Denak said, «I have been trying to get him to see you, brother of mine. So far…» She spread her hands again. He knew how much luck she'd had. But he also knew he still kept his head on his shoulder and all his members attached to his body. That was probably his sister's doing.

«Tell the King of Kings I did not mean to anger him,» he said wearily. «Tell him I am loyal—why would I be here otherwise? Tell him in Vaspurakan I was doing what I thought best for the realm, for I was closer to the trouble than he. Tell him—» Tell him to drop into the Void if he's too vain and puffed up with himself to see that on his own. «Tell him once more what you've already told him. The God willing, he will hear.»

«I shall tell him,» Denak said. «I have been telling him. But when everyone else tells him the opposite, when Farrokh-Zad and Tzikas write from Vaspurakan complaining of how mild you were to the priests of Phos—»

«Tzikas wrote from Vaspurakan?» Abivard broke in. «Tzikas wrote that from Vaspurakan? If I see the renegade, the traitor, the wretch again, he is a dead man.» His lips curled in what looked like a smile. «I know just what I'll do if I see him again, the cursed Videssian schemer. I'll send him as a present for Maniakes behind a shield of truce. We'll see how he likes that.» Merely contemplating the idea gave him great satisfaction. Whether he'd ever get the chance to do anything about it was, worse luck, another question altogether.

«I'll pray to the God. May she grant your wish,» Denak said. She got to her feet Abivard rose, too. His sister took him in her arms.

Ksorane, about whom Abivard had almost entirely forgotten, let out a startled squeak. «Highness, to touch a man other than the King of Kings is not permitted.»

«He is my brother, Ksorane,» Denak answered in exasperated tones.

Abivard did not know whether to laugh or cry. He and Denak had criticized Sharbaraz King of Kings almost to, maybe even beyond, the point of lese majesty, and the serving woman had spoken not a word of protest. Indeed, by her manner she might not even have heard. Yet a perfectly innocent embrace drew horrified anger.

«The world is a very strange place,» he said. He went back into the hall. If the eunuch had moved while he had been talking with his sister, it could not have been by more than the breadth of a hair. With a cold, hard nod the fellow led him back through the maze of corridors to the chambers where he and his family were confined.

The guards outside the chamber opened his door. The beautiful eunuch, who had said not a word while guiding him to his private Prison, disappeared with silent steps. The door closed behind Abivard, and everything was just as it had been before Denak had summoned him.

When Sharbaraz King of Kings did not call him, Abivard grew furious at his sister. Rationally, he knew that was not only pointless but stupid. Denak might plead for him, as she had been pleading for him, but that did not mean that Sharbaraz would have to hear. By everything Abivard knew of the King of Kings, he was very good at not hearing.

Winter dragged on. The children at first grew restive at being cooped up in a small place like so many doves in a cote, then resigned themselves to it. That worried Abivard more than anything else he'd seen since Sharbaraz had ordered him to Mashiz. Over and over he asked the guards who kept him and his family from leaving their rooms and the servants who fed them and removed the slop jars and brought fuel what was going on in Vaspurakan and Videssos. He rarely got answers, and the ones he did get formed no coherent pattern. Some people claimed there was fighting; others, that peace prevailed.

«Why don't they just say they don't know?» he demanded of Roshnani after yet another rumor—that Maniakes had slain himself in despair—reached his ears.

«You're asking a lot if you expect people to admit how ignorant they are,» she answered. She had adapted to captivity better than he had. She worked on embroidery with thread borrowed from the servants and seemed to take so much pleasure from it that Abivard was more than once tempted to get her to teach him the stitches.

«I admit how ignorant I am here,» he said. «Otherwise I wouldn't ask so many questions.»

Roshnani loosened the hoop that held a circle of linen taut while she worked on it. She shook her head. «You don't understand. The only reason you're ignorant is that you're shut up here. You can't know what you want to find out. Too many people don't want to find out anything and just repeat what they happen to hear without thinking about it.»

He thought about that, then slowly nodded. «You're probably right,» he admitted. «It doesn't make this easier to bear, though.» In the end he did learn to embroider and concentrated his fury in producing the most hideous dragon he could imagine. He was glad he had only the rudiments of the craft, for if he could have matched Roshnani's skill, he would have given the dragon Sharbaraz' face.

Some of his imaginings along those lines disturbed him. In his mind he formed a picture of his army swarming out of Vaspurakan to rescue him that felt so real, he was shocked and disappointed when no one came battering down the door. As it had a way of doing, hope outran reality.

Among themselves, the servants began to talk of rain rather than snow. Abivard noted that he wasn't feeding the braziers as much charcoal as he had been or sleeping under such great piles of rugs and furs and blankets. Spring was coming. He, on the other hand, had nowhere to go, nothing to do.

«Ask Sharbaraz King of Kings, may his years be many and his realm increase, if he will free my family and let them go back to Vek Rud domain,» he told a guard—and whoever might be listening. «If he wants to punish me, that is his privilege, but they have done nothing to deserve his anger.»

Sharbaraz' privilege, though, was whatever he chose to make it. If the message got to him, he took no notice of it.

As one dreary day dragged into the next, Abivard began to understand Tzikas better. Unlike the Videssian renegade, he had done nothing to make his sovereign nervous about his loyalty—so he still believed, at any rate. But Sharbaraz had gotten nervous anyhow, and the results—

«How am I supposed to command another Makuraner army after this?» he whispered to Roshnani in the darkness after their children—and, with luck, any lurking listeners—had gone to bed.

«What would you do, husband of mind, if you got another command?» she asked, even more softly than he had spoken. «Would you go over to the Videssians to pay back the King of Kings for what he's done?»

She had been thinking about Tzikas, too, then. Abivard shook his head. «No. I am loyal to Makuran. I would be loyal to Sharbaraz, if he would let me. But even if I had no grievance against him before, I do now. How could he let me lead troops without being afraid that I would try to take the vengeance I deserve?»

«He has to trust you,» Roshnani said. «In the end I think he will. Did not your wizard see you fighting in the land of the Thousand Cities?»

«Bogorz? Yes, he did. But was he looking into the past or the future? I didn't know then, and I don't know now.»

Bogorz had seen another image, too: Videssians and ships, soldiers disembarking at an unknown place at an equally unknown time. How much that had to do with the rest of his vision, Abivard could not begin to guess. If the wizard had shown him a piece of the future, it was a useless one.

Roshnani sighed. «Not knowing is hard,» she agreed. «The way we're treated here, for instance: by itself, it wouldn't be bad. But since we don't know what will come at the end of it, how can we help but worry?»

«How indeed?» Abivard said. He hadn't told her that Sharbaraz had wanted to take his head—and worse. What point to that? he'd asked himself. Had the King of Kings chosen to do it, Roshnani could not have stopped him, and if he hadn't, Abivard would have made her fret without need. He seldom held things back from her but kept that one to himself without the slightest trace of guilt.