A/N: New novel again! This is the sequel to Destined To Be Slightly Hapless, and opens right after that book, with only the slightest summary of previous events. You should therefore really read the first two books of the Pretentious Pentad first.

I’ve got a good feeling about this one. There’s lots of powers and conflicting sides to take into account, which makes for some confusion; I’ll try to keep the storyline as clear as possible. But it will also make for a lot of entertaining story possibilities, which I mean to take full advantage of.

Welcome back to Orlath!

Prologue

What are they doing?

I’m not sure that they know, said Kymenos silently, stroking Sykeen’s head, and holding the stallion back when he would have stood to see over the low ridge. No, stay low. They would take you, too, if they saw you.

Sykeen made a discontented snorting noise, but he lay back down behind the ridge. Kymenos continued to peer over it, watching in fascination as the people in the small valley below herded a flock of chickens towards the burning fire at one edge of a great clearing.

Kymenos had been watching all evening, unable to believe that they would simply repeat their actions, but it seemed that this was going to be another instance of it.

The women who had herded the chickens said something that Kymenos couldn’t hear given the distance and the intense crackling of the flames, and the man behind her nodded. Then the woman gestured with one robed arm, and the chickens moved forward in odd, jerky motions, straight into the fire. Though the distance was indeed great, Kymenos convinced himself that he could hear the shrieks of the birds as they died, and he could certainly smell the burning feathers.

He shook his head. The villagers kept urging their animals into the fire, and there seemed no sense to it. Why would they do this? The spring was still young, and they would need those animals, which had included a few pregnant cows and horses, to get through the season until their crops took root. But they had sacrificed them as though there was no need to retain the animals, even dancing sometimes when the fire gave an especially large flare.

"What is happening?"

Kymenos started. Norianna, the talking sword who hung at his hip, did not exactly sleep, but there were times she kept so silent for so long that it was almost like slumber. She probably could have floated out of her sheath and looked over the ridge herself- Kymenos had seen her do far more impossible things- but she preferred to laze about when possible.

"The villagers are herding animals into a fire," Kymenos said. "I don’t know why. There’s no sense in it. They should have more sense themselves than to do something like that. And yet they keep doing it."

"Let me see."

Kymenos rolled his eyes, but unhooked the sword and held her up over the ridge, trying to tilt her so that her blade didn’t flash in the firelight. As the night had fallen, the light had diminished; the moon was just recovering from her waning, and the fire seemed to dim even the radiance of the stars.

"Ah, no."

Kymenos blinked at the tone in Norianna’s voice. She could not laugh or cry, but it seemed that if she could weep, she would have been doing so now. "What is it?"

"This is a ritual of sacrifice," said Norianna, "but one that I have not seen in so long that I had hoped it had passed out of existence. I did not know that they retained any memory of it." She was silent for a moment, and then said, "Do you see the figure that stands at the edge of the clearing?"

Kymenos managed to take his eyes from the fire- the villagers were herding a cavalcade of goats towards it now- and look towards the far side of the clearing. A tall woman stood there. She had been so motionless all this time that Kymenos had assumed she was a wicker statue, but now he saw her move, raising one hand to touch her face as though she were hiding a cough.

"What about her?" he asked.

"That is an effigy of a goddess called the Masked One," said Norianna quietly. "She consumed all that a village would offer to her, and she offered them weapons in exchange, powerful magic they could use to defeat their enemies. Of course, when they had used the weapons, their fields were devastated as often as the fields of the next village were. And then they had to work twice as hard to get back the things they’d sacrificed to win the war."

"I’ve never heard of her," said Kymenos with certainty. He had avoided religious instruction as much as he could, but some had seeped in. "I thought they still worshipped Elle in Arvenna."

"They did. They do. But the Masked One was worshipped here a long time ago, before the religion of Elle came south and conquered every other religion in its path. Elle’s priestesses learned much of their torture techniques from her clerics. I had thought she was gone, gone utterly, consumed by Elle."

"It appears that she is not," said Kymenos, and then tensed. The villagers who were not watching the goats die in the flames had turned to watch something else, the spectacle that Kymenos had half-expected since he had started watching them herd animals into the flames. They had brought a young man forward, bound and gagged and naked. "They are going to sacrifice him, too?"

"Yes," said Norianna, her voice so careful that Kymenos wondered what she was trying to avoid. "A human dying in the flames is usually required before the Masked One will grant her worshippers their weapon."

"I won’t let it happen."

"Kymenos," said Norianna, her voice gentle. "There is nothing that you can do. The power of a goddess fuels the fire and guards the prisoner. You cannot quench the flames or free him."

"I wasn’t thinking of quenching the fire," said Kymenos. "I was never good with it." He shuddered, remembering the cold nights in the past few days and the other times that it would have been useful to be good with fire, then pushed the imaginings away. Those were old and useless thoughts, and they wouldn’t help him save the young man beneath him. "I will try to free him."

"You can’t-"

But Kymenos was already reaching out. A small river flowed not far away, and Kymenos had always been good with Azure. A small rain might be enough to distract the villagers, and then he could charge down into the middle of them and-

Do something.

He picked up the Azure without trouble, but when he tried to make it rain in the clearing, the rain simply boiled away long before it would have hit the ground, with nothing more than a few protesting hisses. Even worse, the Masked One raised her face, which was indeed covered with a mask, and turned in a slow circle, head up as if she were sniffing.

"You will make an enemy of a goddess," said Norianna, her voice tight, "and she will kill you, and with you will die the hope of recreating the Dalznan royal line. Kymenos, let us depart."

"No," said Kymenos, and tried something else. Perhaps the Masked One, a power of Scarlet, could guard against Azure magic, but Light magic might be something else again. Light was a Wonder discovered only in the past few centuries, and if the Masked One’s worship was old, she probably came from a time when it wasn’t known.

The flare of Light started to explode over the village- and then died again. The Masked One turned to face the ridge, and the villagers hauled the young man rapidly towards the fire.

The young man must have stirred from the haze of fear or whatever had kept him quiet until then. He cried out in pain, and Kymenos knew the accent and tone of that voice. He was Dalznan.

Rage gripped him for only the fourth time in his life, and Kymenos lashed out, mind moving from Azure to Dust while his fingers wove the pattern that had saved his life time and again. He seized on the Azure in the bodies of the villagers who held the prisoner, and changed it in an instant to Dust. They collapsed as their blood dried out, withered husks, leaving the young man to sag to his knees.

The Masked One began to run towards him.

Kymenos leaped the ridge and did the same thing, while snarling to Norianna, "Protect me!"

"I can’t-"

"You can. I know very well."

Kymenos and the goddess had nearly closed on each other before Norianna spread a sphere of light around Kymenos. The Masked One pulled up, and this time her sniffing was audible. Kymenos stared at her, though the giant red lion mask entirely prevented him from a sight of her face. Her eyes were green, though, piercing and hungry as her fire. He resolved to remember that. And the sniffing was as loud as the wind hunting through dry trees.

"Kymenos!" Norianna actually squeaked that. "I can’t hold out much longer!"

Kymenos shook himself away from the goddess’s eyes and ran to the prisoner. His hand rang off the air when he tried to touch him, though.

"Norianna!"

"My creator would melt me if he knew I was doing this," said Norianna in pitiful tones, and then the sphere of light expanded, touching something that Kymenos could see only a flicker of around the young man. It shattered, and then the prisoner was rocking in place, free of obstruction, and Kymenos could hear his breathless sobs. He picked him up quickly, slinging him over his shoulder. He would probably have found the burden too much ordinarily, but the rage still kept him on his feet. Norianna and the young man together felt as light as snowflakes.

"Make for the ridge," said Norianna, "and mount Sykeen. Her power is great in this place, but if we can run, then we can leave her behind."

Kymenos whirled and sprinted up the ridge. He heard the Masked One say something in a language that he didn’t know, and several villagers sprang towards them. The edge of Norianna’s light, though, sliced through their bodies as easily as she would have done. Kymenos would have paused and stared at that if he hadn’t been so intent on getting out of the little valley.

He came up to Sykeen, whose nostrils flared at the smell of the rescued prisoner, and slung his burden over the saddle. "Run," he told Sykeen, even as he leaped up himself.

"Kymenos."

Kymenos glanced back, thinking that something had gone wrong, but found the sphere of light still wrapping them firmly. Norianna’s voice had been awed, though, and after a moment, Kymenos decided that she had just wanted him to see the thing that rose from the valley now.

It was a giant figure of a woman, though her body was small compared to the great masked head and the clawed hands reaching out towards him. A wind began to blow a moment later, and the figure, made of smoke, whipped apart, but Kymenos had understood the message. The Masked One hated him now, and she would probably hunt him with all her power.

I didn’t expect anything else, Kymenos reminded himself, and urged Sykeen into a furious gallop down the other side of the ridge.

*******

"He’s awake, Kymenos."

Kymenos turned from the small fire he had managed to build with Norianna’s help in locating the dry wood, and found a pair of terrified eyes staring at him from under the cowl of his spare robes. Or at the flames, he realized, and came over quickly to crouch down beside the other man.

"The fire is only for warmth," he said, making sure to speak in Dalznan, and let the purity of his pronunciation prove to the stranger that he was a fellow countryman. "My name is Kymenos. Who are you?"

The man blinked at him a moment longer, and Kymenos wondered if a blow on his head or fear had somehow driven him simple. Or perhaps he had been simple in the first place, and that was why the villagers had chosen to sacrifice him.

But he was the only Dalznan in the middle of a village full of Arvennese. There’s something amiss here.

Abruptly, the stranger reached out and grasped his hand. Kymenos smiled and patted his shoulder, letting him take and hold the other hand as long as he needed.

"My name is Talazh," said the stranger. "And I owe you a great debt of gratitude for rescuing me. I thought that was the end. She was a goddess, I knew, even though I had never seen her before. How could I fight her?"

"I would not have been able to, either," said Kymenos, sitting back on his heels and nodding to Norianna. "I had the help of a talking sword-"

And me! said Sykeen, shouldering forward without stopping his munching in his nosebag.

"And a telepathic horse," Kymenos finished. "What of yourself? What were you doing in the middle of an Arvennese village?"

Talazh laughed aloud, though there was little of amusement in the sound. "They captured me not long ago. They had decided that I was a spy and a danger to their cause, whichever one they were defending at the moment, and they decided to throw me in the dungeons. Then that goddess showed up, and she decided that she would make the perfect sacrifice." He shuddered abruptly, and buried his head in his arms. "The moment when she came into the cell and spoke to me- that will give me nightmares forever." His voice cracked on the last words.

Kymenos fetched a waterskin for him without speaking. Talazh drank from it, and then sighed and lay back in the spare robe.

"Were you a spy?" Kymenos asked, leaning back as comfortably as he could on a small patch of grass.

"Oh, of course," said Talazh dismissively. "We’ve heard rumors lately of someone organizing the Crownseekers in the south, and I said I would go south and see what I could learn of it. And then I made a few mistakes, asked a few too many questions, and was a little too obviously Dalznan, so they captured me."

Kymenos blinked. "Then you were a Crownkiller?"

"Still am," said Talazh proudly. He started to sit up, but fell back against the robes. "I was one of their best agents, and they’ll take me back in a moment." He made a wry face. "I’m not good at spying, obviously, but I am good at holding the Crownkiller positions in the north and killing Crownseekers who’re convinced that they’re right. They’ll snap me up." He grinned at Kymenos. "And you, too."

"Kymenos,’ said Norianna, her voice tight. "May I speak to you for a moment?"

"I’m awfully hungry," said Talazh plaintively in the same instant.

"Meal’s cooking," said Kymenos, nodding to the fire. He had wrapped some of the potatoes and meat that the innkeeper in the village where he’d last stayed had given him, and was roasting them in the embers. "Will that satisfy you?"

"It will." Talazh hesitated. "I don’t mean to ask stupid questions, but why did you rescue me?"

"Because I don’t want to see a Dalznan destroyed," said Kymenos. "I’m going home, and anyone Dalznan I meet along the way is, too."

Talazh smiled then, eyes intent as he reclined in the robe. "Oh, yes. They’ll take you in a moment."

"Kymenos," said Norianna in agitated tones.

Kymenos smiled at Talazh and turned to Norianna. "Yes?"

The sword spoke directly into his mind then, something that Kymenos hadn’t known she could do. You are the royal Heir of Dalzna. This man is one of those dedicated to your non-existence. And you’re going to stay with him.

I don’t know I’m the Heir, and I like the Crownkillers, said Kymenos, turning to look at Talazh again. I shall stay with him.

He could kill you.

He could try. And he does owe me a debt for saving his life; those are not empty words. He probably wouldn’t kill me.

Probably?

Kymenos serenely ignored her. He didn’t think he was the Heir, and being in the company of someone from Dalzna again was too great a pleasure to let him listen to Norianna’s silly suspicions.