He had promised his people the lowlands, to ease their straining numbers. He had promised an end to the tax on second children, who went out on the naked rock. For one short season his promises had been honorable, for his man Dziransi had found him a bride who could deliver Aurdwynn.

But the bride was a traitor, a bait set out to entrap him, and the first great act of his Necessary Kingship came tumbling down on him like a keyless arch. And now the army he had raised was camped outside his Mansion with nowhere to invade and no confidence at all in their king. When autumn came they would seize Hussacht’s stores for the winter, and Hussacht would rot away in the wet karst caves of Karakys until the pits and stairways were slimed with corpse. He himself would not live that long. The Uczenith men in particular were agitating in the camp for a dethroning, and traditionally this was done by peeling off the King’s crown and the scalp beneath.

Fucking Uczenith. Fucking shortsighted stone-licking inbred curs. In spite of their overweening insecurity (their old lord Kubarycz the Iron-Browed had tried to marry an Aurdwynni duchess, leading to his exile: the Uczenith lived in terror that someone would come up the mountains to say, Hello, I killed your Lord and his heirs in combat and so I am now the rightful ruler of your Mansion) Ataka had brought them and all the other mansions together. He had been this close to breaking the Stakhi out of the prison of their history.

And Baru Cormorant had ruined it all.

Atakaszir thought: I have started an avalanche and now I cannot get out of the way.

He turned to face the woman.

“How,” he said, in the Iolynic that came so hard to him, “will you dowry me?” He knew he’d gotten it wrong but the creole seemed to fight his very tongue. “How will you open the way that was shut?”

She was dark and clean of face, without one pimple or scar. She wore her coat and furs open and the wind blew her dress back against a body of sinful fullness. She looked as if she had never been hungry; Atakaszir’s eyes betrayed him by seeking out her hips, her full stomach, her breasts. Her sister, Atakaszir understood, had been some kind of whore-duchess, who sealed her alliances in her bed. Ordinarily this would make her and all her sisters unthinkable as consorts to a king. But lately Atakaszir had learned that the Stakhieczi measure of a woman was not always reliable.

“I offer you what you most desire,” Nayauru Aia said, in perfect Stakhi. “A wife from the lands of milk and grain. A key to the door that bars you.”