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cracked like thin ice and fell away from the line of the brilliant blue sky.
    Against it, for those who cared to look, stood the mad, mad mage, conversing with an angry dragon, a creature of stone and glittering scale.
    Anya , the dragon said, its voice rich with the heavy scent of newly turned earth, its words a deep, deep blue. She could feel each syllable crawling across the backs of her hands as they furled around air that was suddenly cold; there was
magic
here. The sensations were always sharpest in the presence of magic.
    She withdrew her own power without thinking, and the soles of her feet, protected until then—because she
liked
bare feet—from the bitter cold, now shrieked in protest. She could hear their voice like the rush of a thousand sibilant whispers.
    She didn’t like it when her feet spoke.
    But the dragon roared again, distracting her from her pain.
    “But they look so much better!” she shouted. “Everyone knows
real
dragons have scales!”
    Thus did the Lord of Night converse with the most powerful, and the least sane, of his many servants, and it must have amused him to do so, for although the outcome of such an argument could never be in doubt, the fact that it existed at all said much.
    20th of Misteral, 427 AA
    The Terafin Manse
    The moon was bright, the air still, the starlight lessened by the presence of thin clouds that huddled, shroudlike, before its silvered face.
    A man stood alone beneath the delicate light of the Averalaan night. The sea’s breaking rumble was a constant rhythm, the heartbeat of the High City; it could be heard in the distance because so many other sounds were absent: the movement of people, their breath broken by laughter or the harsh, sharp bark of angry syllables; the clipped, steady pace of the horses that drew carriages and coaches from manse to manse along the Isle; the heavy tread of the Kings’ Swords as they patrolled the High City with a vigilance not found in the Old City.
    True, those sounds were of necessity distant even during the height of day, but he had become aware of them.
    Had found it necessary to become aware of them; Amarais, named before her rise to power Handernesse, and then Handernesse ATerafin, had become as silent as stone. Yes, stone, Morretz thought bleakly, avoiding the other comparison that was so colloquial and inelegant.
    The Terafin was careful, during the hours of day, to tend her House and the affairs of her House as if nothing troubled her. As if she had had no warning of her impending death; as if death itself was the distant eventuality it would be for the rest of her House. But in the evenings she allowed the full weight of that knowledge to descend upon her, and shrouded by it, protected by it, she sought the solace of the Terafin Shrine—although judging by her expression, both before and after, it was meager solace indeed.
    He waited. He found it increasingly difficult to wait at a distance, although he had always waited here, at the edge of this path, for the lord he had chosen to serve so many years ago. That service now counted for more than half of his life.
    Amarais.
    She would die. She had accepted it with a peculiar, angry grace that Morretz himself had failed to achieve. He hid it; he hid it well. But his days were absorbed by the question of her survival; his mornings—when he had ascertained for himself that a simple thing like the morning meal would not kill her—began, and often ended, with Devon ATerafin.
    Devon, who understood the routines of assassination better than any other member of the House, up to and probably including the man—or woman—who would in the end successfully employ them against The Terafin. He had to. He served the Lord of the Compact as a member of his Astari, and he protected the Twin Kings.
    The Terafin had not, of course, specifically told Morretz to keep his peace—and his silence—in this affair.
    Nor should she have had to. In all things, Morretz of the Guild of the Domicis