If I had a basket big enough, I would take back a piece of the sun. Then I think I could put up with anything.

She wouldn’t even need much of it to take with her, she told herself: her life in the mountain would last barely a fraction of her master’s, though he was her elder by centuries. She often wondered if any of the immortals would remember her after she was gone, any more than they might recall a single fallen leaf.

But what of Nezeru? Will my daughter, who may live almost as long as her father, still remember me when hundreds of years have passed? And what of Viyeki? Will a great lord like him recall that he once loved a mortal? Why stumble on when the end will be the same—darkness and silence?

The sun had dipped. The outer city and marketplace were growing so cold that her own vaporous breath obscured her sight. She shivered. It was past time to return, and she dared not make Viyeki unhappy with her. Not even her death was hers to choose, because she had given a hostage to Fate—her only child.

Back inside, then, to the quiet, endless halls of stone. Back to the incomprehensible rituals, the masked faces, and the constant knowledge that even after giving birth to a praised young warrior, Tzoja herself was still considered scarcely more than a beast.

Ah, beautiful, brave Nezeru, my child, she thought. Though you cannot understand me, and though you despise my mortal weaknesses, I love you still. For you I will go on living in the dark.

Did she love Viyeki, her daughter’s father, too? Was there something more in her feelings for her many-centuried master—her owner—than mere gratitude to someone who had allowed her freedoms that few of her fellow slaves enjoyed? Who had shown her real kindness, and even what seemed like tenderness, as unusual as that was among the Hikeda’ya?

Tzoja had no answer for that. She bade a grudging farewell to the sun, then turned back toward the tall, forbidding mountain gates, but in a small act of rebellion she made her Hikeda’ya guards carry the things she had chosen for herself.

Deep inside the mountain, Viyeki sey-Enduya, Queen’s High Magister of the Order of Builders, was reading in his garden, lingering over a poem by Shun’y’asu:

As the silence of birds just before dawn,

So the silence of the living heart

Just before death.

Then comes the light.

Silence, yes, Viyeki thought. Before death, it is indeed a rich gift. Afterward, though, it will be freely available even to the poorest of us.

Shun’y’asu’s poetry had been important to Viyeki’s master Yaarike, the former high magister of the Order of Builders. This volume had been the old noble’s favorite book—a gift to Viyeki from his own hand—and reading the words almost brought Yaarike sey-Kijana back to stand over him once more, austere but with moments of sudden humor, yet always full of secrets.

Viyeki, like most of his people, valued silence, but it was not what he loved best about his garden. The district of noble compounds on Nakkiga’s second tier was already quiet but for the occasional shuffle of servants’ feet or the muted clatter of a troop of armored guards on patrol: his house was already a refuge from noisy surroundings. It was not silence but solitude that Viyeki coveted.

By the standards of the city inside the mountain, the high magister’s garden was both luxurious and vast, as befitted the leader of one of the most important orders. A shaft led straight up from the chamber’s rocky roof, all the way through the mountain’s stony hide and out to the sky by way of an angled entrance in Nakkiga’s icy flanks that allowed sunlight to bounce down its polished sides and create a single bright column at the center of the garden chamber. At this season, melt water splashed continuously from a crevice in the garden wall into the rectangular pond, luring birds in from the outside sky. On a good day like today, as many as a half dozen mountain sparrows and a few black and white choughs might be splashing in the shallows, shaking out their feathers and calling back and forth in creaky voices barely louder than a whisper. Even the birds of Nakkiga seemed in perpetual mourning.

He heard another sound now, softer even than the birds’ gentle calls—an intake of breath. Viyeki, recognizing his secretary Yemon by that sound alone, carefully slipped the book of poetry he had been reading under his other book, the traditional magister’s copy of The Five Fingers of the Queen’s Hand. Yemon seemed loyal to Viyeki, but he would have been a fool to seem anything else, and Shun’y’asu’s poems had long been forbidden by the palace. Although Viyeki’s copy of The Color of Water had been given to him by his master Yaarike, who was considered a great hero, it was still unwise for anyone to see Viyeki reading it, or any other book that the queen’s Hamakha Clan considered suspect.

Especially now. Especially today.

“I interrupt you, Master.” Yemon did not sound particularly apologetic, more as though he secretly hoped it were true.

Viyeki looked up, mirroring Yemon’s rigorously empty expression with his own. “Not at all. Tell me your errand.”

Small, stolid Yemon was an excellent secretary, clever and observant and without any close family of his own to distract him from duty. He was also ambitious, and almost certainly planned on replacing his master Viyeki someday (as was true of any but the dullest underlings in every royal order in Nakkiga). It would have been foolish for his master to expect anything else, but there was no need for Viyeki to hasten Yemon’s advancement by being caught with a copy of Shun’y’asu. He risked a brief downward glance to make sure the forbidden book was not visible.

“Your appointed time at the palace is at evening bell, Master,” Yemon reminded him, although they both knew Viyeki would sooner forget his own name than a summons from the Mother of the People. “Shall I have the litter ready in the hour before, or do you wish to leave the house sooner than that?”

“I will not need the litter. I will walk.”

He did not have to see him to know that Yemon had infinitesimally raised an eyebrow, as he always did when his master did something he thought oddly sentimental or foolish, a hair’s-breadth movement as telling as a hiss of contempt. “Indeed, High Magister. I will have the guards ready an hour before the bell.”

“Thank you, Yemon. You may go.”

Queen Utuk’ku’s summons, of course, was the reason Viyeki had gone searching for solitude, and why he had been tempted into taking out the forbidden book. Although the poet was long, long dead, Shun’y’asu of Blue Spirit Peak had written in sorrowful yet dancing words of just such moments as this, of trying to choose between perfect duty and the importunities of conscience. Viyeki had stood atop such high and frightening places before, but he had never learned to like them.

This time his dilemma was a simple one, at least in its root: Viyeki had been summoned to the highest honor any Hikeda’ya could have, a meeting with Queen Utuk’ku, the immortal ruler of his people and mother of the race. But he did not want to go. In fact, the high magister had to admit to himself, he was afraid.

The messenger had arrived at the door only an hour before with the summons to the royal palace. It would be his first time waiting on the queen since she had awakened from the deep, decades-long sleep called keta yi’indra, and also his first time meeting her since he had been elevated to high magister of the Builders. The thought of the coming audience filled him with dread, in part because his loyalty to his old master Yaarike meant that Viyeki had kept secrets even from the palace itself. Viyeki had made difficult decisions during the years of the queen’s sleep, always trying to do what was best for his monarch and his people, but he knew as well as anyone that good faith and good intentions were no defense against the queen’s unhappiness. The pits in the Field of the Nameless were full of the scorched bones of those who had meant well but failed to please her.