“The nobles are fools,” Gabril said, cracking the knuckles of one hand, then the other. “They would poison their own well to prevent others from drinking.”

“What if you were able to offer them something?” Triste asked. “Promise them more, if they sign the constitution?”

“I don’t have anything else to offer,” Kaden said, spreading his hands.

“Future rights and prerogatives,” Triste suggested, “in the new republic.”

Kaden considered the idea a moment, then shook his head in frustration. “It was greed over the rights I was offering in the first place that choked off the agreement.”

Morjeta had been staring at him, eyes bright in the lamplight. “It won’t work. . . .” she whispered. “I thought that maybe . . .” She shook her head. “They aren’t going to agree after all. I’m so sorry.”

They fell silent at that, Gabril glaring moodily into the lamplight, Triste gnawing at her lip. Kaden studied them a moment, the thorn of a horrible new thought pricking at his mind, then looked away, watching the delicate curtains shift in the breeze. From the garden below, he could make out the light sound of music and laughter played over the deeper bass of moaning, the fervent cries of physical rapture. The weariness he’d felt just after returning from the warehouse settled on him once more, a heavy, soporific helplessness. These were his people, the patrons of the temple and the angry nobility alike, and yet sometimes they seemed more alien than the Csestriim.

He filled his mind with a saama’an of the meeting, studied various faces in the feeble lamplight. He could see the scene in perfect detail, but it meant little. He could stare at the faces for hours, watch the disaster unfold forward or backward, but he had no idea how to change the result. If it were a crumbling wall, or the broken axle of a cart, a wet clay pot on the spinning wheel or a goat’s carcass to be carved, he would be able to discern the shape of the problem beneath the bright skin of the world, but he could find no pattern in the assembled aristocrats, no shape in the madness.

Exhaling slowly, he let the image go, watching instead as the oil lamp sputtered for a moment, the flame waving wildly before steadying itself. He understood how the lamp worked: oil and air, fuel and space, something and nothing. Starve it of oil—the flame died. Crowd it—the flame died. Kaden reached out, tested the heat, then settled his hand over the top of the lamp. The fire didn’t quite reach his skin, but it hurt, hurt worse, then began to burn. The quick, desperate animal part of his brain screamed at him to pull back, to cradle it to his chest, but he silenced the beast and kept his hand in place, watching the pain but discarding the fear of pain.