Just when Farilane felt the passage was as small as possible, the monks managed to further impress her with their laziness. Still on her knees, she studied with revulsion the next section of the passage, barely a foot tall by three-feet wide. Lying flat on her stomach, skidding her clay lamp across the floor ahead of her, Farilane snaked onward.

After more than a hundred feet of slithering through dirt and debris while breathing the sooty fumes of her lamp, she paused to rest. Her abraded thighs and arms burned from dozens of tiny cuts and scrapes. Her lungs struggled for air that seemed to be in short supply and was infused with the musty smell of dirt, dust, and oil smoke. At that moment, she felt the light kiss of the ceiling on her back even while her stomach was pressed flat to the floor. Lying with her head sideways, her cheek rested on something damp and sharp. She considered the very real possibility that she might get stuck. If I wedge myself, how will I get out? She could scream her face blue, and no one would hear. Kolby would cross that shaft if she took too long. This was as much a certainty as the routine-obsessed Arkum riding his chariot across the sky in the morning. The knights refused to fail. They were all but magical that way—living legends who kept the peace, enforced the emperor’s law, and above all, protected the imperial family. But how could he help her? Even if he stripped naked and slicked himself with grease, Kolby could never crawl as deep as she had. The man was too big, and Cedric even larger. Saving her would require a Furgenrokian effort involving imperial engineers and dozens of laborers to excavate the tunnel on her behalf. As she was nearly one week from the capital—three weeks, for the sort of people and equipment needed—Farilane knew she would expire from thirst long before salvation arrived.

So much risked for an old book, a set of withered pages that might not even be hidden further ahead. I’m insane.

Her mother, Lydia, was the one who had taught her to read. Of all the grand gifts Farilane had received as princess of the empire, this was her most beloved. She felt like a magician when she perceived the words and ideas of people long dead. In that way, reading was a form of necromancy and treated as such by her great-grandfather, Estermon the First, and now his son, Estermon the Second. They were alike in more ways than just their names: Both were conservative in their thinking and dedicated to preserving the imperial phobia of magic that had started with Nyphron. To them, that is what writing was—a form of the dark arts.