The Hall of the Fountain was cooler than the rest of the Citadel, the carved screen filtering the sound of running water into a constant low murmur that made eavesdropping difficult and confidential speech almost private. Sultan Seylim ibn Tahir al-Din sat on the low dais with his back against a cushion and his boots off, which was the only concession he made to the hour and which no one present was foolish enough to comment upon. His brother Farid sat on his right, the ledgers of the day's hearings already stacked beside him. Shaykh Rashid al-Maqdari sat on his left, his ink-stained hands folded in his lap. Emir Hishan ibn al-Walid stood near the fountain with his one hand resting on his sword belt and his ruined arm tucked into his sash, his face as unreadable as old leather. And Prince Zayn al-Seylim stood by the carved screen, turning a cup of water in his hands as though it contained something more interesting than water.
"The day went well," Farid was saying. "The petitions were heard. The grievances were recorded. The Esberians saw law being done rather than vengeance being threatened. The local Illuminants saw their complaints being taken seriously for the first time in three years. Neither side is entirely satisfied, which suggests the balance was correct."
"It was indulgence," Hishan said. His voice was not loud, but it carried the way old soldiers' voices carried, pitched to reach the back of a column on a windy day. "The local Illuminants were permitted to embarrass the Sultanate in front of foreign royalty. They told stories of stolen storerooms and detained cousins as though we were barbarians who had never heard of property law."
"We have heard of property law," Farid said. "The problem is that we have not always enforced it. The hearings allow us to enforce it now, in public, with foreign witnesses. That is not indulgence. That is strategy. If the Esberians claim to have come to protect the Illuminants, we demonstrate that the Illuminants are already protected—by law, not by crusade. The claim collapses under its own weight."
"The claim," Zayn said, without looking up from his cup, "was never the point. The point was always the city. The Illuminants were an excuse. Now we are treating the excuse as though it were a legitimate grievance."
"The grievances are legitimate," Rashid said. "The storeroom was seized. The cousins were detained. The grain was requisitioned. These are facts. The tribunal will hear them. The tribunal will rule. The ruling will be recorded. The record will outlast the siege, the treaty, and all of us in this room. That is what law is for."
Zayn set down his cup.
"And Zeid?" he asked. "What was Zeid for, in the shrine chamber?"
The question was aimed at no one, which meant it was aimed at everyone. Seylim did not move, but his eyes, which had been half-closed, opened fully.
"He was present as the treaty's guarantor," Farid said. "His presence reminded the Esberians that the peace is personal as well as legal."
"He took dictation," Zayn said. "From a local shrine-sister. About storerooms. You did not instruct him to do that."
"No," Farid admitted. "I did not."
"He summoned a clerk. He opened a ledger. He promised hearings before the tribunal had been consulted. He did all of this in front of the Esberian king and the Esberian princess and half the senior clergy of the Revealed Light, and he did it without asking permission from anyone in this room."
"I was in the room," Farid said. "I did not object."
"You did not object because you could not object without appearing to oppose the very justice you claim we are demonstrating. He placed you in a position where silence was the only option. That is not administration. That is politics."
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Seylim spoke for the first time since the meeting had begun.
"You are correct," he said. "It is politics. It is also what I asked him to do."
Zayn turned. "You asked him to take dictation from an Illuminant shrine-sister?"
"I asked him to be visible. I asked him to be useful. I asked him to demonstrate that the House of Tahir al-Din hears grievances regardless of who voices them." Seylim's voice was level, but there was something beneath it, a current of warning that only a son would recognize and only a foolish son would ignore. "He did what I asked. He did it well. The city watched him. The city will remember."
"The city watched him," Zayn repeated. "Yes. I am aware." He picked up his cup again. "You gave him the city for an afternoon, and the city discovered he has hands."
The silence that followed was the silence of a fountain whose murmur had suddenly become too loud.
Seylim looked at his eldest son for a long moment. Zayn did not look away. He was his father's heir and he knew it, and his jealousy was not a child's jealousy but something harder—the jealousy of a soldier who saw a rival being given a command he had not earned on a battlefield that did not exist.
"Better hands than torches," Seylim said.
Zayn's expression flickered—not anger, not quite, but the shadow of anger passing behind his eyes like a cloud crossing the sun.
"I have never used torches," he said.
"No. You have used swords. Swords are better than torches. But hands are better than swords, at least in the city we are trying to keep." Seylim leaned forward. "The Esberians are here for twelve days. Twelve days of pilgrimage and petitions and the performance of peace. When they leave, the peace remains, and the peace will require hands as well as swords. Zeid has hands. You have swords. I need both. Do you understand?"
Zayn held his gaze.
"I understand," he said. "You need both. But you trust the hands more than the swords. You always have."
Before Seylim could answer—if he had intended to answer—there was a movement at the edge of the hall. Qutayba, Zayn's informant, a man so ordinary in appearance that he could pass through a crowd without being noticed and through a guarded gate without being challenged, stepped into the lamplight and bowed.
“My lord,” he said, bowing first to Seylim and then, a fraction lower, to Zayn. "You asked for a report on the day's observances."
"Speak."
"The princess did not recoil from the prince during the procession. At the shrine, the prince did not defer to the Esberian king. In the chamber where the petitions were heard, the prince summoned a clerk without consulting the Esberians or the tribunal. The princess watched him do this. She did not object."
Zayn absorbed this in silence.
"And at the supper?" he asked.
"The princess announced her intention to attend tomorrow's hearings. The prince provided the details. The exchange was cordial."
"Cordial," Zayn repeated, as though the word were a piece of foreign currency he did not accept.
"Most cordial is not warm," Qutayba said carefully. "It is the cordiality of two people who have agreed not to kill each other and have not yet decided what to do instead."
"That is enough," Seylim said. "Leave us."
Qutayba bowed and withdrew. The fountain murmured. The lamps flickered in a draft that came from somewhere high in the vaulted ceiling, where the Heredan stone met the Jaludian tile and neither dynasty had won.
Zayn stood for a moment longer. Then he set down his cup, very precisely, and walked from the hall without asking permission and without offering farewell.
Hishan watched him go.
"That boy," the old emir said, "will either win you a war or start one you cannot finish."
"Both," Seylim said quietly. "If the One is not merciful, both."
He looked at the screen, at the water, at the patterns of light that moved across the ceiling like the ghosts of stars.
"Farid. Tomorrow's hearings. Zeid is to attend. Alianor has declared she will attend as well. Ensure the path between the guesthouse and the House of the Green Pennant is watched. Not guarded—watched. I want to know who watches the watchers."
Farid made a note. "And Zayn?"
"Zayn will do what Zayn does. What concerns me is not what Zayn does but what others do because Zayn has made them afraid." Seylim rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, a gesture so human and so tired that it made him, for a moment, look like his own father. "My son is becoming visible. This is what we asked of him. But visible things are easily aimed at."
No one answered.
The fountain ran. The city slept. And in the cold corridors of the Citadel, behind a door guarded by a eunuch who trusted no one, Prince Zeid al-Seylim lay awake in the dark, counting the hours until dawn, when he would ride out again in a ceremonial coat cut too narrow for the body it was meant to hide.