The magic didn’t glow in him now that his desires, as ever heightened by the song itself, were sated. Still, Enet allowed herself to be overcome by the power of him lying beside her, by her proximity to glory. ‘To wonder such things as a child is barely acceptable,’ he said, bringing her thoughts back to the conversation. ‘To raise them now is blasphemy, and to do so here, in the very source of the song itself, in my presence … Should I have you punished, Enet, Spear of the City?’

Enet smiled wickedly. ‘As the great Singer desires,’ she murmured. ‘And such desires he has. Of course, I but make idle conversation. Our son asked me for some old tales this morning and those sprang to mind. I think I first heard them when I was about his age. But of course, holy lord, I shall accept your punishment with due humility.’ There was another layer to the story she’d been told as a child, but she didn’t so much as acknowledge it in the depths of her mind, let alone speak it aloud.

Singer Xac grunted again. ‘You’ve never been humble in your life,’ he said, but there was the tiniest smile at the corner of his mouth. Enet let out a silent breath that her gamble had paid off. The Singer’s moods changed faster than a hawk’s stoop and there’d been a chance, just a breath of a chance, that he would have ordered her punished for her arrogance. Despite the truth of it. ‘I hope you at least killed the slave.’

‘Not quite,’ Enet said and pointed to the old woman who knelt at the far wall in the shadow of Nara, leader of the Singer’s personal bodyguards – the Chorus. ‘We removed her tongue though, so that she could not repeat such foulness.’ She made a noose from the Singer’s long hair and looped it around her own throat; then she leant in for a lingering kiss that would stir his song-given desires again.

‘They are strange stories though, are they not?’ she breathed against his mouth as his hand grabbed her shoulder with bruising force.

‘Enough,’ the Singer snarled. ‘Enough talk. It is impossible. Singers are gods and ascend as gods. Those they take with them become divine, too.’

‘Impossible,’ Enet agreed, the word blurred against her mouth as the Singer kissed her again, intent once more upon her body.

‘Perhaps I will put a child in you this time,’ he muttered against her throat.

Enet’s insides clenched. ‘We already have Pikte, holy lord. A finer son you could not hope for. And your first song-born.’ He had other children, at least four that she knew of from before he became Singer, and more since, but Pikte occupied that special, sacred space of the first born from his divinity.

The Singer paused, leaning over her. His expression was hard now. Disappointed. ‘One child. One.’