Down south there would be music and glory, heartbreak and heart’s ease, claws or fang drawn sometimes in the lower chamberways and alleys. And come morning, power and passion and celebration all over again, jostling each other in the Pharaoh’s halls— narrowed for furtive love or quick bloodshed. So it goes also into bedchambers and planted courtyards, where flowering hedges droop over springs and deep-dredged artificial pools.

Horselord retreats.

He remembers plains like these. Remembers with whom he’d been there last, in tiger-iris time, before their fathers had died.

The waif aspired to be one of the khagan’s civil servants then, with access to the court. To Jochi and Tselmuun, Oyun and Rasha.

The steppe shimmers. Batu lopes his way northward.