The road wound through the foothills, shifting abruptly one day from rutted wheel tracks in the rocky mud to a wide path of pink granite crushed to gravel and lined on either side with larger stones of the same.

  “Cedrion’s Downfall,” Shaden Second-Son named it as their carriage rattled onto its surface. “He was the third and final emperor during the first Celestial Dynasty. He sought to connect the empire with wide, easily passable roadways that could accommodate a marching army, but he did it by taking levies from the freeholders and working them to death. In the end, the freeholders revolted, dragging him off the throne and entombing him in the same highways he was building.”

  Duke Clarencio raised multiple objections and questions, while the princess listened to the bloody end of the Celestial Dynasty with wide eyes. None of the treachery and underhandedness of the Helat came as a shock to Alaan. Sun-breathers were as brutal as killer whales and as cunning as sea snakes.

  They made camp that night alongside the crushed gravel highway. The princess and her husband retired soon after the evening meal, as had become their custom since her discussion with Alaan.

  Left alone for the night, Alaan turned to his cutlass and swordbreaker. Since their discussion, he had taken up training again in earnest. Ignoring the couple’s time together was simpler when he put everything from his mind but steel and sweat.

  At first, the Helat guards had watched his drills with interest, but soon they began asking to join. The sun-breathers were a welcome challenge. The younger ones reminded Alaan of sparring with Lathe, bold and creative but impulsive. The hunter Nashon’s longknives were deadly fast but easy to read. The graceful, deadly attacks of the purple-eyed Isshoni the Aspen concealed an unpredictable temper that flared to her detriment.

  As soon as Alaan adapted to their styles, they resorted to sun-breather trickery, throwing their images elsewhere to confuse him. The Helat couldn’t become invisible like Lathe could, but they could alter their positions and the landscape so effectively that it was nearly impossible to tell what was reality and what was deception. He welcomed the trickery. More strenuous mental and physical exercise, anything to keep his attention occupied.

  He spoke only in Helenese to the Sun Guard, working to resharpen his grasp of the language so he would not repeat his mistake, and the legionnaires were happy to accommodate him. Most of them had little or no grasp of Khinesian, except where the older words intersected with their own tongue.

  Aging fighters like Brackwater Japhian joined the bouts less often, but when they did, they presented the greater test. The older Helat were cunning and patient. They conserved their strength for a single sure opening, whereas their younger counterparts thought themselves and their sun magic tireless until Alaan proved otherwise.

  “These youth rely too much on the sun magic,” Brackwater said when Alaan had bested Nashon for the second time that night. “In my day, the Sun Guard—”

  “In your day, the Sun Guard trained to run for a full moon’s turn without sun magic and fight for a year without food or water—oh, and don’t forget that they learned to sleep with their eyes open.” Nashon snorted and raised his longknives to Alaan, their blue enamel glinting in the firelight. “One more round, pirate. This time I am certain I’ve found your weakness.”

  “Words are meaningless,” Alaan replied, scraping his cutlass down one enameled blade. “Speak with your weapons.”

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  Not all of the Helat had the sun magic. The Sun Guard were an elite force in the Empire of Day who served the emperor, the equivalent of Royal Thorns minus the soul slavery. Each of the Sun Guard legionnaires had sun magic, but Alaan had fought Helat who had none on their merchant ships. Like the blood-drinkers, most Helat were born without, and those who had been born with magic had varying levels of ability.

  When Alaan faced the Sun Guard, his blood magic gave him no advantage. The grafting, which enhanced his speed, stamina, and healing was matched by a similar enchantment of the Sun Guard. Against the Helat, guile and ruthlessness were better weapons than magic.

  He wondered whether Izak’s royal blood magic would fare differently. His friend had finally realized his swordstaff abilities in combat, but Alaan could not say whether Izak could hold his own on the push north without relying on magic. Against a village of Helat women and children, probably. Against trained warriors, many of whom were just as fast and far more callous than the prince, Alaan was uncertain.

  ***

  As they traveled, the smiling Fell Heather befriended the princess. The redhaired Helat even convinced the princess to ride horseback behind her from time to time, and procured the gold mare Alaan had refused at the beginning of the journey so he could accompany them. Not out of any deference to his grafting or the princess’s need for protection, but so the women could use him as a translator while they learned each other’s languages.

  “You can’t be seventy-eight years old!” The princess angled her parasol and leaned around Fell Heather to study her face more closely. “You hardly look as if you’ve reached a score yet.”

  “How old must be the little blood one then?” the smiling Helat asked in broken Khinesian. “To me, I say a sixty. To you, little blood one?”

  The princess frowned in concentration as she answered in Helesene, “I have six-and-ten years.” She looked to Alaan and switched back to Khinesian. “Was that right?”

  He nodded. The princess was learning the language quickly, proving again that she was not the stupid, empty-headed creature she thought herself.

  “Six-and-ten!” Fell Heather crowed, causing her gelding to twitch its ears and rumble in annoyance at the sudden shout. “My sister’s babe must be six-and-ten! Oh little blood one, how have you left your mother? Shall I search a wetnurse, or can the little blood one eat meat and bread like the child of twenty?”

  The Helat aged slower than the Khinet-born, and those who could drink the sun aged at an even more reduced pace. Nashon, Isshoni the Aspen, and Fell Heather, who looked close in age with Alaan, were all around eighty years old. Shaden Second-Son was one hundred and thirty-six and was considered no more elderly than Duke Clarencio was among the blood-drinkers. Brackwater, whose hair boasted the only streaks of gray in their party, had lived two hundred and three years, most of those spent in service to the Sun Guard.

  “I could’ve left whenever I chose,” he told Alaan one evening between bouts. “Most of the youth these days serve until they earn their twenty-year land bequest, then get out and settle down. But soldiering is the life I know. I’ll serve the emperor until I can’t anymore.”

  Days in the carriage passed for Alaan in endlessly turning over the blood debt, while Duke Clarencio and the princess questioned Shaden Second-Son at length about every facet of Helat life under the Sun Dynasty. Often the discussion turned to a debate between the duke and the legate marshal over laws and societal practices.

  No matter what issue they discussed, the Helat emissary always took the opposite argument, but he was only doing it to test Clarencio’s true stances. Despite their friendly attitudes toward one another, the legate marshal trusted the duke little more than Alaan trusted any Helat.

  Perhaps Clarencio shared some of that distrust. The morning after the princess told him of the coming attack on the imperial city, Clarencio had come to Alaan to clarify some points. When the interrogation ended, he asked Alaan to keep the information to himself.

  “I want to bring it to directly the emperor,” Clarencio explained. “News like this can’t stay contained for long, but when it does get out, I’d rather it be from at the emperor’s discretion than spread to the four winds by gossiping servants and soldiers.”

  Alaan agreed that was the wiser course. All sun-breathers concealed and pretended. They were like the mirages that appeared on a horizon on bright, becalmed days.

  No matter what face Shaden Second-Son presented, he could no more be trusted than the rest of them.