This took her aback, but only momentarily. He saw belief stiffen her shoulders, then doubt. Her chin lowered and she peered upward at him.

“What could the great God Leto fear from me?”

“Your ignorant violence.”

“Are you saying that you’re physically vulnerable?”

“I will not warn you again, Siona. There are limits to the word games I will play. You and the Ixians both know that it’s the ones I love who are physically vulnerable.

“Soon, most of the Empire will know it. This is the kind of information which travels fast.”

“And they’ll all ask what right you have to rule?”

There was glee in her voice. It aroused an abrupt anger in Leto. He found it difficult to suppress. This was a side of human emotions he detested. Gloating! It was some time before he dared answer, then he chose to slash through her defences at the vulnerability he already had seen.

“I rule by the right of loneliness, Siona. My loneliness is part freedom and part slavery. It says I cannot be bought by any human group. My slavery to you says that I will serve all of you to the best of my lordly abilities.”

“But the Ixians have caught you!” she said.

“No. They have given me a gift which strengthens me.”

“It weakens you!”

“That, too,” he admitted. “But very powerful forces still obey me.”

“Ohhhh, yes.” She nodded. “I understand that”

“You don’t understand it.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll explain it to me,” she taunted.

He spoke so softly that she had to lean toward him to hear: “There are no others of any kind anywhere who can call upon me for anything—not for sharing, not for compromise, not even for the slightest beginning of another government. I am the only one.”

“Not even this Ixian woman can…”

“She is so much like me that she would not weaken me in that way.”

“But when the Ixian Embassy was attacked…”

“I can still be irritated by stupidity,” he said.

She scowled at him.

Leto thought it a pretty gesture in that light, quite unconscious. He knew he had made her think. He was sure she had never before considered that any rights might adhere to uniqueness.

He addressed her silent scowl: “There has never before been a government exactly like mine. Not in all of our history. I am responsible only to myself, exacting payment in full for what I have sacrificed.”

“Sacrificed!” she sneered, but he heard the doubts. “Every despot says something like that. You’re responsible only to yourself!”

“Which makes every living thing my responsibility. I watch over you through these times.”

“Through what times?”

“The times that might have been and then no more.”

He saw the indecision in her. She did not trust her instincts, her untrained abilities at prediction. She might leap occasionally as she had done when she took his journals, but the motivation for the leap was lost in the revelation which followed.

“My father says you can be very tricky with words,” she said.