When they climbed to the rolling plateau that stretched to the cliffs, Mena saw Corinn, who was ahead of her, look over her shoulder. She seemed to decide to slow so that Mena could catch up with her. What a revelation her sister was. Nothing at all like the girl Mena remembered. In truth, she felt little easy affection for her. There was an innate connection between them, a bond in the very blood essence of them, but it seemed an ever-prickly thing to navigate. It had been an incredible surprise to learn that Corinn had taken Acacia back from Hanish Mein. The fact that she had done so with the aid of the Numrek, and that she had forged some sort of agreement with the league, further stunned the younger siblings. The two of them had felt themselves in command just behind Aliver. They had been fighting the war, they thought. They had been at the center of all the struggle, or so they had believed. To discover that Corinn awaited them on a liberated Acacia, and that she was undeniably in power, with her own Numrek army and with a fleet of ships at her disposal…Mena had yet to come to terms with it all.

She still thought of their reunion with unease. An event that should have been joyous in so many ways was…well, she was not sure exactly how to categorize the experience, but it was not what she would have imagined. It was a week after the Santoth had cleared the field of every Meinish soldier in sight. She and Dariel sailed into Acacia’s harbor, the two of them standing at the prow of the sloop she’d taken from Larken, gazing up at the terraced city that had once been their home. It was all as she remembered, really, but that still felt strange because she had spent so many years doubting the details she had recalled from her past.

Behind them came a ragtag fleet bearing the remains of the great army. Though she knew they were weary, she felt propelled by the weight of them at her back, as if they were the wind that billowed the boat toward the docks. They were triumph. And relief. And fatigue. They bore grief with them as well, but this had already become inexorably commingled with victory. Mena doubted she would ever feel unadulterated joy. Thus far, life had not provided her this, not as Mena the girl princess, not as Maeben on earth, not as the sword-wielding warrior of the Talayan plains. Still, she watched the island approach with anticipation. She was finally going home.

They docked and disembarked amid a reveling throng. The air rang with the music of flutes and cymbals, sweet with incense and fragrant with roasting meat, simmering stews, and frying fish. Corinn, they were told by the officials that met them, awaited them nearby. Indeed, after leaving the docks and cutting through crowds gathered in the lower town and up to the second terrace, there was no missing Corinn. She stood at the first landing of the granite stairway, the central one that led up toward the palace. An entourage flanked her. It was a mixed company that appeared to be made up of advisers and officials, with a contingent of Numrek officers conspicuously close to her, like personal guards. Though they did not wear particular uniforms, they were all clothed in sanguine colors, shades of crimson and brown and auburn. Mena knew a little of how Corinn had recaptured the palace and defeated Hanish, but it surprised her that her sister seemed to already have some sort of government in place.

Corinn was the centerpiece of this arrangement. How marvelous she looked! Mena remembered that she had always thought her sister a beauty, but the sight of her was more astonishing than she had expected. She wore a long-sleeved gown of a light, shimmering fabric, a creamy color touched with a hint of orange. Her hair was intricately made up, ribbons woven into a tight bun, pierced through with a spray of quills and the white plume of some bird. Her features were perfectly formed, delicate, her bosom and the flare of her hips highlighted by the shapely gown. Her arms were sensuously formed-shapely but not overly lean or muscled, like Mena’s-her wrists and fingers as expressive as a dancer’s when she extended them in a gesture of greeting.

Clearly, she was waiting for them to climb the steps. As they did so, Mena had an unforgivable thought. She did not know where it came from and thought it a coarseness of her war-weary mind. She imagined Corinn snatching one of those hairpins out and snapping it forward, a weapon, a poisoned dart. How frustrating and foul, she thought, that such an image would come to her at what should be a happy moment. What was wrong with her?

With that question in mind, looking up at Corinn’s splendor, Mena realized what she herself looked like in comparison: half naked in a short skirt and sleeveless tunic, small and wiry, leather brown, her arms and legs scripted with all manner of cuts and abrasions, her hair an unkempt cascade. She suddenly felt the salt crusting her cheeks and the grime in the creases of her elbows and the film of dirt and sweat on her sandaled feet. She glanced at Dariel. Dashing as he was with his open raider’s shirt and sun-burnished skin, he too looked more a ruffian than a prince of Acacia. Why had they not thought to make themselves more presentable?

Corinn finally began to descend toward them to close the last few steps. She stretched out both her arms, palms upward, her head listing to one side, her eyes gone kind. “Welcome home,” she said, “my sister, my brother. Welcome, Acacian warriors.”

She carried on speaking, words that seemed strangely formal, as if they were part of a scripted greeting, meant more for the onlookers than for Mena and Dariel. Corinn brought them into a short embrace and then pulled them back and studied each of their faces in turn. Her eyes brimmed as she did so, her full lips trembling slightly. In everything she was courteous and loving and generous, and yet it also seemed wrong somehow. Even when she raised her voice and asked the crowd to welcome this “daughter and son of Acacia” home, and as she smiled down on them through the answering cacophony, Mena could not help feeling that behind the loving faзade Corinn was not actually pleased with what she saw in them.

That was how it had been between them ever since. Mena could not point to any specific slight on Corinn’s part. Her words were never cruel, never less than appropriate. They spent evenings together over fine food and wine, talking of the past, all of them coming to know one another again. They rode horseback as they had done as children, and they sat together as a unit facing the myriad challenges of putting the empire back together again. Dariel seemed completely trusting of her, enough so that Mena never voiced her uneasiness to him. But through it all Mena feared that there would never be the easy, natural warmth between them that there had been with Aliver and that she still felt with Dariel. Corinn went through the motions of such a relationship but did not quite allow it in substance. If they were a triangle now-as Corinn herself said-three points of a family core, Corinn seemed to want them to understand that she was the apex; Mena and Dariel were the base that supported her.

None of these things was far from her mind during the wind-buffeted funeral procession. Corinn smiled as she fell in step beside Mena. She lifted her arm from the now-obvious swelling of her pregnant belly and rested her fingers on Mena’s arm a moment. “Sister,” she said, “the day has finally come. We will make our father very happy today. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure he always hungered for the day that he would be released into the air like mother was years ago. He’ll blend with her and become part of the very soil of this island. He’ll be in every acacia tree. Remember that.”

That, apparently, was all she meant to say. As she began to move away, Mena asked, “Are we going to make a better world?” Corinn looked at her, quizzical, and she fumbled for the right way to explain the question. “You didn’t know Aliver-at the end, I mean. If you had heard the things he said…He had so many ideas of what we should do with power. He talked of a different order to the world. He believed we could eliminate things like the Quota-”