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marry. If they had their way, she would produce a legitimate heir to displace the son Hanish had fathered. They would not have their way. She knew which senators most hated her for curtailing their power and which clans and tribes most chafed against her recent decision to establish one national currency—the hadin—that the royal reserve exclusively minted. She knew which nobles needed to be played against one another during the intricate work of pushing her plans forward. She was glad to know all these things. Added together and weighed one against another, the balance always tipped in her favor. She was secure in rule, and she had plans to become even more so soon.
    If all the scheming complexity of her position had etched fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, so be it. If she was fuller in the hips and chest than she had been before childbirth, what did that matter? If she walked more on her heels and less on the eager balls of her feet, that was as it should be. She had been lovely as a girl, but she knew that there were other ways to be lovely as a woman. She was not yet the age her mother was in her memories, which meant she had not reached the age to measure herself against her understanding of beauty. And of mortality. That day would come, she knew, but not just yet.
    For the time being, her physical appearance was a gift to be used as readily as skill with a sword. The core of her power now resided in her mind, her thoughts, and her capacity to outflank others from a place of intellect hidden behind her pleasing façade. She had never been the vacuous vessel so many had assumed. It just took a great deal of anger to finally awaken the talents she had long let lie dormant. For that anger she had Hanish Mein to thank. In her own way, she remembered that daily.
    At one corner of her desk sat a letter from the winery of Prios. Their vines were ready, it declared. They would happily begin the mass production the queen charged them with. Just as soon as the additive reached them, they would begin bottling. Good, she thought. The people had been clear-eyed too long already. She knew they were starting to grumble, and with good reason, too.
    The document she now studied was the last of the reports she hadcommissioned on the state of agriculture in northern Talay. It told a dire story. While central Talay had always been arid, the north had been somewhat more temperate. The sea currents and the wind that drove them had brought moisture enough to keep the land fertile, well suited to producing grains and fruits and vegetables that could be traded with the floating merchants for goods from throughout the Inland Sea and from as far away as the Vumu Archipelago. These goods, in turn, were sent south into central Talay, which had its own goods to offer in the form of livestock and mineral wealth. Thus, there had been a balance of farming and trade for generations.
    Not so any longer. The damage done to the plains of Talay by the war and by the Santoth magic had left them parched. Something in this had changed the flow of the winds. Now a scorching breeze swept up from the plains and evaporated the sea moisture before it ever reached land. What fog there was, they said in Bocoum, hung offshore, temptingly haunting them like a mirage that appeared each morning but would come no nearer. Northern crops had withered more year by year, and this summer looked to be the driest yet. Even the wheatgrass—usually so hearty—had silvered to straw. It combusted and fed wildfires that blackened the sky.
    The last time the merchants docked at Bocoum they found the Talayans had little to trade. Instead of engaging in commerce, the merchants found themselves fighting off assaults from the famished, desperate farmers and townspeople. Considering the way the sea currents whirled trade around the heart of the empire, this break in the chain of commerce had far-reaching consequences.
    Who would have thought that a lack of water in one place