Dariel reached for the wine, inhaled the spicy scent, and fell into a detailed response to her query. For the past year he had found a sort of joy in daily labor that he had never known before. It came about because he was so very fatigued with war, with piracy, with violence, with seeing his loved ones die. For several years after the war with Hanish Mein, Dariel had led forces to hunt down the surviving Mein—the ones still in any sort of rebellion, at least. And he had squashed the flare-ups of rebellion all over the empire, each people trying to find some way to grab more of the Known World’s map before things settled again. It had amazed him that the peace seemed just as violent as the war. It was always this way after wars, advisers told him, but still it troubled him. This hadn’t been just any war. It was Aliver’s war! The war to set the world to rights so that there need be no future wars. Everyone said they believed this; few, it seemed to him, also acted as if they did.

When the peace was finally established, he found himself just as ill at ease. He did not want the throne, though he could have claimed it as the male heir. That sort of power did not appeal to him. He had no desire to loaf about the palace courting noblewomen, as Corinn seemed to wish him to do. Nor could he return to the Outer Isles and again sail those gray slopes of water. The isles had been handed over entirely to the league in a deal Corinn had struck with it on her own authority. The league owned them now, their own separate state within the empire. It was recompense, Corinn made it clear, for Dariel’s stunt on the League Platforms. He did not understand until later, but she was actually quite angry with him when she fully understood his role in the attack. It had crippled the league’s capacity to trade across the Gray Slopes. It had cost them thousands of quota lives and hundreds of their own kind. It was such a monstrous success that Corinn had to acquiesce to giving them more than she would have liked. And, she hinted, she had needed to give away even more to get them to promise that Dariel would not end up dead in some mysterious way: poison or accident or mysterious disappearance. The fact that she clearly considered them capable of all these things had set his skin crawling.