CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The Revelation of Elia

They rode into Jeds on the wings of a bitterly cold and unseasonably late winter storm. The jaran soldiers rode with their felt coats unbelted so they wouldn't get too warm and those brave Jedan natives who ventured outside to watch the army enter the city huddled in blankets and looked miserable.

A few flakes of snow drifted down. Tess stuck out her tongue and with some effort got some moisture on it, licking her lips.

"In the four years I was a student here," said Ilya, "it snowed once, like this. I thought winter was finally beginning, but then of course I realized that there is no true winter in Jeds, just a lessening of the heat."

Tess waited, but he had finished. In the five months since the army had rescued him from White Tower, he had slowly gotten control back of his speech, although at times he still faltered or ran on as if he had forgotten what he was saying. His men seemed undisturbed by his lapses: Singers often behaved this way; it was the result of speaking directly to the gods. But she always admired—perhaps in part had fallen in love with—the precision of his mind, the incredible scope of his memory, and if one conceived of his mind as a web, a network of interconnected threads, then that captivity had worked like a knife slashing with random cruelness through some of the threads and not others, leaving gaps and unraveling ends.

"Jeds has grown," he said. "That second course of wall didn't even exist, and this was the hostelry district. Now it's too far within the city."

It was a residential district now, thrown up against the inner wall. Ilya did not even flinch when they passed under the massive inner gate and clattered down the main thoroughfare through Jeds, the army streaming out in their wake.

Tess had left ten thousand men encamped a day's ride away from the city, but she had brought an honor guard of five thousand riders and a thousand archers with her, to remind the Jedan nobility who ruled here. Here, in the central city, the populace had braved the cold to see their prince and her barbarians. They shouted and pointed and cheered, and a few bold girls—probably prostitutes—threw flowers at the jaran men. Women and children leaned out of third-story windows.

Tess smelled a hint of smoke on the air and saw a low pall toward the southeast; most likely a fire had caught in one of the districts, as it often did in the cold weather. It was always so: That one person celebrated a triumph hard against the loss suffered by another somewhere nearby.

"Twenty-five years ago I lived as an exile, a poor student, in this city," murmured Ilya. His gaze roved restlessly over the crowd, over the roof lines and the farther spire of West Cathedral and the flatter, more massive dome of East Church, the twin towers of Market Hall and the distant blunt spires that marked the old palace. Here, along the main thoroughfare, the old tenements had been torn down and new buildings, the mercantile Exchange, the clothiers guildhall, the law courts and the playhouse and the public library and pauper's school, erected in their place. Tess surveyed these additions—most of them completed or almost finished— with satisfaction. She liked Sarai better, but Jeds had a certain civic splendor of its own.

She glanced toward Ilya, who was looking toward a clot of people standing on the steps of the library. "And now your armies control the lands that stretch from the plains all the way south to Jeds, as you meant them to all along."

But he wasn't listening to her. He pulled Kriye out of formation abruptly and headed for the library.

Jedans scattered before his advance, but he brushed them aside without notice, so intent was he on his goal: A group of young men and a handful of women who, by their black caps and loose, open gowns, were university students. He reined in in front of them. A few scuttled away, but most stared up at him with the twinned expressions of curious children and trapped animals. He leaned down and said something. After some hesitation, one young man replied, and then there was a flurry of conversation.

Tess brought the parade to a halt and was at once sorry. Several dignitaries pressed themselves on the guards and she had to acknowledge them. After all, her rule had benefited the townspeople as much as the nobility, and she needed their enthusiastic support to counterbalance the grudging loyalty given her by the Santer heirs and the rest of the barons and lords. So it was well past midday by the time they got out through the city and into the park that fronted the new palace.

"What did you talk to the students about?" Tess asked, having got Ilya to herself in the procession once again. Vladimir and Nikita rode in front, and Mikhail and Gennady Berezin behind.

Ilya glanced at her, glanced back toward Jeds, last glanced north, where his empire lay. His eyes burned with that inner light she knew so well. "I have questions. They and the scholars at the university may have answers. Or they may not." That was all he would say.

Old Baron Santer was now deceased. His children met Tess in the courtyard of the palace and, together with the jaran prince who had married the daughter, escorted Tess into the audience hall.

They exchanged formal greetings. Young Baron Santer looked over the jaran escort with a calculating gaze. He leaned to whisper something into the ear of Georgi Raevsky, his brother-in-law; Tess liked the intimacy they seemed to have developed. But the real power in this trio was clearly the woman. Isobel, Baroness Santer, had inherited her father's cold ambition.

"We have heard no recent news of Prince Basil's army, your highness, except that the snow still confines them in the Sagesian Pass," Baroness Santer said now. More coolly still, she inclined her head toward Bakhtiian. "Your Majesty. We did not hear how you managed to cross the hills and get past the Filistian army."

"Bakhtiian will do. We circled around Prince Basil's army, my lady, and crossed by the southern pass."

"But even in a mild winter that pass is closed by snow and ice!" Astounded, she stared at him.

Several men nearby cocked their heads to listen.

"My army has yet to meet an obstacle it cannot surmount." He nodded politely at her, walked up the dais, paced around the single throne, and waved to Vladimir. "Here," he said. To Tess's horror and amusement, Vladimir threw a big gold-embroidered pillow onto the floor beside the throne and Ilya promptly sat down on it. Tess almost laughed out loud at the consternation that broke out through the hall. The bastard was throwing his weight around, seeing what would come of it.

The Jedans did not know what to do: Continue to attend their prince, who stood in the middle of the hall, or pay obeisance to the man who was not just her husband but the general of the army that lay outside their gates.

"How is it fitting to address him?" whispered Baroness Santer, abandoning her pose of calm to show a less composed interior.

"Bakhtiian is itself a title."

Tess looked around as she said it and discovered something odd, watching the five hundred or so dignitaries and noblemen and women gathered in the hall as they turned to stare at the man sitting on the floor next to the throne. He still wore his armor, boiled leather and polished strips of plate tied with ribbons, his helmet sitting on the floor to his left and his saber resting across his knees. Philosophy, celebrating her triumph, smiled benignly down on him from the huge mural painted along the inner wall of the hall.

Ilya scared them.

No, it was not Ilya who scared them. They didn't know Ilya. It was Bakhtiian who made them nervous.

Tess caught Baroness Santer by the elbow and drew her forward to the dais. "Come, Isobel, we will be friends again, as we were before your father died."

"When you took me to the north."

"Your husband has not been a disappointment to you, I hope."

Baroness Santer caught herself before she looked back over her shoulder toward her husband and her brother. "He is a good husband," she said, clipping off the words as if she was afraid that she would reveal something incriminating, that she liked her jaran husband too little, or too much.

Tess mounted the steps and sat down in the prince's throne without looking at Ilya. "Stand beside me, and as each person comes forward, please make sure that I remember the proper name."

So she greeted her subjects, and Isobel, Baroness Santer, gave her names and, often, a tiny squib of information with which Tess could surprise or please each supplicant. Georgi Raevsky wandered up to Bakhtiian and crouched down beside him, and the two men launched into an intense discussion in khush, oblivious to the formalities going on before them. The rest of the guard stood here and there, examining the mural (Philosophy's dress was, perhaps, a bit indecent by jaran standards), whispering to each other, going outside when it pleased them, stamping their feet and shaking out their armor.

Katya was loudly explaining the different figures in the mural to Nikita and whomever else would listen; she was showing off, unaware that she had an audience of Jedans as well, intrigued by her armor and her weapons and her authoritative, bossy manner. In all, the jaran showed no propensity to be overawed by Jeds or its inhabitants. This was the army that had burned down Karkand, after all, and conquered at least ten cities equal to or greater than Jeds. This was really just another city. Filis had not yet capitulated. And there would be other lands.

Tess sent the presbyter of all Jeds on his way and glanced down at Ilya. He looked up at her, one hand on his saber hilt. He did not smile. He did not need to. He had Jeds. He had his empire. He had what he wanted.

But he had that same restless expression in his eyes, that odd, mad, passionate expression on his face: He wanted something else, something new. No doubt, the gods still spoke to him. No doubt, they were filling him with fresh visions.

The abbess of Jedina Cloister knelt before her, and Tess had a sudden inspiration. She, too, could use the gods. She could use them as a bridge to what she had to tell Ilya. Tomorrow, she would call Sarai and have the ke or Sonia transmit to her a facsimile of the scroll that contained the "Revelation of Elia."

Sonia was angry.

"It is time for my daughter to be married." She leaned forward so far that part of her passed out of the picture. She jerked and pulled back into focus. She was still angry.

"Katya doesn't want to get married."

"Why not?"

"Well, uh," Tess temporized, "she's like Ilya in that way."

"Ilya wanted to get married. Or so I had always supposed." Sonia rarely got mad and when she did, she fought dirty. Tess could see her gearing up for battle.

"Now, Sonia. I'm just saying that Katya is young yet and discontent ..,"

"Damn you," said Sonia suddenly. It was so strange, Tess reflected, to be talking to her this way, seeing her head and torso growing up from the console as if the rest of her sat contained within. A line of static popped through the image and cleared. "I know what you're saying. I went to Jeds when I was a girl because I was curious, because I wanted adventure, I wanted to see what lay outside the tribe. Now she wants to do the same. Let me talk to her. Tess, the others who sailed across the ocean to Erthe were told they could never come back. How can I exile my daughter like that? How can you expect me to agree to let her go, knowing I could never see her again?"

"Sonia, if what you say about Anatoly Sakhalin is true, then how can we know how much the interdiction will change? Anything could happen. There you sit talking to me across a gulf of thousands of kilometers—"

"Which reminds me," said Sonia, the anger slipping easily from her face. "How can this image travel as fast as I can speak across a distance that would take a messenger forty days riding day and night without a break except to change horses? What is this image riding? How can it travel on the air?"

"Didn't the ke explain that to you?"

"Well, yes, but—" She launched into such a garbled explanation of the ke's explanation that Tess could only look toward Cara Hierakis for help. Cara shrugged.

"Sonia," Tess broke in. "There is a tutorial encyclopedia under mathetics. Start there."

"Is it true that Newton's Principia has been superseded?" Sonia demanded. "I have been trying to discover how a person can travel in the heavens, but how can a ship sail on a road? How can a road hang in the air? What keeps it from falling? What is a quantum? A singularity? How can passing through a window take you to a different place?"

"Hold on, hold on." Tess laughed.

"Furthermore," added Sonia, "if you khaja could only devise a smaller tool than these stationary consoles, you could communicate this swiftly while you were anywhere! You wouldn't be tied to a building. You could somehow wear them on your backs like a quiver. Think of how an army could use it. Merchants. A mother could converse with her child—"

"Sonia. Sonia! We have thought of such things. We just don't have them on Rhui."

"The interdiction again."

Tess nodded.

"You are very arrogant to make these decisions for us," said Sonia, finally, rebukingly.

"It's true."

"Hmm. Well. This all belongs to the jaran, now, so perhaps we will change all that"

"What do you mean, belongs to the—? Wait a minute, Sonia. Perhaps I didn't understand that correctly. Are you saying that Anatoly Sakhalin was made prince over all the systems governed by humans? Earth, the League, and Charles's territory? Rhui?"

"Of course. All khaja lands now belong to the jaran."

"Oh, my God." Tess make a frantic signal to Cara, but Cara had heard it all before. Cara looked unimpressed. "Sonia, I will call you again. I have to ... think about all this."

"It isn't what you expected, is it?" said Sonia astutely. "But it is what Ilya expected, after all."

"I got the transcripts you sent. And the children—"

"As we agreed. I will bring them myself, when the weather changes and the ships sail again.

Although Dr. Hierakis traveled a different way, did she not? Could we not travel in such a way, in a flying ship? I've never seen one. It would be faster, wouldn't it? Is it dangerous?"

"Sonia, I will call you in two days. I have to think about this."

Cheerful now, Sonia signed off and closed her end of the connection with practiced ease. How quickly she learned.

Tess sagged back into the chair, which gave beneath her and molded itself to the curve of her back, shifting as she shifted. "Oh, Lord, Cara, what have we gotten ourselves into? What did Charles say?"

Cara stood up and leaned onto the console, squinting at the symbols scrolling across the screen.

'Tess, in a decade there's a good chance we will face a doubling or tripling of the human lifespan.

Perhaps more. How can I take this as seriously? It's politics. Temporal power rises and falls in every generation. Empires explode into prominence and then collapse. Charles Soerensen becomes the most powerful human in Chapalii space, and then he is supplanted by someone else, who will no doubt experience his own period of fluorescence before fatigue or fashion or a reversal of fortune plunges him into eclipse. But longevity will be a sea of change for humanity. We can't know how it will shape our view of life, how it will alter our philosophies. So let Anatoly Sakhalin have his moment in the sun.

Let Charles put his intelligence to other work than playing duke."

"But—"

"Don't you trust Anatoly?"

"I don't know Anatoly, not truly."

"Don't you trust Charles? Are you afraid he lives for ruling? For power? That this will break him?

Ruin him? Corrupt him somehow by turning him into a villain out to regain all he has lost? I confess he might be a bit disappointed, but he is wise enough to let it go, to find a new—Ah. It isn't Charles or Anatoly at all, is it?"

"Damn it. It will take me months to get through this transcript."

"It's Ilya. That's it. He's got it all. He's finished. He's complete. He's won. And it leaves him nothing. What will you tell him, Tess?"

Tess shook her head, unable to talk past the lump in her throat. She palmed the console and fed all the information into the chip in her belt buckle.

"What did Sonia send you?" Cara asked.

"A complete transcript of Anatoly Sakhalin's report on his visit to the emperor, points between, and what happened after that, including an addendum compiled by David ben Unbutu and Ilyana Arkhanov."

"Ilyana Arkhanov? But she's scarcely more than a child."

"Evidently she has gotten herself apprenticed to—"

"Of course. I had heard that she had met the female. She's broken past the veil. And? There's something else on the screen. It's not a transcript."

"It's a facsimile of the Revelation of Elia."

"The heretical Hristain Gospel?"

"Not heretical here, remember. It's only in the northern church that it's heretical."

"What do you want that for, Tess?"

"I don't know what else, how else to tell Ilya the truth."

Cara turned away from the flat screen and looked Tess straight in the eye. Her expression made Tess horribly uncomfortable, but she forced herself to face Cara, to hear what Cara had to say, not knowing whether she truly wanted to hear it.

"Have you asked him yet, my child, if he wants to know?"

Tess found Katya waiting outside Cara's laboratory, practically hopping from one foot to the other in her impatience to talk to Tess.

"When will you talk to my mother?" she demanded. "I talked to a merchant down in the Exchange and he said that a ship is leaving for Erthe in ten days. I'll just write a letter to my mother. You know that it could take a year, it could take a hundred days even if we sent it by official messenger and it got to Sarai and back without mishap."

"And you can't wait a hundred days?" Tess asked. Most of the corridors in the Jedan palace were not truly corridors but loggias looking out onto courtyards and gardens. So it was here; however curtailed access might be to Cara's lab, even Cara liked to be able to step outside into the air. Tess had spent much of the afternoon in the lab, having spent the morning with Baroness Santer, the chamberlain of the palace, and a steady stream of visitors with legal questions. The sun had sunk below the rooftop, throwing the garden beyond into shade. A few streaks of snow patched the ground, in the lee of columns and striping the ground along the north loggia. But the weather was already turning. It was warmer now, at the end of the day, than it had been this morning.

"No, I can't wait! Well. I went with Ilya down to the university this morning—"

"You did! What did he want there?"

"I don't know. He went one way and I went another. But it was interesting. I thought—well, if I had to wait, I could attend classes, couldn't I? There were some boys playing castles in one of the sitting rooms, by a fire. I watched them for a while, but they weren't very good. They weren't even as good as Prince Janos." She flushed and broke off.

"Katya. You should tell your mother why you truly don't want to marry, if what you told me is still the truth, for you."

"No."

"It isn't?"

"It is still the truth. I don't want to marry. I don't—" She glanced furtively up and down the colonnaded walkway, but except for two jaran guards at either end of the loggia, no one was about.

No one was allowed into this quarter of the palace, except those Tess or Cara had explicitly cleared.

"—care for men in that way, not truly. But I won't tell her, Aunt Tess. She won't understand."

"I don't think you ought to underestimate your mother. You certainly got your intelligence from her."

"It isn't that. She would try to understand, but it would hurt her. She just isn't... it isn't part of her world. Is it true that, in Erthe, what told you me—?"

"That not every marriage is between a man and a woman? Yes. It's not common, but there are other ways to be granted a legal partnership."

"Aunt Tess, you must let me go! There's no place for me in the jaran. Maybe there will be a place for me there."

"If there isn't?"

"There has to be."

Tess kissed her and left her, wondering if little Katya would brave the forbidden hall and just charge in on Cara even though she wasn't supposed to. That would, in a way, seal her fate. She did not look back as she left the courtyard.

She looked forward.

She had to leave the palace entirely, go out into the park that lay on the landward side of the palace. The ring of guards waved her through, and she walked along a gravel path, the stones crunching in a soothing manner under her boots. She walked alone out here as twilight lowered down over the city and the palace. In its own way, in the three days since they had arrived in Jeds, this area had become even more interdicted than Cara's laboratory. Not a soul stirred. Behind her, the line of guards was marked by an occasional torch and, here and there, a good blazing campfire.

The tent stood on a flat sward of grass, surrounded by a bower of trees and two desiccated beds of flowers. Ilya refused to sleep inside walls of stone. It had never bothered him before.

Tess halted on the edge of the sward and examined the tent. The gold banner fluttered weakly and sagged. Far away, barely audible, Tess heard the shush and sough of the waters on the rocks that buttressed the palace on its seaward front. The awning faced her, the entrance flap thrown open so that she could see into the tent. A single figure sat at the table, a lantern burning by his left hand and another hanging from the pole above. He seemed to be reading, but he was just distant enough that she could not make out the details.

The wind picked up again, a warming front that fragmented the cold haze that had hung over the city for the last three days. Branches shorn of leaves reached into the darkening sky, black lines etched into a night-blue heaven. They shivered in the wind, shuddering against each other. Like veins, they marked patterns onto the sky, pierced by the first stars.

Like a web. Tess blinked, and her implant triggered. She glanced around, once, as she always did, to make sure she was alone.

"Run Sakhalin transcript. Seek mention of transport codes delivered in tripartite sequences." As she waited she was caught by another thought, a detail Sonia had mentioned in passing. "Open a second screen and transfer Sakhalin's description of the emperor." It came up simultaneously with an excruciatingly detailed documentation of transport codes, and Tess had to adjust her focus, dropping her gaze down to the ground, which provided a more uniformly dark backdrop, although the divided screen she read from provided its own transcript.

He sat in a throne. He was almost joined to it, as if part of a web, filaments linking his body to the stone that made up the throne itself.

"Cut in Sojourner transcript, also referenced to tripartite sequences." The sudden swirl of figures fighting the ground and the gentle sway of branches made her dizzy. She put up a hand to cover the trees and the tent, so they wouldn't distract her, and concentrated on the disembodied screen suspended in front of her.

Three sequences recorded by the relay stations as ships traveled through. One went to the public record: That was clear enough. One went to the house record, and that made sense; a ship might reserve information for its own affiliates that it would not want to transmit as public knowledge. But the third sequence, the highest level of encryption, went to an unknown destination.

She shifted her focus back to the screen detailing Sakhalin's visit to the emperor. The emperor, who sat connected to his throne by filamentlike threads. Anatoly Sakhalin had seen this female who called herself Genji in his window visions, as if she was tracking his progress as he traveled across the empire. Ilyana Arkhanov, their under-aged spy in Genji's Chapalii household, had seen Genji connected, also with filamentlike threads, to a chair, which could be a kind of console.

What if the emperor could travel the web? What if the emperor was tapped into the entire Empire, not like a brain, but like the switching board through which most information passed? Everywhere and nowhere. Everyone and no one. He would no longer be a true individual. Like the ke, he would be nameless, because he would be everywhere. It was like a metaphor: his body represented the Empire, just as, according to the Arkhanov transcript appended onto Sakhalin's transcript, the net itself might be the body of the Empire.

Nets could be cut. Like Ilya's mind, the threads severed at random intersections by the stress of his captivity.

If they could cripple the web, they could cripple the Empire. If they could cripple the Empire, they might be strong enough to simply take their freedom or at least to bargain for it while the Empire was weakened.

And Anatoly Sakhalin was now perfectly placed to set out the pieces and begin to move them. It would have taken Charles years to get the information Anatoly had so blithely included in this transcript; if Charles, the Tai-en, could even have gotten it at all. Anatoly was restricted, as far as Tess could tell, only by his willingness to throw himself into the fray and his ability to outface the Chapalii at their own game, once he had figured out how to play it. For the former, she could not guess whether he would choose to support independence or promote his own interests; as for the latter, he had already done it. It was enough to make you laugh, the sheer audacity of presenting himself as a true prince—whatever the hell that meant—to the Chapalii emperor and to expect to be honored as such.

To succeed.

Could Ilya have done it? Oh, gods, was she doubting him, now? Was he less than what she had once thought he was?

She blinked off the implant and walked forward. Ilya sat with two books open and a scroll opened and pinned down by an elbow and a hand. She stopped outside the entrance flap. He did not notice her. He was talking to himself.

" 'And a bright light appeared out of the darkest skies, and on this light He ascended to the heavens where His Father dwelt. To mark his passing, the glance of God's Eye scorched the dirt where His feet took wing into the heavens.' "

He was reading out loud from one of the books; from the Gospel of Elia, the Revelation. She watched his gaze shift from the book to the scroll. He opened the scroll a bit farther by tugging his elbow down, unrolling the parchment, and sliding the scroll to the right so that the lantern light illuminated it better. His face was aglow in the light, his hair a patch of darkness shading into the shadows that filled the rest of the chamber, surrounding him with night.

" 'So will the light ... the lantern ... the torch of God fall to earth ..." He worried at his lower lip with his teeth as he squinted at the scroll, translating it. Tess could not see what language it was written in.

"Descend to earth. From the stars. From the wandering stars." He switched his attention to the second book. "No ... No ... Damn it." He leafed through the pages, searching for a reference.

" 'Because the fixed stars are quiescent one in respect of another, we may consider the sun, earth, and planets, as one system of bodies carried hither and thither by various motions among themselves; and the common center of gravity . . . will be quiescent' . .. This is impossible." With his right hand still immobilizing the scroll, he drew two other books toward him and flipped them open on top of the one he had just been looking in. "The realm of the fixed stars. The realm of the wandering stars."

Tess got a chill. He was reading astronomical texts. After a moment he shifted back to the scroll.

"The mysteries of the wandering stars are these: That they come in two types. The first are the chariots by which the angels sail upon, sail? Ride? Drive? Travel upon the roads that lead through the heavens, borne on the wings of the south wind. The second are the gates to the dwelling places of the angels. Dwelling places .. . palaces ... no, more like a park or garden. Then why wouldn't the fixed stars be the gardens and the wandering stars the chariots?" He was talking to himself. He pulled the topmost book toward him, one of the new books. " 'In this fashion the sun and the sphere of the fixed stars remain unmoved, while the earth and the wandering stars revolve about the unmoving sun in a series of circles, each nested inside the other.' " He flipped pages further, losing his grip on the scroll, which rolled up against his fingers. " 'Suppose a man lived in the heavens and he was carried along by their motion, and looking down he saw the earth and its mountains and valleys and rivers and cities, as far above as angels, might it not appear then to him that the earth moved? Just as it appears to us that the heavens move. Unable to stand in the heavens, we can only stand on the earth and make our judgment.' "

Running a hand through his hair, he shoved that book aside and pulled the last one closer to him. "

'You know from astrological computation that the whole circumference of the earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens ... The man who recklessly strives for glory and counts it his highest goal should consider the far-reaching shores of heaven and the narrow confines of earth.' "

Abruptly, his expression changed. He flung the book against the wall, but it only fell to the floor with a soft thud, having nothing hard to impact. He had lost his hold on the scroll. Turning to stop it from rolling up completely, he saw Tess.

At once, he looked guilty. Or he would have looked guilty, if the jaran had a concept of sin. She stepped into the tent. He closed the three books and was about to get up when she forestalled him by skirting the table and picking up the book he had thrown.

"The Consolation of Philosophy? Ilya ..."

"Give it to me," he snapped, and because he was in a mood, she handed it over without protest.

But she could not help trying to read the gold letters labeling the spines of the others. "On The Nature of the Heavens. The Principia?"

He opened his saddle bags and stuffed the books inside them. Then he rolled the scroll up carefully.

"What is that?"

"It is an old text from Byblos, that I took from the university today. It is called The Mysteries of Elia, but no one knows if it is the same Elia who has written the gospel in The Recitation, or another Elia. There is some debate. You know how scholars are." He did not offer to let her look at it, which was strange of itself.

"What are you looking for?" she asked, although she already knew the answer.

He tied the scroll with a bit of string, slid it into a case, and shoved it into the saddlebag before he straightened up and looked at her. The light had the odd trick of making him look even younger—and he already looked younger than his years. "I will let you know, when I find it."

He said it so dismissively that Tess winced. He did not seem to notice. He rose and untied the flap, pulling it closed. The sky, the trees, the stars, all vanished, and they stood, the two of them, alone in the enclosed chamber, which seemed very small, now, and dim, lit only by the two lanterns.

He kept his gaze fixed on the flap, as though he could see through it to the outside world. "In White Tower they kept me chained at night when I slept. Always. I can still feel the shackles."

"Ilya," she began, knowing that the time had come. There was no putting it off any longer. He had already begun. It was up to her to lead him the rest of the way. "For a long time now I have been trying to think of a way to tell you—"

He whirled. The expression on his face struck her to silence. But he spoke, his voice so low she had to strain to hear it.

"I want nothing given to me, Tess. Do you understand?" He began to pace, agitated. "I am not a slave to be led about in chains, to be cosseted with sweetmeats and pats on the head so that I can pretend that nothing shackles me. If the gods have spoken through me, then let them speak. Let me obey the vision they have sent me and not question it."

"What is this, then?" she demanded, gesturing toward the saddlebag bursting with books. Books he did not intend to let her see.

"What the gods wish me to know they will allow me to discover on my own."

"Ah, gods," Tess said under her breath, watching him cross to the entrance and twitch the flap aside to look out, up, at the trees or the heavens or the dark outline of the palace she could not be sure. But she knew at that moment that if she handed him a book open to the page where the answers were written, he would close it and hand it back without reading it.

What Sonia had embraced, Ilya turned his back on.

But then her gaze caught on the saddlebags, on the tip of the scroll, which he had evidently kidnapped from the university. It was not truly knowledge that Ilya had turned his back on. Ilya allowed his gods to act through him, but no one else. Not even her. He would rather knowingly remain ignorant than learn that he was just another pawn in a greater game. That was the lesson he had learned from Prince Janos, that he could not bear to be anyone less than the king.

Unlike Charles, he could not reshape his life to a new path. That was his great weakness.

Finally he turned to look at her and smiled, almost shyly, testing the waters. "I will send a messenger north to Sarai," he said. "Sonia can arrange for someone to escort Natalia and Yurinya by ship here, when the winds shift."

Tess started, being perfectly able to feel guilty. "Yes. We hadn't talked yet about how long we might stay in Jeds."

"Filis must be conquered, once and for all, and Vasha settled safely in Mircassia. We must stay at least until those campaigns are over." His gaze strayed toward the saddlebags, but he did not add that he evidently had pressing business at the university.

"A year would be good," agreed Tess. "That would give me time to bring the nobles back to heel, call a new council, institute a few laws, strengthen the parliament."

So he drifted toward her, and she toward him, and in the end they met, commencing a new pattern.

He knew that she had at least been willing to tell him the truths that she had chained him away from all these years. She understood, a bit, how close he had come to going over the edge. But Ilyakoria Bakhtiian was perfectly capable of reshaping the untenable path so that it circumvented or concealed the obstacles which might otherwise destroy him.

That was his great strength.

E P I L O G U E

All of the Tribes

"But he's short," said the woman to her companion, not realizing that Anatoly could overhear her.

The great foyer that connected the Bouleuterion, the assembly hall, with the public concourse boasted a number of interesting acoustic properties as well as the cyclopean sculptural frieze depicting the history of humanity for which it was most famous. The floor of the foyer was a mosaic map, not to scale, of the many solar systems that made up League space, and Anatoly had discovered that when he stood on the blue-white circle that represented the star Sirius he could hear the conversations of people standing within the Three Rings system, a spear throw away. It was, he supposed, an elaborate spying system.

"And that woman with him. Why, she looks positively savage! Aren't those weapons she's carrying?"

Anatoly glanced at Katerina Orzhekov, but Katya was too busy gaping at a relief of a woman sitting at a writing desk to listen. Her grasp of the common tongue spoken here was still shaky in any case; she had not yet completed the language matrix. Katya wore a mishmosh of jaran and Earth dress, a long skirted tunic with striped trousers beneath, boots, and her quiver and bow strapped on her back. There was a khaja law about carrying weapons in public places, but Anatoly had grown tired of obeying it, and now he didn't have to anymore.

"It's very strange," agreed her companion.

"M. Sakhalin!"

"Damn," said Anatoly, and to Katya, "Come."

She spun at once and fell in beside him as he headed for the concourse, but even so, the longer legs of their pursuer proved their downfall.

"M. Sakhalin! What a pleasure to see you here. I was so honored to meet you at the reception last month. I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of forwarding some of the specs on our new line of luxury yachts to your ... uh, your office. We have so many models to choose from and we can custom fit to any specification, even include, heh heh, an archery range." The man bowed floridly toward Katerina and, straightening, caught her disdainful expression. He smiled nervously and shifted tactics. "Of course, M. Sakhalin, you understand that Cheng Shipyards guarantees the highest quality, and we are known league-wide for the speed and strength of our models."

"Thank you, M. Chandani. I assure you that we are studying the matter even now. If you will excuse me."

"Most honored, M. Sakhalin. Most honored." Bowing, the merchant let them go, thank the gods.

"He smells of sweetcakes," said Katya in a low voice. "All sticky and oversugared. Does this happen often?"

"It happens all the time."

"How do you remember all their names?"

"I have an implant." He tapped his temples just above his left ear. "It records each person I meet and cross references it with a name, and then those I don't remember on my own can be recalled from the implant. It's very useful. They're flattered when you remember their names, even if they must know I have tools to help me."

They crossed through into the concourse and were at once picked up by two of the Raven's crew—Summer and Benjamin—and by the ubiquitous throng of agents, hangers-on, monitors, and official escorts that attended him whenever he went out into public territory. A tiny globe maneuvered, trying to get a good angle on him for the vids, and Katerina gave it a sharp whack with her bow. A few sympathizers in the crowd cheered. Finally, they got through the concourse and into the docking section and into the blessed quiet of the Gray Raven.

"Am I really that short?" Anatoly asked Summer as they cycled through the locks.

Summer grinned down at him. "Only in height, my dear. But 169 centimeters is below average for a man. Remember, we're used to our princes being Chapalii, and they're all about two hundred centimeters."

"What's a centimeter?" asked Katya. "Oh, it's a unit of measure."

"Five feet six and a half inches," offered Benjamin, who could convert any unit, monetary or otherwise, into any other instantaneously. "Three point eight cubits, depending on the arm."

The lock opened and they dispersed into the gleaming passageways of the ship.

"Come with me," said Anatoly to Katerina. She followed him to the lounge. "Sit." He sat on the couch, she on the floor in the jaran style, watching him intently.

"You have been with me for two khaja months now. How do you like it here?"

"I love it here," she said fiercely.

"I have a task for you. Yesterday I finally got word that my message found my sister Shura, and she is now at Jeds, waiting for word from me. I want you to go back to Rhui."

Her expression fell instantly.

"Not to stay. Go back to the tribes. Bring me one hundred men and women, to be the nucleus of my new jahar. Recruit them wisely, carefully. Find the ones who are discontent, who question—not troublemakers, but the ones who are restless."

"I know how to find them," said Katya quietly.

"Don't let the others know what you are doing. Shura will help you. She, too, will know. She is one of them, as you are. If any riders live who were in my jahar before I left, and they wish to join me, bring them."

"If they have families?"

"It's true it would be best to bring younger people, those who are willing to leave the tribe and make a new tribe here. But I will not turn away the riders who served with me then. They must make the choice themselves. You, Katerina, will be etsana."

She made a face.

"No, it must be you. You came here first. You are a daughter of the Eldest Tribes."

"Your sister Shura—"

"It is not fitting that a brother and sister act together as dyan and etsana of a tribe. But you and I are cousins, of a sort, and we will do very well together, I think. I need the jaran, Katya. Surely you can see that."

She nodded, her clear-eyed gaze steady on him. "Yes. This khaja world is very strange."

But she had adjusted remarkably well. She had not come off the ship in shock, as he had. She had not retreated into a false world, as Karolla Arkhanov had, dragging her children down with her. With that same kind of preparation, with her guidance, the hundred riders and archers she brought off Rhui would adjust as well as she did. In their turn, when it was time, when it was appropriate, they could form the escort that would bring more jaran off Rhui, those that wanted to come.

Because not all would want to come. Nor should they.

"What about my cousin, Bakhtiian?" she asked suddenly.

He bowed his head, as any man does before the authority of a great etsana. "You must obey your aunt Tess Soerensen in this. I cannot interfere with her judgment."

"It's true, you know," said Katya in a whisper. "Before I left, I went to him, but he would not speak to me. I don't understand it."

Anatoly felt a pain in his heart. He made an image in his mind of the man he had admired so passionately when he was a boy, the proud dyan, leader of all the tribes, who had lifted the jaran to face their destiny. Who yet, in the end, could not face the greater truth he had inadvertently uncovered. He was, gods forgive Anatoly for even thinking it, like Karolla in that.

"He is a Singer," said Anatoly at last, unwilling to pass judgment. "He is subject to the will of the gods in a way we are not."

He went to his cabin and lay down on his bunk, palming the top screen on and flipping through the channels idly. There was a report on his upcoming appearance before Parliament, in less than two hours. An Infinity Jilt serial. An immersion mass in the Church of Three Faiths temple in Gabon, ready to trigger once the viewer hooked into the nesh. Freefall acrobatics. A historical epic called Coming of Age in the Milky Way, about the great cosmological discoveries at the end of the Machine Age.

The usual gossip channel. A fencing match.

He flipped abruptly back to the gossip channel.

The bastards!

A crowd of mini-globes and nesh and flesh correspondents had mobbed Chancery Lane. A golden-haired woman walked down the New Court steps escorted by a husky woman with an authoritative bearing and by her father and Aunt Millie. The voice-over was blithering on about final dissolution papers and his name and something about the appearance before Parliament, but Anatoly could see only Diana. He strained to hear her through the globes that hovered around her. Only a Singer could look so composed, only Diana could manage to look so poised, so lovely....

"M. Brooke-Holt! M. Brooke-Holt! We understand that your husband dumped you now that he's become so important."

"No comment," said the advocate, the husky woman, bringing up the rear while Aunt Millie and Diana's father forced a path through the crowd toward a private carriage.

"Isn't there a child involved?"

Anatoly could not see Diana's face. The advocate looked bored. "No comment," she repeated.

"Is it true that he's cut himself loose and is going to establish a harem of exotic primitives for himself, in the Chapalii style?"

Diana stopped dead and turned to fix a glare of monumental disdain on the hapless questioner.

"Oh! You people are so stupid!" She turned her back on the camera, used her elbows to good effect, and ducked into the carriage. It sealed shut behind her, leaving the advocate in charge as the crowd moved back to avoid the backwash as the car rose and flew away.

Anatoly voiced the sound down and just stared at the screen, at the gray stone of the courthouse, at the bleak London sky above. He felt, at this moment, shame more than pain. He was shamed that his wife had abandoned him. Such a thing never happened in the tribes. What if they were to hear of it? Gods, he hadn't even told Katerina Orzhekov the truth, and she didn't understand the language or the tools well enough yet to discover it on her own.

Gods, what would his grandmother say? She would have accepted the emperor's benediction calmly, without surprise; it was, after all, simply what was due to the Sakhalin tribe. But she would be furious that Diana had left him—for a second time.

You should have married the daughter of Baron Santer, she would say. You look like a fool, Anatoly. It never behooves a Sakhalin to look like a fool, and especially not a man. A man must show himself courageous, trustworthy, loyal to his dyan, and responsible to his mother, his sisters, and his wife and children. But if he allows himself to be made a fool of, then no one will respect him.

Though she was dead, he could reproduce her voice, her tone, her words with perfect accuracy, because he knew her so well. He was thankful that she was dead, so that she might never have to know.

The cabin door slid open without warning and Portia rushed in, followed by Evdokia Arkhanov.

The two girls screamed with laughter and threw themselves onto his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. Moshe stopped in the entrance and covered his mouth, stifling his own laughter. "Sorry," he said. "I hope we didn't disturb you."

Anatoly reached up and palmed off the overhead screen. "No." He hoisted the girls off him and sat up. "I wasn't doing anything productive. Now, Portia, you must get dressed in your fine clothes. You, too, Evdi."

The Bouleuterion was domed above and below by stars, or so it appeared to Anatoly. The spider's web of Concord, the great space station still under construction, threw odd patterns on the heavens, like etchings cut through clouded glass. Walking on the transparent floor, with only stars beneath his feet, made him nervous, so as he entered the hall and made his way through the sunken aisle to the center he kept his gaze on the amphitheater surrounding him.

Every seat in the hall was filled. At the high railings above, people stood at least three deep, judging from the heads sticking above the crowd. It was a circular hall, and the platform in the center faced no one and everyone. Four sunken aisles pierced the banks of seats into four quarters. As Anatoly came out into the middle, he let Portia down and shoved her toward Katerina, who waited in the lowest rank of benches. Portia stuck her little finger in her mouth and walked over to Katya, glancing back at her father for reassurance. When the girl sat down, wedged between Katya and Evdi, who were themselves flanked by Branwen and the rest of her crew, Anatoly strode out to the center.

He stood there alone, surrounded by over ten thousand seated assembly members doubled by a ghostly contingent of nesh and amplified by a high ring of vid globes and a hundred soft bulbs that transferred every last detail into the nesh reconstruction.

The audience kept a respectful silence, waiting for him to speak, but he could almost taste their wariness. They did not trust him. Neither did they hate him. They waited, reserving judgment.

He knelt without looking down at the void of stars beneath his feet and set the tower, his token from the emperor, on the smooth floor.

"The board," he said. "Enlarged ten times normal size."

At first he could not tell that the black field had manifested, since it blended with the heavens below, but then the grid of lines burned into view and the midnight black slab of stone that marked the emperor's throne. One by one the pieces flickered into view and solidified. The horseman had moved farther yet away from the throne, shadowed by the teardrop. The other eight pieces lay scattered across the board, marking no pattern he could discern. A murmur ran through the crowd, quieting only when he rose.

"This is the game played by the emperor and the princess," he said to his audience, which no doubt ran into the billions."

He turned slowly, a full circle, surveying the ranks upon ranks of his khaja subjects, like the ranks of an army. There, he thought he recognized the pale outline of Charles Soerensen, attending in nesh, but he couldn't be sure. There was no one who looked in the least like Diana, although perhaps she truly was here, guising in a different form. Perhaps she still cared enough about him to watch over him, now and again. But he pushed these thoughts of her aside; they were too distracting. He could not afford to be distracted.

Instead, he walked through the game, avoiding the other princes, keeping to the lines as much as he could, and made his way to his own piece.

"This is where we stand." He halted above the horseman, which half melded with him. "Where we go from here is up to us."

Here he paused, to let his words sink in, here in this hall and in every hall, every chamber, every street or corner where any woman or man had stopped to hear him, to measure him, to pass judgment. For that was, perhaps, the most important lesson he had learned from Bakhtiian: Let the whole of your people be your army, all of the tribes, and let that army follow you not just willingly but passionately, with their hearts.

He looked up and nodded, satisfied. He had their complete attention.

2

The Shores of Heaven

Vassily Kireyevsky surveyed the battlefield from the hilltop. He turned to Yaroslav Sakhalin. The late summer sun shone down, bathing him in sweat under his armor.

"His banner has fallen. The Prince of Filis must be dead."

"We will see," said Yaroslav, never one to hasten to any conclusions.

But so it proved. Prince Basil's body was dragged up the slope and displayed. A Filistian lord who had turned coat last winter, after Bakhtiian himself had ridden into Jeds and taken up the campaign personally, identified the body.

"What of the Mircassian boy?" Vasha asked, but no one knew, and when he rode down into the Filistian camp, he discovered that Basil's half sister had murdered the child and killed herself rather than fall into the hands of the jaran. It saddened him, more for the child's sake than hers.

He examined the corpse: The boy had black hair and the olive skin of southerners, and although Vasha had heard his age estimated at sixteen, the child looked younger. If he was truly an invalid, a simpleton, no sign of his infirmity showed in his corpse, except that he was small.

"What will you do now, Vassily?" Yaroslav Sakhalin asked when Vasha emerged from the tent.

"I will take the news to my father myself, before I return to Mircassia. King Barsauma is failing, but even if he dies while I'm gone, they don't dare try to unseat me, not now that we have defeated Prince Basil."

"What of your wife?"

Vasha had learned that when Yaroslav Sakhalin spoke, he usually sounded censorious, even if he did not mean to be. But the habit served him well, since it made it easy to distinguish between those of his men who doubted themselves and those who did not.

"Princess Rusudani and I have an understanding, Sakhalin. In any case, she is pregnant now—" He broke off and looked away, concealing a flush of pride. Rusudani was pregnant with his child.

The old general laughed softly. "All young men are full of themselves when their wives become pregnant for the first time. I am told I was insufferable."

Vasha was paralyzed for a moment by the spectacle of Yaroslav Sakhalin joking with him. Then he collected himself.

"Surely it is no more than we deserve," Vasha replied, watching Sakhalin carefully. When Sakhalin smiled, Vasha smiled in return, relieved that Sakhalin seemed amused by this weak sally. But it seemed safer to return to the matter at hand. "It is the council that concerns me. They are not content with either Princess Rusudani or myself, and in particular, with me. I have heard it said that I hold too great an influence over her, that there are too many barbarians at court. There is a young lord who was put forward as a prospective consort for the princess, but I have seen that he was posted to the war. Unfortunately, he didn't manage to get himself killed."

"I'll be sending scouting parties south, to probe," said Sakhalin. "I could use some auxiliaries."

"Yes. That would do very well. I will attach his company to your army before I leave."

So it was settled. Lord Intavio agreed to the posting because he had no choice, surrounded by the far greater jaran army in the hinterlands that straddled the border between Mircassia and Filis.

In the morning, leaving Sakhalin to mop up the remains of Prince Basil's army, which had by now scattered into the hills, Vasha took a contingent of one thousand men, half jaran riders and half Mircassian cavalry, and rode southwest, toward Jeds. Toward his father.

They came after twenty-six days of hard riding to Jeds. Vasha left his guard in the camp that had sprung up to the east of the city and rode the rest of the way with a smaller escort of one hundred picked men and twenty archers. They circled the city and went directly to the palace.

Tess came herself to greet him, where he dismounted in the great courtyard that fronted the palace.

She grinned and hugged him, there in front of everyone, and a moment later Natalia and Yuri ran shrieking from the eastern loggia and threw themselves on him, jumping on him and tugging at his armor and dancing around.

"Gods, you've grown. Stand back. Let me look at you."

Natalia stuck her hands on her hips. "Papa gave me a horse," she said. "It's a very fine horse, too, I'll have you know. And Lara didn't get one because she took Kriye out bareback and got thrown, too."

"Lara is here, too?"

"Yes, and Sofia. We all sailed south together, and none of us got sick, only Yuri did."

Yuri had already strayed off to examine the strange khaja armor worn by the Mircassian soldiers, so he could not defend himself against this slur.

"How many of the children came south from Jeds?" Vasha asked Tess.

She only smiled. "Enough. They're very loud."

"Did Stefan bring them down?"

"No, Sonia did. Didn't you hear? Stefan just got married."

"So Jaelle did get pregnant!" Vasha laughed. "That's the last I heard, that Stefan hoped it was true, but they weren't sure yet. He'll come to Mircassia then, when the child is safely born."

"And you must come in and get that armor off. I'll get you something to drink."

"Where is ... my father?"

She hesitated, then lifted a hand in the direction of the sea. "Out riding."

"Perhaps I should go out directly."

"If you wish. What news have you brought, Vasha? You look well."

He gave a brief account of the battle and its outcome, the disposition of armies, the current mood of the Mircassian populace, which favored Rusudani and her consort, and the council, which remained suspicious.

He took in a deep breath. "Rusudani is pregnant." Unable to help himself, he grinned.

Tess raised an eyebrow. "You didn't wait long. She can't have had the other child that long ago."

"Aren't you happy for me?" he demanded.

"Now, Vasha," she said, maddeningly calm, "let's wait until the child is born to celebrate. What happened to the other baby?"

"When it was eight weeks old, Rusudani sent it north to Lady Jadranka with a wet nurse and an honor guard. It was a little boy. I left before we heard whether the child arrived safely. It was a pretty child." He said it wistfully. He had been sorry to part with the infant, but Rusudani had refused to have anything to do with it. As far as he knew, she had never come to see the baby after it had been born.

Tess put a hand on his hair, ruffling it as if he were a child, and smiled affectionately at him. "I'm glad you came, Vasha. Go see your father."

Like a good son, he obeyed, stripping out of his armor and just wearing his padded surcoat over his clothes. One of the palace grooms brought him a fresh horse, and he rode out with two escorts.

Most of the palace fronted a cliff, but to the north the ridge dropped down and melded with the shoreline, forming a broad strand at the mouth of the River Edesse. Vladimir and a handful of guards sat, some on their horses, some dismounted, at the farthest limit of solid land, keeping watch, but Vasha could see a distant figure that must be his father much farther out on the beach.

Vasha handed his reins over to his guard and headed out onto the strand. Once out of the slight windbreak provided by the last low promontory, he had to duck his head repeatedly to keep the stinging sand from his eyes.

Here, on the shoreline, the wind blew continually, just as it did on the plains. The waves came in in layers, levels building one on top of the next, sliding in over the damp course of sand and soughing away again. The wind coursed over the water, changing its color, darkening it. The constant breaking of one wave atop the next layered an endless steady crashing noise over the world, that shrank into this one stretch of sand and the gray-blue sea, stretching out to the islands that dotted the horizon, pale grey with clouds.

Ilya turned, shading his face against the wind, and, recognizing him, nodded. Then he turned back to stare out to sea. He stood at the very limit of the land, at that point where land and sea blend and become one.

"What are you doing out here?" Vasha asked, having to pitch his voice loud to be heard above the wind.

"Where did you come from?" Ilya demanded.

Vasha launched into his description of the battle, the disposition of forces, the end of Filistian resistance.

Ilya heard him out in silence. "You are well?"

"Rusudani is pregnant," said Vasha, but cautiously, not knowing what to expect.

For the first time, Ilya smiled. The wind tore through his hair, rippling his shirt sleeves all the way down his arms. "That's my boy."

Vasha could not help but laugh. "Why is it that women take the news one way and men another?"

"Women are more interested in the birthing of a child, men in the getting of it."

Emboldened by this levity, Vasha repeated his initial question. "But what are you doing out here?"

"I'm just wondering," said Ilya so softly that Vasha could barely hear him above the wind, "what lies beyond the sea."

"What lies beyond the sea? Don't you have enough to think about on the lands that lie between here and the plains? Half of the Yossian principalities could break away at any time, if they think we've weakened at all, and the Dushan king is still furious about losing the man who was the jaran governor there. Another of his sons is threatening open revolt against his father. And Mitya is still having trouble on his eastern border with Vidiya. Now that Filis is defeated, King Barsauma will begin negotiating over those two border provinces, and Yaroslav Sakhalin is sending scouts to the south. According to the reports we got from Kirill Zvertkov after he joined up with his army again, there has still been no recent word from the second expedition sent out along the Golden Road.

Ilya grunted. "I would take a ship to Erthe," he said absently. "Katya went, and returned, and went north to Sarai."

"When was this? Does she mean to stay? Perhaps she will come to Mircassia now."

"No. She means to return to Erthe. She'll sail from the north, she says. She may already be gone. I don't know. We haven't had word yet. That was months ago."

Vasha struggled with his disappointment and finally got it under control in time to hear his father going on.

"There is something strange about Erthe, Vasha," he said, describing his words with his hands. "I don't think it's a land like these lands. I think it is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by the heavens themselves, so that if a man stood on the shore he would look out into the vault of the sky, only it would lie at his feet instead of above his head."

Vasha laughed. "How could that be?" Sobering, he saw that his father was serious. Ilya was not truly looking at the ocean or listening to the roar of the waves. He was oblivious to the bite of the wind and the fine blowing sand on his skin. He had gone on a Singer's journey, traveling to lands that could only exist in his own mind or beyond human ken, in the worlds that belong to the gods.

"Father!" Exasperated, Vasha raised his voice. "Haven't you spent enough time staring out at the water? There are lands to administer here, right here. I have a much more detailed report to give you, and three other messengers with me, who have reports to give as well. But you only care about what lies beyond, not what you have in your hands already."

He turned, looking toward the guards who waited on the ridge. They stood there, small figures like statues unmoved in the wind. Another rider came, picking her way down the ridge. It was Tess. He recognized her at once, even at this distance.

Ilya did not reply. He did not appear to be listening. A wave ran in and crept up to his boots, then slid back, absorbed into the next wave.

Vasha shrugged finally. It was not his right to disturb the meditation of a Singer. He turned full around and began to walk back across the sand, to meet Tess. Out here the strand was flat and dry, untouched by water, and the wind hit with redoubled force, sculpting the sand into endless tiny ranges of irregular hills, running out along the strand until they were lost to distance.

"Does he come out here often?" he asked as Tess came up to him and they stopped together and looked toward the shoreline and the silhouette of Ilya.

"Yes. I've never quite figured out what he does, though, except just to look. Perhaps the constant wind out here reminds him of the plains."

"He's searching for the shores of heaven," said Vasha flippantly, still irritated by his father's infuriatingly pointless musing.

But Tess smiled sadly. "Has he found them yet?"

"Can anyone find them? I have work to do, reports to hear, Talia and Yuri to play with. I need to write a letter to my wife. I'm going in. Are you coming with me?"

She shook her head, and he threw up his hands in disgust and went back by himself. He stopped once, when he was almost at the ridge to look back.

The sun had come out from behind the clouds and it spilled its light along the waters, turning them to a rich gold. It was beautiful, in its way, rimming the edges of the clouds with white-gold where a patch of deep blue sky showed through. As the sun sank, the golden stream of light reached and reached until it flowed forward in the waves that spilled themselves into nothing at Ilya's feet.

As if, thought Vasha, the shores of heaven had overflowed, lapping over into his world like a promise, sworn by the sun and the moon and the wind. If only Ilya would look at what lay right before him instead of always staring at the sky, he could see it for himself.

The wind picked up, blowing sand hard into Vasha's face, and he shaded his eyes and watched as Tess reached Ilya at last and reached out to touch her husband's arm. After a long pause, Ilya turned.

Coming to himself, he said something to her and together they started back across the sands.

Vasha waited for them.