Men often make decisions in the wake of significant events, if only to pretend they had some control over their own transformations. Sorweel’s first decision was to ignore what had happened, to turn his back on what Eskeles had said, as though rudeness could drive his words away. His second decision was to laugh—laughter was ever the great ward against all things foolish. But he could not harness the breath to see it through.

Then he finally decided to think Eskeles’s thoughts, if only to pretend they had not already possessed him. What was the harm of thinking?

As a young boy he spent most of his solitary play in the ruined sections of his father’s palace, particularly in what was called the Overgrown Garden. Once, while searching for a lost arrow, he noticed a young poplar springing from some far-flung seed beneath a thicket of witch-mulberry. Wondering whether it would live or die, he checked on it from time to time, watched it slowly labour in the shadow. Several times he even crawled into the mossy interior of the thicket, wriggling in on his back, and bringing his cheek close to the newborn’s stem so that he could see it leaning, extending up and out to the promise of light shining through the fretting of witch-mulberry leaves. Over days and weeks it reached, thin with inanimate effort, straining for a band of golden warmth that descended like a hand from the sky. And then finally, it touched …

The last time he had looked, mere weeks before the city’s fall, the tree stood proud save for the memory of that first crook in its trunk, and the mulberry bush was long dead.

There was harm in thinking. He not only knew this—he could feel it.

What Eskeles had shown him had the power of … of sense. What Eskeles had shown him had explained, not only the Aspect-Emperor … but himself as well.

“… we remain fragments of the God, nonetheless.”

Was this why the Kiünnatic Priests had demanded that all Three Seas missionaries be burned? Was this why spittle had flecked their lips when they came to his father with their demands?

Had they been a bush, fearful of the tree in their midst?

“I keep forgetting that you’re a heathen!”

After darkness fell and Porsparian’s breathing dipped into a rasping snore, Sorweel lay awake, riven by thought after cascading thought—there was no thwarting them. When he curled beneath his blankets, it seemed he could see him as he was on that day of war and rain and thunder, the Aspect-Emperor, ringlets dripping about a long face, beard cut and plaited in the way of Southron Kings, eyes so blue they seemed a glimpse of another world. A glaring, golden figure, walking in the light of a different time, a brighter sun.

A friendly scowl, followed by a gentle laugh. “I’m rarely what my enemies expect, I know.”