But her misgivings continued to plague her. Again and again, during whatever thoughtful lull her schedule permitted, she found herself reciting the line: Momemn is the fist in our breast, the beating heart … Momemn … Momemn … At first she took his reference to Momemn at face value—perhaps because of the way the city and its convolutions encircled her apartments on the Andiamine Heights. Nel-Saripal, she assumed, had restricted his symbolic mischief to the latter half of the formula: The literal Momemn was the metaphoric heart. But the substitutions, she realized, went deeper, the way they always did when it came to poets and their obscure machinations. Momemn wasn’t the heart, it was the heart’s location. It too was a cipher …

Momemn was her, she finally decided. Now that her divine husband had taken the field against the Consult, she was the fist in her people’s breast. She was the heart that beat them. Nel-Saripal, the thankless ingrate, was calling her a thug. A tyrant.

“You …” That was how Monius truly began.

“You are the fist that beats us.”

That night, tossing alone on the muslin planes of her bed, she found herself running in the manner of dreams, where distance, the jolt of earth, and rushing movement were little more than an inconsistent jumble. She could hear Mimara calling to her on the wind. Closer and closer, until the cries seemed to fall from the stars. But instead of her daughter, she found an apple tree, its branches bowed into skirts by the weight of crimsonshining fruit.

She fell very still. An aura of whispering sentience enclosed her. The imperceptible sway of branches. The listless flutter of black-green leaves. Sunlight showered down, pressing bright fingertips into the tree’s shaded bowers. She could not move. The fallen apples seemed to glare at her, shrunken heads, withered heads, cheeks to the dirt, watching from the shadows with wormhole eyes.

She screamed when the first of the fingers and knuckles broke earth. They were as cautious as caterpillars at first, scabrous, rotted into spear points, tattered flesh wound like sackcloth about bones. Then blackened arms thrust upward, bearing hands like crabs. The meat of the fruit cracked. Branches were yanked down like fishing rods, then snapped up swishing.

The dead and their harvest.

She stood breathless, motionless, her limbs glassed with horror. And she could only think, Mimara … Mimara … A mumbling thought, nebulous with the confusion that hums through all dreams. Mimara …

Then she was blinking at the grey of night’s slow retreat. The tree was gone, as were the arms reaching from earthen pits. But the terrible thought remained, no more clear for the fact of waking.

Mimara.

Esmenet wept as though she were her only child. Found, then lost.