“We need Sorai,” he said. “If these Tai Mora try to invade, it will be through the harbor. This meeting with the clan leaders may not work. If it doesn’t… we’ll have Sorai, at least.”

“Wise choice.”

“I’m my mother’s son,” he said stiffly. Then, “Exile Almeysia to Dorinah. That’s my wish as Kai. Disobey it and I’ll charge you with treason.” He did not turn. He did not want to see her face. But she did not call after him. She did not stop him.

Ahkio made his way back to the clan square. What now? Where to go and who to trust? He could exile Nasaka, but then he would lose all of her knowledge with her. She knew too much to be thrown out; she had made sure of that. The less she told him, the more he had to rely on her. He could only solve so many things through exile or marriage. Right now, he wanted to do violence against a good many people, even knowing it solved nothing. Fighting their own people… Oma. How was he going to handle that?

He went around the back stair of the council house and upstairs, avoiding most of the clan leaders in the common area. He entered his rooms and found Caisa sitting on the divan, laughing with Liaro. Kirana’s effects from Garika were spread all around, trunk after trunk of them. Kirana had loved a good many books.

Liaro grinned. “You look like death.”

“I’m glad that puts you in fine spirits.”

“We were just finishing,” Caisa said. “Liaro invited me to dinner.”

Lovely, Ahkio thought. That was just what he needed – his cousin and his assistant starting some torrid affair. “Enjoy it,” he said. “Any progress here?”

“Still no progress on the ciphered papers,” Caisa said. “Funny book here, though. Dorinah romances. Didn’t think much of it, but she has a lot of… odd notes in the margins.”

Ahkio took the slim volume from her. It appeared to be bound in snakeskin. The embossed title on the front was indiscernible, the ink long since rubbed away. He turned to the front pages. Inside was his mother’s sister’s name, scrawled in sloppy characters: Etena Mia Sorai. The book’s title wasn’t in Dhai, though. It was in Dorinah and read: “Fifteenth-Century Dhai Romances.”

“She liked reading these,” Ahkio said, tracing the title with his fingers. He’d learned Dorinah as a child in the camps. “We’d sit with stacks of these while our mother went out.”

“Nice binding for something in a slave camp,” Liaro said.

“She’s rebound it,” Ahkio said. The Dorinahs wrote all sorts of stories about the Dhai: their history as written by their captors. He opened it to the first page and found another line scrawled at the bottom, this time in his sister’s neat, formal handwriting. It read:

Remember all the roads.