Strengthen yourself, Jolivet had said, so Kel began by walking. He was half ashamed at how slowly he paced the mosaic-tiled paths of the Palace gardens, past flowering vines of honeysuckle, under trees heavy with lemons and figs. His chest ached—a deep hurt that made itself known when he breathed or moved too quickly.
He stopped taking the morphea. His body missed it most the first night without it, when he turned restlessly upon his bed, unable to get to sleep. But each day the craving faded, and each day he could walk farther, faster.
He limped through the Night Garden, amid the tightly curled green buds of plants that bloomed only after sunset. He circled the Carcel—the windowless, fortified stone sanctuary where the royal family was hidden in the event of an attack on the Palace. It had not to Kel’s knowledge been used in at least a century, and ivy grew thick over the barred iron door.
As there were no prisoners in the Trick, the Castelguards let him climb the winding spiral staircase until he reached the top, where a narrow aisle bisected two rows of empty cells, their Sunderglass doors standing open. He pushed past the pain of it, climbing the stairs once, twice, five times, until he could taste blood in his mouth.
He wandered the cliff paths, where the Hill itself fell away to the ocean, the sea below gray and heaving as a whale’s back. The cliff paths were studded with follies—fanciful structures of white plaster made to resemble miniature versions of temples and towers, farmhouses and castles. They contained cushioned benches and were meant to provide rest and shelter for those delicate souls who found the cliff path a wearying trek.
Sometimes on his travels Kel would catch wisps of gossip as servants or guardsmen went by, paying him no attention. Most of it centered on romantic entanglements among those who served the great Houses on the Hill; some had to do with the Palace, or even with Conor. There was no gossip about debts, Crawlers, or cousins of the Prince who might have been recently injured, however. If anyone wondered about Kel’s peripatetic ways, he heard nothing about it.
He never saw the King, though smoke spilled sometimes from the high windows of the Star Tower. On occasion, he saw the Queen, usually directing the staff or the gardeners. Once, on his way down the stairs of the Star Tower, he overheard her speaking with Bensimon and Jolivet.
“Old Gremont won’t last much longer,” Lilibet was saying, “and his wife is not interested in administering a Charter. That son of his must be fetched back from Taprobana lest the family’s chair become the object of an internecine struggle.”
“Artal Gremont is a monster,” Bensimon growled, and then Jolivet cut in, and the argument turned in another direction. Kel went on his way down the stairs, filing away the information to relay to Conor later as a piece of mildly interesting gossip. Whatever Artal Gremont had done, it was bad enough that Bensimon disliked the idea of him returning, even a decade later.
The next afternoon, on a whim, Kel cut through the Queen’s Garden on his way to the stables, meaning to visit Asti. He was passing the reflecting pool when he heard voices, muffled by the high hedges that surrounded the garden. One voice was a woman’s; the other was Conor’s. He was speaking Sarthian. “Sti acordi dovarìan ’ndar ben,” Kel heard him say. Those arrangements should be suitable.
A moment later, his voice faded. Kel wondered what arrangements Conor was describing, but then, it was Conor’s business, and Kel had been walking for hours now. Life in the Palace was a sort of wheel, Kel thought, as he turned his steps toward the Castel Mitat; it went on and on in the same rotations, cutting the same paths of habit and memory into the earth. The fact that he had nearly died was not even a stone in the road. It mattered only to him; it had changed no one but him. In that, he was alone.
Lin was dreaming.
In the dream she knew she was asleep, and that what she saw was not real. She stood upon a high stone tower, whose top was a bare expanse of stone. Mountains rose as black shadows in the distance; the sky was the color of charcoal and blood, the wounded eye of destruction.
In minutes, the world would cease to be.
A man appeared at the edge of the tower’s roof. She knew he had not climbed its sheer sides to reach her. Magic had carried him aloft: For he was the Sorcerer-King Suleman, and until today, there had been no greater power than his in all the world.
As he walked toward her, his steps light as a cat’s, flames sparked among the folds of his cloak. The wind that blew from the burning mountains lifted his black hair. Lin knew of course of Suleman. The lover of Adassa. Her betrayer. She had never understood why the Goddess had loved him; he had always sounded to her fearful in his power, terrible in his rage. And yet he was beautiful—beautiful as fire and destructive things were beautiful. It was a cruel sort of beauty, but it stirred a fierce longing in her. She rose and turned toward him; she was holding out her hands—
Lin sat bolt upright, her heart hammering, her skin slicked with sweat. She folded her hands over her chest, half incredulous. Had she woken herself out of the dream? Perhaps she had, for she knew how the story ended. She had been dreaming of the last moments before the Sundering. The last moments before Adassa’s death.
In minutes, the world would cease to be.
Lin pushed her damp hair back, rising from her bed to pad into the main room of the house, where she had thrown her cloak over the back of a chair. She felt through its folds until she found the hard shape of the brooch. She unpinned it, running her fingers over the stone. In the dim moonlight, it was the color of milk. Its smooth, cool surface calmed the beating of her heart.
You give me strange dreams, she thought, gazing at the stone. Dreams of the past. Her past.
Adassa had been a Queen among Sorcerer-Kings. She, too, would have possessed a Source-Stone.
What if—？
A low rap on the front door snapped Lin out of her reverie. Two raps, followed by a pause, then a third rap.
Mariam.
Lin hurried to the door. It was late for Mariam to be awake—she usually tired before First Watch. What if she had been taken ill in the night? But then, surely, it would be Chana at the door, demanding Lin’s presence at the House of Women. But when Lin swung the door open, it was only Mariam on her front steps,
In the moonlight, Mariam’s face was stark pallor and shadow, the hollows under her cheekbones like bruises. But she was grinning, her eyes bright. “Oh, dear, I woke you up,” she said, sounding unrepentant. “I meant to come earlier, but I had to wait for Chana to fall asleep, otherwise she would have given me endless trouble for going out at night. ‘You need your rest, Mariam,’” she said, in a passable imitation of Chana’s commanding tones.
“Well, you do,” Lin said, but she couldn’t help smiling. “All right—what is it? Gossip? Galena’s run off with one of the malbushim?”
“Much more important than that,” said Mariam, with an air of injured dignity. “You still want to see your patient, the Prince’s cousin, again, don’t you?”
Lin tightened her hand around the brooch she was holding. “Yes, of course, but—”
“What if I told you I had a solution to your problem?” said Mariam. “Someone willing to help you get into the Palace? Someone who knows when the Prince will be busy?”