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Protector,” Fauconred shouted over the wind’s voice. The boy leaned down to him. “Tell the Protector I bring him a… a visitor.”

2

    T here are seven windows in the Queen’s bedroom in the Citadel that is the center of the City that is on the lake island called the Hub in the middle of the world.
    Two of the seven windows face the tower stones and are dark; two overlook inner courtyards; two face the complex lanes that wind between the high, blank-faced mansions of the Protectorate; and the seventh, facing the steep Street of Birdsellers and, beyond, a crack in the ring of mountains across the lake, is always filled at night with stars. When wind speaks in the mountains, it whispers in this window, and makes the fine brown bed hangings dance.
    Because the Queen likes light to make love by, there is a tiny lamp lit within the bed hangings. Black Harrah, the Queen’s lover of old, dislikes the light; it makes him think as much of discovery as of love. But then, one is not the Queen’s lover solely at one’s own pleasure.
    If there were now a discoverer near, say on the balcony over the double door, or in the curtained corridor that leads to the servants’ stairs, he would see the great bed, lit darkly from within. He would see the great, thick body of the Queen struggling impatiently against Black Harrah’s old lean one, and hear their cries rise and subside. He might, well-hidden, stay to watch them cease, separate, lie somnolent; might hear shameful things spoken; and later, if he has waited, hear them consider their realm’s affairs, these two, the Queen and her man, the Great Protector Black Harrah.
    “No, no,” Black Harrah answers to some question.
    “I fear,” says the Queen.
    “There are ascendancies,” says Black Harrah sleepily. “Binding rules, oaths sworn. Fixed as stars.”
    “New stars are born. The Grays have found one.”
    “Please. One thing at a time.”
    “I fear Red Senlin.”
    “He is no new star. If ever a man were bound by oaths…”
    “He hates me.”
    “Yes,” Harrah says.
    “He would be King.”
    “No.”
    “If he…”
    “I will kill him.”
    “If he kills you…?”
    “My son will kill him. If his sons kill my son, my son’s sons will kill his. Enough?”
    Silence. The watcher (for indeed he is there, on the balcony over the half-open double door, huddled into a black, watching pile, motionless) nods his head in tiny approving nods, well pleased.
    The Queen starts up, clutching the bedclothes around her.
    “What is it?” Black Harrah asks.
    “A noise.”
    “Where?”
    “There. On the stair. Footsteps.”
    “No.”
    “Yes!”
    Feet grow loud without. Shouts of the Queen’s guards, commands, clash of arms. Feet run. Suddenly, swinging like a monkey from the balcony, grasping handholds and dropping to the floor, the watcher, a tiny man all in black. Crying shrilly, he forces the great door shut and casts the bolt just as armed red-coated men approach without. The clash of the bolt is still echoing when armed fists pound from the other side:
    “Open! In the name of the Great Protector Red Senlin!”
    The watcher now clings to the bolt as though his little arms could aid it and screams: “Leave! Go away! I order you!”
    “We seek the traitor Black Harrah, for imprisonment in the King’s name…”
    “Fool! Go! It is I who command you, I, your King, and as you truly owe me, leave!”
    The noise without ceases for a moment. The King Little Black turns to the bed. Black Harrah is gone. The King’s wife stands upright on the bed, huge and naked.
    “Fly!” the King shouts. She stands unmoving, staring; then with a boom the door is hammered on with breaking tools. The Queen turns, takes up a cloak, and runs away down the servants’ corridor, her screaming maidservants after her. The door behind the King begins to crack.
    Because the island City lies within a great deep cup, whose sides are mountains, dawn comes late there and evening early. And even when