A copper lamp hung from the roof, big as a man, on a chain of bronze. The candles in it burned under jade-green crystal, flecking the gargantuan hall with the lights of a summer forest. There was no hearth, yet an airy warmth rose from the walls and the floor.

While I gazed, a man had come in at a narrow doorway. He wore a long womanish garment of dull yellow, and a golden face.

At once every bronze and silver mask was whipped off. Every person in the hall bowed low, saving myself, but my discourtesy did not abide. A moment later my legs were kicked from under me and I crashed at the gold-mask’s feet.

This winded me, and for a while I lost track of the words they were exchanging. Then I heard Zrenn speaking of a black-haired savage who might well be the bastard of Vazkor.

The gold-mask said in a cold impatient voice, “Vazkor was not a man of passions. He desired only to rule, not the bodies of women. His witch-wife was enough for him, and her he took only in order to make sons. I can’t believe a story that has Vazkor rutting for lust among the tribal scum.”

“But observe, Javhovor,” Zrenn said. “He has a look of him, does he not? We should have shaved his beard; you would have seen the likeness better.”

And Zrenn got my hair and pulled my head back to let the gold-mask observe me.

This man was their prince, and they called him Javhovor—High-Lord, a king’s title. His mask of gold was something like the bronze masks of the lower soldiers in that it represented a similar curious bird, a phoenix, for so they also titled him: Kortis, Phoenix, Javhovor. His eyes were shielded behind amber glass, but his neck and ringed fingers were knotty and aging. He, too, like the men in the fort, was old enough to recall the features of Vazkor.

And it seemed he did. His hand went up to his masked face, an involuntary gesture, as if he would doff his visor for me, as his captains had done for him. But he checked himself, and under his breath, too low for them and thinking me ignorant of his language, he muttered, “I never dreamed to meet you in this room again, Black Wolf, Black Jackal of Ezlann.”

Then I guessed why I had regained their tongue, or imagined I guessed. I looked in his glass eyepieces.

“Did you not?” I said. He cried out aloud at that. I said, “And did you call my father ‘jackal’ to his face? Or did you rather gnaw the bones from the jackal’s table, and run at the jackal’s heels like his hound?”

Even Zrenn had taken a step back from me. I got to my feet. Standing, I was a measure taller than Kortis Phoenix Javhovor.

He glared past me and shouted at them, “Did you know he had our speech?”

Zrenn stammered, controlled his shock, and said, “My lord, he never before spoke a word of it. He must have learned from my kinswoman, or the Moi perhaps, who have a smattering of it—”