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PROLOGUE
Meridium, Valtain
The air was filled with screaming and wailing.
Covering one ear with her free hand in a fruitless effort to drown out the sound, the woman hurried across the courtyard.
In her arms, the child she held whimpered softly and burrowed his face more tightly against his mother’s shoulder.
“Shhh, shhh,” she murmured. “You’re safe now. Everything will be all right.” Brushing her hand over her son’s back gently, she tried to reassure him with her touch.
The words had to be true. Anything else was unthinkable.
Her eyes scanned quickly, constantly.
There!
Along one stone wall of the courtyard was a row of arched passageways leading to other rooms in the complex. The woman hurried over to one, the child still pressed tightly to her chest.
They were just in time. As she stepped into the shadowy passage, an eruption of screams filled the courtyard from the way they had just come.
The boy began to tremble. His mother wrapped her arms tightly around him. “Shhh, shhh,” she reminded him.
Her eyes were furtive and desperate as she made her way further into the passage.
There was a scrambling sound from outside the entrance.
A group of small figures streamed past. Running over the ground on all fours like animals. Chasing something. Someone.
More screaming. Then pleas. Words the woman could pick out but didn’t want to.
A ripping and tearing sound joined the screams.
She felt herself begin to tremble as hard as the boy.
Her hand touched a latch. She inhaled sharply. “There.” She moved her hand and an opening in the stone wall appeared. Stepping in quickly, she closed the stone panel behind her, pressing until she heard the click of the latch.
At last, there was quiet. Inside the cool, stone room all was dark and still.
The woman fumbled her free hand along the wall. Light burst up from a torch, filling the small room with pinpricks of dust.
She sank to her knees, cradling the boy against her, and leaned back against the cold stone wall.
“Where are we?” The boy’s weak voice suggested he did not much care but had asked the question more from habit than anything.
His eyes were dull and glazed, his skin a pale sickly shade of gray. While his mother’s shaking had subsided, the boy had not stopped trembling since he had started.
The woman did not notice. She merely clasped the child closer to her body.
“A storage room,” she murmured. “I was here once before, with my father as a child. He was in charge of overseeing the celebration.” She looked around the room slowly. “They stored wine here then.”
The child leaned his cheek against his mother’s chest, his own rising and falling weakly.
The woman caressed the boy’s hair.
“Sleep now, my love. You are safe here. With me.” She kissed his brow and only then did she seem surprised.
“You are so cold, my darling.” She looked down at the boy’s face. “You told me you had not eaten or drunk anything since we arrived at the festival.”
