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held out for all of three days once the Derzhi set their minds on the soft green rain swept hills beyond their southern borders. The Baron thought us weak and stupid to let ourselves be ruled by a woman, and muddled in the head with our sorcery, but at least we had put up our best effort before we were dutifully subdued.
    “These Khelid, though,” he had said, confiding in his slave because no one else would listen to him, “never really fought us before they ran away. I never believed they were engaged in a real battle. They did not ride, you see. No horses. But look at them now, prancing around on these stallions they’ve brought with them—beasts that Basranni would worship as gods. You cannot convince me the Khelid do not fight on horseback.” He was not a particularly intelligent man, the Baron, but he knew horses and he knew war.
    When I asked him what the Khelid had been doing if they were not fighting, he said they had been “testing” the Derzhi. “They would probe here and there, then disappear,” he said. “Show up in another place, get whipped, and run away. One day they just never came back. They learned where we were and how strong we were. Do you know we never captured any of them alive? Only dead. Always dead.”
    “But why is this so different?” I asked. “They learned you were stronger ... as did we all. They just endured the loss of their independence with less death and destruction.”
    The Baron had no answer for that. He had no vocabulary for concepts beyond war.
    I wondered if Lord Dmitri knew the Baron. It seemed he shared something of the same sense about the pale-haired strangers from a land so far away few Derzhi had ever seen it. It had been three years since the Khelid had reappeared, offering their tongueless king to the Derzhi in chains and vowing subjugation to the Derzhi Empire in return for peace, friendship, and mutual respect. Their king had been executed straightaway, and his head dispatched to Khelidar with a military governor and a small garrison. Messenger birds arrived regularly with reports from the governor detailing the good relationship with the Khelid in their remote and harsh land. It was a very different relationship than with other newly conquered peoples. The doomed king—or whoever he truly was—had been the only one to wear chains.
    “Wake up and get out here! You sleep like the chastou at noonday.”
    I had almost given up on ever seeing daylight again. Seven days had passed since I’d read the Prince’s letter. I assumed I had not pleased him, for in the last three of the seven, no cup had been lowered with my daily scrap of food. I couldn’t muster enough spit to wet a dust mote, and hadn’t even been able to eat the last hunk of dry bread they’d given me. Death by thirst was very ugly. Better to be killed outright.
    In the great paradox of the desert, I was so dry I no longer desired to drink. But even in my muddled state I knew I was not one of the sturdy desert beasts, and I’d better do what was needed. I knelt to Durgan once I was out of the hole, and I held out my hands. “Please, master, may I drink?” The words ran together, stumbling over my tongue.
    Durgan growled and called for someone named Filip. A scrawny albino boy, a Fryth, scurried into the long block-shaped room, where it appeared that at least a hundred men must sleep on the straw-covered stone floor. “When did you last give water to the one in the hole?” demanded the slave master.
    The pale-eyed boy shrugged. “You just said feed him. Didn’t say nothing else.”
    Durgan laid the back of his hand into the boy’s head so hard it flipped the child end over end. The boy bounced up and shrugged his skinny shoulders, then strolled casually out of the door. “Drink as you need.” Durgan threw a tunic at me and a tin cup, and pointed me at the cistern at the end of the room, all the while mumbling, “ Cursed Fryth. Don’t have a brain to share out amongst the lot of