Under any normal circumstances, Vinaszh considered, there would have been nothing he'd have wanted to do about any of this. But this winter wasn't… normal.

And the the too-obvious trust in the boy's eyes arrested his thinking. He contrasted it with his own state of mind of late. He was in danger of drinking away the reputation he'd built up for himself over the years. Bitterness could destroy a man. Or a child? He sipped his tea. The women watched him. The boy watched him.

As commander of the garrison it was within his power to assign soldiers as escorts to private parties. Merchants, usually, crossing the border with their goods in a time of peace. Peacetime didn't mean the roads were safe, of course. Normally the mercantile parties would pay for their military escort, but not invariably. Sometimes a commander had his own reasons for sending soldiers across the border. It gave restless men something to do, tested new soldiers, allowed a separation of those showing the tensions of being too much together for too long. He'd sent Nishik with the doctor, hadn't he?

The garrison commander of Kerakek didn't know-there was no reason for him to know-the arrangements proposed for the younger wife and daughter. If he had, he might not have done what he did.

Instead, he made a decision. Reversed a decision, actually. Swiftly, precise now, befitting his rank. Made a choice that might have been considered by any detached observer to be folly on a grand scale. As he spoke, both women began to cry. The boy did not. The boy went away. They heard him a little later in his father's treatment rooms.

"Perun guard us. He's packing things," the younger mother said, still weeping.

The folly of Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, resulted, at the end of that same week, in two women, two children, a garrison commander (that was the point, after all, and his second-in-command could use the experience of a period in control), and three chosen soldiers setting off on the dusty, wind-swept road towards the border of Amoria, bound for Sarantium.

As it happened, Rustem the physician, oblivious as all travellers must be to events behind them, was still in Sarnica on the day his family set out after him. He was buying manuscripts, giving lectures, would not leave that city for another week. They weren't, in fact, very far behind him.

The plan was for the four soldiers to escort the women and children and do some inconspicuous observing of their own as they went west and north through Amoria. The physician would have to deal with his family when they reached him. It would be his task to get them all to Kabadh when the time came. And it would be the women's problem to explain their sudden presence to him. It might be amusing to see that first encounter, Vinaszh thought, riding west along the road. It was curious how much better he'd felt the moment he made the decision to leave Kerakek. The doctor's women, the child, this request-they had been a gift of sorts, he decided.

He and his three men would simply go north with this small party and turn around, but the journey, even a winter journey, would be so much better than lingering in the sand and wind and emptiness. A man needed to do something when the days darkened early and his thoughts did the same.

He would send a written report to Kabadh when they returned, containing whatever observations they had made. The journey could be couched, described, represented as something routine. Almost. He would decide later whether to mention the boy. There was no hurry with that. For one thing, the fact that such people existed didn't mean this child, Shaghir, son of Rustem, was one of them. Vinaszh had yet to be persuaded of that. Of course, if the child wasn't what his mother thought he was, then they were all making an absurd winter journey simply because a small boy missed his father and was having bad dreams because of it. Best not, for the moment, to think about that, Vinaszh decided.

That proved easy enough. The energy of travel, of the road woke dormant feelings in the commander. Some feared the open spaces, the rigours of travelling. He wasn't one of them. Setting out on a day so mild it seemed a blessing of Perun and the Lady upon the journey, Vinaszh was happy.

Shaski was very happy.

Only as they approached Sarantium, some time later, would his mood change. Never a talkative child, he'd been in the habit of singing sometimes to himself as they went along or to calm his infant sister at night. The singing stopped about a week north of Sarnica. And shortly after that the boy grew entirely silent, looking pale and unwell, though voicing no complaint. A few days later they would finally reach Deapolis on the southern bank of the famous strait and see black smoke across the water, and flames.

In Kabadh, in his glorious palace above the gardens that hung as if by miracle down along the slope to the lowest riverbed, with contrived waterfalls running through and behind the flowers, and trees growing upside-down, Shirvan the Great, King of Kings, Brother to the Sun and Moons, lay with one wife or another that winter or with favoured concubines, and his sleep was disturbed and restless, despite drinks and powders administered to him by his physicians and priestly incantations at head and foot of his bed before he retired for the night.

This had been going on for some time.

Every night, in fact, since his return from the south, where he had almost died. It was said quietly-though never in the presence of the Great King himself-that dark dreams before dawn were not infrequently an aftermath of great peril survived, a lingering awareness of a near visitation from Azal the Enemy, the touch of black wings.

One morning, however, Shirvan awoke and sat straight up in his bed, bare-chested, the mark of a fresh wound still red at his collarbone. His eyes fixed on something invisible in the air, he spoke two sentences aloud. The voting bride beside him sprang from the bed and knelt, trembling, on the richly textured carpet, naked as when she had entered the world of Perun and Azal's undying conflict.

The two men honoured with places in the king's bedchamber at night, even when he bedded a woman, also knelt, averting their eyes from the shapely nakedness of the girl on the carpet. They'd learned to ignore such sights, and to keep silent about what else they saw and heard. Or, most of what they saw and heard.

The eyes of the King of Kings had been like cold iron that morning, one of them was later to say admiringly: hard and deadly as a sword of judgement. His voice was that of the judge who weighs the lives of men when they die. It was considered acceptable to report this.

The words Shirvan spoke, and was to say again when his hastily summoned advisers met him in the adjacent room, were: "It is not to be allowed. We will go to war."

It is often the case that a decision avoided, wrestled with, provoking intense anxiety and disturbed nights, seems obvious once made. One looks back in bemusement and consternation at the long hesitation, wondering what could possibly have deferred a resolution so transparent, so evident.

It was so with the King of Kings that morning, though his advisers, not sharing his winter dreams, required matters to be put in language they understood. It was possible, of course, to simply tell them what to do without explaining, but Shirvan had reigned a long time now and knew that most men did better when they grasped certain ideas for themselves.

There were two facts, really, that compelled a war, and a third element that meant they had to do it themselves.

One: the Sarantines were building ships. Many ships. Traders to the west and spies (often the same men) had been reporting this since the beginning of autumn. The shipyards of Sarantium and Deapolis were resounding with the sounds of hammers and saws. Shirvan had heard this hammering in the darkness of his nights.