. “He came to market once in town … more than once! He praised our cheeses. You have a look of him, now that I see it. He and those tall sons of his. What are their names?”

“Luc,” Joscelin said. “Luc and Mahieu. My brothers.”

“Luc and Mahieu,” Agnes echoed wistfully. “They must be men grown now, with wives and children of their own.”

“They are.”

Jacques Écot’s harsh voice broke the moment of reverie. “You’re coming from the wrong way, if you’re coming from the City of Elua.” He looked me up and down. “And from your finery, I’d say you are.”

“Messire Écot.” I inclined my head to him, determined to take no offense. “You have the right of it. But more recently, we come from Elua’s sanctuary at Landras, searching for a boy, some ten or eleven years of age, fair-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. Have you seen anyone matching his description, alone or in the company of others? He has been missing for some three months now.”

Agnes’ fork fell with a clatter and the blood drained from her face. “Jacques,” she whispered.

“Is this some jest?” The dairy-crofter was on his feet, hands balled into fists, sinews knotting, his mouth working with rage. “Do you seek to mock our loss?”

I sat very straight against the back of my chair.

“My lord crofter,” Joscelin said smoothly, easing himself between us, putting his hands on Écot’s shoulders and guiding him gently back into his seat. “I pray you, we meant no offense. My lady Phèdre speaks the truth, we do but seek a missing boy. Will you not sit, and tell us of your troubles?”

The dairy-crofter sat, obedient and dazed, passing one hand before his eyes. “Agnette,” he murmured. “Agnette!”

I looked at his wife. “Your daughter.”

She nodded her head like a puppet, face still white. “Our daughter. Eleven years, going on twelve.” She swallowed. “She went missing, my lady, some three months ago.”

“Ah, no.” I felt a wave of sorrow, gathering and breaking, too immense to be comprehended. “No.” A sense of dread hung over me like thunder, and red haze clouded my vision. My ears were buzzing with a sound like a hornet’s nest. I saw, at last, in the forming pattern, the thing I had been missing, the hand I had forgotten, awesome and implacable.

Kushiel.

It was Joscelin who drew the story of their daughter’s vanishing from the dairy-crofter and his wife, though I daresay it was a familiar enough tale. The spring rains had been meager and she had gone with a portion of the herd seeking pasturage in the next valley. Sweet, pretty Agnette, with her mother’s vivacious face, had never returned. Her father Jacques had sought her that evening, with the help of a lad they hired during the days, pushing his way among the lowing cattle with a lamp held high.

She had vanished without a trace.

Elua is not so cruel as to use a child to lesson his priests
…

So Brother Selbert had said, and he had believed it; but it was not Elua who was once named the Punisher of God. It was Kushiel. And I knew too well his cruel justice to dismiss this as mere coincidence.
A pattern too vast for me to compass
. So Hyacinthe had said, reading the
dromonde
for me. Truly, it was. I had expected anything-
anything
-but this. I sat dumb as a post and listened as Jacques Écot warmed to his topic, his stoic demeanor forgotten in the passion of his grief. A bear, they had thought, or wolves-but surely creatures of the wild would have left traces, signs of passage, prints and struggle, bloodstains. No, he concluded grimly; it must have been human, whatever took Agnette. Tsingani, most like. Everyone knew the Tsingani were not to be trusted, that they would steal D’Angeline babies from their cradles and raise them as their own, given half a chance.

“They wouldn’t,” I murmured, but my voice went unheard, buried beneath the flood of anguish our inquiry had unleashed.

Somehow, Joscelin managed everything that night, hearing out their terrible story, making amends and apologies, pleading the travails of our journey and spiriting me away to our simple bedchamber. Agnette’s chamber, I knew now, the counterpane stitched by a loving mother for the only child of her blood. I sat upon it, turning my dumbstruck gaze to his.

“Oh, Joscelin! What if it’s … it’s nothing to do with politics, with the Queen’s kin, with Melisande. What if it’s just. …” I searched futilely for words. “A bad thing that happened?”

“We will find out.” He knelt beside the bed, eyes fierce, gripping my hands in his. “Phèdre, if someone is abducting D’Angeline children from their homes, we’ll find out about it. We’ll go in the morning to Verreuil. My father won’t stand for this lightly, I promise you that! He’ll give us every aid, put his men-at-arms at our disposal, rouse the countryside. We will find them.”

I was shivering, to the marrow of my bones. I dared not think to what purpose the children had been taken, not yet. The rawness of the Écots’ grief was unbearable. I do not know, if it had been my child, if I could have endured it. What did I know of a parent’s suffering? It was that very fear had kept me from motherhood, and this bereavement was worse, far worse, than aught I had imagined. “These poor people.”

“I know.” Joscelin wrapped both arms around me, warm breath against my hair. “I know,” he repeated. “I know.”

Eighteen

A LIGHT rain was falling when we took our leave of the Écots’ household. I sat my mare, raindrops glistening on my hair while Joscelin discussed treatment of our spavined mule with the dairy-crofter. We would move swifter without it, and they would gain a pack-mule in the bargain when it healed. I could afford the cost.

Agnes Écot lingered in the doorway and looked at me with eyes starved for hope.

“We will find her,” I said to her as Joscelin checked the lead-rope on our remaining mule, preparing to depart. “As Kushiel’s Chosen, I swear it to you. We will find your daughter.”

Joscelin mounted his gelding without comment, swinging its head toward the west and Verreuil, and thus did we make our exit.

It was nearly an hour before he spoke of it.

“You shouldn’t have said that to her,” he said without looking at me. “What I said last night… you and I know the odds. I said it to give you heart. You made her believe, Phèdre. False hope is crueler than kindness.”

“I know.” I could not explain to him that the words had come from a hollow place within me, that I had not known I would speak them until I opened my mouth and the words had emerged. “Joscelin, I had to.”

He did look at me, then, but offered no reply. Soon, our trail led back into the steep crags and gorges, rendering conversation impossible. Joscelin led and I followed behind the pack-mule’s bobbing haunches, guiding my mare with care and considering the strange emotion that churned within my breast.

It was anger.

All my life, I have been marked as Kushiel’s Chosen-and I have suffered for it, as have others, who have born the harsh brunt of my fate. And yet even as I have acknowledged the folly of my choices, the blood-guilt I bear, I have known, too, that each of us makes our own choices, and no one is free of responsibility for his or her actions. To believe otherwise is vanity. If I have questioned Kushiel’s wisdom in choosing me-indeed, if I have prayed to be freed from the burden of my nature-I have never questioned his justice.

I questioned it now.

What had a dairy-crofter’s child done, to be caught up in the terrible net of retribution? Nothing. What sins had her parents committed, that their only begotten should be used as an instrument of vengeance? Sold unripe cheese at market? I could not fathom it. Braced for intrigue, for plots within plots, I had found the last thing I expected: chance, cruel chance. If there were purpose behind it, it could only be Kushiel’s doing-or Elua himself. I could not imagine a purpose so deep it justified this cruelty. And I was angered to the core of my soul.

The rain had ceased by the time we reached the top of a massif, a broad and windswept plateau, the mountains stretching below us in brown wrinkles. Joscelin paused to rest our blown horses. “Phèdre,” he murmured as I came alongside him. “You said it yourself. Even Blessed Elua cannot prevent the world’s ills. He can but give us the courage to face them with love.”

I choked on a bitter laugh. “And what did the girl say? She was right. It’s not enough.”

“It has to be.” He looked steadily at me. “It’s all we have.”

“This is Kushiel’s doing.” I brushed the tangled hair back from my face, gazing at the vista below, the distant blue mirror of a lake that marked the estate of Verreuil. “I feel it, Joscelin. I feel it in my marrow. I was a fool not to see it before.”

“Mayhap it is so.” His hands rested quietly on the pommel of his saddle, and his eyes were as blue as the lake. “Even Kushiel serves Blessed Elua in the end, and even he must use mortal means to do his bidding. And you are his chosen.”

“Yes.” I swallowed, remembering my pledge to Agnes Écot. “Come on. Let’s go.”

It was after midday when we arrived at Verreuil. I had been there before, but I forgot, between visits, the atmosphere of tranquil chaos that reigned at Joscelin’s childhood home. It is a beautiful estate, sprawling along the shore of the lake-Lake Verre-crumbling in its oldest parts, the lines etched clean-graven and new where the family has expanded. We emerged from the dark shadows of fir trees to find one of his nieces at play on the forest’s verge.

“Uncle Joscelin!” I caught a glimpse of an urchin face, smudged and wide-eyed, as the girl ran at him and heard Joscelin’s laugh as he leaned down from the saddle, catching her in a hug. And then with a wriggle, she was gone, high tones setting the hills to ringing. “Uncle Joscelin, Uncle Joscelin’s here!”

We hadn’t ridden ten paces before the manor doors were flung open and its inhabitants spilled out into the courtyard; adults, children, a surge of barking hounds. Tears stung my eyes at the welcome. I hung back, letting Joscelin precede me.

“My lady Phèdre!” Luc Verreuil came over to grin up at me, two years the elder of Joscelin, and taller by as many inches. His broad hands spanned my waist as he lifted me from the saddle, sweeping me into a crushing embrace the instant my feet touched cobblestones. “Well met!”

“And you … you great lummox!” The air had fair left my lungs. I wheezed, greeting his wife Yvonne, tall and willowy, with fox-slanted grey eyes. “My lady.”

“Oh, Luc, do let her breathe.” Stooping, she smiled and gave me the kiss of greeting.

I caught my breath and turned to greet Joscelin’s parents. “My lord Millard, my lady Ges, thank you for your hospitality. Forgive us for intruding, but we’d no time to send word.”

“Nonsense.” The Lady Ges smiled, warm and earthy, even as her husband bowed. “You’re always welcome here, Comtesse.”

“Thank you.” I drew another deep breath. My lungs seemed to be functioning again. “I am sorry to say it isn’t exactly a courtesy call, my lady.”

Millard Verreuil gave me a speculative look. He was a tall man-all the members of Joscelin’s family were tall-with the same old-fashioned beauty as his middle son. What he saw writ in my features, I cannot say, but he took it seriously. “We will speak of it inside.”

I nodded, and then Joscelin brought his younger brother Mahieu to greet me, and Mahieu’s wife Marie-Louise, and nothing would do but that I was reintroduced to their children and Luc and Yvonne’s, and then his elder sister Jehane, visiting with a pair of teenaged sons who shuffled their feet and turned beet-red in my presence, and all around us was the milling presence of dogs, great hairy creatures that stood waist-high on me, as tall as everything else in Verreuil.

Somehow, the Lady Ges got us all indoors and managed to dispense with the children and dogs, assembling the adults in the parlour with light refreshments and wine. There was somewhat of her, I thought, in Joscelin’s quiet competence, for all that he favored his father and had his father’s reserve. I wondered, sometimes, what he would have been like had he grown to manhood in Verreuil, instead of being sent to endure the stern rigors of the Cassiline Brotherhood at the age of ten. I wondered too if he resented it. If he did, he never said so.

There was a scuffling and scraping of chairs as everyone present drew chairs around, the better to hear. The parlour of Verreuil had the gracious, lived-in comfort one finds in old homes. The furnishings were fine, but worn; the carpets threadbare in spots. Still, the wood was lovingly polished with beeswax and fresh flowers adorned the room.

The Chevalier Millard Verreuil took the place of precedence, seated in a stiff, throne-backed chair. I could not but help glancing at his left arm where it lay atop the chair’s arm. It ended in a stump, hidden beneath the cuff of his cambric sleeve. He’d lost his left hand at the battle of Troyes-le-Mont, during the last, desperate surge of attack by a group of Skaldi invaders, cut off from their retreating army. He inclined his head to me, opening the discussion with formality. “How may House Verreuil serve her majesty the Queen?”