A strong wind has blown from the east all day, as they came along the southern coast of Nan-Ya. He promised the empress it would be so, once she summoned the admiral. She is the Daughter of the Old Great Gods and the empress of all Nabban. The Gods bless her and by their grace the winds will serve. But now they grow wilder, swinging, shifting. They swing to a southerly, bringing cloud and rain, and the summer warmth of the ocean, unseasonably early. Not the following wind she will no doubt wish for, but it will serve. I am weak in your world, he reminds her. The heavens are very far from me. “The palace will burn,” her prophet told her, and she believes his words, all his words, even the ones that were spite. The fleet could have carried soldiers from Kozing, could have landed them, driven the Wild Girls back, but—why bother? The south does not interest him. Why should she struggle to hold it? It is in the north that the heir of the gods is moving, shifting the currents of the land.
