Adare nodded, still not looking at him.

“That was foolish,” he said.

Before the battle she would have bridled at the comment, would have argued the point loudly and long, as she had done with Fulton. Fulton, who was dead. Dead because she had insisted on seeing the battle up close. She shook her head slowly.

“It seemed important.”

A cold wind blew through the long pause that followed, nicking the waves, fueling the fires behind them.

“I will leave you,” Lehav said finally. He did not leave.

Adare took a long, unsteady breath.

Intarra, she prayed inwardly, Lady of Light. She had tried so many times already to compose this prayer, had failed so many times that when the last words came, they surprised her: Lady of Light, forgive me.

She couldn’t have said for what transgression she was begging forgiveness. She had failed her father and made common cause with his killer, had taken a leach as her councillor, had raised up an army to fight against armies of Annur, had stolen a throne from one brother and slid a knife between the ribs of another. . . .

It had all seemed so necessary.

Forgive me, she prayed again, again without entrusting the prayer to speech.

Sunlight shattered on the waves. It burned her eyes. Behind her, the flames still raged. Forgiveness, it seemed, lay far from the providence of fire. She watched a moment longer as the fishermen hauled another quiet body from the lake, then turned to Lehav.

He was studying her—his prophet, chosen of Intarra, Emperor of Annur—with dark, uncertain eyes.

“Let’s go,” said Adare hui’Malkeenian before he could speak again. “There is work to be done.”

51

For a while, Kaden considered it.

He hadn’t expected to end the day in the Dawn Palace, hadn’t expected to be heralded as the Emperor of Annur, but then, as the Shin said, To expect is to err.

When he emerged into the burning square at the center of the Dawn Palace, when the guardsmen knelt before him, intoning the ancient formula that had preceded all Malkeenian rulers for generations, it seemed harder to refuse the honor than to accept it. Whatever play Adare had made for the throne, she was hundreds of miles away in Raalte and had made no formal declaration of her own intent. The citizens of Annur were confused, and Kaden, standing at the center of the empire, was best situated to turn that confusion to his advantage. It looked suddenly, shockingly simple to take the throne and declare himself his father’s heir.