The desert city lay under the moon, white roofs and black lanes, and a cloaked figure stood on the ridge above it and looked down at the place for a long time before he started walking. His clothes had been good once. Now they hung off him in strips, and the dust of two countries was ground into them.
He came in through the lower quarter, and the word went ahead of him the way it always did.
"It's him — the cursed prince —"
"Get inside. Get the children inside."
Doors slammed. A woman snatched a bowl off a step and ran. By the time he reached the middle of the street it was empty on both sides, and behind the shutters people were praying not to be touched by whatever it was they believed he carried.
At the palace gate the guards straightened up.
"Welcome back, Your Highness," one of them said, and his face said something else entirely: you're alive. Nobody thought you would be alive.
Mahram bowed his head and went in.
In the throne room the Emperor of Quan looked down at his brother kneeling on the floor.
"Are you injured?"
Mahram said nothing. His head stayed down. A small spirit of blue water hovered near his shoulder, then settled on it like a bird.
"I'm relieved," the Emperor said, and let the words hang there.
Lucky, the spirit said in his ear, in the voice only he could hear. Somebody healed you properly. Do you know how close you came? Who was it? Who healed you?
I don't know, Mahram thought.
He knew almost nothing about her. She had been strange — that was the honest sum of it. A woman as frail as a dry stalk, who had nevertheless fussed over him and washed the blood out of his hair and spoken to him as though he were a small child who had fallen out of a tree. He remembered how close her face had been to his. His eyes stung, briefly, and he made it stop.
"Mahram." The Emperor's voice cracked across the hall. "I asked you a question."
"Forgive me, Your Majesty." He bowed lower. "My attention wandered."
Oh, said the spirit. He's asking about the mission.
The ceiling of the throne room was very high and very ornate, and it seemed to press down on the space beneath it.
He had reached the target's chamber. He had got that far. And then the thing in the bed had opened its eyes and looked at him, and it had seen him instantly — seen through him, the way you see a fish in shallow water — and what came off it was so far beyond anything he had ever measured himself against that his body had simply refused. He had not fought. He had fled, and he had barely managed that.
You did well to come back at all, the spirit said. Honestly, I never expected you to survive it. I'm still surprised.
They said of the Emperor of Quan that he was as wise as a snake and as brave as a tiger, and both halves were true. The one thing he could not manage was his own younger brother — a spirit contractor with a king of the elements at his call, and the sun god's fire in his blood.
Mahram had no ambition. He had said so, and it had changed nothing. His brother looked at what he might one day be and saw a knife lying on a table, and so the missions came, one after another: distant, hostile, and shaped so that a man could die on them without anyone being blamed. Always far from the desert. Always in lands where the god's protection thinned and his own strength drained out of him hour by hour. Always alone, with no one behind him and no one to send word if he failed to come home.
"Rest," the Emperor said, waving a hand. "You'll be busy soon enough. Remember the revelation."
For a moment Mahram saw himself chained to a wall of this palace with his arms out, the way certain of his ancestors had ended, and he thought: my time here is running out.
He climbed to a window and looked out over the city, the white roofs, the black lanes, the doors that had shut against him. It was still his home. That was the ridiculous part.
Something went through him then — a thought so sudden and so painful that he grabbed his own head — and he pushed it away and told himself to forget it. What he wanted was not important. What he wanted had never once been part of the arrangement. If he killed the feeling every time it came up, over and over, he believed that one day it would stop coming up at all, and he would feel nothing, and that would be a mercy.
He fell face down on his bed. That day would come. He only had to wait for it.
The little water spirit drifted down and hung over him, looking at the back of his head with concern. Then it seemed to remember something.
It changed. A woman with dark blue hair stood at the foot of the bed with her arms folded.
"Why," she said, "did you give the bracelet to that woman?"
He didn't move.
"That was your mother's. It is the only thing of hers you have. It is the only thing of hers that exists."
"She deserved it," he said into the blanket. "She treated my wounds."
He remembered the light coming off her while she worked, radiant, filling the whole room, and he remembered that for the first time in his life somebody in a room with him had wanted him to live. The shape of her, pale hair, that impossible glow, had not left him since.
And it had been the right thing to give, whatever the spirit said, because he would be sent back to that place soon; he had heard enough tonight to know it. She was probably a healer attached to the palace, or one of the senior maids. Something like that.
Her face came back to him, bright as a window.
He clutched his chest without meaning to, and blushed into the pillow, and let himself want something more than that — just for a moment, just as an experiment. He remembered her hand on his bloody forehead, careful, unhurried.
He curled up and let the warmth of it settle over him, and the corner of his mouth turned up, faintly, and he fell asleep like that.
The next day, in the great palace of Nyx, the Empress stood in front of a pair of ornate doors and steadied herself.
An official hovered at her elbow, sweating. "His Majesty is — very busy this morning, Your Majesty. Perhaps if Your Majesty were to send word ahead —"
I knelt at an altar with him, she thought. I held his hand there and prayed to a god who has never once been on my side. Whatever he has made of himself since, I am still his wife.
She was aware of her own ridiculousness: a demon lord of death shut inside a body that could be knocked over by a strong draught, standing in a corridor asking a clerk for an appointment. But she had prayed before a holy cross once and it had not burned her, and nothing that had happened since had changed what she was underneath.
She was going to walk in there, look at the man who had killed her, and take back her title in front of him.
She shoved the doors open with both hands.
The man inside jerked upright, flushed and sweating, his shirt unlaced halfway down his chest. His purple eyes went wide.
Enrique.
Across the table from him the pink-haired woman looked up, and understanding moved over her face, and she arranged it instantly into a pretty little shock — one hand at her mouth, eyes round.
The Empress looked at the two of them and thought about what kind of man was caught like this in his own study in the middle of the day, and let the contempt show.
I loved you, she thought. I was a thousand years old and I looked at you and I loved you.
They had made a portrait of him, of course. He was the blonde boy of the border villages, Enrique, the shepherd's name he had been born with — and there was another painting elsewhere in this palace, a famous one, in which that same young man stood with a sword over a fallen horned demon while the light broke over his shoulders. The hero who had slain one of the seven great demons. They still sang about it.
She knew where that light had come from. He had knelt beside her body while it cooled and drawn her magic into himself, all of it, every year of it. That is the whole trick of divinity: pure magic, once it has been taken from its owner, is called divine power by whoever is holding it.
I will never forgive you, she thought, watching him fumble with his shirt. I am going to take back every single thing you took, and then I am going to kill you.
The council chamber was full by mid-morning, noblemen in dark coats leaning over the long table, and they turned as she came in.
"The summit with Quan," she said, "and the guests it brings us."
She walked the length of the room and sat down at the head of the table, which caused a certain amount of shifting in chairs.
"The banquet will be hosted by the empress's palace. I ask the council's support in the performance of my duties."
Enrique smirked at the far end of the table. The saintess sat very still, stunned. An adviser bent to his neighbour and murmured that he could not tell whether this was a political manoeuvre or simply the result of whatever had happened in the corridor that morning.
An official cleared his throat. "It should be said that hosting state banquets is, in law, the Empress's original duty."
At the middle of the table sat a broad blonde man with a neat goatee: Duke Ailo, Leonora's father by blood, and the strongest man in the noble faction.
"Until now," another official said carefully, "the Saint has carried a share of Her Majesty's burden, and carried it well. For an occasion of this dignity, would it not be wiser to let the experienced party take charge? Her Majesty might preside over the smaller events."
None of it was about her. She could see the real shape of it as clearly as if someone had drawn it on the table: three weights hanging in balance — the emperor's people, the nobles, the temple — each of them holding the other two down. The Empress of Nyx was Duke Ailo's daughter. If she stood up and used her authority, that balance would not tilt. It would shatter.
A nobleman on her left rose to his feet, and she watched him decide, in one second, that his faction's moment had arrived.
"Hosting is the Empress's right by law," he said. "There is no argument here. And as for capability — Her Majesty has never once been given the chance to demonstrate it. I say we give her the chance."
Across the room, the saintess turned her head and gave the emperor a small knowing look.
By the time the thing was settled, the Empress was so angry she could barely see, and she went out of the chamber fast enough that Derek had to lengthen his stride to keep up.