Diana winced. Arina had already expressed her fear that Kirill would want to ride in the army; this wasn't going to help her get better.

But Arina got a sudden spark of light in her eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was faint but clear.

"Your own command? Not just to ride in the army?

"My own command. My own army. We talked about it. There's much reconnaissance yet to be done.

There's the Golden Road that runs east to be scouted, and the lands southwest from here, past the city the khaja call Parkilnous." He had warmed to his topic, but now he faltered and looked down at his wife in concern.

In the distance, Diana heard a rhythmic thump and whistle, thump and whistle, over and over and over and going on endlessly.

"What is that noise?" Diana asked when it became apparent to her that Arina had nothing to say about Kirill's good fortune—which, of course, must seem the worst of fortunes to Arina.

Kirill answered without looking up from his wife's face. He held her hand in his withered one, but Diana could see that the hand looked fleshier and the arm actually had some substance to it now, as if by constant exercise he meant to restore it to its former strength. "It's a catapult."

"Oh. What are they doing? Lobbing stones into the city for practice?"

"No. Heads. For a lesson."

It took Diana a full thirty strides to realize that he wasn't joking. She turned her face away and shuddered. Of course, she thought of Anatoly, sent out to bring the king's head to Bakhtiian. How did you separate a head from its shoulders? How difficult was it? Did it cause a terrible mess? Was there a lot of blood, or only if the victim was still alive? Or if the blade wasn't sharp enough?

"Diana, are you well? You're looking pale."

She started. "No, Kirill, I'm fine. Just worried about Arina."

Arina, on her pallet, smiled weakly. "I'll be well," she said. Her voice was breathless and wheezy, but determined. "Bakhtiian has honored you, Kirill," she said finally.

"You're content?"

"Your own command? Yes, I'm content."

She lapsed into silence. But her words shocked Diana. It hadn't been fear for Kirill's life that had caused Anna to speak so before, but only fear that he'd be just another rider. But make him a general in his own right, and then all was well. Goddess, she would never understand these people.

The whole tribe came out to meet them as the little party entered the Veselov encampment. They kept a respectful distance, but they wanted a glimpse of their etsana. At times like this, Diana was wrenched away from her view of Anna as a sweet girlfriend about her own age and forced to realize that Anna had considerable authority and extremely high status. It reminded her of Mother Sakhalin's disappointment in the common woman—a mere entertainer with a pretty face—whom her grandson had married.

Anatoly should have married someone important, someone like Galina Orzhekov or a foreign princess, someone who wanted him to ride in the army, who was proud that he commanded his own jahar and was sent by Bakhtiian to perform important and dangerous deeds. She put a hand to her face, touching the scar that branded her left cheek. What was it Sonia had said, that a woman and a man are married as long as the scar marks the woman's face, or the man lives? And yet, on Earth, it would be a simple procedure to erase the scar forever.

At Arina's tent, Anna's young sister and Karolla Arkhanov waited to place her on pillows inside the great tent. They settled her in. Diana felt superfluous. Mira shrieked, to see her mother, but knelt a handbreadth away from her as she had evidently been instructed not to disturb her. Lavrenti bawled and arched his back in anger because his uncle Anton wouldn't put him down on his mother. At last Kirill took Lavrenti and the boy calmed, his thin face caught in a baby's sullen pout.

Vasil came to pay his respects. He looked battered and bruised, and he limped, but the injuries merely gave him an interesting air of nobility in the face of dangers seen and conquered. Diana edged away and backed out through the throng. It was time to go home.

At the outskirts of the Veselov encampment, Vasil appeared suddenly, mounted, leading a saddled horse. "Oh, I beg your pardon," he said, greeting her with a sidelong glance. He smiled that brilliant smile of his. "It's a long walk back across camp, and I have to deliver these horses.... Would you prefer to ride?"

"Oh, I ..." His presence flustered her. He was so intensely good-looking and so determined to make an impression on her. And it was a long walk. "That's very kind of you. I'd be honored."

"Not at all. The honor is mine." He waited while she mounted. He did not once look at her straight on, and yet she felt that he looked at her constantly. They rode, and she knew that this was all somehow improper, but she wasn't sure she cared. "Five nights ago you sang the story of the etsana who judged her daughters poorly. Who has written this story? Or did you write it yourselves? Is it an old story of your people? And how—well, when a Singer of the jaran sings, she tells a story in music and with her words. How did it happen that with your people you tell these stories by—by becoming the stories?"

All the rest of the way to the Company encampment Diana explained to Vasil, as well as she could, about acting and theater. Vasil drank in every word. He asked a hundred more questions.

At the camp, she thanked him and dismounted. He turned the horses away and paused. "You have only to ask," he murmured, looking down at her from under lowered lids, demure and yet completely assured. He hesitated one instant longer. When she only gaped at him and did not reply, he rode away.

Quinn jogged out. "Well. Well, well. He's a stunner. That your latest lover, Di?"

"No." Diana stared at his retreating back. And a fine back it was, too, straight and even, with his golden hair lapping the collar of his scarlet shirt. "But I think he just told me that he was available to audition for the part. And

I don't think he was delivering those horses anywhere but here."

"What?"

"Never mind." She shook her head impatiently, as if sloughing off the last three days. "I'm back. What did I miss?"

Quinn launched into a long explication of how Ginny and Owen were disputing over whether translation hurt the text more than it helped the process of understanding, and what progress Ginny had made on crafting a telling of the jaran story about the Daughter of the Sun who came from the heavens to visit the earth and ended up falling in love with a dyan of the tribes.

"They're going to risk that?"

"Oh, Di, the jaran will never suspect. How should they? It's a wonderful story. Yomi said that Dr.

Hierakis thinks that it's Bakhthan's favorite story. Now they're talking about actually doing Tamburlaine."

"Oh, I hope not," said Diana with feeling. "I've had enough of war. What about The Tempest? Aren't we going to do that? And the folktale about Mekhala. What about Ginny's Cyclopean Walls?"

"Ah, absence does make the heart grow fonder. We've had to listen to Anahita complain on and on about how sick she is. We've been working like dogs while you've been away."

"I didn't enjoy it!"

"I'm sorry." Quinn backed down immediately.

"No, I'm sorry. I just—I don't know. Never mind. I'm glad to be back. "I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it." Is there anything interesting to eat? Something—not what I could get in the camp?"

"You are out of sorts," said Quinn thoughtfully.

" "How weary are my spirits." "

Quinn rested a hand on Diana's arm. "Poor Di. Come home."

"Gladly," said Diana, and went with her into camp. Gladly she fell back into the routine. She went once a day to see Arina, who slowly grew stronger, but Arina's own people took care of her. As the days wore on, Diana noticed Vasil frequently, here and there, running across her path now and again as if by accident, usually at the Veselov camp. And often, now, she saw him loitering in the background, at the outskirts of the audience that always gathered to watch them practice, watching their rehearsals with a look of hungry intensity on his face.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Despite himself, Jiroannes found the city of Karkand impressive. In its own foreign way, the city rivaled the Great King's capital of Flowering Mountain in southern Vidiya. Two walls enclosed Karkand. The outermost wall ringed a huge expanse of land, fields, gardens, orchards, and suburbs watered by canals, but the Habakar had given these flats up for lost and most of the population had retreated inside the massive inner walls that fortified the twin hills of the main city.

Eight days after the army had besieged the city, Jiroannes rode with Mitya through these environs.

Peasants from the lands surrounding Hamrat and from farther south had filtered in behind the army and taken the fields and the houses and now worked them for their jaran masters. Still, the place was half deserted, and the season was turning.

The triple arched gateway through the outer wall opened onto a broad square paved with stone.

Beyond the square three tree-lined avenues thrust into the suburbs. To the right, a marketplace sprawled along the inner wall, fanners and merchants selling vegetables and grain. They stared at the fifty jaran riders, Mitya's escort, but went about their business nonetheless. Traffic passed through the smaller of the three gateways, men trundling carts or leading donkeys laden with goods.

To the left, a marble fountain spilled water down a series of ledges. To Jiroannes's surprise, a woman dressed in white sat alone and unveiled and unmolested by the pool at the foot of the fountain. She sat with her hands in her lap and a ceramic beaker at her right hand. Now and again a man halted before her, and she dipped the beaker into the pool and offered him water to drink. When the jaran riders paced by, she watched them apprehensively, but she did not move from her station beside the splashing fountain.

Jiroannes noted that the skin of her hands was very fine, the mark of a woman who has not been forced to engage in any heavier labor than dipping water from a font. Her complexion was not as fine, sitting out in the sun as she was, but she looked far less sun-coarsened than did the jaran women, who without exception of rank or age worked at tasks fit only for a slave.

"She might as well be a jaran woman," said Jiroannes. "I had not noticed that Habakar women were so immodest. But perhaps she is a prostitute."

Bakhtiian had elevated the Habakar general's son up from his status as prisoner and allowed him freedom as Mitya's interpreter, because the boy had learned khush, and because the boy was about Mitya's age. Qushid hid a look of horror behind one hand and after a moment uncovered his face again.

He was tall, taller than Mitya, dark-complexioned with close-cropped black hair, but reserved to the point of seeming stupid. Bakhtiian's chief wife conducted a school for those so favored by her husband, and this boy attended it by Bakhtiian's order, learning khush and the ways of the jaran.

Mitya threw a glance back at Jiroannes. "You must learn not to speak so disrespectfully of women, Jiroannes," he said mildly. "My Aunt Sonia still counsels Bakhtiian that you ought to be sent home in disgrace. He listens to her as closely as he would to my grandmother, who is Mother Orzhekov of our tribe."

"I beg your pardon," replied Jiroannes, not wanting to offend his friend. Mitya was too much a savage to understand how civilized women behaved. The Habakar boy doubtless possessed a finer education.

"She is a holy woman," said Qushid haltingly. "The priests choose girls each year to serve as the Almighty God's handmaidens. They are God's brides and are not meant for men."

"Ah." Jiroannes nodded. "I see. Such holy women may not be touched by men."

"Nor would any man touch one. To violate a holy woman is the worst crime any man might commit, except to forswear Almighty God Himself. They are sworn to serve Him, not man."

Mitya looked mystified. "Do you mean to say those poor women aren't allowed to get married? Or even to—?" He broke off, flushing. "That's barbaric!"

"Don't you have priests?" Qushid asked.

"Of course we have priests, a few, and Singers. Both women and men. But just as the gods granted death to us, so did they also grant us love. It's not just foolish but dangerous to turn away from that with which the gods have gifted us."

"It is true," said Jiroannes thoughtfully, thinking of the captain of his guards and how he had pleaded with his master for permission to bring women into the camp, "that the Everlasting God enjoins a man not to go without a woman for more than ten days. But, of course, it is different for women."

"It is?" Mitya looked dumbfounded. "How can it be different for women?"

Jiroannes felt unable to answer this question. Instead, he glanced at Qushid and had the pleasure of seeing that the Habakar boy bore a sympathetic look on his face— one sympathetic to Jiroannes. It was, quite simply, impossible to explain some things to the jaran, because they were too uncivilized to understand such sophisticated philosophical and spiritual concepts.

Mitya pulled his horse aside to admire a cart stacked with ripe melons that gleamed a pale rich green in the noonday sun. At once, the old man tending the cart leapt to his feet and presented the boy with the pick of the melons.

"Here," said Mitya, turning to Qushid, "pay the man whatever is a fair price for these melons and tell him to deliver them to the Orzhekov camp. Aunt Tess loves melons. These look very fine."

"Surely, your highness," said Qushid, "you don't need to pay for the melons. If you wish them, they are yours."

Mitya blinked. The harsh summer sun of this climate had bleached his fair hair out to a coarse pale blond and tanned his skin until he was almost as dark as the

Habakar natives. Over the summer, he had begun to grow a light down of hair along his chin, the first sign of his manhood. Unlike the young riders in the army, he did not follow the fashion and shave off this suggestion of a beard; doubtless, thought Jiroannes, he was hoping enough would grow that it would become noticeable from more than an arm's length away.

"But if we mean to rule this country fairly, and if this man has already paid his tribute—his taxes—to our army, then we must act according to the law. By that law, it is robbery to take goods without paying for them. So you will pay him."

At times like these, Jiroannes recalled quite clearly that Mitya was not his friend but a prince, and heir to the most powerful man in this kingdom. He was a sweet boy, charming and unspoiled, especially compared to the princes at the palace school in Vidiya, who had been uniformly conceited, hedonistic, and cruel. But he was also arrogant, as all the jaran were, and well aware of the extent of his power.

Qushid obeyed. How could he not? Jiroannes knew that the Habakar boy held a rank equal to Jiroannes's own and that it was only cruel fate—or the Hand of the Everlasting God Himself—that had thrown him into the hands of the enemy and forced him to act as Mitya's servant and chamberlain. It must gall him, to handle money like any steward; to translate words as Syrannus—Jiroannes's own bond servant—had once done for Jiroannes before the Vidiyan ambassador had learned to speak khush himself. Jiroannes suspected that Mitya knew the rudiments of the Habakar language, but he would never stoop to using it in public. Why should the jaran speak the language of their subjects? It was fitting that their subjects learn to speak the language of their masters.

The transaction completed, their party rode on. Marble columns alternated with poplars and almond trees along the broad avenue they followed into the northwestern district. Here, villas sprawled, airy houses ringed with trees and manicured gardens, fronted by statues and elaborate fountains. Jiroannes noted that about half of the houses lay empty, stripped of their movable wealth. A few brave merchants had remained, casting (heir lot in with the jaran. Squatters had invaded some of the other houses, men dressed in homespun, rough clothing who looked quite out of place in these elegant homes. Or perhaps they were only slaves, left to tend their master's possessions until such time as it was safe to return.

Jiroannes doubted it would ever be safe for them to return if they thought that safety consisted of the absence of the jaran. He believed firmly, by now, that Bakhtiian would succeed in conquering the Habakar kingdom utterly. Clearly Bakhtiian intended Mitya to rule the Habakar lands once Mitya came of age. Why else give the boy a general's son as his interpreter? Why else betroth him to a Habakar princess?

Mitya pulled up his horse at a crossroads and stared down a broad avenue lined with great columns that led like an arrow's shot to the far distant gate to the heart of the city. Behind those inner walls, Karkand's population waited out the siege. Did they think their king was coming to relieve them? Or was it rumors of the king's nephew riding north that comforted them as they waited, day by day, gazing from their highest towers out over the suburbs to the surrounding plain, where the jaran army invested their city?

"Do you like this country?" Jiroannes asked, watching Mitya as the boy rode up next to a column and traced its carved surface with his right hand.

Mitya did not answer immediately. He regarded the avenue and the distant city with a musing expression on his face. Then he reined his mount around and pulled in beside Jiroannes. "When I become king here, will you ask your king to send you as the ambassador to my court?"

Jiroannes didn't know what to think. At first, he felt a thrill of elation, that he should be invited to serve as an ambassador, and not just as a common ambassador but as a personal one to a powerful king.

But it might mean years and years spent in exile from his own land, and even if his success as an ambassador here won him the white Companion's Sash, and admittance to the Companion's Circle, what use was such influence if he did not live at court in order to exercise it?

"Well," said Mitya, turning his horse around and starting back the way they had come, "it was just a thought. It'll be four years yet before I'm of age. Bakhtiian won't let any man, not even me, ride in the army before the age of twenty. It doesn't seem fair, though, that girls can ride with the archers at sixteen.

Anatoly Sakhalin's sister Shura is only seventeen, and she's fought in three skirmishes and one battle already. Then again, she'll be married soon and having babies, so perhaps this is the only chance she'll have to fight." He considered this in silence.

Jiroannes considered the suburbs of Karkand. What if he did return to Mitya's court? He would receive preference, certainly. Jiroannes reflected on the struggles his own uncle went through, balancing the cutthroat politics of the imperial court with his efforts to live in a comfortable style. Living in Habakar lands, Jiroannes would be well placed to benefit from opening up greater trade between Habakar and Vidiya. These rich villas had ample space and amenities for a man to live in style. Even a Vidiyan noblewoman might live here without disgust, and the homes seemed spacious enough that the women would have ample quarters for their seclusion. Perhaps he could even benefit by several advantageous marriages.

They passed out of the suburbs by a different gate, double-arched. The marketplace along the square here was dedicated to ironworks and blacksmiths, repairing wagons, shoeing horses. A white-clad woman sat in silence, head bowed, in the shade on a wooden bench next to a terraced fountain. A ceramic beaker painted with fantastic birds along the base and lip rested next to her.

"She is another holy woman?" Jiroannes asked. "If I ask for water, then must she give me a drink?"

Qushid nodded. "The Almighty God is served by these handmaidens, the Vani, who by offering each and every man water, remind us that God alone can slake our thirst."

"Did you say they are called Vani?" Hadn't his concubine been wearing fine white silk when she was brought to him? A sudden foreboding seized Jiroannes. His throat grew thick with dread. "Are any of these women called Javani?"

Qushid's eyes widened, giving him the look of a startled hare. He sketched a warding sign in the air with his left hand. "It is ill luck to speak so of the Javani, she who is now dead and not yet at rest in our Lord's bosom."

"Dead?" Jiroannes managed to choke out the word.

"When the citadel in Hazjan burned, thrown down by Bakhtiian, who does not honor the Almighty God and his Holy Book, so did the holy temple burn. Just as common women are marked by the priests to serve the Almighty God, so is one woman of the royal house honored as the Javani, the holiest of these maidens. Usually she is a distant cousin of the king. He sanctifies her and gives her into God's Hands, to serve Him all her days at the heart of the holy temple." He paused. "And, of course, a princess of the royal house also then can serve as the king's ear and mouthpiece to the priests. But it is God she serves first."

They crossed under the arch and came out between fields of hay drying in the sun. Beyond lay the first tents of the jaran army. Jiroannes was relieved to be free of the oppression of the walls and of Habakar habitations. In there, within the walls, in one offhand moment, he had been transformed from a common ambassador into the worst sort of criminal. He had raped the holiest woman in Habakar lands.

He had offended their God mightily, and by their laws deserved to be executed.

"Look," said Mitya, pointing, "there is Bakhtiian out riding. Do you see his gold banner?"

Out here, beyond the walls, he reminded himself that he was a Vidiyan nobleman, answerable only to the laws of his own Great King. Still, to his horror, remorse and fear clawed at him.

"Qushid," he asked slowly, sure that if he did not choose his words carefully, the whole world would know at once of his crime, "what if such a woman did not die? What if she was taken captive by the army?"

When presented with questions that demanded thought rather than a rote answer, Qushid gained a rather slack-jawed look. Perhaps he really was a little stupid. Certainly he did not suspect a thing. "I don't know. The Almighty God wishes no bride who is not a virgin. I suppose she might kill herself, out of shame. That would be merciful."

"What if she didn't kill herself? Might she marry?"

"What man would wish to marry a stained woman?"

"If she is the king's cousin—? Might there not be some advantage to such an alliance?"

"What is a stained woman?" asked Mitya. "And anyway, I'm to marry the king's cousin, the princess, the one they sent out to my grandmother to foster until we're of age to marry. Bakhtiian says that if we mean to hold these lands for our children and our children's children, then we must weave ourselves into their hearts and into their laws and into their royal families as kin."

"Mitya," said Jiroannes suddenly, "I would be honored above all things to be asked by you to attend your court as ambassador."

Mitya smiled, looking heartened and pleased all at once. "I'd like that," he said, with the casual arrogance that characterized his people. Of course they expected the world to bow down to them; hadn't the gods granted them a heavenly sword with which to conquer foreign lands? Weren't the khaja falling before them like the wheat trampled beneath their horses" hooves?

They separated at the outskirts of camp, and Jiroannes rode with his two escorting guards to his own encampment. Once there, he called Lal to him.

"Bring me the woman," he said, and he went inside his tent to conduct the interview.

Lal brought her. She now wore Vidiyan silks, bright-hued, brocaded with peacocks intertwined with flowering vines. She cowered in front of him, kneeling, head bent. Her hands lay folded, trembling, in her lap. Her complexion was pale and spotless. The skin of her hands was so soft that Jiroannes felt that just by rubbing it vigorously between his own hands he could chafe it and redden it. Under the silks, he knew that her body, shaved clean of all hair, was as silkily smooth as that of the finest concubine in Vidiya, where such women were raised from childhood and pampered and scented and oiled and bathed to a fine perfection fitting for a nobleman's use. But now he knew that this woman—the Javani—bore these marks not because she was a slave bred to concubinage but because she was of noble rank.

She did not look up at him. Stillness masked her expression. He could not read her at all, but he knew she cried a little, every night, and then wiped her tears away.

"Syrannus," he called, "bring ink and paper. I wish you to take a letter to my uncle." Syrannus entered and sat on a stool, parchment laid over a board balanced on his knees. "Syrannus, how much of the Habakar tongue can you speak?"

"A little, eminence. Perhaps Lal speaks more."

"Umm. Lal, ask this woman who she is."

"The Javani," she answered in a stifled voice when Lal put the question to her in halting words.

"Ask her if she escaped the burning of Hazjan."

At the name of the city, the Javani burst into tears, a sudden and copious weeping that surprised Jiroannes. She cast herself facedown on the carpets and blurted out a long string of sentences, groveling at Jiroannes's feet.

"What is she saying?" he asked Lal and Syrannus.

The boy and the old man regarded each other. In low voices, they debated, and at last Syrannus nodded and turned to his master. The Javani lapsed into silence. Her hands lay gripped in fists and her eyes were leaden with tears. Her black hair had slipped free of its veil and now spilled onto the carpet in disarray. Jiroannes loved her hair, and he found that the sight of it here, unbound, naked, aroused him.

"Eminence," said Syrannus, "we cannot be sure, but we are agreed that she is lamenting that she did not die, or could not die, or was afraid to die. Perhaps that she is ashamed that she preferred to live in shame rather than die honorably. But it is difficult to understand and unlikely in any case that a woman could entertain such masculine sentiments."

"Yet most men would have chosen to die, rather than live in disgrace," said Jiroannes thoughtfully, staring at die curve of her body under the soft silken fabric of her robes. "A woman might easily be weak enough to fear death more than shame. Still, I wish you to take a letter to my uncle, asking him for his permission to marry."

"His permission to marry?"

"Yes. I wish to marry this woman. Once I have ascertained that she is indeed who I believe her to be: a Habakar noblewoman of the royal line. With such an alliance, Syrannus, I can bind myself both to the Habakar royalty and to the advantages we can find there through trade with Vidiya, and to the young prince, who is going to marry into their family as well. If it is true that she was once a holy woman, then I can't in good conscience keep her as my concubine. And no one else will have her, whether as slave or concubine or wife. I think we can find both profit and blessing in this transaction. Lal, see if you can make her understand what I mean to do. Then take her away and see to her. And—" He hesitated.

"Certainly, eminence," said Lal, "if she is to be your wife, she cannot be expected to share a tent with a slave."

"Of course. Just what I was about to say. See that Samae is lodged somewhere else. Samae can act as her handmaiden for now, but I think—" He bit at his lower lip.

"Perhaps, eminence, I can find a woman in the guards" camp to act as her body servant. That way she may have a woman of her own people as her companion."

"Ah, a fine idea, Lal. But not a peasant woman. Indeed, perhaps one of the merchants left in the suburbs has a niece or daughter he would be willing to sell into our service."

Lal knelt beside the woman and, like a handler coaxing a spooked horse, spoke to her gently and soon enough led her out of the tent. Syrannus's pen scratched across the parchment. Jiroannes leaned back in his chair and sipped contentedly at the cool sweet tea Lal had brought him earlier.

"When you are done, Syrannus, we will go ask for an audience with Bakhtiian. No, with Mother Sakhalin, I think."

"With Mother Sakhalin, eminence?"

"You don't think I'm fool enough to marry her without getting permission from the jaran, do you? Or at least without advising them of the situation? Not while we live in their power. If they come to think well of me, then there will be fewer obstacles in my path four years from now."

"Four years from now, eminence?"

Jiroannes felt a surge of pleasure, seeing Syrannus at a loss for once. Always, before, he had felt that Syrannus knew better than he did what was going on; now, at last, Jiroannes felt that he was beginning to control his own life, to build his own destiny. There was more to life than a Companion's Sash. There was a greater world than that contained in Vidiya. Jiroannes intended to rise as high as he could, no matter how far it meant he had to travel. He had grown up in the Great King's court. And now he had seen the jaran. He was no fool. He could see to whom Heaven had granted her favor.

And what if the jaran collapsed and their conquests were scattered to the winds? What if the Habakar king or his nephew regained his lands? Well, then, Jiroannes still had possession of the Javani, "the king's ear and mouthpiece." Either way, he would benefit.

"Syrannus," he added, rising and pacing the length of the tent and back again, "we will go first to the Habakar priests. I know there are some in camp, hostages, guests, whatever they are called. They must identify her and give their blessing, and then, armed with that knowledge, we can present our petition to the old woman. Yes. Yes. This will do very well."

Syrannus's pen marked the parchment with his flowing script. Jiroannes sat back down and drank his tea.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"Now what?" asked David of the little council gathered in Charles's tent. "By Rajiv's calculations, the actor is 24.7 kilometers away from us, up in the hills."

"And," added Maggie, "we've got a shuttle available for rendezvous anytime in the next three days. It might have been possible to distract Grekov, but Nadine doesn't miss anything. I don't see how we're going to manage bringing down the shuttle and picking up Hyacinth, especially with her eagle eye upon us."

Inside the tent, there was room enough for them all to sit in the wood and canvas folding chairs that Charles favored, although Marco stood and Jo lounged on the floor. Rajiv sat hunched over the table, manipulating data on the modeler sunk within the table's surface.

"I've plotted their course," said Rajiv, "and it's not unreasonable to predict that they'll move another five to ten kilometers northeast tomorrow, which, depending on our course, could put them within ten to fifteen K range of us. But our paths will begin to diverge in another two days."

"Landing sites?" asked Charles.

Rajiv brought up a flat geological map that took over the entire smooth surface of the table. It was detailed to the ten-meter range, shaded to show elevation and vegetation and water patterns. "I've marked them here. But given that it's a Chapalii shuttle, we've got a fair amount of leeway. They can land with relative silence and minimal damage in most terrain."

"Why is the actor staying up in the hills?" asked Jo. "Wouldn't he be safer traveling north down through this valley?"

"Not if he'll get executed if he's caught," said Marco. "What about the people with him, Charles?"

Charles steepled his fingers together and rested his chin on his fingertips. "Difficult to know.

Hyacinth and his stolen gear will have to come with us, of course. His companions can either travel on, on their own, or— No." He shook his head.

"We can't give them our protection?" asked David. "It's ridiculous that they were punished so severely for homosexuality. It isn't even a crime. But I suppose it's all of a piece, when you consider how primitive this planet is."

"Why, David," said Marco, "you're singing a different tune these days."

David shrugged.

"If we give them our protection," said Charles softly, "then what becomes of them once we leave? As we inevitably will. I've thought of that, David, but I don't see how we can manage it. Still, they're the least part of our problem. We need to bring in that shuttle and transfer the medical equipment for Cara onto the pack animals. Without alerting our escort." Charles grinned suddenly. David had long since realized that Charles enjoyed himself most when he confronted a seemingly insolvable problem. "Any suggestions?"

"Kill them all," said Marco facetiously. "That solves the problem."

"Except we have to explain it to Bakhtiian once we arrive at the army. Anyone else?"

"Well," said Jo, "that's not so far from the mark, though, Charles. We have to render them unconscious somehow. Drug them. I don't know. So we can send out an expedition to bring in the actor and pick up the supplies."

"But how do we explain how we found Hyacinth?" demanded Maggie.

"As you see," said Charles, "this kind of masquerade gets more and more difficult to bring off. Jo, can you drug them?"

"Probably. But how do we explain it to them when it wears off? They'd wonder, surely."

"Wait a minute," said David. "You know these people drink like fish. Get them drunk, add just enough of a dose of—whatever—to make them sleep late and wake up with terrible hangovers. If we can get within ten K range of Hyacinth, that should give us enough time to pick him up and rendezvous with the shuttle, and get back by mid-morning. If we leave before dawn. Don't you think?"

They all regarded him openmouthed, all except Charles. Charles rose and paced over to the table, placing his hands palm open, flat, on the surface, examining the topographical model laid out before him. "That's perfect, David. Perfect."

"I admit it might work," began Maggie.

"Mags, your praise overwhelms me."

"Quiet, you. But what possible reason do they have to get drunk in the middle of a long trip south?

And at the pace we're riding, too?"

Charles straightened up. He smiled. "A perfect reason. We haven't celebrated Nadine Orzhekov's marriage yet. Remiss of me, as her host. We've made good enough time that I can excuse an early stop tomorrow, and a late morning start the day after."

All of David's triumph in thinking up a brilliant idea burned away to ashes. Charles was right, of course: celebrating Nadine's marriage provided the perfect excuse. It didn't mean he had to like it. "Well, if that's settled," he said brusquely, "I've some things to attend to. Are we done?"

Charles glanced once, sharply, at him, but mercifully only nodded. David escaped out into the camp.

He strode out to the fringe of camp, to the screen of straggling trees that hid the pack train. The animals grazed peacefully, some hobbled, some on lines. Packs stretched in neat rows along the ground. About one hundred meters away, a mob of horses milled beside a pond, jostling for drinking space. Three jaran riders supervised this chaos. David recognized two of them instantly. One was the quiet boy, Vasha. The other was Feodor Grekov.

He sighed. Was this what it meant to be in love? Purely, simply, David was jealous of Feodor Grekov.

In the ten days since Nadine had rejoined their party, David had found it impossible to address the young man with any semblance of politeness, so he avoided him instead. Only Marco twitted him about it; perhaps only Marco noticed. No, Charles must know. Charles knew everything. But by and large, Charles respected privacy to an almost extravagant degree since he valued it so keenly for himself. Now David had leisure to reflect on Bakhtiian. No wonder Bakhtiian had looked daggers at him, all those months ago, thinking that David had slept with his wife. Then, David had feared that he had violated some taboo. Now he understood that Bakhtiian's anger stemmed from jealousy, from possessiveness, perhaps even from fear. And why shouldn't Bakhtiian be afraid? Tess belonged to David's kind, she belonged to Earth—to Erthe—not to the jaran.

Only, maybe she didn't. Maybe she did belong to the jaran now. Or at least, for now, for a time.

Nadine didn't belong to the jaran; that was one thing that angered David. Nadine deserved better, deserved more than to be a brood mare for her uncle's convenience. She wanted more.

"David!" The voice made him wince. He spun, to see that he had not been paying attention well enough. If he had seen her coming, he would have fled. She grinned down at him from her seat on her horse. Dusk shadowed her, but she seemed cheerful enough. "Walking sentry duty tonight?" she asked.

If she knew that her husband rode herd on the horses close by, she gave no sign of it. "I just spoke with the prince. I don't suppose, since he insisted, that I can refuse the honor of a celebration given by him."

"You don't want a celebration for your marriage?" David asked.

She shrugged and turned her face to one side. She had a fine profile, sharp and distinctive. He watched as her mouth twitched down into a frown, watched her rein herself in, watched her lips straighten and assume a smile again. "It's fitting," she said at last, in a toneless voice, "that a marriage should be celebrated with a feast and dancing and drink. I don't suppose we can have dancing; there aren't enough women. And there's scarcely enough interesting food for a feast. But the prince promises a rare wine, that he wishes to share in honor of the marriage. That's generous of him."

"Well," said David awkwardly, "we all like you, Dina."

Her gaze flashed to him, and away. She wasn't usually so coy. "You all like me," she said softly, "and pity me for what has happened." Abruptly, she reined her horse aside and rode away, out toward the sentry line.

David watched her go. He swore under his breath and walked back to camp.

The next day they camped in the late afternoon on the outskirts of a burned-out village that huddled up against the low hills. The vast gap of land—more than a valley, less than a plateau—through which they rode on their way south to the Habakar heartlands spread out around them, bounded by steep hills to the east and west and mountains to the south. Rajiv calculated that the actor had made his camp 9.4

kilometers away from them, up in the western foothills. He mapped out a path from the village to the signal emitted by the actor's transmitter.

Charles poured the wine himself, pressing the jaran riders to drink from the bottles Jo had spiked.

David managed to swallow his ill-feeling long enough to participate in one toast to the happy couple.

Then he left the party and went out to the horse lines.

"Go on," he said to the young man standing guard. "I'll watch tonight." The rider hesitated. They could both hear the distant sound of lusty singing. "I can't stomach the celebration," added David, appealing to the other man's sympathies, "since I—well, you know. Now she's married to another man."

The rider's expression softened. "Well, and you being khaja and all, I don't suppose you'd any hope to marry her, since she's Bakhtiian's niece. If you don't mind.... Just a sip, and then I'll come back."

David waved at him to go on. Then he waited. He set me perimeter alert on his knife and paced up and down the lines. The singing grew louder and less tuneful, then quieted, and finally ceased altogether.

Eventually, about two hours after midnight, Marco and Charles appeared. They saddled up four horses and slung packs on two of the pack animals; at Morava, they had loaded two of the animals with packs filled with extra odds and ends, so that once they made the pickup there wouldn't seem to be any change in the amount of gear they carried. Then they set off.

Once out of sight of camp, leading the horses, they switched on lanterns to light their way. The steady glare lent a gray color to the landscape as they wound their way up into the hills. Rajiv had coded a pathfinder into Charles's slate, and it guided them up dried-out streambeds and along the curve of the hills, gradually working up into the wilderness. A few wild animals tripped their perimeter alerts.

Otherwise, nothing stirred. The isolation mirrored David's mood.

Just before dawn, with a faint glow rising in the east, they led their train down a defile and halted in the shadow of a copse of trees. With a word, Marco shut off their lamps, shuttering them in the half light of dawn. Beyond the trees, set out on a rocky slope, stood a tent. An off-world tent, that much was obvious by its cut and weave and by the tracery of filaments woven into the canvas, shining like dew-laden spiderwebs against the khaki fabric.

Marco cast a glance down at his slate, hanging open from his belt. "There'a perimeter alert activated inside the tent. We've already triggered it."

"Let's wait a moment," said Charles. "We've no guarantee that some bandit hasn't murdered Hyacinth and stolen his gear."

David winced. No matter how stupid the actor had been, David could not believe that he deserved such an awful fate. He glanced at Charles, but in the dim light could not read Charles's expression—if indeed Charles let any emotion show at all on his face, anymore. "It's true we ignored the emergency signal that came—• what?—weeks ago," he muttered. "We don't know what happened to him after that, or if he even survived."

"You know very well, David, that we couldn't send a shuttle down cold, without marking the ground first. He chose his exile. He knows what it means, that Rhui is interdicted. Marco. Alert the shuttle. I think this is an isolated enough spot for a safe landing." Charles surveyed the sky, lightening ever more in the east, and then looked directly at David. "You were going to say something?"

"You're a damned hypocrite, Charles."

Charles nodded, looking thoughtful. "It's true. So often people in my position are. I wonder if there's any remedy for it? I condemn that poor boy for a crime that I then turn around and commit myself."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"I do what I must."

"Shhh," hissed Marco. "Someone's coming out of the tent."

They watched as a man dressed in jaran clothing emerged from the tent, wary, holding his saber in front of him. He glanced all round and then stared straight at the copse of trees, although surely he couldn't see them. Perhaps he could hear or smell the horses. A moment later another man ducked out of the tent, holding a knife in his left hand.

"I don't recognize either of them," said David in an undertone. The second man wore a dirty tunic over dirty trousers. What color the clothes had once been was impossible to tell. The man's hair was a coarse muddy blond.

"Look at those eyes," said Marco in an undertone. "I think that's Hyacinth. None of the natives in these parts have the epicanthic folds."

David stared, trying desperately to match his memory of Hyacinth with this filthy, coarse-looking man. He looked altered beyond imagining from the glamorous, golden-haired actor who had played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream with such athletic and sensual flair. Then the man flipped open his slate and keyed into it. Lights flashed, and a sudden image projected out from the screen, suspended in midair. It was a heat projection of the surrounding area, betraying their presence. The man's jaran companion did not even start at this sorcerous apparition.

"What the hell?" muttered Marco. "It looks like he's already broken the interdiction."

"Call down the shuttle," said Charles to Marco. He took five steps forward, out into the open, and raised his voice. "I'm looking for the actor known as Hyacinth, legal name, Sven Rajput Nguyen."

The man with the slate jerked his head around at the sound of Charles's voice. He staggered forward three steps and then collapsed onto his knees, signing himself with the Goddess's circle of grace. "Oh, Goddess," he wept. "Oh, Goddess. I thought we would never find you."

Charles gestured to David and Marco, and they came out onto the slope, the horses and pack animals behind them. Light rose in the defile. The sun had come up, although it had not yet breached the high walls to glare down on them directly. Hyacinth struggled to his feet, ran forward, and threw himself prostrate on the gravel in front of Charles.

The first thing David noticed, even from two meters away, was the smell. Hyacinth stank like he hadn't had a bath in months, or even changed his clothes.

Charles knelt and raised the young man up gently. Behind, by the tent, the jaran rider stood and watched, his expression guarded. He did not sheathe his saber.

"I knew that if we kept riding north, we'd come to you. I knew you wouldn't abandon us. I told Yevgeni that you'd rescue us. Oh, Goddess, why couldn't you have heard the transmitter? Maybe you could have saved Valye." Hyacinth babbled on, one grimy hand gripping the sleeve of Charles's shirt as if he never meant to let it go-Marco walked up beside them and pried Hyacinth loose. "You look the worse for the wear," he said mildly, letting go of the other man as soon as he had freed Charles.

"I hate this planet," said Hyacinth with a hatred so implacable that his tone sent a shiver down David's back. "I want to go home."

"I think," said Charles, "that we can grant your wish. What about your friend? What's his name?

Yevgeni?"

"Yevgeni Usova." Hyacinth turned. "Yevgeni! Come here. You must meet the duke."

The other man obeyed, but he approached cautiously, though he sheathed his saber. "The duke?"

Yevgeni halted six paces from Charles and regarded him measuringly. He was of the dark-haired strain of the jaran, David noted, with a blunt nose and brown eyes. He appeared marginally cleaner than Hyacinth, and he certainly didn't smell as rank.

"I mean the Prince of Jeds."

"How did you find us?" Yevgeni asked, evidently still suspicious of Charles and his little party. "Is this your entire party? Are you truly a sorcerer?"

"Yevgeni!" said Hyacinth impatiently. "I told you that we're not sorcerers."

"Then it is true that you come from a land that rests in the heavens? I know that Singers tell many strange stories, and have often visited the gods" lands, but I didn't know that you were also a Singer."

"A shaman?" Charles allowed himself a brief smile. "I'm not a shaman." He turned his bland gaze on Hyacinth. "So. What have you told him? What does he know?"

Hyacinth's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "How did you find us? You must have traced my signal. But that means—-" He caught in his breath and David tensed, waiting for the explosion. When Hyacinth spoke again, he spoke in Anglais, hard and fast. "That means you must have picked up my emergency transmission. How could you not have responded? Yevgeni's sister died because no one responded."

Charles sighed. "May I remind you that you chose exile? You knew you were putting yourself at risk.

You knew—"

"That Rhui is interdicted? Yes, I knew that. But you're here. The Company is here. That's breaking the interdiction. But I suppose that since you own this planet you can do what you damned well please!"

"Quite true. Now, how much does he know?" The timbre of Charles's voice had altered, and though he did not raise his voice at all, the words cracked over Hyacinth and reduced the young man to silence.

"You're responsible for him, now, you know," added Charles. "If he knows too much, he can't go back."

"Goddess! Don't you know anything? He can't go back anyway. His exile is permanent. Without me, he'll die."

Charles glanced at Marco. "Time?"

"Twenty-three minutes."

"Well, then," said Charles. "Take him with you."

Yevgeni edged closer to Hyacinth. David could not tell whether the young rider's proximity was meant to protect Hyacinth or to seek shelter for himself. Startled, Hyacinth gaped at Charles and then turned his head in a smooth motion to stare al Yevgeni. Yevgeni arched an eyebrow, questioning. David admired his stoic silence, his patience, his ability to stand there and hear an argument in a language he couldn't understand and simply wait it out. Or perhaps he had long since grown resigned to death, to his fate, whatever it might prove to be. But David recognized the gleam in his eyes, underlying his composure. He was in love with Hyacinth, and he trusted him.

What a fate lay in store for him.

"I could take him with me?" Hyacinth asked haltingly.

"Indeed," said Charles, "I begin to think you're going to have to take him with you. That would be the easiest solution."

"Wait. You're not taking me back to the Company?"

"How do I explain to the jaran how I found you? No. The shuttle lands in twenty-two minutes. Take down your tent. You're going with them."

"Off planet." Hyacinth shut his eyes. A look of peace smoothed his expression. "Thank you. Thank you."

"I'll help you take down the tent," said Marco. "We don't have much time."

"Hyacinth," said Yevgeni in khush, "what is happening?"

Hyacinth turned, took hold of Yevgeni's hands, and kissed him on the mouth. "We're going home.

We're leaving. You're coming with me."

Yevgeni disengaged his hands and glanced at once, sidelong, at Charles and David, as if to gauge their reaction to Hyacinth's show of affection. Marco had already walked over to the tent.

"I hope you understand," said Charles softly, to Hyacinth, "that the transition will be particularly difficult for him. He'll have no one but you. I'll arrange for a stipend for him, that much I can do, but you'll be the only person he knows. And life will seem—very strange—out there. Do you understand the burden I'm laying on you? Can you manage it?"

Hyacinth drew himself up. "I chose exile because of the burden I had already laid on him. They stripped him of his saber, of his horse, of his name, of his connection to the tribe. It's my fault he got exiled, and exile is tantamount to death in this world."

"In any world," said Charles softly. "When you come right down to it."

"Well, so I already accepted the burden. I'll promise to marry him, if that will make you trust me more."

"Do what you must. Remember, perhaps, once in a while, that the burden I carry with me always is something like the one you now bear. I'm sorry about his sister. I had no choice."

" 'll deliver all," " murmured Hyacinth.

"Ah, that's a line from The Tempest. So says Prospero, when he promises to tell the story of how he came to the island and into his powers."

Hyacinth colored, easy to see even with the dirt caking his skin. "You know the play? We were working on it when I—left."

"It's been brought to my attention."

David stifled a grin, knowing that the poor actor couldn't possibly understand Charles's convoluted sense of humor, his always clear sense of the ugly ambivalence of his situation.

"Seventeen minutes," called Marco from the tent. "What do we do with the horses?"

"The problem with meddling," said Charles under his breath, "is that for every problem you solve, you create two more."

"Rather like the Hydra in Greek mythology," offered David, realizing that it was true, that the two refugees had a dozen horses with them. "Where did you get all of them?"

"We stole some from the army," said Hyacinth. "The rest we—we took in payment for Valye's life."

He seemed about to say more. Instead, he spun and hurried away to help Marco with the tent. Yevgeni hesitated and then turned to follow him.

"Yevgeni," said Charles. The young rider turned back. "You're content to stay with him? You can return with us, to the army. Or we can leave you here."

"I can't return to the army," said Yevgeni. "I've nowhere else to go. I'm content." But the look he cast toward Hyacinth betrayed the depth of his feeling, however offhandedly he might have replied.

"Do you have any suggestions about what we might do with the horses?"

Yevgeni looked puzzled. "But surely we'll need the horses to ride?"

"No. You'll be leaving here by other means than horses."

"Not with you?"

"Not with me. I can't take the horses with me. But if I leave them here, free them—"

"I don't understand." Yevgeni shook his head. "Horses are valuable. Why would you want to loose them? And anyway, they need us to care for them. Even if we—why can't you—?" He stumbled to a halt, looking confused.

"So it begins," said Charles in Anglais. "Do you have any suggestions, David?"

David raised his hands, palms out. "Don't ask me. I'm only an engineer. I know how to saddle one, and I can ride, in a manner of speaking. Can they survive on their own in the wild? I don't know."

"You're no damned help," muttered Charles, sounding both amused and irritated. "Well, I see no choice but to let them go and hope whatever refugees live in these hills find them."

"We can't tell Nadine that we found them running loose in the hills?"

Charles gave a curt nod, and Yevgeni, dismissed, hurried away to help Hyacinth and Marco. Charles regarded David, his lips quirking up. "Do you really think she'd accept that story? She's no fool."

"She's too damned smart," murmured David, "to get stuck here on this planet. She's the one who should be leaving, not him."

"What makes you think she'd be happier out in space?"

"There's so much to know, to learn, to discover...."

"There's so much to know, learn, and discover on Rhui, too. This is a rich planet, David." He shrugged. "Well, in any case, whether in her lifetime or later, they'll begin to leave, more and more of them."

David heard an odd note in Charles's voice. "What do you mean? I thought you were going to keep the interdiction in place, so that we can maintain a protected safe house for growing and shielding the next rebellion."

"It's only a matter of time. We're already breaking the interdiction. We're already affecting their development. "Their understanding begins to swell, and the approaching tide/Will shortly fill the reasonable shores/That now lie foul and muddy." "

"It sounds so awful, put like that. Is that another line from The Tempest?"

Charles nodded. The wind came up, and a low moaning rode in on it, the dawn wind.

Only it wasn't the wind. David caught the silver glint of the shuttle, circling in. Yevgeni leapt back, his hand on his saber. Marco ran to calm the horses. Charles lifted a hand, in sign, and instead, Marco cut them all free. They scattered in fright. David ran back and pulled down the heads of the animals they'd brought, holding them in place, trying to calm them with soft words. From this distance, he watched the shuttle brake in the air and begin its descent.

Marco and Hyacinth backed up, lugging Hyacinth's gear. Yevgeni froze, unable to move as he stared at the hulk above him. What did he think? That it was a dragon? A metal bird? A sorcerer's tame devil?

A demon of the air? Hyacinth flung his rolled up tent on the ground and sprinted forward. By main force he dragged Yevgeni backward, out of the flash range. The poor man looked in shock, as well he might be.

The shuttle landed, spraying gravel and dirt. Its engines whined high, canted sharply, and then cut off.

The silence was deafening. With a pop, a hatch opened and a ramp extruded. A Chapalii male appeared.

By his mauve robes, David guessed it was the merchant Hon Echido Keinaba. He descended and came forward to bow before Charles.

Hyacinth had a hold on Yevgeni's elbow. Only by that grip did the jaran rider stay upright. His face had gone dead pale. A deep, abiding pity filled David for the young man about to be thrown into a world he had not the slightest comprehension of.

Behind Hon Echido, two stewards emerged carrying perfect replicas of the packs already on the pack animals in Soerensen's train. David was too far away to follow the conversation that ensued, but the transaction was swift. The stewards deposited the packs at Charles's feet and, at his direction, hurried back on board with Hyacinth's gear. Hon Echido bowed to Charles and retreated back up the ramp.

Hyacinth spoke rapidly and earnestly to Yevgeni. Haltingly, one stow footstep followed by another, Yevgeni allowed himself to be led. He faltered at the foot of the ramp and stared, back stiff and ramrod straight, up into the maw of the ship. He put a hand on his saber hilt. Hyacinth gestured, spoke. What a vast reservoir of trust it must take for Yevgeni to go up there—that or simple fatalism. David shook his head. Perhaps he was overestimating Nadine; not her intelligence, not her courage, not her curiosity, but her ability to absorb something so utterly outside of her experience.

Yevgeni tested the ramp with one booted foot. He threw his head back and stared up at the blue dome of the sky, seeded with clouds, tinted by the rising sun, that arched above them. Then he turned right round and looked at Charles. He said something to Hyacinth. Hyacinth started, taken aback, and then abruptly grinned and replied. To David's astonishment, the young jaran rider dropped to his knees and bowed his head toward Charles in obeisance. After a moment, he rose and without further hesitation walked with Hyacinth up the ramp and into the ship.

The hatch closed. The engines sang to life. Flame singed the earth and the shuttle rose like light into the air. It yawed, steadied, turned, and circled up. David watched as it sped on its way, winking out at last just as the sun topped the far ridge and streamed bright light into the shadowed depths of the defile.

Charles and Marco arrived, each man lugging one of the saddle packs. They threw the old ones off the pack animals and cinched on the new.

"Shall we go?" asked Charles.

"But what did he ask Hyacinth?" David demanded. "That's what decided him in the end to get on the ship."

Charles grinned, looking like the old Charles, the Charles David had gone to university with. "He asked if I was one of the ten lords attendant on Father Wind, who rules Heaven." He gathered reins into his hand and mounted.

"Well, what did Hyacinth say?"

Charles shrugged.

Marco coughed into a hand, looking sly, enjoying himself. David felt a sudden camaraderie with these two men, the simple pleasure of their company, out on this secret adventure. Charles had a spark in his eyes, of mischief, of suppressed laughter. A horse neighed in the distance.

"He said, "I and my fellows are ministers of fate." "

Which was true enough. Marco and Charles were still chuckling, but David found the quote disturbing. They rode away. Behind them, gravel and dirt lay scorched and scattered, but the first rains would obliterate all traces of the ship. Had Yevgeni truly understood that he was leaving forever? It was no less a sundering than death would have been; but Hyacinth was right, exile was death for a tribeless man like Yevgeni. He had chosen a new tribe. He had chosen to go with the ministers of fate, with the lords of heaven; he had thrown in his lot with Hyacinth's people. He was no longer jaran.

The next day, Nadine's scouts picked up seven horses and brought them into camp that night when they swung in from their rounds. Three of the animals bore the clip in their right ear that marked them as jaran horses. If Nadine thought their sudden appearance strange, if she had any theories about them at all, she did not honor David with her confidence.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Vasil discovered that he could watch as many rehearsals as he wished, as long as he stood quietiy to one side. Sometimes Ilyana came with him, but the hours wore on her, and she fled back to camp, to her mother, to her chores, to the other children. The Company usually attracted an audience, but it shifted as the day passed; no one stayed as long as he did.

He watched. There, the tall, coal-black woman paced out a recurring movement, the same action over and over again. The young man with mud-colored skin tapped at his drums, finding a pulse, working it in with the scene being rehearsed in front of him. On the platform, five of the actors sang, with their bodies, a part of the old jaran tale of the Daughter of the Sun and the first dyan. The man, Owen Zerentous—Vasil thought of him as the dyan of the Company—measured their singing from the side, where he stood with his arms folded over his chest, squinting at the actors on the platform. Now and again he spoke, or they spoke or asked a question; after that the actors would pause, shift their stances, and go back through the same part again. But always, how they spoke, how they gestured, altered subtly at these times.

Diana shone. She had the art of shining. Of the other four, Vasil could only recall the name of the man called Gwyn Jones, because Gwyn Jones was the best singer of them all. They were all fine singers.

Vasil could see that; he had seen it. Diana was particularly good. But Gwyn Jones thought so completely with his body that impulse and action became one gesture. And all trained to a pulse that the musician heard and transmitted back to them.

Owen Zerentous cocked his head to one side and abruptly turned to look at Vasil. Some thirty paces separated them, but Vasil felt that gaze beckon him. Zerentous lifted a hand. Clearly, he meant Vasil to come speak with him. Vasil walked over.

"I beg your pardon," said Zerentous politely but with a kind of detached presumption that Vasil would bow to his word, "you're Veselov, aren't you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "You've been interested in our work, I see. Perhaps you'd agree to help us for a moment."

"I'm not a Singer—" Vasil began, but Zerentous had already pulled his attention away from him.

"Diana, call him up to you as if to an audience."

Diana did not need to speak. She lifted a hand imperiously, as the Daughter of the Sun would do, should Vasil ever have the misfortune to meet her. The dyan who had fallen in love with the Sun's daughter had died an untimely death, of course; it was always dangerous to attract the attention of the gods. And yet, although the Daughter of the Sun beckoned him, she was also Diana. She was both. By such skill, by her ability to be both herself and the Sun's daughter, did she show her mastery of her art.

Vasil clambered up on to the platform and approached her, eyes lowered. Three paces from her he stopped. He gave her a glance sidelong, knowing he appeared to advantage with his eyes cast down, and then bent his head slightly, just slightly enough to show that he knew the respect due to a woman but without demeaning himself in any way, knowing his own power. They watched him, the actors and Zerentous, and whatever jaran audience lingered beyond. He enjoyed that they watched him.

"There," said Zerentous from the ground. "Did you get that, Gwyn? That's what you're missing. It's the modesty without losing the strength. Thank you, Veselov." Dismissed, Vasil retreated back down off the platform. "So, is it because she's a goddess that you approach her so humbly, or because she's a foreign woman?"

"She's a woman," replied Vasil, puzzled by the question. "Whether she's the Sun's daughter or a mortal woman makes no difference."

"Ah." Zerentous nodded, but the reaction mystified Vasil. "Run it again."

As Vasil watched, the actors sang again—no, they didn't actually sing, they played their parts. They acted. This time, Gwyn Jones imitated Vasil's own language of the body, his gestures, his stance, his lowered eyes, so expertly that Vasil was amazed.

"Better," said Zerentous. "But now make it your own, Gwyn."

They went on. After a bit, even standing so close, Vasil realized that they had forgotten him. Perhaps Zerentous was more like an etsana, truly, since an etsana often only noticed those of her people whom she had a special use for or those who shirked their duties. A dyan must know where each of his men rode, and where and how strongly they wielded their weapons that day. They called Zerentous a khaja word; director, that was it. Beyond, at the fringe of the Company camp, Ilyana appeared. She hopped impatiently, balancing first on one foot, then on the other, and when she saw that she had her father's attention, she beckoned to him. A summons.

He sighed and retreated. To one side of the platform, the tall woman paused and acknowledged his leaving with a nod of her head. Her notice heartened him. They had felt his presence. That was something.

"What is it, Yana?" He bent to kiss her.

"Mother Veselov wants to see you. Mama sent me to fetch you." She tilted her head back and examined him with that clear-eyed sight that characterized her. Vasil suspected that she knew very well the kind of man he was, but that she loved him anyway. "They're not pleased with you," she added by way of warning him.

"Oh?" That would have to be mended. It wouldn't take much time. He took her hand in his and they set off together, back toward the Veselov camp.

Yana shrugged. "You spend too much time here."

"Do you think so?"

She had a bright face, unscarred by sulkiness. Like her mother, she had learned to accept what life brought her; unlike her mother, she never seemed resigned to her fate, and she did not let the jars and jolting of life bother her. Where her little brother Valentin saw only the clouds, she saw the sun waiting to break through. Everyone liked her; she was, as she ought to be, a charming, brilliant child. "Well, it isn't so much what I think that matters, Papa, it's what Mother Veselov thinks."

"But / care what you think, little one."

They walked ten steps in silence. "Is it true that, a long time ago, that you and Bakhtiian—?" She faltered and gave him a sidewise glance, gauging his reaction.

Anger blazed up. How dare anyone disturb her with such rumors? But he did not let his anger show.

"Who has said this?"

She shrugged again. "Sometimes I hear things. Once, someone teased Valentin with it, and Valentin just got angry and cried, so I had to protect him."

"What did you do?"

"I told him—the boy, not Valentin—that his mother was as ugly as an old cow, mat his father was as stupid as a khaja soldier, and then I gave him a bloody lip."

Amused, Vasil allowed himself a brief smile. "Well, I suppose that served the purpose, but really, Yana, outright insult is never as effective as more subtle methods. Who was the boy?"

She rolled her eyes. "I'm not going to tell you that! I can take care of myself. I always have, you know."

The words stung him. "Of course you can take care of yourself, but I'm here now, little one."

"Yes. But you might leave again."

He flinched. It hurt, the matter-of-fact way she spoke. He stopped her. "I won't leave you or your mother or Valentin. Ever again. I promise." He gripped her by the shoulders to make sure she understood. He could not bear for her not to believe in him. She had to.

For an instant he thought she looked skeptical, but it wasn't so. Like her mother, she must love him more than anyone else. She smiled her loyal little smile and stretched up to kiss him. "Yes, Father," she said.

At Arina's tent, he had to wait outside for a time, cooling his heels, before Arina's young sister admitted him. Karolla sat beside Anna, as she had for ten days now; Karolla had practically lived in Arina's great tent ever since Anna had been carried back to camp on a litter, after being wounded in that skirmish. These days she paid more attention to Anna than she did to her own husband, and every now and then, when he thought about it, he resented it.

Vasil knelt beside the etsana. Anna gestured with her right hand. Ilyana and Karolla left the tent, leaving Vasil alone with his cousin. She was as pale as the moon and scarcely more substantial than the high clouds that streak the sky on a summer's day. But he recognized the set of her mouth and settled down for a good scolding.

"Vasil, I am minded as etsana of this tribe to ask the Elders to reconsider your election as dyan. I have never heard any complaint about your actions as dyan, but in truth, these days, Anton is dyan in everything but name, and I refuse to allow you to continue to hold the honor if you don't also accept the responsibility."

He bowed his head. Gods, how he hated these discussions.

"Have you nothing to say?"

He stared at his hands, which lay clasped on his thighs. Then he wondered if, by turning his right hand palm up, underneath the shield of his left hand, the arrangement might express a different emotion.

Except the fingers of his right hand stuck out then, from under the left. Perhaps if he curled the right hand into a fist, hidden under the looser curl of his left hand—

"You seem distracted, Vasil." Though soft, her voice was sharp.

"I beg your pardon." He lifted his gaze. She lay propped on pillows with her braided hair snaking down along the curve of her tunic almost to her waist. His dear cousin. She had always supported him.

He was glad she had not died.

"I'll permit you a few days to consider," Anna added. "Come speak to me once you've made up your mind."

This was the time to insinuate himself into her good graces again; he knew it with every fiber of his being. But he wanted to go back and watch the acting. He nodded, allowed himself to be dismissed, and left the tent.

Karolla waited for him outside. "Well?" she demanded. Then she took hold of his arm and led him aside. "Vasil!

You've been infected by some madness. She's going to make Anton dyan again."

"What of it? I never wanted to be dyan."

"You did once. When you came back to the army."

"Oh, that—" He broke off. When he came back to the army, he had been sure that Hya would give in to him eventually, just as he always had before.

"Oh, that!" echoed Karolla scathingly. "She'll install her own brother as dyan instead of you. That's how far you've fallen. What will you do then? Become a common rider again?"

"A common rider? I think not."

"If not ride, then what? Why should Anna keep you in camp if you do nothing? Where will you go?

Where will we go? You have no place here, Vasil, if you're not dyan. Or perhaps she'll take pity on you and allow you to ride in Kirill's new jahar, the one Bakhtiian is granting him. They say he's to ride south past the mountains and the great river, or east on the Golden Road, to discover which lands offer their submission freely to Bakhtiian and which must face his wrath."

He recoiled. "Ride under Kirill's command? Never."

"Then what? What, Vasil? Gods, you're of no use to anyone but yourself. You never think of anyone but yourself!"

"Karolla!" This was too much. Karolla could not doubt him. He grasped her hands and drew them up to his lips. "Never say so, my heart. You are—"

She wrenched herself away. "Don't embarrass me further by acting this way in public. What do you intend to do?" Quite suddenly, her eyes filled with tears, but she smothered them by wiping at her skin ruthlessly, so hard that it surely must hurt her. "Or do you still think Bakhtiian will take you in?11

Tess, pregnant, had a glow about her that made her look almost beautiful, and Vasil admired the way she moved with a rotund grace unimpaired by her swelling belly. Karolla, pregnant, simply developed blotchy skin, and she waddled already, often with one hand on her back.

Vasil folded his hands together and regarded his wife with what he hoped was a measured expression.

"I won't do anything rash, Karolla. I promise you that. If I must speak with Bakhtiian, then I'll do so."

Immediately he saw that he had said the wrong thing. Her mouth puckered up. She bit at her knuckles.

Then she spun and walked away from him. She rolled more, a rocking, ungainly gait. Valentin darted out from behind the screen of a tent and, throwing a single hostile glance back at his father, grabbed a handful of her skirt into a hand and clung to his mother, walking along beside her. Vasil knew he should go after them. Karolla always gave in to his coaxing. But right now he felt—empty more than anything.

He turned and walked back out to the edge of camp. A jahar riding in blocked his path. He stopped to let them by, and there, riding at her ease at the front of the line, sat his newly-widowed sister. She caught sight of him and as quickly, dismissively, her gaze flicked away again. Her fine, handsome face was disfigured forever by the mark of a marriage that no longer fettered her. Petya had died twelve days ago, of wounds suffered in the battle to halt the Karkand governor's flight. Vasil himself had supervised the burning of Petya's body, two days ride out from the besieged city, in marshland, his spirit sent back to the gods along with those of twenty other riders from the Veselov jahar. His saber and his clothes—

those not ruined by blood—Vasil returned to the one of Petya's three sisters who traveled with the Orzhekov camp; she had wept copiously. Vera had not mourned with one single tear, not even beside the pyre. Without the least sign of grief, she had watched her husband's body burn. The next day, it was her arrow shot that had brought Karkand's governor down at last, mired as he was by that time in boggy ground, his horse blown, his last loyal followers dead or straggling behind him. But even then, she had shown no emotion except perhaps disappointment that the chase was over.

The jahar passed him, and he hurried away back across camp. But by the time he came to the Company's camp, they had finished for the day. Already the sun sank below the far rim of hills. A sudden, restless discontent seized

Vasil. Its grip, like a strong hand, clutched hard at his chest. He did not want to go back to his tribe.

Nothing held him here. He had, indeed, no place, no place to go, no place where he truly belonged.

In time, his wandering led him on a spiraling path in to the heart of the camp, to the Orzhekov encampment. Guards challenged him. He used Tess's name like a talisman, and none barred his way.

By now it was dark. He hesitated, past the innermost ring of guards, and instead traced a route that led by discreet shadows and hidden lines of sight around to the back of Tess's tent. Out beyond, at Sonia Orzhekov's tent, laughter and talking and singing swelled out on the night air. Back here, silence reigned. He took his chance, and snuck in, ducking down, crawling, by the little back entrance that Tess had not sewn shut, despite her threat, past the tent wall, sliding out beyond the inner wall of heavy tapestries into the inner chamber of Tess's tent.

A lantern burned. By its light, Vasil saw Ilya seated beside his bed. Ilya twisted around to stare. Vasil settled into a crouch, waiting, waiting for the reaction, for the burning anger, for the sharp sweetness of Ilya's glance, on him.

Instead, Ilya rose gracefully to his feet and touched two fingers to his lips: silence. There, at his feet, lay Tess, deep asleep on her side, her hair spilled out on the pillows, her shoulders bare above the blankets. Ilya walked quietly around her and paused by the entrance flap that led to the outer chamber, then vanished behind it. Vasil had no choice but to follow him.

"What do you want?" asked Ilya in a reasonable tone when Vasil emerged into the outer chamber. He stood at his ease with one hand brushing the khaja table that crowded the far end of the space.

Vasil prowled the chamber, and Ilya let him, watching him as he touched each item: the carved chest, the cabinet, the table and chair, the nested bronze cauldrons and the bronze stove, a knife, the lush tapestries lining the walls, the two ceramic cups and bronze beaker set on the table. All of it, an odd intermingling of jaran and khaja; not one piece of it out of place by a fingerbreadth.

"You've nothing rich here." Vasil lifted one of the ceramic cups. In the dim light, he traced the simple floral pattern that twined around the cup.

"I don't need riches. Heaven has granted me its favor. The gold I leave for the tribes under my command."

Vasil pressed the cup against his own cheek, as if its ribboned surface, held so often by Ilya or by Tess, could whisper secrets to him. "I don't understand you." He said it softly, provocatively.

Standing mostly in shadow, still Ilya burned. Unlike the actors, who channeled light through them and shone with its reflected glow, Ilya was the light.

He regarded Vasil gravely, by no sign betraying the least dismay at Vasil's presence. "No. Years ago I thought you did, but now I wonder."

Vasil set down the cup. It made a hollow tap as it met the surface of the table. "You never doubted me before."

"I loved you once, Vasil, and never doubted you then because I never saw you clearly. I love you still, in that memory. But it is ended."

"Ended! For you, perhaps, or so you say now, when it's convenient for you to do so."

"We've had this discussion a hundred times. I see no point in continuing it now. It is ended."

"Then what was it you gave me, that night in this tent? That wasn't love?"

Ilya moved, coming around the table. He stopped not even a full arm's length from Vasil, and his closeness was like balm. He lifted a hand and brushed his fingers down Vasil's cheek. His touch was painfully sweet. Then, on an exhalation of breath, he leaned forward and kissed Vasil once, briefly, on the mouth. And pulled away, and stepped back.

"That is all it was, the memory of love. Eleven years ago, I gave you up because I thought I had to. I

—" He broke off. "You don't understand what I did. If you knew— No, never mind that now. The gods have their own way of punishing our arrogance. Only you must understand, that I deliberately sacrificed you, Vasil, in the Year of the Hawk. That year."

The ceremony of exile. Ilya had spared him one thing alone, that day those many years ago, and that was the audience of the entire tribe. He and his aunt had performed the ceremony of exile in front of the men of the jahar. Vasil had always thought it the mark of Ilya's love, that Ilya had shielded him from the greater humiliation. Now he did not know what to think. He could not bear that Ilya could stand here and speak to him so evenly, so calmly. Gods, was it true? Did Ilya no longer love him? He discovered that his hands shook, and he closed them over the back of the chair to steady himself.

"I'm not sure you ever truly loved me, anyway," Ilya added, grinding dirt into the fresh wound. "Not as love is true, caring more for the other person, for who she is, in and of herself, than for what she brings you."

"By what right do you stand there and judge me? How can you know? Or is this by way of convincing yourself that you never truly loved me either?"

"No, I loved you. That memory at least is true."

"And by such scraps I must feed myself now? That is generous of you, Ilyakoria."

"Keep your voice down. I don't want to wake up Tess."

"Because you don't want her to find us here together?"

"No, because she's tired. Gods, Vasil, Tess would be the last person to condemn us for being here together. As you must know." Outside, a bell rang three times, softly. Ilya wrenched his gaze away from Vasil and listened for a moment, head cocked to one side. "Send them in," he said in a clear, cool voice.

Vasil knew an instant of such utter despair that he thought his legs would give out beneath him. Only his grip on the chair held him upright. It could be anyone, coming in to speak to Bakhtiian. Had Vasil been just another visitor—a dyan, a rider, any man from the tribes— Ilya would feel no embarrassment in being found with him in the privacy of his wife's tent. Another man might sit in conversation with Bakhtiian to all hours of the night, without it being the least bit improper. And if Ilya was now as willing to be found here alone with Vasil as he would be if his companion was Yaroslav Sakhalin or Kirill Zvertkov or Niko Sibirin or Anton Veselov—gods, what if it was true? What if Ilya no longer loved him?

The entrance flap swept aside and two figures came in.

"Dina!" Ilya started forward, amazed, and embraced his niece. "Have you just ridden in? Where is the prince?"

"About two days behind us, with the pack train. I rode ahead. Uncle." She hesitated. She broke away from him and turned to look directly at Vasil. Her eyebrows lifted.

Under her scathing, skeptical gaze, Vasil flushed.

"Who is this?" demanded Bakhtiian.

"I see I've come at just the right time. Where is Tess?"

"Sleeping. Come here. What's your name?"

Out from behind Nadine emerged a boy. He looked to be a few years older than Ilyana. With his black hair and dark eyes and narrow chin, he bore a striking resemblance to Nadine Orzhekov. Except that Nadine was not old enough to have a child that age. And her mother and younger brother had both been killed the same year Ilya had exiled Vasil.

"Vasha, this is Bakhtiian. Pay your respects."

The boy's chin trembled, but he drew himself up bravely enough. "I'm Vassily Kireyevsky. My mother was Inessa Kireyevsky."

"Inessa Kireyevsky! Gods." For a moment, Ilya simply stared at the boy.

As well he might. It was hardly an auspicious introduction. Vasil remembered Inessa as a nasty, selfish little beast who had foolishly believed she could make Ilya love her more than he loved Vasil.

For an instant, Ilya's gaze met Vasil's. Oh, yes, they both recalled those days well enough.

Ilya turned a piercing gaze on his niece. "Perhaps you can explain, Dina. Why are you traveling with Inessa Kireyevsky's son?"

"His mother is dead. Mother Kireyevsky gave the boy into my hands, and I promised—I promised to bring him to you, and to see that he was safe."

"Why?"

Vasil watched the boy, who watched Bakhtiian. More than watched. The boy stared greedily at Ilya from under lowered lashes, just as a man weak with thirst stares at a cup of water being borne up to him.

Nadine smiled, looking wickedly pleased with herself. She reminded Vasil much more of her grandmother than of her mother, her mother Nataliia had taken after Petre Sokolov, who was a mild-tempered, even-going man, rather than Alyona Orzhekov. Vasil had never liked Ilya's mother, and he didn't much like the look in Nadine's eyes now.

"They didn't want him. His mother never married."

"But how could she have a child, then?" asked Vasil, surprised. A moment later, he felt the movement behind him.

"Isn't Inessa Kireyevsky the one you lay with out on the grass, under the stars?"

Without turning, Ilya replied. "You've a good memory, my wife."

"For some things." Tess came forward. Her calves and feet were bare, but a silken robe of gold covered the rest of her. The fine sheen of the fabric caught the light, shimmering as she moved forward through the chamber. With her unbound brown hair falling over her shoulders and the high curve of her belly under the glistening silk, she looked doubly exotic and nothing at all like a jaran woman.

"You're the khaja princess," said the boy abruptly, jerking his gaze from Bakhtiian to her.

"Yes. What's your name again? Vasha?"

"Vassily Kireyevsky."

"Well met, Nadine." Nadine hurried forward, and the two women kissed.

"You look as big as a tent," said Nadine.

"Thank you. You look sly. If Inessa Kireyevsky never married, then whose child is he? How old are you, Vasha?"

"I was born in the Year of the Hawk."

"And you've no father? Did your mother never marry?"

He hung his head in shame. "My mother never married. That's why my cousins wished to be rid of me."

No wonder, reflected Vasil, a little disgusted. What place was there in a tribe for a child who had no father? The boy watched Ilya from under lowered eyelids, gauging his reaction.

"Inessa never married?" asked Ilya. "I find that hard to believe."

"Evidently it's true," said Nadine. She laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, a surprisingly protective gesture. "They didn't want him, Ilya, and they treated him poorly enough. I thought he'd be better off here. Especially since Inessa Kireyevsky claimed up until the day she died that you were the boy's father."

"How can I be his father? I never married her."

"Oh, my God," said Tess, sounding astonished and yet also enlightened. "Vasha, come here." Like a child used to obeying, the boy slid out from under Nadine's hand and walked over to Tess. Tess examined him in silence. And it was silent, ail of a sudden. Not one of them spoke. They scarcely seemed to breathe. After a bit, she tilted his chin back with one finger and frowned down at his slender face. "It could be. There's a strong enough resemblance, once you look for it."

"But, Tess—"

"Don't be stupid, Ilya. How many times must I tell you? If you lie with a woman, there's a chance you'll get her pregnant whether you're her husband or not." She lifted her hand to touch the boy's dark hair. "Vasha, do you know why your mother never married?"

He looked back over his shoulder, at Ilya. "Because she thought that Bakhtiian was coming back to marry her. But he never did. And she never wanted anyone else." Then he flushed, as if he expected a scolding for his presumption. Ilya wore no expression at all. Nadine smirked.

Tess sighed. "Well, it's possible. I'm beginning to think it's true. And anyway, I've been waiting for this."

"Waiting for this?" demanded Nadine. "What do you mean?"

"Surely this was inevitable?" Tess regarded the others, puzzled. "You don't think so?" Her hand traced a path down the boy's neck and came to rest on his shoulder. He seemed to melt into the shelter she offered him.

Vasil struggled to make sense of what Tess had said.

Certainly, a man might get his lover pregnant—it was possible, but it went against every custom of the jaran to consider that man the child's father; a woman's husband was the father of her children. So it was; so had it always been; so had the gods decreed at the beginning of the world.

Ilya made a sudden, choked noise in his throat. "Gods, I didn't think she meant it when she told me she was pregnant. What woman would want to get pregnant without a husband?"

"A woman who wanted you very badly. Is it just a coincidence that he's named Vassily?"

Ilya flushed. The dim light covered the stain to his skin, but his body, the sudden stiffness in his shoulders, the way his right hand curled around the edge of the table and then let go, transmitted the emotion in the gesture. "I thought she was joking," he said roughly. "How was I to know she meant it?"

Vasil let go of the chair, only to find that his hands ached, he had gripped it so hard for so long. "Do you mean to say that you told her to name the child after me?" he asked in a hoarse voice.

The boy flashed an astonished glance toward Vasil and then sidled farther into the shelter of Tess's arm.

"Be that as it may," said Tess, "I think you did the right thing, Dina. Vasha. Is that what you wish? To be our son?"

The boy gaped at her. Vasil scarcely knew what to think.

"Tess!" Ilya looked astounded. "We can't take him in. That's absurd. I'll raise no objection if Nadine wishes to foster him, but—"

"This isn't your choice to make, Ilya. Or perhaps I should say, you already made the choice. You lay with her. She bore a child."

"But, Tess—"

"Why should she lie? For all those years, why should she lie? Look at him. Gods, Ilya, just look at him. He's your son."

"But—"

"Not by jaran law, it's true. But by the laws of Jeds,

whether bastard or not, this boy would be recognized as your son."

"This isn't Jeds, and neither are the laws of Jeds my laws."

"That may be, but by the laws of Jeds, and by the laws of Erthe, I acknowledge him as your son, and by that connection, as my son as well. And by the law of the jaran, by my stating it in front of witnesses, it becomes true."

As though felled by a bolt from heaven, the boy dropped to his knees in front of Tess and began to cry. Dya took a halting step toward them, stopped, took another step, and froze.

"You think it's true, don't you?" Vasil murmured, absorbing this knowledge from Ilya's face, which, the gods knew, he could read well enough. Yet how could it be true? And how could they take in a shamed child and yet reject him? A hand touched his elbow. He jumped, startled.

"I think we should go, don't you?" asked Nadine with a falsely sweet smile on her face. She took him with a firm grip on the elbow and gave him no choice but to go with her.

Outside, the two guards looked amazed to see him emerge with her, as well they might, since they hadn't seen him go in. She led Vasil past them without a word, on into the night.

"How can it be true?" he demanded of her.

"Veselov, just because the jaran have one set of laws doesn't mean that the khaja hold to the same set of laws. Gods, though, I didn't know what Tess would do. For all I knew, she'd want Vasha strangled."

"Then you believe it, that the boy is Ilya's son? Ilya never had any intention of marrying Inessa Kireyevsky."

"I suppose you'd know. What were you doing in there tonight, anyway?"

"That's none of your concern!"

Nadine snorted. "I could make it my concern, if I wanted to, but I don't. Well, go on, Veselov. Get. Go home. I don't think you need my escort."

Yes, definitely, Nadine Orzhekov reminded him of Ilya's mother, except that Nadine didn't seem to have the same ruthless ambition. Vasil hadn't been sorry when Alyona Orzhekov had been murdered; neither had he been surprised. Only, of course, the result of that awful massacre had been his own exile.

Sometimes, when you wished too hard for something, you paid a bitter price.

Nadine left him standing there, just strode away, leaving him in the darkness. Stars blazed above, the lanterns of heaven. The moon hung low, as sharp as a saber's curve against the night sky. Far in the distance a scattering of lights marked the twin hills of the khaja city, torches raised on the battlements.

For a long time, Vasil simply waited.

After a long while, the stars wheeling on their blind path above him, he realized that he might wait out here all night and through the day and on into night again, and the one person he most wished for would make no rendezvous with him, here or anywhere. Like a weight, the knowledge dragged at him. Like a sundering force, it severed forever the dream from the truth. Ilya would not ever again meet him as anything or anyone, except as Bakhtiian, Vasil thought that he might just as well die as live without hope.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Out on the plains, the jaran army had not seemed so threatening to David. But now he had ridden along its wake; he had seen the Habakar countryside devastated by its passing. Here on a ridge looking far down at the broad fertile valley that harbored the city of Karkand, the tents of the jaran camp covered the lands surrounding the city like some ominous stain. Like an amoeba engulfing its prey. Like a gloved hand crushing a delicate flower within its fist.

"Pretty impressive," said Maggie, sitting astride her horse next to him. "You look philosophical."

"I'm waxing poetic. What in hell are we doing here anyway, Mags? This is insane."

"David." She hesitated. "Are you sure you're—coping well with Nadine's marriage? You've seemed rather moody since it happened, and you're usually pretty even-tempered. It's one of your wonderful qualities."

"Thank you." Luckily, Charles called the party forward at that moment, and the distraction served to get Maggie off his back. They rode down into the valley, under lowering clouds, only to find a welcoming committee. A group of about one hundred riders waited for them beyond the outskirts of the camp. A gold banner danced in the rising wind. Bakhtiian rode out to greet Charles, Tess on his left, Cara and Ursula on his right. Charles took it all coolly enough. He smiled at Tess. He nodded at Ursula.

He met Cara's gaze, and whatever they read of each other satisfied them both.

Then Charles allowed Bakhtiian to escort him to a site suitable to a prince of his eminence. Bakhtiian had evidently set aside a prime bit of land for this purpose just outside the main camp but close to both the hospital encampment and the Bharentous Repertory Company. An awning awaited them, as well as children from the Orzhekov tribe bearing food and drink. Bakhtiian dismounted and went at once to assist Tess from her horse. Charles dismounted. David and the rest of his party followed his lead.

Out of the swirl of activity, Tess created order. Pillows appeared. Riders took command of the pack train, unloading the animals. The change in Tess amazed David. Her entire shape had altered, of course, though she didn't look awkward with it but really rather beautiful. She approached Charles and hugged him, and then stepped back. Charles actually broke; he actually grinned and rested his right hand, tentatively, on her abdomen. He shook his head, still smiling, and removed his hand.

"Oh, thank you," retorted Tess, although Charles had not spoken a word. "Laugh at me." She slid a hand over her pregnant belly, stroking it. The gesture looked habitual.

"No, no," said Charles, "you look very—"

"Very rotund? Very fecund? Very abundant? I feel like a ship. No, a ship is too agile. I feel like a barge. Cara assures me that with two months to go, I'm nowhere close to being big yet." She kissed Charles on either cheek, in the jaran style, her hands on his shoulders. "But I'm glad to see you."

She looked glad to see him. Charles looked pleased. Pleased! Charles, who rarely showed any emotion anymore. David had never seen the two of them look so at ease with each other, not since Tess was a child and their parents were still alive. Evidently, pregnancy agreed with Tess.

Evidently, it agreed with Bakhtiian as well. He chatted easily with Cara and Marco, letting Tess and Charles have their little reunion in what privacy such a public place could afford. Perhaps he believed that now that his wife was pregnant with his child, there was no risk that she would ever leave him.

In Anglais, Charles gave Tess a brief account of Hyacinth. Then he turned away from Tess to address Bakhtiian. "I'm pleased to see you as well, Bakhtiian. There are matters I think you and I need to discuss."

What the hell? What game was Charles playing now?

Tess blinked. Cara arched her eyebrows. Marco frowned. Bakhtiian took it coolly enough. "I trust," he replied, "that you had a fruitful expedition to Morava. My niece tells me that a party of khepelli traders traveled all the way in from the coast to meet you there."

"Yes. I've managed to take one of their trading houses under my protection. With their help, I learned a few things that might be of interest to you as well, and might prove to be of benefit to both of us."

"Charles," began Tess. She looked white. She looked terrified.

"But," said Charles, "I'd like to have a few words with Owen and Ginny first, and perhaps the rest of the afternoon with Cara. We'll need some time to set up our camp as well. And tonight, a small celebration of our reunion."

"Of course," said Bakhtiian smoothly. "Children." He rounded them up ruthlessly. David noticed for the first time the boy, Vasha, among their numbers. The child stuck next to Sonia Orzhekov's daughter, Katerina, and he looked nervous. As well he might. What was he doing with the Orzhekov tribe? They trooped off, Bakhtiian herding them. A rider took his horse.

Tess lingered. "Charles!"

"I know what I'm doing."

"Well, you'd better fill me in."

"I will, Tess. I have quite a bit to say to you, in fact, and I'll need you in on the council as well. Now go on."

She hesitated. Then she looked at Cara, who had waited patiently through all this. Jo and Rajiv and Maggie had already retreated to the gear, sorting it out.

"It's true," said Cara quietly, not without humor, "that we might like a few moments to ourselves, little one."

Tess threw up her hands in exasperation. "You aren't going to do anything rash, are you?"

Charles blinked. "Do I ever?"

"You're impossible. Hello, David." Tess turned her back on her brother and came over to David, and kissed him.

"You're looking well."

"Thank you. I'm feeling well. You're not looking bad yourself. Is it true mat you and Dina—oh, never mind. I'm sorry I mentioned it. I don't think Feodor Grekov is a good match for her, either. She doesn't respect him." "Tess, I'd realty prefer not to speak about it." "I'm sorry. Truly, I'm sorry, if you feel so strongly." She rested a hand on his shoulder, companionably. "And I have a rather urgent request for you." "For me?"

"Is it remotely possible that you can design—I don't know—within the limits of the interdiction, some kind of decent plumbing? Something you can teach the army engineers to build at every campsite?

Something better than a ditch? Something not too difficult to build, not too time-consuming, but, God, I want something like the Company's necessary. I go over there every chance I get. And showers. Hot showers. Is there any chance you can devise—? It's not that they're dirty, the jaran. They're not. They're scrupulously clean in most ways. But still, the conditions...." "And you pregnant." "Oh, tell me you understand." "Not about being pregnant, but I can sympathize," "Oh, David." She hugged him, as well as she could given her girth. "You're an angel."

"I haven't promised to do anything yet." "But you will. You have to. You're an engineer, after all."

At that inopportune moment, Cara paused beside them. "And that reminds me, David, I need a better sanitation system for the hospital. Surely between that brain of yours and your modeler you can design

—"

"Oy vey." David flung up his hands palm out as if they could ward him, "Let me breathe a moment.

Let me set up the camp. Then I'll see. Cara, why don't you and Charles just go? I'll supervise the camp setup."

"Will you? Thank you, David. It is good to see you, you know. Charles and Marco are going over to the Company later, to give them the news about Hyacinth. I'll see you tonight, then." She and Charles left. Tess left. David got to work with the others, and with practiced ease, and the addition of Ursula, they set up the camp before nightfall.

After weeks journeying at an inhuman pace on horseback across the endless, changing landscape of Rhui, David found himself relieved to come to a temporary halt, even in the primitive conditions of a siege. Karkand rose before them, made tiny by distance, but real, there to be touched. The palace of Morava loomed in the back of his mind like an illusion, seen on the horizon, coming no closer.

"Here, you old slug," said Maggie, jostling David where he sat, sore, tired, and grateful, in a chair,

"help me hang lanterns all around here. Don't forget that we're having a party tonight."

"Goddess in Heaven." David dragged himself up. Maggie paused to rub his shoulders, and he sighed and drooped.

"Now don't you sit down again, or I'll stop." "Don't stop. Why the actors? All that noise." "Who knows what lurks in the heart of Charles? You, better than I. He has a position as prince to maintain, you know. Aren't princes meant to give parties? I don't know."

"It's true Charles is often at his best in a crowd. Better than me, certainly."

"You shy thing." She removed her hands from his back. "Here, now, give me a hand."

"Mags, you're an angel. Remind me never to ride that far that fast again. In fact, remind me never to travel any distance in anything other than a skimmer or a shuttle, would you?"

She snorted. "What, you didn't think it was romantic?"

"Not to my thighs and my rump it wasn't." They lit and hung lanterns at the four corners of the awning that thrust out in front of Charles's tent. Rajiv emerged from his tent and helped them. Jo and Ursula had gone to the hospital camp with the new equipment for Cara. As evening fell, Charles returned from his peregrinations, alone.

"Well?" asked David. "Did you give Owen and Ginny the news? How did they take it?"

"They were relieved. Owen said, "perhaps he'll be a better actor for the experience." "

"No! He would. The man's a lunatic."

"Oh, I don't know. He's not unlike me."

"Or Cara, or any of you obsessive types. Where's Marco?"

Charles shrugged. "Marco seemed distracted. I'm not sure whether we'll see him again tonight or not."

"What, already off tomming it?"

"David, this time I'm beginning to wonder if there's more to it than that."

"What? You're not serious?"

But David could see that Charles was, indeed, serious. David followed him inside his tent, where he removed two bottles of whiskey from his precious horde. Only one bottle remained. "I don't know. Help me keep an eye on him, will you?"

David simply grunted in reply, too astonished by the thought of Marco seriously distracted by a woman to think of any words to express himself with. The tent flap swept aside behind them, and Tess and Cara walked in.

"So it's true?" Tess was saying to Cara in Anglais. "I'm not surprised, I suppose, but still, to have it confirmed by your tests... ."

"To have what confirmed?" asked Charles, turning around.

Cara glanced at Tess, as if for her permission to speak, but Tess went on. "The boy, Vasha. He's Ilya's illegitimate son by a woman he knew years ago. Cara has confirmed it by comparing VNTR regions."

"Vasha!" David gaped. "So that's why he looked like Dina. But, Tess, I saw him with the other Orzhekov children—"

"Well, of course, I took him in! Poor child. His mother is dead and his relatives didn't want him, which is no surprise, considering what a disgrace it is to have no father."

"But he has a—"

"Not by their laws. But because I adopted him as my son, then Ilya, who's his biological father, becomes his accepted father because Ilya is my husband." Then she hesitated. "Wasn't it the right thing to do?"

"I think so," said Cara firmly.

Charles thought about it for a while. "For the boy, certainly, I should think. Can he inherit?"

"Only through my line."

"Ah. Of course."

"But you know, Charles, the jaran have changed already, in little ways, since I've come to them. Who knows where it will stop? He's a very intense boy. Quiet, but that may just be the way he learned to survive. Time will tell how ambitious he is."

"But what about your child, Tess?" David asked.

She blinked at him. A moment later understanding flooded her features, and she chuckled. "What? I need to protect my children's inheritance rights by murdering him? How very Byzantine of you, David."

She hesitated, appeared about to say something more, then did not.

But, of course, Tess's children had three inheritances to choose from: Rhui, Earth, and the Empire.

Although their ability to inherit Charles's position was problematic, to say the least. Tess caught his eye and for that instant they spoke without words. David did not envy her her dilemma and yet he could not feel sorry for her either, not really, since she had not only chosen her own fate but seemed content with it.

She turned to Charles. "What happened at Morava?"

Charles unfolded a canvas chair. "Sit down. David, can you go outside and head off any inquiries for

—what?— ten minutes? I want Tess and Cara to hear the basics now, so they can think about it before our council. Which I'd like to hold—oh, not tomorrow. The day after."

David nodded and retreated. He paused by the entrance to listen.

"... and we do have the resources. We have Rhui entire."

"But the interdiction?"

"Will hold. It could take decades for us to process the information and to put a plan into place. The underlying structure, the foundation, has to be as strong as—as bedrock. It has to be invulnerable. So in a sense, Rhui is safer this way—"

"For now."

"How long do you really think the interdiction can stay in place? I can only hold off the inevitable for so long."

"No, you're right. I'm just being selfish. What about the dates on the Mushai, again? My God, Charles, I realize now that I must have learned simply one line of their language, that I was learning—what?—

the male language, or something. It's like turning a corner in a hallway only to find that you've stepped into a whole "nother world. Don't you realize that I'm perfectly placed to learn both the male and the female side, if that is in fact how their culture is structured?"

"Oh, yes," said Charles in his cool voice. "I realize it."

David slipped outside. Almost ran into Bakhtiian, who stood a meter from the entrance, listening.

David choked back an exclamation.

"I beg your pardon," said Bakhtiian in a tone so colorless that a Chapalii lord would have been envious of it. "Is Tess—?" Then he hesitated, because if one listened, one could hear her voice as she spoke with Charles. But, of course, she spoke in a language Bakhtiian did not understand. "I hope," he added, looking David straight in the face, "that you will find time to attend me in the morning. I have some requests to make of you."

"Of course. If you'll excuse me." David retreated as quickly as he could. Goddess, what did Bakhtiian want of him? Was he still holding a grudge against him because he thought David had slept with his wife? And yet, faced with such an order—even though it was phrased as a request—David dared not disobey.

The actors arrived in a flurry of sound and movement. David retreated into the safety of their company, but he was sorry to note that Diana had not come over for the party. The evening passed in a blur of conversation, and he went to bed early.

In the morning, a young jaran rider waited at the edge of the encampment. Bakhtiian had, quite kindly, sent an escort.

"Mags, you will come with me."

"I will?"

"Yes, you will. I need a witness. I'm not going over alone."

"Oh, here," said Ursula, coming up. "I'll come with you, David. You're looking a little ashen about the gills. What's wrong?"

"Nothing!" David cast a last, hopeless glance at Maggie and allowed himself to be escorted away by Ursula and the jaran soldier. The soldier remained respectfully quiet on the long walk, but his presence allowed them to pass right through the rings of guards, straight to the awning under which Bakhtiian sat.

David found himself ushered to the front immediately and was, for once, glad of Ursula's companionship.

"Ah." Bakhtiian beckoned David forward. Reluctantly, David went, keeping one eye on Ursula to see what she did and the other on Bakhtiian's sheathed saber. Tess was nowhere in sight. "Please. Sit down.

You're an engineer, Tess tells me."

David cleared his throat. "Ah. Yes. I am." Ursula settled down beside David as if she were used to sitting in on Bakhtiian's councils.

"We have a need for engineers. Siege engineers. Perhaps you'll agree to ride out with me and survey the city. Any suggestions you have would be welcomed." Without more invitation than that, he rose and beckoned to his guard. Horses arrived, led by soldiers. David saw some khaja prisoners—or at least he assumed they were prisoners—mounted as well; presumably these were other engineers, culled from the ranks of the conquered. David felt compelled by events and by Bakhtiian's proximity to go along. Ursula did not hesitate.

"This is a wonderful opportunity," she said in a low voice to David as they mounted. "You have an entire city to experiment on. Von Clausewitz says that "critical examination is not merely the appreciation of those means which have been actually employed, but also of all possible means, which therefore must be suggested in the first place."

"Ursula!" He was appalled. "There are people in that city. I don't think Charles meant his interdiction to hold only for them and not for the jaran as well."

"Oh, David, be reasonable. The city is besieged anyway. The war is already here."

"That doesn't make it right."

"Well, then, your contribution might save lives on both sides. If the jaran attack is effective enough, and swift enough, perhaps the khaja will surrender to save themselves."

"If that will indeed save them."

"You forget that I've been traveling with the army. Overall, the jaran are merciful to those who surrender."

"Are they now? I wonder what your conception of mercy is. I saw how devastated the lands were, behind us."

"That was Yaroslav Sakhalin's doing. Most of it, anyway."

"It's still against the interdiction."

"I beg your pardon," said Bakhtiian, riding up beside them. "I hope," he said, nodding toward David,

"that you'll ride with me."

As they rode out, all David could think of was how stupid he had been to come here at all. He could have pled illness. He could even have asked Charles to make excuses for him, but then again, maybe Charles would not have done it. Maybe Charles wanted this—not the breaking of the interdiction, but the attempt, the act, the place where the line had to be drawn and his authority thrown up against Bakhtiian's, to prove once and for all who was really in charge. Was this how Tess felt, that she was a pawn tossed about from one side to the other in someone else's game?

They rode out of camp and alongside harvested fields striped with rows of fruit still ripening. Khaja peasants plowed a fallow field under, turning up the soil.

"I was remembering," said Bakhtiian suddenly, startling David, "when we first met."

Goddess, here it came. David recalled all too clearly that awful first meeting, when he and Tess had crawled out of his tent into the full sight of her husband.

"Do you recall that I asked you if you could do a portrait of my wife?"

A series of images flashed through David's mind: the port and the thousand jaran horsemen arrayed along the shore to meet them; the horrible execution; he and Diana sitting in the quiet of camp, Diana watching while he sketched ... Bakhtiian.

"Why, yes," he replied, remembering now how incongruous it had seemed at the time. "I did a sketch of you."

"Yes. You're a fine artist. I hope, now that you're with the army again, that you might find time to do the portrait."

David could not respond immediately. The quiet respect in Bakhtiian's voice for David's ability, the diffident request, the nature of the request itself, all combined with Bakhtiian's formidable presence and the all-too-evident wreckage that his army had left in its wake to confuse David as to the kind of man he was dealing with.

"My niece speaks highly of you," Bakhtiian added, as if this inducement might convince David to agree. "You've taught her a great deal about mapmaking."

Which he had. Thus breaking the interdiction. But that was different, wasn't it? Because she was different. David felt impelled to smile at his own hypocrisy. "I'd be pleased to do a portrait of your wife."

Bakhtiian nodded. He gestured to the khaja prisoners. "These four khaja soldiers are engineers. This woman is our interpreter. Ursula you know, of course. I hope you will be able to contribute to our discussion."

"I.... You understand, of course, that I'm subject to the prince. I must first have his permission to ... to contribute anything." There, it was said.

Bakhtiian measured him, not without sympathy. "I understand." No doubt he did, on one level. After all, his army didn't share its secrets with its enemies either. "But today should give you ample time to observe."

They rode on, out to survey the walls of Karkand.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sitting on the edge of the platform as day slid into evening, Diana unplaited her hair and combed her fingers through it. The Evening Star—which of the planets was it? she never could remember—pierced the darkening blue of the sky, and one by one other stars appeared. Rehearsal had tired her today, but she never minded that; it was a satisfying sort of fatigue.

"Di!" Quinn jogged up, breathless with excitement, and grabbed her hand. "Come with me!" Quinn yanked her forward, and Diana laughed and went with her to the Company tent.

"Look!" Quinn pointed. At first Diana only saw Owen, speaking quietly with Dejhuti and Seshat and Yomi. Joseph wandered up. Ginny arrived, notebook in one hand, pen in the other. Phillippe helped Anahita to a chair. Helen and Jean-Pierre gossiped with Gwyn over on the other side. Oriana stood in the entrance to the huge tent, half-hidden in its shadow.

"Am I missing something?" asked Hal, walking up beside Diana and Quinn. "Everyone's here."

"Except Hyacinth," murmured Diana. Then she spotted two figures crossing toward them from the main camp. At first the dusk disguised them, but then they emerged into the glow of the lanterns fixed at intervals around the camp.

Quinn squeezed Diana's hand. "Look, here comes the duke."

" "With his eyes full of anger,"" replied Diana automatically.

Quinn rolled her eyes. "Are you quoting again?"

"That's As You Like It, you idiot."

"It may be, but unlike you, I don't retain entire plays in my memory for years at a time."

"Charles!" exclaimed Ginny. "How good to see you again. Hello, Marco. Did you just ride in? This afternoon? You made good time. Though I must say, you look none the worse for the wear."

With one thought, Diana and Quinn and Hal sidled closer toward the center of the scene.

"I don't suppose," said Yomi quietly, "that you have any news of Hyacinth, poor lad."

"In fact, I do."

He told them. The entire Company listened intently. Diana found her attention straying to Marco, who stood silently beside Soerensen. He glanced once at her and away as quickly, an exchange that reminded her incongruously of jaran men. Except that he looked nothing like jaran men. By League standards he was not a particularly tall man, but here his height and the breadth of his shoulders marked him as big.

"Thank goodness Hyacinth is safe," said Ginny at last. "I suppose that under the circumstances you couldn't have brought him back."

"No. I thought it best to simply remove him and his companion from Rhui altogether."

Owen sighed. "Which still leaves us one actor short. Well, we've managed so far, by the skin of our teeth."

"Remember, too," added Soerensen in his mild voice, "that we'll be leaving soon."

"Leaving soon!" Anahita roused herself, straightening up in her chair. "Thank goodness. I wish I'd gone with Hyacinth. I'd be quit of here now."

There was a short, embarrassed silence which Soerensen covered by going on. "Autumn's coming on.

In order to maintain the charade, we must return to a port before ships stop sailing for the winter. Or else winter here, which I've no leisure to do."

"What about your sister?" asked Ginny.

"In any case," added Soerensen, "we might be leaving anytime within the next two or ten weeks, and possibly abruptly. Just so you can be prepared."

"Excuse me," said Diana in a low voice to Quinn and Hal, and she escaped the assembly. She wandered back to her own tent and simply stood there, outside, staring at nothing. Two weeks, or ten weeks. What if they left before Anatoly returned? What if she never saw Anatoly again? She shivered. After the long hot nights of the summer, she had forgotten that it could get cold at night. But the season did turn, eventually; eventually, the year turned, and what had been young grew old, and what had sprouted fresh and green in the spring withered and died to make way for winter.

"Diana?"

Somehow, it didn't surprise her that Marco had followed her here. "Hello." She managed to say it without her voice shaking.

"I beg your pardon, if I'm disturbing you."

"No. No. I'm just— No, you're not."

He stood three paces from her. "I thought— You're well? You look well."

"Thank you. I'm well. I hope you are, too? I mean, we got a few reports, not much, but— Everything went as you hoped it would?"

"Better. It's nothing I can speak of, right now, but, yes, it went well."

"No, I understand. Of course, I understand. Was Hyacinth all right?"

"He was traumatized. I think he'll recover."

"Thank the Goddess for that. He took his jaran lover with him? Well, I don't envy him for that.

Neither of them, really."

A sudden, awkward silence fell. "You don't—you don't mean to take Anatoly with you, when you go back?" He jerked a hand up, warding off any comment. "No, I beg your pardon. It's none of my concern."

"No, don't apologize. Please! Thank you for asking. You don't know what it's like. No one in the Company speaks of him anymore, not to me, at least. It's as if they think I'm embarrassed of him, or that I don't want him mentioned anymore, now that he's gone. And in the jaran camp, why, it's hardly worth mentioning, it's nothing unusual to them."

"He's gone?" Marco faltered on the question. "He didn't—"

"Oh, no, he's not dead. At least, I don't think he is. How can a person know, with the communications they have here? He went off months ago—months ago!—and he hasn't come back yet. I don't know when he'll come back. For all I know, we'll leave before he comes back."

He took a single step toward her, and halted.

"It just doesn't seem fair. And it makes me so damned angry. Why can't I know? How can the women stand to live this way? They could be separated for months, for years! There are tribes out on the plains that haven't seen their riders for years. Although in all fairness, I mink there's some kind of a leave system, that after two or three years serving in the army, a man gets to go back to his tribe for a year. Or something, I'm not sure about the details." She broke off and felt a flush rise in her cheeks. "Goddess, I'm sorry. I'm babbling. It just seems like no one else cares. I don't want to bore you."

"You don't bore me, Diana."

Diana shut her eyes, wilting under the heat of that simple utterance. He could have said any words, those words, other words, nonsense words, and she would have known what he meant by them. What a stupid little infatuation she had had for him, before. Then he had seemed wild and strong and half a barbarian himself. Oh, the attraction remained. It had never eased. But she desired him as much now because he seemed familiar and safe to her, standing here on die outskirts of a truly barbarian encampment, as because of what he had once represented to her, an adventurer who had wandered in wild landscapes and faced death and fear with equal self-possession. And she was lonely, and she felt alone. She opened her eyes when she felt him take another step. He loomed before her.

"Diana? I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all the stupid things I said to you. I'm sorry you hurt now."

It took only a half step to move into his embrace, because his momentum still carried him forward into hers. They kissed.

Diana ceased feeling the cold, or the night breeze, or anything except his hands on her back, and her thigh and hip pressed up against his, and the unsteady catch of his breathing against her chest. She was warm everywhere.

A dull ache prodded her ankle. After a moment, she identified it. One of the guide ropes of her tent cut across the skin. She shifted and, shifting, Marco sighing and gathering her back into him, she heard the distant echo of bells. Messenger bells. What if they brought news of Anatoly?

"Marco," she murmured into his lips. He drew his head back and lifted a hand to cup her chin.

"Golden fair," he whispered.

"I can't." It hurt, not the movement, because she moved gently, but the cold and the emptiness. "I can't, Marco. You must know that I want to, but I can't."

"Because you love him?" His voice cracked on the word "love."

She could not reply.

"Do you?" he demanded.

She could not say yes. She could not say no. She said nothing.

"If you don't know by now— Goddess, Diana, any fool could see that you only married him to get back at me or at best because you were infatuated with the idea of marrying a romantic native prince."

She flared, angry and embarrassed together. "Whatever it was," she said, stumbling over the words, "I just feel that I have to stay loyal to Anatoly until I know what's going to happen to him, and to me."

"Well, then," he pressed on stubbornly, "jaran women take lovers. It's accepted—it's even expected—

in their culture."

"I know that now. And it's no wonder, if the men are always off riding for months at a time. I'm not surprised that they take lovers when they're always left behind. But I'm not jaran. I don't want to be jaran. I have to do what's true to me. It isn't you I'm rejecting, Marco. Please tell me you see that."

"Then if you don't want to be jaran, why in hell did you marry him?" He flinched away from her suddenly. "Oh, hell. I'm sorry," It hurt her worse to see him in pain than it had to feel herself alone again, not knowing if Anatoly would even return before she left. He dipped his chin down, like he was containing words he wished to say but refused to say. "I will respect your decision. I'll stay away from you."

"I didn't mean— Don't feel you have to stay away from me. At least come to see me. We can talk."

"Don't you understand, Diana? I love you. I can't pretend to be your friend. I can hardly stand to be this close to you as it is."

Diana had never imagined that Marco Burckhardt might be vulnerable. He had always seemed so self-contained, so confident. It shook her horribly to see him wounded.

"Good-bye," he said, and he walked away.

"Marco! Wait. I—do you remember, that handkerchief you loaned me? When you left for Morava? I never returned it to you. I still have it."

"Keep it," he said without turning around, and he vanished into the darkness that ringed the camp.

She hurt.

She just stood there and let it wash over her, as if that alone would do justice to his feelings, to what she'd done to him. Or had she done anything to him at all? They'd done nothing to each other that they hadn't done to themselves; made mistakes, behaved stupidly, acted without thinking through the consequences of the action. Maybe Marco had made an image of her, mat first meeting, that proved just as false as the one she had made of him. She had let herself fall in love—or into an infatuation, at least—

with Marco before she had the slightest knowledge of who he really was. And if mat was true about Marco, how much more true it was about Anatoly. She couldn't even talk to Anatoly when she married him. She hadn't known him at all. The choice had seemed not rash but adventurous and brave at the time. Now, with clearer sight, it just seemed reckless. A true explorer treads cautiously and with a deep respect for the unknown land. She had charged blithely in, all unconscious of danger. Well, and had she suffered so much? Only in her heart. She tried to imagine Hyacinth, straying through the wilderness, seeing one of his companions die, and could not compare her suffering to his.

"Di? Di!" There came Quinn, of course. "You left so quickly. Soerensen invited us to his camp.

They're having a little party, a reunion party, I suppose. Are you coming?"

"No, sorry, I'm not in the mood."

For once, Quinn gave up immediately and went away.

Diana ducked into her tent and stripped and lay down. She was tired, realty tired now, in the heart as well as the body. But every time she shut her eyes she saw, not Anatoly, not Marco, but Vasil Veselov coming up to her on the stage, dropping his eyes, waiting there—acting— and it suddenly came to her die one element Gwyn hadn't caught yet, the one that would allow him to subsume completely the character of the dyan who loved the Sun's daughter. She threw on her clothes and scrambled out of the tent and ran.

The others had already left camp, but by the single lantern left lit for their return, she saw a shadow blurring the deeper shadows on the stage, and she knew it was him, practicing, still practicing.

"Gwyn! Gwyn, I've got it." She hopped up on the platform and he paused to listen to her. "It's not just what Owen said, about showing the modesty without losing the strength. It's about power contained. It's about the promise of power unleashed. It's as if, through her, you can reach your true power, just as somehow she can reach her true power through you, and the exchange is as much about that recognition of each other ..." She lapsed into silence, puffing, out of breath, she was so excited. "Do you see what I'm trying to say?"

Gwyn considered. He never did rash things, not Gwyn. That remained one of his strengths, that he tread cautiously, that he considered, and when he did move, he placed his feet on the firmest ground. But he wasn't afraid to take chances.

"Let's try it," he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Husband!"

Jiroannes flinched at the sound of his bride's voice. Samae jerked her hand away from his feet, which she had been massaging, and sank back to kneel at the foot of the couch. Jiroannes rose from his cushions and signaled to Lal to bring him a robe. As the boy tied the robe closed with a sash, she who had once been Javani entered through the enclosed walkway that now linked her tent with his. She wore the emerald silk peacock gown and a tiered gold headdress, like a conical cap, with an embroidered shawl draped from it down over her shoulders and a veil of silk covering her lower face. The silk was so sheer that he could see her expression through it; she wanted something. Again.

"Wife."

Her interpreter hovered anxiously three steps behind her.

"Husband, it is impossible that I continue to live in these vulgar conditions. I have sent my steward to find a suitable house within the suburbs, near the vegetable and fruit market. Meanwhile, my handmaiden has gone to purchase silks for my wardrobe. These peacocks are very pretty, I'm sure, but the quality of the weave is mediocre."

"Those silks were woven and embroidered in the women's quarters of my father's house!"

"Then I see that we will have to import Habakar weavers as well as the perfumer and the three cooks I have been forced to engage in order to afford a decent quality of living in this household."

"And how are we to travel with this city of retainers?

And pay for them? Lal, go tell Syrannus to send guards after the steward and the girl. None of these orders can go through."

Lal nodded and slipped out, leaving Jiroannes alone with his wife. He braced himself.

"The orders must go through! I demand it. It is insupportable that I live out here among these barbarians. There are decent houses lying empty within the outer walls, not what one of my birth expects, but they will do until better arrangements can be made."

"We're not leaving the camp. To do so would insult the jaran. I would think you, of all people, would see the Idiocy in such a course. Or would you prefer I had not married you and merely cast you off to the tender mercies of your conquerors?"

What frightened Jiroannes about Laissa was how swiftly her personality had changed once the Habakar priests had sprinkled perfume and holy water over them and proclaimed them betrothed and married by the laws of their Almighty God. At his threat, she merely drew up her chin and stared scornfully at him.

"You would have been a fool to do so, and you're a fool to threaten me with it now. No merchant of my people would dare refuse to do business with me or with my husband's ministers. You will keep that in mind, I hope, if you wish to prosper in these lands. I think you're being unnecessarily sanguine about the possibility that these barbarians will hold on to their conquests. As Javani, it was one of my duties to study the records of my people, and let me assure you that barbarians have ridden through these lands before only to be chased out by our armies or by their own troubles back in the lands where they come from."

He had thought the Habakar a civilized people. Marriage to Laissa had disabused him of this notion.

Their noblewomen learned to read and write and were encouraged to study arts such as mathematics and philosophy and poetry that only men were suited to engage in, and any woman might conduct business in her own name, although it was true that she must be under a husband's or father's or brother's protection.

"Furthermore," she continued relentlessly, "whatever may become of these barbarians, you certainly won't impress them with the paltry retinue that attends you now. If you wish for respect, then you must show that you deserve it. Your guards" camp was a disgrace when I toured it five days ago, children running everywhere, sluttish women unsupervised and unkempt, and no priest to watch over them. I hope it is in better condition now because of my efforts, but do I receive thanks for that? Certainly not.

You complain that I brought in a priest of my people to hold the hand of the Almighty God over those of us in this camp. You refuse me sufficient quarters, and then complain when I act to improve them. If you wish me to entertain jaran noblewomen, I certainly cannot do so in that cramped, colorless little tent that I had to share with my handmaiden. I have managed to enlarge the tent—"

She had, at that. Her tent, attached to his by a covered walkway so that she needn't leave its seclusion, was twice the size of his own, now, and warrened with little rooms for sleeping and primping and administering and one with a cot for her handmaiden.

"—but I need more tapestries for the walls and more carpets. There is a certain kind of carpet from the south, near Salkh, which I should like four of, if they can be got. And some couches for visitors, and I refuse to serve anyone, even a barbarian woman, that swill you call tea. Furthermore—"

"Enough!"

"It is not enough! Furthermore—"

He cuffed her across the cheek. She gasped, and that quickly raised her right hand and slapped him.

The blow didn't hurt—she wasn't strong enough for that—but it stung. "You dare strike me!"

Despite his anger, she didn't shrink back from him. "The Almighty God teaches us that a woman must bow to her husband as the angels bow to God, but if he strikes her without justification, then she may strike back."

"Without justification! A woman ought never to raise her voice to a man! Never! So has the Everlasting God proclaimed."

"Then you are barbarians, as I thought. I encourage you to see how well you will prosper in Habakar lands without my assistance. I lived better than this before the jaran came, and had your guards not discovered my hiding place, I would have escaped and been treated among my own people as a woman of my station ought to be treated.

"Yet you were discovered, and if I judge rightly, you ought to have killed yourself rather than let yourself be dishonored."

Her chin quivered. Silk trembled over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes flashed. "So speaks the man who dishonored me. That is for the Almighty God to forgive, if He judges that I did not do my duty toward Him. Not for an unbeliever such as yourself."

"I hope you realize what forbearance I am showing in allowing you to bring a priest into my camp at all. It is only my respect for Bakhtiian's proclamation that all priests must be tolerated."

"It is only your respect for the power of Bakhtiian's army. It was, in any case, part of the marriage contract that you signed."

A contract witnessed by the Habakar priests and signed by him and by Laissa. As if a woman's word was worth anything, although evidently it was to these people. Still, by birth as reckoned by Habakar standards she ranked far above him; in Vidiya, he could never have hoped for so advantageous a match: She was cousin to the reigning king and to the king's nephew who, rumor said, was now raising an army in the southlands, and also to the princess whom Mitya expected to marry. The bitter truth was, she treated him like the commoner she considered him to be; although his family was an old and honorable house, they were not nobility. That he had been allowed to study in the palace school for boys was due to his uncle's high standing as a Companion to the Great King, and the fact that his uncle had once saved the Great King's father's fife in a battle. And imagine, if Mitya became king here, then the king's wife and his own wife would be cousins!

"Well," he said, quashing an urge to touch his cheek, where she had slapped him, "I forbid any expedition to look for a villa within the walls, but if you need rugs and carpets, and silks for your wardrobe, you have my permission to send your steward out to the market." Her steward. She had a regular army of attendants, more than he had brought, certainly. Yet it was true that in some ways she made his life easier. She had taken over much of the day-to-day administering of the camp, which was by rights a servant's job. Evidently she thought it a woman's duty, and indeed, the Everlasting God proclaimed that women were the servants of men, so perhaps it was fitting.

The tent flap stirred and Lal appeared. "I beg your pardon, eminence. I thought to inquire if you had further orders for me before I left?"

Probably the boy had been listening outside. Jiroannes glanced at Laissa.

She bowed her head, but the show of humility did not fool him. "I abide by your command, husband."

"Lal, the mistress will direct you. Also, I mean to attend the performance this afternoon. Wife, you will accompany me. Although I'm sure you feel reluctant to leave your seclusion, I think it best that the jaran noblewomen see you with me again, out in the camp, so that they can be assured that we are fixed as man and wife."

"As you wish." She retreated to the door and glanced back—not at him, but at the still, silent form that was Samae, kneeling motionlessly, head bent submissively, at the foot of the couch. Then she was gone, Lal scurrying after her, into the women's quarters, a place that no man might follow Laissa into except her husband.

That sudden, lightning interest puzzled Jiroannes. Why should Laissa notice Samae? The girl now slept in the same tent as the two eunuchs, and now that he was married, Jiroannes had felt able to endure her touch again. He remained leery of bedding her so far, but he allowed her to massage him every day.

"Jat! Where is the boy, damn it? Samae, dress me."

She did so without word or sign of what she thought of her new favor in his eyes. Perhaps Samae's exotic beauty interested Laissa. Vidiyan women had their own diversions within the women's quarters, and what they did to keep themselves occupied did not merit a man's concern, as long as they did their duty by bearing him sons of his own seed.

In the afternoon he walked beside Laissa's covered litter, borne by two guardsmen and two servants of her own people, to the ground where the Company performed. Lal and Samae and Syrannus walked in attendance on him, and four handmaidens as well as the interpreter accompanied Laissa, so that when they came to settle themselves in front of the platform, they made quite an unwieldy little group.

After so long with the jaran, Jiroannes had learned to recognize the various ranks within the jaran; today many of their nobles gathered to attend the performance. Evidently, this dance was being danced for the first time, and Bakhtiian himself, accompanied by the Prince of Jeds, meant to attend as well.

Mother Sakhalin hurried up, and Laissa, no fool, eased herself out of the litter to greet the old woman.

Except, to his horror, she did not offer greetings at all. Instead, she and the old woman began haggling over right of place.

"Wife," he began, "naturally we will move to a different—"

Two heads turned. Both women stared at him, most brazenly, and he realized that they were enjoying themselves and that his opinion was not wanted. Fuming, he retreated to stand beside Syrannus.

"They're all barbarians," he muttered.

"Look, eminence, there is Bakhtiian. With his wife and the prince."

Mother Sakhalin and Laissa finished their argument, and Mother Sakhalin moved away to intercept Bakhtiian.

"Husband, we will sit here, as I said."

"But—"

"We are displacing one of the Ten Tribes, but the queen mother wishes them to learn a little humility on this occasion, so she has assented to our presence here. She also sees the expediency in honoring me as an ally in high favor. I hope you understand that this benefits your position as well."

Jiroannes only grunted in reply. They settled down, Laissa within the litter, one flap thrown askew so that she could view the dancing platform as well as her husband. Her handmaidens knelt around her. Lal laid pillows on the ground for Jiroannes, and he settled there, Syrannus to his right and the two slaves seated between him and the litter. At the front of the audience, Bakhtiian sat down between his wife and the Prince of Jeds. Two girls helped Mother Sakhalin sit on a pillow to the right of the prince.

A man entered onto the platform, three small drums slung around his waist. He tapped on them, drawing out a rhythm by whose beat a woman entered. But not just any woman: this was Mother Sun, who sent her daughter to the earth. Mitya had told Jiroannes this story. Now, the actors danced it. It was as if they brought it to life: the daughter's exile and the ten sisters she brought with her to be her companions, who bore the first tribes of the jaran; how she met the first dyan of the Sakhalin tribe; how they loved, how they parted. The Daughter of the Sun traveled away into dark lands, where she bore his child, and he followed her, but in the end, as is the fate of all mortal men, he died. And in the end, as must any child of the heavens, she returned to her home in the gods" lands.

They danced well. Their audience sat with deep respect, in rapt silence. Syrannus sat with hands folded in his lap. Laissa, by her profile, was as busy surveying the ranks of the jaran as watching the performance. A tear trailed down Samae's face.

A tear! Jiroannes stared at the slave-girl. A girl still, perhaps; she had been so young when his uncle had offered her to him at the marketplace that she had not yet begun her woman's courses, although of course the merchant selling her had assured Jiroannes that she was a virgin. In five years, Jiroannes had never seen her cry. He had never seen her show any feelings at all, except once that flash of rebellion, as quickly stifled. Except once when he had thought she had smiled at Mitya. Except now, when a tear lined her cheek as she watched the performance.

What did he know about her? He knew more about Lal, who was a common boy, son of a tavernkeeper and a whore, sold into the palace service and lucky enough to gain a place in Jiroannes's household, and who by dint of hard work and ambition had risen fast. Already Laissa considered him indispensable, and the boy was certainly clever and industrious. But Samae—she had come from Tadesh, the Gray Eminence's lands across the sea. She had been taught the concubine's arts there, while still a child—or she must have been, because she knew them, and where else could she have learned them? She danced finely. Perhaps she had once lived with such a company of dancers—of actors, that was their proper name—when she was a child; perhaps she remembered them; perhaps she mourned what she had lost.

Stirred by a feeling he did not entirely understand, Jiroannes reached out and patted her hand. She flinched and jerked away from him, startled, her eyes wide. As quickly, she pulled her hands in against her chest and bowed her head and sat as still as stone. Jiroannes drew away his hand and glanced up.

Laissa watched him, watched Samae, through her sheer veil, and a moment later looked away.

Jiroannes grunted under his breath and returned his attention to the performance. Well, that would teach him to try to understand women. The Everlasting God enjoined men to rule women, not to understand them. Still, he could not help but wonder what Samae saw in the dance—in the play—to make her cry.

After the performance, Mitya trotted up, all flushed and cheerful. "That was very fine, wasn't it!" he exclaimed. Then he recalled his manners and bowed his head before Laissa's presence. She acknowledged him coolly and sent her interpreter to invite Mother Sakhalin to her tent for refreshments.

The handmaidens closed up the litter and the guards bore her away.

Mitya watched her go, bemused. "It's a curious way to travel. She can't see out, can she?"

"There are a few cunningly concealed slits in the fabric, but otherwise, no. In this fashion a woman can travel from one place to another, when she must, without exposing herself to the eyes of strangers."

"Oh." Mitya nodded, staring after the litter with a look of incomprehension on his face. "Well. It was very fine,

what they did though, telling the tale like that." He glanced at Samae, glanced away, and fixed his attention on Jiroannes.

"Perhaps you would like to return with me to my tent for refreshments."

"Oh, certainly!"

In such charity they went, Syrannus behind them and the two slaves behind the old man. Under his own awning, Jiroannes seated Mitya on a pillow and excused himself to go inside for a moment so that Samae could re-bind his turban, which had loosened at the back. He sat on the couch and she unwound the cloth from his head. His hair fell down around his shoulders and down to his waist, and Samae lifted the ribboned strands and wound them back up in fresh linen. The quiet lent a kind of intimacy to their endeavor, contrasted to the bustle outside as Laissa's servants prepared for the arrival of Mother Sakhalin.

"Samae," he said, surprising himself more than her, perhaps, "what did you do as a child? Who were your parents?"

Her hands stilled. She tensed, not so much in fear but in astonishment, or anticipation, or anger. How could he tell? He knew so little of her. He felt the tiny movements of her fingers, caught half in his hair and half in the complex folds of cloth wound around his hair.

"Husband!" Laissa swept in. "Move aside, girl!" She cuffed Samae hard on the right cheek, carelessly, but her eyes glinted as she surveyed the slave's retreat to the foot of the couch. "Come, come. I want you to greet Mother Sakhalin, and then you may retire to entertain the boy, the young prince. He is Bakhtiian's nephew? No, his cousin's son. How curious their customs are, but evidently he has no children by his own wives yet."

Jiroannes rose, the cloth tumbled in his hands. "It is a grave insult to interrupt a man with his hair unbound. Apologize instantly."

She took a step back, retreating from his anger. It reminded him of those first days, when she had been in his power entirely, when she had groveled before him. "I beg your pardon, husband. I was not aware—"

"Then you will learn. The Everlasting God commands us never to cut our hair and to conceal it from the eyes of strangers, just as we conceal the beauty and worth of our wives from those who might covet them. Do you understand?"

She bowed her head submissively. He clenched one hand into a fist and opened it. Her fear lent her a sudden attraction, and he felt the immediate, full force of desire. But he had a guest outside. "You may go." She turned to retreat, for once not answering back. "Wife." At his clipped tone, she froze and looked back over her shoulder. "I will punish my own slaves, when they deserve it. It is not your place to lay hands on them. Do you understand?"

Her gaze shifted past him, seeking Samae, and then darted back. "I understand," she replied in a low voice.

"I will entertain my own guest. How you choose to entertain women is no concern of mine. Be sure that they are gone by full dark, however, as I mean to come to your bed tonight, and I expect you to be waiting for me."

She dropped her gaze to stare at the carpet, and he saw that the prospect frightened her. This power he still held over her, who had been virgin and protected by her God from the appetites of men for so many years. Invested as Javani in the year she began her woman's courses, by the reckoning of her people she had reigned as priestess for over sixteen years before the jaran had burned the holy temple. Another woman would have borne many children in the intervening span and been aged and withered by the burdens of womanhood, but Laissa had remained young, her flesh unmarked by God's punishing Hand.

So had the Everlasting God decreed, that women bear children as a punishment for their weak natures.

Jiroannes intended to get many children on her.

She ducked her head and padded away into the safety of her own chambers.

"Samae." He said it softly. "Let me see your face." She did not move. He walked over to her and lifted her chin. Red stained her pale skin, where Laissa had hit her. Jiroannes smoothed his fingers over her cheek. "Never mind it. It will fade. Here, now, bind my turban back up, and then you may attend me and the prince. And you may go to him tonight, if you wish it."

Her gaze lifted to his face. She stared, eyes wide, and then recalled herself and averted her gaze. Her astonishment pleased him, and it fed his desire as well. Tomorrow night he would not go to Laissa's bed.

Tomorrow night, perhaps, he would call for Samae to attend him once again. He sat down on the couch and let her minister to him. Was it his imagination, or did she perform her duties eagerly now, with a certain tenderness? He would find out more about her, who her parents were, why she had been sold into slavery, how she had come to learn the mysterious arts of the Tadeshi concubines, why she cried to see the actors perform their play. Quickly she performed her task and followed him outside, where she knelt in silence three paces behind him, eyes lowered, while Lal served tea and cakes to Jiroannes and Mitya.

The two men chatted together, about the return of the Prince of Jeds, about the marriage of Bakhtiian's niece, about the siege of Karkand, about the relative merits of the weave of cloth from Habakar looms and how much the merchants trading this fine cloth to countries north and south ought to be taxed by the jaran on their profits.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"I'm not welcome at this council, am I?"

Tess squatted down in front of the chest, lifted the lid, and rummaged inside. "Ilya, in all fairness, why should you be?" She found the length of gold cloth she was looking for and drew it out. "Charles wouldn't be welcome at your councils, either."

"There might be a time when it was appropriate for him to attend."

"There might be, it's true. I think I'll use this gold cloth to make a shirt for Vasha."

"A shirt for who?"

"You remember him. Your son."

"Tess, he is not—"

"Ilya."

In the silence, he paced while she heaved herself to her feet and went to the table, to unroll the bolt there, smoothing her hand over the fabric. "He's a good-looking boy," Ilya conceded at last, "and he seems well-mannered. Katya likes him."

"Katerina has befriended him, yes. But then, she's a generous girl, like her mother."

"Unlike me?"

Tess grinned suddenly and walked across to him. She took his hand. "I know it was abrupt of me to adopt him like that. But he looked so bedraggled and so pathetic. He's so young. Was his mother dark-featured as well?"

Ilya nodded absently, attention on the entrance flap, not on her. Outside, they heard Katerina calling out: "Vasha! Vasha! Come here!"

"But what are we going to do with him?" he asked at last.

"Raise him as our child."

"Our child? But it goes against all our traditions ... by no custom of the jaran would he ever come to me. Even so, we can never know if he is truly my child."

"Do you doubt that he is? I don't. Oh, it's moving."

He spread both hands over her belly and they just stood there. A smile caught on his lips and he closed his eyes. "Yes, I feel it. Our child, Tess." He sighed, content, and drew his hands up to enclose both her hands between his. "Tess." He hesitated, glanced toward the entrance, and then back at her.

When he spoke, she could barely hear him. "We traveled alongside their tribe for five months, and every night I slept in her tent. It was stupid of me, to show any woman such exclusive attention, but—"

"But?"

"Roskhel's tribe rode alongside ours for those same months, and I wanted away from my mother's tent. I hadn't a tent of my own, and anyway, Inessa was very pretty, so it was no hardship for me to lie with her every night. By the time we left them, she knew she was pregnant. Vasha is my child by the laws of Jeds, where such lines are followed through the man whose seed makes a woman pregnant. But we are not in Jeds. Nor do I rule there. By the laws of the jaran he is not my child, nor am I his father, except that I'm married to you, and that you adopted him as a foster-son."

He released her abruptly. A moment later Katerina burst into the tent. "Aunt Tess! Vasha, come here!"

The boy pushed through the opening hesitantly and halted right on the threshold as if he did not want to intrude, the heavy flap caught on his shoulders. Katerina grabbed his wrist and jerked him forward.

"Look. Vasha, show them!"

"Little one," said Ilya sternly, "he needn't show us anything he doesn't want to." He turned a steady gaze on Vasha, and the boy stared up at him,

Oh, yes, the resemblance was strong enough that anyone might guess just by looking at them together that they were father and son. And Vasha had the eyes, the same fire there, burning. He stared at his father as much with awe as with apprehension. Ilya looked vexed. Finally, Vasha uncurled his right hand to display a finely-carved bone clasp, the kind one would use to close a saddlebag or a pouch.

"By the gods," Ilya murmured. He lifted it up and examined it. It was long and narrow, like a finger, curved, with a small hole at one end for a leather strip to lace through. He laughed out of sheer surprise.

"My father gave me this. He carved it for me, as a present, when my first cycle of years had passed. Do you see the eagle, here? How his wings curl and drape around the clasp, as if he's embracing the winds?"

Katya hung on her uncle's arm, staring. Vasha did not move, did not even close his hand or withdraw it.

"Where did you get it?"

Vasha shrugged, dipping his chin down, staring at the carpet.

"Vasha! When I ask a question, I expect an answer."

The boy mumbled something.

"Gods, boy! I'm not going to punish you for it. I thought I'd lost this years ago, but I see that your mother merely stole it from me."

His gaze leapt up to Ilya. He glared. "She did not! She said you gave it to her!"

"I never gave it to her! And it happened more than once, that she'd take things from me and tell people I'd given them to her—" His voice dropped suddenly, in the face of Vasha's humiliated anger. "But perhaps I merely dropped it somewhere, and she found it and kept it to give to me again."

"Only you never came back," said the boy in a muted tone, looking down again.

"No, I never did. Well, here. I give it back to you, then."

"To me!" His gaze flashed up to Ilya and down again.

"As my father gifted me with it, so do I gift it to you."

"Oh," said Katerina.

Vasha did not move. liya placed the clasp on the boy's palm and closed his fingers over it. "Vasha, you are with us now. Let this be the seal between you and me, then, that ... that we'll raise you as we would any son of ours." Still Vasha did not speak. Ilya glanced at Tess. "Well?" he demanded, as if she could help him.

"I have to go. Katya, I'm going to make a shirt for Vasha out of this cloth. Take it over to your mother and show it to her, please."

"Of course, Aunt Tess." Katya rolled up the cloth and hurried away.

Tess straightened her clothes over her belly. "Give me a kiss, little one," she said to Vasha. He started and came to kiss her, once on each cheek, in the formal way. She kissed him on the forehead as well, kissed Ilya on the cheek, and went to the entrance. There she paused on the threshold.

Ilya examined the boy as if he hadn't the least idea what to do with him. He coughed, glanced at Tess, and frowned. "Well. Do you know how to ride, Vasha?"

"Of course I know how to ride! How do you think I got here? Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm sorry. That was ill-mannered of me. Yes, I know how to ride."

Ilya sighed. He put out a hand as if to pat the boy on the shoulder, withdrew it, and then reached out again and awkwardly touched Vasha on the arm. "You'll ride out with me today, then. We'll go find you a mount."

Satisfied, Tess left them. She stopped to consult with Sonia about the shirt and then went on to Charles's encampment. She enjoyed the walk; she much preferred walking to riding these days, although she sometimes had to stop when her belly tightened up, all the muscles tensing, practicing for the event scheduled to occur in about seventy days. She was seven months pregnant now, with two months to go, more or less, Earth-time, although the year and month were longer here on Rhui.

Sometimes, especially late at night, she really thought the best thing would be to return to Jeds. But Cara could care for her as well here as at Jeds, really, especially with the new equipment Charles had brought with him, and it was too late by now to get her off-planet. What if she died?

But there was no point in worrying. She couldn't turn back now. What would come, would come. And she did have Cara, after all. Somehow, with Cara here, she couldn't imagine anything going wrong.

So what would happen after the baby came? These days it seemed like a veil lay drawn between her here, now, and what lay after the baby's arrival. What did she want out of life anyway? Mostly she wanted to be finished with the pregnancy, which weighed on her like a kind of mental torpor, as if all the activity in her body, mental or otherwise, had been channeled into her womb. Yet for two days now the thought of the female Chapalii had nagged at her. All this time humanity had read old human patterns onto Chapalii culture: males who possessed all the status and did everything important and females who lived in seclusion, as second-class citizens. Now it appeared that they had been wrong; now it appeared that the Chapalii possessed two cultures. Yet surely the two cultures intertwined somehow. Surely the pattern was readable, if only the right person, with the right skills, could investigate. Jess knew quite well who the right person was.

Yet she did not want to leave Rhui. She did not want to leave the jaran. Charles lived in a world made cold by his obsession; by joining with him, her world, her surroundings, would be cold as well. She would have to leave the warmth of her family behind. Because the jaran were her family, now.

Somehow, she had to find a way to work with Charles and yet remain on Rhui.

"Tess!"

"Oh, hello, Aleksi. Where did you come from?"

He ran up to her and settled into a walk. Pink flushed his cheeks. "Sonia told me where you'd gone. I thought—" He broke off.

"You thought what? What's wrong?"

"Nothing." But his expression belied the comment. He hesitated, and then words came out in a rash.

"Tess, don't leave me behind when you go. When you leave. I've got no place here, except with you.

Whatever there might be, out there, in the heavens, I'll gladly risk it, as long as I can stay with you."

"Aleksi!" She stopped. "I'm not leaving. Not yet, anyway."

"But someday—?"

"Yes." She said it reluctantly. "Yes, someday I'll leave the jaran."

"Then?"

She smiled sadly, thinking of Yuri, who had refused her offer to go with her to Jeds. Gods, it seemed long ago that he had died. "Aleksi, I promise that when I leave, I'll take you with me if that's what you truly want." His flush faded. His expression cleared. "You may as well come with me now. You already know too much as it is." He assented with a nod and walked beside her the rest of the way to Charles's tent.

Charles waited outside. He rose when he caught sight of her, and came to greet her. "You're looking well."

"Thank you."

He looked at Aleksi and then back at Tess.

"He knows already, Charles. I don't see the harm in letting Aleksi sit in on the council."

"You don't?"

"Believe me, Aleksi has no standing whatsoever in the tribes except what I've given him. He knows it.

I know it. We can trust him." Beside her, Aleksi stood perfectly still, effacing himself in that way he'd learned over the years to avoid notice.

Charles studied the young man, and then Tess; he drew two fingers down the curve of his short beard, stroking it to a point at his chin. "What benefit?" he asked finally.

"Benefit! You would ask that. All right. This one. He -has his own tent. When you leave, you can leave a modeler and communicator with him which he can keep in his tent, which I can then use without fear of it being discovered by Ilya or anyone else."

"This assumes that when I leave, you don't come with me."

"I'm not coming with you."

"Come inside. Everyone else is here." He turned to go in, turned back. "And you as well, Aleksi."

Aleksi glanced once, swiftly, at Tess. Tess knew well enough what the invitation meant: Aleksi had just stepped outside the boundaries of his old life and been accepted into a new one. He knew it, too. AH

of them knew that this was an invitation that would never be extended to Bakhtiian.

They ducked inside the tent. Tess sank gratefully into the chair Cara offered her. She greeted everyone: Marco, David, Maggie, Jo, Rajiv, and Ursula. Aleksi crouched beside her, one hand on the back of her chair. Better that he be here, to mark that although she was part of this world, this council, she also had inseparable links to Rhui. She rested a hand on her abdomen. The fetus moved, rolling under her hand, under the cloth of her tunic, under the skin and the flesh. That link alone marked her forever, mother to a child half of one world, half of another.

"I think," said Charles into the silence, "that we need to consider the interdiction. We need to consider putting into place a matrix within which the plan of sabotage can develop and from which it can be launched at the appropriate time. Also, I'm running out of time. Now mat I've proclaimed myself a player in court politics, I can't be absent for too long without losing—what? face?—without losing position, certainly, and without causing so much suspicion that the emperor might feel called upon to act, to investigate what I'm actually doing here on my interdicted world. Comments?"

"No doubt that you must go back soon," said Cara,

"I think we should pull everyone off Rhui," said Rajiv, "except those vital to the matrix."

"But if we pull everyone off," said Marco, "then won't the Chapalii be suspicious? We ought to let it go on as it always has, more or less."

"Marco, you only say that because you still have continents you want to explore."

"Selfishness is the root of human success in evolution, don't you think?"

Cara snorted.

"Quite the contrary," answered Rajiv, "cooperation has sustained human development."

"But groups can be selfish as well."

"Now, now," said Maggie, "let's keep to the subject at hand, if you please. For the sake of argument, let's say we keep the interdiction in place without any obvious changes. Where do we install our base of operations? Where do we channel all the information? Where do we build the matrix? Jeds? Morava?

Both at once? Somewhere else?"

"A single fixed base of operations is always dangerous," said Ursula. "Easy to discover, easy to root out. I'd suggest two or three bases."

"But when we increase the number," objected Rajiv, "we increase the necessity for communicating between them, and that poses its own problems and its own dangers.

Maggie shook her head. "Rajiv, communication on Rhui is going to be a problem nevertheless. The interdiction works both for and against us in that way. But you'd know better than I how likely the Chapalii are to be monitoring all planetary communications and how thorough their coverage can be."

David coughed. "And while Morava might seem best because of its size and its banks, we don't know if there are other forms of monitoring going on there that we aren't—can't be—aware of. Yet we must stay in contact with Morava. It's vital to the plan, isn't it?"

Cara nodded. "Jeds provides a good landing point still, and an already established base of power on Rhui. Not to mention a good port, with trade routes spreading out all over the planet."

"Jo?" Charles asked.

She shrugged. "Nothing to offer yet. I've finished my report on the samples I took from Morava. I'm studying the samples Cara has taken from the jaran population now. We'll need Jeds in the link just for the laboratory facilities, for one thing. Even Morava doesn't have facilities we humans can use."

"Unless we bring Chapalii down onto Rhui."

"Marco!" David threw up his hands. "That's absurd. That would be breaking the interdiction all over again."

"David, they've already been at Morava. We've established now that Charles has a merchant house allied with him, established on Rhuian terms, I mean. Why shouldn't they visit Morava?"

"Which still hasn't answered the question of where to centralize operations," said Maggie.

"less," said Charles quietly, "you look like you have something to say."

The answer stared her in the face. It answered both her problems. Neatly. Perfectly. Almost too perfectly. She already knew how to build matrices, and what Charles wanted built here was not that different from any language. She already led a jahar of envoys. A steady stream of visitors, envoys, ambassadors, merchants, and philosophers came and went from the camp of the jaran army. Tess could authorize their movement within the camp; she had the authority to receive them, or to send mem away, or to conduct her own missions, to send her own people to Jeds, to Morava, to anywhere she wanted.

And the jaran moved, always. They never stayed in one place for long. She had allies within the jaran, and allies outside the jaran.

"Base it with me," she said softly, surprising everyone but Charles. Tess doubted she could ever surprise Charles. "Base it with the jaran."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sonia regarded the gold cloth with some misgiving. Certainly Tess had every right to adopt the boy into her tent; indeed, Tess herself had gained a place with the jaran by the same means. But the truth was that this was not a simple adoption. Vassily Kireyevsky ought to have stayed with his mother's relatives.

She faulted the Kireyevsky tribe for casting him off, but it wasn't unheard of that a family would rid itself of an unwanted child by giving it to a family who had need of a servant or even a child to adopt.

But a child who had no father could not then be sent to the man who had, perhaps, sired him—as if it could ever be proven.

Sonia made a face and rolled the cloth up again. She disliked that Rhuian word, "sired." Oh, she did not doubt that Vasha was Ilya's son—by Jedan law—but this was not Jeds. Mother Sakhalin's warnings seemed apt now. If the jaran took one step too many off the path the gods had given them to ride, then they would no longer be jaran. And why should Tess care what happened to this child, anyway? In Jeds, Sonia had read of noblewomen who murdered their husband's or father's bastards. What did Tess expect to come of taking in this child?

She signed and set the cloth aside. Looking up, she saw two riders and their escort halt at the edge of camp. A strange sense—not quite of foreboding but of dislocation—swept her, seeing her cousin and the boy together. There was something very alike about them. She got to her feet and went to greet them.

"Hello, Ilya. Vasha."

The boy stammered a greeting. He looked deeply embarrassed at having the luxury of handing over his reins to another man, who would tend to the horse for him; indeed, he looked embarrassed at having ridden such a handsome horse at all, since they had, of course, gone out on two of the khuhaylan Arabians.

"Go on, then," said Sonia, taking pity on him, "Katya is waiting for you. They're over there—" She waved toward her left, where Katya and Galina and a handful of other girls were practicing archery on the empty stretch of ground lying between the Orzhekov tents and the next tribe.

Vasha looked up at—Sonia could not quite bring herself to think, his father—Ilya, and Hya gave the slightest lift of his chin, which the boy took for permission. He ran off.

"Well," said Sonia.

"It was not my choice!" Ilya exclaimed.

Sonia chuckled, resting a hand on his sleeve. "Ilyakoria, I would never tax you with something that so obviously has Tess's mark about it."

"I will never understand her," muttered Ilya, sounding vastly irritated.

"You do hate that," she agreed mildly. "And you would never have married her if you did understand her. Come. You look thirsty."

He also looked as if he wanted to talk. He walked with her and sat down under the awning of her tent.

She brought komis for them both, and while they drank they watched the girls shoot.

"Vera Veselov wants every girl to ride for at least one season with the archers in the army," said Sonia. "I think she thinks of it as some kind of birbas, hunting the khaja as we hunt animals. Good training. But I and Mother Sakhalin and several other etsanas have argued against it. The experience will do some girls no good; others will prefer to ride for two years before it's time for them to marry. And there are women who have lost their husbands who have asked to join as well, but others who wish only to return to the plains. Right now we have enough volunteers, and we haven't even begun to draw young women from the tribes still out on the plains."

"Right now," said Ilya. "But eventually the novelty will wear off, and then it will no longer be enough to have volunteers and a casual place alongside the rest of the army." His eyes narrowed. "Look."

Galina had given Vasha her bow. He obviously had handled a bow before, although he did not have the skill of the girls.

"Will you stop him?" Sonia asked quietly.

Ilya glanced at her. "How can I?"

The sun baked down on the children, but they appeared not to mind it. Their game interested them more.

"What will happen to him, Ilya?"

"I don't know. I scarcely know what to think of him." He hesitated. His lips quirked up into a half-smile. "I scarcely know what to think of myself. Am I a father or not? What do I do with such a child?

What does Tess want me to do with him? Gods." He grimaced. "What does the child himself want? Or can he even know?"

The air lay still today, hot, oppressive, and crowding, as if it waited on some larger storm to break.

But the sky remained blue, unsullied by clouds, and distant Karkand shimmered in the heat.

"Autumn will come soon enough," commented Sonia, "though I don't think it ever grows as cold here as it does on the plains."

Ilya watched the boy out beyond as he shot another round and then gave the bow back to Galina.

"Sonia," he said. Faltered. Began again. "Sonia, don't you suppose that Aleksi should marry?"

The change of subject surprised her. "Ilya! It would break Tess's heart if he left camp." She regarded her cousin questioningly. Surely he understood his wife by now. "And in any case, Tess rules him with an iron hand, however light it may seem to others. He wouldn't go."

He shook his head. "I didn't mean that he should leave. Surely some woman can be found who might come to us."

"Ah," she said, understanding him now. "You think that if you bind Aleksi to camp as well, it will be yet another reason for Tess to stay."

He flashed her a look so filled with indignation that she laughed. How he hated it when people saw past his words and his authority to his feelings. He knew better, however, than to snap at her. "I don't—"

he began, and stopped, because what she had said was true. He subsided into an offended silence that reminded her all at once of Nadine.

"liya," she added, taking pity on him, "be assured that for my own reasons I am keeping an eye out for a wife for Aleksi."

He did not deign to reply, but she saw that her answer mollified him.

Shadows lengthened around them, and the children ended their game. Katya and Galina and Vasha ran over to the tent and swamped the silence with their laughter. The two girls threw themselves down, unconscious of any need for dignity around their formidable cousin. But Vasha moved cautiously, like a foal testing its legs, and with a touching, stiff gravity that made Sonia actually feel a little sorry for whatever he had endured before. Clearly he was proud. As clearly, his Kireyevsky relatives had punished him for his pride, for him to be so eery of it now.

Katya gave a great sigh and rolled over onto her back. "You have to learn to read and write, Vasha.

Doesn't he?" And she rolled her gaze over toward Ilya. Sonia sighed. Katya rode moods the way she rode horses; right now, she was on a racing tear.

"Oh," said Vasha, flashing a glance toward Ilya, and bit off a question.

"Katya! He doesn't have to!" retorted Galina. "You're being a bully."

"Does so," said Katya, and she sprang up and darted into Sonia's tent, emerging moments later with two books. "Shall we start with Aristoteles? Or Sister Casiara?" She set the books down in front of Vasha and opened them both.

Vasha stared down at the pages filled with tiny words, all of which were certainly incomprehensible to him. He was flushed. Sonia doubted if he even knew what reading and writing were, but he could never admit that here, now.

"Katerina, my dear," said Sonia, "Sister Casiara is a little dry and dense as something to start off with, don't you think? I don't recall that even you have managed to read farther than the first chapter."

Katya scowled at her mother, but it was impossible to make her ashamed enough to blush. The little beast. How like her to generously befriend the boy and then embarrass him like this in front of the person he most wanted to impress.

"You all have far too much energy," said Ilya suddenly. "I think all three of you must be old enough now to attend the envoy's school along with Mitya. Afternoons." He looked at Sonia. "There aren't so many chores to do then." Sonia nodded, pleased that he understood how much she needed the children in the mornings, especially since Galina still spent many mornings with Dr. Hierakis. "Any fool can see that Vasha can't read Aristoteles or Sister Casiara," he added directly to Katya, "since he doesn't know Rhuian. Yet."

Vasha's shoulders had remained hunched all through this recital, but they lifted slightly now.

"Meanwhile, he must learn his letters. You two girls may teach him the letters Tess and Niko devised for khush, since I'm sure you know them all quite well now."

"Oh!" said Galina, looking disgusted. "You idiot!" she hissed at her cousin.

"As for you, my young scholar," Ilya added to Katerina, "you will write me a little book in the style of Aristoteles on the nature and kind of horses in this army."

Katya looked dumbfounded. Sonia was pretty sure that Katya had not a clue what Ilya was talking about. The girl set her hands on her hips. "What if I won't?"

"I don't suggest," said Ilya quietly, "that you disobey me, little one."

Beaten by superior horsemanship, Katya gave up the race. She made a horrible face and flopped down on her stomach. Galina giggled. Katya kicked her.

"Do you mean it?" Vasha asked in a small voice. "That I'm to learn to—" He hesitated, touching the paper with one finger. "So that I can learn to hear what these marks say?"

"Gods! Of course I mean it!"

Vasha flinched back. Ilya let out an exasperated sigh. Katya had one eye open and one shut, as if she was trying to decide whether to venture any more mischief.

"Oh, Vasha," Sonia interceded smoothly. "Since you're here, let me measure you against this cloth."

"What's it for?" he asked sulkily, and then his eyes widened as she unrolled the golden silk.

"May I help, Aunt Sonia?" asked Galina at once. "I recognize that piece. Isn't the weave fine?"

"Is Aunt Tess back yet?" asked Katya suddenly, evidently determined to make one last gallop or even, perhaps, to provoke a stampede. Sonia had a very good idea of how much Ilya disliked being kept out of any business Tess was involved in, especially when that business, that council, involved the Prince of Jeds. Sonia did not doubt that the council might last well into the night, and that Ilya might never learn the least scrap of information about what had gone on there. Sonia did not precisely distrust Tess's brother; on the whole, she guessed he was their ally more than their enemy, but he had yet to impress her as a person who cared much at all what the jaran thought of him. As if he does not need us.

Ilya stiffened. Here it came.

"But I don't understand," said Vasha tremulously, "how these little marks can speak?"

Sonia had to bite her tongue to stop from laughing out loud. Outmaneuvered and outraced.

"Oh, here," said Ilya, rising at once. "Come with me, Vasha. I've got a stylus and tablet. It's the only way to learn letters. I'll teach you."

Vasha leapt up, his face bright. Katya stuck her tongue out at him, looking sour.

"That will teach you," said Sonia to her daughter as soon as Ilya and the boy were out of earshot.

Katya ignored her mother. She had a stubborn set to her mouth now, and she pulled the Aristoteles over and opened it up and began the laborious process of sounding out the words. Sonia smiled.

"May I help you with the shirt?" Galina asked.

"Of course you may, my love."

Together they worked to make a shirt for Vasha. Beyond Karkand the sun set, staining red a trailing growth of clouds that had begun to gather on the horizon.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Diana watched Marco surreptitiously. Outside, rain fell. Here in the Company tent, they all sat listening while Charles Soerensen and Owen and Ginny discussed the possibility of the Company breaking new ground.

"With my patronage, I think it's quite possible you could actually tour outside of League space."

"Think of it!" Diana recognized the gleam that lit Owen's eyes. She had seen it before. She had seen it that winter morning three and a half years ago when Ginny first broached the idea that they travel to Rhui. "Does theater even translate to nonhuman species? Are there links between all intelligent species, or are we simply myopic in thinking that all other forms of life must have some discernible relationship to our own?"

Soerensen sat between Owen and Ginny. Marco sat next to Owen. Marco glanced up at Diana and they looked away together.

"Would this be an exclusive contract?" Ginny asked.

Soerensen smiled. "No, not exactly. I want to encourage arts of all kinds to spread. I want to encourage humanity to move out into the Empire, now that—" He paused. They all waited for him, the entire Company—all but Hyacinth, who was gone, and Anahita, who had stayed in her tent. Anahita rarely met with the others now, except at rehearsal or a performance. Gwyn said that she had succumbed to her own spiritual hollowness.

"—now that we have the means to do so."

A "Hmm," said Owen, and Diana wondered what he was thinking.

"Hmm," said Ginny, echoing her husband. She cocked her head to one side, and she and Soerensen exchanged what Diana always called A Significant Glance. Diana had it in the back of her mind that Ginny had known Soerensen for quite a while, maybe even from before she had met Owen. Then Ginny surveyed her troupe, one by one: Oriana with her willowy, dark beauty; quiet Phillippe; Dejhuti, who looked half asleep but never was; Seshat, born into the profession, who had lived it and breathed it all her life; Helen and Jean-Pierre, who were snappish but good-hearted; sweet, silly Quinn. Yomi and Joseph sat patiently; everyone knew that they provided the foundation on which Owen and Ginny built.

Ginny hesitated, looking at her son, but Hal for once met her gaze with curiosity not antagonism. Next to Diana, Gwyn sat, leaning forward over his knees, chin perched on his intertwined ringers; he looked alert, brimming with controlled energy, and he examined Ginny and Soerensen in turn, as if he read something from them, something that met with his approval. Last, Ginny met Diana's gaze. She nodded, once, with finality.

"They'll do," she said. "We'll see about Hyacinth, and we'll have to do new auditions as well. Given that we'll have fewer physical constraints, I'd like to add a few actors, and definitely we'll need more crew."

"Definitely," echoed Yomi with a sigh of relief.

"Good," said Soerensen briskly. He rose. "Once we're off planet, we'll deal with the particulars."

The meeting broke up.

Diana leaned toward Gwyn. "Am I missing something?" she whispered. "This is all very exciting, but somehow I feel we're not being told everything."

"Think about it." The others got to their feet around them. A few braved the elements, following Soerensen out into the sodden outdoors. Others lingered inside, chatting, while Joseph brewed tea.

Gwyn kept his voice low. "Soerensen doesn't do anything without a reason—that is, without a deeper reason. Humans have never been allowed to travel much outside of League space. Those of us who are allowed to might be able to find out things."

"Oooh. Spies!"

"Sssh. This isn't a game, Di."

"Sorry. But we're actors, not soldiers or diplomats."

"Exactly." Then he grinned. "What better cover? And what better people to play roles?"

"No! You don't really think—?"

He shrugged. "Maybe I'm wrong. One's thinking becomes a little warped after an extended stay in prison. Excuse me." He rose and caught Ginny's arm before she walked outside, and they went out together, Gwyn shrugging his cloak on. A finger of cool, damp breeze brushed Diana's face and dissolved in the heat of the tent. An eddy of movement had trapped Marco between Oriana and Hal. He sidled past them toward the entrance. Diana jumped to her feet and pulled the flap aside for him, and followed him out.

"Thank you," he said without looking at her. They stood under the awning. She slung on her cloak and hitched the hood up over her head. Rain drenched the ground. A wind threw mist under the awning, and out beyond the muddy canvas groundcloth on which they stood, the earth was soaked and weeping rivulets of water. "The soil doesn't absorb the rain very well, does it?" asked Marco. Whether the rain beyond or her presence made him reluctant to leave the shelter of the awning, she did not know. He still didn't look at her. The clouds lowered dull and gray over them. The sheeting rain blurred the distant shapes of tents. Gwyn and Ginny stood talking under the awning of her and Owen's tent, stamping the mud off their boots and shaking water from their cloaks. Farther away, they saw Soerensen trudging through the rain into camp, his shoulders hunched, his pale hair slicked down against his head.

"It must be the rainy season," said Diana, and then she laughed, because it was such a stupid comment.

"I must go." He did not move.

"Marco. Are we going to become spies?"

He flung his head back, startled, and then he chuckled. He reached out and with one finger tilted her chin back and smoothed his finger over her lips. His skin was surprisingly warm. "Only if you wish it, golden fair." He traced her cheek and jaw with his hand and as abruptly closed the hand into a fist and drew it away from her face. "Forgive me."

"No." She captured the hand in one of hers. "There's nothing to forgive. It's true, you know, that I have a right here to take a lover if I wish to." His eyes flared slightly as he watched her. "How soon are we leaving?"

"I can't say. We could leave anytime. Two days. Ten. Twenty. But it will be soon."

"And the Company will go with Soerensen?"

"Yes. What will you do, Diana?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well—" He did not try to free his hand, but she felt his fingers move within her grasp. "Anatoly—"

"The Company is my life, Marco. If they go, I go with them. Or did you think I was like Tess Soerensen? That I meant to stay with the jaran?"

"I didn't think—I mean, I didn't know—it's not my business to ask, is it?"

She heard Hal and Ori at the entrance, and she dropped Marco's hand, but neither of them came out.

"Di!" called Hal from inside. "Did you want some tea? Goddess, this weather is disgusting."

"Come to my tent tonight," said Diana quickly, in an undertone.

"Di! Where are you?" The tent flap rustled aside. Hal stuck his head out. "Oh," he said, and ducked inside again.

They stood in silence, serenaded by the incessant pounding of rain. One corner of the awning sagged down under an accumulating pool, and with a rush the balance tipped and a waterfall began a slow trickle out of the poof, flooded with a tearing splash, and emptied.

Diana sneezed. "I beg your pardon! As if I would want to live like this for the rest of my life anyway!"

"Diana." His voice was taut. "Do you mean it?"

"I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it!"

"I beg your pardon. I only—"

"I know what I said before. I know it was only six days ago. But it's over, Marco. I mean, what are we talking about now? We're talking about touring into Chapalii space! We're leaving Rhui. I can't hang on to here forever. I'll have to let go, I'll have to let him go."

"You might be able to get a dispensation from Charles to let him come with you." He said it reluctantly.

"Come with me? Do you think he'd want to?"

"I don't know. Diana, I'm not the best person to ask that of. I'm not exactly a disinterested party."

"No, I'm sorry. That was cruel of me."

"Not cruel." He took in a breath and let it out. "I would—" He broke off, shook his head, and started again. "I would like to— Of course, I— Oh, Goddess, I'm making a hash of this. The answer is yes.

Excuse me." He jerked the thong of his hat up tight and strode out abruptly into the rain.

Diana stared after him. But it was just as well. Her chest had gone tight with a sudden pounding. She had asked him; he had said yes. And he was just as flustered as she was. She watched him slog away through the mud. A smaller figure, a child, ran toward them through the pelting rain, fair head bent under the onslaught. Marco paused as the child raced by him and then he trudged on in the direction Soerensen had disappeared. The child began a detour toward Diana's tent, but when Diana raised her hand, the figure halted, slipping in the mud, and jogged toward her.

It was one of the girls from the Veselov tribe. She halted outside the awning.

"Oh, here," said Diana. "Come underneath."

The girl did so gratefully. "Mother Veselov sent me," she said after she'd caught her breath. Her hair was soaked through, but the rain slid off her long felt coat and dripped onto the ground. "A messenger came in. From Anatoly Sakhalin's jahar. They'll be here today."

Today.

Wind whipped a sheet of rain in under the cover of the awning, spraying Diana's face. She tugged her cloak around her. "Haven't you anything to wear on your head?" she demanded.

"Oh, of course I do, but it was all so fast, Mother Veselov calling me in, and so I just ran. It'll dry. I don't mind."

/ don't mind. They none of them complained about the hardships. It was one thing to live under these conditions for a short time; that was endurable. But to live under them always. Diana could not imagine how Tess Soerensen could choose to live here, year after year. Or how she could even want to have a child under these conditions. But then, she wasn't Tess Soerensen, and Anatoly, for all his undoubted charms, was nothing like flyakoria Bakhtiian.

"I don't know what to do," said Diana in Anglais.

The girl smiled up at her, blinking drops of water off her pale eyelashes.

But it was worse just to stand here undecided. "I'll go with you," Diana said abruptly. They forged out into the rain. It hammered on her head, and soon enough she regretted that she hadn't thought to get the girl a hat. Mud slathered her boots. Few people moved about; wisely, they had chosen to stay in their tents.

"Mother Veselov said to take you to the Sakhalin encampment," said the girl as they slogged along.

"Anyway, the jahar will have to report in to Bakhtiian before anything else."

"And Anatoly will have to report in to his grandmother."

"Well, of course!"

Halfway through camp, they found themselves caught in a swirl of movement along the avenue that led from the outskirts of the camp straight in to the central encampments. A troop of horsemen rode by.

They were spattered with mud and drenched by the rain, windblown and yet impressive, unbowed by the weather. In better weather. Diana thought they would have formed a triumphal procession, but as it was, only a handful of jaran ventured out to watch them go by. Where had they come from?

She saw the prisoners all at once, three cloaked women and a small child riding on caparisoned horses. Riders surrounded them, but the prisoners paid no heed to their presence or even, seemingly, to the camp through which they rode. They looked thoroughly dispirited. The eldest woman's nose ran with mucus, streaking her face, and she coughed deep from her lungs as they passed where Diana stood. Mud sucked and squelched under the hooves of the horses.

Then Diana saw the king. He could be nothing else. Even brown with mud, his surcoat glinted with gold where the rain washed the mud away in patches. He wore a crown, too, fixed somehow to his head so that when he fell, stumbling, sliding in the mud, struggling up again, it did not fall off. It was more like a mockery of a crown, because of that. A belt of ropes at his waist tied him to the harness of two horses, which were ridden at a taut rope's length on either side of him. Just in front of Diana he slipped and fell to his hands and knees, and the riders kept moving, so that the ropes dragged him on through the mud. He wept, scrabbling to gain purchase, but he could not get up.

She could not stand to watch him. Whatever else he might be, he did not deserve this kind of treatment; it was inhuman. She dashed forward and yelled at the riders to stop. They obeyed immediately, unthinkingly. They stared, astonished, as she bent down beside the man and laid a hand on his arm. He flinched away from her.

"Here, let me help you up," she said in khush, though she doubted he could understand her. Perhaps her tone reassured him; perhaps her woman's voice amazed him. Perhaps he had long since given up hope. In any case, he did not resist as she helped him to his feet.

Lines etched his face. White streaks ran through his hair and his beard, where it wasn't splashed with mud. Tears and rain melded together on his face, so that it was impossible to tell one from the other. His nose was red. His mouth quivered. He stared at her. A strangled noise came from his throat, and more sound, like choked words, and when his lips parted to reveal red-stained teeth, she realized that his tongue had been cut out.

Like a wave, revulsion washed over her, revulsion for the act and pity for the man. The rain poured down. Water seeped into her boots. She felt chilled to the bone.

"What is going on? Who gave you permission to stop?"

The king cowered, ducking his head and lifting an arm to ward off a blow. Diana turned.

Standing, Anatoly was no taller than she was. On a horse, he loomed above her. The horse itself invested him with power. His saber, his spear, the weight of his armor, invested him with authority.

Flanked by his captains, he glared down at her, and she knew, in that instant, what it felt like to be a woman—any person, indeed—trapped and cornered by the conquering nomads. Like savages, like devils, ruthless and driven, they stood ready to strike down anything or anyone that blocked their path.

"Diana!" Without looking away from her, he spoke to one of his captains. "Mirtsov, get a horse for my wife."

It was done. Given no choice, she let go of the king and mounted up on a gray mare, next to Anatoly.

"The girl—" she said, and faltered.

"Mirtsov, take the girl up behind you and escort her to her family. The rest of you— Go on!" His men started forward again. The king stumbled along between them. Anatoly waited, reining in his horse, until the others had splashed past them, and then he started forward as well. Diana rode beside him. He said nothing. He looked angry. She studied him, noting how he had grown a straggling beard, how his fair hair was caught back in a short braid to keep it out of his face. Of the leather segments hanging from his cuirass to protect his thighs, three looked new, as if his armor had been repaired recently; as if he had been in a battle not too long ago. His red silk surcoat was frayed at the hem and mended all down the left side. She saw no trace of the cheerful young man who had left her more than three months ago; this man looked like Anatoly Sakhalin, proud and handsome, but he looked aloof and heartless and hard as well, as if out there in the hostile territory he and his men had ridden through, hunting down the king, he had become a predator in truth.

They rode together in silence until they came to the ring of guards that surrounded Bakhtiian's encampment. With an escort of ten riders, plus the prisoners and the king still bound by ropes, Anatoly passed through with Diana and they came to a halt on the muddy stretch of ground that fronted the awning of Tess Soerensen's tent. Bakhtiian emerged from the tent.

"Bakhtiian, I have brought to you the coat, the crown, and the head of the Habakar king," said Anatoly.

"Still attached, I see," said Bakhtiian mildly. The king simply stood there, looking stupefied. "Who are these others?"

"They attended the king. Wife and sister and daughter, perhaps. The child belongs to the young woman. There were two other children, but they died along the way. They were already sick when we found them. He ran like a coward, Bakhtiian, and in the end, he tried to barter the life of every woman and man in his jahar in order to save his own. He wasn't worth the trouble."

Diana saw how Bakhtiian looked up from the king with a sharp glance to examine Anatoly. "That may be so, but he killed my envoys and blinded Josef. Thus must he and his city serve as an example to the rest. It was well done, Anatoly. You may hand him over to my riders. Send your captains to my niece immediately. She'll want intelligence, all your observations, on the lands you passed through. You yourself may attend me tomorrow." With that, Bakhtiian retreated back inside his tent.

Thus dismissed, Anatoly handed the prisoners over to Bakhtiian's guards and dismissed his own men in their turn, to return to their camps and families.

"I must go pay my respects to my grandmother," he said, only now turning to regard Diana. His steely expression made her nervous. The rain had slackened finally, and drops glistened in the exposed fur lining of his hat. His helmet hung on a strap from his belt. The armor made him look burly and thuggish.

What on Earth had possessed her to marry him in the first place? Well, nothing on Earth, of course. The picture had seemed much more romantic at first. Now it merely seemed primitive and brutal.

He guided his horse around and they rode back through the ring of guards and crossed a narrow strip of field and came into the Sakhalin encampment. Clearly, someone had alerted Mother Sakhalin to their coming. She waited under the awning of her great tent. Anatoly dismounted, handed the reins over to an adolescent boy, and went to greet her with the formal kiss to each cheek. Diana swung down and followed, hesitating at the edge of the awning.

"Grandson. You are welcome back into camp. I'm not sure what your wife has arranged...."

Diana felt like an idiot, as she was sure Mother Sakhalin intended her to. "I didn't know—I just found out that Anatoly had returned."

"Ah. Well, then, Anatoly, I have water and a tub for you to bathe in. You look filthy. Your cousins will help you remove your armor, and they'll see that it's cleaned." Several boys hovered anxiously off to one side; at her words, they hurried forward, evidently eager to help their famous cousin, the youngest man in the army to have a command of his own. Diana wrung her hands. Anatoly glanced at her once, twice, and all the while kept up an easy flow of small talk with his grandmother.

"... and the water is still hot, so you must beware. Mother Hierakis has shown our healers how if we boil all the water we'll have fewer fevers in camp."

"Have there been fewer fevers in camp?" he asked.

"The khaja die in greater numbers than we do, it is true, but they are weak in any case. Still, Mother Hierakis is a great healer, and one must not discount her words."

Stripped down to his red silk shirt and black trousers and boots, Anatoly looked suddenly much more

—human. He handed his saber and sheath away to one of the boys, and he looked suddenly much more

—gentle. His clothes smelled of sweat and of grime, but the sodden scent of rain dampened even that, although Diana imagined that he hadn't bathed in weeks. Not on such a journey as he had ridden.

"Boris and Piotr will help you with the bath, if you wish," said Mother Sakhalin. Two boys waited, each bearing a saddle pack.

Anatoly's gaze flashed to Diana and away. "If that is your command, Grandmother, of course, but I had hoped that you might allow Diana to attend me."

"Your wife has her own tent, and if it was not ready for you—" She sighed.

"Grandmother." The dread conqueror softened, settling a dirty hand on the old woman's sleeve.

"Please."

She gave way at once, before his blue eyes and pleading expression. "For you, Anatoly, but for no one else would I allow it!"

"Of course, Grandmother. You're too good to me." He kissed her again on either cheek.

"Hmmph." She stood aside and gestured for them to go past, into the tent. Anatoly grabbed the saddlebags from the boys and went inside. Diana had no choice but to go with him.

Mother Sakhalin's tent was huge, twice the size of any other tent in camp. To the right of the entrance a rust-red curtain embroidered with three leaping stags screened off a spacious alcove. A metal tub sat on a pile of carpets within, and a weary-looking old man poured a last pitcher of streaming water into the tub. Seeing Anatoly, he ducked his head and limped hurriedly out of the alcove.

"He's not jaran," said Diana, staring after him. The curtain fell into place behind him, shielding them from the rest of the tent. On this side, a herd of horses raced over a golden field toward the rising sun.

"He was a Habakar general," said Anatoly, glancing that way as well. "Now he is Grandmother's servant. She is kind to him, considering that he deserted his army on the field."

"Oh," murmured Diana, not knowing what else to say. She clasped her hands at her waist and stood there.

Anatoly tossed down the saddlebags and stripped. Diana just watched him. He paused, between pulling off his shirt and unbuckling his belt, and glanced at her, and grinned,

"Send one of the boys in to take these things away, if you can't stand to touch them. Did you bring anything for me to wear?"

"No, I—I'm sorry. I didn't think."

"Oh, never mind it. Grandmother will have thought of it."

"Yes," said Diana bitterly, "she always does think of everything."

"There's much you could learn from her, Diana. No etsana runs her camp as well as my grandmother runs hers." He stripped out of his trousers and tested the water with a foot. "Ah," he said, in a way that made her suddenly, achingly aware that he was naked, and close by her. He slid into the tub, which was barely large enough for him to stretch out his legs. Diana took a step toward him without realizing it, halted, and then walked over and knelt beside the tub.

"Where's the—" he began. Diana found the stuff they used for soap and started to hand it to him, then set it down, threw off her cloak, and rolled up the sleeves of her tunic. "Here, could you unbraid my hair? Gods, it's gotten long. I used to wear it that way when I was younger, but not since I joined the army."

"You all wear it like Bakhtiian, now."

Even with his hair as filthy as it was, she could not help but tangle her fingers in it as she unwound the braid. He sighed and lay back against her hands. She dipped a hand in the hot water and started to wash him, his neck, his back, his arms.

"How far did you ride?" she asked in a low voice, aware of his skin under her hands, of the gritty scrape of soap against dirt and sweat, of water sloughing off him. "Where did you find the king?"

"A long way. It would take the army—oh—one hundred and twenty days perhaps to travel as far as we rode southwest. In the end, the khaja bastard tried to row out across a lake. I think there was an island out there, and maybe his gods." He chuckled. "But I was damned if I would let him get away after all that. I threw off my armor and rode after the boat"

"Do you know how to swim?"

"Swim? Oh, in the water, you mean? No. My horse did."

"But you might have drowned!" One hand, slick with soap, lay open on his chest. He caught the other in a now-clean hand and rubbed it against his beard. He smiled and shut his eyes.

"But I can't die. When I saw you, after that battle, I thought you were an angel sent down by the gods from the heavens to take me up to their lands. The gods know my wounds were bad enough that they might have killed me, but they didn't, because you were there. As long as you're with me, I can't die. So why should I fear?"

Diana buried her face in his neck. Tears burned at the back of her eyes. Absently, he stroked her arm with his other hand. "When the king's men saw we were coming after them, even into the water, they threw him overboard, hoping to gain mercy for themselves. I'm surprised they rode with him that far.

He'd abandoned his children and family already. So we caught him and brought him back. There were plenty of riches, too, with his family, but those will go to Bakhtiian."

"You sent me some things, the necklace, the earrings, by a messenger."

"Well, those were fairly won. Do you see the scar on my left thigh?"

She saw it, white and jagged but cleanly healed. She sank her hand into the water and ran it down his leg. He shivered all over and said something meaningless, and she drew her hand back up to his chest and kept washing him. "Did it gain them mercy?"

"Who?"

"The men who were with the king, giving him up like that."

"Of course not. If they'd break allegiance to their own king, their dyan, then how are we to be expected to trust them? Diana, why did you lift him up off the ground?"

She pulled her hands away from him. As he shifted in the tub, arching back to look at her, the water slipped about him, lapping against his legs and the side of the tub. "I felt pity for him."

"But he brought the gods" wrath down on himself three times! First by killing our envoys, second by running away from battle, and third by abandoning his children. These khaja eat birds, you know." He shuddered. "Savages. I only left him alive because I knew Bakhtiian wanted him. Here, can you find my razor? I'd like to shave."

She rummaged in the bags and found the razor. He reclined and watched her through half-closed lids, the barest smile on his face. He looked content enough, having done his duty to Bakhtiian, gained glory in the doing of it, and come home to his beautiful wife. But he didn't look smug, just at ease. Goddess help her, the truth was there for her to see, as bitter as it was. Even knowing how casually he had killed, how simple and pitiless his judgments were, how appalling, compared to what compassion and mercy she believed was due any human soul, still she cared for him.

"You look sad," he said, puzzled.

Still, she would leave here, Rhui, the jaran, him. She had to. Her work lay elsewhere. "What would you do, if you weren't a rider?"

"What would I do? But I am a rider, Diana. What would you do if you weren't an actor?"

But I am an actor. She brought the razor back to him and watched him as he shaved. Then, because it gave her pleasure, because it gave him pleasure, she washed his hair. After that, she found the ceramic pitchers of warm water that the servant had left by the tub. "Stand up so I can rinse you. Look how filthy that water is." But she did not look at the water, only at him.

Clean, he stepped out of the tub. "Now," he said.

"Anatoly! Your grandmother—"

"—will not send us out into the rain this night, you can be sure. It's a long walk from here to your tent, my heart. Shhh." Rain drummed softly on the roof of the tent. "You see, she left pillows and a blanket along the wall, there. It's raining again."

Only much later, when he lay sleeping beside her, did she remember Marco. Had he come by her tent that night, only to find her gone? Anatoly stirred and shifted, opened his eyes, and smiled to find her there.

"Elinu," he said. My angel.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Their tour of the engineering works led them under the ground, down to where the sappers worked.

The khaja laborers pressed back against the damp earth walls of the gallery as Aleksi and his escort ducked by them.

"Once we're under the wall," said David, "we'll burn the props and the fall of the mine will cause the wall to collapse."

Aleksi did not like being underground, nor in such a closed space. The other jaran men liked it less.

Only Ursula seemed more excited than nervous, peering around in the wavering lantern light, breathing in the dank, stuffy air, lifting one hand to touch the earth a hand's-span above her head, but then, everyone knew that she was a little mad.

David wore a loose cotton shirt pulled up to expose his arms. Dirt stained the cloth, and sweat darkened it all down his back. He glanced at the others and bent to whisper to Aleksi. "We've twenty feet to go to the wall. But ten feet out and four to the side there's another tunnel coming. They're countermining. We're going to need to post some kind of guard down here. Those sabers aren't going to work down here, or your lances, or bows."

"Short swords and short spears," said Ursula. "Thrusting weapons, mostly. You won't be doing much cutting in these close quarters. The best use of the companion sword is in a confined space." "

"David," murmured Aleksi, "how do you know there's another tunnel? Is it from your box, your machine?"

"Yes. We can measure it—oh, I can't explain it now. We've seen everything we can down here. Let's go back up."

They edged back past the laborers. Aleksi noted how David said a few words, here and there, to the khaja men stuck down here. All of the people in Charles's party were like that: they spoke to everyone, even to the khaja, however briefly. Only Ursula behaved like a normal person, interested only in the task at hand. After all, when the attack began, most of these laborers would die in the front lines, taking the brunt of the assault.

They wound back through the mines and climbed up until they came out into a trench covered by thick hides, and thence out along a rampart built to screen the mine entrance from arrows. From here, Aleksi looked out over the grassy sward that separated the outlying district from the massive walls of the inner city of Karkand. Once, he supposed, animals had grazed here. Now nothing stirred. Pennants fluttered on the walls above. A few figures moved, patrolling the heights.

With a sharp thud, a siege engine fired, casting a missile into the city. Up until yesterday, they had thrown rocks and dead animals and corpses in. Now, with the Habakar king in Bakhtiian's hands, they had stepped up the assault. Aleksi himself had watched at dawn when the first pot of burning naphtha had been launched. The sun sank in the west, lighting the walls with red fire. In the district where the palace towers gleamed, a thread of smoke flared up. By the southern curve of the walls another column of smoke rose.

"Down," said David abruptly, shoving on Aleksi's shoulder. As Aleksi ducked, he heard the distant echo of a thunk, and he rose to see a cloud of dirt and splintered wood rise in the air behind them, in the suburbs, and dissipate, falling back to earth. The defenders of Karkand had their own siege engines, but unfortunately for them, the jaran camp lay far out of then- reach. The defenders could only attack the well-defended siege engines brought up to fire on them, or those portions of their own suburbs that lay within range of their catapults. Still, as the preparations for the assault grew up, ringing the inner city, the defenders stepped up their fire as well.

"Shall we go?" Aleksi asked. "This khaja warfare leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I'd rather fight out in the open."

"It's true that, as Sun Tzu says, "Attacking a Fortified Area is an Art of last resort," " said Ursula, "but you have to adapt yourself to the conditions that present themselves. Are you coming, David?"

The engineer drew a hand across his brow, wiping off sweat. "No. I've a few more things to supervise here. We need more guards here, too. Some equipped for the tunnels, and another jahar. There was a sortie out from the eastern portal last night, according to the laborers. The auxiliaries posted here had a hard time of it. I don't want any more of my workmen killed."

"Your workmen?" Ursula asked, with a grin that Aleksi could not interpret.

"Charles gave me a free hand. Indeed, he urged me to do what I could." David glanced at Aleksi and then away. "Let's not discuss this here, Ursula."

She saluted him mockingly and followed Aleksi out to where riders waited with their horses. That was another thing that puzzled Aleksi about these people from the heavens: He could not tell where each one stood according to the others. One might defer to another and then be deferred to by that same person.

The prince was clearly in charge, yet he deferred in his turn, at times, and the members of his party usually treated him as casually as they treated each other. Was this how the gods behaved in the heavens, among their own kind? But they weren't gods— Tess assured him of that, and he could see it for himself.

They rode out through the suburbs. Here, beyond reach of the Karkand catapults, siege towers rose, built by conscripted laborers marched in from the countryside and from as far away as Gangana and guarded by the Farisa auxiliaries who hated their former Habakar masters and who had been overjoyed to throw in their lot with the jaran. The wheels of the towers rose almost twice Aleksi's height and were as thick as the length of his arm. Farther back, they built the scaffolding for the Habakar king.

At the gate of the outer wall, the grain marketplace did a brisk business, heavily guarded by jaran riders. Passing through the gate, they came to the huge churned-up field where once a portion of the jaran camp had lain. Much of the camp had moved a morning's ride out from the city, having used up the forage and muddied the water beyond repair. Also, there were rumors that the King's nephew had gathered an army and was even now marching north, to lift the siege. Aleksi knew that Bakhtiian fretted over Tess's safety. Still, Sakhalin ought to stop the king's nephew. And the governor of Karkand had not escaped to join the royal prince. Now and again riders slipped out from Karkand and eluded the jaran net, but such small parties could at best bring intelligence to the Habakar prince and none of them rode as fast as the jaran couriers.

At camp, Ursula left Aleksi to go to Soerensen's encampment. Aleksi rode on past ambassador's row and up to Tess's tent. A council had gathered before the awning. Yesterday the clouds had cleared away, but the air still smelled of rain and the ground had only just begun to dry out. It was a bad time to mount a siege. Aleksi left his horse with his escort and walked around to listen in on the council.

"—despite Mother Hierakis's directions, we're seeing more fevers."

"This rain makes fighting difficult."

"Nevertheless," said Bakhtiian, "it is time to take the city. We have the king, and I don't want to winter here." He glanced at Tess, and Aleksi felt sure that Bakhtiian also did not want his wife to bear their child here. Tess looked a little pale. Sonia sat next to her, and Mitya beyond Sonia. Josef sat next to Ilya, and next to Josef sat Kirill Zvertkov, who had been elevated rather quickly to such a place of honor.

Aleksi sank onto his haunches at the far edge of the awning and settled in to watch. A little later Ursula arrived, with David in tow, and the council shifted to accommodate them. They began to discuss how best to launch and sustain the assault on Karkand's walls, and what to do with the Habakar king.

Tess got to her feet and retreated back into her tent. Aleksi rose and circled around and slipped in the back entrance.

"Are you all right?" he asked, seeing that she was already resting on the pillows. Her paleness frightened him.

"Yes. Just tired. I'm just so tired today."

"Shall I get the doctor?"

Tess shook her head. "You could get me something to drink. Cara's at the hospital. She had a horrible argument with Ilya this morning over how many resources she ought to put into tending to the khaja laborers. Ilya wanted nothing done with them, but Cara told him that if he wanted to rule all people then he had to treat them all as his people. Gods, he was furious—spitting furious." She smiled fleetingly at her memory of the scene. "But what could he do? She's right."

"She is?"

"Aleksi!" She sighed. "I hate it here. I just want to get away from here. I want to go back to the plains." He brought her water and sat beside her. They listened as the council droned on outside. He felt comfortable with her, and he could tell that his presence, quiet and steady, comforted her. She shut her eyes and after a while she slept.

Aleksi ducked outside. Bakhtiian glanced back at him, and Aleksi nodded, to show that Tess was safe.

Bakhtiian turned back to the discussion of scaling ladders and the assault on the towers, of shields and infantry, of mining and the vulnerability of mudbrick walls.

"As at Hazjan, we must bring the archers into firing range behind cover, and much of the early assault will be done on foot with some of our troops mixed in with the Farisa auxiliary behind the cover provided by the laborers. If we can get the gates open, then we can send squads in, but otherwise, as we've done before, we'll use khaja warcraft to take the city. I see no point in further discussion. How soon will the mines be ready?"

"Oh, ah ..." David glanced around and then, reluctantly, spoke. "Certainly in two days I can—"

"One day. Tomorrow we will roll the king out on the scaffolding onto the ground before the main gates of the city. He'll be left there until we kill him or he dies by other means. They'll have one day to consider him. We'll start the assault at dawn, day after next." Bakhtiian rose. "Excuse me, Josef. Kirill, Mitya, attend me." He strode off, Kirill at his side, Mitya two steps behind, leaving the council sitting in silence for a moment before they all burst into talk and rose themselves, hurrying off, some after Bakhtiian, some to their own commands.

Sonia paused beside Aleksi. "He's moody," she observed.

"Bakhtiian?"

"Yes. He's worried about the reports from the south. He doesn't like sitting here in one place. He knows the army is better off in the field. Anyway, they're going to wheel the khaja king out on a cart in front of the walls and offer to kill him quickly if Karkand will surrender."

"And if the city won't surrender?"

She shrugged. "He doesn't deserve a merciful death for what he did to our envoys and to Josef." She looked past Aleksi toward Josef Raevsky, who sat patiently, waiting for Ivan to come help him away.

"Do you think I should marry him?"

"Marry who? The Habakar king? That wouldn't be very merciful for him, would it?"

"Aleksi!" She laughed. "No, Josef."

"Josef!"

"It would mean less work for us, if he slept in my tent, since he's with us most of the time anyway.

And a fair reward, for all he's given, to marry into Ilya's family."

"Do you love him, Sonia?"

"No, but I like him very well, and the children do, too. When are you going to mark Raysia Grekov, Aleksi?"

His heart skipped a beat. "Never. I'm not going to marry." He paused to catch his breath and had a sudden intuition that he ought to be honest with her. "You must know I don't want to leave the Orzhekov tribe."

Sonia considered him. "True enough. And we already have one of the Grekovs in our camp now. Two would be too many."

He grabbed hold of this distraction. "Don't you like the Grekovs?"

"They've gotten a little above themselves since Feodor married Nadine. Haven't you noticed it?"

Aleksi shrugged. "Well, I'll look and see if I can find a young woman who might come to our tribe.

Maybe one who's lost her husband."

It took him a moment to understand what she meant. "Sonia!" Why should she do this for him? Not just to make him happy, surely. "Is there some other reason you want me to marry?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yes. I need more help. Another woman in camp would be welcome."

Stung by her honesty, he snapped at her. "Get servants!"

"Tess won't have them," she said reasonably.

"But you have authority over camp, through your mother."

"That is true, but all the same, if Tess doesn't want a thing to happen, it does not happen. She told me once she finds them too much like slaves to be comfortable with having any about. Aleksi, you might trust me that I do this for you as well as for the tribe."

It was hard to stay angry at Sonia. And it was true that she had always treated him well. "You could use more help," he agreed, placated by her even tone. He hesitated. "And it's true I wouldn't mind being married." She accepted his confession equably. "If you can find someone, and I like her, then I'll mark her."

"Thank you." Sonia kissed him on the cheek and, seeing Ivan crouch beside Josef, went over to them.

An unfamiliar emotion settled on him as he watched Sonia kneel beside Josef and solicitously help the blind man to his feet. Josef did not need her help to stand, of course, but what man would refuse it? It took Aleksi a moment to name the feeling: Envy. He envied Josef the simple kindness Sonia showed him now. Gods, it hurt, like his heart had cracked. He fought to seal it up. He forced himself to watch them dispassionately.

Sonia guided Josef around to the square tent, set back behind the two great tents, where Josef and Tess conducted their jahar of envoys and accepted petitions from khaja supplicants. Josef was a good man, still dignified, and only a few years older than Bakhtiian, and he had been a brilliant general, every bit Yaroslav Sakhalin's equal, until the expedition to Habakar. Sonia was right.

The Habakar king didn't deserve a merciful death. Ursula had suggested that they pour molten silver down his throat until he died. In fact, Tess had left the council right after Ursula had made that suggestion. Would Tess try to talk Bakhtiian out of killing the king? And yet, Bakhtiian had to show the khaja that they could not kill his envoys, and he had to show the jaran that such an insult would not go unpunished. Even if Tess urged him to show mercy, even if he wanted to, he could not.

If Tess was appalled enough by the sight, would she leave with her brother and go back to Jeds? No, not to Jeds; to Erthe. Jeds was a khaja place. Erthe—Earth—-was in the heavens. Soerensen meant to leave soon; how soon, Aleksi did not know. Perhaps no one knew but Soerensen himself. Certainly, Bakhtiian did not know. Aleksi supposed that Soerensen could not really leave until Karkand had fallen, since Bakhtiian had no troops to spare him for an escort. Except, if Earth lay in the heavens, then maybe the prince did not travel mere by horse or by ship. Maybe he did not want an escort.

Aleksi ducked back inside the tent and checked on Tess, but she still slept. He lingered there, reaching out to touch her hair the way Anastasia had touched his hair all those years ago, soothing him to sleep.

Tears stung his eyes. He blinked them back and wrenched himself away. And went to see the doctor.

The tall woman with skin the color of riverbank mud greeted him. "Oh. Aleksi. I'll see if Dr. Hierakis can come out." She returned a moment later and showed him all the way in to the inner chamber.

Dr. Hierakis glanced up from the counter. She smiled, and her smile warmed him. "Hello, Aleksi."

The machine that made pictures was on. It showed a strange spiraling pattern, doubled, like the spirals embroidered onto pillows and woven into tent walls. "Jo, can you finish these measurements? We'll do the correlation later, but I think we've reached an endpoint here. I'm not getting any results I haven't gotten before. We need something altogether new, and I don't think we're going to get it from this pool.

Aleksi, how is Tess?"

He started, jerking his gaze away from the spirals. "Tired."

"Hmm. In a bad way, or do you judge her just tired?"

"I think she didn't like to hear the talk about how the king will be killed."

"Ah. No doubt." She stepped away from the counter, leaving room for Joanna Singh to take her place,

"Why did you come by?"

He hesitated. She felt his hesitation and, kindly, she placed a hand on his sleeve. Embarrassed, he eased his arm away and yet he stood as close to her as he dared. And in any case, she held the answers to his questions. "Doctor. I know you're leaving soon—"

"I'm leaving when less is safely delivered of a healthy child."

"But the prince—"

"May leave sooner if he has to, it's true."

"But how will he go? How do you travel, in the heavens?"

Dr. Hierakis chuckled, and Jo Singh cast a glance back over her shoulder, looking surprised at his question. Then she turned back to her work. "Here, come with me, Aleksi." They went into the outer chamber, and she gestured to the table. He sat, though he still did not like sitting in chairs. "If you traveled from Karkand to Jeds, you could travel by horse, or you could travel by horse to a port and then travel by sea. If you traveled to, say, the Gray Eminence's lands, that they call Tadesh, you would have to sail in a ship because there's a great ocean between his lands and these lands."

Aleksi nodded. "Yes. I've seen a map that Tess drew. It showed a great sea as broad as the land itself.

But Earth is in the heavens."

"Well, think of the stars as lands. Well, no. Think of the stars as lanterns, and around some of these bright lanterns worlds like this one orbit. Earth is such a world, like Rhui, with lands and seas on it. We sail in ships from world to world."

"Is there water out there? Vast seas? Is that what the ships sail on?"

"Think of it as an ocean of night. If I had time, I'd show you some programs, a stellar map. But I don't.