And suddenly Galloway’s legs gave way, and he curled on the floor, weeping. Orem dropped the spoon and ran to him, touched him, and the wizard’s tight, dry skin was cold. “What is it!” Orem asked.

  “We may not—” began the wizard.

  “What?” asked Orem.

  “We are forbidden—”

  Orem held the man’s arm tightly, as sobs shivered in the thin body.

  “We are not permitted to live forever,” he cried softly, and he clutched at the boy and held to him, his cold tears soaking into Orem’s tunic and, he imagined, freezing into fires on his skin.

  After a while the wizard’s trembling stopped, and Orem carried him upstairs, discovering for the first time that the wizard weighed little, as if he were just skin stretched taut over desiccated bones. Live forever? It did not occur to Orem that anyone could live forever, except God, and those most blessed who took God’s heart as their own and shed their own souls, and so were really dead anyway. But here it was a power denied Galloway, one so real that even speaking of it was enough to weaken him.

  Orem could not open the locks to Galloway’s room, of course, and so he laid the wizard in the attic bed and watched him for an hour, until there was no more light and Orem himself could not keep his eyes open. He knew that downstairs the soup was getting cold as the fire died untended. But it was not in sleep that Orem closed his eyes; it was in hunger. He had tasted a faint flavor when the wizard spoke, and he wanted to find it again.

  At first he found nothing unfamiliar when he went roaming with blind eyes among the glowing mists of small magic. Small magic—it had seemed great enough when Orem first learned to taste it. But now, alerted, he found faint traces of that other flavor, so strong that he could pick it out even at the coldfire heart of a wizard’s small spell. Even when the wizard had paid for the spell with a hart’s blood, or the blood of a bear spilled living, that flavor of great magic remained, and Orem knew, tremblingly, that it had been there all along; that it was like the blue of the blue sky, which is so common, so all-pervasive that it seems not to be there, but once you notice it you can see nothing else. It is the Queen’s magic, Orem realized, the Queen’s bright mist, and as he searched for it, it began to gather to him. The flavor was stronger by the moment, and it went to Orem’s head. He had never been affected by the fires he had tasted before, for the power had sunk into him immediately, without price. This time, though, the power could not be swallowed all that quickly; it lingered. It touched him. And suddenly it was so strong that he screamed and pulled in his tongue and opened his eyes and the flavor was gone; but before him stood a living hart, which somehow had come into the closed attic room and now regarded him placidly from the space between him and Galloway. Galloway was awake.

  “What have you done?” Galloway whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Orem answered.

  “O Hart,” Galloway said, “who sent you?”

  But the hart did not answer. Its eye seemed fixed on Orem, and it raised a gentle cloven hoof and placed it in Orem’s open hand. It was warm.

  “Have you been searching for the Queen?” Galloway asked fearfully, but Orem hardly noticed him now. All he noticed was the hart’s hoof in his hand, and the warmth that slowly crept up the veins in his arms and centered hotly in his chest so that he felt alive as never before.

  “What do you want of me?” Orem asked the hart, but without speaking the words aloud.

  The hart did not answer in words, either. Instead a vision came abruptly into Orem’s mind. He saw Hart’s Hope as if he flew in the air, the city teeming with people below him, boats docking and pulling from the shore, the Guard marching here and there along the walls. But as he watched, the city unbuilt itself; its shrank, as if time had come undone and it was a century, two centuries, a dozen centuries in the past. There were no walls; just the huts of fishermen along the shore and behind the shore, forest, unbroken except for one clearing not far from where Wizards Street would one day run. There in the clearing a farmer worked, pulling the plow his wife guided. It was painful work, and the plot was small. Orem could not see his face.

  Suddenly there was a movement at the edge of the clearing; a deer bounded onto the furrows, its hoofs plunging deep into the loosened soil. It was frightened, and behind it came four huntsmen with bows and pikes, and dogs that barked madly at the deer. The hart ran to the farmer, who shed the harness of the plow and took the harts head between his hands for a moment, then let it go. The hart did not move. Nor did it show fear of the farmer, and the hunters stopped in surprise.

  The farmer raised his hand, and the deer took a step away from him, toward the forest on the far side of the clearing. As it did, the hunters also moved, the dogs bounding forward a single leap. The farmer lowered his hand and the movements stopped, and all waited for him again.

  The farmer turned to the plow. He picked it up, heavy as it was, and laid it upside down in front of the hunters’ dogs. Then, behind him, his wife came and took his head in her hands. He knelt, trembling, and placed his throat on the blade of the plow, and drove his neck into it sharply. Blood spurted, and Orem winced with the agony of it, as he watched the wife drive the farmers head down and down, until the blood gushed and spouted and the blade was almost all the way through the neck.

  Then the hunters lowered their bows and did not see as the hart made its escape into the trees. They were watching as their dogs came up and licked the blood leaping from the blade of the plow. The dogs went mad in the aftermath of lapping the blood; they bounded high as if they were dancing and ran from the clearing joyfully, heading in the direction they had come from. The hunters also knelt, marveling, and the wife dipped her finger in the blood and made the sign of seven circles on their faces. The hunters also left.

  It was dark, and the moon rose, and the man’s body still lay broken over the plow, when the hart returned to the clearing. But not alone. There were a dozen harts and a dozen hinds, and then seven times seven of them, and one by one they came and licked the hair of the dead farmer. When they were through, they came to the farmer’s wife, and the hart whose life the farmer had saved led them, and it stretched out its neck to her. There was a knife in her hand, and she cut the hart in the throat as her husband had been cut. The bleeding hart staggered to the man and lay beside him, and their blood mingled on the plow.

  Then, as Orem watched, the plow became a raft, and the head of the man and the head of the stag lolled over the edge, drifting in bright water. The raft flowed against the stream, and suddenly Orem realized that the water flowed from the wounded necks of the two broken animals. Along the banks of the river a million people knelt and drank, each a sip, and left singing.

  At last the raft came to rest against a shore, and like waterbags the two bodies seemed empty, and no more water flowed from them. They were mere skins, now. And Orem looked up and saw, standing beside them on the bank, the living hart and the living man, whole again, both naked in moonlight.

  And the farmer’s face was Orem’s face, and the hart was the deer that stood before him in the room.

  “What does it mean?” Orem asked silently.

  The only answer he got was the face of a woman. It was the most beautiful face Orem had ever seen, a kind and loving face, a face that cried out like a tragic virgin starved for a man’s life within her; Orem did not know her, but recognized her at once. Only one living human could have such a face: it was Queen Beauty, and she called to him, and a tear of joy stood out in one eye as she saw him and reached for him and took him into her embrace.

  And the vision was gone, abruptly, and Orem and Galloway were alone in the attic room.

  Galloway looked at him in awe. “I saw blood come from your neck, Scanthips, and yet there was no wound.”

  “There will be,” Orem answered, and he turned away. “Galloway, how did Hart’s Hope get its name?”

  Galloway shrugged. “Something to do with the Sweet Sisters. A hart died here, I think. There’s a shrine a few streets from here. Kind of a sad place, pretty much untended. If it ever had priests, they’re gone now, and no one knows much what sort of thing one should do in worship. It isn’t a good place to buy magic with a hart’s blood, though, or so I hear.”

  “Take me there tomorrow.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” Galloway said.

  “Nothing for you to see,” Orem answered.

  Galloway stared at him, afraid. Orem had touched something Galloway had no power to find—nor, truth to tell, did he much want to find it even if he had the power. Harts had no business appearing and disappearing in a wizard’s house, not living harts, and not when a wizard’s own servant lay bleeding under the hart’s hoofs. That was not the way the magic worked. And try as he might, Galloway could not imagine who had worked such a miracle. It couldn’t be the Temple, either. The Temple didn’t work in harts.

  The Queen, thought Galloway. The Queen has found the boy. I won’t take him to the shrine. It must be a trap.

  But in the morning the boy was already gone, and Galloway learned from neighbors that he had asked directions to Shrine Street. Galloway ran, using small spells to clear the crowds out of his way. Even so, he got there too late. The guards already had Orem in hand, and as Galloway watched from a distance he could see the guards demanding a pass, and Orem searching for it in vain. The fool lacks his pass, Galloway thought. He forgot it. All I have to do is step forward and say, “He’s my servant,” and they’ll set him free.

  But Galloway remembered the hart in the attic the night before, and he was afraid to link himself with the boy. Scanthips is something out of any wizard’s control, Galloway told himself. Let him go. Let him go. And pray God he dies without telling anything about me.

  The guards bound the boy and led him off toward Little Temple and King’s Road, which led to the Castle, where they were doubtless already waiting for the boy in the Gaols. Galloway searched his heart for pity for the boy, and to his surprise found neither pity nor fear. Just relief. The boy was gone, and life could get back to normal again.

  “Holy shit,” said another wizard standing nearby. “Last night I couldn’t do a single spell! Not a single spell! If I find the bastard who’s been doing it, be he priest or wizard, I’ll have him fried in half a minute. What about you, Galloway?”

  “Couldn’t do a spell all night, either,” Galloway said cheerfully, and they went off to the taverns together to complain about the day.

  This time, instead of dodging furtively across King’s Road, Orem walked right along, flanked by two guards. There were crowds on King’s Road as on any other in Hart’s Hope, but these were different. The pedestrians were more often parted by carriages, and there were no sweating oxen drawing wagons. The clothing was richer, the errands more important, and instead of the normal backdrop of wooden houses garishly painted or grayed with weather, Kings Road was lined with the five-floor townhouses of the rich, with their stone and marble fronts, their porters and coachmen lounging on the porches, their tiny barred lower windows and huge, breezy upper windows that let out curtains to billow like cream in a moving pitcher.

  It was as foreign to Orem as if he had just gone to another country. What went on behind those doors was a mystery. And if a monster or a siren or God himself had leaned out one of the open windows, Orem would not have been surprised.

  But then King’s Road crossed Low Shop Street, and the great houses were replaced by tenements and the workhouses established through the mercy of a king five generations ago. Deathhouses, they were called among the poor, but the despairing went there because at least the uncertainty would end.

  The castle wall towered ahead. Five hundred feet it rose straight up, though half the height was the craggy cliff the castle had been built on. At the end of King’s Road, here called High Gate Road, the cliff had been pierced, so that a road two wagons wide plunged upward into the belly of the hill. It turned immediately, and Orem looked upward in unashamed awe at the cliff and stone walls that came so close to meeting at the top that the sky was only a thin ribbon and it was dusky where he walked with the guards.

  This was power, to Orem; God had put a hill here, and men had made it into a mountain. But now the power was directed against him, and being a Sink would do him no good here. He had not been caught with an expired pisser’s pass. He had been caught with no pass, and new clothes. Slavery for sure, if not worse. Yet the hart had called him there, hadn’t it? Or was last night just a dream after all, a strange nightmare shared with Galloway? The world did not move according to the simple patterns of a farmer’s life after all. There was more than plow and plant, hoe and harvest. Was even the sun unsteady in the sky? Would the shining eye of the Half-blind Hare fall to earth at the command of a Queen?

  And seeing the high, impenetrable walls, Orem wondered at the madness and tragedy of King Palicrovol, who for twenty years had built army after army to attack these walls. Every time he had brought his army to the walls of the city, the Queen’s magic had wrought such terror that all in the army who were weak of heart, who did not love the King, were made to flee, so that the army dissipated and never came to battle at all. The first time, only a dozen men still stood with the King despite the fear; each time thereafter a dozen or a score or a crasp of new men would prove their love and loyalty. Now King Palicrovol had near three hundred men he knew he could count on. Three hundred. And yet, even if they withstood the fear, even if somehow they pierced the city wall, what would they do against walls like these? Three hundred brave men, and how blithely would they ride their mounts between these steeply rising walls, to challenge Queen Beauty at the castle gate?

  No, Queen Beauty would reign as long as she lived, and there were those who said she had already lived ten centuries and meant to live forever. Could that be true, Orem wondered? He had always dismissed it as a rumor meant to lead the King’s men to despair; but Galloway had thought it possible to live forever, and it was certain from all the tales that Queen Beauty never aged.

  Will I see Queen Beauty? Orem wondered. The face from his dream danced in his memory, but faded, and he longed to make the vision whole again. Queen Beauty would not visit the Gaols; but maybe she would be in a carriage within the Castle; maybe she would—

  They passed within High Gate, a steep stairway that led to the ground level of Kings Town—no, Queen’s Town—within the Castle’s walls. There were great wooden platforms raised by winches pushed by grunting slaves; these were lifting dozens of heavily loaded wagons filled with food. Briefly Orem pictured himself at the rod of the winch, sweating out his life in hot sunlight to raise a hundred wagons a day to feed the Queen. He thought of the bees by the Banning, all of them existing only to bring back honey to the queen bee, who lived only for herself, creating children only to be her slaves. That was Queen Beauty, Orem thought. She sits and spins all day, and all the world comes to her, even her hopeless husband Palicrovol; and everything that comes she eats or uses up until all the world is gone, all the world. And then will she make another?

  Rough hands took him through the gate at the end of the stair. “Charge?” asked a clerk. “No pass, new clothes, no friends, at the Dead Shrine,” came the answer. That was his identity now—defined by what he lacked and where his want had been discovered. No friends, no pass. Five times he said his name. Five times a clerk wrote Orem Scanthips of Banningside and passed him through to other guards. In all his life Orem’s name had never been written down except by the register priest in Banningside; since coming to Harts Hope his name had been put on six lists, and Orem felt as if his virtue were being drawn from him with every flowing of the ink.

  But in all the passing back and forth, in and out, Orem did not end up in the Gaols.

  He stood before a table where three judges sat, each dressed in fine clothing, all masked. Orem, too, was masked, for justice knew no names and recognized no faces.

  “Why did you come to Harts Hope?” one man asked him.

  Why? Unable to think of a good reason, Orem told the truth. “To make a name for myself, and find a place, and earn a poem.”

  One of the judges chuckled.

  “How did you get into Hart’s Hope without a pass?”

  “I had a pass, through Piss Gate.”

  “We know that. Your name was on the list there, we are told. But expired months ago. And passed back through before the third day. How did you get into Hart’s Hope without a pass?”

  “Through the Hole,” Orem answered softly.

  The judge who chuckled was still laughing in the undertones of his voice when he said, “We didn’t think you flew. Do you know the way?”

  Orem shook his head. “Tunnels in darkness,” he said. “I didn’t know the way, or who I met. They told me nothing. I’ve never seen the people again.”

  “And who, boy, was your sponsor?”

  “Sponsor?”

  “Come on, boy, don’t waste our time. What you don’t tell us freely, the pins will tell us at great expense to you. You had new clothing. And you never pass through the Hole without a sponsor.”

  Galloway, of course, but Orem hesitated to name his teacher. He had seen Galloway in weakness, weeping. He had held him in his arms and carried him up the stairs gently. The man had no substance to him; he was fragile as a kite. Would he name him to these judges in their silver masks? Orem thought not. No, he decided. He had no friends, for certain; but that did not mean that he could not be a friend. It was not in him to break trust so easily.

  “He can’t speak,” said one of the judges disgustedly.

  “Damned wizards,” said another.

  “Spells and spells,” said the chuckling judge. “Well, we know from the past that even the pins won’t get names from them, not even their own. Someday perhaps we’ll get permission to bum out Wizard’s Street, but until then, boy, we don’t pin them who cannot speak because of the magic on them. There was hart’s blood shed, wasn’t there?”

  Orem nodded. Let them think what they would; no need to tell them that no such spell would work on him.