Hari Aki’s eyes twinkled when he glanced between Duja and the Orfelian. Unlike Duja, he was amused by the young man’s occasional breaches of formality. “If you’ll allow us, Duja,” the king said, “I was just about to give Dr. Sauros here the lay of the land.”

That was his name⁠—Dr. Ariel Sauros. The Orfelian had told Duja this when they’d spoken during the dawn feast, but she still had trouble thinking of him as anything more than an outsider.

“Allow me to accompany you,” she said, leading the way out of the workshop. Her muscles screamed in protest when she reached the staircase. Ariel’s precioso couldn’t come soon enough. Even when the tremors did not plague her, their effects lingered⁠—an ache that seeped deeper into her bones with each passing day. Precioso would slow the tremors’ progression, but the Orfelian had told her how it had poisoned the people in his homeland. The sickest ones craved the drug with a feverish desperation, consuming it before water, before food, until their bodies wasted away.

Even her husband had shared the warnings from his research; precioso addiction would creep in slowly, then all at once. However, there were ways to mitigate the risks. Once Ariel started producing it for her, she’d have to limit herself to small, sparing doses. Duja prayed that the Orfelian’s guidance⁠—and the discipline she’d built over the past twenty-two years of her reign⁠—would save her from such a fate.

On their way upstairs, Aki remarked over his shoulder, “As happy as we are that you’ve come to stay with us, Ariel, we do hope you understand the delicacy of your presence here.”

Duja bit her lip to conceal her smile. Her husband was not a man for straight talk. Every other sentence hid a riddle of a sort. In a number of words, the king had made one thing clear. No one was to know about how Ariel Sauros truly came to Maynara, nor the fact that the queen commissioned him to produce precioso.

She glanced at the Orfelian. Behind his thin wire-framed spectacles, understanding flickered in his eyes. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, this time in a careful, obsequious tone. “I understand.”

The king would never outright threaten him, but Duja could not deny the guilt simmering in her stomach. They had asked people to lie for them before, but the Orfelian was a different case. The previous day, Ariel had briefly spoken of the horrors awaiting him back home. The westerners slaughtered his friends and robbed him of everything he had. She sensed the sadness in Ariel because the same sadness lived at the core of Duja’s being.