Kolby stood guard outside the door to the bedroom. Kile, however, was nowhere to be seen. He had stepped out soon after she woke up, and she hadn’t spotted him since. This was frustrating as she had a number of questions: some urgent, others important, and a few potentially life-altering. Farilane had witnessed the impossible several times now. There could be no doubt that: water ran uphill, the sun failed to rise, and Farilane was struggling to make sense of it all. She had all the pieces to a puzzle yet couldn’t make it work. The fault didn’t lie in how the pieces fit together so much as in the picture they threatened to create. She didn’t want to see it. Every fiber of her being fought to rationalize solutions that might keep the universe from upending, not so much from the anxiety it would cause, but more from the sheer mess it would make. The worst aspect to the whole thing was that she faced the possibility of having opened a door to a new reality without a means to explore it. Her whole life had been spent in the mundane world of what she could see and touch, and she feared having blundered into a place of limitless possibilities without a ship to sail its seas. Farilane was no Ruby Finn, and she knew it.

Trapped in bed, she whiled away the hours reading The Book of Brin and thinking of Sephryn. The empress dowager was one more opportunity lost, another frontier left undiscovered. The amount of wealth left on the table was more than depressing. Even such a tiny glimpse into the empress dowager’s character had revealed a person she could have been friends with—someone who might have understood Farilane and taught her things. Why had everyone tried to keep us apart? At the very least, the legend hadn’t come up short. But now she was gone—murdered by . . .

Farilane had no idea.

Other than having accurately identified the perpetrator as a vague name historically attached to an even hazier figure, she struggled to understand what she had witnessed. As far as anyone knew, the ghazel language had no words for love, forgiveness, surrender, bread, pretty, or a host of other fundamental terms. She had always wondered how they had managed to function—to think—without such basic words to capture necessary ideas. Now she knew what it must be like for she, too, had no language to articulate what she had experienced. So Farilane made a decision. Rather than trying to explain the unexplainable. She would temporarily fill the gaps until she found the proper words. Kile was the key to unlocking—

The key!

The princess screamed.

Once more, Kolby was in the room in the space between two heartbeats, with two of his swords drawn. This she expected. The surprise was Martasen Dray, who rushed in right behind him.