Kylar rode as fast as he could. He left the horse and the stolen clothes before he got to East Kingsbridge and went invisible. He ran the rest of the way, leaving guards with their heads swiveling, trying to find where the patter of running feet had come from. Rather than run through the twisting, illogical halls of the castle, he climbed the wall. In minutes, he dropped onto the queen’s balcony, which was still missing part of the railing where Kylar had freed Mags Drake’s corpse. He looked inside.

The queen wasn’t alone.

22

Before I sent you after Sister Jessie, you said you’d been studying something for two years,” Istariel Wyant, the Speaker of the Chantry, said. They were sitting in her office, high in the Seraph, sharing ootai and strategy. “What was it?”

“The ka’karifer,” Ariel said.

“The what? My Hyrillic isn’t what it used to be.”

A doubtful look crossed Ariel’s face. “Your Hyrillic was never what it used to be. If I recall correctly, your marks in all your language classes—”

“The question, Ariel,” Istariel snapped, with more vigor than she intended. Only perhaps a dozen Sisters in the Chantry would recall how poorly she had performed in a few of her classes, and none of them would dare correct the Speaker. None except Ariel, who was not correcting her because she thought being Istariel’s sister gave her license: Ariel would correct anyone.

“The bearers of the stones of stones,” Ariel said. “Colloquially that would have meant stones of greatest power. The original bearers were Jorsin’s Champions of Light: Trace Arvagulania—fascinating, I think you would have liked her. She was one of the foremost minds of the age in an age famous for great minds. Probably not matched even to the present day, though I know Rosserti argues that Milovian Period is as important, I personally find his contentions regarding the Alitaeran succession to be weak: I think there were complete breaks with Miletian traditions during the Interregnum. But I’m getting side-tracked. Trace, this brilliant but horribly ugly woman—in some accounts the ugliest woman of the age, though I think those legends are as greatly exaggerated as most of the others—was given a stone that conferred all beauty upon her. The poets couldn’t even agree what she looked like. I believe, in keeping with Hrambower’s paper Sententia—damn all Lodricari scholars and their clotted syntax but there you have it—that the confusion was because the ka’kari’s power was not that it shifted Trace’s appearance, but that it directly affected viewers’ perceptions of her, in each case making her what would be most attractive to them. Imagine the fortune Ezra could have made in cosmetics!” She waited for Istariel to laugh. She didn’t.

“Fascinating,” Istariel said, her tone flat.