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inks, and even to rule and prick the pages. With so many books to copy, and new ones coming every month, everyone must help. And I try to read them all. The learning is a wonder.” The boy’s expression shifted as easily as light in an aspen glade.
    “Well then, there is one boon you could grant me.”
    “Anything.”
    “My illness clouds my eyes, so that reading makes my head ache and all the letters swim together. Yet I must commit this scroll of your Rule to memory before Brother Gildas tests me, else I’ll be thrown out of Gillarine ten days hence to languish again among wolves and sinners to the peril of my soul. So if you could aid me…”
    One might have thought I had asked Jullian to polish my heavenly crown. He carefully untied the ribbon that bound the scroll and proceeded to recount the fifteen laws of Saint Ophir’s Rule. Among the expected admonitions to abjure fornication, gambling, excessive drink, and the lures of worldly wealth, to forgo the practices and use of magic and other earthbound power, to pray the holy Hours and give absolute obedience to the commands of prior, abbot, and hierarch, lay the small requirements that declared a novice must be a free man of sound body and legitimate birth and be schooled so far as to read and do simple sums.
    “Am I reading too fast, sir?”
    “No, no,” I said, swallowing a curse. “I’m just fixing the holy words in my head.”
    Of necessity, my memory had developed exceedingly keen. The balance of the world had never seemed fair to me—that reading was placed so high in the scheme of virtue while the skill to remember what others read or to make some use of it languished far below.
    When he had finished the scroll, he picked up the psalter. “I could read you a psalm, to soothe your tormented humors.”
    “Truly my head is so weighted down with words, it will not lift from my pillow. My tormented humors must get along as best they can.”
    He thumbed through the book, paused for a moment, then slapped it down on the stool and snatched his hand away as if it had scorched his fingers. “This is Horach’s book.”
    His anxiety surprised me. Karish held no squeamish notions about unquiet ghosts. “I’ve heard the fellow has no further need of it. You don’t think his spirit minds me using it?”
    “It’s just…whenever I fetch water from the font, I can’t help but see…” He averted his face.
    “See what?” I dragged his chin around again. “Come on, lad. Get it out. It’s not healthy to bottle up a story that turns your face the color of sour milk. And you’ve set up a keening curiosity that needs relieving, else my humors will be more tormented yet.”
    “He was murdered ,” said the boy in a solemn whisper. “Not a twelveday since, I found him in Saint Gillare’s shrine…in the font. Someone slashed his skin to threads and left him bound in the water until he bled out every drop in his veins. Brother Robierre said they had pricked his throat so he couldn’t scream.”
    Spiders’ feet tickled my spine, and I felt an uncommon urge to ward my soul against Magrog’s incursions. I touched the book gingerly—not that I could have said what I was expecting. “Who did such a thing? Not a monk…surely!”
    “Certainly not!” the boy sputtered indignantly. “Father Abbot questioned every one of us under pain of hell’s fire. He even sent to Pontia, and the magistrate brought his pureblood investigator. After three days here, examining us and the abbey grounds and questioning every villager within ten quellae, the sorcerer could say only that a nonbeliever had walked the cloisters. The magistrate said the killer must have borne some tormented grievance against Karish folk and sneaked into the abbey in the night to act it out.”
    “Such a killing seems more than random grievance. Likely this Horach had made some enemy in his life—before taking vows, of course.”
    Jullian shook his head vigorously. “Brother Horach was but