"Then take it from me," Taisen said, "if the oath is the only thing standing between you and what you actually want.
You've made it plain enough tonight that you don't believe in lines you haven't drawn yourself.
Why haven't you simply had it taken."
"Because the oath doesn't say I cannot take it," Malkor said, and for the first time all evening, something in his voice carried a weight that sounded almost like genuine old exhaustion.
"It says the bloodline is protected only so long as a free hand holds it freely.
If I take it by force, from you or from Uros or from anyone else who ever carries it, the protection ends the instant my hand closes around it, and every Monjit of that line becomes, in the eyes of my own people's oldest law, exactly as available to me as every other conquered gift I've ever harvested. I could have ended this a thousand different ways across the centuries that ring has existed, Commander. I have not, because there is, buried somewhere underneath everything else I've become, one single principle I still find myself unwilling to violate outright, not out of sentiment, whatever you'd like to believe about that, but because a promise broken openly costs an empire considerably more than a promise merely, technically, still honored while its spirit rots.
My own people still tell the story of that treaty. I have found it useful, across a very long career of being exactly the thing everyone fears I am, to remain, in this one specific and narrow way, a man who keeps his word.
It is the last piece of ground I have never quite been willing to give up, and I confess I do not entirely understand, myself, why this particular piece and not some other."
"So you're asking me to hand it over," Taisen said, "so you can end the protection cleanly, without breaking your own oath to do it."
"I'm asking to see whether you understand what you're actually holding," Malkor said.
"That's the whole of what I asked for tonight, Commander, nothing more elaborate than that.
If you'd arrived on this beach with that ring in your pocket believing it was simply a dying man's sentimental gift, a keepsake with no weight behind it, I would have known, immediately, that you were exactly the fool your enemies would like you to be, and I would have found a way to relieve you of it before the hour was out, one way or another, and ended this particular thread of my own history tonight, cleanly, on my own terms. You didn't arrive believing that. I watched your face the moment I mentioned the oath, and I saw a man doing the arithmetic in real time, understanding, correctly, that the small piece of metal in his coat is worth considerably more to the people it protects than it will ever be worth to you personally.
That is the man I hoped might be carrying it, when I wrote that inscription.
I find I am not disappointed."
"Then I'm not giving it to you," Taisen said, flat and certain, the decision arriving in him whole and immediate, without the usual weighing he gave most choices that mattered.
"Not tonight, not on this beach, not for any price you're prepared to name.
If the only thing standing between Uros's family and whatever you'd otherwise do to them is a piece of metal in my coat pocket, then it stays in my coat pocket, for exactly as long as I'm able to keep it there, and you will simply have to go on being the man who kept his word about a thing he clearly would rather not have kept it about."
Something moved across Malkor's face then, quick and genuine and gone almost before Taisen could name it, and for one strange, disorienting moment it looked, in the last grey light of the dying dusk, almost like satisfaction.
"Good," he said, quietly.
"That is, for what it's worth, precisely the answer I hoped to hear, though I doubt you'll believe me when I tell you that hoping for it cost me something I don't often let myself spend on strangers.
I will not pretend this changes anything meaningful between us, Commander. I intend to go on doing everything else I've always done, to every world and every people who haven't had the singular good fortune of an oath sworn on their behalf a thousand years before either of us was born.
But I find, standing here, that I would rather lose that particular argument to you than win it, and I have not felt that way about losing anything in longer than I care to calculate."
The tide had come in far enough by then to lap at the toes of Taisen's boots, cold and insistent, and somewhere behind him, up past the tree line, he knew Lyn was watching every second of this with a rifle steady in her hands and a patience that had to be fraying by now, however disciplined she was about not showing it. He should have ended the conversation there, on the strength of the one answer he'd actually come away with worth keeping. He found, instead, that he had one more question left in him, and asked it before he'd fully decided he meant to.
"You said there were three things you wanted from me tonight," he said.
"I've counted two.
You wanted to know what waits for me if I keep on the way I'm going, and you've spent the better part of an hour telling me. You wanted to know whether I understood what I was carrying, and I've answered that too, whatever you think of the answer.
You haven't made the third offer yet, the one you said you'd never made to another living soul."
"I haven't," Malkor agreed, unhurried.
"I find, standing here, that I'd rather make it plainly than dress it up as generosity, because you'd see through the dressing anyway, and I've grown too old to enjoy wasted effort.
Ask me one true thing before I do.
I suspect you have more than one still sitting in your chest, and I'd rather clear the ground first."