The man gave her an admonishing glare and said, "Lord Marhana pays me to advance your education. Would you waste his hard-earned coin?"

Anusha's first instinct was to shrug. Her half brother, Lord Behroun Marhana, cared only for appearances. He was all about the facade, and substance only for what it contributed to the image of courtly nobility. The man wanted to cement himself among the reforming aristocracy of scarred Impiltur. In an attempt to gain a seat on the nascent Grand Council forming after the failure of the royal line, Behroun required the family to appear to possess a polite education.

Despite her opinion, she restrained her instinctive, dismissive gesture. Anusha was twenty years old this month, and even without her recent course on high society manners, she recognized a shrug might be perceived as childish. Instead she merely looked her tutor in the eye, trying to appear interested.

The man sighed, shaking his head as he turned back to point at what he'd written on the board. "What does this say?"

Anusha read aloud, "I am old and battered and have left a heap of bloody, bitter mistakes behind me high enough to bury empires."

"Good diction," murmured her tutor. "Who said it, and when?"

"Elminster of Shadowdale, of course," replied Anusha. She had no idea if she was correct, but it sounded like something the old sage might have said. It was just one more quote among the hundreds he was known for. Who cared what year he'd uttered it?

Anyway, the old sage had dropped out of common knowledge after the Spellplague. He'd been affected like everyone else, and some whispered the old man's powers had been stripped in the disaster. She heard one story from a dock-worker, who had it from a Cormyrean merchant, who heard from a Mulhorandi refugee, that Elminster was glimpsed wandering the Planes of Purple Dust, bald and tattooed with spell scars so outre that-

"Good," replied the tutor. He used the quote as a bridge into another historical fact about Faerыn, a story about how a black arrow was responsible for Imphras the Great's reunification of Impiltur. Three hundred years ago!

History lessons were hard. It was all so dry and… pointless! Everything before the blue fire was irrelevant to how things were today. Anusha had been ten or eleven years old when the Weave collapsed. In Sarshel, the event had come and gone with little to mark it in its first days.

She did recall one particularly lurid account of the event in a report circulated among the sea traders. When Behroun was out of his office, she had slipped in and penned a copy of the report for herself. She could remember it almost by heart: "Magic goes awry, and the world trembles. Magic, earth, and flesh too, burn beneath veils of azure fire that dance across the skies, day and night. The hardest hit are the mages, who lose their magic, their minds, and sometimes, their souls. Where the blue fire touched down, everything changes. Whole villages are gone, save for a few horribly altered former inhabitants, now monstrosities. It is some sort of spell plague, one that even the gods fear to catch!"

Anusha had several tendays of bad dreams after reading that. Nightmares, in fact, of blue fire burning her flesh away, leaving nothing but a substanceless image behind. Dreams that had returned to trouble her recently, in fact.

In Impiltur, no disasters fell from the sky. But stories of atrocities to the south and east continued to roll in from occasional crazed refugees, and the shoreline began to recede. Worst of all, spellcasters forgot their spells. Local officials were finally convinced beyond all doubt that something very bad was in the offing.

Certainly a sinking Sea of Fallen Stars had seemed disaster enough for a city reliant on the many docks and piers that serviced its sea trade. Then again, she had been too young to appreciate the slow fall of the water's level as something terrible enough to choke a city. Likewise, when magic began to go awry, she didn't personally witness it. Her family's shipping fortune shielded her from seeing wizards melting themselves in the street as they adjusted to magic's new regime. But she had heard all the gruesome stories.

It was during this period that her half brother learned of his inheritance. Marhana Shipping was all his. The same day, Anusha learned that her mother and father perished together on their flagship trading vessel with all hands in Sembia. Something to do with the Shadovar.

It was not something she wished to dwell upon. To Lady Anusha Marhana, the Spellplague was just one more event over and done with, no worse than her own personal history of sad remembrances. The Year of Blue Fire was best relegated to history's boring tomes of who said what and when.

"… so Faerыn is splintered," continued her tutor, oblivious to Anusha's lapse of attention. "Communications and trade remain rare and may degrade further before things turn around. Whole nations are gone, never to return-"

Anusha's sigh was overloud, and the tutor heard it. He placed the chalk on the board ledge, turned, and flashed a tight smile. He said, "The lady is obviously overtired. The hour is late. I'll return again tomorrow, and we'll pick up where I left off. Please read the manuscript On the Heltharn dynasty.

Tomorrow I shall test your knowledge about Impiltur's royal line."

Anusha said, "I can tell you this without reading it-the Heltharn dynasty is broken, and the Grand Council is ascendant. So says Behroun."

The tutor's tight smile faltered. He looked suddenly tired. He said, "Perhaps. Perhaps it is so, and the king will not return." Without another word or his usual remonstration to study, the thin, pock-faced man walked out, letting the door to Anusha's suite hang ajar.

Anusha's brows furrowed. Had she said something in poor taste? Did the man have personal connections to the dead king and his family? Or was he merely a loyalist without a king to obey? Behroun said there were many like that around, interfering with the Grand Council's fledgling plans.

The girl pushed aside troubling thoughts and rose from her desk. Lassitude clutched at her. The tutor had suggested she get some sleep, and she was so very tired. Bad dreams of unending, heatless blue fire assailed her, making her dread the night. Not knowing how else to deal with the troubling images, she had fought sleep.

She entered her bedroom. Her canvases nearly crowded out the bureau, the nightstand, and her large bed. The coverlets, blue and pink, looked so soft, so tempting. She shuffled forward, knowing sleep would finally win out against her fear. She hoped the dreams would leave off tonight. Either way, slumber could no longer be denied.

Anusha opened her eyes. Had she dreamed? She couldn't remember anything since she'd flung herself onto her bed. Her bed right over there. Her bed where a girl still lay adrift in sleep's dark bonds.

The sleeping girl was herself. Her long skirts, ruffled blouse, and long boots lay in a heap on the floor.

A moment's more confusion gave way to understanding. She was dreaming now! She was caught up in a tiny story being spun out by her mind, except she was atypically aware. She dreamed and knew it!

She tensed, but the terror she recalled fuzzily from her previous nights of nightmares was absent. All was quiet and restful. She'd heard that if one could learn to recognize when caught in slumber's nets, one could apply some conscious control over the dream. Instead of being caught up in the moment, as was usually the case, the whole thing could be more like attending theater. Like watching a play, written as it went along.

She liked that idea. I shall go with this as long as it lasts, she told herself. What will my mind conjure up?