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chambers.
     
    When Anna finally stretched out on the big bed—lumpy as most were in Defalk—tired as she
    felt, her mind continued to race. Both Firis and Lady Gatrune felt something was wrong in Pamr.
    Is it because of what you did to the chandler? Anna sighed. Why do you have to pay for
    everything you do? Pay more for it than others do?
     
    Still…she wasn’t sure that was the cause. She only felt that. How often are your feelings wrong?
     
    There was no answer to that—not one she liked.
     
     
    4
    ESARIA, NESEREA
     
    Rabyn glances at his own image in the heavy gilt-framed mirror that dominates the dressing
    room off his bedchamber. Light green eyes survey his high-checked, narrow-faced visage. He
    nods and brushes damp and freshly washed hair back over his left ear. After fingering his
    beardless chin, he frowns, then readjusts the green cloak of the Prophet of Music.
     
    His eyes drop to the miniature portrait on the long dressing table, and he smiles at the dark-
    haired woman centered in the gold frame. “I am being patient—as you taught me. But, Nubara,
    all of them, they will find out who is Prophet.”
     
    As he leaves the dressing room, his eyes go to the bedchamber where the blonde girl shivers
    under the silks, pretending to be asleep, and his lips curl into a smile of pleasure—momentar-
    ily—before he turns and walks down the short hall, stepping through the double doors from his
    chamber. The Mansuuran lancers stiffen. So do the guards who flank the lancers, the pair who
    wear the cream-and-green of the Prophet’s Guard.
     
    Rabyn ignores all four and walks not-quite-briskly along the corridor to the stairs, and thence up
    to the scrying pool. The two guards in green and cream follow, four paces back.
     
    From the door Rabyn studies the three players who have risen and then bowed to him.
     
    “The scrying song. Now!”
     
    “It will take a moment, Prophet, to check the tuning;" explains the older violino player, bowing
    again.
     
    ‘Then best you do so. Quickly.”
     
    As the trio of string players tune, Rabyn studies them, his eyes going from the graying and
    heavyset lead violinist to the balding man, and then to the thin-faced strawberry blonde. He
    studies the blonde, then looks back to the leader.
     
    “We’re ready, Prophet”
     
    “Play.” Rabyn clears his throat and nods, then waits for the melody before starting the spell.
     
    Show me the sorceress of Defalk,
      what she does and where she may walk...
    and who stands by her side and hand....
     
    The scrying pool silvers, revealing a slender blonde woman about to mount a palomino—one of
    the oversized beasts from the grassland raiders of the north. She swings up into the saddle with
    an ease born of practice and settles herself quickly, then nods to the officer in Defalkan purple
    beside her. They ride from the stables toward a column of waiting armsmen.
     
    Rabyn studies the image, nodding abruptly. He sings the release couplet, and ripples cross the
    silvered water. The image vanishes, and the pool is but a pool. He turns to the three players, his
    eyes on the center woman, a heavy figure with graying brown hair. “You did not hold the tone
    clearly. Best you do better next time.”
     
    The violino player swallows. “Yes, Prophet and Seer.”
     
    Beside her, the thin and younger strawberry blonde player conceals a silent gulp.
     
    Rabyn turns and leaves the scrying room. The two Prophet’s Guards again follow as he makes
    his way down the stairs and along a shaded and columned walkway toward the open-columned
    hilltop chamber that serves as the summer receiving room. Out beyond the palace of the Prophet,
    the Bitter Sea is calm and flat under the morning sunlight. Barely a breeze penetrates the
    columns of the chamber.
     
    “Greetings, Lord Rabyn.” The overcaptain in the maroon uniform of a Mansuuran lancer who
    awaits Rabyn stands from behind the small desk to the side and below the dais on which