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“They are just fires, Dariel,” Leeka said. “Campfires and lamps.”
“But so many of them! It’s like a city.”
“No, not a city. It’s just a village, but around it is the begi
Together they walked down toward the sea of lights, the individual points bobbing and rising with each step. Their entry into the camp and progress farther into the town was a blur. Leeka handled it entirely. Dariel could not have said how long it took, but at some point he found himself approaching a particular compound. Leeka whispered that this was the place they were searching for.
A Talayan squatted on his heels a little distance from the door. He did not move anything except his eyes as Dariel approached, following him each step of the way forward. The man’s expression did not change in any overt way, but there was something in the quality of how he stared that altered. By the time Dariel stopped before the man, he was sure that there was something like a glimmer of humor behind the stillness of his handsome, dark-ski
He said something in his native language. Dariel started to say he did not understand him, but the man smiled and motioned for him to enter. In accented Acacian, he said, “Welcome, Prince. Inside. Please, go inside.”
The tent stretched off a considerable distance, supported here and there by gnarled beams of wood that lifted the fabric. Lit by oil lamps, it was crowded with stools and couches, tables and charts that made walking into the space feel like entering a maze. Dariel stopped and stood, looking around.
At about the same time that he spotted a human shape bent over a small desk, the man raised his head and saw him as well. His hair was close-cropped like a Talayan’s, but his skin was a lighter shade of brown, a sort of ta
Then the man was moving toward him. In motion he was fluid and strong, like a Talayan ru
And then he understood.
CHAPTER
Cori
Hanish Mein, of course, was responsible for spurring these thoughts. Cori
But she was pleased that she had. Nine years after the tragedies of the war, she had found an order to life, a position that made sense, and a partner to share it with. Their liaison was fresh and newly created, and yet it was so much a part of her that she could not imagine any other way of being. They were together as much as the circumstances of Hanish’s office would allow. They shared the same bed each night. She was so absolutely hungry for him, insatiably and embarrassingly so.
One evening she made him wait for her in bed. When she entered the room she did so from the far side. She wore only a diaphanous shift, so short it was really just a shirt. Walking toward him, feeling his eyes on her, knowing the candlelight would highlight the contours of her hips and abdomen and breasts, she hummed with nervous excitement. It was the strangest of feelings. She felt tawdry and jaded, her lips moistened with oil, eyes shadowed like a courtesan’s. But she also tingled with i
She continued to accompany Hanish on state trips, and in the space of just a few weeks she made herself indispensable in social matters. She stood at his side when Hanish met Candovian tribal leaders at a summit near Elos. At Alyth she tutored the taciturn leagueman Sire Dagon in archery. She won compliments from him by the end of the day, both on her skill with a bow and on her entrancing character. She served as hostess on a pleasure barge that embarked from Alecia and traced a large circle back to port hours later. She was perfectly suited, it seemed, to serve as an intermediary between the rich merchants-many of whom were Acacian-and the ruling Meinish aristocracy.
All of this was much to the chagrin of the ambitious hangers-on that made up the chieftain’s court. They had been happy enough to have Cori
There were more somber moments in their relationship as well, as when she and Hanish stood side by side on the viewing platforms of the Kidnaban mines. They looked down on a crater whose scale denied plausibility. Hanish pointed out the Akaran flags that still flew from the platforms. “Akarans created this,” he’d said. “How did your people ever conceive of such things? Where did they get the gall to imagine they could harness the labor of millions?”
She had felt just enough insult in these questions to consider one or two sarcastic responses, but she said nothing. They would not have been true on her tongue. He was right. The scale of the injustice was incredible. He might be the driving force behind it now, but he had not been the one to conceive of it in the first place. She wondered how she had lived so many years at the heart of an empire without knowing by whose labor her prosperity had been assured.