For as long as he could remember, Sorweel had always thought betrayal a kind of thing. And as a thing, he assumed, it was what it was, like anything else. Either a man kept faith with his blood and nation, or he didn’t. But betrayal, he was learning, was far too complicated to be a mere thing. It was more like a disease … or a man.

It was too insidious not to have a soul.

It crept, for one thing, not like a snake or a spider, but like spilled wine, seeping into the fractures, soaking everything its own colour. Each betrayal, no matter how trivial, seemed to beget further betrayals. And it deceived as well, postured as nothing less than sense itself, as reason. “Play along,” it told him. “Pretend to be one of their Kidruhil—yes, pretend.” Wise counsel, or so it seemed. It failed to warn you of the peril, of how each day playing leached your soul of resolution. It said nothing of the slow collapse of pretending into being.

He tried to remain vigilant, and in the deep of night, he clung to his recriminations. But it was so hard, so hard to remember the taste of certainty.

The Scions were scarcely a hundred strong, far and away the smallest of the Kidruhil’s three-hundred-odd companies. They rode with the strange sense of being a sliver in a great fist, an intrusion that inflamed and irritated. Kidruhil troopers were selected according to their skill and their ardour. If anything made the Scions anathema to their fellow Kidruhil, it was their lack of faith. Though the officers were always careful to observe the semblance of diplomatic decorum, their men understood, enough to allow a general contempt—and in some cases even outright hatred—to shine through.

But if the Scions were an outcast within the Kidruhil, then Sorweel was even more an outcast within the Scions. Of course everyone knew who he was. How could any Son of Sakarpus not be the talk of the Company, let alone the son of its slain king? Whether it was pity or derision, Sorweel saw in their looks the true measure of his shame. And at night, when he lay desolate in his tent listening to the fireside banter of the others, he was certain he could understand the questions that kept returning to their strange tongues. Who was this boy who rode for those who murdered his father? This Shit-herder, what kind of craven fool was he?

At the end of his sixth day, as he stood so that Porsparian could remove his gear, a black-skinned man with an ashen pallor pressed his face through the flap and begged permission to enter.