“I don’t know,” he said.

“Let me take care of this,” Thaddeus said. “Put it out of your mind until I have looked into it. I will send an armed envoy north to meet with Leeka. By your leave I will give them the king’s rights, so that they may travel swiftly and always have fresh horses. We will hear from them within a month, maybe less if they sail to Aushenia and take the short land route. Twenty-five days at most. And then you will know everything.” Thaddeus paused and waited for the king’s response. It was little more than a grunt of affirmation, but it seemed to satisfy the chancellor. He sipped from his glass. “And then you will see that it was nothing serious at all. Leeka has always prickled with suspicions about the Mein, but when has it yet amounted to anything?”

“Things are different now,” the king said. “Heberen Mein was a reasonable man, but he is dead. His three sons are a different matter. Hanish is ambitious; I saw that in his eyes even as a boy, when he visited the city. Maeander is pure spite, and Thasren is a mystery. My father was sure that we would never be able to trust them. He made me swear I would not fall to that weakness-trust. You also used to tell me I did not worry enough. Together you and I conceived plans for all manner of tragic events, remember?”

Thaddeus smiled. “Of course I do. It is my job to. In youth I saw danger everywhere. But Acacia has never been stronger. I mean that, my friend.”

“I know you do, Thaddeus.” The king turned his gaze up toward the ceiling. “Soon I will rouse all the children and take them on a voyage. We will visit each province of the empire. I will try to convince them that I am their beneficent king; and they will try to convince me that they are my loyal subjects. And perhaps the illusion will go on for some time yet. What say you to that?”

“That sounds like a fine thing,” Thaddeus said. “That would make your children very happy.”

“Of course, their ‘uncle’ would accompany us as well. They love you as much as they do me, Thaddeus.”

The other man took a moment to respond. “You honor me unduly.”

The king sat repeating this statement in his head for some time, finding comfort in it even as he drifted away from its original context. He had said something similar once to Aleera. What had it been? You…love me unduly. That was what he had said. Why had he said that? Because it was true, of course. He had explained as much to her one evening a few days before their wedding. He had drunk too much wine and listened to too many speeches praising him. He could not take it anymore, so he had pulled his bride-to-be to the side and told her she should know things about him before they were married. He confessed to her all that he knew about the crimes of the empire, the old ones and the ones still done in his father’s name, the ones that would likely continue in his name. He poured it all out, tearful and pathetic and even belligerent, sure that she would shrink from him, almost hoping that she would turn away and reject him. Surely a good woman would. And he had no doubt of her goodness.

How surprised he was by her response, then. She drew close to him and tilted her lovely, large-eyed face up toward his. There was no surprise on her features, no remorse, or judgment. She said, A king is the best and worst of men. Of course. Of course. She pushed her lips against his, so soft and full of hungry pressure that they took his breath away. That, perhaps, was the moment they were actually married, the moment the agreement between them was sealed. It was hard for him to decipher now which aspect of her love he was most drawn to. Was it the fact that she could forgive him all of it and love him because she understood his ultimate goodness? Or was it that she betrayed that she was just as capable of overlooking the truth and living a lie as he? Either way, having confessed to her and received her blessing, he loved her completely. He would never have been able to fulfill his role as monarch without her approval. This might or might not have been a good thing for the world, but to a man as unsure of rule as he had been, her devotion had been a great gift.

“Perhaps I do, Thaddeus,” Leodan said, responding belatedly to his statement. “Perhaps I honor you unduly. We all make that mistake at times. But what harm does it do?”

He did not hear the chancellor’s response, if, indeed, he offered any. He closed his eyes and felt the sensation of being pressed against an invisible wall. This mist had built in him, filled him. Now the moment of letting go of the physical world was finally his. This moment always came to him as pressure, as if his chest lay flat against a stone and a great force behind him gradually ground him into it. Just when he felt he could take the weight no more, he started to slip through the stone, to merge with it and pass through as if it were porous and he in liquid form. On the other side Aleera waited for him, the temporary delusion he craved almost more than true life. He went to her in reverence.

Rialus Neptos believed he had found a method whereby he could keep track of everyone who came into and went out of the northern fortress of Cathgergen. He believed such surveillance was essential for a governor, especially one with such a tentative grip on power as he. He had ordered a single sheet of glass cast in the furnaces at the base of the fortress. He knocked out a portion of the granite wall in his office and set the pane to form one enormous window. The glass was taller than a man and as wide as he could stretch his narrow arms out to either side. The workmanship was imperfect. It was uneven in thickness, milky in some places and dotted throughout with air bubbles. But there were a few patches of true clarity; Rialus had located each through long hours of inspection.

Alone in his chambers he would press his forehead to the pane. More often than not the touch of the glass would bring a chill on and fuel his cough, a torment that had racked his bird-frail chest all his life. For a time he even took to stretching out on the floor. A ribbon of glass along the lower edge of the pane distorted the world in such a way that he could study the entrance to the military headquarters at his leisure and thus keep track of just who came and went in Leeka Alain’s world. The best vantage came when he stood on a footstool and gazed down with a one-eyed squint that provided a view of the full reach of the western wall and the gate at its center. From this spot he had watched General Alain’s troops march out in defiance of his direct orders. From the same spot he observed the arrival of the second of the Mein brothers, Maeander, some weeks later.

Rialus pulled back from the glass. He was chilled again. The fortress was heated by steaming pools of hot water that bubbled up from the earth. An intricate network of pipes and air ducts channeled the warmth throughout the labyrinthine structure. The Cathgergen engineers claimed it was a wonder of complicated craftsmanship, but in truth the place was never warm enough. He sometimes suspected that his chambers were intentionally denied a full measure of heat, but he had no way of proving this.

He circled his desk one and a quarter times, then walked to the bookshelved wall and trailed a finger over the spines of the volumes there, dusty tomes full of records, accounting documents, and gubernatorial journals kept since the first installment of Acacian hegemony in the satrapy. His father had treated these records with sober reverence. He tried to instill the same in his only son, to no avail. Rialus was only the second generation of his family to oversee the Mein-not a long tenure in office, by Acacian standards. On the demise of the previous governing family, his father had been sent north in punishment for some malfeasance Rialus could not even recall anymore. As the years passed the other governors came to take the Neptos family for granted. The Akarans all but ignored them. It galled him that he was expected to pay indefinitely for a crime no one could even name. It tormented him that the outside world had no understanding of his razor-sharp mind, somehow held captive inside his stunted form, betrayed on every occasion by his jaw’s tendency to freeze up at just the wrong moments. If others would just see beyond these outward defects, they would realize that he was wasted on this posting.