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I come before God in the sanctuary.
As I lift my hands in prayer
I am satisfied as with a feast,
and in the watches of the night
I trust in the love which shelters me.”
The cleric leading the singing faltered, face washing pale, and a hush poured forward like a wave from the great doors at the entrance to the cathedral. Everyone turned to look.
A nobleman stood in the entryway. He seemed frozen, hesitant, as if he could not make his feet move him forward into the nave. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a sharply foreign look about him: a bronze-complexioned face, high cheekbones, and night-black hair cut to hang loose at his shoulders. His features struck Anna with a disquiet that made her mouth go dry. He seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Lord Hrodik waited awkwardly behind him, staring at the big man in awe.
Suzanne staggered, and Raimar steadied her on his arm. “Prince Sanglant,” she whispered.
The nobleman’s gaze swept the congregation. For an uncanny instant, Anna actually thought he found and fastened on Suzanne, alone of the throng. Suzanne made a noise in her throat—whether a protest or a prayer was hard to tell—and hid her face against Raimar’s shoulder.
As if that muffled sound goaded him forward, he strode up the aisle without looking to his left or to his right. The altar brought him up short. He stared at the chain lying at rest in a heap at the stone base, nostrils flaring like those of a spooked horse. The biscop hurried forward from her seat, but he dropped down to a crouch without greeting her and reached to touch the chain as though it were a poisonous snake.
“God save us.” Matthias grasped Anna’s arm so tightly that his grip pinched her skin. “It’s the daimone!”
Anna shook her head numbly. The daimone trapped here by Bloodheart had not been human; it had only taken on human form when it had been forced down out of the heavens and into its painful imprisonment within the bounds of earth.
“It wasn’t a daimone at all,” Matthias went on breathlessly, “but a noble man, that same prince they spoke of. By what miracle did he survive?”
Sweating now and shaking, the prince settled to his knees before the altar and looked unlikely to budge. Lord Hrodik hurried forward as if to remonstrate with him, but a slender cleric placed himself between the two men and with an outstretched hand waved to the young lord to move away.
Biscop Suplicia was not easily startled, although for an instant her lips parted in astonishment. She gestured to her clerics to step back, resumed chanting the service alone in a resonant soprano. Slowly, in stuttering gasps, her clerics joined in, although many of them could not stop staring at the man in his rich tunic and finely-embossed belt who had fallen to his knees right there before the altar. It was hard to tell if he were remarkably pious, stricken by God’s mercy, or simply striving not to fall apart altogether, for his hands clutched at that chain until his knuckles whitened and a trickle of blood ran from one scraped finger.
In this way, the congregation, led by an anxious Lord Hrodik, dutifully followed the service to completion. The prince spoke not one word throughout, and when the biscop lifted her hands to heaven at the close of the final prayer, he bolted up as though he’d been nipped. That fast, like a wind from heaven, he fled down the aisle toward the entryway, then suddenly cut through the crowd, who parted fearfully before him.
Anna darted away, using her elbows to make a path for herself through the crowd, which was by now in a furious state of excitement, everyone talking at once. The prince ducked under the doorway that led down to the crypt, and the folk following in his wake hesitated. The crypt below Gent had become a charnel house during the Eika occupation, and few dared walk there.
But Anna had to find him, to see if it were truly the same creature. Perhaps he was only masquerading as a man, or perhaps he had been a man all along, cast out of a mold different than that from which most folk were formed.
She hurried down the steep curve of the steps, remembering the way the darkness hit abruptly. The noise of the congregation washed away with unexpected-suddenness, and she barely recalled the jarring end to the steps as she stumbled down the last one.
She was blind.
He said, out of the darkness, “Liath?” The voice drifted to her, scarcely more than a whisper, but memory flooded back as she swayed, made dizzy by fear and the pounding of her heart. She would never forget that voice, the hoarse scrape to it, as though it hadn’t formed quite right.
Of course, she did not reply.
His boots scuffed the floor. An unvoiced curse came off his lips in a hiss. A hand brushed her shoulder. Then he grabbed her arm. “Who are you?”
She could not answer.
He touched her face, exploring it with his free hand, grunted, gave up in disgust, and released her.
A soft glow penetrated the gloom, advancing steadily. Torchlight made her blink. The slender cleric who had stood beside the prince at the altar moved hesitantly off the last step and ventured into the vaults.
“Sanglant?” He extended the torch first this way and then that, pausing in surprise when he caught Anna in its smoky light. Beyond, the prince stood mostly in shadow, at the edge of the light, staring fixedly into the depths of the crypt, an impenetrable gloom beyond the torch’s smoky flare.
“Do you know this girl?” demanded the prince. “She seems familiar to me, but I can’t recall her.”
She wanted to tell him, but she could not speak.
“Who are you, girl?” asked the cleric in a kind voice, examining her. She could only shake her head, and abruptly he moved past her, following the prince on into the vault, past the gravestones of the holy dead, those who were once biscops and deacons. Anna trailed after them, torn by curiosity and longing. Anyway, she didn’t want to be left alone in the dark.
