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for the rumours had tallied too closely with his own suspicions.
    After that there had been minor wives, countless concubines, a garden of beautiful faces. But Orsana remained First Wife, his Queen, and she vetted them all. There would never be another Ashana, another woman to share his heart with. He had been lucky, that once.
    The Great King raised his cup, and tilted it first to Kouros, his eldest son, and then to Rakhsar and Roshana, the twins whose mother he had loved. The three siblings returned his salute, and up and down the long tables the other guests let their conversations wither into the warm air, and watched.
    He held their eyes one after the other. Kouros, dependable, thin-skinned, eternally suspicious and yet always on fire for some word of affection or commendation. Roshana, whose face seared something in Ashurnan’s heart, so that it was sometimes hard to look upon her beauty for the memories it evoked.
    And Rakhsar, mercurial, sardonic, the brightest light of the three, and the most dangerous. Ashurnan loved his younger son, but did not pretend to himself that he knew him at all. Rakhsar’s flashing wit turned aside any attempt to know him. Roshana understood him, perhaps, but Ashurnan did not believe he ever would.
    And there was the pity of it.
    The Great King drained his cup, barely tasting the wine. Beside him the Taster sipped, and then nodded, and the royal cupbearer refilled it from the jar.
    The three royal siblings drank their own wine, Kouros and Roshana barely sipping theirs, Rakhsar emptying his cup with a flourish and a grin. He had about him the air of a condemned man who is intent on savouring every morsel of his life, whereas Kouros was like a priest wedded to duty and penitence.
    Kouros, and Rakhsar, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. One will be King, and one must die. That is the way our world works.
    An image lashed through his mind – his brother’s face at Kunaksa as his own scimitar opened the throat below it. Ashurnan closed his eyes a second. Thirty years. He was an old man now, and in his dreams his dead brother’s face was always the same. He could still smell the dust of that day, kicked up in vast clouds by the horses. He could hear the Macht death hymn as they advanced.
    He had witnessed a dozen battles since then, but always, Kunaksa was foremost in his mind. It had been his first, and though the imperial records might say otherwise, he knew it had been a defeat.
    And now they come again.
    God, I am too old. I do not have the strength. I am no longer sure I even have the wit to choose the right men to fight for me any more.
    The wine smote him – he had eaten almost nothing. The sour suspicion that his Queen was trying to poison him cut the appetite. That cat-eyed bitch. How much of a hold did she have over Kouros? Could he be his own man?
    And Rakhsar – would the cruelty in him ever bloom into full, disastrous flower?
    I must stay alive, he told himself. There is no time for this. I am Great King, and it is I who will take on this fight, as I did once before.
    He raised the hand which had killed his brother and stared at it. The liver-spots on the golden skin, the blue-wormed veins thick about the knuckles. Then he looked down the table at Kouros again. Imagine the empire ruled by those knotted brows, that thick-boned forehead, and behind him his mother, whom the palace slaves lived in terror of. Not fear, or respect, but stark terror. She had once bade the Honai rape a pretty little Bokosan noblewoman to death, because the girl had refused her beloved son’s advances.
    Power is cruelty, in the last examination, Ashurnan thought. But for some the pain is an end in itself.
    Kouros was an adequate leader of men, and he had a following in the army. The Arakosans provided the best cavalry in the empire, and they would follow him to the death, for his mother’s sake. If Kouros were to be discarded, it would mean something akin to civil war, here in the heartland