Inside the council chamber, three figures sat close together at a round table built to seat twelve, with every empty chair pushed off to the side as if they offended someone. A teenage boy sat between two women, elbows on the table, expressionless, listening. To his left sat a woman in the flush of middle age, elegant, almost regal. To his right, an old woman with matted hair and a stare that could curdle milk.
"We have waited long enough," the middle-aged woman said, pleasant as poured honey. "Now that the desert fox has returned, we must impose our will on the universe. Let every star know the people of Kharsat have woken."
The boy didn't turn his head. He only watched her from the corner of his eye.
"We act only with our history in front of us," the older woman wheezed. "Move too quickly and the same misfortune finds us twice."
"Then what would you have us do?" the younger woman snapped. "Wait? Our leader has returned. He brought the Skyforge back with him. What more do we need?"
The old woman scowled at her, then turned pointedly to the boy instead.
"Your grace. My grandson. I counsel you to heal this broken world before any talk of war." A pause. "We were not always desert people. A few centuries back we thrived in swampland, and our numbers stood in the hundreds of thousands."
"Those days are gone," the younger woman said. "The only way to secure our future is to reach out and take what's owed us. We could take a better world than this one and put the people who wrecked ours in chains for it."
"Do you imagine they'll simply lie down for us?" the old woman shot back. "We have neither ships nor numbers to force the matter."
"We don't need numbers or ships," the younger woman said, smiling thinly. "We have the desert fox."
"Matriarch Simika. Matriarch Ness. I've heard you both." The boy's voice, when it finally came, was quiet and even. "I agree that we should reach beyond this system, and that the Krell owe us a reckoning. But we are not strong enough. Not yet. I will forge an alliance with the humans of Earth first, and return to the matter of the Krell once the timing serves us."
"There is wisdom in that," Simika said. "What say you, Matriarch Ness?"
Ness pressed her lips into something that wasn't quite a pout and wasn't quite agreement either. "I defer to the will of the Fox."
"We will have our reckoning with the Krell," the boy said, turning to face her fully now, "but at the right time. Will you trust me to carry that debt a while longer, Matriarch Ness?"
He held her gaze with an intensity that made her flush, unwillingly, at the cheeks.
"Of course. You are the fox who walks the desert," she said, rising to kiss his hand and press her brow to it before hurrying from the room.
Once the door had shut behind her, Simika allowed herself a small, dry laugh. "Well handled. Look into a woman's eyes, make her blush on command: you have a gift for winning hearts you have no intention of keeping."
"Thank you," Taisen said. "We need her supporters patient a while longer, that's all."
"How does your training go?"
"Stalled. Lukan's no longer any kind of challenge. I need someone better."
"Perhaps you're ready to face me, then."
He gave her a wry look. "You're a few hundred years too young to beat me, Matriarch."
"You were my grandson and my clan's child before you were anyone's desert fox," Simika said, rising, a curved blade already forming in her open palm as if the air itself had simply agreed to become a weapon for her. "Arm yourself, little Taisen."
"Here? In the council chamber?"
"Unless you're afraid a blind old woman with a bad hip will put you on your back."
"I'll mourn you with my whole heart," he said, already settling into a guard, right foot forward, left arm tucked close, his long straight blade rising in front of his face.
Her stance was nothing like his: aggressive, wide open, both feet squared at him as if she had never once considered the idea of losing.
"Cautious for a boy your age," she said. "Most would be desperate to show off."
"Pride and fear both get men killed in a fight. I can already feel how good you are, before either of us has moved."
"Well said," she said, and closed the distance so fast the words were still in the air when she arrived.
What Taisen did not know (what he had never had reason to ask, because no one on Kharsat had ever needed to explain the current to him any more than a fish needs the concept of water explained) was that every warrior born under this sky carried a well of it low in the chest, under the sternum, in a place that had no proper name in any human language. The Sahir called it, simply, Aether, and treated the word the way other cultures treated the word blood: too basic a fact of the body to warrant much discussion. It could be spent to push muscle and reflex past their honest limits, borrowed against like credit against tomorrow's strength, and for a rare handful of bloodlines (his included) spent to call a second blade into an empty hand as if the weapon had been waiting there the entire time, folded down into nothing, for exactly this moment.
What it cost to spend it, no one had ever needed to tell him either, because he had felt it his whole life: a numbness that started at the fingertips and crawled inward, a chill under the skin no desert heat ever quite chased off, and if he pushed too hard, too fast, a grey ash-ring that crept into the whites of his eyes for anyone close enough to see it happen.