To marry Qin soldiers, and raise children of their own. All that time, when he was Feden’s slave, he had slammed closed his thoughts any time folk discussed marriages of people they knew. Better not to hear about the things you could never have. A debt slave could never marry.

A bead of ink dropped from the brush to splatter on the finely grained rice paper. Aui! He was clumsy, distracted despite his best efforts, an Air-touched Goat whose mind could never rest but must skip from one thing to the next. He could not find peace, not even in prayers said over the prayer bowl he had received in the Sirniakan Empire when he had taken the oath of Beltak: Accept my obedience, you who are Lord of Lords, King of Kings, the Shining One Who Rules Alone.

Peace! Peace! Peace!

What did any of it mean? What did any of it matter?

Shouting broke the silence of his empty chamber. Doors, slid sharply open and shut, gave a series of reports like stick-fighting. He rinsed the brush and set it on its stand, untied his sleeves as he rose.

The alarm bell clanged. The very one purchased in the wake of Tam’s death! The vibration shook through his feet. Who would protect Mai?

He unlatched and opened the secret door behind the scroll cabinet, and ducked into a narrow, lightless corridor that buffered the office from the main house behind. He felt along the brackets on the low ceiling above: one, two, three, four. A latch unhooked another secret door, and he slid into the crane room. By the light of a single flame, the white cranes gleamed like ghosts.

The shouting turned into a roar of confusion as doors drummed open and shut. A woman screamed. Mai!

Mai was in the inner chambers, entertaining the Silver girl she called friend. Of course he had never been in the innermost chambers, but he knew where they were. He ran through the rat room and into a featureless chamber with bedding rolled up against one wall and a door gaping. Two Silver guards with hair concealed beneath turbans had their backs to him as they stared out the other side. He shoved past them.

“Hey, there!” One grabbed for his shoulder. “You can’t go in there.”

With a splintering crash, a wall shattered. Both guards shouted in surprise. Keshad leaped across the corridor, slammed open a door, and dashed through a small room fitted with an altar at one end, draped with cloth and adorned with wilted flowers and the stubs of candles. Men shouted after him. He shoved the next door aside, and stepped onto a porch surrounding a squared courtyard open to the air. His foot touched ground just as bodies smashed through the doubled doors to his left: Qin soldiers in desperate fighting retreat. Wood cracked, spun in the air; scraps of rice paper floated.

In lamplight, Mai stood with mouth agape. Priya stepped in front of the young mistress. One of the soldiers—Jagi—loosed an arrow from his taut bow, but he was shaking so hard its flight went wild and stuck quivering in a beam. The Qin spread out in a half circle to shield Mai, Chief Tuvi at the apex. The chief’s normally imperturbable face was creased with shock and—yes—fear.