“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said, setting his palm over the king’s hand. “There’s too much we do not yet know. Leodan, you may yet live through this. This attack on you may be the work of a single fool. What you ask might endanger the children instead of protecting them. This plan was idle talk at a different time-”

The king smashed his fist against his lap, his face rigid with anger. With what appeared to be a monumental effort-face twisted, jaw opening wide, tongue and lips and eyes and cheeks all trembling-he managed to say, “Do…this.” He repeated the two words several times, until they lost shape and his tongue could no longer form them.

Such an order was impossible to refuse. Once Thaddeus had affirmed that he would see to it, Leodan relaxed. He exhaled and let his weight settle more heavily against the pillows. He did not try to talk again, but he set his eyes on the chancellor and studied him intently, with moist-rimmed eyes full of kindness. Thaddeus almost turned away, but the king’s eyes held him, no reproach in them. Thaddeus sensed that his friend was asking him to remember the fine things that they had done in the past, the dreams they had spoken about, the moments shared only between the two of them. He realized that despite this man’s sudden nearness to death he had one thing to be pleased about. He was finally freed to challenge his children to fight for the cause he always chided himself for not fighting for himself. It was a huge, yawning, frightening journey he was asking the chancellor to set them on, but it was action. For Leodan there was no other choice anymore. He seemed to have no doubt about what mattered now, and he believed fully in setting his children accordingly on the journey this required.

The king penned another terse order. Bring the children first, he wrote, and then, after…Thaddeus did not have to ask him what the latter request referred to. He would see to both requests.

He received the royal children a half hour later. He felt terribly cold, though he was sure the chill was within him, for the room was heated as normal for the season. He stood with his back steadied against the closed door to the king’s chambers, his hands resting one on the other to calm any tremble they might have betrayed. Seeing the four young faces he was glad he had so positioned himself. The sight of them wrung him through with emotion. As if he were actually their father, he thought, Look at them! Look at the magnificence of my children! Aliver…By Tinhadin, he stood straight! He moved with a bearing both military and easy. How well trained he was, how diligent and serious, how strong to put forth a brave faзade. Usually the beauty of the group, Corinn’s skin was puffy and mottled. She looked as if her face might crumble into ugliness at any moment, but there was something heartrending in the pained nakedness of her emotions. Mena’s eyes were saddened beyond her years, her head lowered as if she knew with quiet resolve just why they had been summoned. And Dariel was as wide-eyed and as tremulous as a mouse. Thaddeus had to squeeze down the swell of emotion within him. It took all his effort to speak calmly.

“Your father will see you now. Please do not tax him. Know that he will communicate with you in the only way he can. Do not ask him for any more than he can give. He is not well at all.” He was not sure how much to go on, how clear and specific to be. He wanted them to know what was happening, but he could not bring himself to say it. Instead, he heard himself ask, “Are you ready?”

A silly question. He knew it was silly, hearing his own words and looking into faces decidedly not ready to see their father for the last time. He turned and pushed open the door and stepped aside so that the way was clear. Once all four had passed him, he reached in and pulled the door shut, staying without himself. He walked away, trying not to think about what was passing in that room, between a true father and his children.

His offices were only a moment’s walk down the hall. He left the door open behind him so that he would hear the children leave and know just when to return to the king. He dispatched his secretary with orders to have the king’s mist pipe readied. As he turned to do as ordered, the man’s surprise-or was it scorn-showed on his face. Thaddeus did not reprimand him for it. He was right in many ways. If the king of the empire was approaching death, should he not be clear of mind until the very end? Were there not so, so many things for him to attend to and should not his last breath be expelled in service to the nation? Of course it was all true, and also all ridiculous. The official record of the king’s passing would include no mention of the drug. Official records never did.

Thaddeus stood beside his fireplace for a time. He hoisted the poker and stirred the logs, though they burned well and did not need it. He thought, Let the old man have what he wished for. It was the great gift of the mist. The drug delivered to its user whatever he or she most desired, most needed to carry on living. Leodan had never taken it before Aleera passed away, but in his grief afterward he discovered the drug so many millions of his subjects knew all too well. The slaves of the Kidnaban mines, the parents of Quota children, the teeming masses in the slums of Alecia, the merchants who floated the sea currents unceasingly, soldiers stationed far from home for years at a time, workers in a thousand different trades they had learned as children and carried on throughout their years: they all depended on the balm of the drug for reprieve from the otherwise unceasing torture of their lives. Their king was no different.

Leodan’s time under the mist’s influence, though, was spent in the manner unique to him-with his dead wife. He had confessed as much. She awaited him just beyond that wall of consciousness. Once he passed through it, she greeted him with sympathy and censure in her eyes, with love for him but with no fondness for this vice. After those first moments she took his hand in hers, accepted him completely, and walked him through the beauty of their courtship. They slipped seamlessly from moment to glorious moment in their life together as husband and wife, as young parents with each child the Giver allowed them, through moments large and small and intimate. The small ones, Leodan had said, often surprised him. Tiny moments during which he viewed her from a certain light, when he remembered the details of her features and the idiosyncrasies of her face or voice or demeanor…How could he love her so deeply and yet forget so much of who she had been during his waking hours? It was these details that the king searched for time and again beyond the mist wall. Aleera led him through a tour of everything that had been wonderful about their time together. All in a single evening.

Life, Thaddeus thought, must have been a pale punishment compared to such bliss. But then he thought of the children. At least Leodan had children, which had been denied Thaddeus himself. At least he did not have to live knowing his love died because of treachery. After Dorling’s death he had been asked a thousand times why he did not remarry and father more children. He had always shrugged and answered vaguely and never with the truth-which was that he feared being the cause of more death. Perhaps he had known all along that his loved ones had been killed to squelch his ambitions.

Ah! Thaddeus jabbed the logs in the fire ferociously, angry that he could not control his thoughts. They were like the coils of a snake writhing in his head, a hungry serpent that at times seemed to eat its own tail. He rested the poker back in place and looked again at the king’s note, at the scribbled words, the looping, irregular sentences, the handwriting only faintly familiar as the king’s. Should this document be found by anyone else, none would believe it came from Leodan Akaran. Few would understand the order. Only he and the king had ever spoken of the plan to which it referred. How strange that something they had discussed casually a few years before-Thaddeus sipping wine and the king glazed by the mist-should now become an actual possibility. But it was not meant for others’ eyes anyway. This was for him. The king was entrusting him with his most precious concern. How strange that he had no idea who his greatest betrayer was.