The Lions of Al-Rassan

Seven

"Well then," said Almalik of Cartada, the Lion of Al-Rassan, "where is he?"

The king was angry. The signs were obvious to those in the vast and vaulted chamber. Beneath the horseshoe arches with their red and amber interplay of stone, men exchanged uneasy glances. Courtiers and artists in attendance upon a monarch known for his changing moods learned quickly how to read those changes. They watched as the king snatched an orange from a basket held by a slave and began rapidly peeling it himself with his large, capable hands. Those same hands had swung the sword that killed Ishlik ibn Raal not three months ago in this very room, spattering the poet's blood across the mosaic tiles and marble pillars and the clothing of those standing too close that day.

The young, increasingly acclaimed Tudescan poet had made the mistake of inserting two lines from another man's writing in his own verse, and then denying that he'd done so deliberately. Almalik of Cartada, however, knew his poetry and prided himself upon that. In the Al-Rassan of the city-kings after the fall of the Khalifate a distinguished poet could confer anxiously sought credibility upon a monarch.

And for fifteen years, Almalik's principal counsellor, and then the formally declared advisor and guardian of his eldest son and heir, had been that paragon of many arts, Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais. Who had written, most unfortunately for Ishlik ibn Raal, the two stolen lines in question. And of whom, at this precarious moment, three months after, the king was speaking.

"Where is he?" Almalik asked again.

The attendant court figures, some thirty of them on this particular morning, found much to interest them in the geometries of the ceiling decoration or the mosaics of the floor. No one in the room was looking directly at the king, or at the man to whom he spoke. Only the one woman there, sitting among brightly colored cushions arranged near those of the king's dais, preserved an unperturbed demeanor, lightly plucking at her lute.

The stocky, white-haired commander of the Cartadan army, a man who had seen almost forty years of warfare under the khalifs and after their fall, remained on his knees, his own gaze fixed on the carpet before the dais.

The carpet was magnificent, as it happened, woven and dyed by artisans in the Soriyyan homelands centuries ago, rescued by Almalik from the looting of the Al-Fontina in Silvenes fifteen years before. The echo of the khalifs' imperial splendor here in Cartada was, of course, entirely deliberate.

Despite his efforts to hide the fact, the kneeling general was visibly afraid. The plagiarizing poet was not the only man to have been killed by the king in his audience chamber, he was only the most recent. Almalik had been a military leader before he was a governor and then a monarch; it was not a thing he allowed his people to forget. The blade that rested in its sheath by the dais was no ornament.

Without lifting his head, the kneeling ka'id murmured, "He is not in Fezana, Magnificence. No man has seen him since ... the disciplining in that city."

"You just told me that," Almalik of Cartada said, his voice close to a whisper now. This was a bad sign, one of the worst. None of the courtiers ranged near the dais or standing between the pillars dared even glance at each other now. "I asked a different question, ibn Ruhala. I asked the supreme ka'id of all my armies where one exceedingly well-known figure is at this moment. Not where he is not. Am I deficient in expressing myself, of late?"

"No, Magnificence! Not at all. Never. The deficiency is mine. I have sent my personal cadre of guards and the best of the Muwardis throughout the country, Magnificence. We have put the most extreme questioning to all who might be privy to ibn Khairan's whereabouts. Some of these people have died, Magnificence, so zealous were their interrogations. But no one knew, no one knows. Ammar ibn Khairan has disappeared ... from the face of the earth."

There was a silence.

"What a dreadfully tired phrase," said the Lion of Al-Rassan.

Morning sunlight entered the chamber through the high windows, spilling down past upper galleries through the dancing motes of dust. It could be seen that the woman on the pillows smiled at the king's remark, and that Almalik noted her smile and was pleased. One or two courtiers drew slightly deeper breaths at that. One or two risked smiles of their own, and approving nods.

"Forgive me, Magnificence," murmured the ka'id, head still lowered. "I am only an old soldier. A loyal, plain man of the battlefield, not an artist with a tongue for honeyed phrases. I can say only what I have found to be true, in the simplest way I know."

"Tell me," the king said, biting into a wedge of the orange, "has Prince Almalik been put to the extreme questioning you mentioned?"

The ka'id's white head went straight down to the floor. It could be seen that his hands had begun to tremble. The woman on the pillows looked up at the dais, her expression grave. Her fingers hesitated upon the strings of the lute and then resumed their movement, though with less attentiveness than before.

There was not a man in the room who did not know that if Prince Almalik was no longer the king's heir, the two young children of this woman would be living in greatly enhanced circumstances. With Hazem ibn Almalik, the king's second son, given over to religious extremes and disgraced there would be, effectively, no one between the older of the two boys and succession to the kingship.

"We have asked ... aid of the prince," the general stammered into the carpeting. "Of course he was treated with the utmost deference and he ... he told us what he could. He expressed a great hope that the lord Ammar ibn Khairan would soon be found and returned, that he would be among us all once more. As he had been ... among us in the past."

The ka'id's babbling was manifestly unsuitable for a man of his rank. This was no mere field soldier, this was the commander of the army of Cartada. No one in the room imagined, however, that he would have acquitted himself with greater aplomb in the same circumstances. Not at this juncture. Not in response to that particular question. Those who had smiled were urgently praying to their birth stars that their expressions of levity had passed unnoticed.

Only the four Muwardis, two by the entrance doors and two behind the dais, appeared undisturbed behind their half-veils, watching everything and everyone with inimical eyes, despising them all, not troubling to hide the fact.

The king bit into another section of his orange. "I ought to have the prince summoned," he said thoughtfully. "But I am certain he knows nothing. Ibn Khairan wouldn't bother telling such a fool of his plans. Is his eye still dropping like a leper's, by the way?"

Another silence. Evidently the ka'id ibn Ruhala was nursing a vain hope that someone else might reply to this. When the stillness continued, the general, only the back of his head visible to the king on his dais, so prostrate was he, said, "Your most noble son still suffers, alas, from that affliction, Magnificence. Our prayers are with him."

Almalik made a sour face. He dropped the remaining section of orange beside his pillows and held up his fingers delicately. The slave, swift and graceful, appeared before the dais with a muslin towel to wipe the juice from the king's fingers and mouth.

"He looks ridiculous," Almalik said when the slave had withdrawn. "Like a leper," he repeated. "He disgusts me with his weakness."

The woman was no longer even pretending to play at her lute. She watched the king with careful attention.

"Get up, ibn Ruhala," Almalik said abruptly. "You are becoming an embarrassment. Leave us."

With unseemly alacrity, the old general scrambled to his feet. He was crimson-faced from keeping his head lowered for so long. He made the quadruple obeisance and began retreating hastily backwards, still bowing, towards the doors.

"Hold," said Almalik absently. Ibn Ruhala froze, half-bent, like a grotesque statue. "You have made inquiries in Ragosa?"

"Of course, Magnificence. From the moment we began searching in summer. King Badir of Ragosa was our first thought."

"And south? In Arbastro?"

"Our very second thought, Magnificence! You will know how difficult it is to obtain information from those who live in the lands menaced by that dung-eating outlaw Tarif ibn Hassan. But we have been diligent and uncompromising. It does not appear that anyone has seen or heard of ibn Khairan in those places."

There was silence again. The woman on the pillows by the dais held her lute but did not play. The room was very still. The colored water in the great alabaster bowl in the central aisle showed not a ripple of movement. Only the dust was dancing, where the slanting sunlight fell.

"Diligent and uncompromising," the king repeated thoughtfully. He shook his head, as if in sorrow. "You have thirty days to find him, ibn Ruhala, or I will have you castrated and disembowelled and your odious face stuck on a pike in the middle of the market square."

There was a collective intaking of breath, but it was as if this had been expected; the necessary finale to the scene just played.

"Thirty days. Thirty. Yes. Thank you, Magnificence. Thank you," said the ka'id. He sounded absurd, fatuous, but no one could think of what else he might have said.

In silence, as ever, the two Muwardis opened the double doors and the general withdrew, facing the dais, still bowing. The doors swung closed. The sound echoed in the stillness.

"The poem, Serafi. We will hear that verse again." Almalik had taken another orange from the attendant slave and was absently peeling it.

The man addressed was a minor poet, no longer young, honored more for his recitations and his singing voice than for anything he himself had ever written. He stepped hesitantly forward from where he had been standing, half-hidden behind one of the fifty-six pillars in the room. This was not a moment when one wished, particularly, to be singled out for attention. In addition to which, "that poem" was, as everyone knew by now, the last communication to the king from the notorious and celebrated man the ka'id was so unsuccessfully seeking across the whole of Al-Rassan. Under the circumstances, Serafi ibn Dunash would have greatly preferred to be elsewhere at that moment.

Fortunately, he was sober; not a reliable state of affairs for ibn Dunash. Alcohol was forbidden to Asharites of course, but so were Jaddite and Kindath women, boys, dancing, non-religious music and a variety of excellent foods. Serafi ibn Dunash did not dance any more. He relied on that to serve him in good stead with the wadjis, should any of them upbraid him for the laxity of his morals.

It wasn't the wadjis he was afraid of at the moment, however. In the Cartada of King Almalik it was the secular arms of power that were more greatly to be feared. The secular arms, at the moment, rested lightly on the king's knees as he awaited Serafi's recitation. The verses were not flattering, and the king was in an evil mood. The omens were not even remotely auspicious. Nervously, the poet cleared his throat and prepared to begin.

For some reason the slave with the basket of oranges chose this moment to move towards the dais again. He stood directly between Serafi and the king, and then knelt before Almalik. Serafi's view was blocked, but others in the room now noticed what the slave seemed to have been the first to discern: the king appeared to be in sudden and intense distress.

The woman, Zabira, quickly laid aside her instrument and stood up. She took one step towards the dais and then remained extremely still. The king, in that same moment, slipped awkwardly sideways among his cushions and ended up propping himself up on one hand. His other hand was spasmodically clenching and squeezing over his heart. His eyes were wide open, staring at nothing. The slave, nearest to him by far, seemed paralyzed, frozen in position directly in front of Almalik. He had laid aside the basket of oranges but made no other motion. The king opened his mouth; no sound came out.

It is, in fact, a well-known characteristic of the poison fijana that it locks shut the throat just before it reaches the heart. As a consequence, no one in the room save the man kneeling directly in front of him was able to say, afterwards, if the dying king of Cartada realized, before he lost consciousness and life and went to join Ashar among the stars, that the slave who had been offering him oranges all morning had remarkably blue, quite distinctive eyes.

The king's arm suddenly buckled and Almalik, mouth gaping wide, fell soundlessly amid a scatter of bright pillows. Someone screamed then, the sound echoing among the columns. There was a babble of terrified noise.

"Ashar and the god are merciful," said the slave, rising from his position and turning to face the courtiers and the stupefied poet in front of the dais. "I really didn't want to hear that poem again." He gestured apologetically. "I wrote it in a great hurry, you see, and there are infelicities."

"Ammar ibn Khairan!" stammered Serafi somewhat unnecessarily.

The erstwhile slave was calmly unwinding his saffron-colored headcloth. He had darkened his skin but had essayed no further disguise: no one ever looked closely at slaves. "Ammar ibn Khairan!" stammered Serafi somewhat unnecessarily.

"I do hope he recognized me," said ibn Khairan in a musing tone. "I think he did." He dropped the slave's headcloth among the pillows. He seemed utterly relaxed, standing before the dais on which the most powerful monarch in Al-Rassan lay sprawled in slack-jawed, untidy death.

As one, in that moment, the courtiers looked to the Muwardis by the doors, the only men in the room bearing arms. The veiled ones had remained inexplicably motionless through all of what had just taken place. Ibn Khairan noticed the direction of the glances.

"Mercenaries," he said gravely, "are mercenaries."

He did not add, but might have, that the tribesmen of the desert would not be sparing any moments of prayer for the secular, degenerate worse-than-infidel who had just died. As far as the Muwardis were concerned, all of the kings of Al-Rassan merited approximately the same fate. If they all killed each other the starlit visions of Ashar might yet be fulfilled in this land.

One of the veiled ones did come forward then, moving towards the dais. He passed near to the woman, Zabira, who had remained motionless after rising. Her hands were at her mouth.

"Not quite," he said softly, but the words carried, and were remembered.

Then he ascended the dais and removed the Muwardi veil from the lower part of his face and it could be seen by all assembled in the room that this was, indeed, the princely heir of Cartada's realm, Almalik ibn Almalik, he of the nervous eyelid, who his father had said looked like a leper.

He looks rather more like a desert warrior at the moment. He is also, as of this same moment, the king of Cartada.

The other three Muwardis now draw their swords, without moving from where they stand by the doors. One might have expected an outcry from the court, but stupefaction and fear impose their restraints upon men. The only sound in the audience chamber for a frozen instant is the breathing of terrified courtiers.

"The guards on the other side of the doors are mine as well, by the way," says young Almalik mildly. His afflicted eyelid, it can be seen, is not drooping or twitching at this time.

He looks down upon the toppled body of his father. After a moment, with a swift, decisive movement of one foot, he rolls the dead king off the dais. The body comes to rest at the feet of the woman, Zabira. The son sits down smoothly among the remaining pillows of the dais.

Ammar ibn Khairan sinks to his knees in front of him.

"May holy Ashar intercede with the god among the stars," he says, "to grant you long life, O great king. Be merciful in your grandeur to your loyal servants, Magnificence. May your reign be crowned with everlasting glory in Ashar's name."

He proceeds to perform the quadruple obeisance.

Behind him, the poet Serafi suddenly comes to his senses. He drops to the mosaic tiles as if smitten behind the knees and does the same. Then, very much as if they are grateful for this cue as to how to proceed, the men in the audience chamber all perform full obeisance to the new king of Cartada.

It is seen that the only woman in the room, the beautiful Zabira, does so as well, touching the floor with her forehead beside the body of her dead lover, graceful and alluring as always in the movements of her homage to the son.

It is observed that Ammar ibn Khairan, who has been searched for through the whole of Al-Rassan, now rises to his knees and stands, without invitation from the dais.

It is also a source of belated, devastating wonder to those now imprisoned in the room by the drawn swords of the Muwardis, how they could have failed to identify him before. No one looks quite like ibn Khairan, with those unconscionably blue eyes. No one moves like him. No one's arrogance quite matches his. With the headcloth removed his signature earring gleams—with amusement one could be forgiven for thinking. He will have been here in Cartada for a long time, it now becomes clear. Perhaps in this very room. A number of men in the audience chamber begin rapidly scanning their memories for remarks of an injudicious sort they might have made about the disgraced favorite during his presumed absence.

Ibn Khairan smiles and turns to survey them all. His smile is vividly remembered, if no more comforting than it has ever been.

"The Day of the Moat," he says, to no one in particular, "was a mistake in a great many ways. It is never a good idea to leave a man with no real alternatives."

For Serafi the poet this is incomprehensible, but there are wiser men than he standing among the columns and beneath the arches. Ibn Khairan's remark will be recollected, it will be expounded upon. Men will hasten to be the first to elucidate its meaning.

Ibn Khairan, they will say, whispering in bathhouses or courtyards, or in the Jaddite taverns of the city, was meant to bear the responsibility for the executions in Fezana. He had grown too powerful in the king's eyes. He was to be curbed by this. No one would ever trust him again. Heads will nod knowingly over sherbet or forbidden wine.

With this one cryptic sentence, the dialogues of the next days have been set in motion, or so it seems.

It is an old truth, however, that events, whether large or small, do not always follow upon the agendas of even the most subtle of men.

Behind ibn Khairan, the new king of Cartada finishes arranging the pillows of the dais to his satisfaction and says now, quietly, but very clearly, "We are indulgent of all of your obeisances. No man of you need fear us, so long as he is loyal." No mention of the woman, a number of them note.

The king continues, as ibn Khairan turns back to him. "We have certain pronouncements to make at this commencement of our reign. The first is that all formal rites of mourning will be observed for seven days, in honor of our tragically slain king and father."

The men of the Cartadan court are masters of reading the smallest nuances of information. None of them see any hint of surprise in the features or the bearing of ibn Khairan, who has just killed the king.

He planned this too, they decide. The prince would not have been so clever.

They are wrong, as it happens.

A great many people are about to be proven wrong about Almalik ibn Almalik in time to come. The first and foremost of them stands now, directly in front of the young king and hears the new monarch, his ward and disciple, say, in that same quiet, clear voice, "The second pronouncement must be, lamentably, a decree of exile for our once-trusted and dearly loved servant, Ammar ibn Khairan."

No sign, no motion, no slightest indication of discomfiture from the man so named. Only one raised eyebrow—a characteristic gesture that might mean many things—and then a question calmly broached: "Why, Magnificence?"

In the mouth of someone who had just killed a king, with the still-warm body lying not far away, it seems a question of astonishing impudence. Given that the killing has doubtless been effected with the countenance and involvement of the young prince, it is also a dangerous query. Almalik II of Cartada looks to one side and sees his father's sword beside the dais. He reaches out, almost absently, and takes it by the hilt. It can be seen that his unfortunate affliction of the eye has now returned.

"For sins against morality," the young king says, finally. And flushes.

In the rigid silence that follows this, the laughter of Ammar ibn Khairan, when it comes, echoes from column to arch to the high vaulted ceiling. There is an edge to his amusement though—the discerning can hear it. This is not part of what had been arranged, they are certain of it. And there is an extreme subtlety here, the most quick-minded of them realize. The new king needs to swiftly distance himself from regicide. If he had spoken of murder as a cause of exile that distance would be lost—for his own presence, disguised, in this chamber speaks all that needs to be spoken of how his father's death has been achieved.

"Ah," says ibn Khairan now, into the silence, as the echoes of his laughter fade, "moral failings again. Only those?" He pauses, smiles. Says bluntly, "I feared you might speak of killing a king. That dreadful lie some might even now be spreading through the city. I am relieved. Might I therefore live in hope of the king's forgiving kiss upon my unworthy brow one day?"

The king flushes a deeper shade of crimson. Serafi the poet abruptly remembers that their new monarch is still a young man. And Ammar ibn Khairan has been his closest advisor and friend, and there have been certain rumors for a number of years ... He decides that he now understands matters more clearly. The king's forgiving kiss. Indeed!

"Time and the stars and the will of Ashar determine such things," the young king says with determined, formal piety. "We have ... honored you, and are grateful for your past services. This punishment ... comes not easily to us."

He pauses, his voice alters. "Nevertheless, it is necessary. You have until first starlight to be gone from Cartada and seven nights to quit our lands, failing which any man who sees you is free to take your life and is commanded to do so as an agent of the king." The words are crisp, precise, not at all those of a young man who is anxious and unsure of himself.

"Hunted? Not again!" says Ammar ibn Khairan, his sardonic tones restored. "But, really, I'm so tired of wearing a saffron head-cloth."

The tic in the king's eye is quite distracting, really. "You had best be gone," young Almalik says sternly. "What we have now to say are words for our loyal subjects. We shall pray that Ashar guides you towards virtue and enlightenment."

No wavering, the possibly loyal subjects in the room note. Even faced with mockery and what could be seen as a threat from the subtlest man in the kingdom, the young king is standing his ground. He is doing more than that, they now realize. With a slight gesture the king motions the two Muwardis by the double doors at the far end of the chamber to come forward.

They do so, swords drawn, until they stand on either side of ibn Khairan. He spares them only a brief, amused glance.

"I should have remained a poet," he says, shaking his head ruefully. "Affairs such as this are beyond my depth. Farewell, Magnificence. I shall live a sad, dark, quiet life of contemplation, awaiting a summons back to the brightness of your side."

Flawlessly he makes the four obeisances again, then rises. He stands a moment, as if about to add something more. The young king looks at him, waiting, his eyelid twitching. But Ammar ibn Khairan only smiles again and shakes his head. He leaves the room, walking between the graceful columns, across the mosaic tiles, beneath the last arch and out the doors. Not a man there believes his final words.

What the one woman is thinking, watching all of this from where she still stands beside the body of the dead king, her lover, the father of her children, no one can tell. The face of the slain monarch is already turning grey, a known effect of fijana poisoning. His mouth is still open in that last, soundless contortion. The oranges remain in their basket where it was set down by ibn Khairan, directly before the dais.

* * *

It had been, he realized, one of those miscalculations for which a younger man might never have forgiven himself. He was no longer a young man, and his amusement was nearly genuine, his mockery almost all directed inward.

There were other elements in play here, though, and gradually, as he rode east from Cartada late in the day, Ammar ibn Khairan could feel his sardonic detachment beginning to slip. By the time he reached his country estate an afternoon's easy ride from the city walls a companion might have seen a grave expression on his face. He had no companions. The two servants following on mules some distance behind him, carrying a variety of goods—clothing and jewelry and manuscripts, mostly—were not, of course, privy to his thoughts and could not have seen his countenance. Ibn Khairan was not a confiding man.

There was a safe interval yet before first starlight when he reached his home. It would have been undignified to hasten from Cartada in the morning after Almalik's decree, but equally it would have been showy and provocative to linger to the edge of dusk—there were those in the city who might have been willing to kill him and then claim they'd seen a star some time before the first one actually appeared. He was a man with his share of enemies.

When he reached his estate two grooms came running to take his horse. Servants appeared in the doorway and others could be seen scurrying about within, lighting lanterns and candles, preparing rooms for the master. He had not been here since the spring. No one had known where he was.

His steward was dead. He had learned that from the prince some time ago: one of the closely questioned figures the ka'id had mentioned this morning.

They ought to have known better, he thought. They probably had, actually: no one, not even the Muwardis, could really have imagined he'd have told the steward who managed his country home where he was hiding. Ibn Ruhala had needed dead bodies, though, evidence of zeal in his search. It occurred to him that, ironically, the ka'id was someone who probably owed him his life now, with the death of the king. Another possible source of amusement. He really couldn't seem to summon up his usual manner today, however.

It wasn't the unexpected exile, the prince's turning upon him. There were reasons for that. He'd have been happier had he been the one to plan and implement this twist, as he'd planned all the others, but truth was, however he felt about it, the new king was not about to be a puppet, for Ammar ibn Khairan or anyone else. Probably a good thing, he thought, dismounting in the courtyard. A tribute to my own training, that I'm banished from the country by the man I've just made king.

That ought to have been diverting, too. The problem was, he finally acknowledged, looking about the forecourt of the home he most loved, diversion and amusement were going to be a little hard to come by for the next while. Memories, and the associations they brought, were rather too insistent just now.

Fifteen years ago he had killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan for the man he'd killed today.

Wasn't it the Jarainids of the farthest east, beyond the homelands, who believed that a man's life was an endlessly repeating circle of the same acts and deeds? It wasn't a philosophy that commended itself to him, but he was aware that after this morning his own life might fairly be held up as an illustration of their creed. He didn't much like the idea of being a ready example of anything. It was too uninspired a role, and he considered himself a poet before anything else.

Though that, too, was a half-truth, at best. He walked into the low, sprawling house he'd built with the generous income Almalik had always allowed him. Never leave a man without an alternative, he'd said carefully in the audience chamber this morning, to make certain the cleverest among those assembled would begin to spell out the tale as he wanted it told.

But there had been alternatives. There almost always were. Almalik had indeed administered a stringent, deeply humiliating rebuke to his son's independence and ibn Khairan's pride on the Day of the Moat. The prince had been rendered a hapless observer of butchery, no more than a symbol of his father's watchfulness, and Ammar ... ?

Ammar ibn Khairan, who, on behalf of the ambitious governor of Cartada fifteen years ago, had not scrupled to murder a man named Khalif in the holy succession of Ashar—and who had been branded by that deed ever since—had been defined anew for the peninsula and the world as the coarse, blood-sodden architect of an ugly slaughter.

What he had seen in that Fezanan castle courtyard in the broiling heat of summer had sickened him—and he was a man who had seen and decreed death in a great many guises in the service of Cartada. He detested excess though, and the degree of it in that courtyard was appalling.

Over and above all this, of course, there was pride. There was always pride. He might loathe what had been done to the citizens of Fezana but he loathed, just as much, what had been done to his own name, to his image and place in the world. He knew he was the servant of a king, however lofty his titles. Kings could rebuke their servants; they could strip them of their worldly goods, kill them, exile them. They could not take a man—if the man was Ammar ibn Khairan—and present him to the whole of Al-Rassan and the world beyond mountain and sea as an agent of ... ugliness.

No alternative?

Of course there had been alternatives, had he wanted them badly enough. He could have left the world of power and its atrocities. He could even have left this beloved, diminished land of Al-Rassan and its puffed-up petty-kings. He could have gone straight from Fezana to Ferrieres across the mountains, or to any of the great cities of Batiara. There were cultivated, princely courts there where an Asharite poet would be made welcome as a glittering enhancement. He could have written for the rest of his days in luxury among the most civilized of the Jaddites.

He could even have gone farther east, taking ship all the way back to Soriyya, to visit the stone tombs of his ancestors, which he had never seen, perhaps even rediscover his faith at Ashar's Rock, make a vigil under the god's stars in the desert, finish his life far from Al-Rassan.

Of course there had been alternatives.

Instead he had taken revenge. Had disguised himself and come back to Cartada. Made himself known to the prince and then bribed a palace steward to admit him into the retinue of the court as a slave. The largest single bribe he had ever given in his life. And he had killed the king today, with fijana smeared on a muslin cloth.

Twice now, then. Twice in fifteen years he had murdered the most powerful monarch in the land. A khalif and a king.

I am increasingly unlikely to be best remembered, ibn Khairan decided ruefully, entering his home, for my poetry.

"You have a visitor, Excellence," the under-steward said, hovering inside the doorway. Ibn Khairan sat on the low bench by the door and the man knelt to help remove his boots and replace them with jewelled slippers.

"You had someone admitted without my presence?"

The man was now the steward, actually. New to his duties in a terrible time, he looked down at the ground. "I may have erred, Excellence. But she was insistent that you would see her."

"She?"

But he already knew who this had to be. Amusement briefly resurfaced before being succeeded by something else. "Where have you put her?"

"She awaits you on the terrace. I hope I acted rightly, Excellence?"

He rose and the steward did the same. "Only, ever, admit a woman this way. Have dinner prepared for two and a room readied for a guest. You and I will speak later, there is much to be done. I am leaving Cartada for a time, by the king's decree."

"Yes, Excellence," the man said expressionlessly.

Ammar turned to go within. He paused. "The new king. The old king is dead," he added. "This morning."

"Alas," said his steward, with no evident sign of surprise.

A competent man, ibn Khairan decided. Dropping his riding gloves on a marble table, he walked a sequence of corridors to the wide terrace he'd had built on the west side of the house where his own chambers were. He had always preferred sunset to sunrise. The view overlooked red hills and the blue curve of the river to the south. Cartada was invisible, just beyond the hills.

The woman, his visitor, was standing with her back to him, admiring that view. She was barefoot on the cool flagstones.

"The architect didn't want to build this for me," he said, coming to stand beside her. '"Open spaces go inside a house,' he kept telling me."

She glanced up at him. She would have been veiled for the ride here, but the veil was lifted now. Her dark, accented eyes held his a moment and then she turned away.

"It does feel exposed," she said quietly.

"But see where we are. From what am I hiding here in the country, I asked my architect and myself."

"And what did you answer yourself?" she asked, looking at the terraced slopes towards the river and the setting sun. "And your architect?" She was extremely beautiful, in profile. He remembered the day he had first seen her.

"Not this," he said, after a moment, gesturing at the land stretching before them. She was clever, he would do well to remember that. "I will admit I am surprised, Zabira. I am seldom surprised, but this is unexpected."

The foremost lady of King Almalik's court, the courtesan who was the mother of his two youngest children, effectively the queen of Cartada for the past eight years, looked back at him again and smiled, her small, perfect teeth showing white.

"Really?" she said. "On a day when you kill a king and are exiled from your home by your own disciple, a simple visit from a lady is what disconcerts you? I don't know whether to be flattered."

Her voice was exquisite, there seemed to be music beneath it. It had always been thus. She had broken hearts and mended them when she sang. She smelled of myrrh and roses. Her eyes and fingernails had been carefully painted. He wondered how long she had been here. He ought to have asked the steward.

"There is nothing simple about either the lady or the visit," he murmured. "Will you take refreshment?"

A servant had appeared with a tray bearing pomegranate juice and sherbet in tall glasses. He took the drinks and offered her one. "Will I offend you if I also suggest a cup of wine ? There is a Jaddite vineyard north of us and I have an arrangement with them."

"You would not offend me in the least," Zabira said, with some measure of feeling.

Ammar smiled. This was the most celebrated beauty in Al-Rassan, and young still, though perhaps a little less youthful after this morning. Ibn Khairan was only one of the myriad poets who had extolled her over the years. He had been the first, though, there would always be that. He had met her with Almalik. Had been there when it began.

The woman we saw at the Gate of the Fountain,

As twilight stole down upon the city walls

Like a cloaked thief of the day's light,

Wore the first holy stars of Ashar

As ornaments atop the dark fall of her hair.

What shall be the name of their beauty

If it be not her name?

Sacrilege, of course, but Al-Rassan after the Khalifate's fall—and long before—had not been the most devout place in the Asharite world.

She had been seventeen years old that evening when the king and the lord ibn Khairan, his closest friend and advisor, had ridden back into Cartada from a day's hunting in the western forests and had seen a girl drawing water from a fountain in the last of the autumn light. Eight years ago.

"Really, Ammar, why would you be surprised?" the same woman asked him now, infinitely sophisticated, eyeing him over the rim of the glass. Ibn Khairan gestured at the servant, who withdrew to bring wine. "What do you imagine Cartada might hold for me now?"

Carefully, for he was conscious that what he had done this morning had turned her world upside-down and put her life in peril, he said, "The son is son to the father, Zabira, and much of your own age."

She made a wry face. "You heard what he said to me this morning."

Not quite, the prince had murmured. They had all heard that. Zabira had been careful, always, but it was hardly a secret that with Hazem the second son entangled hopelessly with the most zealous of the wadjis, her own older child was the only real alternative to Prince Almalik—provided the king had lived long enough for the boy to come of age. He had not. Ammar wondered, suddenly, where the two children were.

"I heard what he said. Despite that, Almalik ibn Almalik has a nature not immune to enticement," he replied, still being cautious. In its own way he was making an appalling suggestion, though by no means an unprecedented one. Royal sons succeeded fathers, in more ways than one.

She gave him a sidelong glance. "A man's enticement, or a woman's? Perhaps you could enlighten me as to that?" she said sweetly. Then went on before he could reply: "I know him. I've had him watched a long time, Ammar. He will be immune to whatever charms I yet retain. He is too afraid. For him, I will carry the shadow of his father wherever I go, in bed or in court, and he isn't ready to deal with that." She sipped from her drink again and looked out at the gleaming curve of the river and the reddening hills. "He will want to kill my sons."

Ammar had been thinking the same thing, actually.

He decided it was better, in the circumstances, not to ask where the boys were, though it would have been useful knowledge for later. The servant returned with two more glasses, water and wine in a beautifully crafted decanter. He had spent a small fortune on glass over the years. More things to leave behind.

The tray was set down and the servant withdrew. Ibn Khairan mixed water and wine for the two of them. They drank, not speaking. The wine was very good.

The image of two small boys seemed to hang in the air in the gathering twilight. Suddenly, for no good reason, he thought of Ishak of Fezana, the Kindath doctor who had attended upon Zabira for both those boys—and had lost his eyes and tongue after the delivery of the second. He had gazed with an infidel's eyes upon the forbidden beauty of the woman whose life he had saved. The woman now standing here, her scent vivid and distracting, her white skin flawless. He wondered if she knew what had happened to Ishak ben Yonannon, if Almalik had ever told her. That led to another unexpected thought.

"You really did love the king, didn't you?" he asked at length, uncharacteristically awkward. He didn't feel entirely in control of this situation. Murdering someone left you vulnerable to certain things; he had almost forgotten that lesson over the course of fifteen years. How was one to proceed with the lover of a man one had slain?

"You know I did," she said calmly. "That isn't a difficult or even a real question, Ammar." She turned and stood facing him for the first time. "The difficult truth is that you loved him as well."

And that he had not expected.

He shook his head quickly. "No. I respected him, I admired his strength, I enjoyed the subtlety of his mind. His foresight, his cunning. I had hopes of the son, as well. In a way, I still do."

"Otherwise your teaching was wasted?"

"Otherwise my teaching was wasted."

"It was," said Zabira flatly. "You'll see, soon enough. And though I heard a denial of love, I am afraid I do not believe it."

She set down her empty glass and looked up at him thoughtfully, standing very near. "Tell me something else," she said, her voice changing timbre. "You suggested the new king was not immune to enticement. Are you, Ammar?"

He was, perhaps, the least easily startled man in Al-Rassan, but this, following hard upon the last remarks, was entirely unexpected. Hilarity, intense and swift, rose within him and as swiftly subsided. He had killed her lover that morning. The father of her children. The hope of her future.

"I have been accused of many things, but never that," he said, parrying for time.

She granted him none. "Good, then," said Zabira of Cartada, and rising on her toes, she kissed him upon the lips, slowly and with considerable expertise.

Someone else did this to me, not long ago, ibn Khairan thought, before all such associations were chased away. The woman on the terrace with him stepped back, but only to begin—silk sleeves falling away to reveal the white skin of her arms—unbinding her black hair.

He stared, mesmerized, words and thoughts scattering in disarray. He watched her hands descend to the pearl buttons of her overtunic. She undid two of them, and paused. It was not an overtunic. She wore nothing beneath. In the extremely clear, soft light he glimpsed the pale, pear-like curves of her breasts.

His throat was suddenly dry. His voice husky in his own ears, ibn Khairan said, "My rooms are just here."

"Good," she said again. "Show me."

It did occur to him just then that she might have come here to kill him.

It did not occur to him to do anything about it. He had, truly, never been accused of being immune to enticement. He lifted her up; she was small-boned and slender, no real weight at all. The scent of her surrounded him, dizzying for a moment. He felt her mouth at the lobe of one ear. Her fingers were about his neck. His blood loud within him, ibn Khairan carried her through a doorway and into his bedchamber.

Is it the possibility of dying that does this? he wondered, his first and last such clear thought for some time. Is that what excites me so?

His bed, in a large room hung with Serian tapestries, was low to the ground, covered with cushions and pillows in a diversity of shapes and sizes, as much for love-play as for color and texture. Crimson-dyed squares of silk hung from copper rings on the wall above the bed and set into the carved wooden foot. Ammar preferred freedom of movement in his lovemaking, the slide and traverse of bodies, but there had been those among his guests in this room who derived their keenest pleasures otherwise, and over the years he had earned a reputation as a host solicitous of all of his guests' desires.

Even so, even with almost twenty years of nuanced experience in erotic play, ibn Khairan was swiftly made aware—though not, in truth, with any great surprise—that a woman trained as Zabira had been knew some things he did not. Even, it began to emerge, things about his own nature and responses.

Unclothed among the pillows some time later, he felt her fingers teasing and exploring him, winced at a bite and felt his sex grow even more rigid amid the growing shadows of the room as her mouth came back to his ear and she whispered something quite shocking in the exquisite, celebrated voice. Then his eyes grew wide in the darkness as she proceeded to perform precisely what she had just described.

All the training mistresses and castrates of Almalik's court had come over the wide seas from the homelands of the east, where such skills had been part of courtly life for hundreds of years before Ashar's ascetic vigil in the desert. It was possible, Ammar's drifting thoughts essayed, that a journey to Soriyya might have more to offer than he'd imagined. He felt a breathless laugh escape him.

Zabira slipped further downward, her scented skin gliding along his, her fingernails offering counterpoint where they touched. Ibn Khairan heard a sigh of helpless pleasure and realized that, improbably, he had made that sound himself. He attempted to rise then, to turn, to begin the sharing, the flowing back-and-forth of love but he felt her hands, delicately insistent, pushing him down. He surrendered, closed his eyes, let her begin, her voice exclaiming in delight or murmuring in commentary, to minister to him as he had ministered to so many people in this room.

It went on, astonishingly varied and inventive, for some time. The sun had set. The room was encased in darkness—they had paused to light no candles here—before his sensibilities began, as a swimmer rises from green depths of the sea, to reassert themselves. And slowly, feeling almost drugged with desire, ibn Khairan came to understand something.

She was beside him just then, having turned him on his side. One of her legs was wrapped about his body, she had him enclosed within her sex, and her movements were indeed those of sea tides in their insistent, unwavering rise and fall.

He brushed a nipple with his tongue, testing his new thought. Without pause in her rhythm—which was, intuitively, his own deepest rhythm—she caressed his head and tilted it away.

"Zabira," he whispered, his voice distant and difficult.

"Hush," she murmured, a tongue to his ear again. "Oh, hush. Let me carry you away."

"Zabira," he tried again.

She shifted then, sinuous and smooth, and was above him now, more urgently, his manhood still within her, sheathed in liquescence. Her mouth descended, covered his. Her breath was scented with mint, her kisses a kind of threading fire. She stopped his speech, her tongue like a hummingbird. Her nails raked downward along his side. He gasped.

And turned his head away.

He lifted his hands then, with some effort, and grasped her by the arms; gently, but so she could not twist away again. In the darkness he tried to see her eyes but could discern only the heart-shaped shadow of her face and the curtain of her black hair.

"Zabira," he said, an utterly unexpected kind of pain within him, "you need not punish yourself, or hold back sorrow. It is all right to mourn. It is allowed."

She went stiff with shock, as if slapped. Her body arched backwards in the first uncontrolled movement she had made all evening. For a long moment she remained that way, rigid, motionless, and then, with real grief and a simultaneous relief, Ammar heard her make one harsh, unnatural sound as if something had been torn in her throat, or in her heart.

He drew her slowly down until she lay along the length of him, but in a different fashion from all their touchings of before. And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he'd killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world.

A bitter, ironic world, he thought, still struggling upwards as through those scented, enveloping green waters. And then, as if he had, truly, broken through to some surface of awareness, ibn Khairan confronted and accepted the fact that she had, indeed, been right in what she'd said on the terrace as the sun set.

He'd killed a hard, suspicious, brilliant, cruelly ambitious man today. And one whom he had loved.

Lions died. Lovers died, or were slain. Men and women moved in their pride and folly through deeds of pity and atrocity and the stars of Ashar looked down and did or did not care.

The two of them never left his room that night. Ammar had trays brought again, with cold meats and cheeses and figs and pomegranates from his own groves. They ate by candlelight, cross-legged upon the bed, in silence. Then they removed the trays and blew out the candles and lay down together again, though not in the movements of desire.

They were awake before dawn. In the grey half-light that slowly suffused the room she told him, without his asking, that at the end of the summer her two sons had been quietly sent for fostering, after the old fashion, to King Badir of Ragosa.

Ragosa. She had made that decision herself, she said quietly, immediately after ibn Khairan's poem had arrived in Cartada, lampooning and excoriating the king. She had always tried to stay ahead of events, and the poem had offered more than a hint of change to come.

"Where will you go?" she asked him. Morning light had entered the chamber by then. They could hear birds outside and from within the house the footsteps of busy servants. She was sitting up, cross-legged again, wrapped in a light blanket as in a shepherd's cloak, her face paint streaked with the tracks of her night tears, hair tumbling in disarray.

"I haven't, to be honest, had time to think about it. I was only ordered into exile yesterday morning, remember? And then I had a somewhat demanding guest awaiting me when I came home."

She smiled wanly, but made no movement, waiting, her dark eyes, red-rimmed, fixed on his.

He truly had not thought about it. He had expected to be triumphantly home in Cartada as of yesterday morning, guiding the policies and first steps of the new king and the kingdom. A man could make plans, it seemed, but he could not plan for everything. He hadn't even allowed himself, through the course of the night just past, to think much about Almalik ibn Almalik, the prince—the king, now—who had so decisively turned on him. There would be time for that later. There would have to be.

In the meantime, there was a whole peninsula and a world beyond it full of places that were not Cartada. He could go almost anywhere, do so many different things. He had realized that much yesterday, riding here. He was a poet, a soldier, a courtier, a diplomat.

He looked at the woman on his bed, and read the question she was trying so hard not to ask. At length he smiled, savoring all the ironies that seemed to be emerging like flower petals in the light, and he accepted the burden that came not from killing, but from allowing someone to take comfort with him when no comfort had been expected or thought to be allowed. She was a mother. He had known that, of course, but had never given any thought to what it might mean for her.

"Where will I go? Ragosa, I suppose," he said, as if carelessly, and was humbled by the radiance of her smile, bright as the morning sunlight in the room.

Eight

Ivories and throngs of people, these were the predominant images Alvar carried after three months in Ragosa.

He had been born and raised on a farm in the far north. For him, a year before, Esteren in Valledo had been fearfully imposing. Esteren, he now understood, was a village. King Badir's Ragosa was one of the great cities of Al-Rassan.

He had never been in a place where so many people lived and went about their business, and yet, amid the bustle and chaos, the swirling movements, the layers of sound, somehow still a sense of grace hovered—a stringed instrument heard in an archway, a splashing fountain half-glimpsed beyond the flowers of screening trees. It was true, what he had been told: the Star-born of Al-Rassan inhabited an entirely different world than did the Horsemen of Jad.

Every second object in the palace or the gracious homes he had seen seemed to be made of carved and polished ivory, imported by ship from the east. Even the handles of the knives used at some tables. The knobs on the palace doors. Despite the slow decline of Al-Rassan since the fall of Silvenes, Ragosa was a conspicuously wealthy city. In some ways it was because of the fall of the khalifs, actually.

Alvar had had that explained to him. Besides the celebrated workers in ivory there were poets and singers here, leather workers, woodcarvers, masons, glassblowers, stonecutters—masters of a bewildering variety of trades who would never have ventured east across the Serrana Range in the days when Silvenes was the center of the western world. Now, since the Khalifate's thunderous fall, every one of the city-kings had his share of craftsmen and artists to exalt and extol his virtues. They were all lions, if one could believe the honey-tongued poets of Al-Rassan.

One couldn't, of course. Poets were poets, and had a living to earn. Kings were kings, and there were a score of them now, some foundering in the ruin of their walls, some festering in fear or greed, a few—a very few—conceivably heirs to what Silvenes had been. It seemed to Alvar, on little enough experience, that King Badir in Ragosa had to be numbered among those in the last group.

Amid all the strangeness surrounding him—the unknown, intoxicating smells from doorway and courtyard and food stall, the bells summoning the devout to prayer at measured intervals during the day and night, the riot of noise and color in the marketplace, Alvar was grateful that here in Al-Rassan they still measured the round of the year by the white moon's cycling from full to full as they did back home. At least that hadn't changed. He could say exactly how long he'd been here, in another world.

On the other hand, it felt like so much more than three months, when he paused to look back. His year in Esteren seemed eerily remote, and the farm almost unimaginably distant. He wondered what his mother would say, could she have seen him in his loosely belted, flowing Asharite garb during the summer past. Actually, he didn't wonder: he was fairly certain he knew. She'd have headed straight back to Vasca's Isle, on her knees, in penance for his sins.

The fact was, though, summer was hot here in the south. One needed a headcovering in the white light of midday, one less cumbersome than a stiff leather hat; and the light-colored cotton tunics and trousers of Al-Rassan were far more comfortable in the city streets than what he had been wearing when they arrived. His face was darkened by the sun; he looked half Asharite himself, Alvar knew. It was an odd sensation, gazing in a glass and seeing the man who looked back. There were mirrors everywhere, too; the Ragosans were a vain people.

Autumn had come in the meantime; he wore a light brown cloak over his clothing now. Jehane had picked it out for him when the weather began to change. Twisting and pushing—expertly now—through the crowds of the weekly market, Alvar could hardly believe how little time had really passed since the two of them and Velaz had come through the mountain pass and first seen the blue waters of the lake and the towers of Ragosa.

He had been at pains to conceal his awe that day, though looking back from his newly sophisticated vantage point he suspected that his two companions had simply been generous enough to pretend not to notice. Even Fezana had intimidated him from a distance. Ragosa dwarfed it. Only Cartada itself now—with Silvenes of the khalifs looted and gutted years ago—was a more formidable city. Next to this high-walled, many-towered magnificence, Esteren was as the hamlet of Orvilla, where Garcia de Rada had come raiding on a night in summer.

Alvar's life had forked like a branch that night, his path in the morning running east through Al-Rassan and across the Serrana Range to these walls with Jehane bet Ishak, instead of north and home with the Captain.

His own choice, too, endorsed by Rodrigo and accepted, if grudgingly at first, by Jehane. She would need a guard on the road, Alvar had declared in the morning after a memorable camp-fire conversation. A soldier, he'd added, not merely a servant, however loyal and brave that servant might be. Alvar had offered to be that guard, with the Captain's permission. He would see her settled in Ragosa then make his way home.

He hadn't told them he was in love with her. They wouldn't have let him come if they had known, he was sure of that much. He was also ruefully certain Jehane had realized the truth early in their journey. He wasn't particularly good at hiding what he felt.

He thought she was beautiful, with her dark hair and her direct, unexpectedly blue gaze. He knew she was clever, and more than that: trained, accomplished, calmly professional. Amid the fires of Orvilla he had seen her courage, and her anger, holding the two young girls in her arms. She was a woman entirely outside the range of his life. She was also a Kindath, of the Wanderers, the god-diminishing heretics the clerics thundered against as loudly as they cursed the Asharites. Alvar tried not to let that matter, but the truth was, it did: it made her seem mysterious, exotic, even a little dangerous.

She wasn't, actually. She was sharp and practical and direct. She'd taken him to her bed for one single night, not long after their arrival in Ragosa. She had done it kindly, without guile or promise. She had almost certainly intended that such a matter-of-fact physical liaison would cure him of his youthful longings. Alvar, clever in his own right, was quite clear about that. She allowed him no candlelit illusions at all about what a night together meant. She felt kindly towards him, Alvar knew. Though the journey had proved uneventful, she'd been grateful for his company, found him reliable and trustworthy, his energy diverting. He had come to understand, being observant in his own way, that she, too, was embarking on something new and strange without being sure of her way.

He also knew she did not love him at all, that beyond the physical act, the night's harmony of two young bodies far from their homes, their union made no sense. But far from purging him of love, that night in her room had set a seal, as in heated wax, on his feelings.

In the old stories the kitchen women used to tell around the fire after the evening meal on the farm, brave Horsemen of the god loved endangered maidens on first sight and for life. It wasn't supposed to happen that way in the fallen, divided world in which they really lived. It had, for Alvar de Pellino.

He didn't make a great issue of it. He loved Jehane bet Ishak, the Kindath physician. It was a fact of existence, as much as where the god's sun rose in the morning, or the proper way to parry a left-handed sword stroke towards one's knees. Walking the crowded streets of Ragosa, Alvar felt much older than he had when he rode south with Rodrigo Belmonte to collect the summer parias.

It was autumn now. The breeze from the north off Lake Serrana was cool in the morning and sometimes sharply cold at night. All the soldiers wore cloaks, and two layers of clothing under them if they were on duty after sunset. Not long ago, at dawn after a night on the northwestern wall, Alvar had seen the masts and spars of the fishing boats in the harbor rimed with pale frost under the full blue moon.

In the first sunlight of the next morning the leaves of the oaks in the eastern forests had gleamed red and gold, a dazzle of brilliance. To the west, the Serrana mountains that guarded Ragosa from Cartada's armies and had screened her from Silvenes in the days of the Khalifate had been capped with snow on the higher slopes. The snow would last until spring. The pass through which he and Jehane and Velaz had come was the only one open all year. Friends had told him these things in the Jaddite taverns of the city or the food stalls of the marketplace.

He had friends here now. He hadn't expected that, but shortly after their arrival it had become obvious that he was far from the only Jaddite soldier in Ragosa. Mercenaries went where there was money and work, and Ragosa offered both. For how long, no one knew, but that summer and fall the city on Lake Serrana was home to an eclectic array of fighting men from Jalona and Valledo, and further afield: Ferrieres, Batiara, Karch, Waleska. Blond, bearded Karcher giants from the far north mingled—and frequently brawled—with lean, smooth-shaven, dagger-wielding men from the dangerous cities of Batiara. One heard half a dozen languages in the marketplace of a morning. Alvar's Asharic was increasingly fluent now and he could swear in two Karcher dialects.

Walking a little distance aside with him on the day they had parted, Ser Rodrigo had told Alvar that he need not hurry home. He gave him leave to linger in Ragosa, with orders to post letters of report with any tradesmen heading towards Valledo.

A captain of King Badir's army had summoned Alvar on the third day after their arrival. It was a well-run, highly disciplined army, for all its diversity. He had been marked as soon as they passed through the gates. The horse and armor he'd won at Orvilla were too good for him not to be noted. He was closely interviewed, enlisted at a salary and placed in a company. He was also, after a few days, permitted to leave the barracks and live with Jehane and Velaz in the Kindath Quarter, which surprised him. It wouldn't have happened in Esteren.

It was because of Jehane's position. She had been immediately installed at court, newest of the physicians to the king and his notorious Kindath chancellor, Mazur ben Avren. Her formal place in a palace retinue—in Ragosa, as everywhere else in the world—carried with it certain perquisites.

None of which had stopped Alvar from being embroiled in three fights not of his choosing during the first fortnight after he left the barracks and went to live in their house. That much was also the same everywhere: soldiers had their own codes, whatever royal courts might decree, and young fighting men granted special privileges had to be prepared to establish their right to those.

Alvar fought. Not to the death, for that was forbidden in a city that needed its mercenaries, but he wounded two men, and took a cut on the outside of his sword arm that had Jehane briefly worried. The sight of her concern was worth the wound and the scar that remained when it healed. Alvar expected wounds and scars; he was a soldier, such things came with his chosen course of life. He was also here in Ragosa as a known representative of Rodrigo Belmonte's company, and when he fought it was with a consciousness that he was upholding the pride of the Captain's men and their eminence among the companies of the world. It was a role he shouldered alone, with an anxious sense of responsibility.

Until, at the very end of that same summer, Ser Rodrigo had come himself through the pass to Ragosa on his black horse with one hundred and fifty soldiers and a silk merchant, the banners of Belmonte and Valledo flapping in the wind as they rode up to the walls along the shore of the lake.

Things changed then. Things began to change everywhere.

"By the eyeteeth of the holy god," Lain Nunez had cackled in horror when Alvar reported to them that first day, "will you look at this! The boy's gone and converted himself! What will I tell his poor father?"

The Captain, scrutinizing Alvar's clothing with amusement, had said only, "I've had three reports. You appear to have done well by us. Tell me exactly how you were wounded and what you would do differently next time."

Alvar, grinning for all he was worth, a warm glow rising in him as from drinking unmixed wine, had told him.

Now, some time later, running through the market under the blue skies of a crisp autumn morning to find Jehane and give her the day's huge tidings, he knew himself to be recognized, envied, even a little feared.

No one challenged him to duels any more. The celebrated Ser Rodrigo of Valledo, in exile, had accepted a huge contract with King Badir, with the full year paid in advance, which was almost unheard of.

Rodrigo's men were soldiers of Ragosa now, the vanguard of a fighting force that was to enforce order in city and countryside, to hold back newly ambitious Jalofia, and Cartada, and the worst incursions of the outlaw chieftain ibn Hassan from his southern fortress of Arbastro. Life was complex in Ragosa, and dangers many-faceted.

Life seemed an entirely splendid affair to young Alvar de Pellino that morning, and the brilliant, cultured Ragosa of King Badir was—who would dream of denying it?—the most civilized place in the world.

Alvar had been to the palace with Jehane, and several times with Rodrigo. There was a stream running right through it, watering some of the inner gardens and courtyards and passing, by a means Alvar could not grasp, through the largest of the banquet rooms.

At the most sumptuous of his feasts King Badir—sensuous, self-indulgent, undeniably shrewd—liked to have the meal floated along this stream in trays, to be collected from the water by half-naked slaves and presented to the king's guests as they reclined on their couches in the ancient fashion. Alvar had written a letter to his parents mentioning this; he knew they wouldn't believe him.

He usually tried to avoid running through the streets these days—it was too youthful, too undignified—but the news of the morning was enormous and he wanted to be the one to tell Jehane.

He skidded around a leather-goods stall and grabbed for the awning pole to help him turn. The pole rocked, the canopy tilted dangerously. The artisan, a man he knew, cursed him routinely as Alvar shouted an apology over his shoulder.

Jehane and Velaz would be at their own stall in the market. She had been following her father's practice and her own from Fezana. Even though handsomely rewarded at the palace, she was always at the booth on the country market morning, and in her consulting rooms two afternoons a week. A physician needed to be known outside the chambers of the palace, she had told Alvar. Her father had taught her that. A doctor could as easily go out of fashion at court as come into it. It was never wise to be cut off from other sources of patients.

It had been Velaz who had told Alvar what had happened to Jehane's father.

In the time before Rodrigo's arrival the two men had taken to having dinner together some evenings when Jehane was at court and Alvar free of watch or patrol duties. The night he heard the story of Ishak ben Yonannon and King Almalik's youngest son, Alvar had dreamed, for the first time but not the last, of killing the king of Cartada and coming back through the mountain pass to Jehane in Ragosa with word that her father had been avenged for his dark, silent pain.

This morning's news had ended that particular dream.

She was not at the booth. Velaz was alone at the back, closing up early, putting away medicines and implements. She must have just left; there were patients still milling about in front of the stall. A buzz of excitement and apprehension animated the whispered conversations.

"Velaz! Where is she? I have news!" Alvar said, breathing hard. He had sprinted all the way from the western gate.

Velaz looked at him over his shoulder, his expression difficult to read. "Alvar. We heard, from the palace. Almalik's dead. Zabira of Cartada's here. Jehane's gone to court."

"Why?" Alvar asked sharply.

"Mazur wanted her. He likes her with him now, when things are happening."

Alvar knew that, actually. It didn't bring him any pleasure at all.

Jehane derived a healthy enjoyment from the extremely rare occasions when she engaged in the act of lovemaking.

She also had an equally healthy sense of self-respect. The universally acknowledged truths that Mazur ben Avren the chancellor of Ragosa was the most illustrious member of the Kindath community in Al-Rassan, the most sagacious, the most subtle and the most generous, did not negate the equally fundamental fact that he was the most sexually rapacious man she'd ever encountered or even heard of, outside of royalty with its harems.

He was royalty, in a sense, and he might as well have had a harem. Ben Avren was known as the Prince of the Kindath throughout Al-Rassan, and though he actively disavowed the name—a prudent act given the malevolent watchfulness of the wadjis—there was truth to that title, too.

Royalty or not, Jehane resisted being bedded by a man who clearly expected to do so as a matter of right.

She had made that point as emphatically as she could the first night he'd invited her to dine in his private quarters in the palace. There had been two musicians in the room. It became evident that they were expected to linger after the meal and continue playing while the chancellor and his current companion disported themselves

Jehane was otherwise inclined.

Mazur ben Avren, seeming amused more than anything else, had contented himself with sharing sweet wine and small cakes after their meal, offering anecdotes about her father whom he had known well, and culling her own thoughts—comprehensively—about the likely course of events in Fezana now, among the Kindath community and the city at large. He was the chancellor of Ragosa before all else, he made that clear.

He made it equally obvious, however, that he expected her resistance to him to be temporary, and regarded it as an affectation more than anything else. He was fifty-seven years old that year, trim and fit, with a full head of grey hair under a soft blue Kindath cap, a neatly barbered, perfumed beard, a modulated, meditative voice, and a mind that could move without hesitation from poetry to military planning. He also bore the unmistakable look, in his dark brown, heavy-lidded eyes, of a man accustomed to pleasing and being pleased by women.

There had been days and nights in the period that followed when Jehane had asked herself whether her resistance to him was, in fact, merely an impediment of pride. Most of the time she didn't think so. Ben Avren, stimulating and gracious as he was with her, bestowed the exact same appraising glance upon too many women. Upon all women, in fact. He certainly wasn't waiting for her favors in chaste frustration. In a certain way, one had to admire his omnivorous hunger. Not many men at his age could harbor—let alone implement—such an appetite.

His amusement at her refusal did not fade; neither did his witty, elegant courtesy or the invitation that always lay just beneath that courteousness. There was never even a hint of anger, or force. This was, after all, one of the most cultivated men in Al-Rassan. He asked her opinions, flatteringly. She was careful about what she had to say, and not too quick to answer.

She began noticing changes in herself as time passed, in the way she thought about things. She found herself anticipating what Mazur's questions might be, considering her answers in advance. He always appeared to listen to her, which was something rare in Jehane's experience.

It came to be accepted that the chancellor was being regularly attended upon by the court's new doctor, in the audience hall and elsewhere. Everyone at court, even King Badir, seemed to be aware that ben Avren was persistently wooing her. It was, evidently, a source of amusement for them. She was a woman of his own faith, which made the entire, extremely public dance even more diverting, as summer gave way to autumn and the code of dress in the palace changed with the changing leaves in the gardens and in the forests beyond the walls.

Jehane didn't much like being a source of diversion for anyone, but she couldn't deny it was pleasant to be attending at a court as sophisticated as this one. Nor could she complain about being afforded less than complete respect professionally. Her father's name had ensured .that at the beginning, and her own unfussy competence in a number of matters had consolidated it, after.

Then Rodrigo Belmonte had arrived, with his full company, exiled from Valledo in the wake of events she knew. The Day of the Moat and the burning of Orvilla had altered lives other than her own, it seemed.

Things began to change again. Alvar went to live in the barracks with the rest of Rodrigo's company, leaving her alone with Velaz. His departure was a source of both relief and regret for Jehane. The second emotion surprised her a little. His feelings for her were too obvious, and too obviously more than what she'd hoped they were: the transitory passion of a young man for his first love.

There was more to Alvar de Pellino than that, however, and Jehane had to admit that during the time of her steady siege by the chancellor, when pride kept her from his bed, it had occurred to her to take refuge with her Jaddite soldier again. He wasn't her soldier, though, and he deserved better of her. Alvar might be young, but Jehane could see clear signs of what had led Rodrigo Belmonte to bring him south and then let him accompany her alone to Ragosa. But had she wanted a domestic life she could have had it in Fezana by now with a number of Kindath men, not with a Jaddite from the north.

There might be a day when she regretted decisions made and the ones not made, the paths that had led her to be well past her prime marrying years now, and alone, but that day had not yet come.

Their small house and treatment rooms seemed quiet and empty after Alvar left. She had grown into a habit of discussing the events of the day with him. How very domestic, she'd thought wryly more than once. But the truth was that many times the thoughts she'd later relayed to the chancellor had been Alvar's, over a late-night cup of wine.

Even Velaz seemed to miss the young Jaddite; she hadn't expected a friendship to develop there. Singing the sun god's exultant chants of triumph, the Jaddites of Esperana had slaughtered the Kindath through the centuries or, in generations slightly less bloodthirsty, had forced them to convert or made them slaves. Easy friendships, perhaps even less than love, did not readily emerge from such a history.

It was hard to attach that long, stony bitterness to Alvar de Pellino, though. Or to Rodrigo Belmonte, for that matter. The Captain still wanted her as physician to his band; he had made that clear as soon as he'd arrived. Had said it was one of the reasons he was here. She didn't believe that, but he'd said it, nonetheless, and she did know how important a good doctor was to a fighting company, and how hard they were to find.

She remembered the night ride with him across the land north of Fezana and the river, Orvilla burning behind them, the bodies of the dead lying on the grass. She remembered words spoken around the campfire later. He remembered them too; she could see that in his grey eyes. Rodrigo was still unlike anything she might have expected him to be.

She had teased him on that solitary ride under the two moons, letting her hands slide down to his thighs. She had been irritated, deliberately provocative. She didn't think she would risk that again. She couldn't believe she had done it in the first place. It was reported by Alvar that the Captain was married to the most beautiful woman in Valledo.

Rodrigo had spoken of his wife that night near Fezana as if she was an unholy terror. He had an odd sense of humor. Alvar worshipped him. All his company did. It was obvious, and it said a great deal.

They had spoken seldom since he'd arrived, and only in public. It was among a number of people, including ben Avren, the chancellor, at a reception in a palace courtyard, that Rodrigo had again declared his intention of recruiting her. The chancellor had arched his expressive eyebrows but he hadn't raised the matter later when they were alone. Neither had Jehane.

Rodrigo was usually outside the walls through the autumn's early, mild days, leading his company—or parts of it—on a sequence of minor, overdue expeditions designed to deal with outlaw bands to the northeast, and then making a show of strength in the small, important city of Fibaz, by the pass leading to Ferrieres. Ragosa controlled Fibaz, and drew taxes from it, but King Bermudo of Jalona had increasingly obvious designs upon the town.

He had already made his first tribute demand, the parias gold being exacted from Fezana by his nephew in Valledo serving as an example. The Jaddites were growing bold. Remembering that moonlit conversation by a campfire, Jehane asked Mazur once how long he thought Al-Rassan's city-kings could survive. He hadn't answered that question.

Rodrigo had made it explicit that he wanted Jehane to come as physician with his company on those early expeditions. She knew he saw them as a test for both of them. It wasn't entirely her decision, in a way. She could have accepted or refused, but did not, waiting to see what would happen. King Badir promised his newest mercenary leader that he would consider the matter, and then promptly increased Jehane's duties at court. Mazur was controlling that, she knew. She was uncertain whether to be vexed or amused. By the terms of her engagement she was free to leave if she wanted, but they were determined to make it difficult. Rodrigo, in and out of the city through the autumn, bided his time.

Husari ibn Musa rode with him on several of those expeditions. Jehane's former patient was almost unrecognizable. No longer the portly, soft merchant he had been, he had lost a great deal of weight in a season. He looked a younger, harder man now. The kidney stones no longer vexed him, he said. He could ride all day, and had been learning to handle a sword and bow. He wore a wide-brimmed Jaddite leather hat now, even in the city. Jehane had said teasingly that he and Alvar appeared to have exchanged cultures. When the two men first saw each other they laughed, and then grew thoughtful.

The leather Jaddite hat was an emblem of sorts for Husari, Jehane decided. A reminder. He, too, had sworn an oath of vengeance, and the recollection of that served to modify her surprise at the changes in him. He was still actively doing business, he told her one night when he came for dinner in the Kindath Quarter, as he used to come to her father's house. His factors were busy all over Al-Rassan, even here in Ragosa, he added, as the servant Velaz had hired poured wine for them. There were, simply, other priorities for him now, Husari said. Since the Day of the Moat. She'd asked, cautiously, what affairs he was pursuing in Cartada, but that question he had deflected.

It was interesting, Jehane thought, lying in bed that night: all these men who trusted her had certain questions they would not answer. Except Alvar, she supposed. She was fairly certain he would answer anything she asked him. There was something to be said for straightforwardness in a world of oblique intrigue. She had Velaz for directness, though. She'd always had Velaz. More of a blessing than she deserved. She remembered that it was her father who had made her take Velaz when she left home.

Amid all of this, the king's three other court physicians actively hated her. That was to be expected. A woman, and a Kindath, and preferred by the chancellor? Openly coveted by the most celebrated Jaddite captain for his company? She was lucky they hadn't poisoned her, she wrote in a letter to Ser Rezzoni in Sorenica. She asked him to continue writing her father. She said there was reason to believe there might now be a reply. She wrote home herself twice a week. Letters came back. Her mother's careful handwriting, in slanted Kindath script, but her father's dictation now, some of the time. Small, good things, it seemed, still happened in the world.

She didn't make that jest about being poisoned to them, of course. Parents were parents, and they would have been afraid for her.

On the autumn morning when Mazur's messenger brought her tidings from Cartada and bade her follow him to court that jest didn't seem particularly witty any more.

Someone had been poisoned, it appeared.

In the palace of Ragosa, as Jehane arrived and made her way to the Courtyard of the Streams where the king was awaiting the newly arrived visitor, no one's thoughts or whispered words were of anything else.

Almalik of Cartada, the self-styled Lion of Al-Rassan, was dead, and the lady Zabira—more his widow than anything else—had arrived unannounced this morning, a supplicant to King Badir. She had been accompanied only by her steward in her flight through the mountains, someone whispered.

Jehane, who had made the same journey with only two companions, wasn't impressed by that. But neither was she even remotely close to sorting out how she felt about the larger tidings. She was going to need a long time for that. For the moment she could only grasp the essential fact that the man she had vowed to kill was somehow dead at Ammar ibn Khairan's hand—the story was not yet clear—and the woman who had birthed a living child and had herself survived only because of Jehane's father was soon to enter through the arches at the far end of this garden.

Beyond these two clear facts confusion reigned within her, mingled with something close to pain. She had left Fezana with a sworn purpose, and had proceeded to spend the past months in this city enjoying her work at court, enjoying—if she was honest—the flattering attentions of an immensely civilized man, enjoying the determined skirmishing for her professional services. Taking pleasure in her life. And doing nothing at all about Almalik of Cartada and the promise she'd made to herself on the Day of the Moat.

Too late now. It would always be too late, now.

She stood, as was her custom, on the margin of one bank of the stream, not far from Mazur's position at the king's right shoulder on the island. Wind-blown leaves were falling into the water and drifting away. As many times as she'd been in this garden, by daylight and under torches at night, Jehane was still conscious of its beauty. In autumn only the late flowers still bloomed, but the falling leaves in the sunlight and those yet clinging to the trees were brilliant, many-colored. She was aware of the effect this garden could have on someone seeing it for the first time.

The Courtyard of the Streams had been designed and contrived years ago. The same stream that ran through the banquet hall had been further channelled to pass through this garden and to branch into two forks, creating a small islet in the midst of trees and flowers and marble walkways beneath the carved arcades. On the isle, reached by two arched bridges, the king of Ragosa now sat on an ivory bench with his most honored courtiers beside him. Flanking the gently curving path that approached one of the bridges members of Badir's court waited in the autumn sunshine for the woman who had come to Ragosa.

Birds flitted in the branches overhead. Four musicians played on the far bank of the stream that ran behind the isle. Goldfish swam in the water. It was cool, but pleasant in the sun.

Jehane saw Rodrigo Belmonte on the other side of the garden, among the military men. He had returned from Fibaz two nights before. His eyes met hers, and she felt exposed by the thoughtful look in them. He had no right, on so little acquaintance, to be regarding her with such appraisal. She abruptly remembered telling him, by that fireside on the Fezana plain, that she intended to deal with Almalik of Cartada herself. That made her think of Husari, who had also been there that night, who had shaped the same intention ... who would be experiencing much the same difficult tangle of thoughts and emotions that she was.

If someone doesn't do it before either of us, he had said that night. Someone had.

Husari wasn't here now. He had no status at court. She hoped there would be a chance to talk with him later. She thought of her father in Fezana, and what had been done to him by the king now slain.

Between coral-colored pillars at the far end of the garden a herald appeared, in green and white. The musicians stopped. There was a brief silence then a bird sang, one quick trilling run. Bronze doors opened and Zabira of Cartada was announced.

She entered under the arches of the arcade and waited between the pillars until the herald moved aside. She had arrived without ceremony, with only the one man, her steward, two steps behind her for escort. Jehane saw, as the woman approached along the walkway, that there had been nothing at all exaggerated in the reports of her beauty.

Zabira of Cartada was, in a sense, her own ceremony. She was an exquisite supplicant in a crimson-dyed, black-bordered gown over a golden undergown. She had jewelry at wrist and throat and on her fingers, and there were rubies set in the soft, night-black silken cap she wore. They gleamed in the sunlight. With only one man to guard her, it appeared that she had carried an extraordinary treasure through the mountains. She was reckless then, or desperate. She was also dazzling. Fashions, thought Jehane, were about to change in Ragosa if this woman stayed for long.

Zabira moved forward with effortless, trained grace, betraying no wonder at all in this place, and then sank down in full obeisance to Badir. This was not, evidently, a woman for whom a garden or courtyard, even one such as this, held the power to awe. She wouldn't even blink at the stream running through the banquet room, Jehane decided, just before something took her thoughts in another direction entirely.

Most of the court was staring at Zabira in frank admiration. King Badir had ceased doing so, however, in the moment she lowered herself to the ground before the arched bridge leading to his isle. So, too, even before the king, had his chancellor.

A high cloud slid briefly across the sun, changing the light, lending a swift chill to the air, a reminder that it was autumn. At this moment the newest physician in Ragosa, following the king's narrowed glance past the kneeling woman, encountered a difficulty with her breathing.

Nor, as it happened, was Zabira of Cartada continuing to hold the attention of the newest and most prominent of the mercenary captains at King Badir's court.

Rodrigo Belmonte admired beauty and poise in a woman and evidence of courage; he had been married for almost sixteen years to a woman with these qualities. But he, too, was looking beyond Zabira now, gazing instead at the figure approaching the bridge and the isle, two dutiful steps behind her, preserving a palpable fiction for one more moment.

The sun came out, bathing them all in light. Zabira of Cartada remained on the ground, an embodiment of beauty and grace amid the falling leaves. She hardly mattered now.

The woman's companion, her sole companion, the man who had been announced as her steward, was Ammar ibn Khairan.

For a handful of extremely subtle people in that garden further elements of the death of King Almalik were now explained. And for them, although the woman might be the most celebrated beauty in Al-Rassan, clever and gifted in herself and the mother of two enormously important children, the man was who he was, and had done—twice now, it seemed—what he had done.

He was undisguised, the signature pearl gleaming in his right ear, and Rodrigo knew him by the report of that. The black steward's robe only accentuated his natural composure. He was smiling—not very deferentially, not very much like a steward—as he scanned the assembled court of King Badir. Rodrigo saw him nod at a poet.

Ibn Khairan bowed to the king of Ragosa. When he straightened, his gaze met the chancellor's briefly, moved to Jehane bet Ishak—as the smile returned—and then he appeared to become aware that one of the Jaddite mercenaries was staring at him, and he turned to the man and knew him.

And so did Ser Rodrigo Belmonte, the Captain of Valledo, and the lord Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais stand in the Courtyard of the Streams of Ragosa on a bright morning in autumn and look upon each other for the first time.

Jehane, caught in the whirlwind of her own emotions, was there to see that first look exchanged. She turned from one man to the other and then she shivered, without knowing why.

Alvar de Pellino, just then entering through a door at the far end of the arcaded walkway—sanctioned by his link to both the Captain and Jehane and a hasty lie about a message for Rodrigo—was in time to see that exchange of glances as well, and though he had not the least idea who the black-robed Cartadan steward with the earring was, he knew when Rodrigo was roused to intensity, and he could see it then.

Narrowing his eyes against the sun's brightness, he looked for and found Jehane and saw her looking back and forth from one man to the other. Alvar did the same, struggling to understand what was happening here. And then he, too, felt himself shiver, though it wasn't really cold and the sun was high.

Back home, on their farm in the remotest part of Valledo, the kitchen women and the serving women, most of whom had been still half pagan, so far in the wild north, used to say that such a shiver meant only one thing: an emissary of death had just crossed into the realms of mortal men and women from the god's own lost world of Fifiar.

In silence, unaccountably disturbed, Alvar slipped through the crowd in the garden and took his place among the mercenaries on the near bank of the stream before the island.

Rodrigo and the black-clad Cartadan steward still had not taken their eyes from each other.

Others began to notice this now—there was something in the quality of the stillness possessing both of them. Out of the corner of his eye Alvar saw Mazur ben Avren turn to look at Rodrigo and then back to the steward.

Still trying to take his bearings, Alvar looked for anger in those two faces, for hatred, respect, irony, appraisal. He saw none of these things clearly, and yet elements of all of them. Hesitantly he decided, in the moment before the king of Ragosa spoke, that what he was seeing was a kind of recognition. Not just of each other, though there had to be that, but something harder to name. He thought, still minded of the night tales told at home, that it might even be a kind of foreknowing.

Alvar, a grown man now, a soldier, amid a gathering of people on a very bright morning, suddenly felt fear, the way he used to feel it as a child at night after hearing the women's stories, lying in his bed, listening to the north wind rattling at the windows of the house.

"You are most welcome to Ragosa, lady," the king of Ragosa murmured.

If he had sensed any of this growing tension, he did not betray it. There was genuine appreciation in his voice and manner. King Badir was a connoisseur of beauty in all shapes and guises. Alvar, struggling with his sudden dark mood and protected by the simple fact of love, thought the Cartadan lady fetching but overly adorned. She was flawless in her manner, however. Only after Badir spoke did she rise gracefully from the walkway and stand before the king's isle.

"Is this a mother's visit?" Badir went on. "Have you come to judge our royal care of your children?"

The king knew it was more than that, Alvar realized, having learned a great deal himself in three months. This was a gambit, an opening.

"There is that, Magnificence," said Zabira of Cartada, "though I have no fears regarding your attentiveness to my little ones. I am here, though, with more import to my visit than a mother's fond doting." Her voice was low but clear, a musician's, trained.

She said, "I have come to tell a tale of murder. A son's murder of his father, and the consequences of that."

There was near silence in the garden again; only the one bird still singing overhead, the breeze in the leaves of the trees, the steady lapping of the two streams around the isle.

In that quiet, Zabira said, "By the holy teachings of Ashar it is given to us as law that a murderer of his father is eternally unclean, to be shunned while alive, to be executed or driven from all gatherings of men, accursed of the god and the stars. I ask the king of Ragosa: shall such a man reign in Cartada?"

"Does he?" King Badir was a sensualist, known to be self-indulgent, but no one had ever impugned the quality of his mind.

"He does. A fortnight ago the Lion of Cartada was foully slain, and his murdering son now bears the scepter and the glass, and styles himself Almalik II, Lion of Cartada, Defender of Al-Rassan." There was a sound in the garden then, for all the details were news: she had crossed the mountains faster than messengers. Zabira drew herself up straight and raised her voice with deliberate intent. "I am come here, my lord king, to beg you to free the people of my dear city from this father-killer and regicide. To send your armies west, fulfilling the precepts of holy Ashar, to destroy this evil man."

Another ripple of sound, like the breeze through the leaves. "And who then shall reign in glorious Cartada?" Badir's expression gave away nothing at all.

For the first time the woman hesitated. "The city is in peril. We have learned that the usurper's brother Hazem is away to the south across the straits. He is a zealot, and seeks aid and alliance from the tribes in the Majriti deserts. He has been in open defiance of his father and was formally disinherited years ago."

"That last we know," Badir said softly. "That much all men know. But who then should reign in Cartada?" he asked again. By now even Alvar could see where this was going.

The woman had courage, there was no denying it. "You are guardian here in Ragosa of the only two loyal children of King Almalik," she said, with no hesitation now. "It is my formal petition that you take that city in the god's name and place there as king his son, Abadi ibn Almalik. And that you lend to him all such aid and support as you may during the time of his minority." It was said, then. Openly. An invitation to take Cartada, and the cloak of right under which to do it.

Jehane, listening with fierce attention, looked beyond the woman in crimson and black and saw that Alvar had managed to obtain admittance here. She turned again to the king.

But it was the chancellor who now spoke, for the first time, the deep voice measured and grave. "I would know, if I might, is this also the thought and desire of the steward you bring with you?"

Looking quickly back to Zabira, Jehane realized that the woman did not know the answer to that question; that she had played a card of her own, and was waiting on what would follow.

She played the next, necessary card. "He is not my steward," Zabira said. "You will know, I believe, who this man is. He has been gracious enough to escort me here, a woman without defenders or any recourse at home. I will not dare presume to speak for Ammar ibn Khairan, my lord chancellor, my lord king. No one alive would do that."

"Then perhaps the man who appears before us in the false garb of a steward might presume to speak for himself?" King Badir betrayed the slightest tension in his voice now. It wasn't surprising, Jehane thought. The woman had raised the stakes of the game extraordinarily high.

Ammar ibn Khairan, whom she had kissed—amazingly—in her father's study, turned his gaze to the king of Ragosa. There was a measure of respect to be seen in him, but no real deference. For the first time Jehane realized just how difficult a man this one could be, if he chose. He had also, she reminded herself again, killed a khalif and now a king.

He said, "Most gracious king, I find myself in a troubling circumstance. I have just heard words of open treason to my own kingdom of Cartada. My course ought to be clear, but I am doubly constrained."

"Why? And why doubly?" King Badir asked, sounding vexed.

Ibn Khairan shrugged gracefully. And waited. As if the issue was a test, not for him, but for the assembled court of Ragosa in that garden.

And it was Mazur the chancellor who said, "He ought to kill her, but will not attack a woman, and he may not draw a weapon in your presence." There was irritation in his voice. "In fact you ought not to even have a weapon here."

"This is true," ibn Khairan said mildly. "Your guards were ... courteous. Perhaps too much so."

"Perhaps they saw no reason to fear a man of your ... repute," the chancellor murmured silkily.

A dagger of sorts there, Jehane thought, chasing nuances as quickly as she could. Ibn Khairan's reputation encompassed many things, and it included a new dimension as of this morning's news. He could not, on the face of things, be said to be a harmless man. Perhaps especially not for kings.

Ammar smiled, as if savoring the innuendo. "It has been long," he said, with apparent inconsequentiality, "since I have had the privilege of exchanging words with the estimable chancellor of Ragosa. Whatever our jealous wadjis might say, he remains a credit to his people and the great king he serves. In my most humble view."

At which point the king mentioned appeared to lose patience. "You were asked a question," Badir said bluntly, and those assembled in that garden were made sharply aware that whatever poise or subtlety might be here on display, only one man ruled. "You have not answered it."

"Ah. Yes," said Ammar ibn Khairan. "That question." He clasped his hands loosely before him. Alvar de Pellino, watching closely, found himself wondering where the hidden weapon was. If there was one. Ibn Khairan said, "The lady Zabira, I will confess, has surprised me. Not for the first time, mind you." Alvar saw the woman glance away at the flowing water.

"I was of the impression, innocently, that she wished to be escorted here to see her children," said the man garbed as her steward, "and because there was no haven for her in Cartada. Being of a regrettably short-sighted nature I thought no further on these matters."

"These are games," said the king of Ragosa. "We may or may not have time for them later. You are the least short-sighted man in this peninsula."

"I am honored by your words, my lord king. Unworthy as I am, I can only repeat that I did not expect to hear what I heard just now. At the moment my position is delicate. You must appreciate that. I am still sworn to allegiance to the kingdom of Cartada." His blue eyes flashed. "If I speak with some care, perhaps that might be indulged by a king as august and wise as Badir of Ragosa."

It occurred to Jehane just about then that ibn Khairan might easily be killed here today. There was a silence. The king glared, and shifted impatiently on his bench.

"I see. You have already been exiled by the new king of Cartada. Immediately after you did his killing for him. How extremely clever of the young man." It was Mazur again, and not a question.

Badir glanced at his chancellor and then back to ibn Khairan; his expression had changed.

Of course, Jehane thought. That had to be it. Why else was the prince's advisor and confidant here with Zabira instead of controlling the transfer of power in Cartada? She felt like a fool for missing the point. She hadn't been alone, though. Throughout the garden Jehane saw men—and the handful of women—nodding their heads. "Alas, the chancellor in his wisdom speaks the sad truth. I am exiled, yes. For my many vices." Ibn Khairan's voice was calm. "There appears some hope of my being pardoned, after I purge myself of sundry unspeakable iniquities." He smiled, and a moment later, quite unexpectedly, one man's laughter was heard, the sound startling amid the tension of the garden.

The king and his chancellor and Ammar ibn Khairan all turned to stare at Rodrigo Belmonte, who was still laughing.

"The king of Ragosa," Rodrigo said, greatly amused, "had best be careful, or every exile in the peninsula will be beating a path to his palace doors." Ibn Khairan, Jehane noticed, was no longer smiling as he looked at him.

Rodrigo chuckled again, highly amused. "If I may be forgiven, perhaps a soldier may help cut a path through the difficulty here?" He waited for the king to nod, before going on. "The lord ibn Khairan appears in a situation oddly akin to my own. He stands here exiled but with no offered allegiance to supersede the one he owes Cartada. In the absence of such an offer, he cannot possibly endorse or even honorably be asked to comment upon what the lady Zabira has suggested. Indeed, he ought properly to kill her with the blade taped to the inside of his left arm. Make him," said Rodrigo Belmonte, "an offer."

A rigid stillness followed this. The day seemed almost too bright now, as if the sunlight were at odds with the gravity of what was happening here below.

"Shall I become a mercenary?" Ibn Khairan was still gazing at the Jaddite captain, as if oblivious to those on the isle now. Again Jehane felt that odd, uncanny chill.

"We are a lowly folk, I concede. But there are lower sorts." Rodrigo was still amused, or he appeared to be.

Ibn Khairan was not. He said carefully, "I had nothing to do with the Day of the Moat." Jehane caught her breath.

"Of course you didn't," said Rodrigo Belmonte. "That's why you killed the king."

"That's why I had to kill the king," said ibn Khairan, grave in his black robe. Another murmur of sound rose and fell away.

It was the chancellor's turn to sound irritated. Deliberately breaking the mood, Mazur said, "And are we to offer a position here to a man who slays whenever his pride is wounded?"

Jehane realized, with an unexpected flicker of amusement, that he was irked because Rodrigo had pieced together this part of the puzzle first. On the subject of wounded pride, she thought ...

"Not whenever," said ibn Khairan quietly. "Once in my life, and with regret, and for something very large."

"Ah!" said the chancellor sardonically, "with regret. Well, that changes everything."

For the first time Jehane saw ibn Khairan betray an unguarded reaction. She watched his blue gaze go cold before he lowered his eyes from ben Avren's face. Drawing a breath, he unclasped his hands and let them fall to his sides. She saw that he wasn't wearing his rings. He looked up again at the chancellor, saying nothing, waiting. Very much, Jehane thought, like someone braced for what further blows might be levelled against him.

No blows fell, verbal or otherwise. Instead, it was the king who spoke again, his equanimity restored. "If we should agree with our Valledan friend, what could you offer us?"

Zabira of Cartada, nearly forgotten in all this, turned and looked back at the man who had come here as her steward. Her dark, carefully accentuated eyes were quite unreadable. Another fringe of cloud trailed past the sun and then away, taking the light and giving it back.

"Myself," said Ammar ibn Khairan.

In that exquisite garden no one's gaze was anywhere but upon him. The arrogance was dazzling, but the man had been known, for fifteen years and more, not only as a diplomat and a strategist, but as a military commander and the purest swordsman in Al-Rassan.

"That will be sufficient," said King Badir, visibly diverted now. "We offer you service in our court and armed companies for a term of one year. On your honor, you will not take or offer service elsewhere in that time without our leave. We shall allow our advisors to propose and discuss terms. Do you accept?"

An answering smile came, the one Jehane remembered from her father's chamber.

"I do," said ibn Khairan. "I find I rather like the idea of being bought. And the terms will be easy." The smile deepened. "Exactly those you have offered our Valledan friend."

"Ser Rodrigo came here with one hundred and fifty horsemen!" said Mazur ben Avren, with the just indignation of a man tasked with monitoring purse strings in difficult times.

"Even so," said ibn Khairan, with an indifferent shrug. Rodrigo Belmonte, Jehane saw, was smiling. The other captains were not. A palpable ripple of anger moved through them.

One man stepped forward. A blond giant from Karch. "Let them fight," he said, in thickly accented Asharic. "He says he is worth so much. Let us see it. Good soldiers here are paid much less. Let Belmonte and this man try swords for proof."

Jehane saw the idea spark and kindle through the garden. The novelty, the hint of danger. The testing. The king looked at the Karcher soldier speculatively.

"I think not."

Jehane bet Ishak would always remember that moment. How three voices chimed together, as in trained harmony, the same words in the same moment.

"We cannot afford to risk such men in idle games," said ben Avren the chancellor, first of the three to continue.

Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn Khairan, each of whom had also spoken those words, remained silent, staring at each other again. Rodrigo was no longer smiling.

Mazur stopped. The stillness stretched. Even the captain from Karch looked from one to the other and took a step backwards, muttering under his breath.

"I think," said ibn Khairan finally, so softly Jehane had to lean forward to hear, "that if this man and I ever cross swords, it will not be for anyone's diversion, or to determine yearly wages. Forgive me, but I will decline this suggestion."

King Badir looked as if he would say something, but then, glancing over at his chancellor, he did not.

"I do have a thought," Rodrigo murmured. "Though I have no doubt at all that the lord ibn Khairan is worth whatever the king of Ragosa chooses to offer him, I can appreciate why some of our companions might wish to see his mettle. I should be honored to fight beside him for the king's pleasure against our friend from Karch and any four men he would like to have join him in the lists this afternoon."

"No!" said Mazur.

"Done," said King Badir of Ragosa. The chancellor checked himself with an effort. The king went on, "I should enjoy such a display. So would the people of my city. Let them applaud the valiant men who defend their liberty. But as to the contract, I accept your terms, ibn Khairan. The same wages for both my exiled captains. That amuses me, in truth."

He did look pleased, as if having discerned a path through the thicket of nuances that had been woven in the garden. "My lord ibn Khairan, it is past time to begin earning your fee. We shall require your presence immediately to consider certain matters raised here this morning. You will do battle for our pleasure this afternoon. We shall then require something further." He smiled with anticipation. "A verse to be offered after the banquet we will have prepared in the lady Zabira's honor and your own tonight. I have agreed to your terms, frankly, because I am also acquiring a poet."

Ibn Khairan had been looking at Rodrigo at the beginning of this, but by the end the king had his steady, courteous regard. "I am honored to be of service in any capacity at all, my lord king. Have you a preferred subject for tonight?"

"I do, with the king's gracious permission," said Mazur ben Avren, one index finger stroking his beard. He paused for effect. "A lament for the slain king of Cartada."

Jehane had not actually known he could be cruel. She abruptly remembered that it had been ibn Khairan, in her father's chambers, who had warned her to be careful with Mazur. And with the thought she realized that he was looking at her. She felt herself flush, as if discovered at something. His own expression thoughtful, Ammar turned back to the chancellor.

"As you wish," he said simply. "It is a worthy subject."

The poem he offered them that night, after the banquet dishes and cups had been cleared away, after the afternoons extraordinary encounter in the lists beneath the city walls, was to travel the length and breadth of the peninsula, even on the bad roads of winter.

By spring it had made people weep—more often than not against their will—in a score of castles and as many cities and towns, notwithstanding the fact that Almalik of Cartada had been the most feared man in Al-Rassan. It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.

On the night that lament was first offered, in the banquet room of Ragosa by a man who still preferred to name himself a poet before anything else, it had already been decided that war with Cartada would be premature, whatever the dead king's woman might desire for her sons. There was no real dissent. Winter was coming; not a time for armies. Spring would doubtless open a course of wisdom to them, much as flowers would open in the gardens and the countryside.

Guarding Zabira's two boys had become rather more important than hitherto; everyone agreed on that as well. Princes were useful, especially young ones. One couldn't have too many royal pawns. It was another old truth.

At the very end of that extremely long day and night—after the meeting, after the passage of arms, after the banquet, after the verses and the toasts and the last lifted glasses of wine in the splendid room where the stream ran—two men remained awake, speaking together in the king of Ragosa's private chambers with only the servants, lighting candles, in the room with them.

"I don't feel easy at all," said Mazur ben Avren to his king.

Badir, leaning back in a low chair—an exquisite thing, Jaddite in style but made of Tudescan redwood, with ivory legs in smiled at his chancellor and stretched the shape of lions' feet—with his legs upon a stool.

The two men had known each other a long time. Badir had taken a huge risk at the very outset of his reign in appointing a Kindath chancellor. The texts of Ashar were explicit: no Kindath or Jaddite could hold sovereign authority of any kind over the Star-born. No Asharite could even be employed by them. The penalty, if one followed the desert code, was the death by stones.

Of course no one who mattered in Al-Rassan followed the desert code. Not during the Khalifate, not after. The glass of wine in the king's hand was the most current evidence of that. Even so, a Kindath chancellor had been a very large thing—a gamble that the wadjis would complain as usual but be able to do no more. There was a chance that roll of dice might have cost Badir his newly claimed crown and his life if the people had risen in righteous wrath. In return for that risk taken, Mazur ben Avren, the so-called Prince of the Kindath, had made Ragosa not only independent, but the second most powerful kingdom in Al-Rassan in the turbulent years after the Khalifate's fall. He had guided the city and her king through the dangerous shoals of a swiftly changing world, had kept Ragosa free and solvent and proud.

He had ridden with the army himself in the first years, in campaigns to the south and east, and had directed it in the field, triumphantly. His mount had been a mule, not a forbidden horse; Mazur knew enough to offer the wadjis their necessary symbols of deference. Nonetheless, the simple truth was that Mazur ben Avren was the first Kindath to command an army in the western world in five hundred years. Poet, scholar, diplomat, jurist. And soldier. More than anything else, those early military triumphs had ensured his survival and Badir's. Much could be forgiven if a war went well and an army came home with gold.

Much had been forgiven, thus far. Badir ruled, ben Avren beside him, and together they had shared another dream: a desire to make Ragosa beautiful as well as free. A city of marble and ivory and gardens of exquisite detail. If Cartada to the west under the hated and feared Almalik had inherited the larger portion of the power of the khalifs, Ragosa on Lake Serrana was an emblem of other things Silvenes once had been in the lost days of splendor.

They were an old team by now, the king and his chancellor, deeply familiar with each other, without illusions. Each of them knew that an ending could come at any time, from any number of directions. The moons waxed and waned. The stars could be hidden by clouds, or burned away by the sun.

If Silvenes and the Al-Fontina could fall, if that city and palace could be sacked and fired and left as nothing more than wind-borne ashes of glory, any city, any kingdom could be brought down. It was a lesson learned by all who claimed any measure of power in the peninsula after the death of the last khalif.

"I know you're uneasy," King Badir said, glancing up at his chancellor. He gestured. "For one thing, you haven't touched your glass. You don't even know what I've poured for us."

Mazur smiled briefly. He picked up his golden wine, looked at it in the candlelight and then sipped, eyes closed.

"Wonderful," he murmured. "Ardeno vineyards, and a late growth, surely? When did this come?"

"When do you think?"

The chancellor sipped again, with real pleasure. "Of course. This morning. Not from the woman, I'd imagine."

"They said it was."

"Of course they did." There was a silence.

"That was a remarkable poem we heard tonight." The king's voice, resuming, was low.

Ben Avren nodded. "I thought so."

King Badir looked at his chancellor for a moment. "You've done as well, in your time."

Mazur shook his head. "Thank you, my lord, but I know my limits there." Another pause. Mazur stroked his carefully trimmed beard. "He's an extraordinary man."

The king's gaze was direct. "Too much so?"

Ben Avren shrugged. "On his own, perhaps not, but I'm not entirely sure of being able to control events through a winter with the two of them here."

Badir nodded, sipped his wine. "How are those five men, from this afternoon?"

"All right, I am told. Jehane bet Ishak is looking after them tonight. I took the liberty of asking her to do that in your name. One broken arm. One who is apparently uncertain of his name or where he is." The chancellor shook his head ruefully. "The one from Karch who proposed the challenge is the one whose arm was fractured."

"I saw that. Deliberate?"

The chancellor shrugged. "I couldn't say."

"I'm still not certain how that was done to him."

"Neither is he," ben Avren said.

The king grinned and after a moment so did his chancellor. The two attendant servants had finished with the candles and the fire by now. They stood, motionless as statues, by the doors to the room.

"They fought as if they had been together all their lives," Badir said musingly, setting down his glass. He looked at his chancellor. Mazur gazed back without speaking. A moment later the king said, "You are thinking about how best to use them. About Cartada?"

The chancellor nodded. Their glances held for a long time. It was as if they had exchanged a dialogue without words. Mazur nodded again.

The king's expression was sober in the candlelight. "Did you see how they stared at each other this morning, in the garden?"

"That would have been difficult to miss."

"You think the Valledan's a match for ibn Khairan?"

Mazur's finger came up and stroked his beard again. "Very different men. You saw them, my lord. He may be. He may actually ... I don't know what I think about that, my lord, to be honest. I do know there's too much power gathering here, and I don't think the wadjis, among others, will like any of it. Jaddite soldiers from Valledo now, to go with those from across the mountains, the princely sons of a courtesan, a female Kindath doctor to go with a Kindath chancellor, and now the most notoriously secular man in Al-Rassan ... "

"I thought I was that last," King Badir said with a wry expression.

Mazur's mouth quirked. "Forgive me, my lord. The two most notorious, then."

Badir's expression grew reflective again. He'd had a great deal of wine, without evident effect. "Zabira said Almalik's second son had gone across the straits. To speak with the Muwardi leaders, she said."

"Hazem ibn Almalik, yes. I knew that, actually. He went some time ago. Stopped for a while in Tudesca with the wadjis there."

Badir absorbed this. The range and depth of ben Avren's information was legendary. Not even the king knew all his sources.

"What do you make of it?"

"Nothing good, my lord, to be truthful."

"Have we sent our gifts to the desert this year?"

"Of course, my lord."

Badir lifted his glass and drank. Then his mouth twitched again, the same wry amusement as before. "There was never an assurance of anything good from the time we began, was there? We've had a long run, my friend."

"It isn't over."

"Nearly?" The king's voice was soft.

The chancellor shook his head grimly. "Not if I can help it."

Badir nodded, relaxed in his chair, sipping the good wine. "It will be as the stars dispose. What do we do, in the meantime, with these ... lions in my city this season?"

"Send them out, I think."

"In winter? Where?"

"I do have an idea."

The king laughed. "Don't you always?"

They smiled at each other. King Badir raised his glass and silently saluted his chancellor. Mazur rose and bowed, setting down his own wine.

"I will leave you," he said. "Good night, my lord. The stars and Ashar's spirit guide you safely through to dawn."

"And your moons ease the dark for you, my friend."

The chancellor bowed a second time and went out. The nearer of the servants closed the door after him. The king of Ragosa did not go immediately to bed, however. He sat in his chair for a long time, unmoving.

He was thinking of how kings died, of how their glory came and lingered a while, and went. Like the taste of this good wine, he thought. This gift of Ammar ibn Khairan, who had killed his own king a little time ago. What did a king leave behind? What did anyone leave behind? And that led him circling back to the words they'd heard recited after dinner, while lying at ease on their couches in the banquet room with the tame stream running through it, rippling quietly, a murmurous background to the spoken words.

Badir of Ragosa poured, deliberately, the last of the sweet, pale wine and drank it down.

Someone else was late to bed in the palace of Ragosa, for all that it had been an eventful day and night, even for a man accustomed to such things.

Caught in the difficult space between physical fatigue and emotional unrest, the lord Ammar ibn Khairan finally left the elegant quarters assigned him for the night to go out into the streets long after dark.

The night guards at the postern doors knew him. Everyone seemed to know him already. Nothing unusual there. He was a man who needed to be disguised to pass unnoticed in Al-Rassan. Anxious and overexcited, they offered him a torch and an escort. He declined both with courtesy. He wore a sword for protection, which he showed them. He made a jest at his own expense; they laughed eagerly. After the afternoon's engagement they could hardly doubt his ability to defend himself. One of them, greatly daring, said as much. Ibn Khairan gave him a silver coin and then, with a smile, offered the same to the other two guards. They almost fell over each other opening the doors.

He went out. He had wrapped himself in a fur-lined cloak over his own clothing. He wore his rings again. No point to the steward's disguise any more. That had served its purpose on the road, in the inns between Cartada and here. They had been travelling with a kingdom's worth of gems in the two coffers he had allowed Zabira; over the years Almalik had not been less than generous with the woman he loved. It had been necessary therefore, travelling here, to appear both unconcerned and unimportant. It was not necessary any more.

He wondered where Zabira was tonight, then dismissed the thought as unworthy. She would captivate someone here soon enough—the king, the chancellor, perhaps both—but not yet. Tonight she would be with her sons. The young princes. Pieces on the board in the new, larger game. That much had been decided at the meeting before the challenge in the lists. He had begun, during that crisp discussion, to grasp precisely how shrewd Mazur ben Avren was. Why Badir had risked so much to keep his Kindath chancellor by him. There had been a reputation, of course. One formal encounter. Letters exchanged, over the years, and clever poems read. Now he had met the man. A different sort of challenge. Much to think about. It had been a fully engaged day, truly.

It was cold after dark in Ragosa, this late in the year with a wind blowing. He wanted that cold. He wanted solitude and starlight, the bite of that wind off the lake. His footsteps led him that way, past shuttered shops, then the warehouses, and then, beyond them, walking alone and in silence, to a long pier by the water's edge. He stopped there finally, breathing deeply of the night air.

Overhead, the stars were very bright, and the moons. He saw how the city walls reached out into the water here like two arms, almost meeting, enclosing the harbor. In the moonlight he watched the single-masted fishing boats and the smaller and larger pleasure craft tossed up and down on the dark, choppy waters of the lake. The slap and surge of waves. Water. What was it about water?

He knew the answer to that.

They came from the desert, his people. From shifting, impermanent dunes and sandstorms and harsh, bleak, sculpted mountains; from a place where the wind could blow forever without being checked or stayed. Where the sun killed and it was the night stars that offered promise of life, air to breathe, a breeze to cool the blistering fever of the day. Where water was ... what? A dream, a prayer, the purest blessing of the god.

He had no memory of such places himself, unless it was a memory that had come with him into the world. A tribal memory bred into the Asharites, defining them. Ammuz and Soriyya, the homelands, as a presence in the soul. The deserts there. Wider sands, even, than those of the Majriti. He had never seen the Majriti, either. He had been born in Aljais, here in Al-Rassan, in a house with three splashing fountains. Even so, he was drawn to water when distressed, when something within him needed assuaging. Far from the desert, the desert lay inside him like a wound or a weight, as it lay inside them all.

The white moon was overhead, the blue just rising, a crescent. With the city lights behind him the stars were fierce and cold above the lake. Clarity, that was what they meant to him. That was what he needed tonight.

He listened to the waves striking against the pier beneath his feet. Once, a pause, again. The surging rhythm of the world. His thoughts were scattered, bobbing like the boats, refusing to coalesce. He was in some discomfort physically but that wasn't important. Weariness mostly, some bruises, a gash on one calf that he had simply ignored.

The afternoon's challenge in the lists had been effortless, in fact. One of the things with which he was having trouble.

There had been five against the two of them, and the Karcher had chosen four of the best captains in Ragosa to join him. There was a visible anger in those men, a grimness, the need to prove a point and not just about wages. It had been contrived as a display, an entertainment for court and city, not to-the-death. But even so, eyes beneath helms had been hard and cold.

It ought never to have been so swift, so much like a dance or a dream. It was as if there had been music playing somewhere, almost but not quite heard. He had fought those five men side-by-side and then back-to-back with Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo, whom he had never seen in his life, and it had been as nothing had ever been before, on a battlefield or anywhere else. It had felt weirdly akin to having doubled himself. To fighting as if there were two hard-trained bodies with the one controlling mind. They hadn't spoken during the fight. No warnings, tactics. It hadn't even lasted long enough for that.

On the pier above the cold, choppy waters of Lake Serrana, ibn Khairan shook his head, remembering.

He ought to have been elated after such a triumph, perhaps curious, intrigued. He was deeply unsettled instead. Restless. Even a little afraid, if he was honest with himself.

The wind blew. He stood facing into it, looking north across the lake. On the farther shore lay the tagra lands where no one lived, with Jalona and Valledo beyond. Where the Horsemen of Jad worshipped the golden sun the Asharites feared in their burning deserts. Jad. Ashar. Banners for men to gather beneath.

He had spent his life alone, whether in play or at war. Had never sought a company to command, a coterie of sub-commanders, or even, truthfully, a friend. Companions, hangers-on, acolytes, lovers, these had always been a part of his life, but not real friendship—unless one named the man he had poisoned in Cartada.

Ibn Khairan had come over the years to see the world as a place in which he moved by himself, leading men into battle when necessary, evolving plans and courses for his monarch when asked, crafting his verses and songs whenever the patterns of life allowed space for that, linking and unlinking with a succession of women—and some men.

Nothing for very long, nothing that went too deep. He had never married. Had never wanted to, or been pressured to do so. His brothers had children. Their line would continue.

If pressed, he would probably have said that this cast of mind, this steady, ongoing need for distance, had its origin on a summer's day when he had walked into the Al-Fontina in Silvenes and killed the last khalif on a fountain rim for Almalik of Cartada.

The old, blind man had praised his youthful verses. Had invited him to visit Silvenes. An aged man who had never wanted to ascend the khalif's dais. Everyone knew that. How should a blind poet rule Al-Rassan? Muzafar had been only another piece on the board, a tool of the court powers in corrupt, terrified Silvenes. Dark days those had been in Al-Rassan, when the young ibn Khairan had walked past bribed eunuchs and into the Garden of Desire bearing a forbidden blade.

It was not hard, even now, to make a case for what he had done, for what Almalik of Cartada had ordered done. Even so. That day in the innermost garden of the Al-Fontina had marked ibn Khairan. In the eyes of others, in his own eyes. The man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan.

He had been young then, rich with a sense of his own invulnerability and a dazzled awareness of all the shimmering possibilities the world held in store.

He wasn't young any more. Even the cold, this keen wind off the water, knifed into him more sharply than it would have fifteen years ago. He smiled at that, for the first time that night, and shook his head ruefully. Maudlin, unworthy thoughts. An old man in a blanket before the fire? Soon enough, soon enough. If he lived. The patterns of life. What was allowed.

Come, brother, Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo had said today as five hard men with swords had walked forward to encircle the two of them. Shall we show them how this is done?

They had shown them.

Brother. A golden disk of Jad on a chain about his throat. Leader of the most dangerous company in the peninsula. One hundred and fifty horsemen of the god. A beautiful wife, two sons. Heirs to be taught, even loved perhaps. Pious and loyal, and deadly.

Ibn Khairan knew about that last, now. Only stories before. Nothing like it, ever, in a lifetime of combat. Five men against them. Trained, magnificent fighters, the best mercenaries in Ragosa. And in no time at all, really, they were down, it was over. A dance.

Usually he could remember each individual movement, every feint and parry and thrust of a battle for a long time afterwards. His mind worked that way, breaking down a larger event into its smaller parts. But this afternoon was already a blur. Which was a part of why he was so unsettled now.

He had looked at Belmonte after, and had seen—with relief and apprehension, both—a mirror image of that same strangeness. As if something had gone flying away from each of them and was only just coming back. The Valledan had looked glazed, unfocused.

At least, Ammar had thought, it isn't only me.

There had been uncontrolled noise by then, delirious, deafeningly loud. Screaming from up on the walls and from the royal stand by the lists. Hats and scarves and gloves and leather flasks of wine sailing through the air to land about them. It had all seemed to be coming from a long way off.

He had tried, out of habit, to be sardonic. "Shall we kill each other for them now, to set a seal on it?" he'd said.

The men they'd defeated were being helped to their feet, those who could rise. One man, the Karcher, had a broken arm from the flat of a sword. Another was unable to stand; they were carrying him away on a litter. A woman's pale blue scarf, drifting down through the sunlight, had fallen across his body. Ammar could only vaguely remember having faced the man with the broken arm. It had been at the very outset. He could not clearly recall the blow, the sequence of it. Too strange, that was.

Rodrigo Belmonte had not laughed at his attempted jest, or smiled, standing beside him amid that huge and distant noise.

"Do we want a seal on it?" he'd asked.

Ammar had shaken his head. They had stood alone in the middle of the world. A small, still space. Dreamlike. Clothing, flowers now, more wine flasks, flying through the autumn air. So much noise.

"Not yet," he'd said. "No. It may come, though. Whether we want it or not."

Rodrigo had been silent a moment, the grey eyes calm beneath an old helm with the figure of an eagle on it. From the king's stand a herald was approaching, formally garbed, gracious, deeply deferential.

Just before he reached them, the Valledan had said softly, "If it comes, it comes. The god determines all. I never did anything like this, though, in all my life. Not fighting beside another man."

A star fell into the darkness of the hills west of the lake. Ibn Khairan heard footsteps behind him. They paused, and then withdrew. One person. A watchman. No danger. There wouldn't be danger here, in any case.

He was very tired, but his mind would not allow him rest. The high white moon laid a shining, rippled track on the water, the blue crescent cast a faint one from the east. They met where he stood. This was a property of water at night. Light flowed along it to where one stood.

I earned a goodly portion of my wages today, he thought. Wages. He was a mercenary soldier now, in the service of a king who would be happy to see Cartada in ruins. Who might decide to send an army west to achieve that in the spring. Ammar, by his contract, would be a part of that army, a leader of it. He wasn't used to such shiftings of allegiance.

He had killed Almalik. Twenty years' companion. The slow rise and then the swift rise to power together. Men changed over the years. Power ebbed and flowed, and did things to them. Time and the stars turned and men changed.

The man he'd slain was the only person he could ever have called a friend in the world, even though one didn't use that word of kings. He'd sung his lament tonight. Mazur ben Avren's request, meant to wound. A subtle mind, that. But he'd already been working on the verses during the ride east with Zabira. Had offered them this evening to a banquet hall of Cartada's enemies. A room with a stream running through it. Water again. Ashar's dream amid the desert sands. It was an affectation, that banquet room, but impressive nonetheless, and tastefully done. He could come to like Badir of Ragosa, he told himself, could respect Mazur ben Avren. There was a life beyond Cartada, with scope and sweep.

Where lesser beasts now gather ...

He shook his head. Turned away from the lake and started back, with the wind and the moons behind him now.

From the shadows by the oak-timbered wall of a warehouse she saw him leave the water's edge and the outthrust arms of the city walls. She had retreated here to wait, after walking almost to the pier. As he approached she saw—her eyes by now adjusted to the moonlight—an odd, inward look to his face and she was half-inclined to let him pass. But even as that thought formed she realized that she had stepped forward into the street after all.

He stopped. His hand moved to his sword and then she saw that he knew her. She expected something ironic, a jest. Her heart was beating rapidly.

"Jehane bet Ishak. What are you doing abroad at night?"

"Walking," she said. "The same as you."

"Not the same at all. It isn't safe for a woman. There's no point to being foolish."

She felt a useful flare of anger. "I do wonder how I've survived this long in Ragosa without your guidance."

He was silent. He still had that strange look to him. She wondered what had driven him to the lake. She hadn't come out to quarrel, although she couldn't have said why she had come. She changed her tone. "I am known here," she murmured. "There is no real danger."

"In the dark? On the waterfront?" He raised his eyebrows. "You could be killed for your cloak or merely because of your religion. Where's your servant?"

"Velaz? Asleep, I hope. He's had a long day and night."

"And you?"

"Long enough," she said. "Where you injured I tried to heal. I've come from the infirmary." What was it, she asked herself, that kept causing her to challenge him?

He looked at her. The steady, unrevealing gaze. The pearl in his ear gleamed palely in the moonlight. He said, "It's too cold to stand here. Come." He started walking again, back towards the center of the city.

She fell into stride. The wind was behind them, cutting through her cloak. It was cold, and despite what she'd implied, Jehane was unused to being abroad this late. In fact, the last time had been the night of the day she met this man. The Day of the Moat. She had thought it had been his savage device, that slaughter of innocent men. All of Al-Rassan had thought so.

She said, "I remember what you said in Fezana. That it was none of your doing."

"You didn't believe me."

"Yes, I did."

He glanced at her. They continued walking.

She had seen him go by earlier, from the doorway of the infirmary. Her two patients had been sleeping, one drugged against the pain of a shattered arm, the other still deeply confused, a contusion the size of an ostrich egg on the side of his head. Jehane had left instructions that he be awakened after each of the night bells. Too deep a sleep tonight carried a risk.

She had been standing near the open doorway, breathing the night air, struggling against fatigue, when ibn Khairan went past. She had put on her cloak and followed him, without thinking about it, no reason save impulse for justification.

They had done something astonishing that day, he and Rodrigo Belmonte. Two men against five and had she not known better it might have seemed that the five had consented to be cut down, so swift and crisply defined and elegant had it been. She did know better, though. She was treating two of the five tonight. The Karcher with the broken arm was struggling to deal with what had happened. He was bitter, humiliated. Not a man accustomed to losing battles. Not that way, at any rate.

Stepping out into the street after ibn Khairan Jehane had been awkwardly aware that there were other kinds of women who did this sort of thing, especially after what had happened today. She half-expected to see some of them trailing behind the man, adorned, perfumed. Pursuing the hero of the moment, approaching to touch—to be touched by—glory, the shimmer that clung to fame. She had nothing but contempt for such women.

What she'd done in following him was not remotely the same thing, she told herself. She wasn't young or bedazzled; she wore a plain white cloth cap to keep her hair from her eyes while she worked, no jewelry, mud-stained boots. She was level-headed, a physician, and observant.

"Weren't you hurt this afternoon?" she said, glancing sideways and up at him. "I thought I saw you take a sword in the leg."

He looked dryly amused, an expression she remembered. "A scratch, truly. One of them caught me with his blade when he fell. It is kind of you to ask, doctor. How are your patients?"

She shrugged. "The broken arm will be all right. It set easily enough. The Batiaran that Ser Rodrigo felled was still having trouble remembering his mother's name before he fell asleep."

Ibn Khairan grinned, the white teeth flashing. "Now that is serious. If it were his father's name, of course, I'd call that normal for Batiara."

"Go ahead and jest," she said, refusing to laugh. "You don't have to deal with it." A silly thing to say.

"I'm so sorry," he murmured, all solicitude. "Did I add to your burdens today?"

She winced. She'd asked for that. It was important to watch what one said with this man. He was as sharp as Mazur was. At least as sharp.

"How is your father?" he said, changing tone. She glanced over in surprise and then away. She had a clear memory, as they walked through the dark streets, of this man on his knees before Ishak last summer, their hands clasped together.

"My parents are well enough, I thank you. My father ... has dictated some letters to me since that night in Fezana. I believe that ... speaking with you was of help to him."

"I am honored that you think so."

No irony in the voice now. She had heard his lament tonight. He had slain a man she herself had sworn to destroy. Had made her own vain, childish oath the meaningless thing it always had been. She had actually been close to grief, hearing the cadenced verses. The sorrow behind the sword.

She said, "I had intended to kill Almalik myself. For my father. That's why I left Fezana." As she spoke the words, as she told him, Jehane understood that this was why she had come out into the cold of the night.

"I am not surprised," he murmured, after a pause. A generous thing to say. Taking her seriously. A Kindath woman. A child's rash vow. "Are you angry that I forestalled you?"

She hadn't expected that either. She walked beside him a while in silence. They turned a corner. "I'm a little ashamed," she said. "I did nothing at all for four years, then came here and did nothing again."

"Some tasks take longer than others. As it happens, it was a little easier for me."

Disguised as a slave. She had heard the tale from Mazur just before the banquet this evening. Poison on a towel. The royal son entirely complicitous, then exiling ibn Khairan. There had to be pain there.

They turned another corner. Two lights shone ahead of them now at the end of the street, outside the infirmary. Another memory rising suddenly, against her will. That same summer's night in Fezana, the same room. Herself with this man at the window, rising on her toes to kiss him. A challenge.

I must have been mad, she thought. She stopped at the entrance to the infirmary.

And as if he could actually trace the course of her thoughts, Ammar ibn Khairan said, "Was I right about the chancellor, by the way?" A revealed edge of amusement again, infuriatingly.

"Right about what?" she temporized.

He would have seen where she had been placed tonight, at the banquet. He would have duly noted the fact that she was there at all. She hoped, fiercely, that he could not see her flushing. She almost regretted now that she had come.

He laughed softly. "I see," he said. And then, mildly, "Are you looking in on your patients, or going home?"

She glared up at him. Anger again. Useful. "What does that mean?" she said coldly. In the light from the torches she could see his face clearly now. He regarded her with composure, but she thought she saw laughter lingering in his eyes. "What does 'I see' mean?" she demanded.

A brief silence. "Forgive me," he said gravely. "Have I offended?"

"With that tone you did, yes," she said sturdily.

"Then I shall have to chastise him for you."

The voice was behind her, and known. She wheeled, but not before she saw ibn Khairan's gaze shift beyond her and his expression change.

In the doorway to the infirmary Rodrigo Belmonte stood in a spill of candlelight, wearing the same overtunic and vest he'd worn to the banquet, with his sword on one hip.

"I am always being chastised by someone," ibn Khairan complained.

Rodrigo gave a snort of amusement. "I doubt that," he said. "But you ought to know, if you don't already, that Mazur ben Avren's lack of success with our doctor here has been the talk of Ragosa for months."

"It has?" said Ammar politely.

"It has?" said Jehane in a very different tone.

"I'm afraid so," Rodrigo replied, looking at her. He, too, was amused now, a certain wryness to the expression beneath the full moustache. "I must confess I've made a sum of money in this matter."

"You've been wagering on me?" Jehane heard her voice swirling upwards.

"I have great confidence in all the members of my company," Rodrigo said.

"I am not a member of your company!"

"I continue to live in hope," he murmured blandly.

Behind her, ibn Khairan laughed aloud. She wheeled on him. He held up his hands in a quick, warding gesture. Jehane was silent, speechless in fact. And then, resisting all the way, she felt her own amusement welling up. She began to laugh, helplessly.

She leaned in the doorway, wiping at her eyes, looking from one man to the other. From within the infirmary the two night attendants looked disapprovingly towards the three of them. Jehane, who had to give the attendants firm instructions in a moment, struggled for composure.

"She can't join us," said Ammar ibn Khairan. He had moved into the entranceway, out of the cutting wind. "Ben Avren will never let her leave the city."

"Us?" said Rodrigo.

"Leave the city?" said Jehane, in the same moment.

The handsome, smooth-shaven face turned from one of them to the other. He took his time before speaking.

"Some things do seem obvious," said ibn Khairan, looking at the Valledan. "King Badir will be exceedingly nervous about having both of us in Ragosa this winter without gainful activity. We will be sent somewhere. Together. I'll place a wager on that. And given what you have just told me about the chancellor's entirely understandable interest in our splendid physician he is not going to permit her to leave Fezana with two such irresponsible men."

"I am not an irresponsible man," said Rodrigo Belmonte indignantly.

"I beg to dissent," Ammar said calmly. "Jehane told me that you caused a Batiaran mercenary—a fine man, a doughty soldier—to forget his own mother's name this afternoon! Deeply irresponsible, I call that."

"His mother's?" Rodrigo exclaimed. "Not his father's? If it was his father's name—"

"You could understand it. I know," said Jehane. "The high lord ibn Khairan has already made that feeble jest. Among other things the two of you appear to share the same childish humor."

"Other things? What other things? I may now be offended." Ibn Khairan's expression belied the words. He didn't look weary or unfocused any more, she noted. The physician in her was pleased with that. She chose to ignore the question.

"I am the one offended, remember? And you haven't apologized yet. Nor have you," she said, turning upon Belmonte. "Wagering on my conduct! And how dare you assume that the chancellor of Ragosa—or anyone else—dictates where and when I travel?"

"Good!" said Rodrigo. "I have been waiting a long time to hear you say that! A winter campaign will be an excellent trial for all of us."

"I didn't say—

"Won't you come?" he said. "Jesting aside, Jehane, I badly need a good doctor, and I still remember something you said, about working among Esperanans. Will you give us a chance to prove a point about that?"

Jehane remembered it too. She remembered that night extremely well. Even the sun goes down, my lady. She turned her mind from that thought.

"What?" she said, sardonically. "Are there no pilgrims heading to blessed Queen Vasca's Isle this year?"

"Not from my company," said Rodrigo quietly.

There was a silence. He had a way of stilling you, she thought.

"You might also consider that a campaign outside the city would give you a respite from ben Avren's attentions," said ibn Khairan, a little too casually.

She spun to glare at him. His hands came up again, defensively. "Assuming, of course, you want a respite," he added quickly. "He's a remarkable man. A poet, a chancellor, a genuine scholar. Prince of the Kindath. Your mother would be proud."

"If I let him bed me?" she asked sweetly.

"Well no, not that, I suppose. I was thinking of something more formal, of course. Something ... "

He stopped, having registered the look in her eyes. His hands came up for a third time, as if to block an assault. His rings glittered.

Jehane glared at him, her own fingers curled into fists. The problem was, she kept wanting to laugh, which made it difficult to cling to outrage. "You are in grave trouble if you happen to get sick on this campaign," she said grimly. "Did no one ever warn you not to offend your doctor?"

"Many people, many times," Ammar admitted ruefully. "I'm just not a responsible man, I fear."

"I am," said Rodrigo cheerfully. "Ask anyone!"

"Only," she snapped over her shoulder, "because you're terrified of your wife. You told me so!"

Ibn Khairan laughed. A moment later, so did Belmonte, his color high. Jehane crossed her arms, refusing to smile, scowling at both of them.

She felt extraordinarily happy, though.

The temple bells chimed, beyond the rooftops south of them, bright and clear in the cold night, to awaken the devout for prayer.

"Go home," said Jehane to both men, looking into the infirmary. "I have patients to check on."

They glanced at each other.

"And leave you here alone? Would your mother approve?" asked ibn Khairan.

"My father would," Jehane said crisply. "This is a hospital. I am a doctor."

That sobered them. Ibn Khairan bowed, and Belmonte did the same. They left, walking together. She watched them go, standing in the doorway until they were swallowed up by the night. She stood for another moment there, staring at the darkness before going into the infirmary.

The Karcher with the fractured arm still slept. It was what he needed. She had given him absinthe for pain, and her father's mixture to help him rest.

She woke the other man gently, with the attendants on either side of his pallet. Sometimes they were violent when awakened. These were fighting men. The Batiaran knew her, though, which was good. She had them hold up a torch for her and she looked at his eyes: cloudy still, but better than before and he followed her finger when she moved it before his face. She put a hand behind his head and helped him drink: cloves, myrrh and aloes, for what had to be a brutal headache.

She changed the dressing on his wound, then withdrew to the other side of the room while the attendants helped him pass water into a beaker for her. She poured the urine into her father's flask and studied it against the candlelight. The top layer, which told of the head, was mostly clear now. He was going to be all right. She told him as much, speaking in his own language. He sank back into slumber.

She decided to snatch a short rest in the infirmary after all. They made up one of the beds for her and drew a screen in front of it for privacy. She removed her boots and lay down in her clothing. She had done this many times. A doctor had to learn to sleep anywhere, in whatever brief snatches of time were allowed.

Just before she dropped off, a thought came to her: she had, it seemed, just agreed to leave the comforts of city and court to go out on a winter campaign—wherever that expedition turned out to be going. She hadn't even asked them. Nobody went on winter campaigns.

"You idiot," she murmured aloud, aware that she was smiling in the darkness.

In the morning the Batiaran remembered his mother, knew where he was, the day of the week and the sub-commanders of his company. When she asked, a trifle unwisely, about his father's name, he flushed a vivid crimson.

Jehane took pains to show no reaction at all, of course. She swore a silent oath to herself, on the spot, in the name of Galinus, father of all physicians, that she would die before telling Ammar ibn Khairan or Rodrigo Belmonte about this.

That oath, at least, she kept.

Nine

The wind was north. Yazir could taste salt in the air, though they were half a day's ride across the Majriti sands from the sea. It was cold.

Behind him he could hear the flapping of the tents as the wind caught and tugged at them. They had come this far north and set up a camp to meet with their visitor.

On the coast, out of sight beyond the high, shifting dunes, lay the new port of Abeneven, whose walls offered shelter from the wind. Yazir ibn Q'arif would rather be dead and with Ashar among the stars than winter in a city. He shrugged deeper into his cloak. He looked up at the sky. The sun, no menace now at the brink of winter so far to the north, was a pale disk in a sky of racing clouds. There was a little time yet before the third summons to prayer. They could continue this discussion.

No one had said a word, however, for some time. Their visitor was clearly unsettled by that. This was good, on the whole; unsettled men, in Yazir's experience, revealed more of themselves.

Yazir looked over and saw that his brother had pulled down the veil that covered the lower half of his face. He was breaking beetle shells and sucking at the juices inside. An old habit. His teeth were badly stained by it. Their guest had already declined the offered dish. This, of course, was an insult, but Yazir had gained some insight into the manners of their brethren across the straits in Al-Rassan, and was not unduly perturbed. Ghalib, his brother, was a more impetuous man, and Yazir could see him dealing with anger. The visitor would not be aware of this, of course. Their guest, miserably cold, and obviously unhappy with the smell and feel of the camel hair cloak they had presented him as a gift, sat uncomfortably on Yazir's meeting blanket and sniffled.

He was ill, he had told them. He talked a great deal, their visitor. The long journey to Abirab and then along the coast to this wintering place of the Muwardi leaders had afflicted him with an ailment of the head and chest, he had explained. He was shivering like a girl. Ghalib's contempt was obvious to Yazir, but this man from across the straits would not see that either, even with Ghalib's veil lowered.

Yazir had long ago realized—and had tried to make his brother understand—that the softness of life in Al-Rassan had not only turned the men there into infidels, it had also made them very nearly women. Less than women, in fact. Not one of Yazir's wives would have been half so pathetic as this Prince Hazem of Cartada, his nose dripping like a child's in the face of a little wind.

And this young man, lamentably, was one of the devout ones. One of the true, pious followers of Ashar in Al-Rassan. Yazir was forced to keep reminding himself of that. The man had been corresponding with them for some time. Now he had come himself to the Majriti, a long way in a difficult season, to speak his plea to the two leaders of the Muwardis, here on a blanket before flapping tents in the vast and empty desert. He had probably expected to meet them in Abirab, or Abeneven at worst, Yazir thought. Cities and houses were what the soft men of Al-Rassan knew. Beds with scented pillows, cushions to recline upon. Flowers and trees and green grass, with more water than any man could use in his lifetime. Forbidden wine and naked dancers and painted Jaddite women. Arrogant Kindath merchants exploiting the faithful and worshipping their female moons instead of Ashar's holy stars. A world where the bells summoning to prayer were occasion for a cursory nod in the direction of a temple, if that much.

Yazir dreamed at night of fire. A great burning in Al-Rassan and north of it, among the kingdoms of Esperana, where they worshipped the killing sun in mockery of the Star-born children of the desert. He dreamed of a purging inferno that would leave the green, seductive land scorched back towards sand but pure again, ready for rebirth. A place where the holy stars might shine cleanly down and not avert their light in horror from what men did below in the cesspools of their cities.

He was a cautious man, though, Yazir ibn Q'arif of the Zuhrite tribe. Even before the foul murder of the last khalif in Silvenes wadjis had been coming across the straits to him and his brother, year after year, beseeching that the tribes sweep north across the water to a burning of infidels.

Yazir didn't like boats; he didn't like water. He and Ghalib had more than enough on their hands controlling the desert tribes. He had elected to roll small dice only behind his veil—akin to a cautious play in the ancient bone game of the desert—and had allowed some of his soldiers to go north as mercenaries. Not to serve the wadjis either, but the very kings they opposed. The petty-kings of Al-Rassan had money, and paid it for good soldiers. Money was useful; it bought food from north and east in hard seasons, it hired masons and shipbuilders—men Yazir had reluctantly come to realize he needed, if the Muwardis were to have any more permanence than the drifting sands.

Information was useful, too. His soldiers sent home all their wages, and with these sums came tidings of affairs in Al-Rassan. Yazir and Ghalib knew a great deal. Some of it was comprehensible, some was not. They learned that there were courtyards within the palaces of the kings, and even in the public squares of cities, where water was permitted to burst freely from pipes through the mouths of sculpted animals—and then to run away again, unused. This was almost impossible to credit, but the tale had been reported too many times not to be true.

One report—this one a fable, obviously—even had it that in Ragosa, where a Kindath sorcerer had bewitched the feeble king, a river ran through the palace. It was said that there was a waterfall in the sorcerer's bedchamber, where the Kindath fiend bedded helpless Asharite women, ripping their maidenheads and laughing at his power over the Star-born.

Yazir stirred restlessly within his cloak; the image filled him with a heavy rage. Ghalib finished cracking beetles, pushed the earthenware dish away, pulled up his veil and mumbled something under his breath.

"I'm sorry?" the Cartadan prince said, leaping at the sound. He sniffled. "My ears. I'm sorry. I failed to hear. Excellence?"

Ghalib looked at Yazir. It was increasingly evident that he wanted to kill this man. That was understandable, but it remained a bad idea, in Yazir's view. He was the older brother. Ghalib would follow him, in most things. He narrowed his eyes in warning. Their visitor missed this of course; he missed everything.

On the other hand, Yazir abruptly reminded himself, Ashar had taught that charity towards the devout was the highest deed of earthly piety, short of dying in a holy war, and this man—this Hazem ibn Almalik—was as close to being truly devout as any prince of Al-Rassan had been in a long time. He was here, after all. He had come to them. They had to take note of that. If only he wasn't such a sorry, emasculated excuse for a man.

"Nothing," Yazir grunted.

"What? I beg—"

"My brother said nothing. Do not trouble yourself so." He tried to say it kindly. Kindness did not come naturally to him. Neither did patience, though that he had been at pains to teach himself over the years.

His world was different now from when he and Ghalib had led the Zuhrites out of the west and swept all the other tribes before them, leaving the sands blood-red where they passed. More than twenty years ago that was. They had been young men. The khalif in Silvenes had sent them gifts. Then the next khalif, and the next, until the last one was slain.

There was still blood on the sands, most years. The tribes of the desert had never taken easily to authority. Twenty years was a very long time to have held sway. Long enough even to build two cities on the coast, with shipyards now and warehouses, and three more cities inland, with markets, where the gold of the south could be assembled and dispersed in the long caravans. Yazir hated settlements, but they mattered. They were marks of endurance on the shifting face of the desert. They were a beginning to something larger.

The next stage of permanence for the Muwardis, though, lay beyond the sands. That much was becoming more and more clear to Yazir as the seasons and the stars turned.

Ghalib flatly rejected the very thought of leaving the desert life he knew, but not the idea of a holy war across the straits. That idea he liked. Ghalib was good at killing people. He was not a man well-suited to leading the tribes in peacetime, or to building things that might remain after him, for his sons and his sons' sons. Yazir, who had come out of the west those long years ago with a string of camels and a sword, with five thousand warriors and a bright, hard vision of Ashar, was trying to become such a man.

Ibn Rashid, the ascetic, the wadji who had come to the westernmost Zuhrite tribes bearing the teachings of Ashar from the so-called homelands none of the Muwardis had ever seen, would have approved, Yazir knew that much.

The wadji, gaunt and tall, with his unkempt white beard and hair and his black eyes that read souls, had settled with six disciples in a cluster of tents among the wildest people of the desert. Yazir and his brother, the sons of the Zuhrite chieftain, had come one day to laugh at this new, harmless madman in his settlement, where he preached the visions of another madman in another desert in a far land named Soriyya.

Their lives had changed. The life of the Majriti had changed.

Ashar's truths had been moving through the desert for some time before ibn Rashid came west, but none of the other tribes had accepted those truths and pursued them as resolutely as the Zuhrites were to do when Yazir and Ghalib led them east—all of them veiled now like ibn Rashid—in holy, cleansing war.

Yazir had spent almost half of his life trying to earn his wadji's approval, even after ibn Rashid had died and only his rattling bones and skull accompanied Yazir and Ghalib in their journeys. He still tried to measure his deeds by what the wadji's eyes would have seen in them. It was difficult, trying to change from a simple warrior, a son of the desert and stars, to a leader in a slippery world of cities and money, of diplomats and emissaries from across the straits or far to the east. It was very difficult.

He needed scribes now, men who could decipher the messages brought him from those other lands. In scratchings on parchment lay the deaths of men and the fulfillment or rejection of Ashar's starry visions. That was a hard thing to accept.

Yazir often envied his brother his clear approach to all things. Ghalib had not changed, saw no reason to change. He was a Zuhrite war leader still, direct and unblunted as a wind. This man sitting before them, for example. For Ghalib he was less than a man, and he sniffled, and insulted them by refusing to eat food they offered. He ought, therefore, to be slain. He would provide some amusement then, at least. Ghalib had a number of ways of killing men. This one, Yazir thought, would probably be castrated then given to the soldiers—or even the women—to be used. Ghalib would see such a death as an obvious one.

Yazir, a son of the hard desert himself, half-inclined to agree, continued his long struggle towards a different view of things. Hazem ibn Almalik was a prince from across the water. He could rule Cartada if circumstances changed only slightly. He was here to ask Yazir and Ghalib to change those circumstances. That would mean, he had told them, a true believer on the dais of the most powerful kingdom in Al-Rassan. He would even don the half-veil of the Muwardis, he told them.

Yazir didn't know what a dais was, but he did understand what was being asked of him. He was fairly certain his brother understood as well, but Ghalib would have a different attitude. Ghalib would hardly care who ruled Cartada in Al-Rassan. Whether this man adopted the veil ibn Rashid had ordained for the tribes—to screen and hold back impieties—would be a matter of uttermost indifference to Ghalib. He would simply want the chance to go to war again in the name of Ashar and the god. War was good, a holy war was the best thing in the world.

Sometimes, though, a man striving to shape a divided, tribal people into a nation, a force in the world, something more than drifts of sand, had to try to hold back his desires, or rise above them.

Yazir, on his blanket in the north wind, with winter coming, felt a deep uncertainty gnawing at his vitals. No one had ever warned him that leadership, this kind of leadership, was bad for the stomach.

He had begun losing his hair years ago. His scalp, though usually covered, had burned the same hue as the rest of his face over the years. Ghalib, with no concerns save how to keep his warriors killing enemies and not each other, still had his long dark mane. He wore it tied back, to keep it from his eyes and he still wore his thong about his neck. Men sometimes asked about that. Ghalib would smile and decline to answer, inviting speculation. Yazir knew what the thong was. He was far from a squeamish man, but he didn't like thinking about it.

He looked up at the wan sun again. There remained only a little time before prayers. There was information their visitor lacked. He had been a long time journeying here; others had left after him and come before. Yazir was still unsure how to make use of this.

"What about the Jaddites?" he asked, by way of a beginning.

Hazem ibn Almalik jerked liked a snared creature at the words. He flashed Yazir a startled, revealing glance. It was the first concrete question either of the brothers had put to him. The wind whistled, sand blew.

"The Jaddites?" the man repeated blankly. He was, Yazir, concluded, very nearly simple-minded. It was a pity.

"The Jaddites," Yazir repeated, as if to a child. Ghalib glanced at him briefly and then away, saying nothing. "How strong are they? We are told Cartada allows payment of tribute to the Horsemen. This is forbidden by the Laws. If such tribute is paid there must be a reason. What is the reason?"

Hazem wiped at his dripping nose. He used his right hand, which was offensive. He cleared his throat. "That tribute is one reason I am here, Excellence. Of course it is forbidden. It is a blasphemy, among so many others. The arrogant Horsemen see no danger in the weak kings of Al-Rassan. Even my father cringes before the Jaddites, though he calls himself a Lion." He laughed bitterly. Yazir said nothing, listening, observing through hooded eyes. The sand blew past them, tent cloths flapped in the camp. A dog barked.

Their visitor babbled on. "The Jaddites make their demands, and are given all they ask, despite the clear word of Ashar. They take our gold, they take our women, they ride laughing through our streets looking down upon the faithful, mocking our feeble leaders. Little do they know that their danger comes not from godless rulers, but from the true heirs of Ashar, the pure sons of the desert. Will you not come? Will you not cleanse Al-Rassan?"

Ghalib grunted, pulled down his veil, and spat.

"Why?" he said.

Yazir was surprised. His brother was not inclined to demand reasons for war. The prince from over the water seemed more confident suddenly, he sat up straighter on the blanket. It was as if he had needed only their questions. All those who had come to them from Al-Rassan over the years, the wadjis and emissaries, were great talkers. They wore no veils, perhaps that was part of it. Poets, singers, heralds—words ran like water in that land. It was silence that made them uneasy. It was quite clear by now that their visitor did not know his father was dead.

"Who else is there?" Hazem of Cartada asked, and gestured excessively with his hands, almost touching Yazir's knee. "If you come not, the Horsemen of Jad will rule. In our lifetime. And Al-Rassan will be lost to Ashar and the stars."

"It is lost already," Ghalib muttered, surprising Yazir again.

"Then regain it!" said Hazem ibn Almalik quickly. "It is there for you. For us."

"Us?" Yazir said softly.

The prince visibly checked himself. He looked briefly afraid. He said, "For all of us who grieve for what is happening. Who bear the heavy burden of what Jaddites and Kindath and false, fallen kings are doing to a land once strong in the will of Ashar." He hesitated. "There is water there, orchards and green grass. Tall grain grows in the fields, rain falls in the spring and ripe, sweet fruits can be plucked wild from the trees. Surely your soldiers have told you this."

"They have told us many things," Yazir said repressively, stirred in spite of himself. He believed little of it, in fact. Rivers running through palaces? Did they think he was a fool? He could not even conceive of what kind of a fruit might grow freely, untended, to be taken at will by any man with a thirst. Such things were promised in Paradise, not to men on the sands of earth.

"You sent soldiers to serve my father," Hazem ibn Almalik said shrilly. "Why will you not lead them to serve Ashar?"

This was offensive. Men had been flayed for less. They had been staked alive in the sun with their skin peeled away.

"Your father has been killed," Yazir said quickly, before Ghalib could do anything irreversible. "Your brother rules in Cartada."

"What?" The young man scrambled to his feet, fear and amazement imprinted on his pallid, exposed features.

Ghalib reached for the spear planted beside him. He swung it with one hand, almost casually, so that the shaft smote the prince behind the knees. There was a cracking sound, swallowed by the empty spaces around them. Hazem ibn Almalik crumpled to the ground, whimpering.

"You do not rise before my brother does," Ghalib said softly. "It is an insult." He spoke slowly, as if to someone deficient in his faculties.

He planted his spear again. The handful of warriors who had accompanied them here from the encampment had glanced over at the flurry of movement. Now they looked away again. This talk was boring for them; most things had been boring of late. Autumn and winter were a difficult time for discipline.

Yazir again considered giving the Cartadan to his brother and the soldiers. The prince's death would offer a diversion and the men needed that. He decided against it. There was more at stake here than an execution to quiet restless warriors. He had the feeling even Ghalib knew that. The shaft of a spear along the back of the knees was an extremely mild response for his brother.

"Sit up," Yazir said coldly. The prince's moaning was beginning to grate on him.

It was amusing how quickly the sounds stopped. Hazem ibn Almalik swung himself up to a sitting position. He wiped at his nose. His right hand again. Some men had no idea of manners. But if they denied the god and the visions of Ashar, why should they be expected to know polite, proper behavior? He reminded himself, again, that this man was among the devout.

"It is time for prayers," Yazir said to the Cartadan prince. "We will go back to the camp. After, we will eat. Then you will tell me all you know about your brother."

"No, no. No! I must go back home now, Excellence. As quickly as possible." The man showed a surprising amount of energy for the first time. "With my father dead there is an opportunity. For me, for all of us who serve Ashar and the god. I must write to the wadjis of the city! I must—"

"It is time for prayers," Yazir repeated, and rose.

Ghalib did the same, with a warrior's grace. The prince scrambled upright. They began walking back. Hazem limped along, still talking, trying to keep pace.

"This is wonderful!" he said. "My accursed father is dead. My brother is weak, with a corrupt, godless advisor—the evil man who killed the last khalif! We can take Cartada easily, Excellence. The people will be with us! I will go home to Al-Rassan, and tell them you are following. Don't you see, Ashar has given us a gift from the stars!"

Yazir stopped. He didn't like being distracted as he readied himself for prayer, and this man was clearly going to be a vexing distraction. There was also the distinct possibility that Ghalib would be irked enough to kill him out-of-hand.

Yazir said, "We go to pray. Be silent now. But understand me: we travel nowhere in winter. Neither do you. You will remain with us. You are our guest for this season. In spring we will take counsel again. For the rest of the winter I do not want to hear you speak unless addressed by one of us." He paused, tried to sound gentle, soothing. "I say this for your safety, do you understand? You are not in a place where things are as you know them."

The man's jaw had dropped open. He reached forward with a hand—his right hand, alas—and clutched at Yazir's sleeve.

"But I cannot stay!" he said. "Excellence, I must go back. Before the winter storms. I must be—"

He said no more. He was looking downwards, a blank incredulity in his face. It was very nearly amusing. Ghalib had cut off the offending hand at the wrist. He was already sheathing his sword. Hazem ibn Almalik, prince of Cartada, looked at the bleeding stump where his right hand had been, made a strangled sound in his throat, and fainted.

Ghalib looked down at him expressionlessly. "Shall I cut out his tongue?" he asked. "We will never endure a winter of his words. He will not survive, brother. Someone will kill him."

Yazir considered it. Ghalib was almost certainly right. He sighed, shook his head. "No," he said reluctantly. "We do need to speak with him. We might have need of this man."

"Man?" Ghalib said. Lowering his veil, he spat.

Yazir shrugged and turned away. "Come. It is time for prayers."

He turned to walk on. Ghalib looked as if he would protest. In his mind's eye Yazir could almost see him severing the man's tongue. The prospect of silence was appealing. He imagined Ghalib kneeling, knife drawn, the Cartadan's head lifted to rest on his left knee, the tongue pulled out as far as it could go, the blade ... Ghalib had done this many times. He was good at it. Yazir very nearly changed his mind. Nearly, but not quite.

He didn't look back. A moment later, he heard his brother following. Most of the time Ghalib still followed. Yazir gestured, and three of the warriors moved to bring the Cartadan. He might die of his wound, but it was unlikely. They knew how to treat such injuries in the desert. Hazem ibn Almalik would live. He would never realize that his life and speech were Yazir's gift to him. Some people you just couldn't help, no matter how you tried.

He joined their wadji and the tribesmen in the compound. They had waited for him. The bell was rung, the sound small and fragile in the wind. They lowered their veils and prayed then in the open spaces to the one god and his beloved servant Ashar, their exposed faces turned to where Soriyya was, so far away. They prayed for strength and mercy, for purity of heart and mortal body, for the fulfillment of Ashar's starlit visions, and for access, at the end of their own days among the sands of earth, to Paradise.

He had been forewarned, but not sufficiently. King Ramiro of Valledo, sitting upon his throne set before the triple arches in his newly completed audience chamber, was sharply aware of trouble the moment the visitors entered the hall.

He glanced briefly at his wife and noted the heightened color in her face, which only confirmed his instinct. Ines had taken great pains with her appearance this morning. Not a surprise; these were guests from Ferrieres, which had been her home.

On his other side, one step back from the throne, his constable, Count Gonzalez de Rada, displayed only his customary arrogance to their guests. That was fine, but Ramiro was almost certain that de Rada was oblivious to what these men might actually mean for Valledo.

No real surprise there, either. Gonzalez had a good mind and a direct way of achieving things, but his perceptions extended no further than the three kingdoms of Esperana. He could make shrewd observations about what King Ramiro's brother in Ruenda or his uncle in Jalona might intend, and propose measures to balk them, but clerics from countries across the mountains held no interest for him and therefore shared no part of his thought.

Which was why the warning had been insufficient. Five men of the god, one of them high-ranking, were stopping here at the queen's invitation, en route to the shrine on Vasca's Isle. What could that possibly signify? Gonzalez had hardly given it a thought. Neither, to his own swiftly growing regret, had the king.

Betraying no hint of these emerging apprehensions, Ramiro of Valledo gazed politely at the man proceeding down the carpeted approach to the throne, a few telling steps ahead of his fellows. Some men alerted you with their very presence that something of substance was afoot. This was one such.

Geraud de Chervalles, High Cleric of Ferrieres, was tall enough to look down on every man in that room, including the king. His face was shaved smooth as a baby's, with grey hair swept straight back from his brow, making him seem even taller. His eyes, even at a distance from the throne, were a penetrating blue, set beneath straight eyebrows and above a long nose and a thin, wide mouth. His bearing was patrician, courtly, the manner of an ambassador to a lesser court, not that of a servant of the god appearing before a monarch. Garbed in the blue robes of the Ferrieres clerics, fringed and belted with yellow for the sun, Geraud de Chervalles was an undeniably imposing man.

The king saw no deference at all in that aristocratic face. Nor did he find it—sparing a quick glance—in the expressions of the four lesser clerics who had now come to a halt behind de Chervalles. No hostility or aggression, nothing as ill-bred as that, but clerics didn't have to be hostile to cause a world of trouble, and amiro now, belatedly, had a sense that trouble was what had arrived beneath his arches to stand upon the newly laid carpets and mosaics this cold and drizzly morning in autumn.

It didn't help to know that his wife had requested their presence.

He pulled his fur-collared robe more closely about himself. Out of the corner of one eye he saw Gonzalez make a discreet gesture and servants hastened to build up the fires. His constable was endlessly solicitous of the king's comforts in such small matters. Unfortunately he had missed something large here. On the other hand, so had Ramiro himself, and he was not a man to task others for failings he shared.

"Be welcome to Valledo," he said calmly, as the tall cleric stopped a proper distance before the throne. "In the holy name of Jad."

Geraud of Ferrieres bowed then—not before, Ramiro noted. The bow was proper, though, a full, formal salutation. He straightened.

"We are honored, my lord king." The High Cleric's voice was rich and cultured. He spoke Esperanan flawlessly, even to the patrician lisp. "Honored by the invitation from our own beloved Ines, your most devout queen, and by your royal welcome. Only the prospect of a winter's comfort here at Esteren's much-celebrated court could have drawn us forth upon the roads and through the mountains so late in the year."

No bones about it then. His very first remarks. They were staying. Not really a surprise, though they might have been intending to push on to Ruenda. That would have been pleasant. Ramiro was aware of Ines beaming beside him, elegant and desirable. She had been looking forward to this for a long time.

"We shall offer what comforts we may," the king said, "though we fear we cannot match the fame of Ferrieres for the delights of the flesh." He smiled, to make clear it was a jest.

The High Cleric shook his head. There was an unwelcome hint of admonition in his expression. Already. "We live simple lives, your grace," he murmured. "We will be well content with any meager space and amenities you are able to spare. Our delight and sustenance will come from the presence of the god in this mighty stronghold of Jad in the west."

Ramiro schooled his features. He was aware that Ines had already allocated and sumptuously furnished a suite of connecting rooms for the Ferrieres clerics in the new wing of the palace, in the event that they elected to linger for more than a short time. There was even a chapel there, at her insistence. Geraud de Chervalles would not be forced to deal with any meager spaces here. The king was also aware of the detailed exchange of letters between his queen and the clerics of her birthplace. It would be unseemly, of course, to betray knowledge of this. He felt like being unseemly.

"We are certain our dearly beloved queen has been at pains to comply with every point of your instructions regarding what accommodations would be adequate for your needs. The hot water has been arranged for your rooms, your personal masseur for each afternoon. The food as stipulated. The requested Farlenian wine."

He smiled genially. Ines stiffened beside him. Geraud de Chervalles looked briefly discomfited, then sorrowful, in the manner of all clerics. He had, however, no easy reply. It was useful, Ramiro thought, to bring them up short early, like a horse in the breaking, before all the smooth, rolling phrases began to pour endlessly forth. He doubted, though, that this man was susceptible to being checked. A moment later this was confirmed.

"I do regret that my advancing years have made it necessary to beg certain solicitous favors from those who honor us with a request to visit. Especially in winter, I fear. Your majesty is young yet, in the flush of your god-granted vigor. Those of us who have begun our mortal decline can only look to you as our stern arm of support, under the holy sun of Jad."

As expected. Not someone who could be quelled as he had managed to quell the yellow-garbed clerics here over the years. Erratic men, ambitious, but without leadership or force. Without looking he could picture the smug expressions on their faces. They had a champion now, and things might be about to change. Well, he ought to have known this was coming. He ought to have given it more thought. He had no one to blame but himself for agreeing to Ines's request that they invite one of the High Clerics from her own country to stop here on his way to the Isle, for the comfort of her soul.

He'd known the name of de Chervalles, known he was a figure of power. Beyond that he had not concerned himself. A weakness. He didn't like thinking about clerics. He did have a vague memory of the afternoon she'd asked his permission to invite the man. He had been lulled and languorous in the aftermath of lovemaking. His queen, thought Ramiro of Valledo, looking straight ahead, knew him altogether too well.

He forced himself to smile again at the tall, grey-haired man in the luxurious blue and yellow robe. "You are unlikely to need defending here in winter. Except against cold and boredom, perhaps. We will do what we can to make you comfortable during your brief time with us." He allowed his tone to hint at dismissal. Perhaps this first encounter, at least, could be kept short. That would give him time to think things through a little.

De Chervalles's expression grew dark, troubled. "The god knows our fears are not for ourselves or our own comfort, gracious king. We come hither on the hard roads heavy with thoughts of the Children of Jad who live not beneath the benevolent rule of the kings in the lands of Esperana. This, I confess, is what will make the coming winter hard for me."

Well, that had been a vain thought: that they might keep the first meeting brief. And trouble lay ahead now like a thicket of spears. Ramiro said nothing. It was still possible he might deflect the worst of this, for the moment. He really was going to need time to think.

"What can you mean, most holy sire?" Ines's question was transparently earnest. Her hands were clasped together, holding the sun disk in her lap, her face betrayed anxious concern. The king of Valledo swore inwardly, but refused to permit any flicker of emotion to cross his face.

"How can I not think of all our pious brethren of the god who must endure yet another winter under the cruel torments of the infidels of Ashar," said Geraud de Chervalles. Said it smoothly, flowingly, sorrowfully. Loudly enough for the whole court to hear.

It was upon him, Ramiro thought grimly. It had arrived, with this assured, dangerous man from Ferrieres. De Chervalles had come here to say this one thing. Say it this morning, and then again, and again, until he made kings and riders and farmers from the fields dance to his tune and die.

Despite his earlier resolutions, Ramiro felt a flicker of anger against his constable. Gonzalez ought to have been alert to this. Was that not part of his office? Did Ramiro have to plan and prepare for everything of importance? He knew the answer to that, actually.

No one to blame but himself. The king thought of Rodrigo Belmonte, far away in Al-Rassan. Exiled among the infidels. They weren't even certain where he'd gone yet. He had promised not to attack Valledo with anyone; promised that much but no more. He had been Raimundo's man: his boyhood friend then his constable. Not entirely trusted by Ramiro, or trusting him, if it came to that. Raimundo's death. The shadows around it. Too much history there. And Belmonte was too proud, too independent a man. Needed, though; badly needed, in fact.

"But most holy sire, what can we do?" Ines asked, lifting her clasped hands to her breast. "Our hearts are heavy to hear your words." Her golden disk shone in the muted light falling down through the new windows. It had begun to rain outside; the king could hear it on the glass.

Had he not known better, Ramiro would have thought his queen had been given her words by de Chervalles, so patly did they lead to the High Cleric's next speech. The king wanted to close his eyes, his ears. Wanted urgently to be away from here, riding a horse in the rain. The words came, entirely predictable, but sonorous and compelling nonetheless.

"We can do what those charged by Jad with his holy mission on earth can do—that, and no more or less, most revered queen. The accursed Khalifate of the Asharites is no more," said Geraud of Ferrieres, and paused, suggestively.

"Now there's news," said Gonzalez de Rada sarcastically, his own beautiful voice cutting into the mood. "More than fifteen years old." He glanced at the king. Ramiro understood: the count had finally grasped where this was heading, and was trying to steer it aside.

Too late, of course.

"But there is fresher news, I understand," the tall cleric from Ferrieres said, undeterred. "The vicious king of Cartada is also dead now, summoned to the black judgment Jad visits upon all unbelievers. Surely there is a message here for us! Surely with the leader of the jackals gone it is a time to act!"

The voice had risen, modulating smoothly towards a first crescendo. Ramiro had heard this sort of thing before, but never from such a master. In a kind of horrified admiration, he waited.

"To act? Now?" Gonzalez didn't bother to mask his irony. "A trifle cold is it not?"

Another good effort, the dry tone as much as the words, but Geraud de Chervalles overmastered it. "The fires of the god warm those who serve his will!" His gaze as he looked at the constable was scornful and unyielding. Gonzalez de Rada was unlikely to tolerate this, the king knew from experience, and wondered if he ought to intervene before something serious happened.

But then, unexpectedly, the cleric smiled, much as any man might smile. His stem features relaxed, he lowered his voice. "Of course I do not speak of a winter war. I hope I am not so foolish as that. I know these matters take time, much planning, the right season. These are issues for brave men of the sword such as the valiant kings of Esperana and their legendary Horsemen. I can only try, in my small way, to help light a fire, and to offer tidings that may aid and inspire you."

He waited. There was a silence. Rain drummed on the windows. A log shifted in one of the fires, then fell with a crash and a flurry of sparks. Ramiro expected Ines to ask the awaited question, but she had fallen unexpectedly silent. He looked at her. She had lowered the sun disk to her lap and was staring at the cleric, biting her lip. Her expression was unreadable now. Inwardly, the king shrugged. The game had begun, it was going to have to be played out.

"What tidings?" he asked politely.

Geraud de Chervalles's smile became a radiant thing. He said, "I thought it might be so. You have not yet heard." He paused, raised his voice. "Hear, then, news to cause all hearts to exult and offer praise: the king of Ferrieres and both counts of Waleska, the mightiest lords of the Karch Lowlands and most of the nobility of Batiara have come together to wage war."

"What? Where?" Gonzalez this time, the sharp words pulled from him.

The cleric's smile grew even more triumphant. His blue eyes shone.

"In Soriyya," he whispered into the stillness. "In Ammuz. In the desert homelands of the infidels, where Jad is denied and his life-bringing sun is cursed. The army of the god is assembling even now. It will winter south by the sea in Batiara and take ship in the spring. Already, though, a first battle has been fought in this holy war; we heard the tidings before we left to come to you."

"Where was this battle?" Gonzalez again.

"A city called Sorenica. Do you know it?"

"I do," said Ramiro quietly. "It is the Kindath city in the south of Batiara, granted them as their own long ago, for aid given the princes of Batiara in peace and war. What Asharite armies were there, may I ask?"

Geraud's smile faded. There was a coldness in his eyes now. The belated recognition of a possible foe. Be careful, Ramiro told himself.

The cleric said, "Think you the so-called Star-born of the desert are the only infidels we must face? Do you not know the rites the Kindath practice on the nights of two full moons?"

"Most of them," said Ramiro of Valledo calmly. It seemed he was not going to be careful, after all. His slow, deep anger was beginning to rise. He feared that anger, but not enough to resist it. He was aware that his wife was looking at him now. He stared at the cleric from Ferrieres. "I've given thought to inviting the Kindath back, you see. We need their industry and their knowledge in Valledo. We need all kinds of people here. I wanted to know as much as I could about Kindath beliefs before I proceeded further. There is nothing I've ever heard, or read, to suggest blood or desecration are part of their faith."

"Invite them back?" Geraud de Chervalles's voice had lost its modulated control. "At the very time when all the kings and princes of the Jaddite world are joining together to cleanse the world of heresy?" He turned to Ines. "You told us nothing of this, my lady." The words were an accusation, stiff and grim.

Ramiro lost his temper. This was too much.

But before he could speak, his queen, his holy, devout queen from Ferrieres said, "Why, cleric, would I tell you such a thing?" Her tone was astringent, royal, shockingly cold.

Geraud de Chervalles, utterly unprepared for this, took an involuntary step backwards. Ines went on: "Why would the plans of my dear lord and husband for our own land be a part of any communication between you and me with regard to your pilgrimage? I think you presume, cleric. I await your apology."

Ramiro was as shocked as the man addressed. Support from Ines against a High Cleric was not something he'd ever have expected. He dared not even look at her. He knew this ice-cold voice of hers extremely well; most often it had been used against him, for one sin or another.

Geraud de Chervalles, his color heightened now, said, "I beg forgiveness, of course, for any offense the queen has perceived. But I will say this: there are no internal, private affairs of any Jaddite kingdom, not when it comes to the infidels, Asharite or Kindath. They are a matter for the clerics of the god."

"Then burn them yourselves," said Ramiro of Valledo grimly. "Or if you seek men to die and women to be put at risk of losing all they have in your cause, speak a little more softly, especially at a royal court where you are a guest."

"I have a question," Ines added suddenly. "If I may?" She looked at the king. Ramiro nodded. He still couldn't believe what had happened to her. She asked, "Who is it has mounted this war? Who summoned the armies?"

"The clerics of Jad, of course," said Geraud, his color still high, the easy smile gone. "Led by those of us in Ferrieres, of course."

"Of course," said Ines. "Then tell me, why are you here, cleric? Why are you not with that mighty army in Batiara, preparing to make the long journey to those distant, dangerous eastern lands?"

Ramiro had never seen his wife like this. He looked at her again in frank astonishment. His own surprise, he saw, was as nothing compared to that of the man addressed.

"There are infidels nearer to home," Geraud said darkly.

"Of course," Ines murmured. Her expression was guileless. "And Soriyya is so far, and sea voyages so tedious, and war in the desert so chancy. I think I do begin to understand."

"I don't think you do. I think—"

"I am fatigued," Queen Ines said, rising. "Forgive me. A woman's weakness. Perhaps we might continue this another time, my lord king?" She looked at Ramiro.

Still unable to believe what he was hearing, the king rose. "Of course, my lady," he said. "If you are unwell ... " He extended a hand, she took it. He felt, unmistakably, a pressure of her fingers. "Count Gonzalez, will you be so good as to see to our distinguished guests ... "

"A great honor," said Gonzalez de Rada.

He snapped his fingers. Eight men came forward to flank the clerics from Ferrieres. Ramiro nodded his head politely and waited. Geraud de Chervalles, still red-faced, had no choice but to bow. Ramiro turned, Ines swinging around him, still holding his hand, as in the steps of a dance—though she never danced—and they went out through the new bronze doors behind the throne.

The doors closed behind them. It was a small retreat they entered, graciously appointed, with carpeting and new-bought tapestries. There was wine on a table by one wall. Ramiro walked quickly over and poured for himself. He drained a glass, poured another, drained it.

"Jad curse that insufferable man! Might I have just a little of that?" his queen said.

The king wheeled around. The servants had withdrawn. They were alone. Ines's expression was not one he could ever remember seeing. Covering his confusion, he quickly poured for her, mixed water, brought her the glass.

She took it, looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I brought this upon us, didn't I?"

"An unpleasant guest?" He managed a smile. He felt oddly buoyant, looking at her. "We've dealt with such before."

"He's more than that, though, isn't he?" He watched her sip from the glass. She made a face, but took another sip. His sudden high spirits faded as quickly as they'd surged.

"Yes," he said, "he is more than that. Or, not him alone, but the tidings he's brought."

"I know that. A holy war. All those armies together. They will want us to join the cause, won't they? In Al-Rassan?"

"And my soldiers will want it."

"You don't want to go south." It was not a question.

There was a discreet knock. The king spoke and Gonzalez de Rada entered. He was very pale, his expression somber. Ramiro went back to the table and poured another glass for himself. This one he watered. It was not a time for indulgence.

"Do I want to wage a holy war in Al-Rassan?" He framed Ines's question again for the constable. "Truthful answer?" He shook his head. "I do not. I want to go south on my own terms in my own time. I want to take Ruenda from my feckless brother, Jalona from Uncle Bermudo—may his fingers and toes rot—take Fezana from those butchering Cartadans, and then look further afield, or let my sons look further afield when I am dead and troubling you no longer." He smiled briefly at Ines. She did not smile back.

"If an army of kings is sailing to Ammuz and Soriyya," Gonzalez said, "it will be hard for us not to go south in the spring. Every cleric in the three kingdoms of Esperana will be threatening from his chapel that we endanger our souls if we do not."

"I know that," Ramiro murmured. "Pour yourself some wine. It will ease your endangered soul."

"This is my fault," said Ines. "I brought him here."

The king put down his wine. He went to her and claimed her glass and set it down. He took her hands. She did not pull away. All of this was very new.

"He would have come, my dear. He and others. If all the lords east of the mountains are dancing for them now, why should we be allowed to live free of the yoke? You may be sure there are men like this one in Jalona already, and on the way to Ruenda if not there by now. They will demand a winter meeting between the three of us. Wait for it. They will order us to meet, on pain of banning in the chapels, of losing our immortal places in the god's light. And we will have to listen to them. We will meet, Uncle Bermudo and brother Sanchez and I will sit together, and hunt. They will watch every move I make, and I will do the same with them. We will swear a holy truce amongst ourselves. The clerics will sing our praises in rapture. And we will almost certainly be riding to war in Al-Rassan by spring."

"And?"

She was direct, his queen. Clever and surprising and direct.

Ramiro shrugged. "No sober man ever speaks with certainty about war. Especially not this kind of war, with three armies that hate each other on one side, and twenty that fear each other opposing them."

"And the Muwardis across the straits," said Count Gonzalez softly. "Do not forget them."

Ramiro closed his eyes. He could still hear the rain. Ferrieres, Waleska, Karch, the cities of Batiara ... all gathered together in holy war. Despite himself, despite all his sober instincts, there was something undeniably stirring in the image. He could almost see the assembled banners, all those mighty lords of war brought together. How could any man of spirit not want to be there, not want to share in such an enterprise?

"The world is a different place than it was this morning," Ramiro of Valledo said gravely. He became aware that he was still holding his wife's hands, that she was allowing him to do so. "Do you know what I would like to do?" he added suddenly, surprising himself.

She looked up at him, waiting. He knew what she was thinking. He always wanted the same thing when he spoke to her like that. Well, she wasn't the only person here who could offer the unexpected. And this new feeling was strong.

"I would like to pray," said the king of Valledo. "After what we have just learned, I think I would like to pray. Will you both come with me?"

They went to the royal chapel together, the king and his queen and their constable. The palace cleric was there, having just arrived from the audience chamber in great dismay. He was as astonished as might have been expected at the sight of the king, which was extremely so. He took his place hastily at the altar before the disk.

Each of them signified the symbol of the god's sun with their right hand over their heart and then sank down upon their knees on the stone of the floor. The light in the royal chapel was muted. There were windows but they were old, and smaller, and rain was falling upon them.

They prayed in that simple, unadorned space to the one god and the life-giving light of his sun, their faces turned to where an emblem of that sun was set upon the wall behind the altar stone. They prayed for strength and mercy, for purity of heart and mortal body, for the fulfillment of Jad's bright visions, and for access, at the end of their own days among the fields of earth, to Paradise.