The high council is housed in an expansive room filled with rows upon rows of wooden benches, easily enough to seat two hundred, all pointed towards a raised semicircular dais. It reminds me of the theatre, to be honest; a space for the players, and a space for the audience.

            Picturing the councilors at the dais, trying to govern while a crowd of gaping citizens looks on, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. All my life I've watched my mother govern from the head of a table, in a room only the nuclear Amarin family is allowed to enter. It's an intimate process, aided by tradition and the bonds of family. To put it on public display, inviting any ignorant layman into its most private machinations, seems almost perverse.

            I swallow my distaste and follow the ambassador forward, taking a seat in the third row of benches. Esato slides in next to us. He leans back and crosses his legs, looking completely at ease, a contrast to the anxiety painting the faces of the twenty or so other people in the room.

            "What do you suppose this is really about, then, Irei?" He asks as we wait for the session to start.

            "Your guess is as good as mine."

            "It's not about potentially offending those Yi'ili fools, I'll tell you that," Esato muses. "Since when has anyone cared about Yi'il? A hundred years past maybe, back when their mines were still full of opals?"

            "Hush, Lyu," the Ambassador says absentmindedly, the way you'd quiet a child, or a pet. Esato doesn't seem to mind; he settles back in his seat and stays quiet as more people, including several councilors, slowly trickle in.

            I'm shocked by the diversity I see. Only eight of the Councilors look ethnically Kamai, with dark hair, dark eyes, and deeply tanned skin. The rest are an amalgam, the result of traders passing through Kama's ports for centuries and inevitably leaving half-Kamai children behind.

            I see men with dusky brown skin, as dark as any in Yi'ili or Ardéna, sitting next to women light enough to pass for native Suumari. I see Seramichen eyes sitting in Shikkan faces, above sloping Mirrenovese noses, surrounded by clouds of thick, red Dehlian hair.

            Shikkah seems unbelievably homogenous by comparison. Even with the mixing of blood between Shikkans descended from Suumaral and the native Harrowin they conquered, our hair at most gets to light brown, and our eyes to a dark grey or green.

            Unless you're the bastard Izsai, I think sardonically. It's strange to think that the eyes I always resented, that marked me apart from my family, that othered me, should now seem mundane. In the face of a crowd so varied in color and form it's almost kaleidoscopic, I won't raise an eyebrow.

            The Grand Councilors make up for their diversity by dressing in identical dark cotton robes. Though they serve the function of distinguishing the leaders from the lead, they're much too modest to look respectable. I was dressed finer this morning, in my green silk tunic. The robes only differ in the color embroidered along their collars and sleeves.

            "What do the colors signify?" I whisper, choosing to focus on concrete details over the fearful anticipation gripping my mind, the hope that I might learn the truth of my home after a month of questioning blindness.

            "One color for each of the eleven Cantons in Kama," Ambassador Nara answers.

            "Oh- and why does Lyu call you Irei'kionaxi?" I ask. "Is it an honorific, or a title?"

            "Neither," he answers. "It's my clan name. My mother was descended from the Kionaxi clan."

            "Ah," I reply, remembering lessons on Kamai social structure taught to me years ago by an aged tutor with wrinkles deep as riverbeds. "Isn't each of Kama's eleven Cantons derived from the original boundaries of clan lands?"

            "Loosely, yes. But quiet now- the last councilor's arrived."

            Sure enough, only one of the nineteen seats on the dais is left empty. A woman of about forty, with long black hair and a harsh mien, her collar the color of red wine, ascends and takes the seat.

            Her eyes pass bored over the faces in the crowd, pausing for a moment at Ambassador Nara. She gives him a small smile, then continues her survey. I feel her eyes pass over me, then pause, and snap back. I make the mistake of maintaining eye contact, shocked by the look she gives me, a look of recognition.

            "She knows me," I whisper harshly, digging my fingers into the Ambassador's leg like claws as panic hits my bloodstream, coloring everything a shade of red.

            "Hush," he mutters dismissively, shaking off my hand.

            "Listen to me, Irei," I hiss, using his given name for the first time. "We have to go, that councilor, the third from the left, she knows who I am-"

            "I know," he says, giving me a withering glare. "Now be quiet."

            "You know?"

            "Of course. Taís is my sister, Shira. She's the one that got you the papers."

            "Your sister," I repeat dumbly, pushing the panic back.

            "Yes, now be quiet and take out your notepad. You're my scribe, remember? The session's about to begin!"

            "Oh- ah- right," I mutter, drawing forth a clean sheet of parchment and the quill and ink Tyro gave me. I rest the ink on one knee and the parchment on the other, bearing down on a thin piece of wood. My grip on the quill is tight enough I have to ease up so I don't snap it in two.

            "The Grand Council of the sovereign nation of Kama is hereby called into session," a red-haired woman intones solemnly. "Grand Councilor Isrit'fíanami Aith presiding. I'd ask that everyone remember this is a closed session, and that nothing discussed herein is to be shared outside of these chambers until the Grand Council has come to a vote. Also, as a consideration to out Shikkan guests, we will be conducting the full of the session in Alyezsin."

            I blink, realizing belatedly that I never once considered that the Kamai council would conduct their official business in Kamai. I'm so used to the official diplomatic language, a vestige of the long-dead Alyezsani empire that once stretched from Alumankarra to Seramich, I just assumed I would find it spoken in this hall.

            But Kama was never conquered- they've just adopted the language in order to trade efficiently with the east. How foolish would I have looked with parchment and ink, making no notes, understanding nothing, if they chose to speak primarily in Kamai? I know five languages, but Kamai doesn't number among them. I only hope the ambassador would've told me beforehand if the council operated only in its native tongue-"

            "Now, please lock the door," Councilor Aith says authoritatively, cutting off  my thoughts.

            An aide clicks a large lock into place, making sure no one will enter the council room without official leave. I fidget in my seat, hating the feeling of being locked in. Ever since that night, running breathless through the seed cellar, my mother dragging me faster, away from the blaze of the rifles we imagined were chasing us like mad dogs.... Ever since my escape I've hated the feeling of being enclosed. My mind has begun cataloguing the exits in each room in case I need to run.

            "Bring in the Shikkan delegates, please," Grand Councilor Aith says. I take a deep breath as a door to the left of the dais opens.

            The moments before the "delegates" step out feels infinite. I can't help but picture the door as a portal to the Eternal Sands, a gate to the godless, the immortal, because it seems impossible that mortal men could have engineered such a perfect destruction as Shikkah's fall.

I half expect two nightmares to present themselves to the Council.

            Instead there's only a man and a woman, two strangers. The air in the room still feels cold to me, though, as if the evil of their sin is chasing the heat of life from the room.

            "Please step to the dais and identify yourselves," Grand Councilor Aith instructs.

            "I am General Idera Onra, Grand Councilor," the man says. I stare at him so intently I almost forget to blink, forcing myself to memorize his face so I will never forget one person connected to, complicit in, the wrong that was done that night. So that each might be repaid in kind.

            He has dusty hair cropped short over a pair of small, pensive eyes. His face is long but well-made, appearing refined. A good diplomat by appearance, I admit, not someone you'd associate with assassinations in the night.

            "I'm the representative of Deme Sholu Verlaina, now leader of Shikkah."

            I have to press my hand to my mouth to keep from laughing at the statement. Deme Verlaina, I think, my mind reeling between outrage, disgust, and amused disbelief. He's dared to take my mother's title, the title of the leader of a Dimaraste. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised- nothing is below that man.

            I'm so focused on the man who spoke first I almost forget to notice the woman beside him. She's much smaller, hardly taller than a child, but her face is too full of sharp edges and hard lines she can't be less than thirty.

            I realize with a bolt of confusion that she's not Shikkan- her skin is the darkest olive, her hair glossy black, her eyes wide-set and black as coals in their sockets.

            "And I am Y'merit Bekjaat Yukkaita, Grand Councilor," she says in a soft, reedy voice that might as well be a knife sinking into my stomach. With her next proclamation, issued without any obvious force, she twists the blade and begins to spill my lifeblood onto the polished wooden floor. "I am the representative of Matachai Iskao Yukkaita, third commander of the Shao Asha."

            "So that's why they called an emergency session," Lyu mutters. I barely hear him.

            Shao Asha. Those two syllables reverberate inside of me, bouncing around like bullets, breaking all they connect with. Now I know how Shikkah fell so quickly, so easily. Our little civil war isn't a civil war at all.

            It's an invasion.