She recognized that expression: she had seen it on occasion in her tent. Indeed, she had seen it this very night.

Renarr unclasped her cloak and folded it carefully against the back of a chair. Then she walked over to a side table. ‘The last wine I had this evening,’ she said, taking up a decanter and sniffing at the mouth, ‘was sour.’ She poured herself a glass. ‘Father,’ she said, turning to face him, ‘I have so many things to say to you.’

He would not meet her gaze, intent instead on a scroll laid out before him. ‘It’s rather late for a conversation,’ he said.

‘If you mean the time of night, then, yes, perhaps.’

‘I did not mean the time of night.’

‘Oh, that bulwark,’ she said, sighing. ‘I know why you threw it up, of course. Your love for my mother, and what did I do? I went into the camps, into the taverns, to learn a trade. Was I punishing you? Perhaps I was simply bored. Or at that age where rebellion seems a good idea, an idea full of… ideals. So many of us, at around my age, will flare bright, with the vague, despondent understanding that it will all fade. Our fire. Our nerve. The belief that it all means something.’

He studied her at last, with the heaped desk between them.

‘Osserc is out there,’ Renarr continued, ‘flaring bright. Somewhere. Me, I didn’t walk that far.’

‘Then, Renarr, is your… rebellion… at an end?’

Was that hope she saw in his eyes? She couldn’t be sure. ‘Father, I can’t give you my reasons. But I know what my choices yielded, beyond this much-used body. My mother was an officer in your company. I was her daughter, held apart from her beloved legion. So, I knew nothing of it, nothing of a soldier’s ways, nothing of my mother’s ways.’ She sipped the wine. ‘What she did to me, and what you did to Osserc… well, of your children, one of us at last understands your reasons.’

She did not think there was enough in her words to make his eyes glisten, and the sudden emotion, so exposed and raw in Urusander, shocked her.

Looking away, Renarr set down the goblet. ‘A young soldier of the Legion came to me tonight. He came, not for my cheap gifts of love, but to confess his crimes. Slaughter of innocents. Terrible rapes. A mother, her young boys. He named the squads and the company. Then he stood before me, and cut his own throat.’

Urusander rose from behind the desk. Then he was directly before her. He moved as if to reach out, to take her into something like an embrace, but something held him back.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘you have troubled children.’

‘I will make amends, Renarr. I promise you. I will make amends!’