text: Harajan bordered an underground sea. Tactically, structurally, that seemed like a terrible idea, but it was another of the old holds built by the Talamynni, maintained by the Dhai, and inherited by the Saiduan. The Talamynni had an eye for making the illogical a reality. One level below the hold was a vast glass and iron ballroom jutting into the sea, twisted with still-living plant matter, suffused with some long-standing, and long-forgotten, parajista hex that kept the glass walls intact after these many thousands of years.
  
  Instead of darkness, the view from the ballroom was luminous. Tens of thousands of bioluminescent creatures drifted lazily through the sea, casting an eerie light on those within. Maralah stood close to the glass. The smell of dust and damp was strong. No slave had been down here to polish it up for a party in at least ten years. Maralah remembered attending only one gala here, for Alaar's predecessor, Patron Osoraan. It was a riotous, drunken affair made even stranger with a variety of imported hallucinogens tucked away into select dishes. One man died, bashing his head repeatedly into the glass wall. Two women tore the skin from their own faces, and best Maralah could remember, there was a great deal of fucking – the mad kind, not the fun kind. If she inhaled deeply now, she could almost believe she smelled the incense that had suffused the space that night, watering her eyes, muddying her head.
  
  Driaa was her only company now. She rocked back on her heels, sipping thoughtfully from a flask of aatai, her face lit garishly by the blue and white lights from the creatures in the sea beyond the glass. She passed the leather flask to Maralah.
  
  Maralah drank, trying to keep the silence, but knew Driaa had not asked her down here for some sultry assignation. No, this was the type of place used by those who wanted to talk about dangerous politics.
  
  "You've spent your whole life propping up weak men," Driaa said, finally. "How much longer are you going to wait to take the seat while Morsaar muddles about making cakes?"
  
  The aatai burned Maralah's tongue. She coughed. Did Driaa brew it herself? It wouldn't surprise her. Food stores in Harajan were grim. The last dog sled caravan had been weeks ago, and half empty. Tai Mora scouting parties slaughtered six of the eight teams. "I will be the woman who destroyed us," she said. "No matter it was the decisions of others that brought us to this place. No matter that Alaar was the wrong man to lead a war. Our destruction will be heaped on my shoulders if I take the seat now. They won't see we lasted five years longer than we would have with Alaar's successor. We wouldn't be here if not for me. We'd be singing to Lord Sina. But history won't paint it that way."
  
  "What do you care for the books?" Driaa said. She took back the flask, and gestured at the dancing sea creatures. "You think anyone remembers who built this? What's their name? It's more likely no one will remember you or me or anyone but Rajavaa anyway. They'll write the story the way they want to remember it. Nothing you do now changes the story. That's for them to decide. You're here to act."
  
  "I wish I hadn't sent Kadaan on that fool's errand. I could use him now."
  
  "Couldn't we all?"
  
  "He loved that Dhai boy."
  
  "Love is not a bad thing, especially now."
  
  Maralah hesitated. Was this an assignation after all? "Soft words," she said. She almost growled it. She was not so far gone that she would fuck another sanisi to pass the time. Too many politics in that.
  
  "I was a different ataisa in training, Maralah. I believed we must be hard, and ruthless. We must gut them before they gut us. Now I wonder if something was lost in all that gutting."
  
  "Is that so?"
  
  "When I was very young, still living in Tordin–"
  
  "I hope you don't tell many people that story." No one liked foreigners and slaves becoming sanisi. They had that in common, she and Driaa – Maralah once enslaved by an indebted father, Driaa clearly of foreign parentage.
  
  "My father claimed me, yes," Driaa said, "and brought me back to Saiduan with him. Got me the papers and everything, or I wouldn't be here, would I? There was… bad business in Tordin in those days. My mother was a bit of a rogue. Wild. Not very popular with Saradyn. She and her people were killed. My father took me away from that."
  
  "Becoming a sanisi was easier than staying with your father?"
  
  Driaa made a face. "My father wanted me to be many things I'm not. But I saw what Saradyn did to my mother's people, and when you're six years old… you can't fight. I wanted to fight because of what I saw Saradyn do to the people I loved. Isn't that why we fight? For those we love?"
  
  "I fear I just don't know how to stop. If it wasn't the Tai Mora, who would we fight? Ourselves? The Dhai? The Dorinah? Always another face, always the same face."
  
  "You have, perhaps, had too much to drink."
  
  "Not nearly enough," Maralah said, but she did not reach for the bottle. She remembered fucking on this floor. How many people? A time best left forgotten, like her five years of servitude.
  
  Driaa shrugged and took another drink. "I hold my liquor better."
  
  "Is that an ataisa trait?"
  
  "No more than your outpouring of nurturance is a female one," Driaa said.
  
  Maralah snorted at that. She'd had a daughter once who'd said something similar, in precisely the same sarcastic tone. "Sometimes I wonder why we bother persevering at all."
  
  "Well. It matters to me. It matters who I follow."
  
  "That's a discussion for another time."
  
  "If you don't take the seat, Maralah, someone else will. Others will be consolidating power."
  
  "Have you been contacted by other parties?"
  
  She shrugged. "I'm a sanisi. You know there are always warring factions."
  
  "Who?"
  
  "Just know this, Maralah. If you move, I am with you. If you do not… When Rajavaa dies, things may be very bad. No one dares now because of the loyalty of the army. But without Rajavaa–"
  
  "I know," Maralah said.
  
  Driaa tried to give her the flask again. Maralah shook her head.
  
  "I best get back," Driaa said.
  
  Maralah did not answer. Driaa shifted her weight, almost imperceptibly. "You should have the seat," she said, and then she was walking lightly away, back into the dim corridors.
  
  Maralah lingered in the space, though she would have preferred to be first to leave. Instead, she found herself stuck with far too many thoughts and an unclear plan of action. As she watched the creatures beyond the glass, a hulking form moved through the darkness, glowing softly blue, brighter and brighter until she could see its vast head, as big as a doorway. It fixed her with one of its eight massive eyes, each the size and shape of her fist, as it swam lazily past the tank. It was free to swim on, unencumbered, but the only thing that made it possible to stand here was to create a prison for the observers. Of all the things the gifted could build with their brilliant powers, they chose this decadent room, spying into the sea. Perhaps, in some other age, it was an observatory, an enclave for research and advancement in the study of obscure fauna. Alaar would have used it for that purpose, certainly. But that peaceful, prosperous dream was over now.
  
  She needed Rajavaa – the man of war – whole, no matter the cost. She needed him put back together before her people turned on her, and the false dream that she'd brought with her, only to discard as war devoured them.
  
  As a child, she yearned for control over the petty wars and local government squabbles that rolled through her village. Now that she ostensibly controlled it all, she had never felt so out of control. Huge forces moved around her, threatening to swallow far more than just a village.
  
  She tugged at the threads of the ward that bound Taigan to her, murmuring a litany, and activated the ward she'd seared into his flesh the day he betrayed Alaar. A simple ward, sent into fiery motion with the barest hint of Sina's breath, all she had now in its decline. No more waiting on messages, hoping for clear harbors. Driaa's message had been very blunt: Put this house in order, or someone else will.
  
  She called Taigan home.