He sat up on the edge of the bed, and somehow she found herself in his arms, immersed in his wide-world husband smell, wracked with sobs.

“We’ve been cursed!” she gasped. “Cursed!”

Kellhus gently pressed her back into his gaze and somehow above the surface of her immediate grief. She found herself drawing cool and soothing air.

“Misfortune,” he said. “Nothing more, Esmi.”

When had his voice become a drug?

“But isn’t that what the White-Luck means? Mimara has fled, and no one can find her, Kellhus! I have this-this terrible feeling—such a terrible feeling! And now Samarmas! Sweet-sweet Samarmas! Do you know what they’re saying in the streets? Do you know that some of them actually celebrate! That—”

“You must take no action against them,” he said with stern compassion—the perfect tone. He always spoke in the perfect tone, words like cool plaster trowelled across the cracks of desire and confusion. “Not the Yatwerians. They are not a people that we can massacre or uproot like the Mongilean Kianene. They are too widespread, too diffuse. The Great Ordeal is all that matters, Esmi. It has taken us too long as it stands. Golgotterath must be overcome before the No-God is resurrected. The immediate ever clouds the far, and desire ever twists reason to its own ends. I know these concerns seem to blot out all other considerations—”

“Seem? Seem? Kellhus! Kellhus! Our son is dead!”

Her voice pealed raw across the polished stone hollows.

Silence. Where for others the lack of response augured wounds scored or truths too burdensome to ignore or dismiss, for her husband it meant something altogether different. His silence was always one with the world about it, monolithic in the way of framing things. Without exception it said, Hear the words you have spoken. You. It was never, ever, the mark of error or incapacity.

Which was why, perhaps, she found him so easy to worship and so difficult to love.

Then he uttered her name, “Esmi …”

“Esmi,” spoken in a voice so warm, so laced with compassion, that she found herself once again crying freely. He kissed her scalp and hair, a divine monster. “Shhhh … I’m not asking you to take comfort in abstractions, for there is none. Even still, the Great Ordeal remains the end that maps all others. We cannot allow anything, anyone, to take precedence over it. Not riots. Not the collapse of the New Empire …” It was as if she stared into her own eyes, his look was so canny—save that he knew her so much better than she knew herself.

“Not even the death of our son.”

She had understood this all along. His tone had told her so.

A breeze bellied the dust-violet sheers, drawing them over the hard line of the Meneanor Sea. A finger of light flickered across the mural of Carythusal.

“How much misfortune must there be?” she heard herself crying.

The White-Luck hunt us … Hunts us …