Page 243 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

I lie where starlight cannot see.

I was forged in fire, and from comet wrung.

I am over leaf and under tree,

my worshippers furred, their offerings dung.

Quench fire, break stone, and set me free.

“Another wretchedriddle.” Perhaps it was the strain of the last few weeks, but Ead felt so threadbare with frustration that the thought pinched at the fraying edge of her sanity. “Mothercursethese ancients and their riddles. We have no time to—”

“I know exactly what it means.” Margret was already stuffing the parchment into her bodice. “And I know where Ascalon is. Follow me.”

Margret left word with the steward that they were going for an evening ride, and that Lady Annes should not wait up for them. She also asked for a spade apiece. The ostler brought these, along with the two swiftest horses in the stables and a saddle lantern each.

Garbed in their heavy cloaks, they galloped away from Serinhall. All Margret would tell Ead was that they were bound for Goldenbirch. To get there, one had to take the old corpse road. It was heaped in snow, but Margret knew her way.

In the days of kings, bodies had been taken from Goldenbirch and other villages on this path to the now-destroyed city of Arondine for burial. During the spring, pilgrims would walk here by candlelight, barefoot and singing. At its end, they would lay offerings at the site where Berethnet Hearth had once stood.

They rode beneath crooked oaks, across grassland, past a standing circle from the dawn of Inys.

“Margret,” Ead called, “what does the riddle mean?”

Margret slowed her horse to a canter.

“It came to me as soon as Papa whispered the words. I was only six, but I remember.”

Ead dipped her head under a snow-heavy branch. “Pray enlighten me.”

“Loth and I grew up apart, as you know—he lived at court with Mama from a young age, and I lived here with Papa—but Loth would come home in the spring for pilgrimage. I hated it when he had to go back. One year, I was so cross with him for leaving me that I swore not to speak to him ever again. To appease me, he promised we would spend the whole last day of his stay together, and I made him promise we would doanythingI wanted. Then,” she said, “I declared that we would pay a visit to the haithwood.”

“Brave indeed for a child of the north.”

Margret snorted. “Daft, more like. Still, Loth had made the vow, and even at twelve, he was too gallant to break it. At dawn, we slipped out of our beds and followed this very road to Goldenbirch. Then, for the first time in our lives, we kept walking, until we reached the haithwood, home of the Lady of the Woods.

“We stopped at the very edge of the trees. They were like faceless giants to a little girl, but I found it all thrilling. I held Loth by the hand, and we stood trembling in the shadow of the haithwood, wondering if the witch would come to steal us and skin us and chew on our bones the moment we set foot in it. Finally, I lost patience and gave Loth a rather firm push.”

Ead bit down a smile.

“Such a scream he let out,” Margret recalled. “Still, when he failed to be hauled away to a bloody end, the pair of us grew bold as peacocks, and soon we were picking berries and otherwise larking about. Finally, as dusk fell, we decided to go home. That was when Loth spotted a little hollow. He said it was naught but a coney-hole. I reckoned it must be a wyrm-hole, and that I could kill whatever wyverling was hid in it.

“Well, Loth had a hearty laugh at that, and it stung me into crawling in. It was very small,” Margret said. “I had to dig with my hands. Headfirst, I crawled inside it with a candle … and at first, it was just soil. But as I tried to turn around, I slipped and tumbled, and found myself in a tunnel large enough to stand in.

“Somehow my candle had stayed lit, so I dared venture a little farther. It was clear the tunnel had not been made by conies. I don’t remember how far I went. Only that my terror was growing by the moment. Finally, when I thought I would fairly wet myself, I ran back and scrambled out and told Loth there was nothing there.” Snow caught in her lashes. “I thought I had stumbled on the abode of the Lady of the Woods, and that if I ever told a soul, she would come to steal me back. For years, I had nightmares about that tunnel. Nightmares of being drained of my blood, or buried alive.”

It was rare that Margret looked afraid. Even now, eighteen years later, it touched her.

“I suppose I forgot about it, in the end,” she said, “but when Papa spoke to me . . . I remembered.I am over leaf and under tree, my worshippers furred, their offerings dung.”

“Conies,” Ead murmured. “Kalyba told me she seldom went to the haithwood, but Galian might have. Or perhaps it was your ancestors who told him about the tunnel.”

Margret nodded, her jaw tight.

They rode on.

Dark had fallen by the time the ruins of Goldenbirch came into view.

In this hallowed place, the cradle of Virtudom, the silence was absolute. Snow wafted like cinders. As their horses trotted past ruins that had lain untouched for centuries, Ead almost believed the world had ended, and she and Margret were the last people alive. They had gone back in time, to an age when Inys had been known as the Isles of Inysca.

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