She knelt, filled her bowl, and drank until she thought she would burn up from the inside. But she knew it now as the nectar that demons crave, the clear milk of the gods. She could exist without it, hiding from the others, but to drink it made her strong. It gave her the clarity she needed for the path ahead.

33

In the Qin compound in Olossi, in the center of the living quarters and surrounded by a porch backed with rice-papered sliding doors, lay a square courtyard. Lamps set on tripods burned with a particularly bracing flavor, purple-thorn seeds crushed in with the lamp oil, that mostly cleared the twilight air of insects. On a brick platform surrounded by troughs of flowers, Mai sat cross-legged on a pillow, happier than she had been in many days, because her dear friend had at last been allowed to visit.

“Anji has forbidden me to go to the market—to go out at all!—until they’ve tracked down everyone involved with the attack.”

“If such people can be tracked down,” said Miravia, “which I doubt. Really, anyone might have killed Tam. A Sirniakan spy posing as a beggar, as your husband believes. A discontented laborer. A sweet-smoke addict. A thief.”

Mai shook her head. “Only a trained assassin like one of the Red Hounds could have lured two Qin soldiers into such circumstances, and then taken them by surprise like that.”

“Perhaps Olossi’s sweet-smoke addicts have surprising talents.”

Mai laughed, and then was ashamed she had done so, thinking of Tam, a polite young man who had never said more than ten words to her in all the time she had been with the Qin.

“It isn’t funny, is it?” said Miravia as she picked up her ceramic cup and examined, with half her attention, the egrets in flight painted around the white finish, brushstrokes of gray and black suggesting the movement of the wind. “Nor do I suppose a common thief or disgruntled laborer could have managed such a skillful murder, or known to put such a deadly poison on his blade. Your husband is correct in being cautious.”

“Surely any attack is directed against him, not against me.”

“Because of his connection to the Sirniakan throne?” She set down the cup. “But it has always been true that one way to strike at a man is to strike at what he values most.”

“Must I live forever trapped inside the compound?” Mai rubbed her belly. A flutter like butterfly’s wings startled her. “Oh! Here, feel it. It moved.”

They sat in silence as Miravia pressed her hands over the curve of Mai’s belly. Then she, too, gasped, and laughed. “I felt it!”

Priya looked up from her seat on the porch, smiled, and resumed her discussion with Miravia’s brother, who naturally had to act as escort to make sure his sister was at all times isolated from the men of the house, although Mai suspected that he had also been tasked to make sure that Miravia behaved according to other, more subtle strictures. Miravia’s attendants remained beyond the doors, the veiled women in a private sitting room and the male guards relegated to duty beyond the private rooms in tandem with the regular Qin guard.