“Don’t avoid my–”

“Dead right there in her house, untouched… surrounded by the mangled bodies of three men. Men we still haven’t been able to identify. Dhai men without families. Impossible, wouldn’t you say?”

“There are dead Garikas in there accusing me of not being my mother’s child, saying I’m a man with no right to this seat, and you’re going on about a way house keeper?”

“You know what’s important, Ahkio? That this country has a legitimate Kai. Especially now.”

“Ah, yes. Now,” Ahkio said. “Yisaoh tells me you and Kirana knew about the coming of Oma for years. Is that true, too?” He hadn’t wanted to bring it up; Yisaoh played a good game of dividing allies against one another, but if Nasaka conspired to lie to him about his own birth, he couldn’t imagine how many other lies she’d told him.

Nasaka stood. She gestured to the wooded gardens all around them, and lowered her voice. “Can you imagine a time when none of this exists? All turned to dust. Eaten by fire. Did Kirana and I entertain ideas of Oma’s rise? Certainly. But Oma has been spoken of for centuries. It so happens the Garikas were within a decade of being right. Sometimes prophets of the cataclysm get lucky. I have more important things to concern myself with now than the mad rumors of a power-hungry clan trying to get us to eat each other.”

“If I married Meyna–”

“Meyna! Have you learned nothing yet?”

“I’ve learned plenty,” Ahkio snapped. “I know that path is closed.”

“And which have you picked? Or will you mire yourself in this rumor? Curl up and weep on that bloody floor in there and piss about how your life turned out?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll go to Garika and return their kin. And I’ll exile them. Every last one of them.”

Nasaka stiffened. It was a rare day he could shock her, and he found himself grimly pleased.

“If you exile the Garikas, you’ll exile–”

“I know who I’ll be exiling,” he said.

“This is–”

“And I need an assistant, someone I can trust, to start helping me here. Not you or someone bound to you.”

“I’ll find–”

“I want Caisa, that novice parajista who fought with us today.”

“That… would not be my first choice.”

“An even better reason to have her next to me,” Ahkio said. “You’ll be sending scholars north with Ora Dasai soon, is that right? That hasn’t changed?”

“He’s selecting his scholars, yes.”

“Have him send Rohinmey.”

“The novice who attacked Ora Almeysia? Absolutely not.”

“He was defending me from harm. I have my reasons.”

“What does that boy have to do with anything? You realize we just bartered away a kitchen drudge for that boy’s life, and you want to send him to Saiduan?”