“Are you sure?” she asked, blank in voice and expression.

“I met your mother sometime after …”

In a blink Achamian had seen it all, written in a language not so different from the charcoal scrawlings beneath their feet. It was inevitable that Esmenet would do this, that she would use all her power as Empress to recover the child she had forbidden him to mention all those years ago … To find the girl whose name she would never speak.

“You mean after she sold me,” the girl said.

“There was a famine,” he heard himself reply. “She did what she did to save your life, and forever wrecked herself as a result.”

He knew these were the wrong words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow justifications over and over again.

The fact that she refused to reply to them said it all.

Esmenet had recovered her some time ago—that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of desperation.

Hope was ever the great foe of slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin. Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground—many, many times.

“But why do I remember you?”

“Look—”

“I remember you buying me apples—”

“Child. It wasn’t—”

“The street was busy, loud. You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that little girls shouldn’t eat through their nose, that it wasn’t—”

“It wasn’t me!” he exclaimed. “Look. The daughters of whores …”

She flinched once again, like a child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More? Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking about apples on a crowded street.

“The daughters of whores …” she repeated.

Achamian gazed at her, filled to his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.

“Have no fathers.”

He had tried to say this as gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning. She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt black. “You said that I was clever.”

He ran a slow hand across his face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?

“I feel sorry for you, child—I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured …” A deep breath, warm against the bright cool. “Go home, Mimara. Go back to your mother. We have no connection.”

He turned back toward the tower. The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.