When Dorian’s half-brother Paerik had brought his army to Khaliras to seize the throne, he had abandoned a vital post. The general who had served under him, General Talwin Naga, stood in front of the throne, explaining how the wild men would invade in the spring.

“Sixty thousand of them?” Dorian asked. “How could they raise so many?”

“Raise may be exactly the word, Your Holiness,” the tiny Lodricari man who had accompanied General Naga said.

“Who are you?” Dorian asked.

“This is Ashaiah Vul,” the general said. “He was your father’s Raptus Morgi, Keeper of the Dead. I think you need to hear what he can tell you.”

“I’ve never heard of such an office,” Dorian said. And “raptus” didn’t primarily mean keeper, either. It meant taker, stealer. Dorian’s stomach turned.

“By your father’s order and his father’s before him, it was a quiet office, Your Holiness,” Ashaiah Vul said. He was utterly bald, with a knobby skull and a pinched face with nearsighted eyes, though he looked barely forty years old. “I was known only as the Keeper. Your father’s Hands discouraged questions.”

The Hands. There was another problem. Whoever led the informers, torturers, spies, and guards who served as the Godking’s thousand hands had yet to show himself. Regardless, Dorian doubted Ashaiah Vul would dare lie about them.

“Go on,” Dorian said.

“I think you may want to come with me, Your Holiness. I suggest you leave your guard here.”

Is this the first attempt on my life? If so, it was rather clumsy. That made it all the more impossible to refuse. When the attempts on Dorian’s life began, he had to defeat them ruthlessly. Then they would end. “Very well.” Dorian signaled the guards to stay and dismissed the general.

In the hall, they immediately ran into Jenine. “My lord, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, giving him a version of a Khalidoran bow mixed with a Cenarian curtsey, chin up, eyes closing demurely only for a moment, right hand sweeping into the Khalidoran courtiers’ flourish while the left hand flared her skirt as she curtsied. She made the mixed curtsey look graceful, too. Obviously she’d practiced it. It occurred to him then that there was no Khalidoran form of a woman’s salute to an equal male. Khalidoran women who were equals would nod to each other, but were always inferior to men in the same social rank, and invisible to men of lower rank. And all women prostrated themselves before a Godking. This was Jenine’s offering of a middle ground. He smiled, pleased with her solution.

Dorian nodded more deeply than any Godking before him would have. “My lady, the pleasure is mine. How may I serve you?”

“I was hoping to spend the day with you. I don’t want to be in your way. I just want to learn.”