Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel Page A

truth the king’s rule ended at Balnamoine. The mountain people kept to their own ways.
    That might, Asharre reflected, be why the High Solaros had sent two of his Blessed to serve their annovair in Carden Vale. Their presence would be a light touch of civilization, a gentler means of bringing the mountain villages into the fold than sending a company of the king’s soldiers to force their allegiance.
    Perhaps. The politics of northern Calantyr weren’t her concern. Her only duty was seeing the Celestians safely to Carden Vale. Ahead, the Irontooths solidified from a misty band across the horizon to a towering wall. The mountains’slopes were rough and gray as battle-scarred steel, their peaks so white they vanished into the clouds.
    Evenna drew them aside as they came to the gates of Balnamoine. “I have an old friend here,” she told them. “An old patient, really. Nessore Bassinos. He’s a merchant who does some trade with the mountain villages. I thought it might be helpful to talk to someone who knew the lay of the land, so I sent him a letter before we left Cailan. We have a standing invitation to dinner.”
    â€œHow’s his cook?” Falcien asked.
    â€œBetter than you,” Heradion said. “If he offered us boiled boot leather and fried mud, I’d consider it a welcome respite from what you’ve been serving up.”
    Asharre shook her head, amused despite herself. “Where is his house?”
    Evenna showed them. It was a large dwelling, and Nessore Bassinos had not stinted on its ornaments. Both the balustrades flanking the great doors and the doors themselves were marked with the Celestian sunburst and looked like new additions. The earth around the house was rutted by builders’ wagons and trampled by their boots. Come summer, the house’s gardens would cover the damage, but for now it was still raw.
    A servant greeted them as they rode up. An old woman with a snow white scarf tied over her hair in a fashion that had gone out of date in Cailan generations ago, she fussed over Evenna like a mother embracing a wayward child. Asharre was glad to hand her horse’s reins to the stablehand who came for them, and gladder when the old woman offered them the use of Bassinos’ baths.
    The merchant had not one bathhouse but two, one for the men and one for the women, that faced each other across a portico of yellow sandstone. Tiny windows nearthe ceiling pierced their curved walls. A garden lay behind them, and a chapel past that.
    The chapel wasn’t new, but several of its windows were. Their stained glass sparkled against mastic as pristine as fresh snow. Other windows were boarded over, their old glass not yet replaced. The holy sunburst in the largest of the new windows had an unusual design; its eight wavy rays were all of a size, instead of being longer at the cardinal points and shorter between, and the tip of each one was rounded like an onion’s bulb. For some reason they made Asharre think of open palms reaching for something. Enlightenment, perhaps? One of the Blessed might know. She brushed the thought aside and went in for her bath.
    The bathhouse was extraordinary in its luxury. It held basins of hot and cold water, three kinds of scented soap, a goldenwood brush with boar’s-hair bristles, and decorative trinkets whose uses baffled her. Evenna came in as she was examining a sculpture of a dancing woman holding a bowl. Putting the tool aside, Asharre filled a bucket from the steaming basin.
    As she sluiced water over her head, she caught Evenna looking sidelong at the scars that striped her ribs. That, too, was something Asharre had taught herself to ignore, but something in the younger woman’s face made her pause.
    Their eyes met. Evenna had the grace to blush. Asharre did not think it was because they were unclothed; a healer would be used to that, just as she was. Modesty died quickly on the battlefield.
    The first