The girl with the drum began tapping a low tattoo, her voice droning in

a lament. Maati shifted to look at Nayiit. The boy's gaze was fixed on

the singer, his expression melancholy. The urge to put his hand to

Nayiit's shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved

through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the

anguish in the singer's voice growing until the air of the teahouse

hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer

box came past again, but Maati didn't put in any copper this time.

"You and Mother. You're lovers again?"

"I suppose so," Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. "It

happens sometimes."

"What happens when you're called away to the Dai-kvo?"

"Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We're waiting to

hear two things from the Dal-kvo-whether he thinks my speculations about

avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and

whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from

Liat. But we aren't who we were then. I don't pretend that we can be.

And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I've missed her

for more years than I spent in her company."

I have missed you, he thought but didn't say. I have missed you, and

it's too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late

nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.

"Do you regret that?" Nayiit asked. "If you could go hack and do things

again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to

the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that ... that longing behind you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

Nayiit looked up.

"I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she'd taken my chance to

be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. "There you

were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the

andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and

because of me." Nayiit's jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker

than the pale brown of his mother's staring at something that wasn't

there, his attention turned inward. "I don't know how you stand the

sight of us."

"It wasn't like that," Maati said. "It was never like that. If it were

all mine again, I would have followed her."

The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth

tightened like that of a man in pain.

"What is it, Nayiit-kya?"

Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face.

He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.

"Something's bothering you," Maati said.

"It's nothing. I've only ... It's not worth talking about."

"Something's bothering you, son."

He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from

his lips, not since he'd been too young for it to mean anything. Maati

felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock

on the boy's face. This was the moment, then, that he'd feared and

longed for. Fie waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the

polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of

strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread

the ground.

Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to

hear over the music and the crowd, "I'm trying to choose between what I

am and what I want to be. I'm trying to want what I'm supposed to want.

And I'm failing."

"I see."

"I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I

want to want them. And I don't. I don't know whether to walk away from

them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but. . ."

Maati settled hack on the bench, put down his howl still half full of

wine, and took Naviit's hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.

"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me all of it."

"It would take all night," the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he

didn't pull hack his hand.

"Let it," Maati said. "There's nothing more important than this."

BALASAR HADN'T SLEPT. THE NIGHT HAD COME, A LATE RAIN SHOWER FILLing the

air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had

lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn't come.

The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to he

issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his

campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary

captain had surmised. 'T'hose he'd sealed in green would lead the army

to the North, laying waste to the Westlands and sending the thin stream

of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of

the High Council. Those he'd sealed in red would wheel the army-twenty

thousand armsmcn, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and

God only knew how many servants and camp followers-to the east and the

most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.

If he succeeded, he would he remembered as the greatest general in

history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to

he simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies

to protect them. Balasar would he remembered for two things only: the

unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that

would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.

As the dark hours passed, the thought pricked at him. He had put

everything in place. The poet, the books that concerned

FreedomFrom-Bondage, the army, the arms. There was nothing he would ever

do that would match this season. Succeed or fail, this was the highwater

mark of his life. He imagined himself an old man, sitting at a street

cafe in Kirinton. He wondered what those years would be like, reaching

from here to the grave. He wondered what it would he like to have his

greatness behind him. He told himself that he would retire. "There would

he enough wealth to acquire anything he wanted. A reasonable estate of

his own, a wife, children; that seemed enough. If he could not regain

this season, he could at least not humiliate himself by trying. He

thought of the war leaders who haunted the corridors and wineshops of

Acton reliving triumphs the world had forgotten. He would not he one of

those. He would he the great General who had done his work and then

stepped hack to let the world he had made safe follow its path.

At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing,