text: Anavha whiled away his days in the great, drafty hold playing board games and learning to play cards with the guards, both men. They thought him ridiculous, he knew, but they seemed to soften to him after a time, as if he were some child in need of tending. He learned about their families. One, a widower with six children; the other, a young man not much older than Zezili, courting a woman in a neighboring village. Anavha found himself both fascinated and horrified at their courtship practices. The young man said he'd never had sex with a woman, and intended to wait until she accepted his proposal, at the very least. Anavha admitted he had probably had sex with a dozen women before he married Zezili.
  
  They both looked at him as if he were some horrifying insect, crawled up from gnawing on a corpse. Then the widower laughed, slapping his great knee.
  
  "Dorinah!" he said. "What a place that must be!"
  
  "It was not very pleasant," Anavha admitted. "It wasn't… it's not what you think."
  
  But the younger one started joking as well. So Anavha pressed a smile onto his face: smile, smile, and pretend at joviality. He had spent much of his life smiling, but in that moment, with these two unbound, gregarious men, he found that he was very tired of smiling.
  
  He was given new clothes, clean but plain and garish, like something a prisoner would wear, yes, but most men in Tordin seemed to wear these blandly cut trousers, tunics with square-cut collars, leather vests that fell to their knees, cinched with a belt. Drab green and brown and dark blue colors. Anavha had not seen a flash of red since they left Aaldia a month before.
  
  In truth, he missed the Aaldians. Their broad smiles. Easy laughter. The intentness of their gazes when they spoke to you, as if what you said was the most important thing in the world. He and Natanial had spent two nights with an Aaldian friend of Natanial's, a broad-cheeked woman with an absurd yellow hat like a cone who taught him the Aaldian alphabet and numbers, all written out into practice books of expensive paper that she let him take when he left. He liked the look of the Aaldian script. It put him in mind of running rivers, and the eddies of currents. But he had lost the books during their difficult crossing of the Mundin mountains, and now he drew the symbols of the script from memory on the wall of his cell with a charred stick; the guards thought it was some kind of art.
  
  Outside his artistic scribbling, Anavha spent a lot of time staring at the window above his bed, remembering his long days at Zezili's estate, waiting for something to happen to him. A year into their marriage, Zezili had been pregnant for a time. That had excited him terribly. The men he knew from his days in the mardanas were all fathers within a year of their marriages, raising strong, beautiful children for Dorinah. But when he met with them during the early days when Zezili was still sharing him with her sisters in the city, he had no children of his own to speak about. Their little tea house meetings – always out on the sidewalk, as unescorted men were not allowed inside – became awkward. He would listen to them talk, smiling beatifically, saying nothing, while one of Zezili's sister's dajians watched him from a nearby table to ensure he didn't get into any trouble.
  
  As soon as Zezili's sisters bore children, he rarely saw them. Their care was relegated to house dajians. He longed to be a father, and spent endless nights after learning of her pregnancy thinking up names, and the stories he would read to her, and the trees he would help her climb, and how much she would love him, and he would love her, and they would be a family.
  
  But that was all just dreamy nonsense. Zezili miscarried three months into her pregnancy, as she would miscarry twice more in their marriage. She was not a woman built to make life, she told him. Just take it.
  
  That left him here, alone in Tordin with two jailers, losing time, his life, to chatter and nonsense. Nothing had changed but the scenery of the bedroom.
  
  Two weeks into his gilded captivity, the younger guard, Mays, came to his room. Anavha glanced up from his Aaldian writing – he was writing a poem, he decided, about birds in cages. It was too early for cards.
  
  "The King is back," Mays said, "Natanial with him. Thought you'd like to know they ran into some of your friends. Dorinahs."
  
  Anavha had not thought Mays his friend, but it seemed a kindness, to tell him that. "Did anyone ask for me?"
  
  "Natanial's coming up. He'll be upset you haven't gotten fat."
  
  Much of the guards' good humor, Anavha always suspected, was because they were trying to get him to eat more than was good for him. Until now, he didn't realize it was some order from Natanial, who had pressed lard-soaked rice and pork fat at him for most of their journey in Aaldia.
  
  "Thank you," Anavha said.
  
  Mays hesitated, and his clear, bright face darkened for a long moment. "I'll miss you," he said.
  
  "I'm not going anywhere," Anavha said.
  
  "Sure, of course," Mays said.
  
  "Can you bring me clean water? I want to wash up."
  
  "Of course," Mays said, and shut the door.
  
  Anavha waited for the water before he undressed. It was not Mays who brought it up, but a guard he'd never seen before. The man set the bucket down inside the door without a word. It was barely lukewarm.
  
  Anavha sponged himself off and dressed in his cleanest clothes, the terrible Tordinian ones. Natanial hadn't even let him keep his Aaldian garments, the broad robes and heavy purple drapes and deep cowls. He admitted he missed Aaldia more than he missed Dorinah. No one treated him like a man in Aaldia. They treated him like a person.
  
  He was reading over the poem on the wall when Natanial entered. He carried a tray of rice and buttered greens circling a gravy-soaked hunk of some kind of meat, most likely bear. Anavha hated bear.
  
  Natanial slid the tray onto the table on the other side of the room. The table was a battered but functional piece that Anavha mostly used for the card games.
  
  "Well," Natanial said, peering at the Aaldian script on the walls. "Are you out of paper, or run to madness already?"
  
  "They said the historian wouldn't authorize any paper for me," Anavha said. "There's a shortage."
  
  "We're at war with the province that makes most of it," Natanial said. He made as if to expand on that, but stopped. Motioned to the table.
  
  "Come sit with me," Natanial said.
  
  "I'm not hungry."
  
  "Eat."
  
  "I told you, I'm not hungry."
  
  "Mays and Foryer say you haven't eaten a full meal in three days."
  
  "I like staying slim."
  
  "You're starving."
  
  "Zezili likes me thin."
  
  Natanial grimaced. "Of course she does. Starving people are easier to confuse and control. Ask any dictator. Get up here."
  
  Anavha reluctantly sat across from Natanial. His stomach growled, betraying him. Trying to keep his expression stoic made his whole face hurt. Natanial once listened to him cry for three hours in Aaldia, and in the end, he'd had to eat it all anyway.
  
  "You telling me to eat is no better," Anavha said.
  
  "Don't listen to me then. Listen to your stomach. Listen to yourself." Natanial tapped the plate.
  
  Anavha's stomach hurt, but his stomach always hurt. Hunger was a vice. If you worked hard enough at it, you could capture and contain it. If you were strong enough, you could eliminate hunger all together.
  
  "I don't know what that means," Anavha muttered, and pushed his plate away. He saw the blobs of glistening fat tremble on the plate. Definitely bear meat.
  
  Natanial sat across from him. "I have good news. Saradyn agreed to leave your care and training to me, for a time."
  
  "What does that change?"
  
  "It means he won't turn you over to his wind witches to be beaten and tortured."
  
  "Oh."
  
  "Thank you would be nice."
  
  "Thank you for–" for kidnapping me, he almost said, and bit his tongue. He told Natanial the truth of what he felt far too often. Natanial had never struck him. Maybe that made him too bold. Maybe Zezili was right, and he needed a firm hand to keep him on the path to Rhea's embrace. He certainly wasn't going to get there speaking everything that came into his head.
  
  Natanial laughed. "You say what you want," he said. "Go on. I'm not Zezili."
  
  "If it wasn't for you," Anavha said slowly, "I wouldn't need protection from Saradyn."
  
  "That's true," Natanial said. "You'd be cutting yourself open in front of a monstrous spouse who was as concerned with that as she would be with a dog that bashed its head repeatedly into its kennel. You know what she'd do with the dog, eventually? She'd have it put down."
  
  "You don't know anything about Zezili."
  
  Natanial narrowed his eyes. "That's being remedied," he said. He stepped away from the table. "We'll start training in the morning with a friend of mine. Get you some fresh air. If you don't eat, you'll be hungry. I'm not bringing some palanquin out here to haul you out into the woods."
  
  "I'd rather write more poetry," Anavha said.
  
  "Yes, well, wouldn't we all? But that's not the world we're living in. So eat up, and prepare yourself."
  
  Anavha stared at the plate a few minutes more after Natanial left. Then he picked up the tray and dumped its contents in his refuse bucket.
  
  For eight days, Natanial led Anavha out into the woods, a two hour walk from the main keep, to meet with his friend Coryana. Natanial seemed to have a great many women friends in many countries. Anavha would not have thought that odd except that they never seemed to visit any men, and in Tordin, the population of men and women was far more equal than in Dorinah. Anavha saw men everywhere: tall, fat, thin, short, lanky, muscular, and hairy – very hairy. But they never stayed with any of them.
  
  When Anavha asked him about that after the first day as they walked home, Natanial shrugged. "Never thought about it," he said. "I suppose I just feel more comfortable with women, and they with me. They don't mind my… peculiarities."
  
  "Like being an assassin?"
  
  "Oh, that too," he said, and did not elaborate.
  
  The third day, Anavha didn't want to get out of bed. Natanial dragged him half the length of the hall outside his cell until he relented.
  
  His friend Coryana was no better. However much Anavha insisted he was of no use to anyone – that someone had played a cruel joke on them and he wasn't gifted – they carried on. For hours. Their patience grated. He didn't understand it.
  
  On the eighth day, hungry and exhausted, unable to remember the bit of poetry Coryana had been trying to get him to use to focus his thoughts, he threw himself to the warm spring ground among the wildflowers and sobbed.
  
  "Get up, Anavha," Natanial said. "We go again."
  
  Anavha curled up next to a stump, huffing in the smell of the fresh everpine shavings. "I can't. I can't."
  
  "I can outlast you," Natanial said. "You get up and do as Coryana tells you. Then we get to have a rest. It's your choice. Make good choices."
  
  Anavha keened. He could not say why his whole body rebelled, why he wanted to scream and seethe with every fiber of his body; fear and sobbing were his only tools, the only ones that didn't get him beaten. If he showed anger or violence he would be harmed. Crying was the only emotion his world ever allowed him. If he had any power, it was in his tears, and he was well versed in using them.
  
  But Natanial remained unmoved.
  
  Anavha lay crying until his face felt puffy and his eyes hurt. He cried until there were no more tears to squeeze out.
  
  An hour later, Anavha was standing again, concentrating on the susurrus of Tordinian words Coryana whispered to him. Listen, repeat. Pull.
  
  "Like breathing, a second breath," she said. "A breaking apart. A release."
  
  Release.
  
  Anavha saw the blood welling from the cuts in his arms, the bloody knife, the parting of the world.
  
  Release.
  
  He gasped.
  
  A threading needle of power rippled beneath his skin. It felt like hot liquid seeping into his organs. He wanted to vomit it out like some vile poison.
  
  Release.
  
  The poetry. He repeated the poem again, sharpening his focus, and the liquid poured from his body, a bloody burst of light that tangled together like a misty ball of yarn. But instead of blowing apart the tree, or starting some fire, the misty red ball of threads dissipated in the warm air.
  
  Anavha let out his breath.
  
  Natanial came up beside him, arms folded, and shared a long look with Coryana.
  
  She pressed her hand to Anavha's shoulder. "There it is. You see?"
  
  "And you didn't even have to bleed on anything," Natanial said.
  
  "This is enough for today," Coryana said. She was smiling for the first time, her voice full of warmth. "A controlled, first-time draw is the most difficult," she said. "The rest will come easily, in comparison."
  
  Anavha started crying. He wasn't even sure why this time.
  
  "Hush now," Coryana said.
  
  "It was well done, Anavha," Natanial said. "We'll go home now, all right?"
  
  But far from being proud, Anavha felt sick, and powerless.
  
  Natanial hauled him back into his room – not ungently – but because Anavha refused to stand, he had to be dragged by the arm the whole way down the hall outside his cell. He was screaming the whole way, shrieking like he was dying, because it felt like dying, being pushed to do something, to be something, he did not want to be. And he was so tired.
  
  Natanial dumped him in his room and closed the door.
  
  Anavha lay on the floor in the dark for at least ten minutes more, sobbing until there were no tears, just huffing, choking anger.
  
  Clouds roiled in the world beyond his little window, revealing the moons. A well-appointed prison was still a prison.
  
  Anavha pulled off all his clothes and grabbed the empty wooden tray on the table. He smashed it against the table again and again until it splintered to pieces. He took the biggest piece and began sharpening it against the rough stone until he had a good point on it. Then he pressed it to his arm, sawing at flesh. When that didn't work, he stabbed, and the tears came again. He was completely out of control. He had no control over his life. They had taken this too, his ability to decide what he ate, and what he did to his own body.
  
  Slivers of wood embedded themselves into his flesh. He threw the stake away. It thunked on the far wall. He sagged to his knees and bowed in front of his wall of Aaldian poetry. He pressed his hands to the words and wiped them all out, smearing his hands in char.
  
  When it was gone, he lay still on the floor, staring at the window.
  
  The door opened.
  
  Natanial came in, illuminated by the bold white light of the moons. Tall and lean, his beak of a nose made bolder by the shadows, he was like some bird of prey – powerful, beautiful.
  
  "Oh, Anavha," he said. He picked Anavha up and brought him to the bed and lay him down.
  
  Anavha wrapped his arms around him and pressed his face to his warm chest. He was out of tears, but he trembled just the same.
  
  "The world is mad," Anavha said.
  
  "Yes." Natanial stroked his hair, pressed his rough hand against the nape of Anavha's neck.
  
  Anavha pulled away, so their faces were a breath apart. What he saw in Natanial's gaze was the same unnamable thing he felt.
  
  "Take me from here," Anavha said.
  
  Natanial traced the line of Anavha's mouth. The desire his touch inspired coursed through Anavha's body, hot and breathtaking. For a moment he felt a terrible shame, but who was here to see them? Not Zezili. Not the priestesses. He was aware of his nakedness, and the obviousness of his desire.
  
  "If I take you, my own captive," Natanial said softly, "a young man adrift in a strange land, then I'm no better than Zezili, am I? Power can be monstrous, can make men monstrous. I'm an artist, not a monster."
  
  "But I…" What? Anavha thought. What did he want, really? Did he know? "I want you," he said, and it felt rebellious, impossible, like saying bears could dance in the clouds.
  
  "You don't know what you want." Natanial released him. "We'll take a day or two to rest, then start again. I know this is difficult, and difficult things can be painful, but it will make you stronger, more in control of your own life, do you understand?"
  
  Anavha did not, but he nodded.
  
  Natanial shut the door, leaving Anavha alone in the darkness.
  
  Anavha sat a moment more before he realized how cool the room was. He pulled on his night gown and noticed someone had put out his dinner earlier, before he returned to the room. He hadn't even noticed.
  
  Anavha pulled up a chair. The plate was heavy with thick hunks of rye bread piled in rice and meat gravy. They left no utensils. He wasn't permitted eating sticks or the pronged implements that Tordinians used, but they usually left a spoon. Not this time. The smell of the cold food made him salivate. How long since he cared to notice hunger?
  
  He ate with his fingers, smearing gravy on his chin, until the food was gone.
  
  The next morning, he dressed and washed first thing, and sat waiting for Natanial at the table. He ate his breakfast, most of it, because he really was overfull.
  
  While he waited he murmured the words of the poetry Coryana had been intoning all week. He wrote it onto the smeared charcoal wall with his charred stick. He concentrated on calling the breath of power, until he felt it crawling under his skin, a whisper, a whiff—
  
  The door opened, and he lost the thread of power. The mist dissipated.
  
  He stood, smiling, but it was not Natanial. It was Mays, looking apologetic.
  
  "You're cleaned up all ready?" he asked.
  
  "Yes," Anavha said. "I'm training with Natanial today."
  
  "Not today," Mays said, "King Saradyn wants me to bring you downstairs. He wanted to make sure you were made up and presentable."
  
  Anavha smoothed his tunic. "I am."
  
  "Good, all right." Nodding.
  
  "What's wrong?"
  
  "No one's told you, have they?"
  
  "I've been training with Natanial."
  
  "So he didn't say anything about it?"
  
  "About what?"
  
  Mays chewed his lip. "Maybe you can just–"
  
  "What, Mays?"
  
  "King Saradyn wants to present you to your wife," he said. "Zezili Hasaria has been our captive for weeks, and he thinks she's softened up enough to see you. They're in the dining hall. I'll–"
  
  Anavha threw up his breakfast.
  
  Mays rushed in. Just as he reached Anavha, Anavha bolted past him, still dry heaving. Mays slipped in the vomit, swore.
  
  Anavha knew where the dining hall was.