The streets that weren’t still in flames were largely deserted except for the scattered Plenimaran and Mycenian dead. Klia walked on, looking this way and that, until she settled on what appeared to be a deserted house. After a search to be sure, they gathered in the kitchen at the back of the building, which was lit by the red, shifting glow of distant flames.

Klia took a small, painted wand from her purse and broke it, releasing the message sphere. “Thero, come to me. I need you,” she said softly, and touched the sphere with the tip of one finger. It sped away through the walls, in the direction of Rhíminee.

“How will he find you here?” asked Beka.

“Don’t worry. He will,” Myrhini told her with a smile.

A few moments later Thero himself stepped from the shadows at the back of the room, dressed in a nondescript coat and boots rather than his usual blue robe. Concern showed clear on his face. “Are you hurt? What’s happened?”

Klia laughed softly. “Nothing so dire. We have something for you.”

* * *

It wasn’t the translocation spell that left Thero a bit dizzy. He’d waited months for such a summons. By the time he stepped out into the light, he’d managed to shake off the disappointment of finding the others with Klia, concerned instead at how thin she looked, and how drawn.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Klia greeted him.

“Has there been another attempt on your life?”

“No.” She handed him two sheets of creased vellum. “Nyal saw one of Danos’s riders open this letter and put this smaller, coded one inside. He managed to steal it for me.”

Thero took the pages from Klia and snapped his fingers, lighting the candle half melted on the mantelpiece over the hearth. “Hmmm. This isn’t good.”

“It’s not true, Thero. I’ve never looted and my riders are forbidden to do it. Any gold captured goes to the queen.”

“I have no doubt of that, Highness.”

“We think Danos may not have written the coded one,” Beka told him.

“Just going by the handwriting, I’d have to agree, but it’s best to be sure.”

He set the coded message aside on the kitchen table and pressed the one from Danos between his palms. Images swirled across his mind’s eye: the goat that had given its skin, the man who’d scraped and stretched it, a few other people who’d used this particular page before Danos. He could have guessed at that last; the vellum hadn’t been scraped well of the last writing that had been on it, which still showed here and there under Danos’s strong script. And at last, there was the man himself. The letter itself was perfectly innocent, just the details of the siege that had no doubt destroyed this town, and salutations to relatives, friends, and Princess Elani.