The Devil's Last Wife

ed steps beneath the palace,

from black glass to older, rougher rock, scored with marks she did not recognise. Somewhere below, water dripped in the dark. The a

ing," she said. "I k

ot ner

the same four not

one hand on the iron door, and said without turning, "Wha

appens

." He pushed the door open.

out of her the way a cough does, in the dark, on the hundred-and-ninetieth step, with

Rule four," he had said at last, with a lightness that did not reach his eyes. "Doors that are locked are loc

m the ot

estions in the sweetest voice I have ever heard." He lifte

tstone was round, domed

d. Marguerite. Philippa. Sabine. Wilhelmina. Rosalind. The brass was worn in the

tar of black stone, and on

an eye with no pupil. It seemed to drink the lamplight. Looking at it gave Elowen th

he black armour of formality, he looked more like a man than she liked, tall and lean and tired, with

om the doorway, in a vo

looked

ne should say it." He glanced at Lucan

r boome

It was blank, with no name engrave

three hundred years ago or a hundred and fifty, and set it into the floor beside six others, and left it waiting. She wondered who had made

mewhere in the stone, as if behind the walls, a faint and regular note was sounding, too low to be musi

nging the dish with a precision that suggested his hands needed something to do. "Before then,

sto

ay

ng to ask e

u tell me

er left arm, the sleeve pus

d so careful that it made her chest feel strange. He turned her arm over, found the vein

d in the lamplight, and

stion," said Lucan, w

eyebrow. "Th

s us to ask. It does not say we

You f

ever been

teen

yes l

n. "It's an occupational hazard.

waver. "To make me

ready quite

ed once. I found

like a stone into a well, and f

n

m?" she

ew the lancet and pressed a square of

h in his hair and the faint, fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the ki

n you will die?"

was ver

feel the v

said

he

thousand pieces of truth lay

s every Marrow woman at twenty-five.

ith the inside carved out, and she saw him almost k

had hoped that it would be-" He sto

tugged her arm away, ge

ng moment. Then he nodd

her. It came out of her low and fast, like something she had been carr

ead c

words were pulled out of him, one by one, as though agai

looked at him and he looked at the dish, and neither of them said a word until the lancet w

in a rare moment of seriousness. Six women had stood on those plates, and six times the Devil

drop fall from th

d spread, a bright red

ng ha

d suddenly that it was not relief. It was resignation. Six times, he had done this,

stone f

e dark. It pulsed once. Twice. And then it widened, bloomed outward in a slow white fire, unt

lv

across the altar and over the brass plates, bright enough to throw their shadows long against the walls. Somewhere, a very high, ve

d stoppe

at her. He was looking at the stone with an expression she had no name for, because it was too naked to be called

rom his fingers an

," he w

em to know he

his sword. He looked at the silver light. He looked at Lucan. And Elowen, whose entire life

surprise. I

aid carefully

voice was barely there. "The b

kno

cann

ep away fro

nd the stone faded back to black. The note died away. The chamb

anding with her fist pressed ag

at had tugged at her like a word on the tip of the tongue. She had heard it in the dark, in a bed in the east tower of Marrow Hall, when she was small and ill and a woman she could not remember had sat beside

solde?" s

t through the ro

line that appeared at the corner of his mouth, the way a man's face contort

ng time bef

" said Lucan, "I

with both hands. Then he walked past her, past

der the dead dome, with the echo of the sil

eant. She understood only that for a single moment, in the glow of that cold light, the Devil of Ashfall had lo

n the doorway, woul