The first week had belonged to Butcher, boiled cloth, broth, poppy, and the slow proof that Ouz’s body had chosen to remain one body.
The weeks after that belonged to Thresher’s Teeth. He moved into the team tent once Butcher decided he could walk from one pole to the next without splitting his shoulder open. The medic had made it sound like exile from proper care. The team treated it more like a prize someone had won through a great deal of blood and an amount of stupidity everyone found worth discussing at length.
Captain gave him the cot nearest the stove trench and the least draft.
Brawler declared this a corruption of all military order and spent the next three nights bringing him hot water before anyone else could.
Mute said nothing. He rolled extra padding under the cot legs where the ground dipped and tied the canvas seam above Ouz’s head tighter so rain would not drip through if the weather turned.
Rat checked the new sling knot once, found fault with it, and fixed it in silence with quicker hands than any camp servant would have managed.
Key came on the second evening with two wax tablets, one brush, and the face of a clerk about to commit a small crime for reasons he intended to call administrative necessity. “You are expensive now,” he said, looking over the cot, the blankets, the bowl on the stool, and the bandages laid out nearby. “Do you understand what that means?”
Ouz was sitting up with his left arm bound hard against his side and a wool blanket over his knees. “It means somebody found a new column to steal from.”
Key’s mouth moved by a hair. “It means I had to discover three separate categories of recovery allowance that no officer above a certain rank ever reads closely enough to question. One for sustained field merit. One for wound stabilization. One for dietary support when a soldier is judged useful enough to keep alive at cost.”
“Useful enough to justify the paperwork,” Ouz said.
“You want warmth, ask the bard,” Key said. He set the tablets down and lifted the lid off the covered bowl beside the bed. Steam rolled out with the smell of marrow broth, minced liver, soft millet, and fat skimmed from the top and added back in because Butcher had ordered it. “I can write allowances. I can adjust inventories. I can’t write your shoulder closed. Eat while the ink still protects you.”
Ouz looked into the bowl. “And the common sense?”
Key’s mouth moved by a hair. “If the records ever cover that, I’ll steal those too.”
After that Key made a habit of appearing whenever fresh paperwork gave him an excuse. Sometimes he brought bowls with more meat than camp rations should have allowed. Sometimes he brought dried fruit, or old winter pears taken from stores meant for officers who had never noticed what was missing from their own tables. He never called any of it kindness. He called it resource allocation, record adjustment, forward planning, or once, with a faint look of contempt at the pot he carried, “preservation of profitable assets.”
Ouz ate every scrap. It still was not enough for a body that had lost that much blood and taken that much damage.
Sleeper noticed first. He said nothing, which was how he said most things worth saying. He went out for his watch rotation with a spear, a bow, and the blank face he wore for every kind of weather. He came back near dusk with a skinned hare hanging from one hand and mud to the knee. The next time it was a brace of birds from the scrub south of camp. After that it was a thin-legged deer too young to have strayed near soldiers and fires unless hunger or bad luck had driven it there first. The best cuts kept finding their way into Ouz’s bowl.
Captain noticed on the third day and looked across the fire trench at Sleeper while the meat hissed in a pan blackened by a hundred other meals. “You keep this up,” Captain said, “and he’ll think we care.”
Sleeper turned the meat once with the tip of his knife.
Brawler sat cross-legged with a whetstone and a grin that belonged in less serious places. “He already thinks that. You should hear the way he accepts help. Very dignified. Very grateful. Like a wounded magistrate receiving taxes.”
Ouz was leaning against a rolled blanket with his sling off for the moment and his left wrist supported by a folded pad while he tried to flex the fingers without setting his whole shoulder on fire. “I would sound more grateful if half the tent stopped speaking.”
“That’s pain talking,” Brawler said.
“That is taste,” Ouz said. “Pain would have been kinder.”
Captain took the pan off the fire and cut a strip from the browned edge with the small camp knife he trusted more than most men. He handed it across to Ouz first.
“We still have sentries up after dark,” he said. “So eat before he starts insulting the food too.”
The team laughed at him the way soldiers laughed at anything that had nearly killed one of their own and failed to finish the work cleanly. It was rough laughter, close to the bone, and real enough to ease the tent for a few breaths. Nobody left him alone with his pain for long unless he asked for it, and even that only lasted until the next meal, the next bandage change, or the next excuse someone found to sit within reach and talk as though they had come for some other purpose.
Every few days the camp looked like a different army. Another ditch cut deeper. Another timber stack rose behind the smith lines. Wagon ruts split one road into three. Broken carts came in from the rear and rolled out on new wheels. Reinforcement companies arrived first in knots under tired officers, later in whole files with spare spears, mule teams, and camp followers already cursing the mud.
Ouz watched a great deal of it from the tent flap, from a stool, or from a slow walk between guy ropes with one hand free and the other side still pulled tight by scar and healing flesh.
Samraj did not come again in force. Twice he heard horns in the distance and saw mounted scouts brought in bleeding by noon. Once a wagon train returned short by six mules and two drivers. Another day a burial trench opened near the lower edge of camp because a river skirmish had gone badly for a work party trying to secure timber. Yet no second full strike came. No new shell closed around men in open ground. No night fires rose from the works.
Captain put his judgment on it one evening while sharpening a spearhead by lantern light. “They bled too,” he said. “They just bled out of our sight.”
Brawler snorted. “I would like it more if they had the courtesy to bleed where we could count it.”
Captain turned the spearhead, checked the line, and kept going. “I said they bled. I didn’t say they became fools. A side can lose hard and still learn.”
Ouz sat on the stool by the flap with his right hand resting on the pommel of the replacement side knife Butcher had approved for walking practice. “You think they are waiting?”
“I think everyone is,” Captain said.
Ouz listened past the canvas and heard an army doing the work of waiting: hammers from the smith lines, curses from a wagon axle somewhere in the mud, a mule screaming once and going silent. Men always made noise before killing started again.
Liujingting came and went through those days in a rhythm of his own.
Sometimes he arrived with a borrowed cup and tea that had cooled on the walk from some better officer’s line. Sometimes he arrived with a split lip from a card game he swore he had nearly won. Once he came with two charcoal pages full of scratched-out verses and read half a stanza before deciding the meter had failed him and crumpling the page into the stove trench.
The visit that stayed with Ouz happened on a rainy afternoon when the others were away on rotation, errands, or the kind of duties soldiers pretended not to hate because hating them changed nothing.
Liujingting stood just inside the flap shaking water from his sleeves. “Your tent remains disappointingly martial,” he said. “I had hoped severe wounding might have improved the decor.”
Ouz nodded toward the stool. “You are welcome to hang silk from the center pole.”
“That would only encourage Daxuan.”
Liujingting sat. His eyes moved once across the tent, the folded bedding, the hanging kit, the small table with bandage rolls and a cup of broth gone half-cold. He waited until the silence settled properly between them. After that he reached inside his outer sleeve and placed something in Ouz’s good hand.
The stone hit the palm with a weight Ouz knew at once. He looked down. The jade had a chipped edge on one side and the old wolf lines worn smooth where thumb and skin had found them over the years. The cord was not the one he remembered. This one was newer, darker, less frayed. Ouz’s head lifted.
Liujingting rested his forearms on his knees. “They laid your gear out in the surgeon’s line the first night. Armor pieces. Belt. Knives. Shirt. One clerk from the quartermaster’s side had the look of a man who had started calculating curiosities before the blood had dried.” His mouth tightened. “I dislike men who inventory the dead too early. Even when they’re wrong.”
“You took it?”
“I borrowed it from future theft.” He glanced once toward the flap and back. “I had it restrung. The old cord was nearly finished. You didn’t notice it was gone?”
“I didn’t notice much.”
“That seems consistent with being opened from shoulder to ribs.”
Ouz closed his hand around the stone. For a moment the tent, the rain, the distant hammering from the armorers, all of it fell a little farther off. “Thank you,” he said.
Liujingting waved it away, which was as close as he ever came to admitting he had meant something by it. “I also rewrote the third turn in the Wolf and the Bard. The previous version had become too honest.”
“Does he survive the new one?”
“For one more fire.” Liujingting’s mouth bent at the corner. “I have found audiences prefer him half-broken. Whole men make poor songs.”
He asked no questions about the stone. He asked none about where it came from or why Ouz had worn it hidden under grime, armor, and a false life. He stayed long enough to speak of a quartermaster who cheated at dice with loaded knucklebones and a cavalry lieutenant who had started repeating one verse of the song as though he had invented it himself. He left once the rain eased and the tent grew too quiet around the object in Ouz’s hand. That night Ouz tied the stone back around his neck one-handed and slept with it against his chest. He woke once before dawn with the cord biting lightly at the back of his neck and his hand closed over the stone hard enough to leave a mark in his palm. For a few breaths he did not remember the tent, the bandages, or the army. He only remembered that something of his old life had made it through the knife-work intact.
Recovery worked in increments too small to notice while they were happening. The first time he could lift a bowl with the left hand an inch off the table, the whole shoulder trembled with the effort and he nearly dropped the thing on his blanket. The first time he could pull his shirt over his head without needing Brawler or Mute to help, he had to sit afterward until the blackness at the edge of his sight thinned. The first time he could cross from one end of the company street to the other without stopping, Rat followed him at a distance for the entire walk and never once pretended it was for any other reason than the chance that Ouz might collapse in the mud and prove annoying to carry back.
At night, when the others slept or lay half-awake under their blankets listening to camp sounds bleed through canvas, Ouz worked his breath the way Hermit had worked his own by the old fire. He followed the pattern he had learned by watching rather than instruction, slow in, slower out, the mind walking the pain rather than wrestling it.
Sometimes the body answered by loosening a little. Sometimes by sleeping sooner. Once or twice by showing him the hard clean lines that came when some deeper part of him steadied and accepted the shape it had to keep. No pale words crossed his sight during those nights. He did not need them.
By the end of the month he could walk anywhere in camp without help, raise the left forearm to chest height, and close his grip around a wooden practice hilt for a count of twenty before the shoulder told him to stop. That did not mean he was ready for war. It meant he was no longer an object to be carried from one piece of shelter to another.
The summons came in the late afternoon, when the stove trench had gone low and the tent smelled of old smoke, rendered fat, leather damp from a day of mist, and the sour edge of boots that had seen too much mud.
A messenger stood outside with his helmet under one arm and the careful expression of a man who had been instructed to show respect without inventing familiarity. “Chanyu,” he said. “General Guanyan and His Highness request your presence.”
Brawler looked up from the knife he was cleaning. “Request. Hear that. A month in bed and he has turned formal.”
Captain stood from the map scrap spread over his knee and looked Ouz over once, from shoulders to boots. “Can you make the walk?”
“Yes.”
Captain nodded. “Go. Listen more than you speak. If they offer you tea, drink it. If they offer you a command, understand the price before you accept.”
Key was not in the tent. Sleeper had not returned from the outer line. Rat sat by the gear pile with a needle in one hand repairing a strap that did not yet need repair.
Mute held out Ouz’s coat. Ouz took it and shrugged into it with some care.
Brawler rose and pulled the collar straight with more force than needed. “If you come back promoted, I’ll hate you in a louder voice.”
“You already do most things in a loud voice.”
“That’s because subtlety failed to improve the camp.”
The messenger led him away. He did not take Ouz toward the command tent where maps, officers, and shouting usually gathered. He led him upslope past the officers’ rows, past a pair of sentries with finer armor than the rest of the camp could afford, and toward a larger pavilion set apart from the rest by space rather than ornament. Bam waited at the entrance.
The messenger saluted and withdrew at once. He did not enter. Bam lifted the flap himself and looked at Ouz’s left shoulder before his eyes came back to the face. “You walked here cleanly,” he said.
“I had warning.”
“That helps less than most men think.” He stepped aside.
The inside of the pavilion held more comfort than a soldier’s tent and less luxury than a court fool would have called princely. A carpet lay over packed ground. The brazier in the corner burned a better grade of charcoal than common lines received. Two low tables stood near the center with a squat teapot, three cups, and a lacquer box set beside a folded cloth. A screen cut off the rear sleeping space. Lamps hung from taller poles than usual and gave off cleaner light.
General Guanyan sat by one of the low tables with a cup in hand.
The Third Prince sat farther back on a layered cushion with his eyes closed and his legs folded beneath him. He wore no shirt. Sweat marked the skin at the chest, throat, and shoulders. The muscles there had gone harder over the last month and sat tighter over the frame beneath. Ouz smelled the medicine on him almost at once, sharper in the heat of the closed tent and stronger than it had been during the earlier field audience. Under sweat, under clean skin, under the faint charcoal air, it sat bitter and metallic with a sweet rot behind it, something closer to a prepared poison than any ordinary tonic.
Bam touched the back of a chair set near the table.
Ouz sat.
Bam took his place by the flap for a few breaths. When Guanyan gave the smallest motion with two fingers, he stepped out and let the canvas fall behind him.
No one spoke.
Guanyan poured tea into the third cup and set it near Ouz’s hand.
Ouz took it.
Across the pavilion the prince kept breathing in measured pulls through the nose and out through parted lips. Ouz had seen Hermit work long sits before dawn with frost on the stones and no audience to impress. This was not the same. The posture was sound enough and the discipline was there, yet the breath betrayed strain. He was holding too high, forcing too hard near the top of each pull. Someone had taught the prince a method that worked. No one had taught him how to live inside it without fighting himself.
Guanyan drank once and let the silence continue long enough that any weaker man might have mistaken it for a test. Ouz did not mistake it for anything. He sat, drank tea, and kept his face loose.
At last the prince opened his eyes. Sweat ran from one temple down the line of his jaw. He took the cloth from the table beside him, wiped his face and neck, and looked directly at Ouz. “So,” he said. “You came.”
The voice had changed very little from their first meetings. A little deeper. A little more settled. The same severity lived under it.
“I was summoned, Highness.”
A faint line appeared at one corner of the prince’s mouth. Not quite amusement. “That too.”
Guanyan set his cup down. “How does the shoulder hold?”
“It complains.”
“That means it still has principles.” The old general studied him for a moment longer. “Sit easy. You are here to speak, not bow.”
Ouz shifted only enough to take pressure off the left side.
The prince reached for his own cup but did not drink from it yet. “You looked at me strangely when you came in.”
Ouz said nothing.
Guanyan’s gaze sharpened by a degree. “Do you find the air unpleasant?”
Ouz understood the line of the question. He also understood that stupidity here would be fatal in quieter ways than a public execution.
“The air in an army camp is rarely pleasant, General.”
Guanyan’s face did not move. “I was not speaking of sweat. You have lived among soldiers for months. Worse smells have passed your nose.”
The prince watched him with open interest now.
Ouz set the cup down before answering. “The health of the royal house is not a road I should walk on, General.”
The prince smiled at that, small and brief. “You thought I was ill.”
Ouz let the silence stand.
Guanyan asked the next question before the prince could choose whether to enjoy the answer. “Do you know why Zhanar marches this year?”
Ouz felt the old habits in him close ranks at once. A man in false colors. A man under a false name. A steppe boy passing as something shaped by a city he did not belong to. Questions like that did not invite opinions. They invited rope. He gave none too quickly.
Guanyan saw the caution and dismissed it with a wave of two fingers. “You may speak as you speak to Moying.”
That narrowed the danger and changed none of it.
Ouz looked at the tea for one breath, gathered the safest pieces of truth, and spoke. “I am sure the court has reasons I do not know. Kingdoms usually go to war for the same causes. Land, roads, grain, river access, taxes. Pride if the men making decisions have too much of it.”
The prince’s mouth twitched.
Guanyan’s answer came with a quiet breath that might have been approval. “You know enough to be wrong usefully.” He poured more tea into his own cup. “Zhanar did not climb to its present height because our fields were kinder than everyone else’s. They were not. We did not rise because we had the largest population. We built, kept, and expanded power because our armies could produce a kind of man other armies could not produce often enough.”
The prince leaned his forearms on his knees and finally drank.
Guanyan continued. “Bam told me how long you stayed alive in front of Ishaani.”
Ouz’s mouth moved before he chose it. The expression carried no humor. It came from the memory of bark against his back, blood in his sleeve, and the clean knowledge that one arm lost there would have been worse than death.
Guanyan read the expression another way. “If that smile means you think the achievement small,” he said, “correct yourself. Any ordinary man in your place dies before Bam clears half the distance. Most die before they understand what stands in front of them. You held long enough for aid to matter. Accept the fact.”
Ouz said nothing.
The old general’s eyes stayed on him. “A Blessed Warrior starts before the body changes,” he said. “In nerve. In endurance. In the part of a man that keeps its line while death is already close. Bam says you have more of that than most officers he has known.”
The prince spoke before the room could settle around the words. “My uncle believes you are one of the rare men born for it. I am less interested in birth. I have watched results. Since you entered our lines, your decisions have kept helping this army. You found signal work where others saw brush. You broke a packet that mattered. You kept Moying alive on the road. You saw the shape of the west rise before older men did. Feiyan’s report says the same thing in his own harsher language.” He set the cup down. “There are things you should know,” he said. “Before that, there is an offer.”
Ouz waited.
“This is not an order. If you refuse, you go back to your unit. Your place there remains what it is now. No loss of standing. No punishment.” The prince’s eyes held his without wavering. “Swear yourself to my faction and step toward an opportunity granted to very few.”
Ouz looked at Guanyan. The old general’s face gave away nothing except the absence of objection.
The prince reached to the low table beside him, took up a folded sheet, and placed it in front of Ouz. The writing was formal court script, clean enough that some copied clerk had feared the hand would be examined by people who killed for errors. Two spaces stood blank. One for the name. One for birthplace.
The body of the oath ran beneath them.
I, ______, of ______, born under the Kingdom of Zhanar, from this day forward join the faction of Third Prince Beilue for a common cause: to aid the endangered, steady the troubled, strike the enemies of the state above, and protect the people below. I seek no glory for my own name. I ask only to spend this life in the service of my prince. Let Heaven and Earth bear witness to what I hold in my heart. If I betray His Highness in deed, design, or concealment, may both Heaven and the people of the earth judge me and cast me down.
Ouz read it twice. The first time for the words. The second for the gaps between them: name, place, Chanyu, Shan-He. The oath did not ask for Ouz.
A memory rose on its own, unbidden and unwelcome in the way the most useful memories often were.
Who was Torhun? No one knew. No king claimed him. No banner named him.
The line belonged to the opening of Torhun. Ouz remembered the cadence well enough that it rose whole now and settled somewhere under the ribs. Another memory followed it, colder and older.
Names are for straight threads.
Aldaci’s voice had not needed to be loud to stay. Ouz looked down at the oath again. He was not a straight thread. He had not been one for a long time.
“What is the opportunity?” he asked.
Guanyan answered because the prince had already had his chance to enjoy mystery. “If you choose this path, we will give you a chance to become Blessed.”
Ouz’s full attention settled on the old general.
The old general saw it and did not soften the next words. “You will have a chance. Nothing more.”
“What would you require?”
“Loyalty first,” the prince said. “Knowledge second. Endurance after that.”
Ouz turned back to the oath. “If I sign with Chanyu, you accept Chanyu.”
The prince’s face did not change. “That is the man who entered my army.”
“And if that man proves useful, it is him you will judge.”
“Yes.”
For a beat Ouz looked at the ink drying in the prince’s hand and saw the other road just as clearly. Refuse, and he went back to his quarter with the same shoulder, the same sword, and the same distance between himself and men like Ishaani. Accept, and the road turned dangerous in a different way, but at least it moved. Hermit did not have years to spare for Ouz’s caution.
Guanyan’s eyes rested on him in a way that said the old man had heard the shape of the question beneath the words and chosen not to tear it open yet.
Ouz picked up the brush. He wrote Chanyu in the first blank and Shan-He in the second. The prince watched every stroke.
After that Ouz read the oath aloud. He did not raise his voice or ornament the words. He spoke them clearly enough that no one in the pavilion needed to ask him for a line again. When the last word left his mouth, the prince took the paper back, folded it once, and set it aside. The air in the pavilion tightened.
Guanyan poured fresh tea.
The prince rested one hand on his knee. “You have earned the truth of it.”
Guanyan took over at once. “Zhanar possesses a formula. In some years it yields three pills of extraordinary value. They do not build greatness inside an empty man. They do not turn weak bone immortal. They act on candidates who already carry the right frame, nerve, and hidden capacity. In the right body, they open the threshold from which a true Blessed Warrior may emerge.”
Samraj, according to intelligence gathered over the past year, had reached toward something similar. That alone had helped push the court toward open war. Ouz listened in silence, and piece after piece found its place.
The prince. The smell in the pavilion. The change across the shoulders. The guarded patience in Bam. Guanyan delaying full commitment while still building a war camp deep enough to support it. A campaign where waiting had become more dangerous than marching.
He looked at the prince once, and that was enough.
Guanyan caught the look at once. “Yes. He took one.”
“How long ago?”
“Close to three months,” the prince said. “The first month gives signs. The full settling takes longer.”
“What happens if it fails?”
Guanyan looked at his nephew before answering. The look lasted only a breath. “If it fails cleanly,” he said, “the body never takes this road again. More pills do not change that. If it fails badly, a man may not live long enough to care. A man may become many things after failure. Blessed will not be one of them.”
Ouz let that sit. “So failure remains possible.”
“Failure is always possible,” Guanyan said. “Some years the court produced the pills and gained no Blessed men from the whole effort. Records exist for that. Do not let rarity flatter you into idiocy. Bam’s opinion matters to me. It does not overturn the nature of risk.”
Ouz took the cup and drank, buying himself the moment needed to think. The tea had gone cooler while they talked. He welcomed that. Heat made the shoulder throb harder under the coat, a deep patient ache that never let him forget how close Ishaani had come to taking the arm with him.
If he took it now and survived the process, the first real effects might show by mid-summer. If he failed, the road closed. If he refused, Ishaani remained the measure of what waited beyond his current reach. One encounter had already shown enough. A hundred more deaths against that man would still leave the answer ugly. If he wanted Hermit alive within two years, if he wanted the boys out of Zhanar hands and back toward the steppe with their chains gone for good, he needed strength beyond clean sword lines and a stubborn refusal to die on schedule. “How much does the process restrict a man once it starts?” He asked.
Guanyan answered. “You can train. You can walk. You can rebuild. Hard fighting at close quarters waits until the body settles. The strain cuts different in each case. Some men run hot. Some shake. Some bleed from the nose for weeks. Some lose sleep and grow stupid. Others keep their heads and suffer in ways less visible.”
The prince said, “I had the sweating, the sleeplessness, and a temper worse than usual.”
Guanyan glanced at him. “That statement lacks useful scale.”
The prince ignored it. “You would not be sent back to soft duty forever. Only kept from waste while the change takes hold.”
Guanyan added, “My judgment is that Samraj took enough pain in the last operation to spend some time behind stronger caution. We expect skirmishing. Raids. Probing at supply lines. I do not expect a full press from them soon.” He took another sip of tea. “What I would prefer is better understanding of the men directing them.”
That thought struck another loose piece in Ouz’s memory.
On the rise, before steel had closed and pain had reduced the world to surviving the next breath, Ishaani had spoken one word in broken Zhanar with enough contempt and certainty behind it to matter. Ouz looked up. “I heard a name from him.”
Both men sharpened. “Whose?”
“I do not know. Ishaani said it while looking at the rise after the quarter pulled away. He said Padsha would hate losing the trap.”
Guanyan’s attention hardened all at once. No visible shock crossed his face. The room still changed around the word. “Padsha,” he repeated.
“That was what I heard.”
The prince leaned forward. “You are sure?”
“As sure as I can be with blood in my mouth and a sword coming at me.”
Guanyan reached for the brush himself, drew a scrap from the side table, and wrote the name in quick characters before the sound could change in memory.
“That is enough,” he said. “If the word is title, name, or office, we will work it.”
He set the brush down and for the first time looked faintly pleased that the meeting had gone wider than one offer and one answer.
The prince reached toward the lacquer box Ouz had noticed earlier.
Up close it was finer work than he had first thought. Long and narrow. Dark wood under clear polish. The lid curved in a half-round over the top and slid back with a soft, precise sound on hidden runners cut into the sides. It resembled the shape of a small bread chest made for a noble’s table, only reduced, refined, and built to hold something no kitchen would ever deserve.
Inside, cushioned in pale cloth, lay two spheres no larger than fat peas. Under the lamplight their surface held a dull nacre sheen, somewhere between worked shell and dried medicine. A third hollow sat empty beside them where another had once rested.
The prince lifted the box and held it where Ouz could see clearly. “Every prince of the royal line receives three,” he said. “One for himself. Two for men he may choose.” His gaze flicked toward the flap where Bam stood outside somewhere beyond the canvas. “My uncle made it easy for me to secure loyalty from certain men without spending what the court gave. I kept the others. I have not offered one before now.”
He extended the open box across the table. The two pills sat between them in the warm lamplight, small enough to lose between fingers, heavy enough to tilt a kingdom into war.
Ouz did not reach for the box. The shoulder throbbed once under the coat, deep and stubborn, and memory answered at once with bark at his back and Ishaani coming through steel like weather. Two pills rested in the cloth. Two futures sat with them.
“This is the first time,” the prince said, “that I offer one to a man I chose myself.”