“How can you know-”

“She’s Marked.” Only the Tarkina would interrupt the Tarkin, and she’d been silent so long they had all forgotten her. She sounded as though she smiled with delight under her veil, and her voice had the liquid lilt of her northern homeland. “She’s a Seer.”

“That’s why you include the Jaldean priest in your accusation.” Gan-eGan stabbed the air with his beringed index finger. “Now your motives come clear. The Marked have ample reason to wish the Jaldeans accused of the assassination of the Tarkin.” The man’s eyes narrowed with calculation as he turned to the Tarkina, “My lady, this is not proof.”

“You could always let the Tarkin be poisoned, then you’d know for sure.” Parno said in his most reasonable tone.

“I Saw what happens to the Tarkin, and I Saw Lok-iKol on the Carnelian Throne,” Dhulyn continued, leaning forward against the grip Parno had on her arm. “I don’t need the Sight to know what will happen to you. It’s all the same to you who sits on the Carnelian Throne, providing you keep your office-” She poked the aide’s shoulder with her index finger.

GAN-EGAN STANDS IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBER AND TALKS TO A TALL MAN IN A DARK RED GUARD’S UNIFORM. HE IS CALM AND SMILES A SMALL, VEE-SHAPED SMILE; HIS EYES ARE A WARM JADE GREEN. ANOTHER GAN-EGAN, TRANSPARENT LIKE THE IMAGE OF THE SCHOLAR SHE HAS SEEN BEFORE, STANDS BEHIND HIM,

WEEPING, AND WRINGING HIS HANDS. WHEN HE IS FINALLY ALONE, IN HIS OWN ROOM, AND HIS EYES ARE GRAY ONCE MORE, HE FITS A ROPE AROUND HIS NECK AND STEPS ON TO A CHAIR.

Dhulyn sucked in air and clung to Parno’s arm. The green again. The green fog. In the priest’s eyes, in the one-eyed Lok-iKol, and now in this old man. What was it, and how did it move? And why did it seek out the Marked? She swallowed. Gan-eGan’s eyes were gray now. If she saved the Tarkin, would she save this counselor as well?

“You will feel differently, sir,” she told him. “You will. If this man falls-” she jerked her head toward the Tarkin, “so will you.”

Dhulyn stepped back into Parno’s circling arm and hung her head, swallowing. They were fools, all of them. Listen to them now, Alkoryn’s urgent whisper going unheard, drowned out by the clerk bleating his outrage. Only Parno’s murmur in her ear made any sense. She wished she hadn’t come.

The doors to the anteroom opened, and the slim, golden-haired young woman who’d been their escort through the winding corridors of the Carnelian Dome came in with a unit of six guards in the Dome colors at her back.

“My lord Tarkin,” she said, “a report has come from House Tenebro. It seems the old House did not Fall of age and infirmity as was thought at first. There is now evidence that the Fallen House was poisoned, and two members of the House have run away, suggesting their guilt.”

“I grieve to hear it, Amandar,” the Tarkin said. “But why must I hear it now?”

“One of the runaways is a distant cousin, Mar-eMar, recently come to the House, and brought by these Mercenary Brothers.”

“Who else ran from the House?” Parno said.

The young woman shot a quick glance at Parno out of the corner of her eye before focusing again on the Tarkin.

“The Scholar Gundaron of Valdomar,” she said when the Tarkin had nodded his permission for her to answer.

Dhulyn looked at Parno and raised her eyebrows.

“And do we know where these people are now?” the Tarkin asked.

“They were followed almost to the doors of Mercenary House, and then lost, my lord.”

“Alkoryn Pantherclaw,” the Tarkin said. “You will understand that I must detain your Brothers-” He raised his hand to halt Alkoryn’s whispered protests. “This is the Fall of a High Noble House, and not any House, mind, but one closely related to my own… and it places into a different light the tale that these Brothers have brought you. Some will say,” here he looked aside at Gan-eGan, “that they wished to make the first move in a game of accusations-but enough! Questions must be asked, and these Brothers will remain here, well-treated, until the answers are found. You, I hold blameless; you may go. But see that you send the Tenebro cousin and the Scholar Gundaron to me, should you have occasion to find them.”

“My lord, we are neutrals, we cannot merely-”

“You may go.” The Tarkin stood and looked to his wife, who shook her head and remained standing beside the chair. He nodded to Alkoryn, and left the room by the double doors to the right of his chair, accompanied by Gan-eGan. Once her husband had cleared the door, the Tarkina turned back to the young woman and the guards.

“Amandar, you will give me a moment with these Brothers. You guards may wait outside. Alkoryn Pantherclaw, I know you have matters to attend to at your own House.”

“I do, my lady, but I expect to return for my Brothers.” He turned to them and touched his forehead.

Dhulyn caught herself before the smile reached the surface of her lips. It was not the Tarkina, but she and Parno who were being reminded. Dhulyn remembered Alkoryn’s workroom, and the charts and floor plans that lined his shelves, and thought she knew how Alkoryn intended to return for them.

“Dhulyn, Parno,” Alkoryn touched his forehead with his fingertips. “In Battle.”

“Or in Death,” they replied in unison, saluting him in return.

The young woman, Amandar, hesitated but finally made a short bow and gestured the guards out of the room. The Tarkina waited until they were alone before sitting down in the Tarkin’s chair and throwing off her veil with a sigh. The face revealed was striking, her olive skin darker than the norm for Imrion, and her profile too pronounced, too hawklike, for conventional beauty. But her eyes, the darkest Dhulyn had ever seen, were large and lustrous, her lips full, warm and ready to smile.

Dhulyn pressed her own lips together. She’d wondered what the presence of the Tarkina might mean; perhaps she was about to find out.

“Do you know when this will come to pass?”

For a moment, Dhulyn wasn’t sure what the woman was asking about. Then she remembered it was the Tarkina who had guessed she was Marked.

“You believe me,” she said.

The dark woman in the Carnelian chair nodded slowly, the jewels in her hair twinkling in the light of the oil lamps. “Most people think there are no Seers left in the world, but I know differently. There was one, an old man from the far west, at my grandfather’s court when my father was a child. Long before my time, truly, but unlike Gan-eGan, I do not need to experience something personally to know that it exists.”

“And you do not mistrust the Wolfshead’s words, simply because she is Marked?” Parno said, his head tilted to one side as he considered the woman in the chair.

“No,” the Tarkina said, leaning back in such a way that it was obvious she’d often sat in her husband’s chair. “By what I was taught, the New Believers are heretics, and in Berdana the Queen, my sister, provides asylum to the Marked, and refuses the demands they are starting to make. Here in Imrion they are my husband’s subjects, and therefore safe from my bad opinion.”

“You’re not afraid of what you don’t understand?”

The dark woman shrugged. “I don’t understand higher mathematics, but I am not afraid of the Tarkin’s accountants nor yet his astronomers. And I’m not afraid of the Marked, that’s certain. Whether I understand it…” She shrugged again. “When we were young, my sister and I, in our father’s palace in Berdana we had many companions from among the children of the noble classes, and my favorite, the one who I think would have loved me even if I were not the daughter of the King, she was Marked. Not a Seer, no, but a Finder. Because of my love for my friend, our tutors told us stories of the Marked, and made their histories part of our studies.”