PROLOGUE by beni Page B

Deacon Fortensia cares faithfully for our small village though she herself resides a half day's walk farther north, at the church of St. Sirri. The monks at the monastery at Sheep's Head are — -were —" For had not Eika killed them all? "—famed for their devotion to Our Lady and Lord."
    "Some do enter the church to serve God, and do so faithfully throughout their lives. Some see in the church an opportunity for advancement. Others are put in the church against their will."
    As Ivar had been.
    "Are all who serve in the church faithful to God alone?" Wolfhere continued. "What of Frater Hugh? You were acquainted with him, I believe."
    Hanna shut her eyes and turned her face away, ashamed to remember so clearly and with still a betraying warmth in her throat. Only Wolfhere's unheralded arrival had saved Liath from a lifetime of servitude to Hugh. Beautiful Hugh.
    Wolfhere grunted, but he might simply have been settling himself more comfortably on the hay. He said nothing more and for once she did not want to ask any more questions. He had an odd, perhaps a deliberate, way of turning questions back on the one who asked them. She set her cheek against the folds of her cloak and shut her eyes. The light snores of the men-at-arms, the rustling of mice scurrying on their nightly rounds, and the quiet noises of the horses stabled below lulled her to sleep.
    the rats came out at night to gnaw on the bones. The whispering scrape of their claws on stone alerted him, brought him instantly out of his doze. Most of the dogs slept; one whined in a dream and thumped his whipcord tail against the cathedral floor. The Eika slept, sprawled across the stone as if it were the softest of featherbeds to them. They loved the stone the way a nursing child loves its mother's breast, and nuzzled near it whenever they could.
    Only he did not sleep. He never slept, only napped, caught moments of dream and then bolted awake as a muzzle nudged him, testing, or as Eika laughed and poked him with their spears, or if he heard a human voice cry out in agony and hopeless pleading. That was the worst, the slaves —for he knew the Eika had brought human slaves into the city when summer came and that he could do nothing to help those poor souls.
    Gent had fallen, and he would have died protecting her, only he could not die. That was the curse his mother had put on him at his birth: "No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death."
    He could not sleep, and when he was lucid, he wondered if the periods of madness, the shaking, the fits of insensibility when he would come to suddenly and realize it was night when last it had been dawn, were a mercy set on him by the Hand of Our Lady. An educated man might have known disciplines of the mind with which to combat this prison that was as much of spirit as of chains. But he had only been trained for war. That was his lot, the bastard son of the king, the child whose birth gave Henry the right to be named Heir to the throne of Wendar and Varre: to become a fighter and defend his father's realm.
    He had always been an obedient son.
    Would his father send soldiers to rescue him? Yet surely Henry thought him dead. It was Gent they must rescue. No king could leave such an important city in barbarian hands.
    And even if he were rescued, what if his father no longer wished to acknowledge him, seeing what manner of creature he had become?
    He vaguely recalled a dream in which two children had visited him —except there were no children in Gent, not any more. She had led them to safety, long ago.
    Once children had flocked to him, but these two children had been afraid of him. They had seen not a prince but an animal; he had seen their reaction in their eyes. Were they only mirrors created in his mind? A vision through which he could see himself and what he had become? Or had they really been here?
    As rats scurried through the refuse, he searched under the