The Shriah and the Empress walked in silence for several moments. Their journey had taken them into the Apparatory, where the residences of the palace’s senior functionaries were located. The girth of the halls had narrowed, and the mirror sheen of marble had been replaced with planes of lesser stone. Many of the doors they passed stood ajar, leaking the sounds of simpler, more tranquil existences. A nurse singing to a babe. Mothers gossiping. Those few people they encountered in the hall literally stood slack-jawed before throwing their faces to the ground. One mother viciously yanked her son, an olive-skinned boy perhaps two or three years younger than the twins, to the floor at her side. Esmenet heard his crying more in her belly than in her ears, or so it seemed.

She clutched Maithanet’s arm, drew him to a halt.

“Esmi?”

“Tell me, Maitha,” she said hesitantly. “When”—she paused to bite her lip—“when you … look … into my face, what do you see?”

A gentle smile creased his plaited beard. “Not so far or so deep as my brother.”

Dûnyain. It all came back to this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her possessed some measure of Dûnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her husband’s all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he had stood twenty years earlier, a thousand smoke plumes scoring the sky beyond him. “But you’re not thinking! You see only your love for him. You’re not thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you …”

And with a blink both he and his heretical words were gone.

“That wasn’t my question,” she said, recovering herself.

“Sorrow …” Maithanet said, probing her face with warm, forgiving eyes. He lifted her small, slack hands in the thick cage of his own. “I see sorrow and confusion. Worry for your first, for Mimara. Shame … shame that you have come to fear your children more than you fear for them. So very much happens, Esmi, both here and in places remote … You fear you are not equal to the task my brother has set for you.”

“And the others?” she heard herself ask. “Can the others see this as well?”

Dûnyain, she thought. Dûnyain blood.

The Shriah squeezed her hands in reassurance. “Some sense it, perhaps, but only in a dim manner. They have their prejudices, of course, but their sovereign and saviour has made you their road to redemption. My brother has built a strong house for you to keep. I hesitate to say as much, but you truly have no cause to fear, Esmi.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason I have no fear. The Aspect-Emperor has chosen you.”

A Dûnyain. A Dûnyain has chosen you.

“No. Why do you hesitate to tell me?”