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Of course there are many soldiers already, and a full queen with strong hands. What do you suppose queens do when someone else wants to be queen, and she is still as potent as ever? Or the soldiers who never need cease being soldiers, who have Fountain-water in their veins, who stay young, strong, who need never give it up if they do not wish to?

Now they understood it. I saw it in the children’s uncertain, widening eyes.

Death is the mother of ambition, and we are all orphans here. Everyone wants, everyone strives, but we trip over infinitude. If a monarch lives forever, how shall anything ever change? How shall any brilliant creature rise? If the monarch tends toward the despot, how shall we free ourselves?

I leaned in close to the children, so that I could not be overheard, but they would not mistake me.

How do you think your mother became queen?

The meta-collinara discovered the Fountain themselves, as they drew further and further away from the busy settlements of those unlike them, those loud, boisterous, hungry, keen. The swan-headed folk were gentle, and wished nothing but to dwell together and twine their necks, to count their eggs and eat silence. When they found that crevice we all now know so well, they showed us the way and left one of their own there to administer the water—a great sacrifice, for her to be so left behind, while the rest drew further and further away, telling no one the name of their new city. And so the history of Pentexore diverted from the one begun in the Ship of Bones, when they still feared death, and had so little time.

Suddenly, the world possessed an abundance of time. And because we are neither pure nor perfect, we treated it viciously.

Once, some time after the Fountain but before Abir was born (yes, such a cosmos existed, that did not contain her!) there lived a king and a queen in the al-Qasr. What I mean to say is, one man who was king, and one woman who wished he were not. The king, Senebaut, was a vartula-man and so possessed instead of your charming orange eyes, a ring of many-colored eyes around his brow. The aspirant queen, Giraud, was a cyclops maid, with only one eye in her forehead, but that an unusually clear and bright one, which saw far off for many leagues.

Now, ruling Pentexore had for sometime been a brutal business—for if a monarch is merely stabbed or dropped from a great height, she may be buried and, if her tree does not sprout bearing only hair or fingernails, continue to rule as well or poorly as she ever did. To truly eradicate one’s predecessor, the body needed to be done away with entirely, obliterated. And perhaps, if she had possessed a more violent nature, Giraud might have been willing to cut Senebaut into as many pieces as she could and confine them in one of the long silver vessels that line the great hall—what did you think they contained? Not spice, nor gold.

Don’t cry. History is like this, sometimes.

But even had she liked to cut folk into meat, a vartula-man is never easily caught out, seeing as he does both before and behind. Giraud would find another way.

Houd, Who Felt Sick, Though He Would Not Show Me: Was Senebaut a bad king? Did he arrest people? Did he keep his wives in the cellar?

You might think so, but he was no better or worse than any king. He wanted things his own way—which is the primary trait of a king. He disliked both porridge and economic philosophy. But he threw many festivals, and asked only enough taxes to build a bridge over the Physon, and employed several chroniclers, sculptors, and painters to fashion what they pleased with no requirement that they exalt him in particular.

Giraud was a prodigy of government—ever since she was small she had lorded over the other cyclopes, and with great cleverness and subtlety made certain that they played only the games she enjoyed—though she did not insist on winning, for she had a practical disposition. When she lost, she sank into contemplation for days, until she could pinpoint exactly how the losing occurred. As she grew, she set suitors impossible tasks,