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Trente. “Elua! Imri, why did you do this?”
    His face was a study in teary mutiny. “ You said-you talked about friends, and honor, and the precept of Blessed Elua! Love as thou wilt .” He spat the words like a curse. “Why am I not allowed to choose?”
    I sat down on my cot and looked to Joscelin for aid.
    “Fedabin.” He bowed to Kaneka, crossing his forearms with care, speaking in the halting zenyan which was our only common tongue. “How dangerous is this trip, anyway?”
    “To find the Melehakim?” Kaneka shrugged. “Dangerous, lord. There is a river greater than the Euphrate, and deserts that kill. There are crocodiles and lions, and scavengers in between-hyenas, jackals, even the blood-flies that drive strong men to madness. And there are tribes, many tribes, in Jebe-Barkal, some of them hostile. But,” she added, a glint in her eye, “none of them will seek to kill a boy due to an accident of birth. Besides, he could always remain in Debeho, if you willed it. He would be warded well enough in my village.”
    Joscelin looked at me. I looked back at him. “You can’t be serious,” I said.
    “Phèdre.” He sounded eminently reasonable. “Think of it. At least he’d be safe from assassination attempts. And ... Name of Elua, the boy has a point! Is he never to be allowed a choice?”
    “You weren’t,” I murmured. “I wasn’t. Not at ten.”
    “And look where it brought us. Still, neither of us had to endure Daršanga.”
    Some choices must be made swiftly, lest the enormity of them overwhelm the chooser. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eye-sockets. “All right,” I said. “All right, all right, all right ! Imriel .” I lifted my head. “If we let you stay-if we sanction this-do you swear to me that you will obey us? Joscelin and me both-yes, and Kaneka, too-every word, every whim, as if Blessed Elua himself had crossed the boundary of Terre d’Ange-that-lies-beyond to give voice to a new sacrament?”
    Imriel was nodding with every word I spoke, not listening, agreeing to it all. “I swear,” he said breathlessly. “I swear, I vow, I promise, Phèdre, every word!”
    I spent the remainder of our voyage composing the letter to Amaury Trente.
    It was a foolhardy decision, and one I daresay I wouldn’t have made half a year ago. Still, great distance and great events have a way of changing one’s perspective. As mad as our quest might be, it was nothing to what Imriel had undergone in Daršanga, and Kaneka was right; no one in Jebe-Barkal wanted him dead. Once he set foot on Terre d’Ange, he would always, always have enemies, the shadow of his mother’s vast treachery hanging over him, every move watched and scrutinized.
    Even so.
    “I can’t believe you sided with him,” I said to Joscelin that night. Imriel was sleeping in Kaneka’s cabin, which held a spare cot. After three days of scavenging for scraps and sleeping wedged in a dark corner of the hold, he was grateful for it. If she hadn’t caught him at the water-barrel, he might have held out till Iskandria. “Amaury will be like to kill us. And Ysandre ... I don’t want to think of it.”
    Joscelin shrugged. “You’re the one thought you saw an assassin aboard his ship.”
    “Thought!” I lowered my voice. “Even I admitted it was probably my imagination playing on my fears. It’s not like you, that’s all. Honor, duty, loyalty-all those Cassiline virtues, that should demand we send him back .”
    “I’m tired.” Lying on his side, he regarded me across the cabin. “Phèdre, all my life, I’ve had to make that choice, over and over. I’m tired of it.”
    Daršanga, I thought, had changed him, too; it had changed us all. “Then love is reason enough? Because he willed it?”
    “I don’t know. Blessed Elua says it is. Imriel followed you-us-out of love. I know that much is true; there’s no other reason for it.” Joscelin rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling. “Phèdre, did you tell him how his mother escaped from Troyes-le-Mont?”
    A chill ran the length of my spine. “No,” I whispered.
    Incredible as it seems, I had not thought, until then, how very similar were the means, even down to the concealing cloak. In Troyes-le-Mont, Melisande had traded places with her cousin Persia and walked out of captivity under the very noses of the men set to guard her. And her son had played nearly the self-same trick. It would not go unremarked, not by the men who’d been duped by