Shen glanced back at the others, her expression one of amused perplexity. She knelt and touched her fingertips to the man’s shoulder. She intoned the traditional words of Talayan greeting. “Old friend, the sun shines on you, but the water is sweet.”

“The water is cool, Your Majesty, and clear to look upon,” the man answered, speaking his words to the earth. “You are loved.”

In those few words Kelis recognized the speaker’s voice.

“I know,” Shen said, as if she heard such greetings regularly. “Did the stones send you to tell me so?”

“The stones?” The prostrate man sounded confused for a moment, but then his voice picked up with the rhythms of practiced formality. “The Santoth called you, and you came. That is a blessing. Come with me, Princess. I will take you to them. They have much to tell you.”

Before he knew it, the man’s name whispered through Kelis’s lips. “Leeka Alain?”

The man raised his head, turned, and looked at Kelis. For a moment Kelis thought himself mistaken. The man’s face was nothing like the craggy one he remembered on the general. And then it was. And a moment later it was not. His features appeared as fixed and solid as anybody else’s, but his face contained more than a single man’s features. It was ancient and cracked and eroded with the wear of ages, and yet it was also a face of clear green eyes and a once-broken nose and lips that glistened with moisture when his tongue wet them.

“They don’t call me that here,” the man said, “but that was my name before.”

C HAPTER
T HIRTY-FOUR

The breakneck speed at which the league clipper careened into Acacia’s main harbor would have been reckless even in the light of day. At night, it was madness. But league pilots were nothing if not adept at all things nautical, and the officer at the helm of the Rayfin carved a wild course through the anchored vessels, passed the trading floats. He hooked the vessel around the inner watchtower and dropped sails only when momentum alone was more than enough to place it skimming along a fortunately unoccupied section of league-owned pier. He shouted for the messenger to disembark before they had even halted. The man did not need the encouragement. He leaped from a height and ran with all the haste he had been ordered to show.