Chapter II

Question how we would, neither Two nor I could get any more out of Tez. Cornered, Tanekhet would give me a courtier’s answer and slide away. Iatha knew less than I: it all deepened my apprehension as the last quarter moon slid by, till Two was sparking at the least alarm.

I also had a demonstration, in small, of a true prophecy’s effect. Therkon was bringing six guards, a personal servant, a cook and a chamberlain, and the fuss over what to feed them, where to lodge them, who would fettle their mules and do their washing, went the length of Iskarda.

With Asaskian and the children gone our own house had the most spare room, but though the most secure, it would also put them closest to me. Eventually, it took the whole council’s decision to billet them at the Market inn. From there they might stray into the village, or elude our troublecrew, but they were on the outer environs of the House. As for food . . . by the last day, I could have consigned Therkon’s fads and preferences to the River bottom along with everything else.

Nor did I see them arrive. I was forbidden so much as to peek from an upper window, let alone, perish the thought, stroll by like some nameless worker in the street. Instead Azo took me up past the village cistern to the high valleys where the hares had begun to breed, and we hunted there all day.

It was nearly dusk when we came home, the time when, usually, I love Iskarda most. Spring, the trees full of pristine new green, the irises in sheltered spots flowering creamy gold or horizon blue, the air redolent with growing grain. Iskarda’s single street full of homing workers and hunters and men fetching the last wood, sunset steeping the high, gabled wooden house-fronts in dusty gold. And beyond, the great tapestry of the River’s prospect, faded and blurring under immanent night.

That evening the street’s feel had Two jittering before we reached the market-place. Everybody for once wanted to talk at if not with me, gossip or opine about the arrival, orate, worry, exhort. It took Azo, dour, stolid, silently interposing a wall-solid shoulder, to get me in our gates without a check.

With my cousins there, Darr would have raced up in the passageway to babble everything I did want to know, what time they came, what they looked like, what was happening at the Market, under the stress of housing a crown prince. I could almost hear his high-octave squeal, “And you should’ve heard what he said about the baker’s rolls!”

As it was, I had only Iatha’s grumble of, “The usual speeches. Tez offered ’em hot water and a night to recuperate before the yapping starts.”

The reception, I knew, had been in the market square, Tez and Eria together. In our kitchen, Shia had heard the prince had been courteous if travel-stained, after bucketing on muleback the fifty miles up from Marbleport. Duitho and Ashar were already up the village on patrol.

“And tomorrow,” Iatha added flatly, “you’re out at daylight. Before it starts.”

Before the council meeting, she meant. The house was on edge too, a fine underlying tension I could neither escape nor ignore. Having failed to pump Iatha on what Therkon actually looked like, I let them push me out of the kitchen conclave when my yawns grew noticeable, and went almost willingly to bed.

* * * *

Azo did rouse me at dawn: I could tell from her even rarer than usual words that she was no happier in exile than I. We prowled the higher hills, going gradually blind to the spring revelations of new beasts and the onset of familiar flowers, and by a little after noon we were both at rebellion point. Azo made the merest demurral, when I said, “Let’s go back to the look-out. I want to see the qherrique.”

The women of Iskarda have used the place time out of mind, in formal ceremonies for the Mother, for trysting, or just to be alone. Inevitable that the House should propose it first, when the time came to establish our seed, the tangible legacy of Amberlight. And the qherrique had been as willing as we.

We clambered to the closest crest above the village, right to the brink where the bastion of creamy grey rock thrust from its cluster of low-growing, pure white snow-helliens. Azo made one circuit, a bare formality, and settled on a backside-polished boulder. I stood a moment at her back, while we stared out through greenish silver leaves over the River’s green and silver prospect, and down, in a hawk’s vista, onto the street of Iskarda.

Neither of us had to say that they should have eaten by now. The Market workers would be soothing frayed nerves after another meal’s success—or debacle. Tez and Tanekhet would be back in council. And so would the embassy. Surely, at this hour, we could go home?

“I’m hungry,” I said.

Azo did not answer, but the line of her neck agreed.

“Could you get something, do you think? Even if it’s at the Market.” I giggled a little, too tired and bored and stressed to help it. “One of his majesty’s rejected rolls?”

Azo gave me an eye-corner, but I knew she was trying not to snort. She said, “You’d be alone.”

“What would get me up here? What can get me up here? Especially,” I stood back a pace, “if I’m with the qherrique.”

I withdrew another step. Azo eyed me dourly. Then she growled, “So stay there,” and got up herself.

I walked dutifully back to the secret bay among the rocks. Tiny hyacinths had always grown there, purple-blue, so my father Sarth once claimed, as the depths of a sunlit sea. Around them thin mountain grass swayed and jounced in the wind, and through the helliens’ dancing shadow, at a boulder’s foot, I saw the qherrique.

When they planted it, the year I was born, it was no larger than the pearl it had once seemed. Now my father Alkhes called it the size of a Dhasdein phalanx shield, a man’s armlength in diameter, rising at the boulder foot, a mushroom rock, an oysterless pearl, a gleaming, convex, mist-grey curve. A presence. Two had already acknowledged it.

And the seed was beginning to glow.

In the old days, coming to the mother-face, the cutters would sing. Crafters preparing to work the cut slabs would sing too, the merest troublecrew waking a light-gun would hum. I alone had no need, though sometimes I liked to. But as the seed would never, had never stung me, so when I came, it always knew.

The light welled up in the boulder-shade, softened by high sun but purer than moonlight and as clear. Here, if nowhere else on earth, I was not unusual, my greeting not uncertain. Here I was known and welcomed by my own.

I walked up, as even my mother or my father Sarth would hesitate now to do, and laid my hand on the breathing stone.

How long I—we—stood there I have no idea. Very often when we touched I would lose track of time. Nor can I put into words what thoughts, or feelings, or whatever they cannot be called, that we exchanged. Like the exchange itself, its matter is not something that fits in human terms.

But eventually, as if reluctant as I was, the glow began to fade. I sighed, finding muscle and bone and earth underfoot again. Then I took my hand away and stepped back a pace. There was no need to say farewell.

The outer world re-assembled: swaying grass, tick-tack of hellien leaves, a little sigh of air through the balmy spring afternoon. Sunlight ricocheted among the rocks, shadow dappled the hyacinths and the flank of the qherrique. In a year or two, my mother said, we could take the next step. Someone would bring a cutter, in the moon-dark and her own cycle’s dark, and make the covenanted approach. Take the first, almost miniature slab, this time with a truly complete assent.

And sometime after that we would have new light-guns and cutters and shapers, and once again, all the tools of Amberlight.

I lifted my hand once more, as I always did, in acknowledgement of the pact: and stopped.

Someone was coming through the rocks.

Not Azo. I knew that instantly. The foot was light, but not troublecrew’s stealthy, almost soundless tread. And not a woman. It was slightly too measured, the pace a little too long. A man.

Our men could come here now. Some did, those who found rapport with the qherrique, who would follow a Craft one day. But this was a stranger. I knew as if I saw it, hearing that careful, just not quite hesitant footfall among the stones.

I turned about as troublecrew would and stood four-square, Two roused and hackling, before the qherrique.

At first I thought it was Keshaq. The black-bronze hair was as straight and silky, drawn back from temple and forehead with beauty’s carelessness, the features were as exotic, the long coffee-dark eyes, the high brow and flaring sweep of nose. He was as tall and narrow-built, his muscle carried in haunch and chest rather than width, and he moved with the same unconscious, bone-deep bearing of birth and rank.

But Keshaq never sported a knee-length tunic of some flame-orange, almost diaphanous, double-thread silk, over narrow cotton trousers of glistening leaf-green. Or a shirt whose embroidery would beggar temples, just in the narrow band the tunic revealed. Rings did not glitter on Keshaq’s long, beautiful hands, nor did he pull back his hair with jewelled pins, and secure it in a thillian clip.

I stood like a lump of rock. My nascent troublecrew reflexes could not get past, Sweet Work-mother! How did he get up here alone?

He navigated the last rock-step. Looked up. Stopped.

For a moment I saw some dark, beautiful deer, elegant and cautious, picking its way through a dangerous wood. And then a deer that had thought itself, just this once, unpursued. For one blissful moment, free.

Then, just noticeably, he drew himself up. He was the foreigner, the interloper, and he knew it. My body language must have been shouting, Stop, Stand back, Beware. You have no business here. His eyes met mine, cool and steady, the armour complete now. Even at a disadvantage, he would be composed.

After another moment he said, not quite tentatively, “Damis.”

It is the old Amberlight word, title, courtesy, to greet an unwed maid.

My lips parted and my breath caught. Mother aid, what should I call him? But Two already knew.

“Your Highness,” I said.

He did not start. He was a crown prince, after all, trained and inured to almost anything. But for half a flash the eyes did widen, in more than surprise.

Then I realised where Two had got the title. Iskarda would say, Sir, Amberlight, My lord. “Highness” was a Dhasdeini usage. Straight from Tanekhet.

When he spoke it came with his rank’s authority. He said, “You know the Riversrun Suzerain.”

Oh, Mother! I nearly cried. He was as fast in the wits as my fathers, he already had a first-class clue, he need only look behind me to guess the rest. The one person he was not supposed to encounter in Iskarda. The one person I should never, ever have met.

Without knowing it I took a step back. I forgot to be troublecrew, I put my hands out as Two had suddenly ordered, not to protect but to take shelter, to protect myself.

He saw past me then. His eyes did open, almost white-ringed in that dark flamboyant face. He said, “You’re the one. The oracle.”

Two answered before I could stop it. “And you are the Dragonfly.”

* * * *

For all his birth and schooling it caught him unawares. His eyes flicked downward, over his clothes, perhaps. Then he let out a little involuntary laugh.

“So some call me,” he said.

“But what,” I had the weirdest sense Two was actually quoting, using others’ words as happened under stress, “are you doing here?”

His chin lifted a little. Again his eyes went past me, this time by intent. After a moment he said, “I wanted to see the qherrique.”

With a touch of longing, and a stronger touch of defiance, that told us both what he understood. No need to reply aloud: he was a stranger. And a man. Strange men do not, are not permitted, to approach the qherrique.

The next question was reflex. “Where are your troublecrew?” I asked.

He actually shifted weight a fraction, the sort of move that would have been a shuffle in anyone else. “Ah. Well . . .”

“You gave them the slip.” I was too surprised for outrage. “You didn’t leave them outside the rocks. You never brought them at all!”

“And where, pray, are yours?”

The unaccustomed Iskardan frankness might have stung him, or perhaps the return was pure instinct. I could feel the color rise, though, on my face.

“Azo’s just gone to the village. I’m perfectly safe!”

His eyes went past me again and the expression became something I understood. Recognition, wonder, a rising hint of awe. And then wistfulness, for a marvel he would never share.

“It does talk to men. Sometimes.” I stopped. To go on would only be telling him what he already knew. Even to remind him how little freedom he must have left.

“But,” I said again, “how did you get up here?”

His eyes went down and up. He knew what I meant. Then he ducked his head a half-fraction and a hand brushed his jaw.

“The, ah—the salad. There was so much oil.” Less off-balance, he would never have committed such a solecism as to criticise his hosts’ food. “I had to postpone the meeting . . . They had leave to wait.”

To leave him alone. To let his notoriously sensitive stomach settle. It was not just gossip or exaggeration, and down in Iskarda the Market workers would be chagrined to their souls.

But he did not know that. Therkon, crown prince of Dhasdein, the Empress’s hatchet man. Staring at me in defiance that this time shielded embarrassment, or maybe, something more.

A flash of Two’s memory played past me. Therkon the crown prince, the cipher, the nonentity, extinguished in his father’s shadow. Perhaps, belittled by his father as well as the rest.

“I’m sorry.” It was out before I thought. “They were all so worried, but they didn’t know what was safe—” My father Alkhes’ audacity rescued me. “Our intelligencers aren’t as good as yours.”

He nearly gave a little gasp. Surprise, affront? Our eyes met and locked while the rest of the understanding passed between us. Going both ways.

Then his stance loosened, his eyes’ focus widened, and the long mouth eased. I had a moment’s image of that dark, beautiful deer, temporarily at bay. At length, with the hunters’ passing, lowering its head, safe now to turn away.

“I found a back-stair.” Now he spoke with a soft, flexible quiet that had nothing in common with Tanekhet’s mannered calm. “You should not blame them. They thought I’d have to lie down an hour and more.”

“So you came out.”

His eyes tracked round again, this time with a different wistfulness. “The qherrique: it was a reason. I thought—it seemed—quite wonderful, that somewhere, along the River, you could be quite alone.”

The choice of verb said it all. Where he could have been alone, for a crown prince of Dhasdein the ultimate luxury. But I had been here first.

“I’m—”

The little gesture was purely imperial: apologies are unnecessary. Other gifts have cancelled them. His eyes came back to me, this time frankly curious.

“I thought,” he said, “you were only twelve.”

“I grew.” I had become accustomed early to winnowing curiosities at a glance. Some were comfortably innocent. More were wary, some hostile, the worst, both invasive and prurient. To this one Two and I responded as easily as grass to the sun. “My mother thinks Two helped. Because of the River. You know?”

Because of the impatient waiting world. Because of Dhasdein.

He inclined his head a little. Admission, acknowledgement. But it was candid wonder in his voice. “You look, sixteen, seventeen.”

“My father is tall . . .” The wave was upon me, it was shoot it or overturn. “My father Sarth. You know?”

He nodded solemnly. His eyes were still fixed on me. I re-
assayed that attention, and still found no taint of prurience. No hint of adult-to-child patronage either. I might have been his own age.

I took my own bracing breath. “You know I have two fathers, I suppose.”

After a minute, he said, “I heard.”

The pause spoke our common knowledge. Of course he had heard, just as he had known where to find the qherrique. Dhasdein intelligence.

“It—sometimes people feel confused. Sometimes, they—they—”

He moved a fraction, almost as if to put out a hand. “People always talk,” he said, “about the unusual. Or,” with a wry little turn of the voice, “the notable.”

As they had talked about him. For the length of his life, with reason or not.

“Yes. Well, I suppose I am—notable. But, my fathers. It isn’t just my mother’s consort. They are supposed to be my fathers in, in—”

He did move this time, his face suddenly alive with more than interest. “They tell the story,” he said. “When you were born, you had two shadows. Both your fathers’ faces. I always thought it was something to do with—” He gestured to the qherrique. But there was no wariness in that movement, no revulsion. If he saw me as a specimen, and there had been Dhasdeini scribes, I knew, who would have liked nothing better than to dissect me, to him I was a live specimen: a thinking, feeling being.

“Yes,” I said gratefully, relaxing into the speed of his understanding, so like my fathers’ own. “My mother says that. If it could choose to be—reborn—with a human—” I looked to be sure he understood all I meant—“it could choose to have two fathers as well.”

He had understood. His eyes went once to the qherrique and back, and then the momentary sadness passed. “But when you were born,” he said softly, “your mother was so pleased.”

“Yes.” I could almost smile this time, remembering with Two’s memories as well as his. “So I don’t really care if I have one blood-father or two, and if anyone else wants to worry about it, they can.”

He had been watching me closely all the time. Whatever he read from that last sentence, his eyes narrowed a little. Then he said abruptly, “You don’t look like them. Any of them. Your father Alkhes,” it came without a stumble, “his hair is much blacker, and his skin is white. You have the Amberlight skin, but your hair is straight. And your father Sarth’s is lighter. Yours is like—black coffee. With lights of gold. You don’t have your mother’s nose, either. When you move or speak, sometimes I can see all three of them. Just the turn of a phrase. Or the shape of your cheekbone at a certain angle. But that is not you. In the end, you are someone else. I don’t know who that someone is, but it is not them. Even the sum of them is not you.”

Nobody in Iskarda, not even my mother, had ever seen so far into my heart. I stood with a feeling of enlargement, of surprised recognition, of a gratitude close to joy. Such as a riddle, given life, might feel at being finally fathomed. Rightly known.

He gave me a diffident little smile and another gesture, this time pure Dhasdein: I have over-stepped, and been presumptuous. Pardon me.

“Tell me, if you will, about your fathers? Your mother’s consort? Was that not part of her, her plans for change?”

It was a deflection, a mannerly ward for my feelings. Old news, too. Yet despite the newly restrained manner, he sounded genuinely interested. And still, despite the subject, without prurience.

“You mean,” I said, “the plan to end marriage? As it was in Amberlight?”

The corners of that long, usually governed mouth winced a little, but he nodded.

“No more men’s towers? No more—losing—firstborn sons? And men, as well as women, able to marry or, or have more partners, as they wish?”

The spark of interest had brightened. “Has it worked?”

“Not really.” I could not help echoing my mother’s disgust. “There aren’t towers, or any more sons lost. But even the young women just want to share one man between two or three of them, or marry a man and keep a partner, but not allow him one. Except my sister Tez’s consort, it’s all just like before!”

He was laughing. Openly, shaken clean out of manners and wariness and composure, a soft but lung-deep burst of laughter that warmed me like spring rain.

“Ah, damis, seen from Dhasdein, all of that is change!”

He caught himself, and managed the sketch of a bow. “Forgive me. I only meant . . .”

“It is unimportant,” Two said.

He heard the difference instantly. His eyes went wide and my own heart cringed. Now he knows how different I really am. Now he’ll be put off, or shocked.

Or worse, I would not let my heart say, afraid.

I put my own chin up and stood waiting to meet my fate.

His eyes flicked once to the qherrique and back. He drew a sharp little breath. Then he said, “Who was that?”

Not, What. Who. Suddenly my quaking heart swelled with more than relief.

“That was Two,” I said.

“Two?” Then his whole face lit. “The qherrique? It, you—she? can talk as well?”

“Two. Just Two.” I could have laughed aloud from simple happiness. “He, she, it, doesn’t work. Say, She, if you want. Two, because we are two. And Too, as well as me.”

He actually took a step forward, his eyes shining, still with that candid curiosity welcome as a companion’s touch. “And Two? Is Two the qherrique?”

“We think so,” I said.

“That is—that is most wonderful.” I could have opened like a flower, at the focus of that warmth. “Tell me, has she—” suddenly he waved his hands in a sort of frustration, trying to look past me and at me at once—“Two, how do I talk to you? Or do I talk to, to,” he visibly drew the name back, “to Chaeris?”

“You talk to me,” I said. “Two is me. Or I’m her. When Two wants, she’ll say things I miss.”

“Oh.” He could get worlds in a syllable. Comprehension, eagerness, excitement far beyond simple interest. “Tell me then, Two—no, Chaeris. When did you first know—Two—was there?”

“As soon as I began knowing.” I could not remember a time otherwise. “She was there before that, of course. I just wasn’t old enough to tell.”

His eyes told me he was envisioning a life with no possible chance of solitude. And its more amazing obverse, a companionship one would never want to lose.

“And,” he visibly struggled over questions’ choice. “How does it work? Do you feel Two, like an arm, or an eye, or is there one place where—she—stays?”

Questions posed since I could string words together, as my close kin or our own physicians tried to fathom the enigma in their midst. I had no time to consider how readily the answers came for him.

“It seems more like something we, I, carry in the blood. Everywhere and nowhere. What I feel, Two feels. What I see, Two sees. Two just has memories, lots more memories. All the memories, like this seed had.” I did not have to reach out to the qherrique behind me. “Everything it, they, we brought from Amberlight.”

His face opened in pure amazement. Almost faintly, he said, “All?”

He had seen the seed, Two remembered, when my mother came back from the Source. He too understood what it would mean, to call on Two’s resources, and see back to the beginning of Amberlight. To the moment when a human first bespoke qherrique.

This time when his gaze returned to me it held longing doubled, tripled. More than longing. Unfulfillable, unkillable desire.

Two flashed an image past me and as suddenly I understood. My mother with my father Sarth, somewhere in outdoor dark. My mother saying, with wonder in her own voice, “You’re a philosopher, Sarth.” Adding, softly, “That means, you don’t need to believe things, you need to know.”

And Therkon was a philosopher too. Just as for Two and me, his instinct was to learn things. That, not embarrassment, had unlocked his shield at this encounter’s very first. The pure acquisition of new knowledge gave him joy, the need was a hunger in his heart.

But unlike my father, he was a crown prince of Dhasdein.

I saw the deer again, dark and beautiful, and turning, always turning, in the confines of a net.

“I could show you,” I said.

“Two will do it.” I actually took a step forward, when he blinked. “For some people, we can transmit. Like my mother, with the seed, for Tanekhet.” I bit down hard on, I want you to be one of them. “Just let me try.”

Carried away by his desire, the philosopher had already answered, Yes. He actually lifted a hand before the crown prince caught up. And after him, the man.

The way his stance, his eyes changed, was a southerly down my back. I bit hard to cover the tremble in my lip.

He had seen. His own face replied. He made me a grave half-bow, philosopher and prince at once. “Lady Chaeris, there is nothing I should like better. For myself.”

Cold reality was returning, priorities first. “Your troublecrew wouldn’t like it,” I said.

He went to say, Yes, and then, caught by truth, No. Then he said, diffident but determined, “Lady Chaeris, I am a stranger. And you know I have heard . . . how . . . how Two . . .”

“Oh, Mother. That was long ago. Two knows better now. Two only sparks when we’re really upset, or stressed, or—it would be all right!”

He did pause. Then he said, more diffidently, “They told me—the first time. Your own father. Alkhes saw you on the cliff here. Almost over the cliff. He ran and caught you and the—and Two—his arm was useless for three days.”

“We were young then! Just learning to move! The old qherrique was anchored, even the seed they just carried about. But I, we can walk, Two was so excited—” In his face wonder fought with doubt, but not hard enough. “We just wanted to measure the drop! We were going to climb down, far enough to guess. My father didn’t understand, he was terrified, and he . . .”

I had to stop. The image of my father’s shock, the pain, the way he had carried his arm in that sling, was graven too deep. I hung my head in our common shame, struggling to suppress the tears.

He had taken his own quick forward step. Stopped. Silence again, stretching painfully, wider and colder, as the companionship ebbed away. I had imagined him more than a philosopher. And after all, he was no different to anyone else.

I did hear him draw in his breath. And the change in his voice as he said, “Lady Chaeris?”

I looked up. The light had left his face, but the philosopher remained. Sober now, with all the ruler’s wariness, and the man’s simple caution. Steeling himself, however knowledge and commonsense protested, not to be afraid.

He said, “I—we—could try.”

His face told me what mine had said. He produced a little smile. Half shy, half impudent. The man, pleased to have pleased me. The philosopher, cocking his thumb at rules.

I reached my hand out. In a moment, his came to my touch.

* * * *

When I opened my fingers it was the philosopher who looked back at me, dazzled and delighted, and still distant as a man finding himself in love. Like his, my eyes still held the pale, distant winter sky, the Amberlight hillside vacant of Houses or citadel: the face of Amanazar.

It must have been another thirty heartbeats before he realized I had not let go.

He looked down quickly at our hands. His eyes flashed up with all the other reflexes jerked awake and I shut my fingers as lightly as I could and said, “Two would like a favor. If you please.”

The old childhood phrase half-disarmed him. His fingers relaxed a little. Then the prince inclined his head, an unconditional, imperial assent.

I said, “Two wants to learn you.” I held on at the twitch of his wrist. “There’s never been anyone from Dhasdein here. All we know of it is, is second-hand. We, I, just thought . . .”

He had been startled, far enough to show the struggle of shock and some form of amusement, and very imperial affront. You want, the arch of his chin demanded, to learn Dhasdein from me?

“Well, after all, you are the Prince!”

The affront dissolved in an almost helpless laugh. “Ah, my lady.” Then he became somebody quite new, a practiced, more than practiced courtier. “Such a petitioner, who could refuse?”

He smiled into my eyes with such blatant charm I almost recoiled. In the pause he glanced swiftly over a shoulder, head cocked. Listening. All prince again, seeking what we both ought to have expected. Voices, troublecrew challenges, thud of feet. Gauging, from their absence, how much longer we might stretch this magic interlude.

Before he turned back to me and asked gravely, “What must I do?”

“Uh. Ah—could you, um, sit down?”

He did splutter then. But he also disposed himself with grace’s brevity on the nearest handy rock. The sun had come further toward afternoon. The inclining light flashed across his eyes, far darker than the usual Amberlight bronze or brown, the silky sheen and the flare of jewels in his hair. Raising his brows in something that was not quite regal hauteur, he looked expectantly in my face.

One stride had me so close he suppressed a recoil: Two was rapaciously eager for so much wealth. But it was an echo of memory, something unexplained about Zuri and Sarth, that sent my hands first to his hair’s thillian clip.

The pin came out and I drew it carefully clear. We were eye to eye now, and I read the flicker of expressions, doubt, a certain alarm, something that, in an Outland woman, Two would have called modesty flouted, if not outraged. He kept still, deliberately, as I palmed the clip and two-handed, began to spread out his hair.

Undone, it was longer than I had thought, almost down to the end of his shoulderblades. But it was the texture that fascinated us, as silky but far lighter than my father Sarth’s, with no sign of his slight curl. It hung over my fingers in skein upon skein, slipping, slithering, darkly glistening as some fragile net.

Therkon had grown still. When I looked up, he was watching me, as fascinated as Two.

I came a little closer, so my upright thigh crossed close to his. With the back of my free hand I did as Two wanted. I smoothed my knuckles very lightly down his cheek.

He almost jumped. I did hear his breathing jerk but I was all but swallowed in Two’s response, greedy as qherrique feeding on heat. His skin was smooth, with an underlying roughness I had felt before, on my fathers’ faces, a shaven man’s hint of beard. But the bones, the bones of that bold jaw and cheek were entirely different.

I drew my knuckles right down his jawbone to the chin, and up. He quivered all over, as a truly tuned string does when its neighbour is struck. I let the pads of my fingertips slip over his temple, the bridge of that arrogant nose, back to the startlingly delicate framework of his ear. Over his forehead, Two absorbing every detail and dimension as water melts into sand. Along an eyebrow, then with a finger under his chin, tilting his eyes to mine.

His tension was part incipient affront, part something else. His breath had quickened, his eyes dilated. When I looked into their depths the oak-water irises had almost vanished. It was darkness, entire and absolute, that looked back.

Two knew that look, if I did not. Our thighs brushed and he gave one quick jerk. Then Two leant over and touched his mouth with mine.

His breath met mine in an uncontrollable gasp and his hands instinctively went to grasp my hips. In the same moment he tried to let go, to pull away, and Two made an imperative noise and clamped my own hands over his.

Whatever he or I might have wanted, Two gave us no choice. She slid my tongue along his lips, making him half-gasp again before his own responses cut in.

His hands firmed under mine. His mouth opened, he straightened up and tilted his head to reach closer, and his tongue came to answer my own.

Practice, I can recognise now. And skill, atop a fine native talent for love. Or at least, for dalliance. Attentive, too, to his partner’s desires, anything but hungry, a man who has always had his fill of both. Two was cascading memories past us, Two was a fire in the blood, urging me on, Two understood and wanted what would happen next and suddenly among the flow of unknown bodies a flash shaped my mother and my fathers, naked together in a moonlit glen—

I tore my mouth away and stumbled back. Without words I screamed, Stop!

Two’s contact snapped. I was alone with myself amid mundane dirt and rock.

Elsewhere I could not look. I clung to the refusal while, slowly, the dance of my blood calmed, while I made the lowering discovery that my body alone could be as lawless as Two. My heart steadied, finally. Unconsciously I wiped a hand across my mouth.

Then, at last, I had to face the man I had touched.

He was looking as bewildered and shaken as I felt, with a fine touch, atop the confusion, of wounded, truly imperial pride. But he regained his balance far faster than I.

Silently he stood up, raised both hands and scooped his hair back. Held out a hand, as silently imperative. I gave him the clip.

He fastened it home. His every muscle spoke pure affront. In a moment, as silently, as thoroughly outraged as his body-speech proclaimed, he would turn and go.

“It wasn’t you!” I burst out. “It was something Two did. I—I didn’t expect—”

I stopped, feeling the flush rise as it too often did. Looked away, unable to help myself. I had been abashed often enough by Two’s memories. I had never been led so far astray.

There was a chasm of a pause. Then, icily calm, his voice enquired, “Did you learn enough?”

I had ado not to close my eyes in pure misery. He had been so understanding, so alight with such a welcome, more than a friend’s interest. And I could not even explain.

It was Two who said, “We are ashamed.”

My very bones felt Therkon freeze.

“We are of age,” Two said. “This year.”

He had to know what that meant. A woman’s moon-phases. I wanted to sink in the dirt and wriggle away. I grabbed for control and Two flatly refused.

“We wished to know what it is, how it is, between women and men.” Two seldom used, or could not often achieve inflection, but urgency surfaced now. Almost passion, it felt. “We wished to know, for ourselves.”

Let me do it, I was yelling, stop, don’t make it even worse!

“But we—I—did not know the way. We—” a sudden break, sharp as glass. “I apologise.”

Two had never said such a thing in my life. I had never heard Two use the pronoun “I.”

The pause built, and built, and teetered on the brink of impossibilities. I have to breathe, I was thinking, or I will die . . .

It was Therkon who let his breath out, a quick audible chuff. Then his boots moved beside the rock.

“My lady.”

He stopped, and began again.

“My ladies.” I could understand the falter. Two and I would strain even a crown prince’s store of protocol. “I think I also am ashamed. Shall we,” it was formal but not icy, “shall we call that a mistake? And—begin again?”

“Begin?” Two yanked my head up and he put both hands before him with genuine haste however convincing the laugh.

“In the River-lord’s name, not like that!”

“I only meant,” he amended, as I stared at him, “perhaps we might, uh, begin to talk again?”

While we can, expanded his look, quiet, composed now, too aware of the time ticking inexorably with every click of a hellien leaf.

“Yes.” I could feel my own face light, I was almost silly with relief. “Yes, we could do that, oh, I’m sorry, that was something, I can’t tell you, but I never meant—”

Forgotten, answered that gesture, elegant as everything else. Now he even managed a faint, wry half-smile. “Though I must say, my lady, I never expected to be so, so taken in my own net.”

Not the deer, turning and turning in those distant, silken chains. But though I caught his sense, the irony of the investigator investigated, what took precedence was my own shame.

“It was my—our fault,” I said to the rock. “Two, I, we worry so much. They’re all going to rely on us. They’ll ask what to do—and we have to know everything, how can we even forecast a flood height, if we don’t have all the possible facts? And men and women, the, the sex thing, it’s so important. If I miss one small thing, I’m so afraid I won’t—we won’t—we’ll say something, and it—it will be wrong . . .”

The words dwindled. I kept my eyes down, wanting now to creep entirely away. The helliens tick-tacked suddenly, in the wakening breeze. Inside the rocks it felt like the egg of the world. Absolute, unbreathing hush.

Then Therkon hitched himself back onto the boulder, moving over to make room, and said, more than gently, “My lady. Will you sit down?”

* * * *

Gauche as ten-year-old boy, I sat. I feared to move any further, and he kept silent until all my awareness narrowed on his faint scent, his breathing, the sense of his presence, so tormentingly close.

He murmured, “I think I know what you mean.”

I was too ashamed to look up. But I felt the way he, too, braced himself.

“I.” His hands moved, locking one over the other wrist. “I carry a burden as well.”

I did not have to ask. I had seen the philosopher, the desires he could not fulfil.

“Dhasdein. I have seen Dhasdein come from a great empire to,” the gesture finished, to a shadow of itself. “I am not sure that was not my fault. But it has set me . . . in debt, to what is left.”

I looked up then. He nodded a fraction, as if I had spoken aloud.

“I was trained and raised . . . as you were. Though I was to be,” a wry expression, “a prince. An,” the inflection was past irony, “heir-breeder. A figurehead. A fledgling ‘emperor’.” He flicked a hand. “Once, I could avoid that path. For safety, I had to play the fool, the spendthrift.” Another, very conscious pause. “The lover. Only to survive.”

“Antastes,” Two said.

His arm tensed, but he did not flinch. In a moment he said, “My father. Yes.”

Then he looked round to me and raised his chin. “Now, I have another part. My mother—the Empress—depends on me.” He read my face and his mouth corners turned down. “What do they say? The imperial hatchet man?”

“You aren’t like that!”

It was out before I could help myself. He eyed me sidelong, and the ruefulness deepened, hardening into something else.

“Oh, yes,” he said quite quietly. “Be sure, my lady. If I must be, I can.” Now his whole face was cold and inhumanly beautiful, merciless as the veritable axe.

“There is,” he finished softly, “more than enough blood on my hands.”

I looked down and tried to quell Two’s memories of Dhasdein’s descent on Iskarda. Tried not to think what future this warning might predict. But irresistibly, invincibly, both Two and I drew back the other memories. The deer. The eager, inquiring philosopher.

Greatly daring, I reached out for his hand. And after one tiny hesitation he gave it to me.

I took it palm down, but he turned it upward in my grasp. I opened out the fingers, long and slender and dark against my milk-coffee Iskardan skin. The nails were beautifully shaped and perfectly manicured.

I said, “Your hands are beautiful.”

He took the meaning. His fingers twitched once and relaxed. “Useless,” he answered ruefully. “Not like your fathers’.” A quick pain crossed his face. “Or Tanekhet’s.”

I had noticed my foster-father’s hands when I was four in human time. They had the same shape, graceful and elegant, but the skin was rough, the palms calloused, and on one hand nails had been torn away, leaving gnarled scars. I had asked, What did that? And for the first time we were denied knowledge. His consorts, my own fathers, even my mother’s face had closed. Then, abruptly, they had spoken of something else.

So I asked again now, uncertain of the response. “What happened to his?”

His mouth clipped tight and thin and he averted his face. “He was tortured,” he said to his sleeve. And then, muffled, “I tortured him.”

“You—!”

“I gave the orders. He—he planned it.” That long, too-feeling mouth twisted. “In our own ways, we betrayed each other.” The note changed. “As well as Dhasdein.”

Both of us understood that inflection. Don’t, if you care for me, ask any more.

After a moment I smoothed my fingertips across the elegantly shaped, polished shields of nail. Then I said, “For a crown prince, for an emperor, I think these will do.”

“You think?” It was almost a laugh. The fingers curled involuntarily over mine, and I felt the rings.

The thunderbolt and serpent had been carved on the big bloodstone over his first knuckle. An imperial signet. We knew that instantly. The other, on his wedding finger, was a simple hoop of gold. Set with three seed-sized, matched, magnificent blue-white thillians.

“What’s this?” I asked.

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “It belongs to the crown prince. A betrothal ring.”

My heart seemed to fall mysteriously under the arc of my breastbone. “To whom?”

He looked up sharply and it was mostly surprise. “To Dhasdein.”

“Oh.”

That time earth itself fell under me, as if air had opened in the solid ground. Of course, he had said it already. The deer turned and turned before me, in the net it could not, would not let itself try to break. Dhasdein. The rule of empire, the weight of empire. The crown prince’s responsibility.

I shut my hand on the suddenly illusive warmth of his fingers, as if a ghost would slip between us and all in a moment drift him away.

“My lady?”

I looked up, and it was the philosopher, or just the man, who looked back. Quiet, gentle, concerned for me. As if we were of the same common, companion flesh and blood.

Then the concern became a slight, conscious constraint. I read the signs of an unwelcome but pressing decision and waited for him to release his hands. However courteously, to move back.

He said, “My lady Chaeris, if you understand all that . . . then you know why I am here.”

Two did not have to tell me. I said, and it sounded hollow too, “For Dhasdein.”

“Yes.” He bent his head a little, but he did not look away. “And I know you are young. And you need knowledge still. And I would not wish—now—to press you.” He hesitated. When he went on, it was open stress. “If I might just—”

Then he jerked his head up like a genuine deer and I heard the frantic, panting voices, the thump of multiple feet among the rocks.