But Sorweel had found only desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and selfpity—self-pity most of all.

Words had saved him, even if he could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving Zsoronga’s pavilion that first night was that the Zeümi Prince, despite all his displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, “sausages,” implied.

That he would be returned to the prison of his backward tongue.

As it turned out, Zsoronga invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to Obotegwa’s tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga’s Brace, as the Zeümi called their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Scion’s commander—a campaign-grizzled Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority, searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel’s direction. Even still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to him and said, “The General wants to see you … Kayûtas himself.”

Sorweel had seen the Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General’s battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion. He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses parted …

There. A man who should be a man like any other.

Only that he wasn’t. Anasûrimbor Kayûtas was more than powerful—more even than the son of the man who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.