His eyes unfocused in calculation, then returned to her. “Because if I see your fear, then he has seen it also. And if he has seen it, then he counts it as a strength.”

She tried in vain to blink away the tears. His image sheered and blurred, Maithanet seemed an elusive, predatory presence. A concatenation of liquid shadows. “You mean he’s chosen me because I’m weak?”

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shook his head in calm contradiction. “Is the man who flees to fight anew weak? Fear is neither strong nor weak until events make it so.”

“Then why wouldn’t he tell me as much.”

“Because, Esmi” he said, drawing her back down the hall, “sometimes ignorance is the greatest strength of all.”

For a thing to seem a miracle, it cannot quite be believed.

The following morning Esmenet awoke thinking of her children, not as the instruments of power they had become, but as babies. She often found herself shying away from thoughts of the early years of her motherhood, so relentless had Kellhus been in his pursuit of progeny. Seven children she had conceived by her husband, of which six had survived. Add to that Mimara, her daughter from her previous life, and Moënghus, the son she had inherited from Kellhus’s first wife, Serwë, and she was the mother of eight …

Eight!

The thought never ceased to surprise and to dizzy her, so certain she had been that she would live and die barren.

Kayûtas had been the first, born close enough to Moënghus that the two had been raised as fraternal twins. She had delivered him in Shimeh upon the Holy Juterum, where the Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus, had ascended to the Heavens two thousand years previous. Kayûtas had been so perfect, both in form and in temperament, that the Lords of the Holy War had wept upon seeing him. So perfect, like a pearl, she sometimes thought, taking in the world’s shadowy jumble and reflecting only a generic, silvery light. So smooth that no fingers could grasp him, not truly.

It had been Kayûtas who had taught her that love was a kind of imperfection. How could it be otherwise, when he was perfect and could feel no love? Simply holding him had been a heartbreak.