Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.Do you sing? Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him. A band of nausea circled Arin's throat, just as it had when she had asked him that question, in part for the same reason. She'd had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.

Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time.Her words silenced him, steadied him.Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. Ready?He smiled. Play.

Arin, are you all right?How? He managed. How did her arm break?She fell of a ladder.He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold. I imagined something worse, he tried to explain.She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.

People of the hundred, he said, using an ancient Herrani phrase Arin was surprised he knew, who leads you?So many cried Arin's name that it no longer sounded like his name.

A strange feeling: as if filaments trailed from Arin's body. A thousand fishing lines snagging attention. Here and there. Little tugs. People caught on the lines. The way sometimes people couldn't look him in the eye, and when they did they become fish trying to breath air. He wished it weren't like that.He knew it would be necessary.

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this.

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel's balcony— close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.He was here. He had come.Arin.

He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn't time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin's ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.

She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. "I'm going to miss you when I wake up," she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream."Don't wake up," he said.