"We can walk."

"We can't, Shaski, not in this world." She was still holding his hands. "He doesn't need us now. He is helping the Kings of Kings in a place in the west. He will meet us in Kabadh in the summer. You will see him then."

They still didn't understand. It was strange how grown people could fail to understand things, even though adults were supposed to know more than children and kept telling you that.

He said, "Summer is too long from now, and we mustn't go to Kabadh. That is the thing we have to tell father. And if he is too far to walk, let's get horses. Or mules. My father got a mule. I can ride one. We all can. You can take turns holding the baby when we ride."

"Holding the baby?" his mother Jarita exclaimed. "In the Lady's holy name, you want us all to do this mad thing?"

Shaski looked at her. "I said that. Before."

Really. Mothers. Did they ever listen? Did they think he wanted to do this alone? He didn't even have any idea where he was going. Only that his father had gone one way on the road out of town, so he had gone that way himself, and the place he was at was called Sarantum, or nearly that, and it was far. Everyone kept saying that. He had understood that he might not be there by nightfall, walking alone, and he didn't like the dark now, when his dreams came.

There was a silence. His mother Jarita slowly dried her eyes. His mother Katyun was looking at him strangely. She had let go of his hands. "Shaski," she said finally, "tell me why we mustn't go to Kabadh."

She had never asked him that before.

What he learned, as he explained to his mothers about the dreams and how he felt certain things, was that other people didn't. It confused him, that the pull to go away, and the other feeling-the shape of a black cloud hovering whenever they said the name Kabadh-was not something either of his mothers shared, or even understood.

It frightened them, Shaski saw, and that scared him. Looking at their rigid expressions when he finished speaking, he finally began to cry, his face crumpling, knuckles rubbing at his eyes. "I'm- I'm sorry, "he said. "For run- running away. I'm sorry."

It was seeing her son in tears-her son who never cried-that made Katyun realize, finally, that there was something very large at work here even if it was beyond her grasp. It was possible that the Lady Anahita had come to Kerakek, to this insignificant fortress town at the desert's edge and had laid her finger on Shaghir, their darling child, Shaski. And the Lady's touch could mark a human being. It was known.

"Perun guard us all, "Jarita murmured. Her face was white. "May Azal never know this house."

But he did, if what Shaski had told them was in any way the truth. The Enemy knew Kerakek already. And even Kabadh. A cloud, a shadow, Shaski had said. How should a child know of shadows like that? And Rustem, her husband, needed them in the west. More north than west, actually. Among the infidels in Sarantium, who worshipped a burning god in the sun. Something no one who knew the desert could ever do.

Katyun drew a breath. She knew there was a trap here for her, something seductive and dangerous. She didn't want to go to Kabadh. She had never wanted to go there. How could she survive in a court? Among the sort of women who were there? Even the idea kept her up at night, trembling, sick to her stomach, or brought dreams, shadows of her own.

She looked at Jarita, who had been so very brave, hiding the blackness of her grief at the tidings of Rustem's elevation in caste, his summons to the court. The summons that meant they were to find her another husband, another home, another father for Inissa, little Issa.

Jarita had done something Katyun didn't think she herself could have done. She had let Rustem, the husband she loved, go on his journey thinking she accepted this, that it even pleased her, so that his heart might not be troubled in the wake of such great tidings as he had received.

In Perun's name, the things that women did.

It didn't please her. It was tearing her apart. Katyun knew it. She could hear Jarita in the dark at night, both women awake in the small house. Rustem ought to have seen through the deception, but men-even clever men-tended to miss these things, and he'd been so greatly caught up in healing the king, and then the caste elevation and his mission to the west. He had wanted to believe Jarita's deception, and so he had. And in any case, it was not as if a man could refuse the King of Kings.

Katyun looked from Shaski to Jarita. Rustem had told her the night before he left that she would have to do the thinking for the family, that he was relying on her. Even the students were gone, to other masters. She was on her own with this, as with all things now.

The baby cried from the other room, waking from her afternoon sleep, swaddled in her wooden cradle near the fire.

Kerakek. Kabadh. The Shadow of Black Azal. The finger of the Lady touching them. Shaski's…feelings about these things. An understanding coming, late, of how he had always been… different from the other children they knew. She had seen it, actually, had resisted. Perhaps in the same way that Rustem had resisted knowing how Jarita really felt: wanting to believe she was happy, though it might wound his pride. Poor Jarita, so delicate and so beautiful. Sometimes there could be flowers in the desert, but not in many places and not for very long.

Sarantium. Even larger than Kabadh, they said. Katyun bit her lip.

She hugged Shaski and sent him to the kitchen to ask the cook for something to eat. He hadn't had his breakfast yet, had left the house in the dark while they slept. Jarita, still white-faced as a priestess on a night of the Sacred Flame, went to the baby.

Katyun sat alone, thinking hard. Then she summoned a servant and sent him to the fortress with a request that the garrison commander be so good as to honour them with a visit when time allowed.

Boredom. A sense of injustice. A peace bought with gold. They all came together for Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, in that winter of bitterness.

He never used to find it tedious here in Kerakek. He liked the desert, the south: it was what he knew, the world of his childhood. He enjoyed the visits from the camel-riding nomads, going out to drink palm wine with them in their tents, the slow gestures, silences, words doled out as carefully as water. The people of the sand were important here, buffers against the Sarantines, trading partners bringing spices and gold from the distant, fabled south on the ancient camel routes. And they were advance troops in any war.

Of course some of the desert wanderers were allied with Sarantium and traded there… which was why it mattered so much to keep those tribes that favoured Bassania happy. The soldiers didn't always understand that, but Vinaszh had grown up in Qandir, even farther south: the nuances of Ammuz and Soriyya and the nomads were no mystery to him. Or less of a mystery than they were to most men: no one could truthfully say they understood the peoples of the sand.

He had never nourished visions of himself in a more prominent place or role. He was a garrison commander in a world he comprehended well enough. It had been, until recently, a life that pleased him.

But this winter the court had come to Kerakek, and a good part of it-with the king himself-had lingered as an arrow wound healed, and the ripples that followed upon the deaths (some deserved, some not) of princes and royal wives subsided.

Vinaszh, who had played no small part in the events of a terrible day, had found himself altered after Shirvan and the court left. The fortress seemed empty to him. Bleak and echoing. The town was what it always had been… a dusty, eventless cluster of little homes. And the wind kept blowing from the desert. He had dreams in restless nights.