First time Sterya had stepped into the royal library, she had not been a queen. And her breath had been snatched impolitely from her lungs.

The sight of it did not cease to impress her still. There were colonnades upon colonnades upon shelves upon shelves of books old and new. The place was richly lit also, as places of such nature are wont to be, assisted in this matter by several tens of windows framed with iridescent stones and green-flamed lanterns. Alchemically speaking, green fire only illuminated and did not burn. Fire that was white, while it did not burn it did give the sensation of burning if smitten by – therefore none of the lanterns glowed white here.

Tables shaped like cockatrices and basilisks and dragons were littered about the floor at calculated distances. Crystal sculptures and vases were critically placed. The carpeting was silk, as supple a silk as used for livery, such that walking would be a noiseless conduct.

A concierge in a mustard uniform showed her in, then retreated to his desk. Another male attendant followed her around as she admired the smell of age and preservative the place detained. Sterya told the attendant what texts she intended to read to-day, and away he scampered.

From the table-and-chair Sterya chose, she had a crescent view of the sub-landing filled with even more shelves and ladders. Very few people were seated down there, certainly not more than she could count on the fingers of her hands, and even those were largely the attendants. One or two ladies and one or two lords in their fine loose frocks and coats and frock coats, most of them young as her, none of them recognizable. The library was as good a venue for such young nobles to flirt in as any.

Then Sterya spotted a face that seemed familiar. Her mother-in-law’s handmaiden. Interesting. The queen squinted her eyes and watched the girl collect two heavy, lanolin-jacketed tomes in her arms and scramble up the stairs. Sterya pushed back her chair and put a couple feet under her heels to meet the maiden at the head of the double-staircase.

The girl was rather startled. For a beat Sterya thought she would fall the tomes and fall herself down the stairs too, but Minair held her ground. Rather, her stair. Tried she to bob a curtsy but failed under the weight of words scribbled on parchment.

Sterya clapped her hands and a uniformed attendant appeared. On Sterya’s gesture he relieved the maiden of her burden despite her meek dissent. “Walk with me, sweet thing,” said Sterya, so walk they did. The attendant hobbled behind them delicately holding the books.

“Is your father doing better?” said she to the maiden, remembering when on Ozl Minair had interrupted their game of Penva. How she had been distressed due to her father’s illness.

The handmaiden was focused intently on her feet. Her eyes had a blank sheen to them, and her cheekbones were more pronounced than would appear fashionable, or, indeed, healthy. “He passed away, your Majesty,” Minair responded in a small voice.

“Oh, sweetie!” Sterya dove into a sideways hug with the girl. “I do hope the gods judge his soul well to rest and comfort. Come sit.”

They sat themselves down in an alcove, whilst the attendant sat the books on the table in their front. Then away he scampered like to his colleague who was off finding the queen her text of choice. Sterya did lay a hand on her mother-in-law’s handmaiden, who was clearly abundantly broken. Less a rose – Rosy – than nectarless lavender.

“Brackwhisp, was it, if my memory does me justice?”

Minair nodded. What a sad little nod it was.

Hasheem had been an admiral at the Muscale Keep, where Sterya had spent her childhood. Where her grandfather and guardian Aleth Sanghon oft found himself unable to provide his little princess much-needed embraces, Admiral Hasheem had always been there with his arms spread aloft. Hasheem had been struck by troteye a maes preceding Sterya’s Reddening, the juncture which marks every girl’s becoming into a woman. Sterya had wept as much at the pain and horror of her body’s decisions as at the dreadful fate of such a comely man. There were no known cures to troteye.

But Hasheem had pulled through. His new anatomy was about as healthy as a skeleton’s, but he had pulled through. Nobody had rejoiced, not the man’s wife nor his children, more than the newly become woman. Sterya had riddled his emaciated black face with a hundred kisses, so sure that the admiral was invincible, so convinced that no ailment could strike down a man of his ilk.

Hence the wretched dry day when her grandfather informed her that Admiral Hasheem had been taken to Jovanni’s custody had been the most wretchedly dry day of her life. Hasheem had, unbeknownst to Sterya, been fighting Brackwhisp along with troteye, and where the latter had surrendered to him the former took his life.

“Dreadful disease,” Sterya declared now, kneading the maiden’s hand. “Dreadful. I hope you and your family do well?”

“We . . . we survive.”

“I feel for you. I know what it is like to be without a father.”

Do you? Minair must have wanted to say, and she would have been fully justified in her saying this. You are the King’s wife, a most mighty Highlord’s grandchild, what know have you of my sorrow?

But she said nothing.

“Would you like some beverage perhaps, sweetie?” Sterya didn't what else to say or offer.

Minair shook her head no.

“If you need a break from your duties, I shall be obliged to talk to the Lady Mother on your behalf. I am certain she will be so gratuitous as to let you luxuriate.”

“No. No please. Work distracts.”

“Your will. Did they show your father to Mistress Leyh?”

“N-no, your Majesty,” said Minair. “He – he’s Casteless. I’m Casteless.”

Sterya gave her a bewildered look. “And?”

“The Mistress only treats nobility, your Majesty. She may treat particularly interesting cases once in a while, but . . . never us Casteless folk.”

“That is unacceptable!” Obviously the medics at the Hadekin Palace – comprised mainly of placated Testers from Houses of Ations – would place their priorities on nobles higher than the rest, but Sterya hadn’t known they didn’t even deign to operate on them. “I shall have word with Leyh. That is no ethical way for a medic to act.”

“It’s always been that way,” Minair whispered, sounding as resigned as she appeared. “Since the Emperor First. Since Kreror Bhaklu.”

Bhaklu had been the first true monarch of Rhaktoor, of a world before Disasters.

“Times for change are sudden in their coming,” Sterya said firmly, “if a bit tedious in the adjustments their changes demand. I will talk to Leyh. I will talk to the King if need be. Believe me, I know just how to seize his attention.”

Sterya had hoped to win a smile at this, but the handmaiden looked so completely dejected it was heartbreaking to see. Sterya would have word with Eoli as well in that she should give the girl a provisional leave; her 'Rosy' could do well to find better distractions than work.

“How, if I may be so rude as to ask,” said Sterya tenaciously, “might a sweet thing like yourself be finding herself here? You are fond of reading?”

“Don’t know how to. Fetching them . . . for – for the Lady Highest.”

“Ah. Of course. Of course. Well, should you feel you want any aide, any aide whatsoever, just you let me know.”

“Thank you kindly, your Majesty. I – I should get going. The Lady will be awaiting my coming.”

“Yes. Assuredly. Have a care for yourself, sweetie, and your family.” Sterya reached for the tomes, but Minair sprung to her feet and started hassling.

“I’ve got it, your Majesty.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, this – "

In their gentle struggle at grabbing the books, the jacket of the topmost tome was flipped. Inside Sterya caught the glimpse of a most curious symbol: a humanoid thing with serpents erupting from its armpits, extending to form the circular border of the emblem.

Minair quickly picked the books up. She looked rattled as she tried, and failed, to curtsy, muttered “With your leave, your Majesty,” and absented herself.

Sterya spent the next many beats sitting still with only her eyes roving about the place and her brain tossing avid thoughts around. She watched the green flames flutter at their lanterns’ hearts. She watched a noble couple snogging against a bookshelf while a hapless concierge gave them the evil eye. She thought all the while of Hasheem and of the symbol, before at last the attendant brought her the texts she had asked for. He apologized for having taken so much time.

However, Sterya could simply no longer read Ornoth’s fictional notwithstanding mythically accurate romances when those armpit-serpents seemed to be hissing at her in her imagination. “Actually,” she said to the attendant thus, “I would like to know what books the Lady Mother has been reading lately . . .”

The concierge was called, a man with horn-rimmed optics and gouty legs, for the attendant was powerless in that the royal library did no snitching on what books had been borrowed from them, and by whom. But not by any stretch of even Sterya’s serpent-permeated imagination did the gouty-legged concierge hold any power before her Majesty.

“It is by no means a bad bid to have the queen owe you one.” Sterya smiled sweetly, the smile her tutors had gotten perfected, only one among smiles of many mold. “Besides, I assure you, the Lady Mother and I have a lot of our reading assemblies together.”

The lie was unneeded but harmless, and she was a good liar.

Handwritten replicas of the tomes Minair had taken for Eoli Khad were brought to her table thereafter. Similarly bound in lanolin, similarly thick and fragile.

“There are only four copies of these in all of Heim, I wager,” the concierge gloated, cocking the optics over his nose. “Two of the originals with us. As many years between the ink drying on that parchment and you reading it as between the Ytranar and Nywan Era. These texts hold information of delicate nature, delicate and unsettling, if I may be so bold as to say. Why, outlawed in six princedoms for their baseless claims in – "

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I wish to do the reading on my own,” said Sterya.

“Of course. It is only an honor – "

“And in peace.”

“Oh. That is to say, yes. Of course.”

“Many thanks.”

The man let her be. She dived in to solve the mystery of the symbol.

They stood on the western galleries of the Tall Tower, a king and his fool. A wind of harsh cadence flapped the king’s gold-embroidered cape while the fool’s feathered cloak did him no benefits either.

Before them the whole of Rivate was laid out like a poorly rendered labyrinth, like a painting with infinite moving parts. There, the hovels. There, the shacks. There the temples, chapels, gurtems. Bright polished domes and monasteries in Pardel, again the huts and shanties in Charmat – shadowed like their residents' lives by the rich and their riches, in the form of the Inner Terdam. Beyond it the moat. Beyond that the Reef Harbor, and beyond it a suggestion of the calm, level surface of the Shadneer. Carriages romping on lines Alain could cover with his little finger, dimensionless ships he could crush by the parallax of his knuckles.

The afternoon bled away to evening as they stood by the railings, watchful, watching. The city would almost appear to be a peaceful sanctuary from up here, with the wind howling in their faces. Almost.

“Can you tell me,” said Alain, “why this gallery is built like a rampart?”

“Because the masons couldn’t make up their mind?”

“I need to speak with Otius, not Narnbutter the saphead.”

“As you wish, your Grace.” Once again that change in tone as the fool shifted demeanor put Alain at enormous unease. It was like two personalities jostled beneath the boy’s skin, and he could switch them as he willed. It was only unnerving to imagine what it would be like if he lost control over which one spoke, and when. “As to an answer to your question, I heard from the servants that this palace was originally to be made a fort by Khad Johri and not a palace at all. Is that so?”

“That is so,” Alain ordained. “And do you know why the Hadekin Palace and others such are built so near the coast?”

“The sandstorms, your Grace. They’re less likely to occur near the Shadneer.”

“Right again. It is eerie how much people know about me, about where I live, about my ancestors. It’s like I have no secrets.”

“But surely you must have a few,” appealed Otius.

“None of any significance. You tell me about your life, why don’t you?”

“Well, I was born and raised right here in the city.”

“Outside the Terdam?”

“Yes. In Charmat.”

“That’s it? I ask you to tell me about your life and all you tell me is you spent it here?”

“There is not much to know about me, your Grace. I fear I am not as interesting as you had hoped, which puts my career at peril.”

“Oh, no,” said Alain. “I think you are just as interesting an entertainer as I could have hoped for. I think you wallow in withholding information about yourself. I think you enjoy having secrets of your own.”

Otius grinned, but it was Narnbutter’s grin that showed. Alain did not know how he could distinguish between the two, but plainly he could; it was akin to knowing a castle will grow bigger when you move closer to it.

Then the fool’s eye glistened blue. “Why would I retain secrets from you, little brother? I haven’t anything to hide.”

Alain’s face paled. “What did you call me? What did you just say?”

During their sparring sessions at the Cupola, even after several months of training, Vaarin had always defeated Alain in duel. When they had switched to swordplay from churlish rapiers the outcome still hadn’t changed its mind. So Alain, nine then, had accused Vaarin of not teaching him all the tricks and nuances of fight. Perhaps not shown him how to parry half-swings properly, or misinformed him on which muscles to tense to oppose which lunge. To which Vaarin, sickened of accusations, had said – ‘Why would I retain secrets from you, little brother? I haven’t anything to hide.’ – and knocked Alain off his feet. For no reason this had stuck with the now-king.

“The fuck did you say – ?” Alain launched himself at the fool, grabbing the false-lapels of his feathered cloak. “What sorcery is this!”

“Wh – what did I do, your Grace? I – I promise whatever I spoke I meant no harm to come of it!”

He looked truthfully frightened, distraught even, Otius or Narnbutter or whichever one it was that helmed the reality behind his skin’s veil. His eyes were brown, not blue. The flesh around them was painted salmon-pink.

Alain let go of the fool’s cloak, his stomach twisted in knots. He staggered to the railing and let his vomit plummet five hundred feet. Whatever, if any, guard was stationed below would be favored by a soured taste of the King’s afternoon meal.

Alain sank to his knees. The fool cried “Help! His Grace is down, hurry!” and next Alain was yanked like a bud from its flower to his feet by a pair of guards in vest-armor.

“What,” he panted, wiping retch off his chin, “what did you say to me, fool?”

Otius thought on it. His face was expressive. “I think I said, ‘I haven’t any secrets since I haven’t an eventful life.’ But are you all right, your Grace?”

Alain pulled his arms from the guards’ clutch, wrested down his coat. “I am fine,” he mumbled. “I am fine.”

Nobody seemed convinced, so Alain closed his eyes and infused some mageical strength into his muscles. Instantly he felt better, and no doubt he looked better as well. His heart wouldn’t obey, though, and it kept his blood pumping hard. If not for the sturdiness of flesh, Alain would have been a bidirectional fountain of red fluid right then.

“What did happen, your Grace?”

“Gut acted up,” said Alain, avoiding looking straight at the fool’s face for fear of what he might see this time. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

“You should catch some rest, your Grace,” Otius suggested.

“No. I have to meet with someone. Go to your chamber.”

“Your Grace – "

“Just go to your bloody chamber, for Esper's sake!”

It was a ploy of light and mind, Alain told himself as he descended the great many steps of the Tall Tower. A deceit birthed from, and played on, the subconscious. Nothing more.

He did a poor job of convincing himself.

And he ran into an old friend – an old lover, some would say – on the concrete steps.

“Why, if it isn’t his Gracious Majesty!” Lady Vieira Tremletti exclaimed in delighted shock. She was wearing an aesthetically pleasing brocade and moonstones in her hair. “What a rarest of rare occasion this is! Is it a Moonsnight, Wylen?”

“No, my Lady,” answered her squire, but naturally a young handsome man. Vieira liked having younger men’s eyes on her. At least the young men she deemed qualified enough to do so.

“Well then all the more reason for thrill in this encounter!” squealed she.

“I am rather in haste, dear Lady,” said Alain awkwardly.

She puckered her face in the prettiest way conceivable. “Now isn’t that convenient? I say it is. What would you have said on the matter, Wylen?”

The luckless creature opened, closed, re-opened and closed his handsome mouth again, not wanting to speak ill of his ruler.

“I wish I were making this up,” Alain said in earnest. “I do have someplace to be.”

“You always have someplace to be since you wed Sanghon,” countered Vieira.

Alain generally liked Lady Tremletti, had in fact at one point been betrothed to her, but at present he was starting to feel incensed. “She is my wife, and the rightful queen of the Five Kingdoms. At any rate, it is not her I have to see.” 

“Who is it then, Alain, who is more important to you than me?” interrogated Vieira.

“A madman.”

The King entered the throne room just as the Gdrag bell chimed the sixth hour of dusk. The civic council chairs were empty, all, but Highsecretary Anauj Orlocke did stand beneath the dome frieze on his foot and the brass stump he had for second leg. Accompanying him in standing was Commander Maurya, dressed not in a knight’s attire but rather in meek, peach-colored robes.

Both swept a bow to Alain, who said, “Good even! How fares your health, Maurya? I drank to it on my wedding night.”

“I presume that means those that told me the King read his vows sober are liars,” said the Commander.

“You presume too much. I never mentioned what it was that I drank.”

Maurya laughed at this, a good-natured laugh of a good-natured man. No, that wasn’t the laughter of a man who'd lost his screws. This much Alain could guess without his mageic.

The Highsecretary let out a colossal yawn. “Pardon,” said he. “Had a late night with the lady, if you know what I mean. Long day too, what with lending Whasu and the Watch a hand for the revolts. Shall we wrap this up quick?”

“Indeed we shall,” Alain agreed, compelled to think of the Highlady Saphira Orlocke heavy with child, whom Sterya spent so much of her time with. “Without preamble, tell me first what took you so long in Dassan, Maurya.”

“I lost all my men fighting,” said Commander Maurya acutely, the expression he bore nothing short of petrifying. “Myself, I was injured bad. Never let those things touch me, I didn’t, but their spears did. I got marks to testify to my profit.”

He pulled up his robe from the waistline. Long white scars, the thinnest and whitest and most painful-looking Alain had ever seen, were incised along the man’s midriff on his side torso. Incised by no blade he knew of, neither.

“It still stings.” Maurya let his robe down. “I could . . . smell them, the enemy, the shadows with burning eyes. Smell them long past the massacre was over, long past their depart. So I went with my gut. Followed the scent on my dying horse. He did die. Holder knows I nearabout did too.”

“You cannot expect – "

But Maurya impeded the King. “I know how it sounds, your Grace. I wouldn’t believe me if I was in your place. But I am only telling you the truth.”

Alain swallowed a gulp. He thought of Narnbutter’s eyes turning blue. “Do continue.”

“I lost the scent a couple ten miles off Dassan, near a small coast state,” said Maurya. “I hadn’t had a bath or a meal since the fight and . . . I wanted to convince myself that what I had witnessed was fiction, that I was going cuckoo, but . . . what I saw was real as you and me, your Grace. Real as the marble of this floor or a lady’s touch on your face. Not as gratifying to us, maybe, but real.

“I made myself at home at an inn called the Stayback for a few days. Five days, or so said the innkeeper. Barely felt like two to me, I could’ve sworn I slumbered through the rest. They gave me food and got me a medic, thanks to this.” The Commander tapped the crown-badge insignia on Anauj’s breastplate. “I borrowed a horse soon as I felt well enough to ride and here I am. An old man with a crazy story.”

Alain and Maurya heaved a shattered sigh together, whereas Anauj managed to look narrowly bemused.

There had been no rush of blood to the Commander’s xela that Alain’s mageic could detect, which meant that Maurya likely wasn’t lying.

“I believe your story,” Alain said after moments of furious thought.

The first book terrified her.

There was no author’s name attached to it, only the symbol. Sterya had heard of notable men who wrote under aliases, but writing under symbols was a new concept to her.

The book was full of haunting diagrams and figures. The worst part of it was, that it did not read like fiction. Sterya’s hands were clammy with sweat as she turned page after page, watching creatures of twisted spine and many eyes. Women with privates of men. Men with privates of women. Men with privates of both men and women. Bony humanoid critters with eyes like lamplights that pierce the night.

“Bvegans,” she read the scribble on top of one such figure. “Mutated humans. Cursed by . . .”

She could not make out the word.

Again she set to turning pages. There were loose, labelled drawings of orrocks too – only these were obviously more elaborate than ordinary orrocks, what with cow-like udders hanging under their bodies and gill-like fissures they had for breathing instead of nostrils.

Sterya had seen enough, yet she somehow could not have enough of the enough. Something, some force of curiosity, kept her reading.

The second tome was no less disturbing. It spoke on the forbidden art of necromancy. Although the book claimed that it was more than what conventions made the art out to be. That it were a pseudo-science. That it involved ample more than conjuration of sprites and communication with the dead.

What would Eoli Khad be doing reading such books?

Sterya leafed through it, skimmed through it all, and when she reached the last page she gasped. It exhibited the drawing of an altar at the center of a circle of rocks indicated ‘hempstone’.

It was the exact image she had seen in her dream the other night. The dream she had hid from Alain.

And for good reason, too. In it Alain had been a man of peacock skin, like every breadth of his flesh was eaten by moths and bitten by frost. He had been on a litter, which hovered past the boundary of rocks and settled him on the altar. Sterya in the dream had felt like she were the one controlling the litter, like she were the one who had made it fly. As though she were a Skiller.

Then the dream had shifted. Suddenly she was on the altar, looking up at that peacock-skinned model of her husband. He held a blue dagger in his hand, thin as a leaf.

No, Sterya remembered whimpering in dream. No, my King . . . Please . . .

But Alain had slit his own throat. Instead of blood the sky fell out of it, and Alain tumbled into the sky he bled, and he kept falling and Sterya kept whimpering until she awoke.

She had thought it best not to share this dream with him when he asked.

Now she breathed shallow breaths, each one she drew an ordeal. Her tongue felt thick and her skin writhed as she stared at the drawing of hempstones and the altar. Finally she forced the book shut.

Sterya felt a swift urge of seeing her husband. An offended couple gaped at her as she blasted out the library like a ribbon caught in the wind.

Do let me know your thoughts on this chapter, good people!

I had a blast writing it for some reason.

Anyway, we'll be going back to Addie now. Last we checked, despite being a Skiller she had done a Tester's job: by healing herself.

Let's go see what's up with that!