Page 225

He doesn't speak for a while.

"Your brother," she says. "Or any man you trust. Someone has to marry her and get her out of that house. Promise me."

"Nox."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

She lets go of his wrist.

"You should know what she is, before you find her. She's beautiful. She's clever, more than anyone's let her be. And she's fertile, which in the end will matter to more men than the other two put together." Her mouth twists. "Everyone will want her."

"And in the end, who has her?"

"I don't know."

He takes that in. "And you?"

"What's left for me is uncertain." Her voice is even. "I can only tell you what I want."

"Then tell me."

"I'll sit the Rathmor throne. Or the child we make will sit it." She holds his eyes. "One or the other. It doesn't have to be me."

"Why Rathmor? You're Yorali. Yorali is yours by blood. It's the one thing your father can't take back."

"Because not one corridor of it is clean."

She lets the silence hold, then goes on, and her voice changes.

"And because whoever seats Rathmor seats Morrath. That's the true power. It's the only protection from Yorali that has ever existed."

Sevrin is very still.

"He takes his power from Morrath," she says. "All of it. He wants Sarenal, because that's where so many of Morrath's creatures come from. That's why he wants the amulet as badly as he does."

"What amulet?"

Nox shakes her head.

"Don't carry that one. You won't remember it anyway, and if you did it would only get you killed."

He sits with all of it. When he speaks again there's an edge under it.

"So all of this," he says, "only to tell me I'm to wait, and want your sister, and never have her?"

Nox smiles.

"I didn't say you'd never have her. I said I don't know whether you will."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." She shrugs one shoulder. "I know you'll come near to marrying the other sister. I don't know whether you go through with it. And if you don't, I can't tell you whether that's because you want my sister or because you're waiting for me."

He looks at her a long time.

"Do you care?"