The Sea Eternal

Book 2: Empire Without End

by Emery Robin

Genres: Science Fiction Romance; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

"Wherever Emery Robin goes from here, I'm going to follow." —Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author

From one of the most original voices in science fiction comes the spectacular sequel to the epic, interstellar love story that began in The Stars Undying. 

Goddess, tell me the story. 

Matheus Ceirran, commander of half the known world, is dead. For the past year, his loyal captain Anita has hunted down his assassins—that is, when she can pull herself from the bed of Altagracia Caviro Patramata, queen and oracle of the client planet of Szayet. But when Anita’s quest for revenge takes her across the borders of an enigmatic neighboring empire, she uncovers a dangerous secret that could upend the fragile balance of the galaxy. 
 
Meanwhile, Ceirran’s heir apparent Otávio Julhan grows more and more powerful in the capital that Anita has left behind. Caught between home, Szayet, and a new and greater threat, Anita finds herself at the center of a war that threatens to collapse her world.
 
The fate of empires dances on the tip of a knife, and history will be written by the victors in this sweeping tale of myth, imperial legacy, and the love affair of a lifetime.

Praise for the Empire Without End: 

"Dazzling, transportive, boundless, precise—and dares to ask, what if Mark Antony was the hottest butch girl in space?" —Casey McQuiston

"Gorgeously written, impeccably characterized, and profoundly aware of the way the ghosts of history linger." —Emily Tesh 

"A glittering triumph of a book that weaves together history and tragedy into a star-spanning epic." —Everina Maxwell 

Release date: March 11, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 528

Sample

One fine summer day, when the birds were singing and the lindens had flowered and the sun had come to rest on the ripples in the river, a woman bashed her sister’s skull in with a rock. So the city of Ceiao was born.

Don’t like it? Well, it’s only one story. Here’s another: Long ago, so long ago that the days were too new to be counted, a great ship landed on a fine and fertile planet. Out streamed the people, men and women, noble and brave. They had come from a faraway city by the sea, these brave and noble people, a city where a war had been lost and all their fine towers had burned. They had fled a long way. And their leader was the noblest and bravest of them all, because building Ceiao was his destiny, and because he was the son of a god, and because he always did as he was told.

When I was young, my neighbors would tell me that the people of the second story made Ceians in their image, strong and disciplined, upright and hardworking, uncorrupted and chaste and dutiful, enlightened and enlighteners and explorers and leaders of men. For all I know, it may have even been true. That was beside the point. It was for children, and so it wasn’t the truth but the lesson that mattered: Home is wherever you can take it. This is the beginning of empires.

You asked for a story. Before I begin, let me tell you the truth: I think now that the woman of the first story made Ceians in her image, too.

At the highest point of heaven there was a spark, and the spark danced, and as it danced it grew and licked with a red tongue out at the dark and at the jagged half-moons, and it spat out light and shouted, and the seagulls cried and hurled themselves off the ships and the harbor-gate and beat frantically toward the west. Through the light shot one—two—three dozen steel dots, flashing through smoke, weaving, screaming toward the town below.

“A message for you, Disciple,” said a servant into my ear. “Urgent news from Ceiao.”

“Go away,” I said, and emptied my gun at the sky.

The drones burst. Where they’d hung in the sky, scraps fluttered, ashes falling—then, as they drifted toward the torches and strings of lanterns and flashing violet lamps, the light caught them, and the crowd that had gathered before the royal palace shrieked and leapt up, hands scrabbling in the air, snatching the flakes of gold to their chests, turning up their faces to let them fall into their open mouths.

A palace official threw her hands up. “Twenty-one confirmed hits to Admiral Decretan!” she bellowed. “The Honored Disciple wins again!”

The noblemen around me burst into applause. So did the crowd, hooting and whistling, waving cups and tankards in my direction. I let my gun fall, and so did the Szayeti next to me, a long-haired young man in the palace guard. The official stomped her feet for attention. “The prize!” she shouted, gesturing. Around the side of the steps, puffing and panting, came two of my soldiers, carrying an enormous silver platter stacked with bottles of wine.

Fire streaked across the sky again, green this time, then blue. Behind it, an eye opened up in the black, and resolved itself into a glittering golden falcon, which spread its wings and became two leaping cats, four silver crocodiles, eight asps winding down the sky toward the horizon, a holo-forest of shining kelp curling back up from the sea and bursting into sunflowers.

I thrust my fist in the air. “Give them to the people!” I bellowed.

The Alectelans roared, surging up. The platter tumbled immediately and vanished. A dozen hands reached out and bore me up onto the people’s shoulders, a riot of hot flesh and drunken voices, the river of stars rolling and swaying above me, the buildings of the Bolvardo del Tombo bobbing along the corner of my eye. Women smacked kisses onto my cheeks. Wine spilled over my mouth and down my shirt collar. I whooped, shouted, stuck my tongue out for people to drop sweets onto it, and somewhere around the third street corner fell out of their arms and into a circle dance. The dancers were screaming the words to a song I didn’t know, something Sintian, and when I howled nonsense syllables in time they shrieked with laughter, tugged me back toward the palace, and shoved me toward the woman waiting at the base of the steps.

“My lady,” I called, swaying, and held out a hand.

Fireworks burst again. Szayet’s smile flared gold. She seized me and spun into my arms.

When we had come down to the streets of Alectelo this morning to begin the festival day, her hair had been braided tightly back, her kohl in neat wings beneath the jade on her eyelids, her crown straight and gleaming on her brow. Now that we’d paraded up and down the Bolvardo del Tombo, cheered on the footraces, feasted on fish and beer and fresh cherries with the crowd at the Summer Market, and rowed out into the harbor to light the first fireworks, the kohl had smeared across her temple and the pads of my fingers, the crown sat askew, the hair hung loose and sweet-smelling over her bare brown shoulders. I’d been dragging my fingers through that hair not half an hour ago, when we’d ducked into an alleyway near the Summer Market, and she’d walked me up against the wall and pushed her thigh between my legs and her hands under my shirt.

“What is this,” she said into my ear now, “the fifteenth time you’ve won an athletics contest against the Alectelans this week? The sixteenth?”

I tilted my neck invitingly. She laughed and kissed me there, lingering to dig her teeth briefly into my pulse. “Fortune loves me,” I said.

“Someone certainly loves you,” she said, took my chin in two fingers, and caught my mouth in a long, slow, hungry kiss, her hand sliding round my waist and drifting down with interest.

Her mouth was bittersweet with wine and magnificently warm, and the rain spattering my neck was a nasty shock of cold. I shivered and pulled away. Deep clouds were collecting over the palace, blurring the poppies and monkey flowers still sketching themselves in light across the sky. Weather always came on so damn quick in this town, I thought—you couldn’t trust its sky any more than its queen. At the palace door stood the messenger who’d said Ceiao to me before I’d shot at the drones. She’d been waiting; now she grimaced at the sky, pulled her hood over her head, and turned to duck into the dry hall.

Szayet caught the direction of my gaze. Her hand stopped moving, to my great annoyance. “The courtiers will want to celebrate your victory,” she said into my ear. “Your officers will want to celebrate, too.”

“We don’t have to go in,” I said to her dark eyelashes, her half-open lips, the wink of quicksilver pearl in her ear. “We could just stay here, you and I, until it all goes dark.”

“You always say that,” she murmured.

“It’s always true,” I murmured back.

We were drunk with sun as much as we were with wine, and with laughter more than either. When I blinked, I could still feel flecks of gold on my lashes. The shadows of the great sandstone statues leaned over the palace steps, peering thoughtfully at Szayet’s crown. To my left, smooth-faced and pale-eyed, its mouth hooked up in a sneer: Alekso of Sintia, called here the Undying. I had never seen that face outside of statues and paintings. Only two living people ever had, and one was locked in a cell on Itsaryet, and the other was striding ahead of me toward the palace’s double doors.

To my right, though—older than Alekso but no less handsome, a long scar curving along his jaw, his smile faint and unreadable—a face that I knew as well as I knew my own. Sometimes I thought I’d known it better. It was five hundred and fifty-one days since I had found my friend Matheus Ceirran’s hacked-apart corpse, and three hundred and forty days since I had last touched Ceian soil, and twenty-nine days since I had last gone to bed sober. Nothing in the world was wrong with me, and I was spectacularly happy.

There were two guards at the door, one Szayeti and one Ceian. The Szayeti fell to their knees. “Holiest Oracle,” they shouted over the noise of the flutes. “A blessed Feast of the Ship Bokapalo to you,” and when Szayet gestured them up, they scrambled to their feet and bowed deeply to me. “Beloved Disciple.”

The Ceian guard was rolling a sílfion cigarette. She caught my eye and smirked. I grinned back. “You keep telling me so,” I said.

Almost a year of breathing her air meant that Szayet no longer had to glare at me. It was just as good a thrill, anyway, to know that she wanted to. I grinned at her, too, and slipped my hand around her waist.

“We’ve received an urgent message from Ceiao, Disciple,” said the Ceian. “It says—”

“Not now, it doesn’t. Like hell Ceiao is seeing me before I’ve had a bath,” I said. “We’ll eat at the dice tables, I think. Does that suit my lady?”

“Well enough,” said Szayet, though her expression had grown still flatter. “Tell the kitchen to bring up whichever boar has finished roasting.”

They bowed again to her and pulled the doors open. Noise tumbled down the steps, into the night.

A dozen Szayeti nobles burst toward us in a cloud of thick perfume, laughing and shouting tuneless love songs, clinging to one another’s arms. They paused to sweep deep and elegant bows—first to Szayet, then to me—and went swaying toward the street, calling out to strangers, waving bejeweled hands. From within the hall two dozen more arms reached out to us, encrusted with rings and bracelets—a jungle of bright eyes, pipes shrieking, incense billowing out into the dusk, blue and red light, Holiest, Anita, Oracle, Anita, Queen, Anita—

Szayet caught an outstretched hand and was gone. I struck a match on the doorframe, lit the Ceian soldier’s cigarette, and paused briefly at the Szayeti guard’s side—how’s your latest lover, that’s a crying shame, cards tomorrow night in the cellars, I won’t forget—and went without haste into the throng.

Once I had charged through this hall in the middle of a gunfight, and pockmarked the granite pillars with fire, and torn the tapestries, and smashed the mosaics on the floor. Now the pillars were green marble, the ceiling was new curved glass, the walls were scattered with lanterns winking in every color, and the floor was scuffed with five hundred moving feet. Bodies pressed close on each side of me, hands on my shoulders, hands on my thighs. One of my soldiers pressed a wine cup into my hand. I tossed it back at once and reached out blindly for another.

Here were drummers, here were timbrel players. Here were dancers on the balconies, dressed in gauze and necklaces of lilies. Here were basins of ice carved in the shapes of women, their bellies stacked high with black grapes and white melon and their arms and feet already melting onto the floor, dancers splashing barefoot in the puddles. I snatched an infant squid from a platter spilling over with shellfish, stumbled, fell into a platinum tree stretching its arms up to the ceiling—here were leaves made of gold and fruit of diamonds, here were living ivy and bougainvillea hanging down from their branches between twisting silk ribbons. Four dozen hummingbirds fluttered round the ceiling and darted down to light on the branches.

Up the stairs, to the landing where mechanical ostrich-feathered fans waved clouds of perfume down across the crowd—from this height I could see the whole curving shore of Alectelo: a handful of Ceian ships with wings folded up in the harbor, the crowd on the boulevard still dancing as the sky flashed from bronze to honey and the rain shimmered down, horses galloping round the new racetrack, noblemen diving in the marble-lined hot springs in the courtyard, a pair of tigers pacing through our rooftop garden. Around the side of the balcony, a three-headed stone serpent spouted wine, frankincense-scented water, honey. I dunked my cup in the foaming mixture at its base and threw it back. Down the stairs again, and here were more fireworks, little ones, green and violet sparks spitting up from the floor, stinging the bare thigh of a Sintian girl who shrieked with laughter and fell into the arms of a palace guard. Here a circle dance, tripping left toward the musicians—here two more of my soldiers and a Szayeti girl, pressed up against the wall together, hands moving over one another’s hips—and here my lady again, sandwiched between two wide-eyed noblewomen, rolling her dice in her hand.

I slipped my arms around her waist. She startled and threw: two ones, two fours.

“Your luck’s run out,” I whispered into her ear.

She twisted in my arms and cupped my jaw with her free hand and kissed me slow, slow, until I shivered and gave in and opened up for her, and then she pulled back and said, “What did you mean, You keep telling me so?”

“What? Nothing,” I said, and went to catch her mouth with mine again, but she laid her hand over my lips and I had to settle for flicking my tongue over the pad of her finger. “If you mean to begin whipping me when I blaspheme, you’re a little late,” I said against her palm. “There’s a few years’ worth of it to catch up on by now.”

“I don’t believe in too late,” she said.

The swift and unwanted thought came to me of the scarred sandstone face outside. “That’s where I part from you, I’m afraid,” I said. At that her face tightened, and I grinned an easy grin and said swiftly, “Well, it’s too late for you to strip me down and have your way with me back in that alley by the Summer Market, isn’t it?”

“Hm,” she said. The girl beside her had thrown four threes, and was pulling gleaming stacks of dekar into her bust while her friend laughed. Szayet scooped up the dice without looking and threw again: three sixes. The dealer burst into applause, but Szayet slipped out of my arms.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

The noise of the party did not fade when we were in her rooms. The noise of the party never did. It drifted sometimes, to the shore or to outlying taverns, or it dimmed to the faint murmur of laughter and one flute—that was usually when I would muster up defiance against my hangover and descend again, dressed in a pink feather coat and bearing three bottles of Ceiao’s best in my fists, roaring for all my best soldiers to come and see. But to my knowledge, whether we were there or no, whether it was market day or a holiday or a day when any decent person would have been working, whether it rained or shone or blew hurricanes from the west, the party had never yet died.

Now, while the kitharas thrummed under our feet and muffled whoops echoed over the sea, my lady held her hair away from the nape of her neck. I untied the fastening on her dress, pausing occasionally to kiss the curve of her shoulder, the high knob of her spine. Ordinarily, she would even let me leave marks on her here—one, fading purple, stained the nape of her neck like wine—but now, when my mouth lingered too long on her jaw, Szayet pushed away from me and let the loose fabric unfold itself down from her breasts to her hips to her legs.

She stepped out of the pooled cotton and went to the mirror by her window. I allowed myself to sit still and look at her, which I had not yet had my fill of today: her dark red mouth, her wide soft thighs, the long and nimble fingers of her hands. She was looking at me, too, but if what was in her face was hunger, I didn’t recognize it. I could think of no reason for her to be hungry, in any case. My hair was stiff with salt wind from the harbor, my arms and legs the usual mess of old scars and muscle gone soft. My clothes were fleet clothes—a blue tunic, a soldier’s belt, well-worn boots. I looked, I thought, exactly as I had looked every single day since she’d met me on the Ceian docks when we’d both been young. From the tablet I’d left on the bedside table, a red seal blinked urgently: a message from my sister, Flavia. I stepped casually to the left, so that her shoulder obscured it from me.

“Disciple,” said Szayet.

“Yes?” I said.

“You answer to it when it suits you, then,” she said.

“Oh, I do everything if it suits me,” I said, coming toward her. “I eat and drink, if it suits me, and I come when I’m called, if it suits me. And if it suits me—” I took her hand, ducking my head to press my open mouth to her palm, but she pulled away.

“I told you I bought a new dress, didn’t I?” she said. “From that new weavers’ studio down by the Winter Market.”

Bewildered at the change of subject, I retreated to her bed. “You told me,” I said. She had a thousand pet businesses springing up around Alectelo and all the southern islands: tailors here, painters there, pearlsmiths and vintners and glassmakers and starfighter racers. Szayet, as the letters piling up in my tablet from the Merchants’ Council informed me in tones of increasing irritation, needed less from Ceiao than Szayet ever had. That was well enough, to my mind. Why was I meant to give a damn whether there was Ceian steel hanging in the skies, or whether I spoke Ceian with my men at the harbor, or whether I treated with Ceian merchants at the Summer Market? It wasn’t life-and-death, this place. It was only Alectelo.

Szayet went to her wardrobe, bare feet silent on the carpet, and lifted the dress carefully out. It was a liquid silky red thing, a low-cut collar and ribbons floating out at its back. Around its hem and up the skirt, gold and black crossed and crisscrossed: Sintian shape and Szayeti pattern, a mixture unmistakably of this place.

She held it out and looked at me. It took me a moment to understand what she meant. When I did, I grinned, uncertain.

She didn’t smile back. My humor died. I swallowed. “It won’t fit,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” she said, face unreadable. “Still. You’ll do as you’re told, won’t you?”

Fortune help me, I thought, and I shed my clothes and stepped into the skirt of the dress. She smoothed the fabric up my sides, over my chest—it was too big, I’d thought, and I had been right, but she pulled the ribbons sharply at my back, and I gasped, and then the dress was tight against me, as tight as binding rope.

“Sit,” she said, turning to the wardrobe without looking to see whether I would obey her.

I sat. On my knees, over my thighs, the silk ran as smooth as water. When I looked down at myself, it was like seeing two sheets of glass laid over each other: from my knees downward, my own familiar legs and feet, and then up, my belly and my breasts, Szayet, Szayet as she must appear to her own eyes.

She turned back, now holding a terra-cotta pot in her hand, and she came toward me and settled herself on my thighs, a warm weight. “Be still,” she said, “and don’t blink.”

The kohl stick trailed over one eyelid, then the other. When she leaned back and I blinked at last, I could feel the heaviness, faint and wet.

“Open,” she said.

I opened my mouth. Her right thumb pressed into my lip. Her left took my chin, holding it steady. In her eyes was a look of focus I rarely saw. Now I was not breathing.

She slid off my lap, went to the table again, and returned with two strings of pink pearls. “Bow your head,” she said, and when I did, she looped one around my throat and lifted my wrist to fasten the other. At last she stood back.

“Come to the mirror,” she said.

When she had begun, I had thought I would laugh. I would look grotesque, I thought, like a costume party, a theater clown. The reflection in the mirror was not ugly. It was unrecognizable. The mouth that twitched redly in its face, the hips and waist under the delicate silk, were not a soldier’s, they were not a Ceian’s. The black eyes within the black kohl were hardly human. They were the eyes of an insect—of a creature I did not know.

“Now I am Ana Decretan,” she said, just behind my shoulder, “and you are Patramata.”

“I’m not,” I said, turning.

“You are,” she said, and laid her cool hand on my cheek and kissed me and bit hard at my lip. Her mouth came away red. “You are my client queen, and I am the lady of the Swordbelt Arm. Lie back on the bed.”

I stepped back and fell onto the pillows. She took the hem of the skirt and lifted it, and then her hand was on me, fingers working, and I swallowed and swallowed and could not speak. “Do you like this, Madam Oracle?” she said. “Do you like it, Altagracia?”

“Szayet, please,” I managed to gasp.

“But you are Szayet,” she said. “Open your legs, dear heart.”

I threw my hand over my eyes. The pearls moved coldly and roughly over my skin. I could feel the kohl smear against them. My legs were open, and her hand was between them, and her naked animal’s body clambered over mine and held it down, and I opened my red mouth and said nothing at all.

When I woke, my head was pounding. Grey morning slanted in through the window, prickling warm air. I’d slept through the storm.

In the palace wing that Szayet had rebuilt after her civil war, a solarium jutted out precipitously over a maze of priests’ quarters and palace gardens. Its roof and three of its walls were clear glass, tessellated with golden wire into hexagons, so that when I came through the door I felt I was walking into a wasp’s nest. A dozen cages dangled from the ceiling. Hoopoes cooed inside, sidling along their perches in flutters of orange and black.

Szayet was sitting cross-legged on one of her silk cushions, wearing a loose blue robe embroidered with peonies and eating a peach. Cushions had to be replaced rather more often than not in an aviary, but she’d told me she judged it a worthwhile expense. “Sit down,” she said. “There’s bread and honey left for you.”

I approached carefully, eyeing her to see if she intended any sudden moves, and sat. She bent over my hands and began to apply honeycomb carefully to a brown slice of bread.

“An ambassador from your colony Cherekku came to court the day before last,” she said. “You remember, of course, the war brewing between the puppet king Ceiao installed on Cherekku ten years ago and the priests’ council there.”

“Mmph,” I said in knowledgeable tones around the honeycomb.

“Well, the ambassador was from the priests,” said Szayet. “They’re very low on funds, as are their enemies, and they’ve come to me for help. The ambassador says, if the priests are victorious in convincing Ceiao to install a different puppet king, Cherekku can offer very favorable trade deals to Szayet. But my foreign minister suggests we can do better than trade deals. He says that we could convince the priests to permanently accept a Szayeti into the council.”

About one-fifth of this speech I understood. I blinked politely at her. “Mmmmph.”

“Two hundred years ago, Szayet had colonies,” said Szayet. “We lost them when we were poor. We became Ceiao’s client state in those days, and we fell into Ceiao’s debt. Now we are still Ceiao’s client, but we are wealthy beyond imagination. Our neighbors beg us for favors, and we may force them into whatever terms we find favorable. Of course, now our neighbors are all Ceiao’s colonies—” She paused for me to interject. I did not. Her mouth flattened. “Should I do it, then?” she said. “Arrange to install a representative of Alekso and Ceirran Undying in one of Ceiao’s possessions?”

My eyes went involuntarily to her ear. A silver pearl sat in it, gold wires curling around her helix and into her temple. In the pearl’s center shone a deep black fingerprint.

I’d seen her dip her finger in ink and press it to the pearl herself. I’d seen her proclaim to her people and to my gathered soldiers that this pearl held the soul of Matheus Ceirran, the immortal and undying—that Ceirran had chosen her as his Oracle, so that for the rest of her days she would be the bearer of not one god, but two. I’d seen her show the priests a smooth, unmarked pearl in her ear, and tell them that this was Alekso’s soul, and the marked one was Ceirran’s, and the mark would tell them which of her two Pearls she bore that day, and which of Szayet’s two gods spoke through her now.

I was the only person in the world besides her who knew that there was only one Pearl of the Dead. The one that should have been Ceirran’s immortal soul had been dissolved in a cup of wine by Cátia Lançan, one of Ceirran’s assassins. Alekso had helped her build that Pearl in exchange for a promise that she would abdicate the throne and proclaim her sister his Oracle. She had broken that promise, and she and her god had not spoken in over a year.

Honey dripped onto her first knuckle. She put it absently to her mouth and sucked, and I saw a black streak on the calloused pad of her finger. The memory of my own eyes in the mirror, kohl-stained and unrecognizable, floated back to me. “Fine,” I said.

“That’s all?” said Szayet. “Fine?”

“Put whoever you like in whatever government you like,” I said through a mouthful of bread. “Don’t raise troops against me, I suppose. Why should it matter to me?”

“I have no interest in raising troops against you,” she said with strained patience. “I thought it might matter to you whether or not we have a man loyal to Ceirran Undying in the government of one of Ceiao’s colonies. Loyal to Ceirran Undying, Anita. Not to Ceiao.” I still said nothing, and she said, “Does Ceirran’s disciple think Ceirran wants Cherekku to liberalize its sex laws? Does Ceirran’s disciple think Ceirran wants Cherekku to buy six thousand imperial tons of pearl from Szayet at outrageous rates?”

“What do you think he wants, Oracle?” I said.

“For Alectelo to be the crossroads of trade across three galactic spiral arms,” said Szayet. “For a Library overflowing with books, and a sea overflowing with pearl, and land overflowing with green. For Sintian officials to speak both the Sintian and Szayeti tongues in official business—and for the Szayeti tongue to come to Cherekku, too, and even the court of the Kutayeti emperor, and Itsaryet, and all the rest of the neighboring worlds. For new philosophy, and new theater, and new poetry, to suit a strange new future. For the Szayeti people to have power they haven’t known for some five hundred years—for them to come out of the shadow of not only dead, broken Ostrayet, but out of the shadow of Alekso’s Sintia, and Ceiao’s shadow, too.”

I shrugged, reaching for the honey pot. “You talk like you expect me to object.”

She slid the pot away, and my hand closed on empty air. I grunted, outraged. She hissed through her teeth. “I speak in the hopes that you’ll tell me what you want our god to say!” she said. “Greater financial support to the poor? Relaxation of immigration control? Hymns sung to his name at every morning and evening?”

Ceirran would have very much liked that last, I thought, and found myself suddenly in an ill temper. “Szayet, you and I are acting out a bad play. Write the lines for your god that you like best. Why should I care?” I said.

She’d let go of the honey pot. I snatched it up, dipped two fingers in it, and stuck them between my teeth. Szayet looked as though she wanted to smack the pot out of my hand. “Why should you care?” she said. “Anita, the people ask you to bring me their blessings at the docks. They bow to you in the gaming halls. They call you Honored and Beloved when they buy you drinks. They let you win sixteen athletics contests in the space of a week.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “More fools they,” I said.

“More reverent,” said Szayet warningly. “I have spent a good deal of gold and pearl, and risked a good deal of their love, asking them to be reverent toward Matheus Ceirran. Will you try to tell me that you don’t understand how they feel?”

My first urge was to stand, call her one of the words I’d learned in the Szayeti bars, and stalk out of the room. I did not move. The air was too warm and thick, and my belly felt too full and sour, and my legs and my head too hot with last night’s drink. Sweetness was suddenly cloying. I put down the honey and hunched over myself.

“Whenever you can’t find a weakness in me, Szayet, you never hesitate to make one,” I said.

At that her face went flat, and I knew that she, too, was thinking of last night. “What is that meant to signify?” she said.

“I’m not a clown from Diajunda,” I said, “or one of these caged birds. I make a fool of myself on my own terms. So they call me Honored, so they call me Beloved—well, let them. Let them believe that Ceirran’s turned from flesh and blood into some invisible magic. They can believe that I’ll speak to him again. I’ve only ever called myself lady of the Swordbelt Arm.”

“Who’s calling you a fool?” Szayet said. “Who has called you a fool to your face in the last year? Ceirran’s bones, Anita, you’ve slept near three hundred nights now in my bed, and you’ve slept a dozen more on the Alectelan streets to boot. How long do you mean to fear Ceian mockery? How long do you mean to laugh at my people behind their backs for naming you part of my cult and my court? How long do you mean to keep your wine and your laughter here, and your life somewhere else?”

“What’s the difference?” I said, stung.

Her eyes grew cold. She opened her mouth, but before she could call me whatever name she meant to, there was a knock on the door. “Admiral Decretan,” said a voice. “The morning’s reports from Ceiao are in. You have an u