Suddenly embarrassed, Adare turned away. There was nothing remarkable about the sight, just an old man and an old woman sitting side by side, one munching through a pear, the other watching him with a blend of fondness and irritation, the whole thing transpiring in the open, beneath the warm gaze of the sun. And yet, for some reason she couldn’t place, Adare felt as though she were spying, witnessing a moment that should have been private. Confused and chagrined, she stopped, looking out over the canal as the wagon jolted on down the road.

It was impossible to imagine sharing such a scene with Kaden or Valyn. Even as children, before they were sent away, there had been a distance between Adare and her brothers, a gap of years and gender that proved impossible to bridge. The boys’ invented adventures in the Dawn Palace seemed so pointless, so childish, next to the very real politics and maneuvering unfolding all around them.

“You should stay with your brothers,” Sanlitun told her once, when she demanded to accompany him to yet another imperial audience. “You should try to know them.”

“There’s nothing to know!” Adare had complained. She was eight years old at the time, which meant Kaden was five and Valyn even younger. “They’re babies. They play like babies and they cry like babies. I want to go with you, to do something important.”

“They will not be babies forever, Adare,” Sanlitun replied, putting his arm around her shoulder. “A day will come when they need you, especially Kaden.”

And yet, despite the admonishment, he had allowed her to accompany him, to sit silent and still on an upholstered cushion to the right of the Unhewn Throne as he went about the business of the empire. And then, one day, her brothers were gone, shipped away to opposite ends of the earth.

For years she had barely noticed their absence. Her studies consumed her at first. Then, as she grew older, Sanlitun gave her more and more responsibility: the greeting of foreign delegations, year-long apprenticeships in the various ministries, short journeys beyond the city walls, always heavily guarded, to observe the local estates and industries. When she reached her fifteenth year, Sanlitun even had a second desk moved into his study, a smaller version of his own, where she was allowed to work with him late into the night, the two companionably silent as he reviewed the endless ephemera of government and she studied whatever stack of maps or papers he set in front of her.