Beans lived with foster parents, and given Frey’s authority, it was a simple task to bring her alone to the castle keep. Once in Frey’s study, they sat her in one of the padded chairs by the fire. Frey offered her a cup of watered-down wine, along with a powdered mixture he crushed from herbs Gareth only vaguely recognized.

  “Drink this, and you will sleep deeply,” Frey said, kneeling before the girl. Beans tentatively reached out for it, but he pulled it from her reach. “But first, I need your name. Your true name.”

  Her eyes darted between them. The irises should have been a lively green, but Gareth noted discolorations near the edges, a draining of color, and it made him feel ill.

  “Yuni,” she said. Frey smiled and put a hand on her knee.

  “Drink, Yuni,” he said.

  She accepted the cup and drank. It must have tasted foul, for she tensed the moment it touched her tongue, but she forced it down. When finished, she offered the cup back, and Frey took it.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked. She’d not been told the purpose of coming to the keep, only that it involved the reason for her blackening tongue. Yuni was a bright girl, and she likely knew it a foretelling of the blight.

  “No,” Frey said. “You will only dream.”

  Her eyelids fell heavy, and she slumped forward, the powders within the wine acting rapidly.

  “I can do that,” she said. “I can…I’ll dream for…”

  Frey caught her slumping body and gently pushed her back into the chair. Once she was settled, he stood and nodded toward her body.

  “Carry her,” he said.

  She was light in Gareth’s arms, skinny and small even for her ten years of age.

  Like carrying a bundle of twigs, he thought, as he brought her to Frey’s forbidden room. The lord locked the door behind them, banishing them to the flickering light of the twin torches on either side of Eiman’s statue. As ordered, Gareth placed her body at the foot of the statue, before the tangled assortment of stone legs.

  Frey, meanwhile, approached the table in the back.

  “Do not fear,” he said, returning holding the bloodstained knife. “This will not be the first.”

  The older man dropped to his knees beside the slumbering Yuni. With surprising tenderness, he undid the first knot of her hair, unrolling it as a long red line above her head.

  “I have long hoped for resurgence in the faith Vaan has smothered.” He spoke as he worked. His words were heavy, his tone, tired and respectful in equal measure. “A reawakening to the truth the god-king’s priests and priestesses would bury. For so long, it has felt like a dream that would endure far beyond my lifetime, but with the blight’s continued spread, perhaps necessity will force the people’s eyes to open.”

  “If you seek the breaking of the god-king, why did you deny giving the Beast aid when he came to Vestor?” Gareth asked.

  Three years earlier, a commoner known as Batal the Beast had conquered Inner Emden’s two provinces, declaring himself king and the city of Thalia his seat of power. Lord Frey had rebuked Batal’s attempts to recruit him into the doomed rebellion. Rather than waste time unifying the sprawling, poorer parts of western Yensere, Batal had left Vestor alone and marched his army east, assaulting Goltara. It had ended in disaster, with Batal captured, his army broken, and Inner Emden reclaimed in the name of the god-king. Batal had been flayed, and his body kept alive through the power of the god-king so he might be paraded about Inner Emden as a warning to all who might consider resisting Vaan’s rule.

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  “I resisted because if Batal had conquered Yensere, we would be no better off than before,” Frey said as he began unrolling Yuni’s other knot. “His name was truer than you know, Gareth, a beast through and through. Whereas we now bow our heads in prayer to Vaan as a god, Batal would have no gods at all. I would not cast my one chance at rebellion at his mad feet. Better to wait, and watch, and listen. Reformation is coming. The rule of Vaan nears its end.”

  With Yuni’s hair finally let loose, Frey took his knife and pressed it to his forearm. Blood dribbled across the dark steel in a thin stream from the shallow cut. Using the knife like a quill, and his blood as ink, he carefully drew symbols upon Yuni’s forehead, one after another.

  “Many think of the blight as a sickness,” he said. “But it is more than that. It is deeper. A malediction that runs to the very core of the soul. It is a forgetting, Gareth. An abandonment by a world left impoverished and desiccated by our supposed god-king. And so, with Eiman’s gifts, I shall make this right.” He refreshed the blood on his knife from his arm. “I call upon the name of he who has been banished. I mark the forgotten to be remembered. The world moves on, and it would leave Yuni behind. I will not allow it.”

  Frey drew a solid line of his own blood down across her nose, over her lips, and then down her chin to her throat. When he reached her shirt, he cut into the rough fabric with his dagger. Gareth tensed, fearing what would follow would be debauchery fitting the stories that lingered of the Sinifel Empire. The knife, however, stopped upon reaching her sternum and did not descend lower. Spreading out the fabric, Frey cut into his arm a second time to renew the flow of blood and then began drawing four different symbols to form a ring around the lowest portions of her neck and collarbones.

  “All are equal under Eiman’s gaze,” Frey said as he drew. “All are seen, cherished, and remembered. The blessings of the world are not given solely to the strong, nor the cruelties given only to the weak and poor. What imbalances rise inevitably fall come the needed calamity. There would be death, but also remembrance. Cleansing. Reunification. A reminder to the purpose of our lives as we rebuilt anew in the thousand years granted to us before the black sun opened to release Eiman’s horde upon us.”

  Frey positioned the knife in the center of Yuni’s chest, the sharp tip pressing against the skin but not puncturing.

  “Do you hear me, Eiman!?” Frey shouted. “Do you bear witness to this child of yours? Let her not be abandoned! Let her not fall sway to the curse of this wretched blight! I call upon you, and I demand the power that is yours be made mine!”

  The dagger sank into her flesh. Gareth reached out, his mouth opening to protest. The shock wave rolling out from the Eiman statue silenced him. He felt it strike like an invisible force, locking his limbs and denying movement of his tongue. The flames on the torches danced, and they flashed an assortment of colors. Despite her drugged slumber, Yuni arched her back, lifted up from the floor, and screamed.

  And then silence. Yuni collapsed to the floor, and Frey withdrew the dagger. It was a shallow wound, far less than the depth Gareth swore he saw it plunge. A bit of blood trickled down to her shirt as her head lolled to one side.

  “Beans?” Gareth asked, dropping to his knees beside her.

  “She is well,” Frey said, standing. “Eiman has heard my plea and brought his gaze upon her.”

  Gareth used his thumb to force her mouth open. Even in the dim light, the change was obvious. Her tongue was perfectly pink. Not a hint of blight. He let her go and rocked back onto his heels, his mind racing through a thousand thoughts, so many of them heretical to the beliefs he had clung to since childhood.

  “It worked,” he whispered.

  Frey approached the statue, and he reached up to caress the perfectly smooth, featureless face.

  “Now do you see?” he said. “The power once wielded? The gifts we are denied to share?”

  Gareth gently brushed Yuni’s face with his thumb. The blood had cracked and dried during the ritual, and it flaked off with ease. He saw the face of a young girl given new life. With that joy came fury. How many lives had he watched wither away over the past years? How many suffered, not just in Meadowtint, but in Greenborough, Bibury, Hamdlen, and South Bend? What of the blight’s inexorable spread eastward, threatening his mother in Avazule? The people forced to wear signs marking them as afflicted, denied work, denied a warm bed and a roof over their heads, for fear of the unknown ways the blight chose its victims?

  God-King Vaan was supposed to be the salve against all wounds, but this was a wound he had never cured, and now Gareth knew why.

  He stood, frightened by the strength of the resolve filling him. Turning his back on a lifetime of belief should never be so easy, but it was.

  “What must I do?” he asked.

  Frey’s smile spread from ear to ear.

  “My friend, you need only accept the knife.”