Official word of the Dhais’ agreement had come to the Patron some time later, with the Dhais’ terms. They must have finished hashing out some kind of paper treaty by now. As if words on paper meant anything. Maralah remembered burning shelves and shelves of old treaties back in Aaraduan. Just so much ink on paper, or hide, or bone, or whatever other fool thing they thought to make marks on.

Above her, the sky was a gray wash. At night, the cloak of the stars sometimes rippled. Staring at the night sky too long now made her seasick. She had seen the invaders coming through the tears in the sky, driving omajistas far more skilled than Taigan before them. But countering their forces without an equal number of those who could channel the dark star was impossible. If Taigan did not find more people like him, they were lost.

“I come presently,” Maralah said. Her chest tightened, but she banished her anxiety in the next moment. Foolish thing, to lose even that bit of calm in front of a servant. Rainaa was one of the Patron’s little partridges; her every word and wince would find its way back to him.

Rainaa bowed stiffly at the waist.

Maralah watched her go. Every time a new Patron’s family ascended the throne, they killed all the prior family’s men and women, and raised their children as slaves. She wondered how much it delighted former Patrons to have the descendants of their enemies preparing their meals and washing their cocks. Maralah found the whole thing unsettling.

She walked back to her rooms and changed into a clean black tunic. She changed her padded shoes for a sanisi’s proper boots and donned her coat, though it was early in the season for it. Most days were still above freezing.

Caisau’s hold had been patched and rebuilt hundreds of times, so it was a hodgepodge of organic and inorganic matter. She walked from the tumorous growth that was the women’s court and across the sky bridge to the central keep. Air moved through the hold from its skin, but light was another matter. Skilled tirajistas had lined the ceiling with bioluminescent flora around the entire outer perimeter of the hold. Windows only made an appearance as one neared the core of the keep or one of the centralized courtyards. Wandering Caisau’s hold was like scurrying up and down four or five cities, each of them trundled up on top of each other, then suddenly bursting into the open spaces of the yards with their mosaic of fountains and shimmering green gardens. Even during the worst of the winter, yards in the central keep stayed warm, heated from below by great geothermal vents that carried heated air from the nearby hot springs beneath the floor and into the walls.