“Thank you,” she said.

“Go now and get something to eat.” Suddenly he would not meet her eye. “It has been a long day’s exercise.”

Strange, stubborn, sour old man! The only way he knows how to show love is by teaching me how to kill people.

The thought arrested her, and she stopped to watch the Tuani walk away. It is love, she thought. It must be. And after all we did to him.

She sat in the growing twilight for some time, thinking.

“How well do you know Lord Shaso?” she asked Idite. As much as she had been offended at first by not eating with the men of the house, she had come to enjoy these quiet evenings with the hadar’s female inhabitants. She still could not speak the women’s tongue and doubted she ever would, but some of the others beside Idite had proved able to speak Briony’s once they had got over their initial shyness.

“Oh, not at all, Briony-zisaya.” Idite always made the name sound like a child’s counting game, one-two-three, one-two-three. “I have never met him before you came to our door twelve nights ago.”

“But you speak of him as though you had known him all your life.”

“It is true that I have, in some ways.” Idite allowed a delicate frown to crease her lips as she considered. One of the young women whispered a translation to the others. “He is as famous as any man who ever lived, except for of course the Great Tuan, his cousin. I mean the old Great Tuan, of course. Where his eldest son is, the new Tuan, no one knows. He escaped before the autarch’s armies reached Nyoru, and some say he is hiding in the desert, waiting to return and lift the autarch’s cruel hand from our homeland. But he has waited a long time already.” She forced a little laugh. “But listen to me, talking and talking and saying nothing, croaking like an ibis. Lord Shaso’s name is known to every Tuani, his deeds spoken of around the cooking-fire. People still argue over Shaso’s Choice, of course—so much so that the old Tuan made it a crime to discuss it, because people died from the arguments.”

Briony shook her head. “Shaso’s…choice?”

“Yes.” Idite turned to the other women and said something in Tuani—Briony could make out Shaso’s name. The women all nodded solemnly, some saying, “sesa, sesa,” which Briony had come to learn meant “yes, yes.”

It was strange to think of Shaso as someone who had his own history—his own legends, even, although she had known that in his day he had been a much-respected warrior. “What choice, Idite? I mean, surely you can talk of it now without breaking the law. He’s only a few rooms away.”

Idite laughed. “I was thinking of Tuan. There is no law here in Marrinswalk.” In her accented speech it became “Mah-reens-oo-woke,” an exotic name that for a moment made it seem an exotic place to Briony, too. “But there is custom, and sometimes that is as strong as law. His choice was to honor the vow he made on the battlefield, to a foreign king, to leave his country and live in exile. Even when the Autarch of Xis attacked us, Shaso was not allowed to return and defend us. Some say that without his strong hand, without the fear he made when he led our armies, the Great Tuan had no chance against Xis.”