Part I: Sea and Stone

Chapter 1

Year 1293 of the Ardran Principality

Year 216 from the unification of Ardra, Morian, and Evanore as the Kingdom of Navronne

Year 3 Interregnum, mourning the death of Good King Eodward

Late Spring

You are not a murderer. The curious fact had been served to me that morning like cold fish on a platter, to be digested as I took my daily run.
    My bare feet slapped on the mud flats, instinct bound with magic leading me inerrant between pools and mud and the sucking sands left behind by the tides. Cold damp slicked my bare arms. Fine soft particles of sand and clay coated my feet.
    That I had ever taken life unsanctioned by law or duty would never have occurred to me. It was true, the story of my years before coming to Fortress Evanide remained a gaping void inside my skin. And some of my comrades here had almost certainly escaped from rough entanglements with crown law. But my habits and inclinations, so carefully examined and strictly groomed in my training, suggested nothing like in my own nature. Yet if I had not been similarly entangled, why would my guide choose that fragment of my past to return to me—infused by way of enchantment so that I recognized its inerrant truth?
    My destination had not yet emerged from the thick fog, though its chill stone bulk loomed scarce half a quellé ahead of me. Formidable. Hidden. Fortress Evanide—its name derived from the Aurellian word for disappeared, like those who worked, studied, and trained here. Supposedly the few hardy travelers who ventured this tide-scoured coast believed the place a stronghold of the gods…or demon gatzi…or even more elemental creatures of air and sea who sent the rampaging waters to drown any who ventured close.
    My arm blotted the salt sweat stinging my eyes.
    Every day at Evanide I raced this course. Some days it stormed. Some days the sea never entirely relinquished the flats. Still I ran—or swam if it was impossible to stay afoot. At first, two hovering guards had watched amused as I floundered in sinkholes and tidepools and retched from unfocused terror and unaccustomed exertion. Later I ran with a companion of my cadre, a paratus, a man lacking only his final months of training before taking on the arms of the Equites Cineré, the Order of the Knights of the Ashes. Now that I was myself a paratus, I was required to run alone, just as I now slept alone for the first time in all my days here—two years, more or less, by my reckoning of the seasons.
    Commander Inek, my guide, had told me that the unaccustomed solitude prevented more men from taking the last step from paratus to knight than any other aspect of our training. I'd been skeptical, until I, too, experienced these solitary hours when questions and fears, so long suppressed, rattled around in the emptiness inside my skull. Where is my home? Who are my people? How have I come to be here?
    No one came to Evanide unwilling. Magic powerful enough to remove memory could not be effected without some measure of consent on the part of the subject. Why would I have agreed to such a thing? What had I been?
    Not a murderer. That, I supposed, was a comfort. I was a sorcerer of more than average skill, although my deepest talent—the inborn bent that was the keystone of every sorcerer's work—had been deliberately hidden in the same moment my past was ripped away. Instead, my masters at Evanide had taken the retching, wretched tyro, who'd had to crawl the last quellé across the mud those first days, and made a warrior of him.
    Screeching gulls mocked my passing.
    Warrior. That was an ill-fitting skin as yet. My initial weakness, physical ineptitude, and ignorance of defensive and strategic magical practices testified that my life had been a comfortable one, focused on more sedentary pursuits. But once convinced I was not going to be purposely drowned or driven entirely mad, I had grown to relish Evanide's rigor, living and breathing the lessons of magical warfare, preparing to combat the evils of a world I could recall only in the abstract. Every day I reveled in the satisfaction of growing strength and agility. And the magic seared my soul with wonder and glory—defenses and attacks, obscurés and veils, weapons crafted from light, heat, and cold as well as steel and wood, encryption, exposures, strategies of wit and illusion to support an ally or confuse an opponent. The Order's training stretched body and talent in ways I could never have imagined, no matter what my previous life.
    Our masters had made us empty so we could learn without boundaries, Commander Inek had told me in the days the ache in my head and the vacancy inside kept me constantly breathless and nauseated. Only now that I was left alone to consider it all had the questions returned a thousandfold, less fraught with emotion, but plaguing nonetheless. Who was I? Who am I?
    A deep and resonant horn call split the muffled silence of the fog—the tide call, its rising note sounding as much in my gut as in my ears. A second blast followed. The sea was ever our first enemy. A single long blast meant the turn—the ebb was done. The double warned of the deluge.
    My feet sped up on their own. The tidal onrush in Evanide's bay bore the strength of an avalanche, spawning deadly whirlpools and vicious currents as it raced across the mud flats and up the rivers and swamps of the level coast. Though an hour yet remained until the onslaught, my body had learned its lessons well.
    Every tyro of Evanide was dragged from sleep at least once during his months of initiation and sent onto the mud flats at low tide, forbidden to return to the fortress until the rising water had reached the Octaré Mark on the tide pillar—the height of eight men standing on each other's shoulders. Two of my cadre's five had drowned in their test, unable to muster wit, strength, and magic enough to survive the maelstrom. For the rest of us, the experience lived on in our nightmares, ground into our bones and sinews, as our commanders knew it would be. We never began a day unaware of the tide charts. And when the hour warning sounded, our feet ran.
    "Get a move on, Greenshank!" Dunlin, the scarred, cocky second paratus of my cadre, was perched on the rocks beside the water gate like his namesake bird. He didn't unlatch the gate for me. The spells for all entries and defense works changed randomly throughout the day and night, and it was each man's responsibility to unravel them for himself. Agility was not just for feet and hands. "Inek has a change of duty for you this morning."
    "Gods be thanked," I said, as my fingers investigated the tendrils of spellwork that entwined the bronze latch and my inner senses responded with the counters. "Totting up bundles of reeds and quivres of salt and calculating factors' commissions have me ready to leap from the seaward wall."
    All were required to train in the business of the Order as well as its martial purposes. "You must have been well behaved of late." Dusky-skinned Dunlin picked his sound teeth with a sliver of reed and a show of nonchalance. "Fix is readying a boat for you."
    "A boat… I'm sent out?"
    Once raised from tyro to squire, I'd been off of the island numerous times. To fields and forests for training in open combat and riding practice. To remote villages to practice enchantments of stealth and illusion. To isolated crossroads to stash casks of reeds, salt, inks, or dyes for retrieval by our trusted factors. But always I had been in company of a knight or a commander and other trainees. To be sent on a mission away from the fortress alone was a measure of trust, a recognition of honor. A test, too, of course. Every activity in Evanide was a test.
    A moment's focus to release magic through my waiting fingers, and the gate swung open.
    "You'll find Inek in Fix's chartroom."
    My smirking comrade chortled as I smacked him on the shoulder and dashed up the steep, narrow steps. I splashed through the cold footbath and left a trail of wet footprints through the stone halls as I hurried to my sleeping cell in the South Tower. A quick blot with a towel and I donned wool shirt and hose from the wooden chest, leather jaque from the peg on the wall, along with my knife belt and gray mask. Our full, clinging masks were the pervasive symbol of our life. The Equites Cineré lived by secrecy, stealth, and anonymity.
    Left behind in my chest was a fragment of a small, rectangular stone called a relict—given me on the day I joined the Order and broken in half on the night I arrived at Evanide. The relict's design was intaglio, a thin layer of black over white, so that the engraving showed white against an ebon field. When whole, it portrayed the emblem of the Order, a quiver with five disparate objects poking out of it—a staff, a sword, a whip, a hammer, and a pen. The relict's matching half was hidden away in a safe place, so I'd been assured. I prayed to every god that was true, for the missing fragment of stone held the sum of my lost memories.
    I could leave Evanide this day, running as far and fast as I wished. But unsanctioned departure meant relinquishing those memories for all time.

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