That meant that as Maralah ascended, the air got warmer, and she soon regretted bringing her coat. Before the routing of the western army, she had thought they might hold Caisau another three months, maybe even all winter, but every report she received from her scouts said the invaders were marching straight for Caisau, stopping only to pick over any field or farmhouse Maralah’s razing party had overlooked. It would only be a few weeks before they had to abandon Caisau and move further south. Only her brother’s army remained intact, and they were still holding the east. Eighteen armies massacred in just five years, cities swallowed, villages leveled. Some days, she felt like Saiduan had turned to sand, now slowly trickling through her clenched fingers.

Maralah asked after the Patron at his diplomatic secretary’s desk and was directed to his private garden. One of his personal sanisi, Ganaa, held her up at the entrance and insisted one of his body servants announce her.

Maralah remained relaxed, despite her annoyance. She had saved the Patron’s life numerous times. To be treated like one of his servants, like Rainaa, sometimes grated. She thought their sense of ceremony would have broken down here at the end, but it was the opposite: the closer they were to annihilation, the tighter they all clung to ritual and ceremony.

“You may enter,” the Patron’s chief attendant said, and Maralah moved past him into the garden.

The garden was a riotous mass of color. Massive bamboo bird cages hung from weeping willow and birch trees entangled with ivy and holly and some hardy purple flowered thing that looked like wisteria. A great copper-colored stone at the center of the garden pushed gouts of water over its surface, where it tumbled into elaborate channels carved into the floor. Maralah walked over them; the mosaic of the grate above the streams of water was solid and very old.

At first glance, it appeared the Patron was alone. He was a tall, straight-backed man with soft hands and bright eyes. He was about her age, though she would not have believed it if she hadn’t read his birth date in some scandalous rag put out by the merchants in Albaaric on the occasion of his forty-fourth year. His face was a puckered morass of scarred tissue just below his jawline; he had grown a fine beard in an attempt to mask the scars, but it only drew attention to them. The Patron’s beard had become all the rage among Saiduan men and a few hirsute women, though, and now they all grew them out and trimmed them to the same squared-off wedge at the end.