Squat candles had been set on the floor along the passageway, spreading fans of illumination across the decorative mosaics above. Figures roped in and out of the gloom, the shadows of men warring against animals. Breathing deep, Achamian chipped shut the door, listened for the rasp of iron. The heavy stone of the Annexes had swallowed all sound save the spit of candle flames twirling in the wake of his passage. Resinous perfumes steeped the air.

When he found her—Suriala, glorious and wanton Suriala—he knelt in accordance with the very Laws he was about to break. He knelt before her beauty, before her hunger and her passion. She raised him to her embrace, and he glimpsed their entwined reflection in the contours of a decorative shield. They looked as bent and desperate as they should, he thought. Then he pressed her to the bed …

Made love to his High-King’s wife—

A convulsive gasp.

Achamian bolted forward from his blankets. The darkness buzzed with exertion, moaned and panted with feminine lust—but only for a moment. Within heartbeats the chorus call of morning birdsong ruled his ears. Throwing aside his blankets, he leaned into his knees, rubbed at the ache across his jaw and cheek. He had taken to sleeping on wood as part of the discipline he had adopted since leaving the School of Mandate, and to quicken the transition between his nightmares and wakefulness. Mattresses, he had found, made waking a form of suffocation.

He sat for a while, trying to will his arousal away, to banish the memory of her nakedness sheering against his own. Had he still been a Mandate Schoolman, he would have run shouting to his brothers. But he was not, and he had dwelt with too many revelations for too long. Insights that would have once wired his body with horror or exultation now merely throbbed. Discovery, it seemed, had become but another ache.

Snuffling and coughing, he walked across the plank floor to the square corona of white outlining the shutters. “Shed some sun on this,” he muttered to himself. “Yes-yes … Light is never a bad thing.”

He closed his eyes against the explosive brilliance, breathed deep the many layers of morning: the bitter of budding leaves, the damp of forest loam. The cries of children rang up from below, claiming, daring—the singsong of careless souls. “I don’t-don’t believe you!” Banished from the lower floors by their parents—Achamian’s slaves—they always ran rampant about the tower’s shadow in the morning, racing and twittering like combative starlings. For some reason, hearing them today seemed a profound miracle, so much so he almost wished he could stand such—here, now, eyes closed and all else open—for the remainder of his life.

It would be a good end, he thought.