if she were giving a performance. She didn’t think she could eat, no matter how delicious it smelled. She crumbled a bit of bread between her fingertips.
“We should arrive at the palace soon.” The emperor’s voice fell deep and heavy, as if just thinking about the palace made him tired.
“You’d rather stay in the desert,” she murmured. Not a question.
“Always.”
He reminded her of a Rider in winter, restless, waiting for the day the raids would begin, but for the emperor there would be no raids. The empire was at peace, if living with the pattern could be called peace.
“What is the palace like, Your Majesty?”
He smiled. “Like a garden full of snakes.”
Like me. Mesema tried to bite the bread, but ended up just brushing it against her lips. The crust felt sharp and tough. She tried to push the evening’s vision from her mind.
“Something worries you, Zabrina.”
“Yes.” She took a gulp from her goblet—wine, they called it. She shaped the Cerantic word as the wine ran over her tongue, deciding how much to say. “The wind showed me something in the sand, Your Magnificence.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I saw the pattern.” She left out the rest, for now, and it made an empty space in the room.
He stared at her, his hand clutched around his goblet. “You play a game with me?” He lifted it in a rough movement and the wine sloshed over the side and ran across his fingers, but he didn’t take a drink. “There are enough women in the palace who play games. Perhaps I should have sent you home to your father.”
“I…” Banreh had warned her to keep silent. Mesema looked down at her hands. A smudge of blue showed on her fingertip, a threatening touch of colour. Everything seemed to slow as she wiped the mark against her skirt. She felt the soft threads against her finger, the fabric moving against her thigh, the sweat on the back of her hand. It’s just a mark from the colour they put on my eyes. It’s from the soap. It’s from the dye in my clothing. But when she looked at her finger again, the spot remained, taking the shape of a crescent moon. It sent a message she couldn’t read, though she knew it to be fearsome.
“What is it?” the emperor asked, putting his drink aside. She had nearly forgotten him. He would kill her now.
“Nothing.” Run. Go now—find Tumble and go. But she hadn’t run the first time, when she saw the vision in Mirra’s garden, and she wouldn’t run now. The emperor stared across the table at her, and she kept still as a tent pole. His face remained that of a stranger, his expressions alien and unreadable, except when transformed by anger.
“Show me.” He knocked the pile of food aside with his elbow and grabbed her hand. Fruit fell and rolled against her slippers as he examined her fingers. He must have felt her hand shaking. He must have felt her fear.
To end here, in the desert… She had seen death fly through her village on the back of red-hoofed horses. Jakar’s clouded eyes made a hollow in her that she felt to this day. Iron was terrible, but the pattern was worse. The pattern wrote your end upon you. It made you wait, knowing your death, wondering to what sinister goal you were to give your life’s breath.
At long last the emperor looked up and told her what she already knew. “A tiny moon.”
“No!”
“A pattern-mark.” His lips grew tight.
“It’s not!” Her mouth lied without asking permission.
He let go and patted her hand. “Don’t let anybody see it.” She watched him. He should kill her, or at least call his guards and have her removed, but instead he drank again from his goblet. If she were to guess at his expression now, she would call it worried.No, he will not kill me. It is I who will kill him. Would the pattern make her do it? At last she said, “I’ll… I’ll be careful.”
“When we get to the palace, I’ll have the mages protect you as they do me.”
They fell silent for a time. She thought about Eldra, first with the marks across her skin, and then lying on the desert sand with an arrow sprouting from her chest. She thought of herself, standing over the emperor with a knife.
“Your Majesty, why are you helping me?”
He smiled. “You have spirit. I wish I had known you before.”
“Before the pattern touched me?”
He shook his