"Do it, then," I say. I hate the slight quaver in my voice.

He looks at me searchingly, eyebrows raised.

"Do it, then," I repeat with more conviction, my voice solid. "Change your mind. Chain me up in the dungeons, feed me gruel, beat me, use me, scar me. If you'd do it, do it, but for the goddess's sake, stop going on about it. Torture me or not, but spare me the poetry, the long-winded speeches!"

"The poetry," he quotes with quiet disbelief. "Never once has anyone called me a poet- a murderer, a tyrant, a whoreson, a genius, but never a poet."

"Do you like poetry?" He asks suddenly, the question spilling unbidden from his lips.

I stare at him with some combination of anger and confusion.

"I only ever liked the epics," he continues in one-sided conversation. "Stories of blood and love and war. Ahren con afva sha contriova, shahan zsiri mirio va ko," he quotes. It's old Shikkan, not Alyezsani, but I know it well. The lines come from the Epic of Aramizsa.

Wrought iron woman, steel-blooded warrioress/ she came from the north in a thunderous chorus."

I've never felt so lost. I can't understand, much less predict, his jumps in logic. The conversation seems to twist around me like a desert viper, striking at odd times, then retreating. Or maybe it's more like a serpent from the Isomarashi jungle, coiling slowly around me, pulling tighter and tighter until I'm lost and breathless.

"Ava mohari, Zsavina na dijik suu/con sahevin con dresha ilt derosyasha," I quote back, grappling for some control in a conversation that seemed like a battle only a moment before and now turns to literary talk over tea.

Aramizsa came down upon them as a fire upon kindling/ With divine justice she burnt all opposition.

He laughs, a real, bold laugh that seems out of place coming from his stony face.

"I like your spirit," he mutters. "Even after all that's happened, you're still stupid with spirit."

His laughter chafes at me more than the ropes of the gallows.

"Do you suppose this will be an epic one day?" He asks, ignoring my glowering. "It has the makings of one, I think. Vast change, vast death, fluidity of life no one would have predicted."

"An epic?" I ask angrily. "It will be a tragedy- it is a tragedy! History will remember this as a mass grave and sing funerary songs!"

"History remembers Aramizsa as a hero, and she killed hundreds of thousands of Harrowin to take Shikkah. I only killed one hundred and ten. I've cleaner hands than your city's patroness! Compared to her, I might even be a good man."

"You are not a good man," I spit in disgust. The bread knife glints invitingly in the hash light of the noonday sun. "You will never be good, could never be. Are you really mad enough to think yourself a good man?!"

"No, I'm not," he answers simply, taking a bite of a roll. "I know I'm not a good man. But I'm a necessary man."

"You're a madman," I say, almost in awe of his twisted logic. "Necessary- none of this was necessary- all of this loss, this waste-"

"Was necessary to avoid greater evil," he counters. "You're still on that goddamned pedestal, looking down on all of Shikkah like the goddess herself. Come back to earth, O'otani. Look at what was happening to the country under the Dimaraste's rule."

"We survived two droughts in ten years. We kept people from starving, and we kept the silk market afloat-"

"You lost the whole of the treasury to ill-planned humanitarian relief. People starved. I saw them in the streets, and you'd have, too, if you ever left this cloister. Children, O'otani. Children like your Halima. The silk farmers are barely in business and the only reason the country didn't fall into total economic chaos is the intervention of the Vasayaste, those little lords you hate so much."

"Yes," I laugh, "because the Viryka family's sale of cheap fabrics or the Shimaya family's perfume brought in enough money to support our economy-"

"Not the fabric and the perfume, no," he says, cutting me off. "But you know as well as I do that the Vasayaste sell much more than that. Starving nations might stop buying silk and perfume, but there's always a market for liquor, and Lirium, and whores. The black market money supported us and you know it. Your whole family knew it, that's why they didn't inspect the ports at certain times, looked the other way at others-"

I look away, trapped by my own knowledge.

When I found out they were letting Lirium cross the border I turned on my mother like a wild thing, cursed her, argued with her, pleaded with her- we could not bend the law, we couldn't let any sort of lawlessness in or it would overtake us.

She laughed, a hollow sound, like wind whistling through reeds. "It is the lesser of two evils, O'otani," she said, "all our laws are worth nothing if there's no money and the government collapses. Like it or not, we need the Vasayaste if we want to survive. Even Somitu sees it."

Still I railed against the idea of looking the other way while the rising merchant class and their goddess-damned black market flourished. She listened to all of it patiently, stoically, the lines on her face seeming to grow deeper by the minute.

"This is the difference between being a child and an adult, daughter," she said. "Sometimes you make choices that betray your ideals so those very ideals have a chance to survive, to flourish later on. If we crack down on the black market, we lose the Vasayaste's money, we make those with more present capital resent us, and we likely lose all of Arzsa. Would you be willing to lose it all just to say you never bent the rules? Would you look Amshira in the eye and say, "there might be a way to save this city, this family, but we can't do it because it might stain our hands?"

I was quiet for a long while. I battled myself, but I knew from the moment she said his name what answer I would come to. I would not let Shira lose his title, his city, whatever the cost. If it meant looking letting the Vasayaste have their way for a while, so be it.

As my mother said, "we must do what we must do to survive."

"You're quieter now," he murmurs, sitting back, still looking at me with those damned grey eyes. "Reality caught up to your high ideals?"

"We did what needed to be done," I say. It sounds weak even to my own ears.

"So did I," the murderer says. "You would have ruined Shikkah, you and your family. Let the Vasayaste in when you need us, and as soon as the market starts to recover, shut us out. We saved you, and you looked at us like we were dogs sitting at your feet."

"We did not-"

"You did!" He says, suddenly harsh. "The Dimaraste was moving to push the Vasayaste back down into the dirt from which they rose. Moving to limit not only the black markets, but legitimate markets. The proposed export duty- of course lower for those merchants who earned your seal of approval, meaning none of us! And you expected us to just take it, and smile, and go back to being nothing.

"You can't go back," he whispers, sounding far away. "Once you've been something, once you've tasted success, held power in your hands and cradled it like a newborn, watched it grow- you cannot go back."

"None of us can go back now," I reply bitterly, almost choking on my own acid. "You've made sure of that."

"Not without your help," he adds. "As I told the city, you were instrumental, Izsaiki."

I bare my teeth at him. My hand aches to hold the knife, to rend flesh with metal. Soft flesh giving way to cold iron, to entitled steel teeth... but he doesn't look soft, not now, looking down on me with taunting eyes and a curved smile. He looks like a man carved from marble and animated by the darkest of wills.

I don't say anything. Restraint, I think between flashes of anger and violent intent. Restrain yourself. Do not give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait.

He waits, then frowns slightly. "Well, aren't you going to ask me?"

"Ask you what? From what dark pit you crawled from?"

"I thought you'd want to know why I said what I did on the scaffold."

"I know why you said it," I mutter from between clenched teeth.

He raises his eyebrows mockingly. "Do you, now?"

"Salting the fields. Why kill something just once when you have the opportunity to kill it twice?"

"Salting the fields," he repeats. "Well, yes, at least partially. I need no latent loyalists stirring up trouble. But then why let you live? Why not just proclaim you a traitor and hang you then and there?"

"I don't know, and I don't care."

"You spoke of waste, earlier," he says, ignoring me. "Well, I think killing you would have been a waste. Those other hundred and ten, all of them were rotted through with the ideals of the Dimaraste. Nothing was lost when they were. But you- you are different. You proved it that night in the silk tent."

I stiffen. The undulation of red silk comes over my eyes like a veil, a vision from four months ago. It's just one meeting, my mother said, just one...

No. I banish the silk from my vision. I can't think of that now, I can't-

"After all, what I said to Arzsa was only half a lie. You were a traitor, just not to the degree I claimed."