Batu listens to the echo of her, and to her description of a place where she is nothing, entirely, where the past itself is a vast keep of memory; whereas here there is a great determination to pitch recall and live only in spaces where she is all things. To be inconsequential; and not even an echo that will spring up again long after she is dead.

For a time, he had been that. There is Yuè’s voice, and here where Batu stands, blocking the sun, his teeth are revealed in frames of dust.

“Because you are living. Because sometimes we like the void; the danger, [i]saran dari ekh. Sometimes it is the only way to be alive.”[/i] Does she see that monotony is the slowest death? That without turbulence and that which makes eyes glisten and hearts canter, there is no living? To never risk what is safe for the uncertain, to never run at least once, away from sensible advice?

Breath ascends, swells, gathers, then is sent adrift in shards of rutilant gold light. The image of Siakhanbayar appears in snap-shot. She does not reach him through tactile memory of any sense but smell.

Even that, too, has become hard to remember.

Yuè is in his eyes. Wife of thy enemy. Is she not also his enemy?

He could do it, now. He could bleed life from her and set the han kingdom in ruinous wailing.

He could take what the emperor had not, brim her with his issue, with mongol bastards too wide and rugged to be mistaken for anything else.

What he finds now is a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. Multiple acts of artifice dissolved. Prepared to meet this day, her true appeal emerging. The lord steps forward, inherently.

He wanted her.

What do you imagine? Your husband’s throat in my jaws.

“I imagine the opposite of my Empress, Teng Yuè. But there is little use to a guard’s imaginings. So I do not dream, Empress. I work.”