A clatter rose outside. This austere suite might be his entire world for the remainder of his existence: a reward for having befriended a woman and having saved the life of a man.

It was the middle of the night. Darkness with stars filled the single foot square window high in the east wall, well beyond his reach. He should be sleeping.

He lay in bed, back to the doorway, feigning sleep, when the visitors arrived. Three, from the sounds of it: one large, one small, one delicate. Female, if fragrance did not lie.

“He heals slowly,” one said. “The physician blames his despair.”

That voice belonged to Lord Ssu-ma Shih-ka’i, commander of Shinsan’s Western Army. It was by Shih-ka’i’s grace that the prisoner lived.

A second familiar voice said, “The physician should look closer. He’s clever. He’ll show you what you expect to see till you relax. Then you’ll be dead.”

The prisoner’s exact strategy. If only his body would heal!

Shih-ka’i said, “The physician says his wounds pierced his soul. He over-reached—and it cost him everything.”

Mist, Empress of the Dread Empire, considered before she replied. “It can’t be easy, living on after making so many bad decisions.”

The prisoner, who thought of himself only as “the prisoner” because of his shame, compelled himself to relax, to breathe slow and deep. But he could not stop tears from leaking.

Thousands had died because of his decisions. A kingdom might be destroyed by civil war. His family would be fugitives already. The child-woman he had loved… Who knew? If Sherilee was clever she would insist that she had known him only as someone who visited her friend Kristen, widow of his son and mother of his grandchildren.

He thought about Inger, his wife and queen, seldom. When he did, though, it was with a grand ration of guilt. That love had died.

Inger came to mind when the pain was bad. They met the last time he lay just outside the Dark Gate, she a volunteer nurse helping heroes injured while holding the wolves of the Dread Empire at bay. In his loneliness he had asked her to become his wife.

He had lost another wife, Elana, and another lover, Fiana, before Inger.

Women who loved him did not fare well.

“Were I in charge here,” said the woman who had been a friend, and a wife to his best friend’s wife’s brother, “and I was sure that he would recover, I would brick up the doorway.”

Lord Ssu-ma said, “I bear the man no love but that is excessive. He’s a cripple. He’ll never recover fully. And he’s nowhere where he can cause any grief.”

The prisoner had no idea where “here” was. Inside Dread Empire territory, certainly. Though Shinsan had suffered severely lately, not one inch of ground had been abandoned