“Murder,” Gabril said finally. The word was sharp with the accent of the Western Desert, vowels polished, consonants pitted as though by the scouring sand.

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You should,” Gabril replied. “You talk of my father’s ‘death’ as though Gabril the Gray choked on the pit of a date or wandered from the well with no water. This is not the truth of the matter.”

“He was executed,” Kaden said, “in accordance with Annurian law.”

“He was murdered,” Gabril replied, “by your father.”

Kaden slowed his pulse, loosened the muscles of his shoulders and back. The Shin had trained him in all manner of techniques to control his own fear and rage, but they had said nothing about how to calm others—one more way in which they had left him ill prepared to rule an empire, one more deficit he would have to make up on his own, provided Gabril left him alive long enough.

The First Speaker eyed Kaden appraisingly. “You are not dead, as they say in the streets, but you are not Emperor. You return months after Sanlitun was set in the earth, and you come here, to me, your eyes hidden in this hood. Why? You must know what passed between our fathers.”

Kaden considered what he knew of the young man seated across the table, searching for a hook, a handle. As a child, he had grown up with stories of the desert tribes of Mo’ir, tales filled with vengeance, violence, and blood. He and Valyn had imagined every man and woman a shadowrobe, every meeting a duel to the death. According to Kiel, however, the stories were almost all wrong, the figment of an Annurian imagination obsessed with the exotic. Not that there weren’t shadowrobes in the west, not that Mo’ir’s history lacked its own share of blood, but if Kiel were to be believed, the tribes valued eloquence over violence, insisting on speech before every fight. Kaden had wagered his life on that insistence, but, face-to-face with Gabril, the words he had prepared seemed inadequate.

“I am not my father,” he said quietly. “Just as you are not yours.”

Gabril studied him for a long time, then raised a hand. A robed servant stepped silently from behind a wooden screen.

“Ta,” Gabril said, not bothering to look at the man. “Two cups.”

They waited in silence as the servant arranged a clay kettle, steeped the leaves, then poured the steaming liquid into twin clay cups. Kaden hesitated, eyeing the vessel warily.

“Drink,” Gabril said, gesturing. “If I kill you, I will use a knife.”

It was a slender reassurance, but Kaden lifted the cup to his lips, sipping gently at the bitter, unsweetened ta. Gabril raised his own cup, drank deeply, then set it gently back on the tabletop.