He looked away only when Porsparian returned bearing unleavened bread and a steaming bowl—some kind of stew. The scent of pepper and other exotic spices bloomed through the tent, but Sorweel, as gaunt as he was, had no appetite. After some urging, he finally convinced the slave to eat the entire meal instead of, as Sorweel surmised, waiting on whatever scraps he might leave.

He thought it strange the way Men did not need to share a language to speak about food.

He sat on the end of his cot as before, watching the diminutive Shigeki. Without a whisper of self-consciousness, the man pulled aside one of the rough-woven reed mats, revealing a patch of bruised turf. He parted the grasses, cooing in a strange voice as he combed his fingers through them, then he began praying over the line of bare earth he had uncovered. In a moment of almost embarrassing intensity, Porsparian pressed his cheek against the ground, hard, the way an adolescent might grind against a willing lover. He muttered something—a prayer, Sorweel supposed—in a language far more guttural than Sheyic. Holding his hand like a spatula, he pressed a slot into the black soil—a ritual mouth, Sorweel realized moments afterwards, when Porsparian placed a small portion of bread into it.

By some trick of the light, it actually seemed as if the earthen mouth closed.

Smacking his lips with satisfaction, the cryptic little man rolled onto his rump and began fingering the food into his own grey-and-yellow-toothed mouth.

Though Porsparian ate with crude honesty of a Saglander, Sorweel could not help but see a kind of sad poetry to his feasting. The inward pleasure of his eyes, the crook in his wrists as he raised each stew-soaked gob of bread, the slight, backward tilt of his head as he opened his darkbrown lips. The young King wondered how it could be that two men so dissimilar, a world apart in age, station, and origin, could share such a moment. Neither of them talked—what could they say, with their tongues wrapped around different sounds for similar meanings? But even if they could have spoken to each other, Sorweel was certain they would have said nothing. Everything, it seemed, was manifest.

Nothing needed to be spoken because all could be seen.

Sitting as he sat, watching as he watched, a kind of wild generosity seized him, that glad-hearted madness that emptied coffers and pockets. Without thinking, he reached under the cot and retrieved the writ of bondage that Kayûtas had given him that very morning. What did it matter, he thought, when he was already dead? For the first time he thought he understood the freedom that lay concealed in the cold bosom of loss.