‘I have not—’ she began, disbelief coating her words. Where was this coming from? How could the firm ground of her status be so suddenly treacherous? Pikte was sobbing and she reached for him on instinct; Xac pulled him against his side, away from her. Taking him from her. ‘I have given you something no one else would. No one else could,’ she said, almost begging. ‘I have done it for you, only you, so that your power knows no limits and your glory will span the world.’

Enet poured belief and sincerity into her words and into her mind. She believed this. She believed it and he would read nothing different in her.

Her words were smoke in the breeze, drifting past the Singer and making no impression. ‘I rescind the status of Great Octave from you. There will be no limit put on my power, no leaching away of my authority into the hands of the incompetent and the greedy. No more lies whispered in my ears from your lovely mouth. I rescind the status of Spear of the City from you and name Yana in that place. At least he works for me and not himself.’ Xac’s great muscled chest ran with sweat. Pikte’s sobs subsided to whimpers, his eyes squeezed shut and the flesh of his arm crushed and bruising under his father’s grip.

‘Holy lord,’ Enet choked, collapsing to prostrate herself.

But the Singer wasn’t finished. ‘You are banished from my circle and from my sleeping mat. The boy is cast out. He is no longer song-born. No longer my son. And if you breathe one more word in defence of yourself or of him I will send you to join him. I will seize all your property and cast you onto the street for the Choosers and the beggars to fight over. But not before I ensure you’re not pretty enough to tempt anyone into taking you into their home.’

Three Chorus warriors stood guard around the source, their usual impassivity vanished as they stared at the scene with shared expressions of horror: Enet was their patron; her fall from grace would be theirs if she so chose.

Enet could barely breathe, crushed beneath the weight of his pronouncement. With his words she had lost everything, and the work of twenty sun-years, work that had begun long before Xac was made Singer, was undone. She looked at Pikte, at his wide eyes glazed with incomprehension and his smooth, soft skin.

He would not survive on the streets for more than a day, and although it was a crime to sell Pechaqueh into slavery, there were those who would risk the city’s wrath to have and to break a boy so tender. She swallowed her tears, for they would frighten him, and she made her heart into stone.