Sleep should have come easily to him as tired, well fed, half drunk as
he was, but it didn't. The bed was wide and soft and comfortable. He
could already hear his men snoring on their straw outside his door. But
his mind would not be still.
They should have killed each other when they were young and didn't
understand what a precious thing life is. That was the mistake. He and
his brothers had forborne instead, and the years had drifted by. Danat
had married, then Kaiin. He, the oldest of them, had met Hiami and
followed his brothers' example last. He had two daughters, grown and now
themselves married. And so here he and his brothers were. None of them
had seen fewer than forty summers. None of them hated the other two.
None of them wanted what would come next. And still, it would come.
Better that the slaughter had happened when they were boys, stupid the
way boys are. Better that their deaths had come before they carried the
weight of so much life behind them. He was too old to become a killer.
Sleep came somewhere in these dark reflections, and he dreamed of things
more pleasant and less coherent. A dove with black-tipped wings flying
through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiami sewing a child's dress
with red thread and a gold needle too soft to keep its point; the moon
trapped in a well and he himself called to design the pump that would
raise it. When he woke, troubled by some need his sleepsodden mind
couldn't quite place, it was still dark. He needed to drink water or to
pass it, but no, it was neither of these. He reached to unshutter the
candlebox, but his hands were too awkward.
"There now, most high," a voice said. "Bat it around like that, and
you'll have the whole place in flames."
Pale hands righted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight
revealing the moon-faced keeper. He wore a dark robe under a gray woolen
traveler's cloak. His face, which had seemed so congenial before, filled
Biitrah with a sick dread. The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes.
"What's happened?" he demanded, or tried to. The words came out slurred
and awkward. Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them.
"I've come to be sure you've died," he said with a pose that offered
this as a service. "Your men drank more than you. Those that are
breathing are beyond recall, but you ... Well, most high, if you see
morning the whole exercise will have been something of a waste."
Biitrah's breath suddenly hard as a runner's, he threw off the blankets,
but when he tried to stand, his knees were limp. He stumbled toward the
assassin, but there was no strength in the charge. Oshai, if that was
his name, put a palm to Biitrah's forehead and pushed gently back.
Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it. It was like violence
being done to some other man, far away from where he was.
"It must be hard," Oshai said, squatting beside him, "to live your whole
life known only as another man's son. To die having never made a mark of
your own on the world. It seems unfair somehow."
Who, Biitrah tried to say. Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?
"Still, men die all the time," Oshai went on. "One more or less won't
keep the sun from rising. And how are you feeling, most high? Can you
get up? No? That's as well, then. I was half-worried I might have to