“Oh,” I said lightly. “I fell in with a man of your escort when your chariot passed me on the road, and he told me everything. Now I suggest you bring me in out of the rain.”

“I always said you’d make the best spy I ever—” He yanked me under the overhang. I sat down composedly, glad he couldn’t see the smirk of delight I couldn’t get off my mouth. He hunkered on his heels, staring full at my all-but-invisible profile.

“How long have you been here?”

“One day. I was just in time to see the old, real Atlan before you take over and turn her into a second North kingdom. Are you glad to see me?”

He started to grab, then let me go. He said uncertainly, “You’ve changed. I always knew you would, yet now it’s—You’ve disconcerted me, Cija.” He was almost asking for sympathy. I held in my giggles: I knew they might go on and on. The hysteria was bubbling feverish in me. “You’re mine at last?”

“I’m yours at last.”

He took a deep breath. Still he did not grab. “You’ve made me wait long enough,” he grumbled. “What made you come to your senses?”

“It happened an hour ago. And I didn’t decide. It happened. Even in Atlan, you pursue me. Or rather,” I said modestly, “you come. It’s no good holding it off. I think I must belong to you.”

“So you’re a fatalist… This Atlan, from what you say you don’t approve of my being given it? Mind you, it was a gift, I didn’t take it.”

“I’m sure that wouldn’t matter to you except when you’re trying to impress someone like me. And she, not it.”

“Uh?”

“Atlan, she not—”

“You don’t approve?”

I said slowly, “You are a brilliant General, a meteor who will stay up, but ever moving, ever blazing. Your blaze is power; but you yourself are power-lust. I see you, old, then dead, never leaving the world, still at the head of a train of regiments whose marching feet and axles lift the earth and fill men’s hearts with dread, and you at the head, grinning death’s head, lusting after power, marching after it.”

He peered at me for a few moments.

Then he said, “Yes. You are right.”

And the half-smile did not quite reach his dark eyes. “Nevertheless,” he said, “you’ll benefit as my Empress. You’ll see. We’ll have—”

“Empress?” I sort of squeaked rather without dignity.

All at once he was the one to take command of the situation as it dangled. With a hint of the old amusement in his voice he said, “So you haven’t come to me because of my new preferment? You meant to be my loving, loyal slave-girl? But surely you realized no one else would be my Empress?”