Porsparian, suddenly wary, had set down his bowl to watch him. Sorweel stepped past him to squat over the lantern, strangely conscious of the way his shadow swallowed the rear quarters of the tent. He held the papyrus out, so the light glowed through the pulped lines of the reeds used to make the sheets. Then he touched it to the tear-drop flame …

Only to have the writ snatched away by a stamping and cursing Porsparian. Sorweel jumped upright, even raised his hands—for a bewildered moment he thought the old slave was about to strike him. But the man merely flapped the sheet until the flame went out. Its uppermost edges were curled and blackened, but it was otherwise intact. Breathing heavily, the two regarded each other for a crazed moment, the king slack and bewildered, the slave braced with old man defiance.

“We are a free people,” Sorweel said, warring against a renewed sense of dread and futility. “We don’t trade Men like cattle.”

The yellow-eyed Shigeki shook his head in a slow and deliberate manner. As though relinquishing a knife, he set the writ onto the mussed blankets of Sorweel’s cot.

Then he did something inexplicable.

Bending at the waist over the lantern, he drew his finger along the edges of the flame, oblivious to the heat. Straightening, he pulled aside his tunic, revealing an old man’s sunken chest—wild grey hairs across nut-brown skin. With the lamp-black on his fingertip, he traced what Sorweel immediately recognized as a sickle over his heart.

“Yatwer,” the man breathed, his eyes alight with a kind of embittered intensity. He reached out, gripped the young King by the arm. “Yatwer!”

“I-I don’t understand,” Sorweel stammered. “The Goddess?”

Porsparian let his hand slide down Sorweel’s arm—a strangely possessive gesture. He grasped the young King’s wrist, ran a thumb along his horsing bracelet before turning his hand palm outward. “Yatwer,” he whispered, his eyes brimming with tears. Drawing Sorweel’s palm between them, he leaned forward and kissed the soft-skinned basin.

Fire climbed the young King’s skin. He tried to yank his hand back, but the old man held him with the strength of newly cast stocks. He rolled his age-creased face above Sorweel’s palm, as if drowsing to some unheard melody. A single tear tapped the spot where his lips had touched …

It seemed to burn and cut all at once, like something molten falling through snow.

Then the slave uttered a single word in Sakarpic, so sudden and so clear that Sorweel nearly jumped.

“War …”

He was in awe of these people. Their devious refinement. Their labyrinthine ways. Their faith and their sorcery. Even their slaves, it seemed, possessed enigmatic power.