As she approached, she tried not to let any of these questions or emotions show. This man would have killed her. Pride, she thought, despises uncertainty. She began speaking as soon as his head lifted and his eyes found her. “I had thought to enter here with a bow and a quiver of arrows,” she said. “I thought I might have you nailed to the wall, splayed out as a target. You recall how good a shot I am, don’t you? I would have had you name the spots you wished me to place each arrow in.”

Blinking, Hanish seemed to have trouble seeing her. Drops of blood from his wrists speckled his forehead. He looked dazed, as if he might not be entirely conscious. But then he said, “One in my heart would have been enough.”

Corinn crooked her mouth, making it a knot that kept her emotions hidden.

“I never thought it before,” Hanish continued, “but I see now why you were so apt at archery. You kill best from a distance. You can shoot an arrow from hiding, from a safe place. I can see now why that sport suited you.”

A safe place? Corinn had never in her life found a safe place. She planned to, though. She planned to. She lifted the dagger and held it high enough for him to see. “And yet here I am with your blade. You are going to die on it.”

Hanish smiled, his teeth brown with blood. “So this is all your personal revenge? You were scorned, and because of it you ordered thousands killed. Do you know what that makes you? It makes you just like me, or perhaps worse than me.”

I am not like you, Corinn wanted to say. But she feared her voice might quaver around the words, suggesting things she did not wish suggested. She stayed to her planned script. “Before you die you should know all the ways in which you’ve failed. For one, you have lost everything to me, your concubine. Everything. I’ve cut out the heart of your empire. Even if your dead brother’s army defeats my dead brother’s army, they cannot change what I’ve done here.”

She felt herself warming to her words. Saying them to him made her feel better than she had in many years. She climbed the granite steps up onto the Scatevith stone, feeling the ceremonial import of the platform, the honeycombed ranks of the Tunishnevre all around her, their energy as palpable in the air as electricity. It was hard not to feel that the sarcophagi were going to begin opening one by one, the dried corpses in them animated by their own hatred.

As she spoke she studied the bowl carved in the stone that Hanish had planned to drench with her blood. “Already there are boats sailing the sea in all directions, each of them a herald of the change. Messengers will fly from here within the hour. They will tell the entire Known World that Hanish Mein is dead and that Acacia is once again in Akaran hands. Also, your Tunishnevre will never walk the earth again. If that was what you lived your life for, know now that you failed at it.”

Hanish sucked his teeth and then spat, a halfhearted gesture that left a stain of saliva on his chin. “I should have chained you the moment I heard what your sister did to Larken. I should have realized Akaran women were deadlier than the men.”

She moved closer, the dagger held high enough, near enough, that it was a threat to his bruised skin, no more than a quick slash away from his ribs and muscles stretched taut by his bondage. “Is that why you Meins don’t let your women fight?” she asked. “Are you afraid of them?”

“I should have chained you,” Hanish repeated, fixing his gray eyes on hers. “But I loved you too much. That thing-love-is what I should have feared. Now we both see why.”

“You cannot win me over now,” Corinn said, though the words did not come out with the clipped tone she wished for. Her hands were sweating. The dagger grip was slick against her palm. She wanted to put it down, just for a second, so that she could wipe the moisture from her skin. She thought, How can I even now feel something for this man?

The life seemed to be draining out of Hanish with each breath. He let his head drop forward again, a low, ruminative moan reverberating in his throat. He asked slowly, with pauses so that he could inhale or exhale, “Would you kill me now? Do that for me. My ancestors have things they wish to say to me…directly. Never let the past enslave you, Corinn. The dead seek to burden us…to twist our lives as badly as they twisted theirs. Don’t let them.” With that he fell silent. His breathing came regular but labored, his lungs struggling against the pressure his hanging body put on them. It was not clear if he was conscious anymore.

The knife, held high, shone with the light from the few unbroken oil lamps. She raised it and looked beyond it at her former lover’s chest, at his neck, at his muscled abdomen. Where does one stick a knife? No place seemed right. Each and every portion of him was too familiar. She had held that chest close to her too often, brushed her lips over that skin, and listened to that heart beating within that cage of ribs. In a way, she knew, a piece of that heart beat inside her, small, quiet, growing. There was no place on him into which she could thrust this blade. Instead, she did something else, something she had not been aware she’d even considered an option.

She pressed the honed edge of the dagger into the palm of her other hand. It cut the flesh easily down to the bone, without any real pain. Removing the blade, she clenched the wounded hand into a fist, held it up for a moment. Crimson oozed between her fingertips, inching tentatively over her hand. “Do you know what?” she whispered. She wanted Hanish to hear her, but hoped he would not look up, hoped that the words would enter his unconscious mind, unsure that she could say them into his eyes. “I am carrying your baby. Can you believe that? You’ve fathered the future of Acacia.” She bent and pressed her bloody palm into the receiving basin, leaving a blurred handprint that the stone sucked up like a sponge. “I will raise this one well, as an Acacian. Whether that is a joy or a punishment is up to you. But neither you, nor your ancestors, will have any say in this child’s fate.”

She could not be sure if she heard Hanish call to her as she turned and descended from the stone. She might have, but the air was too filled with other sounds. Who knew if she was supposed to have intoned certain words in a certain way? Perhaps she should have spoken the language written in The Song of Elenet, the hidden volume that she would begin to study soon. Surely, she did not do it quite right. But she did the thing that mattered. She offered her blood, willingly, in forgiveness. In the first moments afterward, the air filled with a thousand cries that she might or might not have heard, protests from those ancient undead at being denied their second chance at life. But it did not last long. In their coffins, she sensed, those ancient bodies of Hanish’s ancestors finally gave up their long purgatory. They became dust, and the spirits within them rejoined the natural order of the world. They joined the mystery, no longer trapped outside it, no longer a threat to the living in any way.

When she stepped back into the sunlight, she found Rialus staring toward the south, transfixed enough that he did not note her approach. She followed his gaze. As her eyes adjusted to the glare of the late afternoon, she made out the seething clouds that fascinated him. There was a storm of some sort on the horizon. The heavens shuddered with the power of it, alive with color, flashing with what must have been bolts of lightning, though they were like nothing she had ever seen. It might have been an ominous sight, but the longer she stared, the more she resolved that whatever was happening out there was at a great, great distance. It was not going to affect them.

Reassured of this, she reached out and touched Rialus on the shoulder. He turned toward her, his face letting go of one set of questions and adopting another. Seeing the blood dripping from her hand, he asked, “Are you hurt?”