NINETEEN

What’s furniture got to do with anything?” asked Jethan again when Shaldis finally opened her eyes.

It was evening. The whole world smelled of dust and greasy cooking.

The children outside were still screaming, but a voice Shaldis recognized as Rosemallow Woman’s was yelling at them to shut up.

“To make it look like you’re not just staying here for a few days on somebody’s orders.” Shaldis sat up, waited for the room to stop swaying, then fished in her satchel for her spell tablets. There were still twenty-five of them. Her hands shook but she felt better, and ravenously hungry. “What did you tell the landlord?”

“Preket? I didn’t tell him anything. I told him I wanted to rent the room. The Summer Concubine isn’t back from the aqueduct yet, by the way; I sent one of the children to ask around the market whether the king’s procession had returned.”

“Curse.” Shaldis looked around her. The room was more barren than any cell in a barracks. There wasn’t even a lamp: just the water jar, the gourd cup, the pillowless blanket and a broom. The broom was typical of Jethan. The dirt floor was spotless, the hearth clean as a bridal chamber. “And the people in the court didn’t ask questions?”

“What business is it of theirs?” He looked surprised at the thought that they’d even take notice of a new neighbor.

Shaldis rolled her eyes. “What business is it of theirs that Turquoise Woman bolted her door during the day? What business is it who Rosemallow Woman is sleeping with, or what names Preket’s wife calls him when they fight?” She’d heard both of these topics discussed outside in the yard—even with the door shut voices carried like plague in the summer—during the hours she’d lain between sleep and waking. “In a court like this everybody knows everybody’s business. You might as well just hang a sign on the door saying, I’m Just Staying Here for a Purpose. New bedding, new water jar, no apparent work. Of course everybody here knows you’re working for someone.”

“So!” Jethan settled himself cross-legged on the floor in the corner farthest from the bed, his back straight as if on parade. Shaldis wondered what he’d done here for the past three days other than sweep the floor.

“So people talk about anything that seems unusual to them. And it’s not going to take long for our friend, whoever he is, to learn that the Summer Concubine is asking questions, especially if he isn’t a Sun Mage after all. From her to me isn’t a big leap, which means that as a hiding place this is about as secretive as my room in the Citadel.” She finished sorting the tablets into which sigils she could make work and which she couldn’t, and pulled up her spattered and filthy outer robe—which had doubled as a blanket over an immensely proportioned and very dirty cotton nightdress—around her shoulders. “Don’t you have any coffee here?”

“I don’t drink it.” The young guardsman’s tone implied that neither should women who were proper women.

“That explains a lot about you. Can you make yourself useful and get me some from the café near the Temple of Phon south of the road? Get me some food, too, if you would.” She found her belt and purse on the heap of her robe beside the mattress and dug in the purse for money, which Sun Mages weren’t supposed to carry. There wasn’t much left of the little hoard of dequins she’d had in her pockets when she’d fled her grandfather’s house. In addition to nightlong nausea on top of a day without anything to eat except a few vanilla wafers, some apricot paste, and a lot of tea—poisoned, at that—she had worked more magic yesterday than she had ever done continuously outside the Summoning of the Rain, and as usual felt that if she couldn’t get sweets she would die. Women weren’t supposed to wear purses, either; a respectable woman was to look to her husband for money, as Sun Mages were to look to the college. It always gave Shaldis a sense of exhilaration to handle money like a man. “On the way back could you stop at that slop-shop on the corner of Hot Pillow Lane and get me a dress and some veils? I can’t keep a cloak over myself the whole time I’m here.”

“I thought you could do any sort of magic you chose,” retorted Jethan, and took his departure before she could reply, pointedly ignoring the handful of copper and silver she held out to him.

Beyond the room’s shut door she heard Melon Girl call out, “ ’Morning, Excellency,” in a languid voice, with a dip in it as inviting as if she’d pulled up her dress—which Shaldis reflected she might very well have also done, for all the good it was likely to do her. His footfalls neither paused nor altered stride as Shaldis’s mage-born hearing traced them across the yard:

“Xolnax’s boys never heard of him,” she heard the prostitute remark quietly as the young guardsman’s tread lost itself in the yammer of the street.

“You stupid sow—Xolnax would never give one of his goons money for a new blanket,” retorted Rosemallow Woman. “I think he’s got to be from out of town.”

“You mean Udon’s gang from Reeds, or one of the boys from over the White Walls?” She lowered her voice still further. “Why send a man here? You think they’d try for a takeover?”

“Well, if the wells over there are drying quicker than they are here . . .”

Shaldis grinned to herself, wrapped Jethan’s red cloak around her shoulders and strolled to the door with the hem of it dragging. Rosemallow Woman sat next to her door spinning wool with a simple weight and distaff, while Melon Girl sat next to her painting her fingernails, neither woman veiled and neither of them taking the slightest heed of Zarb and his friend Vorm drinking in Zarb’s doorway and talking about cockfights, as they appeared to have been doing for decades. Melon Girl looked up and called out to her, “Hey,” and Shaldis idled over, doing her best to walk like the girls in the market.

“Hey,” she replied. “Thanks for the loan of the dress.” She flipped the sleeve of the nightdress, which she’d deduced had to belong to the short, plump Melon Girl. The young harlot’s round and extremely pink painted face broke into a lazy smile.

“I asked your boyfriend what you wanted a dress for. You all right now? He said you were sick, and cold with it . . . .”

“Honey, I thought I’d shiver to death.” Shaldis propped a shoulder companionably against the wall. “You probably saved my life. I’d have paid money to see Jethan borrowing it, though,” she added, with a giggle she hoped was flirtatious. “I mean, he’s a sweet boy, but wherever he’s from, they raise ’em strict there.”

The other women laughed. Shaldis supposed she should have realized that the neighbors would jump to the conclusion not that Jethan was a guardsman, but that Jethan—obviously trained in war, obviously well fed, obviously doing nothing to earn his own living—was a bullyboy for one of the city’s gang leaders staking out the district.

I’ll have to tell him, she thought. And then, Maybe I’d better not. Whatever unconvincing story he’ll come up with if anyone asks will sound a whole lot more like a genuine lie if he’s not trying to make himself sound like a thug at the same time.

“You from town, sweetheart?” asked Melon Girl. “We thought you’d be back, seeing you here with old Stone-Face Jethan the other day.”

Shaldis shrugged. “Over by the Bazaar,” she said. She was tempted to claim origin outside the city—White Lake or the Lake of Reeds—but wasn’t sure she could get the accent right. Besides, she didn’t know enough of the intervillage affairs outside the Yellow City, and to pretend knowledge was simply asking to be tripped up. She ran a self-conscious hand over the straggling lacquered snags of her undone hair, added, “Boy, did I have a night last night . . . . I know it’s asking a lot, but could one of you lend me a mirror? I feel like such a teyn . . . .”

“Sweetheart, don’t we all have mornings like this?” It was at least five hours past noon, but Shaldis groaned and nodded in agreement, and Melon Girl heaved herself to her feet and trotted to her own room, which was next to that of Rosemallow Woman. Shaldis extemporized a name for herself—Golden Eagle Girl—and a brief and fictitious history of meeting Jethan at the Hospitality of BoSaa Café, and listened to Rosemallow Woman’s account of Preket the landlord’s iniquities and what a nuisance it was to live so close to the Temple of Nebekht, with lunatics coming and going all night and the absolute stink of the animals they were always killing there, and Lohar rampaging through every few days to throw stones at Turquoise Woman’s door.

“The poor girl never did anybody any harm! Not like that Corn-Tassel Woman, who was always claiming she could do this or that with her magic. She all but killed Normac’s poor dog, putting a spell on it to shut it up from barking just because a friend of hers asked her to. Then Normac’s house was robbed because the poor thing couldn’t make a sound besides just a little hoarse wheeze, and it broke my heart to hear it try to bark. She couldn’t take the spell off it, either, after that.”

“Cattail Woman is worse.” Melon Girl emerged with a cheap brass mirror, which she held out to Shaldis. “She lives over in the Fishmarket, and she’s always doing things ‘for your own good,’ like making her friends’ husbands impotent after they’ve had a fight—”

“Like that’s going to make them friendlier,” put in Rosemallow Woman.

“—or putting ward spells on the whole neighborhood that are supposed to drive away rats but that make everybody’s chickens lay out and their pigs stray as well. Sometimes I think old Lohar has a point about women doing magic bringing nothing but trouble. At least wizards don’t do anything much besides healing and spell warding.”

Shaldis returned with the mirror to Jethan’s room, and settled herself once again on his blanket. On the two or three occasions that she’d been instructed in scrying, it had been with a crystal specially ensorcelled to show her faraway scenes. She’d never attempted to communicate with another mage through it. But before all else, the Summer Concubine had to be told of yesterday’s events. She was still trying to summon the concubine’s image in the mirror when Jethan returned, bearing a round wicker basket of bread, fruit, and soft goat-milk cheese, a little sack of coffee beans, and a mortar, pestle, pan and coffeepot all wrapped together in a netted string shopping bag. He also had a horrifying green-and-yellow-striped dress.

“It was the only thing they had,” he said into Shaldis’s appalled silence. He frowned at her expression in the dense gloom of advancing evening. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, if I needed money in a hurry.” She held the thin, tight, low-cut bosom to her shallow breasts, inspected the grimy golden bows on the front, the clinging petticoats and ostentatious, front-fastening girdle.

“I got you veils.” He held them out. They were pink and almost transparent. “I think it’s pretty,” he added, and under his defensive tone she detected chagrin that she didn’t approve of his choice.

“You’re supposed to.”

Shaldis changed clothes while Jethan resolutely looked at the wall. “I’ll have to go out later and buy some paint, I suppose,” she said, settling once more on the floor and picking up the mirror again. She had no idea how such a thing was applied—her veils looked like laundry on a wash line. “By the way. I told the neighbors that I’m your girlfriend. Golden Eagle Girl.”

“Golden Eagle Girl?” She didn’t know whether he was more disgusted by the name or by the idea.

“Why can’t a woman be named after something splendid?”

“Eagles eat carrion,” pointed out Jethan. “And no woman should be able to—”

“Devil spawn!” roared a piercing voice from the street beyond the court. “Transgressor! It is your stubbornness, your wicked willfulness, that has brought down drought and the wrath of Nebekht on us all!”

“Not again,” groaned Jethan. “This happened last night too. If I hear Lohar one more time about wizards . . .”

“Wait a minute—who’s he calling a wizard?” Shaldis yanked the larger of the two pink veils back over her hair, wrapped the smaller around her face as she pulled open the door and strode across the dusty stink of the court. The children were already streaming through the gate to watch the fun, the men who’d been drinking in the doorway ambling after.

Most of the people gathered in Little Pig Alley were of the same type: loafers, or the lowest type of artisans taking a break from their work. A couple of men from the slaughterhouse were with them, flies circling the blood on their hands and clothing; the women who did the flensing tagged along with their knives still in hand. Lohar marched ahead, managing to keep up his tirade even while he bent and picked up rocks, dog filth, and broken bottles from the roadway to pelt his target, a stooped, balding man whose tight-screwed little face was gouged with bitter wrinkles of resentment and hate.

“. . . have not repented, have not seen even yet the sin of your blindness, the sin which draws the righteous punishment of Nebekht upon the whole of the Valley of the Lakes!”

“You bastards think I asked to give up my power?” screamed back the little man. His voice was old and cracked, his movements stiff, and something about him snagged at Shaldis’s memory, as if she knew him. “You think I like writing Xolnax’s letters for him? You think I like living in a stinking hovel?”

“Still you seek to regain what was rightfully taken from you, Earth Wizard! Dirt wizard! Dung wizard! This is your blindness! This is your sin!”

“Damned right it’s my sin and if I still had it in me I’d put a wyrd on your bowels that’d have you praying day and night to Nebekht for relief!” The man called Earth Wizard turned at bay before his house, jabbed a skinny finger at Lohar and his followers, who had swelled, Shaldis was disconcerted to see, into a crowd that blocked the whole of the street. “You’re a crazy man, you know that? I know you, Lohar! Listen to me, all of you! This man started drinking ijnis ten years ago, he was so afraid he’d lose his powers!”

“Lies! All lies!” Lohar had a voice like storm wind in the Eastern Cliffs. He flung up his arms, face distorted in a popeyed grimace of passion. “In his house he still keeps the devil books, the vile books of spells, seeking to regain that which the great Nebekht rightfully took away.”

“And how rightfully did your great Iron-Dicked One take it away from you, pal?” The little man ducked, flinched as a rain of rocks and bottles shattered on the wall around him, bloodying his face and upraised arms. He dropped the satchel he carried, record tablets and scrolls tumbling into the dirt of the street, fumbled with a latchkey at the door. The mob, encouraged, began to fling half bricks and chunks of adobe and tiles. “I’m watching you! I’m watching you all!” screamed the former Earth Wizard. “Just wait until one of you wants to borrow money from my master, or buy water—damn it!” He slipped through the door of the little house, and Shaldis, stretching out mage-born senses, heard the scrape of a bar over the door, the scratching of furniture shoved against it.

The mob closed around the house, hammering the door and window shutters, cursing and screaming and pelting the walls with garbage. Others gleefully tore up the papers their quarry had dropped, or hurled the tablets into the air. Jethan drew Shaldis aside.

“He’s all right,” he said.

Footfalls thudded in the narrow street; someone shouted, “Here, what’s all this, then?” and people began to disperse, fast, in the face of the constables of the watch.

“Who is he?”

Jethan shrugged.

“Xolnax’s clerk.” Melon Girl appeared behind them in the narrow street, what appeared to be an entire garden of silk flowers flourishing tipsily in her garish curls. “Urla, he calls himself, Urnate Urla.”

Shaldis startled, remembering the face now, remembering the blue eyes. He’d had a beard in those days, and the long pigtail Earth Wizards generally wore. His hair had been black then, too. She recalled him as a soft-voiced man, always ready to lay a mouse ward on a kitchen or mosquito spells on windows. He’d been very well off then, and a good wizard.

“I remember him when I was a little girl coming into Mama’s kitchen to witch it against rats.” Rosemallow Woman joined them as they walked back around the twisting alley to Greasy Yard, one of her little girls—Five-Fish, a delicate, fair child—on her hip. Her mouth twisted a little at the sound of his name. “He slipped a candy to me when I was fourteen that gave me dreams of him—what dreams!—for weeks, and when I’d see him I couldn’t hardly help myself, wanting him to kiss me . . . ugh!” She flinched, and hugged Five-Fish tight. “Later on I found out I wasn’t the only girl in the neighborhood he’d lay those spells on, either.”

Shaldis looked over her shoulder at the shut door of the house, the closed shutters. It was true, she thought, that he’d always been giving candies to children. She’d only thought he was kindly at the time.

Maybe Jethan wasn’t the only naive one.

“Serves him right.” Melon Girl cast a speculative glance up and down Jethan’s strapping form. “Preket’s like that, you know, our landlord—not a wizard, I don’t mean, but if I had a little boy I’d move. I guess just because a man’s a wizard doesn’t mean he’s a decent man. Now old Pomegranate Woman, she’s crazy as a bedbug, and she can write mouse wards that really work and do a little healing . . . . She fixed my cat’s broken foot, anyway.”

“Like Murder Girl’s foot wouldn’t have healed up anyway?” demanded Rosemallow Woman with good-natured sarcasm. “Pomegranate Woman claims she can make rocks and bricks and pieces of old glass talk to her too.” She turned to Shaldis. “Pomegranate Woman lives out in the ruins, and she has this imaginary pig—she used to have a real pig, but he got run over by a cart about five years ago, so now she has an imaginary one. Old Urla, he’d always act so meek, but you could tell he thought it gave him rights over everyone, just because he could do healing. Like it was something he’d done, instead of something the gods gave him just for coming out of his mother’s belly like everybody else. And now there he is, working for a couple pennies a week for a crocodile like Xolnax.”

She glanced back in the direction of the shut door, the mud-spattered house, hidden now by the turn of the walls. Lohar could still be heard shouting alternately at the constables and at Urnate Urla behind his enclosing walls: “Not until the king bows to Nebekht will Nebekht open the skies to the people! Not until Nebekht is acknowledged in all his greatness, his infinite greatness, will the rains return . . . .”

Melon Girl sniffed. “The gods only know how he’s getting laid these days,” and ducked into her room to get herself ready for business.

“I wonder,” said Shaldis softly.

She spent the remainder of the evening alternately sitting before the little brass mirror, staring into her reflection—staring past her reflection—and meditating on the Sigil of Sisterhood, and writing Sigil after Sigil of Deep Listening on the walls. But her concentration kept sliding away, broken by bouts of dizziness. At last she gave up trying to scry the events within the room and concentrated on conjuring the Summer Concubine’s name and image. Trying to summon her, to warn her—trying at the same time to put from her mind all the things that tugged it away: the foul memory of the spells that whispered in the door of her Citadel room, the glowing ward sign on the peeling stucco wall of House Jothek, and the sharp wary eyes of the Red Silk Lady. He’ll use you as he uses everyone . . . as Oryn will use you.

Tried to put aside the resentment that pulled at her heart with every groan of the Citadel’s horns, with every whisper of chanting that the desert wind brought down from the bluff.

The red God Sun, as it was called—the sun’s final name—seemed to swell and flatten as it touched the waters of the lake, slipped away out of sight and gave way to cloudless night.

“The Red Silk Lady is a Raven, like us.”

“Good heavens!” The Summer Concubine sat, a little numbly, on the leather cushion before her dressing table and stared in surprise into the depths of the mirror where she saw reflected not her own face, but that of Raeshaldis of the Sun Mages. “My dear, are you all right?” she asked seeing in the next moment—the light where the girl sat was not at all good; the tiny glimmer of a tallow-soaked reed, it looked like—how haggard her face was, how hollow her eyes and checks. “Have you been ill?”

“Not exactly ill. I was poisoned; I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“Poisoned?” Having found, at last, the small talismans marked with a jumble of Earth Wizard signs that had been buried beneath the scaffolding, she and Soth had spent the day riding with a small detachment of guards through the Dead Hills searching for the place where the talismans had been ensorcelled. Her body ached now from the hours spent in the saddle, and she thought with longing of the baths in the Summer Pavilion, and of her horoscope for the day: You will yearn for that which is far away.

The horoscope had added the admonition that rose pink was a lucky color for water-influenced Five-Rabbits—which the Summer Concubine was—to wear.

“It might have been Ahure,” said Shaldis. “Lord Jamornid may be thinking of hiring me—I don’t know how he knows I’ve been having trouble in the Citadel, but something made him think I might be looking for a new job. And Ahure knows he’s damn well not going to he able to convince anyone of his powers once he’s out of that fake lair of his. And it could have been Aktis, acting under orders from Lord Mohrvine, who’ll do just about anything to undercut the king’s power. And it might have been Red Silk Lady, who apparently hasn’t told Mohrvine about her powers and isn’t going to.”

“Did she tell you this?”

“Not in so many words. Someone in her household definitely has magic. There are ward signs at her gate, and in the walkway leading there. She claims to ‘suspect’ one of the servants, as if a woman like her wouldn’t have found out the moment she ‘suspected.’ She said that Mohrvine uses everyone who comes to his hand, and I got the impression she wasn’t about to be used. She may have poisoned me simply because she thought I suspected. She hides in a run-down courtyard at the far end of the compound which I don’t think would be the case if Mohrvine was using her powers. As far as I could tell, the courtyard isn’t guarded. And the ward signs she used to protect it are Pyromancer signs—and badly distorted ones at that—instead of the earth signs Aktis would have taught her.”

“The Red Silk Lady,” the Summer Concubine murmured, and ran her hands through her dusty hair. All her fears and apprehensions—everything Oryn had said to her about the delicate balance of power with Mohrvine and the other clan lords, based on the enslavement of the teyn—came back to her, turning her cold and ill.

“I sent Jethan out to the aqueduct camp with a message, in case I couldn’t get through to you at all,” Raeshaldis went on. “I wrote it in blood on a brass circle and then wiped it away—the spellmaster at the college once told me that was the easiest kind of message for a mage to summon back. He should get to you sometime tonight.”

Just in time to wake me up urgently, thought the Summer Concubine with an inward sigh. Jethan was such a desperately conscientious young man that telling him tactfully that his message could wait until morning might not work.

“Did you learn anything of Turquoise Woman ?” she asked after a time. “Did you find anything with your scrying?”

“Not yet. I’ll try again in the morning—I think the poison is still interfering with my ability to work. But it’s got to be the same person who attacked me. I can’t imagine a woman with power being carried away by someone who had none. It isn’t necessarily someone from the college, either. Anyone with power could have gotten past the Citadel’s gates. And another thing: According to Rosemallow Woman, there’s another Raven who lives in the ruins out beyond the Slaughterhouse, someone named Pomegranate Woman. I think I need to find her, warn her . . . and warn Xolnax’s daughter Amber Girl as well, though the gods know how I’m going to get to Amber Girl. Xolnax apparently keeps her pretty close.”

“Have you heard anything about her working magic?”

Shaldis shook her head. “I haven’t had much time to ask, but I think if anyone in the district knew about it, they’d have said. It stands to reason he’d keep it a secret, with the True Believers so strong around here. What did you find out about the aqueduct? Did you sense a power that’s . . . kind of cold and jangly feeling? Prickly, like the smell of the air before a storm?”

The Summer Concubine shook her head. The smell of lamb stew and fresh breads filled the tent, mingling with that of steam and scented oil. Blessed rest, blessed quiet, save for Jasmine and Lupine giggling together as they set out the wash things in the tent’s opulent silk-curtained bath cubicle. Oryn would sup with Bax and Ykem again. All the Summer Concubine wanted to do was sleep, but she knew he’d be in late and would need, like Raeshaldis, to know what she’d found.

“The marks I found were indistinct, only conduits, Soth said, for power that was raised elsewhere, with a circle of some sort. That way the mage had only to place the talismans—the hex marks were written on copper dequin coins—without having to divert his attention from the cloak that kept him safe from the guards. We searched for such a thing among the tombs of the Dead Hills. There was one, a Hosh Dynasty tomb, the only south-facing tomb on the hills, that looks out over the desert. Every time we passed its entrance we both felt there was some power there, but we couldn’t find a way in. We’ll go back there tomorrow. Where are you now, dearest? Are you somewhere safe’

“Where’s safe?” returned Shaldis. “Whoever it is who’s after me, he knows to look in the Citadel. I’m in Turquoise Woman’s room.” She gestured behind her. The Summer Concubine saw that the chamber, tiny as it was, had been further divided by muslin sheets hung on a rope, like crude curtains, which when drawn across would officially separate the room into seryak and harem. “I’m with Jethan, except I sent him with the message to you. Who let him in the guards, anyway? He should be a nursemaid!”

The Summer Concubine smiled in spite of the day’s weariness and anxiety. “Will you be all right there? You could go to the palace if you don’t feel safe in the Citadel.”

“If you can figure out a way to keep my presence unknown to the servants, that might be a good idea, but offhand, without you there, I’d be afraid to try it. At least down here I’m known as someone else—I’m supposed to be Jethan’s girlfriend Golden Eagle Girl—and nobody knows I’m a Raven instead of a golden eagle.”

That explained, thought the Summer Concubine with another, inner, smile, the too-pink stains of cochineal on Raeshaldis’s thin cheeks, and the fact that her long brown hair, formerly slicked back into the tight knot demanded by Sun Mage austerity, now lay in loose heavy waves over her shoulders. She’d changed clothes, too, into a startling green-and-gold dress that revealed curves and softness unguessed in her rangy body.

“I’ll try again tomorrow to see what I can see here, after I’ve had time to sleep and let the last of the poison work out of my system. I told Rosemallow Woman I had a former boyfriend who might be looking for me, and she’s got a couple of her children recruited to keep an eye on the place through the night. I don’t know how safe that’ll make me, but I don’t know how safe anywhere is. I’ve put every ward and wyrd I can think of on the door and window bolts, but all I can do is hope for the best.”

Looking at the smudges under Shaldis’s eyes, the Summer Concubine would not have bet a worn hairpin on the girl’s being able to stay awake for more than a few minutes after she put aside her scrying mirror. Shaldis was right: Trying to install her anywhere in the House of the Marvelous Tower, now that the gates were shut for the night, would be risky, and there was no way to keep servants from talking. So she only said, “Speak to me through the mirror tomorrow at”—she was about to say dawn, then took another took at the girl’s exhausted face and amended it—“noon. Just so that I know you’re all right. Do you need a message sent to the Citadel?”

Shaldis sighed and shook her head. “Until I know who’s after me,” she said, “I have to assume that it could be anyone, in the Citadel or outside. Anyone who has power. The gods know what Hathmar’s thinking: I only had a few hours’ leave yesterday to speak to you. I may not even be welcome there when I go back.” She spoke casually, but the Summer Concubine heard the strain in her voice.

She is isolated, and terrified, she thought, cut off from the Sun Mages for whom she traded her family. Divorced from family and friends.

She wondered where she got her strength.

“Whatever happens,” the Summer Concubine said firmly, “I—or the king—will deal with Hathmar. You won’t lose your place in the college over what you’re doing. So sleep well, dearest. We’ll speak in the morning, and all will come out right.”

Shaldis smiled, like marble melting into life. “Thank you.”

The mirror went dark.