“What’s that?” Bao cupped his ear. “Surely, you don’t think his highness exaggerates!” He scoffed, freeing the bamboo staff lashed across his back with a quick twist. “Stand back and watch.”

Bao put on a show for them, fighting an imaginary opponent-ten imaginary opponents. He whirled like a dervish, the staff spinning in his hands until it was as blurred as a dragonfly’s wings. He crouched low, his staff sweeping the grass. He leapt high, lashing out with both feet in opposite directions and his staff in a third. He hurled his body in the sideways spinning kick parallel to the ground that seemed to defy the laws of nature. Bao vaulted and somersaulted, turned handsprings and backsprings, sending his staff soaring high into the air and catching it upon landing upright once more.

The children shrieked with delight, raising a deafening cacophony that made me smile and wince at once.

The women clapped for him.

“He’s quite something, your bad boy, isn’t he?” Amrita took my arm, smiling. “Moirin, would you consider staying here, you and Bao? It would please me very much if you made Bhaktipur your home.”

I hesitated, not wanting to refuse outright, a part of me not wanting to refuse at all.

“Look.” She squeezed my arm. “Ravindra dotes on him, eh? Your bad boy makes my serious boy smile. And you…” She searched my face, shook her head and laughed her chiming laugh. “You are a little bit of a great many things to me, young goddess, and I do not know how to name the sum of its parts. I only know that I am very, very fond of you, and I would rather not lose you.”

Since Bao and I had been reunited here, I had not consulted our shared diadh-anam. Now I did. It whispered the same message it had at our first reunion in the Tatar encampment a year ago. And it was not urgent, but it was persistent.

West, it called to us. Westward.

Somewhere, oceans beckoned.

“We can’t, Amrita,” I whispered, tears in my eyes. “I can’t. I wish I could, because whatever home means to me anymore, it is so very far away. If I could call any other place home, it would be this place with you and Bao and Ravindra in it. But I can’t. The gods are not finished with me. And… and I miss my mother, too.” I sniffled. “I hate to think of her never knowing what became of me.”

“Oh, Moirin!” Amrita fussed over me, wiping my tears away with the draped hem of her sari. “Of course you do. Forgive me, I did not mean to make this harder for you.”

I smiled at her through my tears. “You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“No.” I shook my head. “It was a kindness. And I am always grateful for your kindness.”

“Ah.” Unexpectedly, Amrita kissed my lips, sweetly and gently. “Yes, I know. I have not forgotten. Your demonstration of gratitude was very memorable. Will your gods let you stay a while, at least? Until spring comes? It will be much easier to travel then. I would be grateful for your aid in changing the world, Moirin. And I have promised to see you and your Bao wed. I would like to see it done when all the flowers are in bloom.”

My diadh-anam did not speak against it.

“Yes,” I said gratefully. “We will stay until spring.”

Bao fetched up alongside us, sweat glistening on his brown skin. “I am too old for such acrobatics,” he announced. “It makes my bones ache. Moirin, why are you crying?”

“Because we will have to leave this place,” I said.

He frowned and glanced unerringly toward the west. “Not yet, surely?”

“No.” I rubbed my face. “But it makes me sad to think on it.”

“I know.” Bao stroked my back. “We’ll just have to make the most of our time here, all right?”

I nodded. “That we will.”

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Alone in the bedchamber with Bao that night, I found myself feeling suddenly and unwontedly shy for the first time since… ever.

It had been so long since we’d been intimate, and so much had happened to us both. He had survived Kurugiri and Jagrati’s favoritism. I had been the instrument of Naamah’s blessing, and the near-victim of Kamadeva’s diamond. As much as I wanted this, I didn’t know how to be an ordinary, mortal lover anymore.

Bao sensed my uncertainty. “Do you want to wait until after we’re wed?” he asked. “I can if you can. I have great strength of will, you know,” he added, making me smile.

“No.” I took his hand, traced the creases on his callused palm. “No, it’s just…” I shrugged, lacking words. “I feel strange. Unlike myself.”

“Come here.” Bao tugged me close to him. I slid my arms around his waist, pressing my palms against his back, burying my face against his shoulder. He held me and breathed the Breath of Earth’s Pulse, one hand sliding through my hair, lifting it and letting it fall, a motion rhythmic and soothing, as though he were petting a cat. “Do you know why I was unkind to you when we first met?”

“Because you hated Raphael de Mereliot,” I said in a muffled voice. “And you didn’t think I was deserving of Master Lo’s attention.”

He laughed deep in his chest. “True. But there was another reason. I did not like D’Angelines very much. They think so highly of themselves, of their beauty.” His fingers slid through my hair, rising and falling. “Maybe it would have been different if I’d let myself get to know some of them. Too proud, I know.”

“They probably didn’t encourage it,” I murmured.

“No,” Bao agreed. “But I did not find them all so beautiful, either. To a Ch’in eye, it is a hard, sharp beauty, deadly as a blade. You… you were different. You looked like them and unlike them all at once, a more subtle blade, exotic to them, but a blend of the familiar and the strange to me.” He lifted my face, stroked my cheekbones with his thumbs. “You wanted me to speak of desire, Moirin? You were the most desirable woman I’ve ever seen, and I resented you for it. Foolish, but true.”

“Oh,” I whispered.

He kissed me softly, and I felt Naamah’s gift stirring at last. Doves-the wings fluttering in my belly were doves, not ravens. “If I were a poet, I would write poems of praise to your golden skin and ebony hair and green, green eyes,” he said solemnly. “But I am not a poet, Moirin. Only a peasant-boy risen high above his station.”

My throat tightened. “No, you are a great deal more than that, my magpie.”

His mouth quirked. “Oh, aye?” he asked, mimicking my inflection. “Am I?”

“Aye.” I wound my arms around his neck and kissed his lips. The feeling of strangeness had fled. “You are.”

Bao’s eyes gleamed in the lamplight.

The bright lady smiled.

It was slow and gentle and glorious. Cupping my face, Bao kissed me until I was dizzy with pleasure, his tongue delving into my mouth, teasing my own. Our flickering diadh-anams entwined in a private celebration, echoing the dance of our bodies. Liquid heat uncoiled in the pit of my belly, spreading languorously to my limbs. With careful reverence, he unpinned my sari, unwinding its complicated folds, kissing the skin he unveiled. The hollow of my throat, my collarbones.

Sinking to his knees before me, Bao traced patterns on my taut skin with the tip of his tongue, probing my navel and making me giggle breathlessly. He tugged down my fine linen underskirt, his deft tongue parting my nether-lips and darting between them.

“Oh!” I caught my breath, sinking my hands into his hair. My knees felt weak. “If you’re going to do that, I cannot keep my feet.”

He rose gracefully, his hands catching the hem of my cropped undershirt and easing it over my head, caressing my aching breasts in the process. “Lie down on the bed.”

I did.

Bao gazed at me, hot-eyed and infinitely patient. After all, my boasting boy did have great strength of will. He stripped off his tunic, revealing a sculpted brown torso corded with lean muscle. He shucked his loose breeches, his tight flanks rippling, more lean muscle on his thighs and calves. Ah, gods! He had a gorgeous body, the most beautiful I’d ever seen on a man. His erect phallus was drawn as tight as a bowstring, curving toward his flat belly, the swollen head as dark and ripe as a plum.