She paused before the great bronze door to his room, stared with distaste at the Kyranean Lions stamped into its panels. Even though she passed it several times every day, it always seemed larger than she remembered. She ran her fingertips along the greening rims. She could feel nothing of his cries in the cool metal. No warmth. No hum. The frantic sound seemed to rise more from the cold floor at her feet.

Kelmomas leaned against her thigh, mooning for her attention. “Uncle Maithanet thinks you should have him sent away,” he said.

“Your uncle said that?” An itch always accompanied references to Maithanet, a premonition too indistinct to be called a worry. Because he was so much like Kellhus, she supposed.

“They’re frightened of us, aren’t they, Mommy?”

“Them?”

“Everybody. They’re all afraid of our family …”

“Why would that be?”

“Because they think we’re mad. They think father’s seed is too strong.”

Too strong for the vessel. Too strong for me.

“You’ve heard … them … talking?”

“Is that what happened to Inrilatas?”

“It’s the God, Kel. The God burns strongly in all of you. With Inrilatas he burns strongest of all.”

“Is that why he’s mad?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you keep him here?”

“He is my child, Kel, as much as you. I will never abandon my children.”

“Like Mimara?”

An unearthly sound burrowed from the polished stone, a shriek meant to pass sharp, cutting things. Esmenet flinched, certain he was there, Inrilatas, just on the other side of the door, his lips mashed against the portal’s marmoreal frame. She thought she could hear teeth gnawing at the stone. She looked from the door to the slender cherub that was her other son. Kelmomas. Godlike Kelmomas. Healthy, loving, devoted to the point of comedy …

So unlike the others.

Please let it be.

Her smile seemed proper to the tears in her eyes. “Like Mimara,” she said.

She couldn’t even think the name without a series of inner cringings, as though it were a weight that could be drawn only with ill-used muscles. Even now she had her men scouring the Three Seas, searching—searching everywhere except the one place where she knew Mimara would be.

Keep her safe, Akka. Please keep her safe.

Inrilatas’s shriek trailed into a series of masturbatory grunts. On and on they continued, each sucking on the one prior, all possessing a hairless animality that made her clutch Kelmomas’s shoulder. She knew this was something no child should hear, especially one as impressionable as Kelmomas, but her horror immobilized her. There was something … personal in the jerking sounds—or so it seemed. Something meant for her and her alone.

The cry of “Momma!” snapped her from her trance.