lined walls going briefly liquid, and she wondered whether Sergei might be right. Perhaps it was time.
There was a soft knock on the door, and she blinked, wiping at her eyes quickly with her sleeve. “Come,” she said, and Talbot stuck his head in the doorway.
“The Ambassador said you would want me, Kraljica.”
She sniffed. “Yes,” she told him. “Come in, but first have one of the servants bring parchment and ink. And if Vajiki ca’Vikej has arrived, tell him that I will be with him shortly.”
“I was terrified when I heard, worried that you might have been injured…”
Erik was pacing back and forth in front of the windows of the apartment. Their lunch steamed on the table untouched. Allesandra watched him from her chair at the table, staring at him: at the worry in his face, at the way the muscles lurched on his bald skull.
It’s real, the concern he has for you. It’s not faked, it’s not based on his own agenda: it’s genuine. She hoped she was right in that. She also realized that she’d made a decision, all unbidden and unasked for. It was wrapped in her own loneliness, in her estrangement from Jan, in the mistake she’d made with Erik’s vatarh, in the intense grief she felt when she was with Varina, in her anger with the Morellis. She hoped her decision was the right one.
“I’m fine, Erik,” she told him. “I was shaken but not injured. The attack wasn’t directed at me.”
He nodded fiercely. “Had you been hurt, I would have gone out myself and found this Nico Morel, and…” He stopped, turning away from the windows to look at her. His face and his voice softened. “My apologies, Kraljica. It’s just that I was so worried…”
“I’m fine,” she repeated. “And here, while we’re alone, I would prefer you call me Allesandra.”
“Allesandra,” he said, as if tasting the name. He smiled. “Thank you. But don’t underestimate these Morellis. They’re a danger to you, whether you believe it or not. They’re fanatics, and they threaten anyone who doesn’t believe as they believe.”
“Are you a fanatic, Erik?” she asked him gently. She gestured to the chair next to her right.
He sat before he answered. “About West Magyaria, you mean?” His hand cupped his wineglass, shivering the ruby liquid in it. “No, not about that. In politics, I’m more of a pragmatist than my vatarh. I believe that West Magyaria would be better off as part of the Holdings. I believe that I would be a good Gyula, if Cenzi desires that to happen. I’m willing to work as hard as I need to make that happen, but I also know that sometimes sacrifices and compromises must be made to accomplish things, and that sometimes the best result isn’t the one you would like to see. So, no, I’m not a fanatic but a realist.” He lifted the glass and set it down again. “That’s not to say that there aren’t things that I care deeply about or that I’m not a passionate man, Kralji-” A breath. “Allesandra. When I come to love something, or someone…”
His hand left the glass and lay on the linen tablecloth. She reached out her own hand and put it on top of his. She heard him draw in his breath. His lovely pale eyes held her own gaze, unblinking, almost as if in challenge. His fingers opened, then laced with hers.
“I am passionate,” she told him softly. “Nessantico and the Holdings are my passion. And I am also dangerous because of that. So this…” She pressed his fingers lightly. “… would not be a decision to make lightly. Or, if you prefer, we can eat the dinner that’s set here for us.”
He nodded. He lifted his hand, still holding hers, to his mouth, and kissed the back of her hand. His breath was warm on her skin, the touch of his lips soft and exciting. “Are you hungry, Allesandra?” he asked.
This is what you want… This is why you asked him here today. .. “I am,” she answered. She rose from her chair, still holding his hand.
She led him away.
Niente
The waters of Munereo Bay swarmed with ships anchored together so densely that it seemed a person might walk entirely across the great bay without getting wet. Their sails were furled and lashed on their masts, and they huddled together under a low sky with the clouds racing west. Fleeting shafts of dusty sunlight pierced the clouds and slid over the bay, sparkling on the distant waves and the bound white cloth on their masts.
Niente had never in his life seen so many ships gathered in one place, had only once before seen so many warriors of the Tehuantin gathered together.
He heard a gasp from his side as his son Atl came alongside him. “By Axat’s left tit,” he breathed, the profanity loud in the chill morning air, “that is something new in the world.”
“It certainly is,” Niente told the young man. He blinked, trying unsuccessfully to clear his blurred vision-even his remaining eye’s sight was beginning to fail. They were standing on a hill outside the city walls, not far from the main road down to the harbor. The road was thick with soldiers, marching down to the boats. The few hundred nahualli, the spellcasters that would be accompanying the invasion force, were gathered in their own group a little farther down the hill, just off the road. They would be among the last to board the ships, just before Tecuhtli Citlali and his High Warriors.
Behind Niente and Atl, the thick walls of Munereo were still pockmarked and stained by the vestiges of the battle that had raged here a decade and a half ago, when the Holdings forces had been defeated by the army of Tecuhtli Zolin, Citlali’s predecessor. Niente had been here for that battle, had seen the black sand roar and the stones fly, had helped to sacrifice the defeated Easterner leaders to Axat. And he had sailed with Tecuhtli Zolin from this very harbor across the sea to the Holdings itself.
So long ago. It felt like another lifetime to Niente.
A lifetime he was now forced to revisit if he wanted to achieve the vision he’d glimpsed in the scrying bowl. How many of these warriors will die for this? How many souls will be sent to the underworld because of what I’m doing? Axat, please tell me that I can do this, that it will be worth the guilt my own soul will have to bear. Help me.
“Taat?”
Niente shook himself from reverie. “What?”
“I thought you said something.”
“No,” he answered. At least I hope not. No one could know this vision. Not yet. “I was clearing my throat; the air this morning is hard on my lungs.” He gestured out toward the ships and the bay. “Tomorrow, we’ll be sailing toward the sun when it rises.”
“And there will be good winds,” Atl said, and the confidence in his voice made Niente turn to his son, his eyes narrowing.
“You know this?” he asked.
Atl smiled briefly, like the touch of sun through the clouds on the ships below. “Yes,” he answered.
“Atl-” Niente began, and his son lifted a hand.
“Stop, Taat. Here, I’ll finish it for you. ‘Look at me. Look at how Axat has scarred me. Leave the scrying to some other nahualli. Axat is hardest on those to whom She gives Sight.’ I’ve heard it all. Many times.”
“You should look at me,” Niente persisted. He touched his blind, white eye, stroked the sagging muscles of the left side of his face, the ridges of scarred, dead skin: a mask of horror. “Is this what you want to look like?”
Atl’s gaze swept over Niente’s face and departed once more. “That took many years, Taat,” he said. “And the oath of the nahualli binds us to do what Axat asks of us. And your scrying got you that also.” He pointed to the golden band around Niente’s right arm.
“You musn’t do this,” Niente persisted. “Atl, I mean it. When I’m gone, do as you wish, but while I live, while I’m your Taat and the Nahual…” He put his hand on Atl’s shoulder. The contrast of their skin startled him: his own was loose, painfully dry, and plowed with uncountable tiny furrows; Atl’s was smooth and bronzed. “Don’t call on Her,” he finished. “That’s my task. My burden.”
“It doesn’t have to be yours alone.”
“Yes, it does,” Niente said, and the words came out more sharply than he’d intended, snapping Atl’s head back as if he’d been slapped. The young man’s eyes were slitted, and he shot a glance of raw fury at Niente for a moment before turning his head slightly to stare deliberately out toward the bay. “Take care of him,” Xaria had told him before they left. “He loves you, he respects you, and he admires you. He wants so much to make you proud of
