“I swear on the fiery head of Zosim Salamandros that you have the wrong man,” said Dawet. One of the guards stepped toward him, but the Tuani man had the blade up and cocked for throwing so quickly the soldier froze as if snake-addled.

The captain sighed. “Swear by the Salamander, do you?” He stared at Dawet dan-Faar like a householder trying to decide whether to buy a lump of expensive meat that was only going in the stew, anyway. “You two, you heard him,” he said, gesturing to a pair of guards standing nearby, short spears at the ready. “Deal with him. I have better things to do than waste any more time here.”

The two heavily-armored men lunged forward and Briony let out a muffled shriek of alarm. Dawet, handicapped by the much shorter reach of his dagger, feinted as if to throw it, then turned, leaped, and scrambled over the courtyard wall. The two guards hesitated only a moment, then hurried out through the yard’s back entrance. A few other soldiers moved as if to follow, but the captain waved them back.

“Those two are canny fellows,” he told his men. “Don’t worry, they will deal with that Xandy fool.”

“Unless the darkling can fly like Strivos himself, you’re right to call him foolish,” the tavernkeeper Bedoyas chuckled. “That alley’s a dead end.” Briony wanted to hit the man in his fat face.

But to her surprise, the guards appeared a moment later without Dawet. They were smiling nervously, as if pleased by their own failure. “He’s gone, sir. Got clean away.”

“He did, did he?” The commander nodded grimly. “We’ll talk about this later.”

The rest of the guards shoved Briony and the other players back into line again and led them out of the inn, marching them toward the stronghold in the great palace at the city’s center. Bad enough to have lost a throne, but now even her humble, counterfeit life as a player was in ruins. Briony’s eyes blurred with tears, though she tried hard to wipe them away. As they crossed the first bridge it seemed she walked through some place even stranger than the capital of a foreign land.

37

Silence

Thunder and his brothers at last found Pale Daughter wandering lost in the wilderness without her name or her memory. His honor satisfied, Thunder did not think any more upon her, but his brother Black Earth was unhappy with his wife, Evening Light, and their music had strayed out of sympathy. He sent her away and took Pale Daughter to be his wife. He gave her a new name, Dawn, that she might not remember what had gone before. She was ever after silent, sitting beside him in the dark chambers beneath the ground, and if she remembered her child Crooked or her husband Silvergleam, she did not say.

—from One Hundred Considerations
out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

WHILE MATT TINWRIGHT PAUSED for breath and mopped his brow, Puzzle played a refrain on the lute. The tune was a little more sprightly than Tinwright would have liked, considering the seriousness of the subject matter, but he had finished his poem so late that the two had found little time to practice.