Two days was Bastien's guess and two days was right. We came up out of the last basin on the second morning and there was the Dawn Gate.
A boy on the wall saw us first. He just stared for a minute, and then his whole posture lifted as if the sight had pulled him upright. Then he ran to share the news.
By the time we reached the gate itself, half the guard on duty had turned out to watch us come in. Not all of them were Heliqari. Some wore a teal I didn't recognize. They stood the wall alongside our own, arms crossed. I was too tired to be alarmed by it, and too glad to be walking through that gate at all to be curious about uniforms.
We were a sorry sight. Tuspaks and men were both the same red as the sand. One of the wagons was missing a wheel extension we'd never had the chance to bolt back on. For a moment the whole gate just stared as if they had given up on hoping for our eventual return.
The market square off the main thoroughfare was a surprise. It was as busy as I'd ever seen it. Caravans queued against the Grand Ledger's slate. The arrivals column was full for what looked like the first time in forever. Whatever else had happened while I was gone, the caravan routes were running again.
"Take the men to Ishra," I told Bastien. "The infirmary first, the bathhouse after. Then let them go to whoever they've got left to go home to."
"And you?"
"I have to go tell the King and Queen their son is home."
Bastien grinned, the first real one I'd seen out of him in months. "Good luck with that," he said, and went in the direction of his home.
My mother reached me before I'd crossed the second courtyard. Someone had outrun us. She held my face in both hands, like she was checking it against a memory. She'd gotten thinner since I'd been gone. I decided to let her hold onto my face for as long as she wanted.
My father came slower, his bad eye turned half away from me. When he reached me he put both hands on my shoulders instead of one. "Twelve of you left," he said. "How many came back."
"Ten of us, counting me. We lost Olen in Spartova. We lost the Quartermaster in the Sea, four days out from Cygnus Point."
He nodded once and asked the question that mattered more to a King than to a father. "And the treaty?"
"There isn't one."
My mother's hand found my father's arm. Neither of them looked at it.
"Come inside," my father said. "Akram will want to hear this. So will Kael."
They were already in the small council room by the time we reached it, which meant a runner truly had beaten us there. Uncle Akram looked older than five months should have made him. Kael looked exactly the same. That had been a running joke in the palace. Nothing short of the Sea itself swallowing the city whole seemed likely to change Kael's face.
I told it the way I would have written a report. Olen dead in Spartova, executed in front of me as a lesson meant for me specifically. No treaty, because Spartova had no interest in trading anything. A trial before their Assembly that had not gone the way anyone in that hall expected. A Hegemony that no longer had one government to speak of, not since it came apart in my hands. An Imperial officer who'd gotten us out of the wreckage more or less alive, and delivered us to the edge of the Sea with a map and a warning that it might be wrong. One more man dead on the way home because the map was wrong, by a mile, in exactly the wrong place.
"The whole Hegemony," Kael said, when I'd finished. He almost smiled, which for Kael counted as popping open a good bottle of wine. "You don't know if it will still take our caravans as slaves, or if it'll be too busy eating itself to bother. Either is possible. Ask me again in a year. For the first time in a long while, I like our odds."
"There's more you need to hear," my father said, "before you hear it from someone in the market instead of from me."
He told it plain and in order, the way I'd have wanted it told. Two weeks after I'd left, the stored grain ran out. The Council voted to sign with the Latifundium of Carth. My father had withheld his own signature, which bought the city four more weeks of scrounging and hunger. Then the Council signed without him, which was their right, and it became law regardless of what he wanted.
Carthian mercenaries had held the west wall and patrolled the caravan routes since. Heliqar paid them tribute, and paid the Empire's old tariff on top of it. Every merchant now paid twice to move what had once cost him once. Carth had also emptied half a season's grain surplus into our granaries the week their garrison arrived, more food than the city had seen in years. Carth grew more grain than any nation in the world and had it to spare. Nobody had gone hungry since. That was the market I'd walked through an hour ago, full stalls and a full Ledger, more food in this city than it needed, and I'd just been glad of it.
"And the marriage," I said.
"Was never a separate term," Akram said. "It was written into the same contract as the garrison, contingent on your survival. Section 4 named your cousin Hakeem and an increase in tribute if you didn't come back in a year. You came back."
"You go to Carth," my father said. "You marry the girl in her father's house, in front of his own court. That was their price."
"Full bellies and open roads," Kael said, unmoved. "That's how it always starts. Nobody ever signs a chain, Highness. They sign a rescue, and the chain comes later, one contract at a time. I told the Council that before you left, and nobody wanted to hear it, because the alternative was starving. There will be more links. Each will look reasonable enough on its own."
My mother hadn't spoken since the council room door closed behind us. She spoke now. "Your father held it off far past what any other King in his position would have. I want you to know that before you decide how angry to be."
I told her I didn't have the energy left to be angry. What I had energy for, unexpectedly, was hunger. When my stomach announced this to the whole council room, Kael actually laughed out loud.
"When do I leave," I asked, once the room had settled.
"Not tonight," my father said, something almost like a smile finding his face for the first time since I'd walked through that gate. "Wash first, and eat something that isn't hardtack. Sleep in your own bed, at least."
I didn't go to my quarters yet. I went to the stables first. I needed a place to think away from my own species.
The tuspak master saw me coming and didn't say anything at first, just tilted his head toward the far stall, the good one with the deep straw. I didn't understand why until I was close enough to see the animal in it, broad and low-slung, one foot-long tusk capped in silver and the other bare, cracked on a rock somewhere years before we'd ever gotten the chance to fit her a new one.
"She came home on her own," the tuspak master said, grinning like he'd been saving this for me the whole walk over. "Right after you left for the Hegemony. Walked through the west gate one morning like she'd never left. Nobody can explain how she survived, and nobody's tried very hard, because who argues with good news."
Aukoa bellowed the same low note she'd always made when she recognized me, and tried to knock me over with her head the same way she had the last time I'd stood in front of her, a lifetime ago.
I put my hand on her flank and laughed, properly this time, for what felt like the first time in five months. It was the first thing since the Dawn Gate that had come back to me instead of being taken.