Since then I have earned my own rosette and my own acolytes, and I have followed my dark dreams wherever they might take me. Since the opening of the Rift it has become a trial to watch them unfold. I have scratched at my face and my throat in my sleep. I have shouted myself hoarse. Shouted my retinue awake. But not this time. This time, when I wake to the grey darkness of my chambers, I am smiling.

I get up from the carved wooden chair I fell asleep in and start looking for the words that will prove it. My desk is covered in rolled scrolls and star charts and books and binders, as is the floor around it. As is almost every surface in my chambers, save for the cot in the corner, which I haven’t slept in for weeks. It’s a bad habit, keeping everything in such disarray. I haven’t always been this way. This much of a mess.

I go through the texts on my desk at speed. Lifting them and turning them and dislodging stacks of parchment in my search for those words. Every book and scroll and scrap of paper here is ancient, and immensely valuable. Almost certainly unique. But none of them are what I’m looking for. I step over and around the stacks of books and scrolls on the floor, too, moving and disturbing each of them in turn until finally I find it.

‘There you are,’ I say to the book in my hand.

It is small and slim and bound in battered old leather. It has no title. No author. There is no imprint or printer’s mark. It is hand-bound, and handwritten, and just holding it brings back the smell of mountain air, and cold, old stone. It brings back my father’s voice.

What troubles you, my daughter?

I open my father’s journals, and flip through to the last pages. To the verses I remember so clearly from my childhood. I trace my finger along the old words written in faded blue ink. My hand shakes as I do it, just a little. I reach the end of the page and realise that I am holding my breath. I let it go, slowly. Close the book slower. I want to believe that this is it. But I can’t. Not yet. I have been fooled before.

I reach up to my collar and pull the pendant I wear from beneath my indigo tunic. It is something else that once belonged to my father. A skull wearing a ten-pointed halo. I roll the pendant in my hand, feeling the weight and the texture of the Marleyan smokestone. The way it warms to my hands. Every tiny toolmark and imperfection. Then I curl my fingers around the pendant and squeeze it tightly. So tightly that the spiked halo pierces my skin.

I open my hand again and look at the ten tiny points of blood welling up in my palm. It’s a test. The method by which I can prove that I’m awake, and this isn’t just a continuation of my dream. In my dreams, the points of the pendant never make me bleed. Knowing I’m awake is only the first test, though. Knowing I’m right is much more crucial. For that, I need a second opinion.