I KEPT SILENT ALL the way out of the palace, speaking no word to my escort nor to the pilot officer who took me from cloud-bound city to the deeper silence of space where the Tamerlane waited at anchor. I did not speak to my men in the landing bay, and acknowledged the salutes of those in the halls with only a stiff nod. I moved in a kind of fog, not truly seeing the faces nor the dark metal of the halls.

I had to see her, had to tell her. Had to know.

She wasn’t in our apartments.

I found her in the hydroponics section, in my private place beneath the hanging basil plants. She was sleeping. A pocket projector stood on the table beside her, still running. The air felt cool and close beneath the bower, and the sweet smell of the herbs hung on the air like perfume. Careful not to wake her, I stood the projector on its end and glanced at the image. It showed an inscription scanned from a monument on Iubalu’s ship. With a brushing gesture, I toggled the scan to the next: a similar inscription taken from the Quiet ruins on Calagah. One of the round glyphs was highlighted on each, a circle with a triangle and a pair of arcing lines inscribed within it.

Valka had been scanning the new Cielcin writing for symbols that matched her old scans of Quiet ruins from a dozen sites across the galaxy. A prodigious task, even for one with Valka’s machine-enhanced memory. No wonder she’d fallen asleep. I knelt beside her, restrained the impulse to push a loose strand of hair back into place.

I did not want to wake her.

I did not know what to say.

But my hand moved without my willing it, and found hers.

“What is it?”

Valka did not wake up like normal people. There was no change in breathing, no stirring, no sudden start. The delicate praxis that crouched spider-like in her brain regulated her body’s autonomic functions, augmenting the action of the medulla. She was always stable . . . unless she wanted to be otherwise. She told me once that she could control her endocrine system, could order a shot of adrenaline or dopamine as easily as you or I might make a fist. I envied her her control.

I was losing mine.

“Did you see the Emperor?” she asked. “How did it go?”

“I’m . . . to marry the princess,” I said. My voice shook. “And he’s offered me a seat on the Imperial Council.”

Not letting go of my hand, Valka pushed herself back in her seat. Then she did something I did not expect. Something absurd.

She smiled.

“ ’Tis wonderful news, is it not?”

“Wonderful?” Had I not spoken correctly? Surely she understood me. Foreigner or no, Valka’s Galstani was perfect. “Valka, he wants me to marry Selene.” He wants me to marry someone else.

“So what? You don’t have to love her.” Valka squeezed my hand. “Don’t have to fuck her, either. I thought marriage didn’t mean much to you palatines. ’Tis just . . . business?”

She had a point, but she was missing mine. Holding her hand tighter, I said, “I don’t want to marry her.”

“Can you refuse?”

“No!” My hand was shaking. “He’s the Emperor, Valka. If he ordered me to leap from the battlements of the palace I could not refuse.”

Valka took her hand from mine. “Then ’tis a good thing he did not ask you to leap from the battlements.” I knew that look, those narrowed eyes, those compressed lips. It was the face she made when she remembered what I was. She shook her head. “Anaryoch.” This was not going at all like I’d hoped, nor as I’d feared. I felt unsteady, as if the decking at my feet were sagging beneath me. Valka pulled her legs up beneath her, and despite her rebuke she smiled and lay a hand on my cheek. “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” I repeated. “Valka, don’t you understand?”

“No!” she said sharply. “We don’t marry in Tavros.” Valka’s hand did not leave my face, and though my vision blurred, she smiled. “Marry this woman. You’ll never see her anyway. What does it matter?”

I almost laughed. “What does it matter?” I was kneeling anyway. “Valka, I want to marry you.” We had touched on this topic before, a hundred times. Touched and retreated as though our hands each found a burning plate of iron. I found her hand again and seized it.

She held mine in both of hers, a bemused smile on her face. “Hadrian. I don’t need your Empire’s approval to keep you. I have you already. And you have me. This doesn’t change anything. ’Tis a gesture.”

She didn’t understand. How could I make her understand? Still on one knee, I said, “It would change everything. A seat on the Council means I’ll be trapped here. Do you want to be trapped here?”

“Of course not!” she snapped. “Do you seriously think the Emperor will keep you here? You’re too much use to him out there.” She leaned toward me, dry lips brushing mine, and when she spoke her breath entered me. “We can run away whenever we like.”

“Run away?” I did laugh then, though it was a weak and feeble sound. “The Empire doesn’t just misplace a prince-consort, Valka. They’ll come after me.”

Her face—so close to my own—darkened. “Then don’t run. Stay here if ’tis what you want.” She pulled her hands away.

“That isn’t fair,” I said.

“You are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist!” she said, almost rolling her eyes. “How many of your lords keep women? How many of your ladies keep men? All of them, surely.”

Valka wasn’t wrong. With child-rearing the province of the Emperor’s High College, the gene looms, and the birthing vats, the marriages between palatine houses built on love were few. If there were any. My own parents had never shared a bed. Never kissed. Never touched one another that I can recall. My mother had kept her lovers, a stream of talented young ladies with bright futures eager to please the master artist. Doubtless the princess in the holo-opera we’d watched together weeks before had been one. My father kept none, preferring the cold solitude of power.

“I don’t want you to be my woman,” I said, exasperated. “I want you to be my wife.”

“Hadrian,” she said, smoothing down her shirtfront, “we have been together for decades. What is the difference?”

She knew full well what the difference was. We both did. It was only that I was afraid to say it. Afraid because I knew she did not want what I desired. She wanted no more of me than me. I wanted . . . “If we were . . . married, the High College would let us have children. Or might.” With Selene, an afterling princess, there would be no children. So few of the Imperial family were permitted offspring. There were enough to keep parallel branches of the family running, distant strains separated so the new Emperor or Empress always married a distant cousin and kept the bloodline pure for the second coming of the God Emperor, but Selene and I would have nothing, I knew.

Unless your visions are real . . . a little voice said to me. Unless you take the throne.

I am not sure when I started wanting children. As a boy, the thought had never occurred to me. I had wanted to be a scholiast, and scholiasts do not marry or father children. When had I changed?

“Valka?” She hadn’t spoken.

She wasn’t looking at me.

“Valka?”

“You know,” she spoke over me. “You know we don’t marry in Tavros. Loving someone more than someone else is, well . . . ’tis a kind of prejudice.” Though she did not turn to face me, she smiled. I’d known that, we’d discussed this kind of thing before. “The clans actually separate people if they stay together for too long. ’Tis not right to keep one person to yourself.” She glanced at me with golden eyes, her smile widening. “Or so they say.”

That was new to me. I felt a sucking horror at the thought and said, “That’s barbaric.”

The irony of my word choice was not lost on her, and she barked her short laugh. “There was a boy in my clan I knew—Soren. The council shipped him offworld when they discovered he’d been with the same girl for six years.” Valka looked down at her hands, massaged the tattooed one with the other. “I saw her after. The girl. She looked like someone drained the blood out of her.”

A weak laugh escaped me, and I said, “I know how she felt.”

One corner of Valka’s mouth rose sadly, and she stretched her legs out on the long chair. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. I shifted my weight, moving so that I sat now on the deck beside her, staring up at the light fixtures through the curtain of basil leaves. “Hadrian, I don’t want children. I’m no mother.”

“You wouldn’t have to be,” I said. “I’m a lord, Valka. You think the Empress carried her children? Fed them? Told them stories?” Before Valka could reply, I pressed on, “But I don’t want this to end.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“I don’t want it to end with us, Valka,” I said more forcefully, and retook her hand.

“Hadrian, everything ends,” she said. I pulled my hand away. “What is the matter with you?”

I glowered up at her. “I want you to care,” I hissed.

“You want me to be Lady Marlowe, you mean. To wear those ridiculous gowns and hang on your arm and smile at those disgusting lords of yours,” she said, ice on her tongue.

“If I’d wanted that,” I snapped, “I’d not have wanted you. I’m not trying to change you, Valka. I never have.”

She sniffed. “Yet you wish to—what is that charming barbarian expression? You wish to sire children on me, ’tis right? I am not some fucking racehorse, Hadrian.”

“I never said you were,” I said. The first tears had fallen, but it was anger that had pushed them out. “Not ever.”

Something in my face must have spoken to her, for she quailed and looked away, those golden eyes downcast. “I’m sorry.”

Briefly, a smile broke through my fresh-fallen tears. “I want a family with you because I love you, damn your eyes.” I found her hand again, willed her to feel what I was feeling and could not explain. “And because I’ll love them. Our children. I want us married because I want there to be no question that you matter more to me than princesses and titles. I want everyone to see I love you.”

“ ’Tis not what marriage is,” she said simply, but this time did not release my hand.

“It’s what it should be,” I answered with a snarling force I’d not guessed was in me.

Her smile shone with a sadness deep as the oceans of cloud on the world beneath our feet. “You were born too late, you know? You should have been one of those knights in your stories, saving girls from dragons,” she said at last, turning my hand over in hers. “I’m not a princess, Hadrian,” she said. “This isn’t one of your fairy stories.”

I looked up at her once more. Cold eyelids hid her hard eyes, while my own eyes moistened and burned. “I know that,” I answered her, “I—”

“But she is,” Valka said. My hand tightened on hers, tightened as though I braced myself against a blow, as if all the mass and force of some giant pressed against me, matched strength for strength.

“Don’t,” I said, my voice very small.

“Are you so sure she’s not exactly what you want?” Cruel lips moved.

“How can you ask that?” I asked, and did not scream, How dare you ask that! “You know me better than that.” I saw her then as I often had, as a creature made of glass, hard-edged and piercing and cruel. The icon of some fury or goddess left on some cold and distant altar, no votive candle lighted to her majesty save mine.

So tender and bitter, my lady. My lady of pain.

“Do I?”

Who was it said that our being only what we are remains our chief and unforgivable sin? What a pair of sinners we made: paper and fire, devil to one another. I saw suddenly that her coldness was only self-defense, as are all the worst of nature’s poisons. How else was she to react to this news? How else could she react and save her dignity? She who the great powers of the Empire would spurn and set aside?

Her cruelty twisted then before my eyes, revealed its soft underbelly.

“We’ll run,” I said, cutting through this dance and charade. “As soon as we’re sent away. We’ll run and not look back.” Nothing else mattered then. Not the war, not the Emperor, not the knives His Radiance would send after us if we fled. Not Syriani Dorayaica or Calen Harendotes; not MINOS and the Extras; not Kharn Sagara, not Brethren, not the Quiet. Not even my own death, my visions and purpose, nor the white jewel that hung at my throat.

“I thought you said they’ll come after us.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Valka shifted where she sat, rolling toward me. “We don’t have to run,” she said, and brushed away my tears. “I have everything I want right here.” She kissed me. Salt and the dry must of sleep mingled on our lips. “Marry the damn girl. She’ll have nothing of you. Not even your name. Let them seat you on this council. Let them call you prince. You’re mine, barbarian.” She seized the front of my shirt. “I cannot give you children, but neither can she. Accept it.”

She was right. Whether with my witch or the afterling princess, the High College would never grant my wish. Whatever ambitions the Lions thought I had to sit the throne and sire a dynasty could be crushed by a single bureaucrat’s red stamp on a Writ of Nativity.

Request denied.

I would never be a father, I knew that. What I wanted could not change that.

“I don’t want her,” I said. “I don’t want Selene.” It was important to me she understood that.

“You think I don’t know that?” she said, those hard eyes grown soft. “Hadrian . . . Hadrian, you knew this was coming. Do you really think I didn’t know it, too? I have loved you for more than fifty years. My own people would hate me for such selfishness.”

“It isn’t selfish,” I said.

Valka pressed her forehead to mine and whispered, “You’re right. I thought it would be. I thought I’d get tired of you. But I haven’t, I . . .” Her words vanished into smallness, returned like the tides. “I think we might be barbarians, too. In Tavros.”

“I just . . . want you to know I didn’t ask for this.”

“You men do such strange things to show how much you care,” she said. “Was this whole show for my benefit?”

There was nothing I could say to that, and I compressed my lips.

“I told you that night at the ball,” Valka said, tugging me upward by the tunic to kiss me yet again and pulling me into the great chair on top of her. “I don’t care about the bloody princess.”