Achamian stared at her aghast, his own vehemence ringing in his ears. Of course she was a believer.

“He sent you.”

It was too late, he realized, staring at the image of Mimara across the fire. It had already happened. Despite all the intervening years, despite the waning violence of the Dreams, she had returned him to the teeth of yesterday. To simply gaze upon her was to taste the dust and blood and smoke of the First Holy War.

He understood her look—how could he not when he so readily recognized it as his own? Too many losses. Too many small hopes denied. Too many betrayals of self. The look of someone who understands that the World is a peevish judge, forgiving only to render its punishments all the more severe. She had suffered a moment of weakness when she had seen him clambering down the slopes with food; he could see that now. She had let herself hope. Her soul had taken her body’s gratitude and made it its own.

He believed her. She was not a willing slave. If anything she reminded him of the Scylvendi, of a soul at once strong and yet battered beyond recognition. And she looked so much like her mother …

She was precisely the kind of slave Kellhus would send to him. Part cipher. Part opiate.

Someone Drusas Achamian could come to love.

“Did you know I was there when he first arrived in the Three Seas,” he said, broaching the silence of dark forests and rustling flames. “He was no more than a beggar claiming princely blood—and with a Scylvendi as his companion no less! I was there from the very first. It was my back he broke climbing to absolute power.”

He rubbed his nose, breathed deep as though preparing for the plunge. It never ceased to strike him as strange, the fits and starts of the body and its anxieties.

“Kellhus,” he said, speaking the name in the old way, with the intonations of familiarity and wry trust. “My student … My friend … My prophet … It was my wife he stole …

“My morning.”

He glared, challenging her to speak again. She simply blinked, wriggled as though to adjust her position. He could see her swallow behind the line of her lips.

“The only thing,” he continued, his voice wrung ragged with conflicting passions. “The only thing I took with me from my previous life was a simple question: Who is Anasûrimbor Kellhus? Who?”

Achamian stared at the bed of coals pulsing beneath the blackened wood, paused to allow Mimara fair opportunity to respond, or so he told himself. The truth was that the thought of her voice made him wince. The truth was that his story had turned into a confession.

“Everyone knows the answer to that question,” she ventured, speaking with a delicacy that confirmed his fears. “He’s the Aspect-Emperor.”