Tau-indi smiled at them and went back into the sweatroom to drink antimony wine and vomit.

After that the house was livelier, and Tau-indi felt taller. They had taken their first steps as a true Prince.

*   *   *

SUMMER passed, and then storm season, and then spring and summer again. Tau turned fourteen. The Armada War raged across the Ashen Sea. What happened in the war that year was important, of course—but this is a story about Tau-indi, who ended the war.

And what mattered to young Tau-indi was their mother’s release.

She came up the slope from Lake Jaro at a run, and Tau tried to hold their place in the welcoming crowd, but in the end it was too much: they broke from the line and ran down to embrace their mother.

Tahr kissed their brow. “Oh, lama.”

“Mom,” Tau said, with shaky bravery, “I kept the house.”

“You did. You did marvelously.”

“You’re all right?”

Tahr showed them respect, and not pity, when she answered honestly. “Hard times are coming,” she told Tau. “Hard times you’ll inherit soon. I want you to meet two men from Falcrest, sent here with me as hostages against atrocity, both eager students of our ways.…”

They were in their early twenties, still youth by Oriati standards (adulthood was earned by works and knowledge, not merely a calendar). But they strolled about with the loose-limbed confidence of old men. Tau would realize, later, that this arrogance had developed in the coffeehouses and testing rooms of the Faculties, and that they meant it entirely for each other.

The groundskeepers murmured that they were brave, brave men, to come here to Jaro, when they must know the full wrath of Oriati Mbo would awaken against Falcrest soon. When a lion attacked a water buffalo the lion might chew on the buffalo’s rump for a very long time while the buffalo stood there twitching and snorting. But when the lion was exhausted, the buffalo would turn its horns.

The first of the hostages was beautiful and shy. Cosgrad Torrinde was a slim tall man of twentysomething, a few shades lighter than already cool-skinned Kindalana and Padrigan. His eyes folded elegantly, his nose flat and thin, his smile easy, his laugh full of wonder. He did not have the name Hesychast yet, of course. Tau-indi would only learn about that later.