Baru yelled and spun on her ass. It was only Apparitor’s little golden-eyed Oriati concubine, coming in from the shore and the harbor. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, irritably, “that depends on you, really, are you here to try to seduce me again?”

He protected his throat with a soft calfskin glove. Yesterday Baru had pinned him against a stone battlement and choked him. “No, my lady. My lord Apparitor sent me to ask you which map you want prepared in the morning-room.”

Oh, the poor boy. She shouldn’t lash out at him (had to learn, immediately, how to wield her power carefully). He’d probably been torn away from friends and family, initiated into service as a boy, dragged around the world on Apparitor’s missions—rather like Muire Lo.

The flinch she felt at that name got her to her feet. “The map, yes. We’ll be discussing Aurdwynn. Get one of the full-rug maps, the sort we can walk on.”

“Aurdwynn, mam? You’re certain?”

“Absolutely.” Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. “It’s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little”—slack on their chains—“honey for their table.”

What was his name anyway? Irashee? Irama?

“My lord suggests a map that will show you the full span of your new dominion.”

“Does he?” Baru stretched her locked hands over her head, and yawned mightily. She was pleased, a little, when the boy’s attention wandered down her jacket and waistcoat: not because she cared about his tastes, but because his dark gold-flecked eyes were like Tain Hu’s. “What map is that?”

Iraji. That was his name. Iraji of the oyaSegu tribe.

“A map of the world, my lady,” Iraji said. He blinked at her, softly, and she saw that he had a mind for spying, a polite and empathetic cunning which could be turned to wound or weal. “You are exalted now. You must consider the mosaic, not the stone.”

2. Incarnation

2

INCARNATION

SHE came into her morning-room, where, before the ship and Tain Hu and the test, she’d read and written and then torn up all she wrote. Hard morning light came down through the hive window: teeth of fine thick glass in an iron truss and a clear scouring luminance, Incrastic, virtuous. Like the chimes of the proctors at the Iriad school, calling the girls out for dawn inspection.

Baru went into the little pit commode and vomited in grief.

When she came out, rinsed and empty, wanting strong whiskey to clear the taste off the back of her tongue, a map of the world had been laid out across the smooth dry floor.