No. Let Tain Hu be laid to rest the way Baru’s parents taught her. Let the birds scatter her across earth and sky. That’s how the Taranoki give their beloved dead back to the world. Ah, Baru, do you remember the ragged pink guts of your grandmother Pahaeon, carved with shell knives, salted with the iron salt, scattered across Halae’s Reef for the gulls and the colorful fish? You were a little girl when Pahaeon died, and you didn’t understand: that, more than loss, made you sob.

But a cormorant called to you across Pahaeon’s funeral, and you stopped crying.

Baru remembered. She remembered all her dead.

“I’m going back to my keep,” she told Apparitor. “Bring me a map of the world and the laws of my new power. And your boy, to write down my orders.”

“Your orders?”

“Of course.” She showed him her perfect bloody Incrastic teeth. “I’m not finished with Aurdwynn.”

*   *   *

IT was her fucking fortress: they’d told her so when she arrived, the exiles and condemned intellects who staffed this gray redoubt. For the duration of your stay, you are lord and master of the Elided Keep.

“What are you all waiting for?” she barked at the crowd of clerks and housekeepers peering through the bars of the tall, narrow portcullis. “The traitor’s dead. Now we work!”

A murmur rushed through the masked assembly. Dead? How could she be dead? She was the hostage.…

Was it, Baru wondered, the very first time a candidate had refused the bargain? How often had these walls of sloped granite looked down on mothers who begged for the lives of their bastard sons? Had the fortress stared, angular and indifferent, as candidates for the Throne admitted every kind of guilt to every sort of charge—the authorship of seditious texts, the exchange of illegal monies, adoption of a forbidden child, a murder of passion, an addiction to narcotics, religious rapture, royal ancestors, incest, incoherence of thought, the scars of self-abasement, profit off a great disaster, predatory moneylending, a taste for violence, perjury, perversion of a trial, visions, seizures, unfulfilled vengeance—

How many newcomers had stood at these galleries? Falcrest had destroyed King IV Asric Falkarsitte a hundred and thirty years ago. Had the Throne existed ever since?

The keep didn’t remember. She was sure of it. These walls had been washed by time and chemistry, stains of gray acid, laundry effluent, bleached mortar, burnt stone from ancient siege—scoured, again and again, of their history. Maybe this place predated the Throne. Maybe it had been a redoubt of the old royalty, the House of Antlers, before Lapetiare’s revolution destroyed them: a retreat on foreign shores.…

But she was certain this place didn’t know. It only had a ringing antimemory, the opposite of a past. It was used to make futures now.