That night, on the way home from the court assembly, Kaien asked me a question he had been carrying for months.
I knew he had been carrying it because I had seen it in his silences. Not the comfortable silences — those I had come to know well, the ones that were simply the space where words weren't needed. This was a different kind. A silence with something inside it. Something patient and waiting, biding its time until the circumstances were right.
The circumstances were apparently the late-evening road home, the city going quiet around us, the summer air thick and warm and smelling of jasmine from the gardens we passed. The carriage was closed against the evening insects, and we sat across from each other in the particular intimacy of a small enclosed space, and he looked at me with those steady eyes and said:
"How many of them were there?"
I went still.
