She started to sigh again, but checked the impulse before it could become audible. She didn't want to inflict her sour mood on her mother or sisters.

The door clicked open.

Andrin turned, grateful for any diversion, yet so anxious about what might be happening somewhere in the many universes Sharonians now called home that her heart stuttered until she saw that the sound was merely her father's arrival for dinner.

She tried to summon a smile, grateful that bad news hadn't actually arrived on their doorstep … yet, at least. Her father was a large man, as were most Ternathians. Not stocky, and certainly not fleshy, but he was built like a bull, with the massive shoulders and thick neck that were the hallmark of the Calirath Dynasty. To her private dismay, and the despair of her dressmaker, Andrin looked altogether too much like her father, and not a bit like her mother. The Empress Varena might stand nearly five feet eleven inches in her stockings, but she looked delicate, almost petite, standing beside His Imperial Majesty, Zindel XXIV, Duke of Ternath, Grand Duke of Farnalia, Warlord of the West, Protector of the Peace, and by the gods' Grace, Emperor of Ternathia.

The emperor who, at that moment, wore a look which so nearly matched Andrin's own mood that she felt herself trying not to gape open mouthed.

Zindel chan Calirath caught the grim set of his daughter's jaw, the stiffness of her shoulders, and knew, without a word spoken, that Andrin felt it, too. He halted in the doorway, halfway in and halfway out, and nearly had the door rapped into his heels. The doorkeeper had been opening and closing the Rose Room door every day at six p.m. sharp for the last twenty years, and not once in all that time had the Emperor stopped dead in the middle of the doorway.

But Zindel couldn't help it. The warning that vibrated through him when his gaze locked with his eldest daughter's was as brutal as it was unexpected. He sucked in a harsh breath, totally oblivious to the doorkeeper's frantic, last-minute grab at the door handle. He never even realized how close the door had come to slamming into him as his entire body vibrated with the Glimpse.

Something was going to smash her life to pieces. Soon.

Dear gods, no, not Andrin, a voice whispered inside his head, and his eyes clenched shut for just an instant. Clenched shut on a bewildering dazzle of half-guessed images, so fleeting, so jumbled, they were impossible to capture. Explosions of flame. Weeping faces. A powerful locomotive thundering along a desert rail line, with the Royal Shurakhalian coat of arms displayed on either side of its cab. A great whale rising from the sea in an explosion of foam. Gunfire stabbing through darkness and rain. A city he'd never seen yet almost recognized, a ship flaming upon the sea, a magnificent ballroom, and his tall young daughter weeping like a broken child… .

His nostrils flared under the dreadful cascade of almost-knowledge which had been the greatest gift and most bitter curse of his line for twice a thousand years and more. He was no Voice, yet he could taste the same splinters of vision ripping through Andrin, as if the proximity of their Talents had somehow sharpened the fragmented Glimpse for both of them, and he bit his lip as he felt her anguish.

But then he fought his eyes open again and saw Andrin biting down on her own distress. He understood the tension singing just beneath her skin, the shadows in her eyes. They were echoes of his own fear, his own gnawing worry, and his eyes held hers as the cheerful greetings from his wife and younger daughters splashed unheard against him, drowned out by the terrible prescience. Andrin's eyes were dark with its heavy weight, all the more terrible because they could give it neither shape nor name, and when she smiled anyway, it broke his heart.

She'd grown so tall, these last two years, too tall for mere courtly beauty. She was strong beneath the silks and velvets of an imperial princess. She wasn't a beautiful girl, his Andrin, not in the conventional sense. Her chin was too strong, her nose too proud, her face too triangular, for that, but strength lived in those unquiet eyes and the firm set of her mouth. Her long sweep of raven hair, shot through with the golden strands which were borne only by those of Talented Calirathian blood, lent her an almost otherworldly grace she was entirely unaware she possessed, and her eyes were as clear and gray as the Ternathian Sea.

"Hello, Papa," she said, holding out one hand.

He crossed the Rose Room swiftly and took her into a careful embrace, denying himself the need to crush her close, to protect her. He was careful, as well, to hug each of his younger daughters in turn?and his wife?in exactly the same manner, for exactly the same amount of time. He didn't want Varena to guess his Talent was riding him with cruel spurs. Not yet. Not until he'd Glimpsed more of whatever terrifying thing he might yet See.

"Now, then." He smiled at Razial, who'd just turned fifteen, and Anbessa, whose eleventh birthday had been celebrated two months previously. "How did your lessons go today?"

He let their youthful voices wash across him, finding comfort and even mild humor in little Anbessa's complaint that she saw no need to learn what Ternathia's imperial borders had been eight hundred years previously, since the Empire's current borders were far smaller. Then there was Razial. His middle daughter's bubbling enthusiasm over her latest art lesson was, Zindel knew, motivated more by the physical attractiveness of her art tutor than it was by any real love of watercolor painting. But he also knew the tutor's proclivities did not include nubile young grand princesses. And since Janaki was not only old enough to hold his own in affairs of the bedroom, but out of the Palace and several universes removed, Zindel had no real worry about the safety of his offspring under the roving eye of a handsome young art instructor. Razial's current infatuation was merely entertaining, in a gentle and soothing way that dispelled some of the gloom after a day like today. He gave Razial another six months, at most, before some other gloriously handsome devil caught her eye and the tension of her raging hormones. He'd worry about that devil when the day came.

Meanwhile …

Zindel sat beside his wife, drawing comfort from Varena's warmth at his side, while they waited for the servants to arrive with their supper. Varena's needlework?a new cover for their kneeling bench at Temple?was a work of art in its own right. Varena's designs were copied eagerly throughout the Empire, viewed as instantaneous must-haves for anyone on the Society list, or anyone with the aspiration to be on it, and not simply because of who she was.

Her Imperial Majesty Varena smiled as her husband sat beside her, but her skilled hands never paused in their work. She drew no small pleasure from the work she created with nimble fingers, needle, and thread … and if her hands were busy making something beautiful, no one would see them twist into the knots of fear which came all too often for an imperial wife.

She was Talented, of course; it was legally required for any Calirath bride. But hers wasn't a very strong Talent, just a middling dollop of precognition. It was nothing like the Glimpses her husband and her older children experienced, yet it was enough to set up tremors in her abdomen which threatened to upset the balanced poise of her busy fingers. Something was wrong. She could feel it in her own limited way, and she knew the signs to look for in her husband and her daughter, but she let them think they were succeeding at hiding their inner agitation, because it was kinder to give them that illusion.

Neither of them wanted to add stress to her life, so she carefully hid her own disquiet, aware that whatever was wrong would come in its own good time. She saw no sense in rushing to meet trouble before it arrived, unless one had a clear enough Glimpse and sufficient time to alter what might be coming.