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travel, and into the Golden Land, marshaling parades of yellow women.”
    “Teaching Asanion that you are its emperor.”
    “It does need lessoning,” he said. Breath gusted out of him.
“God and goddess, Vanyi. I thought I was safe from this for years at least.
There’s empire enough here to keep any man occupied.”
    “Except that it’s yours entirely, and always has been, and
always will be. Keruvarion knows you, loves you. Asanion has never seen you.”
    “It saw plenty of me when I was younger. I do remember that
much,” he said, sharp, almost angry. “They marched me about like a prize calf.
They dressed me in so many robes I could barely move, and perched me in a
litter, and made me sit like an icon for people to gape at.”
    “You were a child then,” Vanyi said. She did not know where
the words were coming from. The earth, maybe. The cold thing that, a little
while ago, had been her heart. Had the empress mother been trying to ease the
blow this morning, telling her that she could never be empress? She worked the
knots out of the emperor’s shoulders and said to him, “They never knew you as a
man. Now you’ll show them. You’ll teach them to love you as your easterners do,
for the brightness that’s in you.”
    “I’m as dull as an old stone,” he said, with the soul
burning so fierce in him that her mind’s eyes were dazzled, and his eyes
lambent gold, and gold burning in his hand. She felt the wash of it, the pain
that would have sent any other man into whimpering retreat, but only sharpened
his temper and made him rub his hand against his thigh.
    She caught it, held it to her cheek. It was no more than
humanly warm, stiff with the metal that was born in it, holy and impossible.
All the heat burned within. “Oh, my lord,” she said, and her eyes pricked with
tears. “Oh, my dear lord. How can anyone keep from loving you?”
    “You’re besotted,” he said. But a little of the tautness was
gone. Not all, yet enough that he could lie down, and let her hold him, and be
soothed into something resembling peace.
    o0o
    Dark. Stars. Eyes. Teeth that gleamed in the blackness.
Maws opened wide, gaping to devour.
    “Vanyi!” "
    She clutched at warm solidity. Estarion’s voice thrummed out
of it, deeper always than one expected, with a singer’s purity. She clung as
much to the voice as to the body, gulping air. He stroked the rigid line of her
back. “Hush, love. Hush.”
    She pulled free. She was laughing, hiccoughing. “No! That’s
my part. You’re the one with nightmares.”
    “Sometimes,” he said, “one has to share.” He was barely
smiling. His eyes were as dark as lion-eyes could be, all pupil, and about it
the thin rim of gold.
    She burrowed into the warmth of him. The dream was fading in
his brightness, the horror shrinking to insignificance. She had forgotten to
eat after her vigil in the temple, that was all, and the oddity in the Gate had
come back to haunt her empty stomach. No mage alive knew all the secrets of
Gates. Maybe the Guild had, that in its prime had made them and used them and
ruled them with fabled power.
    The Guild was long since fallen. Vanyi was not supposed to
regret that, or to wish that it had survived long enough to teach her what she
yearned to know, of Gates, of magic, of the worlds beyond the world. But it was
gone; only memory remained, embodied in the Gates.
    Pride had laid it low. It had set empire against empire,
Keruvarion against Asanion, striving to fell them both and set a puppet of its
own making upon the doubled throne. But the puppet it had made had turned
against it—and, wise cruelty, done nothing to destroy the Guild. Only let it be
known what the Guild had done and intended, and offered a newer way to those
who would be mages: the priesthood of god or goddess, and training in the
temples of Sun or Dark. The Guild had withered, its twinned pairs of mages dead
or lost. The robes that once had won such awe, lightmage grey and