“You know. I trusted you.”

“Trusted me, you say? You are still cruel, my lady, whatever else time has done.” He smiled, but the mockery was mixed with true sorrow. “The King was wiser than you guessed. And stronger. He made me his. He sent me to live among the mortals. And it has borne fruit, has it not? For the moment, no one is dying.”

“It would only have been sunlanders dying. We had won.”

“Won what? A more glorious death for all the People? The King, apparently, has other ambitions.”

“He is a fool.”

Kayyin lifted his hand. “I do not seek to arbitrate the quarrels of the highest. Even when you lifted me up, you did not lift me far enough for that.” He peered at her from the corner of his eye, perhaps wondering whether this little gibe had shamed her, but Yasammez showed him nothing but stone, cold stone. She had been old already when Kayyin’s father had fought with her against Umadi Sva’s bastard offspring, and she had held him as he died in the agony of his burns on the Shivering Plain. If it had been in her to weep at someone’s death, she would have wept then. No, she had no shame in her—not about anything to do with Kayyin, at any rate.

After a long silence, the traitor laughed. “You know, it was strange, living among the sunlanders. They are not so different from us as you might think.”

She did not honor such filth with a reply.

“I have considered it a great deal in the days since I returned to you, my lady, and I think I understand a part of the King’s thinking. Perhaps he is less willing than you to destroy the mortals because he thinks that they are not entirely to blame.”

She stared at him.

“It could even be that our king, in his labyrinthine wisdom, buttressed with the voices of his ancestors—your ancestors, too, of course—has come to believe that we may have helped to bring our woeful situation upon ourselves.”

Yasammez rose from the chair in a blind rage, her aspect abruptly juddering about her, shadow-spikes flaring. Kayyin came closer to his promised death at that moment than ever before. Instead, she raised a trembling, ice-cold finger and pointed to the door.

He stood and bowed. “Yes, my lady. You need solitude, of course, and with the burdens you bear, you deserve it. I await our next conversation.”

As he walked out the room behind him came to life with flickering shadows.

The strange, glaring sun had long since set. Yasammez sat in darkness.

A soft voice bloomed inside her head. “May I speak with you, Lady?”

She gave permission.

The far door opened. The visitor glided in like a leaf carried on a stream. She was tall, almost as tall as Yasammez herself, and slender as a young willow. Her white, hooded robe seemed to move too slowly for her progress, billowing like something underwater.