“I admire your scholarship,” said Anonoei. Through the shred of outself she had left in Wad, she called him urgently. Take me out. Get me away from here. Take me now. But Wad must have been caught up intensely in whatever he was doing, because there was no response. Not even a flicker of annoyance at the nagging doubt she knew she was causing him. Come to me, if you won’t bring me! But still he ignored her.

“Your pet gatemage hasn’t come for you yet,” said Queen Bexoi. “Whatever could be wrong?”

Bexoi couldn’t have had anything to do with the business with the Great Gate that had kept Wad from paying attention to her. But she clearly meant Anonoei to think that she had.

“We’re both on our own,” said Anonoei. “To match up head to head, so to speak.”

“Nose to pretty little nose,” said Bexoi, smiling slightly but without a trace of amusement. “Neither of us is particularly beautiful, though we’ve both learned how to appear more beautiful than we are. No doubt it came naturally to a manmage like you. But to me, it was painstaking effort to become a beauty. To know just what angle, just what degree of smile. Ambition is the great driver, but it lives on hope. I could persist in my study, in my solitary practice, in my hours before the mirror, because I had hope.”

“I’ve heard you’re a great firemage,” said Anonoei.

“I do well enough, in this decadent age of the world,” said Bexoi.

“A self-seeming clant that bleeds,” said Anonoei.

“Wad was so impressed by that simple illusion.”

Anonoei could not find any road into her. The woman had no emotions.

“I have no emotions,” said Bexoi. “I can see that you’re frustrated. What do you think my studies taught me? That when manmages send their outselves into a victim, they use the low road by preference—the deep emotions. So you block them by having no emotions. Feeling nothing. It came quite naturally to me, and helped me during the long years when my husband only desired you and ignored me almost completely.”

Anonoei knew of no road but the low road—no way into a person except by way of their emotions. But Bexoi must have learned of others. I should have studied more, thought Anonoei. But members of royal houses have better libraries than my father and his friends. There may also have been books in Gray that were lacking in Iceway.

She thought of the things that Wad had just remembered about Set, the Dragon, and how he possessed people completely, sending his very ka into their bodies, instead of using the insidious ba, the gentle outself.