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jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was.

CHAPTER II
    B ytsan sri Nespo was furious with himself, to the point of humiliation. He knew what his father would have said, and in what tone, had he witnessed this shame.
    He had just bowed—far too deferentially—when the Kitan, having removed his stupid hat for some reason, said he was honoured that the Lion knew his name in Rygyal, so far away in glory.
    But it was a gracious thing to say, and Bytsan had found himself bowing, hand wrapped around fist in their fashion (not that of his own people), before he was able to stop himself. Perhaps it had been the hat, after all, the deliberate self-exposure of that gesture.
    The Kitan could do such things to you, or this one could.
    Just when you’d decided, one more time, that they were all about their centre-of-the-world arrogance, they could say and do something like this from within the breeding and courtesy they donned like a cloak—while clutching a completely ridiculous straw hat.
    What did you do when that happened? Ignore it? Treat it as decadence, softness, a false courtesy, unworthy of note on ground where Taguran soldiers had fought and died?
    Bytsan wasn’t able to do that. A softness of his own, perhaps. It might even affect his career. Although what defined military promotion these days—with warfare limited to occasional skirmishes—was more about whom you knew in higher ranks, had gotten drunk with once or twice, or had allowed to seduce you when you were too young to know better, or could pretend as much.
    In order to be judged on courage, on how you fought, there had to be fighting, didn’t there?
    Peacetime was good for Tagur, for borders and trade and roads and raising new temples, for harvests and full granaries and seeing sons grow up instead of learning they were lying in mounds of corpses, as here by Kuala Nor.
    But that same peace played havoc with an ambitious soldier’s hopes of using courage and initiative as his methods of advancement.
    Not that he was going to talk about that with a Kitan. There were limits: inward borders in addition to the ones with fortresses defending them.
    But if he was going to be honest about it, the court in Rygyal knew his name now, as well, because of this Shen Tai, this unprepossessing figure with the courteous voice and the deep-set eyes.
    Bytsan stole an appraising glance. The Kitan couldn’t be called a soft city-scholar any more: two years of punishing labour in a mountain meadow had dealt with that. He was lean and hard, his skin weathered, hands scratched and callused. And Bytsan knew the man had been a soldier for a time. It had occurred to him—more than a year ago—that this one might even know how to fight. There were two swords in his cabin.
    It didn’t matter. The Kitan would be leaving soon, his life entirely changed by the letter he was holding.
    Bytsan’s life as well. He was to be given leave from his post when this Kitan left for home. He was reassigned to Dosmad Fortress, south and east, on the border, with the sole and specific responsibility—in the name of the Princess Cheng-wan—of implementing his own suggestion regarding her gift.
    Initiative, he had decided, could involve more than leading a flanking attack in a cavalry fight. There were other sorts of flanking manoeuvres: the kind that might even get you out of a backwater fort in a mountain pass above a hundred thousand ghosts.
    That last was another thing he didn’t like, and this he’d even admitted to the Kitan once: the ghosts terrified him as much as they did every soldier who came with him bringing the wagon and supplies.
    Shen Tai had been quick to say that his own people from Iron Gate Pass were exactly the same: stopping for the night safely east of here when they came up the valley, timing their arrival for late morning just as Bytsan did, working hastily to unload his supplies and do whatever tasks they’d assigned