The Grandmistress sat hunched over the worktable, wearing naught but a silken shift-her sleeping garb, Sorweel imagined. She hung her head to one side as she read, so that her hair fell in lazy blond wings across her right shoulder. She had hooked her bare feet about the forward legs of the chair-an undignified pose, and all the more erotic for it. Silk hung loose about her breasts, and pulled tight across her parted thighs. The hairlessness of her legs made her seem a little girl and so poisoned his desire with a peculiar shame.
Sin. Everything Three Seas, no matter how awe-inspiring or beautiful, had to be greased in sin.
"My brother finds you odd…" she said, apparently still absorbed by the inked lines before her.
"I find your brother odd."
This occasioned a small smile-as well as her attention. She turned to regard him, careless enough with her knees to make him forget how to breathe. He struggled to remind himself that for all her wanton youth, she was the most powerful woman in all Earwa, short of her Empress mother… who had been a whore.
"Have you come to thank me, or have you come to woo?"
The Sakarpi King scowled. "To thank you."
Her eyes ranged across him with a boldness that would have seen a Sakarpi wife or daughter whipped.
"That pouch… hanging from your hip… Where did you find that?"
He swallowed, at last understanding the reason for this otherwise inexplicable visitation.
"It's an heirloom. As ancient as my family."
She nodded as if believing him.
"That motif… the triple crescent…"
"What about it?" he asked, far too aware of the proximity of her gaze to his groin.
At last her eyes climbed to meet his own. Her look was cool, remote in the way of old and prideful widows.
"That is the Far Antique mark of my family… the Anasurimbor of Tryse."
Sorweel struggled to speak around memories of the Goddess reaching into the muck of her womb.
"Would you like it back?"
A laugh like a sneezing cat.
"You seem more insolent than thankful."
And in a heartbeat, Sorweel understood how the penetration of the Anasurimbor, their godlike cunning, was as much their greatest weakness as their greatest strength. Men, Zsoronga had said, were like children to them.
Who fears children?
"I apologize," he said. "The past weeks have been… difficult. This afternoon I… I murdered my slave in your father's name."
He saw Porsparian slump from the upright spear, hang twitching…
"You loved him," she observed with something resembling pity.
He saw the light of watching fade from the slave's yellow eyes.
"Here…" Sorweel said, grasping the pouch. "Take it as a gift."
You are mad, a voice whispered in some corner of his soul.
"I would rather you keep it," she replied with a frown almost identical to her brother's. "I'm not sure I like you, Horse-King."
Sorweel nodded as if in apology.
"Then I shall woo you…" he said, turning to step back out into the cool Istyuli night.
He had half-hoped she would call him back but was not surprised when she did not. He crossed the incense-fogged expanse of the Granary, his thoughts roiling in that strange fingerless way that prevents them from gripping your expression. He walked the way a man who had just gambled his freedom might walk: with the nimble gait of those preparing to run.
Anasurimbor Serwa… She was one of the Few, among the greatest to practise the arcane arts, were the rumours to be believed.
"What the Mother gives…"
And he had carried a Chorae- concealed — within an arm's span of her embrace.
"You must take."
The following weeks did not so much pass like a dream as they seemed like one in hindsight.
Despite Anasurimbor Kayutas's fine words the day following the Battle of the Horde, he did not so much as consult with Sorweel once when it came to the Sranc, let alone the mountain of trivial issues that confronted any great host on the march. Sorweel and Zsoronga spent most of their time mooning about the perimeter of the Prince-Imperial's entourage, waiting to be called into whatever the ongoing debate.
They were accorded the honour of martial advisers, but in reality they were little more than messengers-runners. This fact seemed to weigh more heavily on Zsoronga than Sorweel, who would have been a runner for his father eventually, had the past months never happened. The Successor-Prince sometimes spent entire watches cursing their lot while they supped together: the Zeumi court, Sorweel had come to realize, was a kind of arena, a place where the nobility were inclined to count slights and nurture grudges, and where politicking through the dispensation of privileges had been raised to a lethal form of art. Zsoronga did not so much despise the actual work of bearing missives-Sorweel himself genuinely savoured the freedom of riding through and about seas of trudging men. What he could not abide, Sorweel decided, was the future, the fact that, when he finally found his way back to Domyot, he would be forced to describe things his countrymen could not but see as indignities. That in the sly calms between official discourse, they might murmur "Zsoronga the Runner" to one another and laugh.
More and more, Sorweel saw fractions of his former self in the Zeumi Prince-glimpses of Sorweel the Orphan, Sorweel the Mourner. Zsoronga had learned a dismaying truth about himself in fleeing when Sorweel had turned to save Eskeles. He had also lost his entire entourage-his Brace, as the Zeumi called their boonsmen-as well as his beloved Obotegwa. For all his worldly manner, the Successor-Prince had never experienced loss in his privileged life. Now he was stranded, as Sorweel had been stranded, in the host of his enemy. And now he was burdened, as Sorweel had been burdened, with questions of his own worth and honour.
They did not so much speak of these things as act around them, the way young men are prone to do, with only brotherly looks and warm-handed teasing for proof of understanding.
Zsoronga still asked him about the Goddess from time to time, his manner too eager for Sorweel's comfort. The Sakarpi King would simply shrug and say something about waiting for signs, or make some weak joke about Zsoronga petitioning his dead relatives. The toll Zsoronga had paid in self-respect had turned the man's wary hope into a kind of pressing need. Where before he had feared for his friend's predicament, now he wanted Sorweel to be the instrument of the Goddess-even needed him to be. Each day seemed to add a granule of spite to the hatred he was slowly accumulating in his soul. He even began to take risks in Kayutas's distracted presence-insolent looks, snide remarks-trifles that seemed to embolden him as much as they alarmed Sorweel.
" Pray to Her!" Zsoronga began to urge. "Mould faces in the earth!"
Sorweel could only look at him in horror, insist that he was trying to no avail, fretting all the while about what traces of his own intent the Anasurimbor might glimpse in the man's face.