“Ah, perhaps, perhaps. But that does not explain the little Xixian girl.”

“What?” Olin looked startled, even took a step back. His foot tipped over the goblet and the dregs pooled on the floor.

“Surely you don’t think you can meet with a chambermaid, or laundry-maid, or whatever that little creature is, let alone my castle steward, without my knowing it. If such a thing happened I would have to poison all my spies like rats and start over.” He brayed a laugh. “I am not such a fool as you think me, Southmarch!”

“It was curiosity only.” Olin took a deep breath; when he spoke again his voice was even. “She resembled someone, or so I thought, and I asked to meet her. I was wrong. She is nothing.”

“Perhaps.” Ludis clapped for the servant again, who came in with an ewer of wine and refilled the lord protector’s cup. He saw the goblet on the floor and looked accusingly at Olin, but did not move to clean it up. “Tell the guards to bring in the envoy,” Ludis ordered the man, then turned back to his captive. “Perhaps all is as you say. Perhaps. In any case, I think you will find this interesting.”

The man who came in, accompanied by another half-pentecount of the lord protector’s Rams, was hugely fat, his thighs rubbing against each other beneath his sumptuous silk robes so that he swayed when he walked like an overpacked donkey. His head and eyebrows were shaved and he wore on his chest a gold medallion in the shape of a flaming eye. He paused when he reached the foot of the throne and looked at Olin with casual suspicion, like someone who had spent most of his life making quick decisions on court precedent and disliked seeing anyone he could not quickly put into an appropriate list in his head.

“Pay no attention to my…counselor,” Ludis Drakava told the fat man. “Read me your letter again.”

The envoy bowed his huge, shiny head, and held up a beribboned scroll of vellum, then began to recite its contents in the high tones of a child.

“From Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, Elect of Nushash, the Golden One, Master of the Great Tent and the Falcon Throne, Lord of All Places and Happenings, may He live forever, to Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol and the Kracian Territories.

“It has come to Our attention that you hold prisoner one Olin Eddon, king of the northern country called Southmarch. We, in our divine wisdom, would like to speak with this man and have him as Our guest. Should you send him to Us, or arrange for him to return with Favored Bazilis, Our messenger, We will reward you handsomely and also look kindly on you in the future. It could even be that, should Hierosol someday find itself part of Our living kingdom (as is the manifest wish of the great god Nushash) that you, Ludis Drakava, will receive a guarantee of safety and high position for yourself in Our glorious empire.