The sword felt different in the cold.

Not heavier — different. The grip absorbed the temperature of the air rather than the hand, and the first twenty minutes of the morning drill were always slightly wrong in a way that corrected itself as the metal warmed. Lysander had learned this in the first winter and had developed the habit of beginning the drill earlier in cold weather, working through the wrongness until it became rightness, which took longer when you were also trying to think about something else.

He was thinking about Fylon’s four sources.

He was also running the weight-shift sequence.

The two activities were not incompatible. The sequence had stopped requiring conscious direction somewhere in the past month — it ran in the part of the mind that had absorbed it, while the thinking part thought about other things. This was the difference Hector had described. You are starting to see it without looking.

He was starting to think without stopping.

He heard the gate.

He finished the sequence — the full sequence, not shortened — before he turned.

Paris came in the way he had been coming into spaces for the past year: without performance, with the specific directness of a person who had learned that most rooms did not require a presentation. He wore a traveling cloak which meant he had been out of the palace already, and his eyes had the quality that Lysander had come to recognize as his thinking quality — not distracted, internally occupied.

He sat on the low wall.

The same wall as always, Lysander thought. I should probably name it after him.

He lowered the sword. "Tell me."

"I was thinking about Meron," Paris said.

"Yes."

"About the second house. About what Kephon said — that I should come back when I understand what comes next."

"Yes."

"I have been thinking about what comes next."

He said it simply, the way he said things that were factual rather than constructed. Over the past year, Lysander had watched the construction disappear — the performance of a prince who needed to seem like he belonged in every room he entered. What was left when the performance went was something more interesting: a man who was genuinely trying to think clearly about things and was frustrated when he could not.

He is going to say something important, Lysander thought. Or he is going to stop before he says it.

"Tell me what you think comes next," Lysander said.

Paris looked at the practice marks in the dirt.

"The eastern picture is clear," he said. "We have the framework. The regional commitments, the vessel arrangement, the settlement organization. We know what the eastern pressure looks like and we are building toward it. We have been building for two years and the shape of what we are building is becoming visible."

"Yes."

"The western picture is not clear."

"No."

"Agamemnon is building something. We know what he is building toward. We have been building to resist it. Two forces building toward each other."

"Yes."

"And the only question that matters is whether the collision can be avoided or whether it cannot."

Lysander said nothing.

He had been living with this question for two years. He had a history lecturer’s perspective on it, which was essentially useless except as a reminder of what the answer had been the last time it was asked, which was: no. The collision had not been avoided. Troy had burned.

The question was whether it had to burn.

He did not know. He had not known on the first day he woke in this body and he did not know now. What he knew was that every day he had not resolved it was a day that had not yet become the answer.

Useful, he thought. Very useful. Thank you, history.

"The western picture requires different tools than the eastern picture," Paris said. "The eastern picture is about absorbing pressure. Organizing. Building capacity. The western picture is about—"

He stopped.

Lysander waited.

The training ground was quiet. The early morning sounds of the palace beyond the wall — distant, ordinary, the sounds of people who were not in this conversation.

Paris looked at his hands.

"I have been thinking about what I specifically can do," he said. "What I have that others do not. You have the analysis and the networks and the institutional relationships. Hector has the military picture. Ampelos has the commercial intelligence. What I have is—"

He stopped again.

The second stop was different from the first. The first had been a man approaching a thought and deciding not to finish it. The second was a man who had finished the thought and was deciding whether to say it.

Lysander read this correctly and said nothing.

Don’t help him, he thought. If he says it he says it himself.

Paris looked up.

"I am not asking to go anywhere yet," he said. "I am telling you I have been thinking about it."

"I know."

"You have known for a while."

"Yes."

"You have not said anything."

"No."

Paris looked at him with the specific look of a person who has expected a reaction and has not received one and is not sure whether the absence of the reaction is the reaction.

"Why not."

"Because you have not asked me anything. You have been thinking. Thinking is not a request."

Paris was quiet for a moment.

Then something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, the expression that existed in the space before a smile, the one that meant he found something genuinely worth finding.

"That is very precise," he said.

"Yes."

"You are going to make me ask the actual question."

"Yes."

"Before I ask it I want to understand what I am actually asking. That is why I came this morning."

"Then understand it first," Lysander said. "There is no deadline on the question."

Paris stood from the low wall.

He looked at the practice marks in the dirt — the same marks that had been there before his first departure, the same marks that would be there after his next one.

"The weight-shift sequence," he said. "Hector changed it."

"Yes."

"It shows. The right side is different from six months ago."

"Miros said the same thing. So did Hector."

"We are all watching you," Paris said. "You know that."

"I suspected."

"Hector watches because it is his work. Miros watches because he watches everything — it is how he thinks. I watch because—" he paused "—I watch because you are one of the few people in this palace who is actually trying to do something about what is coming and I want to know whether you think it is working."

"What does watching my shoulder tell you about that."

"That you have been building something in yourself at the same time as building everything else. That you are not the same person who arrived at this palace and started counting words on a shard."

Lysander looked at him.

He knows about the shard, he thought. Of course he does. He is Cassandra’s brother. Observation runs in the family.

"Is it working," Paris said. Not the question about the shoulder.

Lysander thought about the framework on Hector’s desk. The four people in the settlement with intelligence that no official network had produced. The vessel arrangement with Caria. The Lycian king who had read an argument twice. The schools in six districts. The shard with a number over a thousand.

Is it working.

"I don’t know," he said. "I know it is more than nothing. I know it is more than Troy had when I started. Whether it is enough—"

"You will not know until it is tested."

"No."

"And by the time it is tested it will be too late to fix what does not work."

"Yes."

"That is a terrible position to be in."

"Yes," Lysander said. "It is."

Paris laughed — brief, genuine, the laugh of a person who found something darkly accurate rather than funny.

"You know what I find strangest about you," he said.

"Tell me."

"You know things are probably going to go badly. You have known since before I met you. And you keep building anyway."

"What else would I do."

"Most people would either pretend it was fine or stop building."

"Most people have that luxury," Lysander said. "I have the shard."

Paris looked at him for a moment.

Then he walked toward the gate.

At the gate he stopped — his own stopping, the lighter one.

"When I am ready to ask the question," he said, "you will tell me honestly what you think."

"Yes."

"Even if what you think is that I should not."

"Especially then."

Paris nodded once. He went out.

Lysander stood in the training ground.

The question is coming, he thought. In a month. Perhaps two. He is not ready yet — he knows he is not ready yet, which is the only thing that makes him ready to be ready.

He thought about what the question would mean when it came. About Paris in the Aegean on a trading ship. About what a charming Trojan prince with genuine political intelligence and a desire to do something only he could do would find when he arrived in the Greek world at exactly the wrong moment in history.

It’s fine, he thought. Everything is completely fine.

He picked up the sword.

He ran the weight-shift sequence.

The hesitation at the end — the half-count delay — was smaller than it had been yesterday.

Stop knowing it and stop doing it.

He ran it again.

He picked up his shard.

One thousand and thirty-three words.

Keep going.