“They are just fires, Dariel,” Leeka said. “Campfires and lamps.”

“But so many of them! It’s like a city.”

“No, not a city. It’s just a village, but around it is the beginning of your brother’s army. And yours, as well.”

Together they walked down toward the sea of lights, the individual points bobbing and rising with each step. Their entry into the camp and progress farther into the town was a blur. Leeka handled it entirely. Dariel could not have said how long it took, but at some point he found himself approaching a particular compound. Leeka whispered that this was the place they were searching for.

A Talayan squatted on his heels a little distance from the door. He did not move anything except his eyes as Dariel approached, following him each step of the way forward. The man’s expression did not change in any overt way, but there was something in the quality of how he stared that altered. By the time Dariel stopped before the man, he was sure that there was something like a glimmer of humor behind the stillness of his handsome, dark-skinned faзade. Dariel opened his mouth to speak, but the Talayan beat him to it.

He said something in his native language. Dariel started to say he did not understand him, but the man smiled and motioned for him to enter. In accented Acacian, he said, “Welcome, Prince. Inside. Please, go inside.”

The tent stretched off a considerable distance, supported here and there by gnarled beams of wood that lifted the fabric. Lit by oil lamps, it was crowded with stools and couches, tables and charts that made walking into the space feel like entering a maze. Dariel stopped and stood, looking around.

At about the same time that he spotted a human shape bent over a small desk, the man raised his head and saw him as well. His hair was close-cropped like a Talayan’s, but his skin was a lighter shade of brown, a sort of tanned richness. His face conveyed intelligence, and for a moment Dariel imagined him to be an adviser of some sort, perhaps a scholar with a specialty useful to the war planning.

Then the man was moving toward him. In motion he was fluid and strong, like a Talayan runner. A warrior after all, then. He wore a sword at his side, a gently curved blade unlike anything Dariel had yet seen in Talay. But there was nothing aggressive in the man’s motions. He walked with his chest exposed, arms held out to either side. His hands were empty and his legs pushed carelessly through the footstools that clogged the space between them. It almost seemed like he was rushing forward to embrace him. This was such an unlikely possibility that Dariel just watched as the man’s face got closer. It was smiling and pained at the same time, and terribly, terribly familiar.

And then he understood.

Corinn began to believe that she could recover joy. It was not easy. There would always be memories to weigh her down during quiet moments. The specter of death would ever lurk in the dark regions of her thoughts, but the ache of loss did dull with passing years. Old sorrows lost their urgency, especially in the shadow of new affection, which could be so delightful. It was possible to live with some measure of joy, to forget anything but happiness for short periods of time. Her father had always wanted her to be happy. He would welcome her contentment, no matter what vessel bore it to her.

Hanish Mein, of course, was responsible for spurring these thoughts. Corinn’s submission to him was not first and foremost a sexual matter. It was not about the lovemaking that night at Manil or the physical intimacies they had shared since. It was something more frightening. It was the act of allowing herself to want him to see her, admitting to him that she wanted him to know her, to understand her, to care for her. She had been so long bottled up in defense against the world that allowing her barriers down was the greatest act of faith in a person she’d made since childhood. She had to remind herself of the many secrets Hanish had confided in her. They were both giving, both trusting. They were both vulnerable. She would not have let down her defenses in any other circumstance.

But she was pleased that she had. Nine years after the tragedies of the war, she had found an order to life, a position that made sense, and a partner to share it with. Their liaison was fresh and newly created, and yet it was so much a part of her that she could not imagine any other way of being. They were together as much as the circumstances of Hanish’s office would allow. They shared the same bed each night. She was so absolutely hungry for him, insatiably and embarrassingly so.

One evening she made him wait for her in bed. When she entered the room she did so from the far side. She wore only a diaphanous shift, so short it was really just a shirt. Walking toward him, feeling his eyes on her, knowing the candlelight would highlight the contours of her hips and abdomen and breasts, she hummed with nervous excitement. It was the strangest of feelings. She felt tawdry and jaded, her lips moistened with oil, eyes shadowed like a courtesan’s. But she also tingled with innocence, as if she were a child again, girlish, walking in the glow of an appraising eye that seemed somehow fatherly. Very strange, she thought, but also decidedly to her liking.

She continued to accompany Hanish on state trips, and in the space of just a few weeks she made herself indispensable in social matters. She stood at his side when Hanish met Candovian tribal leaders at a summit near Elos. At Alyth she tutored the taciturn leagueman Sire Dagon in archery. She won compliments from him by the end of the day, both on her skill with a bow and on her entrancing character. She served as hostess on a pleasure barge that embarked from Alecia and traced a large circle back to port hours later. She was perfectly suited, it seemed, to serve as an intermediary between the rich merchants-many of whom were Acacian-and the ruling Meinish aristocracy.

All of this was much to the chagrin of the ambitious hangers-on that made up the chieftain’s court. They had been happy enough to have Corinn around when she was a pincushion to receive Hanish’s barbed witticisms, but now that she was elevated it was another matter. She never heard any of them speak a word against her, but she could imagine their thoughts well enough. They hated her. She knew it. She could feel it. Sometimes she even thought she could see physical manifestations of their loathing wriggling beneath their skin. She was, after all, a lowly Acacian, of a conquered race. Her beauty was of a rich-toned ideal that was not supposed to win Meinish men. In their minds she should never be anything more than an entertaining mascot. Even Rhrenna, who had once seemed the truest friend she was likely to make, spoke to her no more than she had to, with no particular kindness when she did.

There were more somber moments in their relationship as well, as when she and Hanish stood side by side on the viewing platforms of the Kidnaban mines. They looked down on a crater whose scale denied plausibility. Hanish pointed out the Akaran flags that still flew from the platforms. “Akarans created this,” he’d said. “How did your people ever conceive of such things? Where did they get the gall to imagine they could harness the labor of millions?”

She had felt just enough insult in these questions to consider one or two sarcastic responses, but she said nothing. They would not have been true on her tongue. He was right. The scale of the injustice was incredible. He might be the driving force behind it now, but he had not been the one to conceive of it in the first place. She wondered how she had lived so many years at the heart of an empire without knowing by whose labor her prosperity had been assured.