"Tomorrow morning will do," the king answered. "We'll want to make sure we have a strong cordon around this place. We can't have the Menteshe trying to take it back while you're in the middle of a spell."

"They'd have to be crazy to want it back," Hirundo said. "If I were a nomad, I'd say take it and welcome."

"You might. We can't be sure they will," Grus said. So far, less than a day into their push south of the Stura, the Avornans had seen scattered scouts. Grus hoped the Menteshe were still busy murdering one another. He wanted to make his foothold south of the river as firm as he could before the nomads tried to throw him back.

He slept in a pavilion upwind from the thralls' village. Some of the stink from it reached him even so – or maybe that was the more distant stink of a downwind village. Despite the foul odor, he slept well. The first part of the invasion, and maybe the most dangerous, had gone well. He'd got his army over the river. Now he would see what happened next.

When he woke up, he realized he'd been foolish the night before. Crossing wasn't easy, but it wasn't most dangerous, either. Losing a battle, falling into the hands of the Menteshe – that would be dangerous. He might find out what thralldom was like… from the inside.

The first wizard Pterocles had chosen to free a thrall with him was a bald, gray-bearded man named Artamus. Both sorcerers bowed to King Grus. "I'll do my best, Your Majesty," Artamus said. "I'd like to see it really done before I try myself, if you don't mind. I think I know how everything's supposed to go, but you always like to watch before you go and do something yourself."

"Seems reasonable," Grus said. Pterocles nodded.

Royal guards brought two thralls to the king's pavilion – a man with a scar on his forehead and a woman who might have been pretty if she weren't so filthy and disheveled, and if her face weren't an uncaring blank mask. "If I have first choice…" Pterocles smiled and nodded to the woman. "What's your name, dear?"

"Vasa." By the way she said it, it hardly mattered.

"Pleased to meet you, Vasa." Pterocles began swinging a bit of crystal on the end of a chain. Vasa's hazel eyes followed it as he went back and forth, back and forth. Grus had watched this once before, when the wizard worked the spell on Otus. The king looked around for the ex-thrall. There he was, standing in the shade of an almond tree, watching intently but keeping his distance.

Pterocles waited, watching Vasa's eyes follow the swinging crystal. When he thought the time was right, he murmured, "You are an empty one, Vasa. Your will is not your own. You have always been empty, your will never your own."

"I am an empty one," she echoed, and her voice indeed sounded empty of everything that made ordinary human voices show the character of the speaker. "My will is not my own. I have always been empty, my will never my own." Even parroting that much was more than a thrall could usually manage.

The crystal kept swinging back and forth. Vasa's eyes kept following it. She might have forgotten everything but its sparkling self. As softly as he'd spoken before, Pterocles asked, "Do you want to find your own will, Vasa? Do you want to be filled with your own self?"

"I want to find my own will. I want to be filled with my own self." By the way Vasa sounded, she couldn't have cared less.

"I can lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light. Do you want me to lift the shadow from your spirit and give you light?"

"I want you to lift the shadow from my spirit and give me light." No matter what Vasa said, she still seemed dead inside.

"I will do what I can for you, then," Pterocles said.

"Do what you can for me, then," Vasa said. Back when Pterocles freed Otus, the wizard hadn't expected him to respond there. Now Otus leaned forward intently, eyes staring, fists clenched. What was he thinking? Grus would have given a good deal to know, but he didn't presume to do anything to interrupt Pterocles' wizardry.

Still in a low voice, Pterocles began to chant. The Avornan dialect he used was very old, even older than the one priests used in temple services. Grus could make out a word here and there, but no more. The wizard went on swinging his crystal in its unending arc. Rainbows flashed from it. Before long, there were more of them than could have sprung from the sun alone. "Ah," Artamus said softy.

Pterocles made a pass and said, "Let them be assembled," in Avornan close enough to ordinary for Grus to follow. Those rainbows began to spin around Vasa's head – faster and faster, closer and closer. Even the thrall's dull eyes lit at the spectacle. "Let them come together!" Pterocles said, and Grus could follow that, too.

Again, the rainbows obeyed the wizard's will. Instead of swirling around Vasa's head, they began swirling through it. Some of them still seemed to shine even inside her head. Grus wondered if that might be his imagination, but it was what he thought he saw. He'd seen – or thought he'd seen – the same with Otus, too.

Vasa said, "Oh!" The simple exclamation of surprise was the first thing Grus had heard from her that had any feeling in it. Her eyes opened so wide, the king could see white all around her irises. The rainbows faded, but Grus fancied he could still see some of their light shining out from her face.

She bowed low to Pterocles. "Oh," she said again, and, "Thank. Thank. Thank." She didn't have many words, but she knew what she wanted to say. When he raised her up, her face had tears on it.

So did Otus' as he came up from his place under the tree. "She is free," he whispered. "Like me, she is free. Gods be praised for this."

Pterocles nodded to him, and to Grus, and to Artamus. To the other wizard, he said, "You see."

"Yes, I see, or I hope I do," Artamus answered. "Thank you for letting me watch you. That was a brilliant piece of sorcery." He also bowed to Pterocles.

"I've done it before. I knew I could do it now," Pterocles said, and gestured toward the other thrall. "Let's see you match it. Then we'll know how brilliant it is."

"I'll do my best," Artamus said. He turned to the thrall, who'd stood there all through Pterocles' spell, as indifferent to the marvel as he was to everything else in his miserable life. Artamus asked, "What is your name, fellow?"

"Lybius," the scarred thrall replied.

Artamus had his own bit of crystal on a silver chain. He began to swing it back and forth, as Pterocles had before him. Lybius' eyes followed the sparkling crystal. Artamus waited for a bit, then began, "You are an empty one, Lybius…"

The spell proceeded as it had for Pterocles. Artamus wasn't as smooth as Grus' chief wizard, but he seemed capable enough. He summoned the rainbows into being and brought them into a glowing, spinning circle around Lybius' head and then into and inside it.

And, as Vasa had – and as Otus had before her – Lybius awoke from thralldom into true humanity. He wept. He squeezed Artamus' hand and babbled what little praise he knew how to give. And Grus slowly nodded to himself. He did have a weapon someone besides Pterocles could wield.

Lanius was studying a tax register to make sure all the nobles in the coastal provinces had paid everything they were supposed to. Officials here in the capital had a way of forgetting about those distant lands, and the people who lived in them knew it and took advantage of it whenever they could. But they were Avornans, too, and the kingdom needed their silver no less than anyone else's. Lanius might not have wanted to raise taxes, but he did want to collect everything properly owed.

Prince Ortalis stuck his head into the little room where the king worked. "Do you know where Sosia is?" he asked.

"Not right this minute. I've been here for a couple of hours," Lanius answered.