“I’m not done,” Shai said. “Now is the most difficult part. I have to carve those several hundred stamps in tiny detail, melding them together, then create a linchpin stamp. What I’ve done so far is like getting all of the paints ready, creating the color and figure studies. Now I have to put it all together. The last time I did this, it took the better part of five months.”

“And you have only twenty-four days.”

“And I have only twenty-four days,” Shai said, but felt an immediate stab of guilt. She had to run. Soon. She couldn’t wait to finish the project.

“Then I will leave you to it,” Gaotona said, standing and rolling down his sleeve.

Day Eighty-Five

DAY EIGHTY-FIVE

YES, Shai thought, scrambling along the side of her bed and rifling through her stack of papers there. The table wasn’t big enough. She’d pulled her sheets tight and turned the bed into a place to set all of her stacks. Yes, his first love was from the storybook. That was why … Kurshina’s red hair … But this would be subconscious. He wouldn’t know it. Embedded deeply, then.

How had she missed that? She wasn’t nearly as close to being done as she’d thought. There wasn’t time!

Shai added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravan’s romantic inclinations and experiences. She included it all: the embarrassing, the shameful, the glorious. Everything she’d been able to discover, and then a little bit more, calculated risks to fill out the soul. A flirtatious encounter with a woman whose name Ashravan could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a woman now dead.

This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shai to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravan had not always been emperor.

She had to extrapolate, lest she leave the soul bare, without passion.

So private, so powerful. She felt closest to Ashravan as she teased out these details. Not as a voyeur; by this point, she was a part of him.

She kept two books now. The formal notes of her process said she was horribly behind; that book left out details. The other book was her true one, disguised as useless piles of notes, random and haphazard.

She really was behind, but not so far as her official documentation showed. Hopefully, that subterfuge would earn her a few extra days before Frava struck.

As Shai searched for a specific note, she ran across one of her lists for escape plans. She hesitated. First, deal with the seal on the door, the note read in cipher. Second, silence the guards. Third, recover your Essence Marks, if possible. Fourth, escape the palace. Fifth, escape the city.