Since leaving the cages, Niquel had received the smallest of reprieves: the short, sheer garment they’d given her to wear—a toga, if her memory served her—allowed her body at least partial relief from the unending lowland heat.

   None of the other palace servants Niquel had seen wore anything as transparent as this, and she wondered if it denoted something different about her and Bellora that they were dressed this way. Perhaps something to do with the pardon?

   Half a weak smile formed on her lips as she smoothed the filmy linen over her thighs. If they’d thought to humble her by leaving her body exposed this way, it only served to show how little these lowlanders knew about the Taunai. The people on the mountain covered their bodies, to be sure, but only out of necessity against the year-round cold. No one in Jeqnamset was any more ashamed to walk in their skin than the nearest fox or roundhorn sheep. Bellora had appeared far less comfortable, tugging at the material, keeping her arms crossed in front of her breasts. Wherever the woman was now, Niquel hoped she fared well.

   There was a clanking sound and her drifting attention snapped to the doors. The latch turned and she heard men talking on the other side. Her heart sped up.

   The Pattern. Calm.

   She took a deep breath and let it out. Again. In and out. Again.

   The door opened and a foot stepped through, followed by half of the emperor.

   Calm.

   “Just don’t let anyone in here unless the palace is on fire, will you?” he said to someone in the hall.

   “Your Grace,” came the affirmative.

   The man who was also a horse and also a lizard came all the way into the room. He shut the door behind him, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and exhaled. Then he turned to Niquel.

   They passed through a sunny courtyard with a square fountain at its center. A number of indolent-looking hangers-on were sitting around it on benches, doing what appeared to be nothing of use. Their heads turned as a group as he and Ellestia moved down one of the bordering colonnades, but not in his direction.

   From the other side of the courtyard, the Blyd Kriga’al general came strolling toward them, thumbs hooked into her belt as though nothing important at all were happening today.

   “Your Grace,” the general greeted him as she fell into step. “Seneschal.”

   “General,” the older woman acknowledged her.

   “Headed to the feast?”

   “We are,” said the seneschal, never breaking her glide.

   “Makes three of us,” Ayzhus said. “I’m happy to show His Grace to the hall. Assuming you have other things that need your attention.” It was less an offer and more of a command, and Raothan wondered just what the pecking order was in the palace between the seneschal and the councilors.

   “Of course, General,” Ellestia said with her unflappable neutrality. “I have matters to see to in preparation for the Release Rite. The sooner they are taken care of, the better. Your Grace.” She swept a small bow to him as the only warning for her departure and disappeared down another hallway in a swirl of fabric.

   “So,” said the general, taking up the seneschal’s glide with more of a swagger, “Your Grace.” Her tone had an intentional needling quality to it and, as much as  Raothan was trying to take this impossible day in stride, it made him lose the top layer of his composure.

   “Cut the shit, General,” he said. “I’m about as much anyone’s ‘grace’ as I was two weeks ago on my farm.”

   “Shall I call Your Grace by some other name?” she asked, a knowing mischief coming into her voice. “Hast Kriga’al, perhaps?”

   His feet stopped working. Ayzhus went on for a few more steps before turning back to him, grin in full bloom.

   He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a weary shake of his head.

   “Fuck me.”

   Of course. She saw the tattoo. The brotherhood always knows its own.

   “Oh ho! Haven’t heard that one in a while. You Elvigra have the greatest curses.”

   “Yeah, well,” he started walking again, grumbling, “there’s more where that came from.”

   Raothan bent back to his task, using the repetitive motions to smother away nagging thoughts and urges. Before long, he was in that still place with only his breathing and the sensations of the moment: the sun on his back, rind and stalk moving under his hands, the scent of warm earth in his nostrils, hoofbeats …

   Hoofbeats?

   He cocked his head, focusing his attention on the muted thudding. His farm was, if not remote, at least a short ride form the main road. There would be no one with occasion to lead a horse out this way, and damn sure not more than one. Still, his ears didn’t lie. He stood and turned in the direction of the sound.

   A sprig of something dark bounced over the rise, growing as it came. Raothan knew that silhouette. The years would not let him forget. A spear point, aimed at the sky from horseback. Another black point joined the first, and then another. A rider’s helm, the pointed ears of a mount. Two, three, ten …

   J’rt Thi’s fucking blood, what’s this now?

   He tucked the harvest knife into his belt and dusted his palms together, knocking away the worst of the dirt. The approaching riders—some sort of  guard unit, if his impressions served him—came on at a walk: casual, confident, not even bothering to press their mounts into a trot. 

   They were cutting a straight path in his direction, and his steps took him back to the near edge of the field where it abutted the yard surrounding his house. What was there to do but meet them and learn their business? 

   Probably some fool new decree being enacted. A tax levy, I’ll wager.

   The riders jangled up, bits of tack glinting under the noon light, two columns of five splitting apart and fanning out into a semi-circle before him. An eleventh man, who’d ridden in at their head, stepped his horse forward. Raothan crossed his arms over his chest.

   “Look at this one,” he heard one of the riders mutter to a neighbor, “head shaved like he thinks he’s some kind of warrior.”

   “The general would shit a sword,” the other agreed on the low assessment of this foreigner standing before them.

   The leader swept a hand to the side for silence.

   “Are you Ga’ardahn?” he said.

   Raothan suspected the man already knew the answer to his own question. How many other Elvigra kissmelon farmers could there be out here?

   He laid a finger alongside his nose and then angled it at the man, acknowledging the accuracy of his guess. “It seems I am.”

   His eyes skimmed the line of what he now was sure were Imperial Guard. The Emperor’s sigil—a pair of crossed swords beneath a crescent moon—fluttered on blue pennants strung around the shoulders of every horse. Raothan noted the bulk of muscle distributed among the riders, the sharp eyes and taut grips. There were seven men and three women. None of them looked as though they had seen lives of ease. They were not here for a tax levy.

“And the horse was a lizard.”

“Oh come. Now you are just flinging snow.”

“No!” Niquel said. “I do not know how to explain it. This is what I am telling you. It was all very strange.”

“Well you are strange, so it suits you.”

Niquel ignored her friend’s poking. “And there was this itch, this pain. Right in the center of my back, between my shoulders where I could not reach. Nothing I could do would make it go away.”

They were silent for a few moments after this, Maudri unsure what to say to her friend, and Niquel deciding whether she needed to reveal the part where her dream went from odd to unnerving. It seemed she ought.

“In my dream,” she said, “Vodi was not there. None of the guides were there. I could not hear J’sau Jeqnam. I could not hear anything.”

Maudri looked over at her with wide eyes as their ponies picked their way along, oblivious. “You said it was a dream, not a nightmare, Niquel.”

“I know. What do you make of this?”

Her friend shook her head, eyes drifting back to their path. “I do not know. But I hope for your sake that this is not a dream of foresight. To not hear the guides …” She saw Maudri hunch her shoulders in a cringing way, as if to shrug off something unpleasant.

“Well,” Niquel said, trying to bring some mirth back into the exchange, “the dream had a man-lizard-horse in it, so how true could it be?”

“Right.” They laughed together and moved their talk to other things. The River Omeron would be at their feet by the next morning, and Niquel intended to enjoy her friend’s company before then. J’sau Jeqnam could make them privy to the most likely probabilities, but there was always a chance events would unfold along an unlikely path instead.

Niquel wanted to laugh and talk and drink in the sight of her closest friend.

In case she never came back.