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each other like two snakes reluctant to mate. “I have friends, yes. I don’t feel burdened by them.”
    “Sometimes I feel so burdened I can hardly stand,” Phyrea said, and again Marek lifted an eyebrow.
    “Perhaps you don’t have enough to occupy your mind,” Devorast said.
    “Should I build a canal then?”
    “No,” he told her, still without a trace of emotion. “But you can do anything else.” “I wish that were so.”
    “It is,” he assured her, and Marek felt bile rise in his throat.
    “Oh, yes, my darling,” Meykhati’s pinch-faced wife whispered at Marek’s elbow. Her hissing voice was so loud to him that Marek had to close his eyes. “Straight away.”
    With that, at least she was gone.
    As the new lead pair of dancers worked their way back to the line behind them, Marek turned to glance at Phyrea and Devorast. Ran Ai Yu had wandered off to be replaced by Lau Cheung Fen, who took Devorast by the arm.
    The Shou gentleman had no trouble pulling Devorast away from Phyrea, who all but ran to the farthest corner of the large room, disappearing into a crowd of her father’s friends and political associates. Devorast didn’t watch her go, but a twitch of his eye betrayed him to one as observant as Marek Rymiit.
    This, the Red Wizard thought, is a relationship I will need to follow as closely as possible.
    Two new dancers began to quiver so quickly they appeared in the throws of some sort of catalepsy. The jangle
    of their various bells and cymbals began to intrude on Marek’s spell, and he noted a few in the crowded room place hands to their ears to fend off the foreign cacophony.
    “I will leave it to you to determine the advantages to you and your trade,” Devorast told Lau Cheung Fen.
    “And there is nothing you wish to add?” the Shou asked. “I should think that to have the endorsement of the merchant fleets of Shou Lung would be for you a very … ah, but help with the word… ?”
    “Advantageous?” Devorast provided.
    Sharp, Marek thought. Very sharp of mind indeed, this shipwright turned canal builder.
    Lau sketched a shallow bow and said, “To have this advantageous support from afar would give you greater support at home, is that not true?”
    “I have all the support I need,” Devorast replied, and Marek cringed at the supreme self-confidence of that, the bold naivete. “I will build the canal, who uses it and why makes no difference to me.”
    “Ivar,” Willem Korvan said, appearing from the crowd holding a half-full tallglass of Inthelph’s upstart local vintage. He took Devorast by the arm and bowed to the Shou. “If I may.”
    Lau Cheung Fen appeared reluctant to release him, but apparently felt he had no choice and returned Willem’s bow.
    All seven of the dancers began to move in a slow, fluid motion that Marek assumed most men would find alluring. For him, though, there was Willem Korvan. The young senator’s immaculate dress complimented his perfect features. Next to the disheveled, weather-beaten, ill-dressed Devorast, Willem appeared soft, still in the full flower of youth. Though Marek had heard the two were of an age, he would have thought Ivar Devorast at least a decade Willem Korvan’s senior.
    “Is that the best you can do?” Willem said to Devorast, the contempt soaking each word in bile.
    “Hello, Willem,” Devorast said. “Is that the best you can do?”
    “Is there something you need from me?” asked Devorast.
    Willem’s handsome face went flat, his jaw tight and his lips twisted.
    “Do you realize that that one man could—” Willem started to say, and just then Marek’s spell faded out, and the clashing harmonics of the exotic music once more assaulted his ears.
    He started moving in the direction of the two Cormyreans before he even made up his mind as to which of the several reasons for doing so drove him over there. Did he want to break up what might become and unseemly brawl? Other than the fact that it would be a shame should something