She’d been on her way to Karringdon to spend the summer with her aunt, one of Rig’s early and swiftly abandoned schemes to have his sister instructed in the art of being a lady. About half a day north of the river, they’d passed through a deserted husk of a town overgrown with weeds. Abandoned, her governess had explained, in the Year of the Great Fever, the fourteen-month nightmare that had claimed the lives of nearly half the population of the Blacklands. Alix recalled it vividly: the crumbling hovels dotting the field like tombstones, the naked bones of the temple with its gaping mouth of a doorway and dark, empty sockets for windows. Even more than the images, she remembered the feeling of the place. Eerie. Bitter. Mournful. Erroman had that same feeling on the morning Alix, Ide, and Vel rode through her gates. From the road, the city looked the same as always; if anything, it was a little busier than usual. The walls buzzed with more activity, and the guard at the portcullis had been doubled since Alix’s departure a month before.
