The mages voted eight-to-one for Ciamon Kaltevuus to drag the Winze back to Nynomath. Perhaps they admired Ciamon`s courage in confronting the Apostate archmage. Or—more likely—they figured he was already a condemned man when the High Court learned he carved an unlicensed curse on a sovereign prince of a foreign nation.

　　News of the witch massacre and the death of the Lightning King spread faster than the mages could escape. All the ports surrounding Mahaut were closed. They traveled by cart like the other fleeing peasants, filthy and stained with blood.

　　Ciamon struggled to heave the Winze`s limp body up into the cart. The other mages shifted away from him, twitching their cloaks and skirts away from the cursed witch, who still bled. They avoided Ciamon`s gaze and hid beneath their cloaks. Their fingers moved in silent, frantic prayers for protection.

　　 They stopped four days outside Mahaut to rest in a proper town. A spell candle in the window of a farmhouse told them this was a safe haven. They waited until dark to enter the house. Ciamon was obliged to blanket-drag the Winze into the stables by himself, while one of the other mages covered the trail of blood that the man left with straw and dirt.

　　The horses whickered and pawed the ground. Ciamon murmured a charm to calm them. For a moment, he missed Lord Gruffydd`s country manor house where he`d spent years posing as a groom. Worked to earn the man`s trust while he read every letter, listened to every voice that came through the house.

　　The other mages snuck out to join him when the half-moon was high overhead, just after midnight. The moonlight wasn`t bright for any of them to work a spell that could guide them. Instead, they had to rely on their wits and debate what to do.

　　 "We shouldn`t be near him," one mage said. She had the wide, flat accent of the great plains. "He could wake up and kill us all."

　　 "Damn straight. We should leave him," said another. This one was like Ciamon, with scars over his eyes and the cauliflower ears from the pits. "Weigh him down with stones, drop him in a lake. Let Ammar keep their demon."

　　 Ciamon didn`t like the suggestion. "The Hell we will. Their Queen told us to take him back to Nynomath. That`s what we`re doing."

　　 "No, that`s what you`re doing. I`m out," said a third. This mage wore a stolen face, though the enchantment slipped the further away he got from its owner. The nose hung down by the lower lip and one eyelid drooped. "You can drag this abomination over the mountain if you want. I`m going back to Mahaut to see if I can track down some of the ditch-witches we missed out on&"

　　 Just leave em alone, Ciamon wanted to say. He kept his mouth shut because he knew he could not talk the other mage—any mage—out of it. Bounties on Ammarish weather witches were so high in Nynomath, Ciamon could`ve bought a farm and ten slaves to work it if he brought back just one alive. If it were a weather witch, two farms.

　　If it`s the Winze& Ciamon shivered.

　　Once in a lifetime, Ammar`s witches yielded a sacred mage to the Dome, someone who could work all five of the Greater Curses. All the best archmages studied for decades to wield even one of them. The Winze was the other side of that coin. A witch with all the power of a sacred mage who stole God`s light from the world just by breathing. A dark star among the heavens who could pull all light around it into Hell.

　　Ciamon grew up on stories of the Winze. The night he broke the Dome, it was said that a red shadow passed over the moon, and all the mages of the High Court fell down dead where they stood when their spell to bind the Winze failed. Then he vanished, leaving only a trail of broken glass and splintered bones all the way from the holy city to the mountain.

　　They were only stories. The Great Dome had a crack in it, sure enough, but all the rest were just fireside ghost tales. There was no way to tell them apart from what really happened that night. The archmages presiding over the High Court that night were named Apostate—their other names struck from the walls, crossed off the parchments, and forgotten.

　　Ciamon used to dream of joining the High Court. That he might have some great destiny to repair the Dome or cure the plague. That was before Ciamon learned that it was dangerous to want things. God was sure to hold it against you.

　　Dream of her every night and despair.

　　Ciamon pushed the memory of the Apostate`s voice from his mind and tried to sleep for a few hours. Sure enough, he did dream of Beatrice. The way that she smiled when he explained something to her. The smell of her perfume—cinnamon and sandalwood.

　　How could he not dream of her? He`d thought only of her, of every need and want that she could have, for months. In his pocket, he still had the little leather book he`d stolen from Haley Lawson, with all the details of Beatrice`s arrival in Ammar circled. The professor was so meticulous, he`d even written the different spellings of her name in three languages. Ciamon traced the letters of each in his mind to lull himself to sleep.

　　He woke up to find the Winze still bleeding, still somehow not dead. There was no doubt in Ciamon`s mind that this was him. Ammar`s hellfire witch, guardian of the Gates of Hell. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

　　Three more mages deserted that morning. Ciamon was half-tempted to go with them. Renounce his vows, shatter his crescent, and convert to the Church of Ammar. Then maybe he would enroll at Amwarren University, and show that snob Professor Lawson just what he knew about international law. Ciamon had lived it for over a decade.

　　Yet he found he couldn`t abandon a wounded man. The light from Ciamon`s star compelled him to help, somehow. Just as he`d helped Anryniel of Ammar, though it might`ve put him on the wrong side of the High Court. So he continued to haul the Winze along, hiding out in barns and ditches while they made their way back to Nynomath.

　　Whenever they stopped for the night, Ciamon tried to staunch the bleeding every way that he knew how. He applied pressure to the wounds. He stuffed them with hay. In one of the safe houses, he heated a kitchen knife in the fire and tried to cauterize them.

　　None of it worked. Ciamon stood over the bleeding witch in another pitch-black barn on a night with no moon. He struggled to think of some new trick to try. Ciamon didn`t dare try to Weave or to use his own crescent to close the wounds. He did not want his light sucked out of him by whatever dark star lurked under that immortal skin.

　　Ciamon didn`t notice the plains mage come into the barn. With no moonlight, she moved like a shadow over the ground. Ciamon leaned over the Winze in the dark, trying to pinch the edges of the sword wound shut to see if they could scab over. He only noticed her when she pulled off her veil to hiss at him.

　　"What do you think you`re doing?" she said. "You`re not trying to help him?"

　　"Hard to hide when we got a trail of blood leading to us," Ciamon said. He was too tired to mind his manners.

　　"Smart." She conjured a flame inside her palm and held her hand aloft. Under the warm orange glow of her spell, she smiled at him. "Are you hungry?"

　　Ciamon wiped his bloody hands clean with a rag, and glanced at the wicker hamper she held in her other hand. Bread and cheese, and a bottle of liquor poked out the top. The two of them exchanged a tense look as Ciamon took the bottle from it.

　　"Drink up," she said. "I`ve filled every empty vial I had with the good stuff. God knows when we`ll be back here, again."

　　"Ny calls and Mat answers," Ciamon replied in agreement.

　　He uncorked the whiskey and drank a long sip. It was the good stuff. He recognized the label with the Four Wolves howling at a holy crescent. Once they were back in Nynomath, the only alcohol either of them would taste would be in medicines or poisons.

　　This gave Ciamon another idea. He tore strips of green silk from his jacket and soaked them in the whiskey. He tucked these into the Winze`s wounds. Ciamon had to lift him up to reach the one in his back where it oozed alongside the pinpricks of blood welling out of the curse marks. The plains mage didn`t try to help, but she did squint at the lines on the Winze`s back while she held her flame near it to read the words. She shivered and made a warding sign against evil.

　　"We should leave the Winze in Ammar," she said. "Do what the others said and tie him to a tree somewhere& We can just say we`re not qualified to deal with this. They should send one of the archmages to collect him."

　　"Nothing doing," Ciamon told her.

　　The Winze moaned. His pale, cracked lips moved.

　　The plains mage clenched her fist, smothering the flame. She fled from the barn, quick as an arrow. Ciamon stayed where he was, but braced his feet, ready to bolt himself if he felt even the slightest tug of a spell being cast. He watched the Winze`s face and looked for some sign.

　　Ciamon felt a pull. But it wasn`t his soul being stolen. It was only his urge to help tugging at him. Had the whiskey in the wounds revived the Winze after all? He crouched back down by the man and dribbled a little from the bottle over the Winze`s mouth.

　　The man`s eyelids cracked to slits, the fierce brown eyes glittering behind them. He looked right at Ciamon. The Winze murmured again, and Ciamon realized he was repeating a name.

　　"Anryn."

　　"The prince is alive," Ciamon said to him in Ammarish. Beatrice would have called him with the coins, otherwise.

　　The Winze was silent for a while. Then, he whispered, "You carved her."

　　Her. The word stuck itself in Ciamon`s ears. He flexed his fingers and remembered the feel of flesh under his crescent. The curve of a woman`s breasts in the Seeing mirror. For a moment—a sinful one he would revisit in confession later—he thought of Beatrice with his hand pressed against her.

　　"I was just trying to help& Bea`s bad enough at being a wife—she`d make a terrible widow," Ciamon said in his own language. He wasn`t sure whether he spoke to comfort the Winze or himself. Just to hedge his bets, he repeated himself in Ammarish.

　　The Winze smiled a little and closed his eyes again. Ciamon thought that he seemed a little like the prince—noble. The man saved the witches of Ammar when he burnt up the pyre, and then gave himself up to the Dome in Anryniel`s place.

　　Ciamon started to wonder how the Dome had got it wrong the first time around when the Winze came to them. Archmages didn`t make mistakes, but someone clearly had. It baffled him to think the High Court would carry on with the Winze wandering free for decades and no one setting a bounty. That no one would notice an Apostate became the reigning Queen of Ammar&.

　　They had to know& didn`t they? Ciamon thought.

　　If so, why hadn`t someone at the Dome thought to mention it to him when they sent him off as a spy? He ran through all the words he`d read and heard. He tried to fit them together like pieces to a puzzle. There were only two that he could join together: Maeva Sininen`s hand cursed the Winze, then cursed her own child. That must be what drew the two together, like a star yanked into a spiral by something bigger and heavier.

　　What words did Sininen write onto her child that dragged a star out of heaven, Ciamon wondered. The only words that he could picture clearly were the ones that the Queen hissed at him: Dream of her every night and despair.

　　"Fuck," Ciamon said.

　　He poured more of the whiskey into the Winze`s mouth, then drank the rest himself. It was a long way back to the Dome, and both of them were cursed with what might last an eternity.