“Without a kiln?” Gaotona said, sounding faintly amused. “With no bellows? But that is beside the point. Tell me, how were you planning to survive inside a cell where the wall was aflame at over two thousand degrees? Would not that kind of fire suck away all of the breathable air? Ah, but of course. You could have used your bed linens and transformed them into a poor conductor, perhaps glass, and made a shell for yourself to hide in.”

Shai continued her carving, uncomfortable. The way he said that… Yes, he knew that she could not have done what he described. Most Grands were ignorant about the ways of Forgery, and this man certainly still was, but he did know enough to realize she couldn’t have escaped as she said. No more than bed linens could become glass.

Beyond that, making the entire wall into another type of rock would have been difficult. She would have had to change too many things—rewritten history so that the quarries for each type of stone were near deposits of anthracite, and so that in each case, a block of the burnable rock was quarried by mistake. That was a huge stretch, an almost impossible one, particularly without specific knowledge of the quarries in question.

Plausibility was key to any forgery, magical or not. People whispered of Forgers turning lead into gold, never realizing that the reverse was far, far easier. Inventing a history for a bar of gold where somewhere along the line, someone had adulterated it with lead… well, that was a plausible lie. The reverse would be so unlikely that a stamp to make that transformation would not take for long.

“You impress me, Your Grace,” Shai finally said. “You think like a Forger.”

Gaotona’s expression soured.

“That,” she noted, “was meant as a compliment.”

“I value truth, young woman. Not Forgery.” He regarded her with the expression of a disappointed grandfather. “I have seen the work of your hands. That copied painting you did… it was remarkable. Yet it was accomplished in the name of lies. What great works could you create if you focused on industry and beauty instead of wealth and deception?”

“What I do is great art.”

“No. You copy other people’s great art. What you do is technically marvelous, yet completely lacking in spirit.”

She almost slipped in her carving, hands growing tense. How dare he? Threatening to execute her was one thing, but insulting her art? He made her sound like… like one of those assembly-line Forgers, churning out vase after vase!

She calmed herself with difficulty, then plastered on a smile. Her aunt Sol had once told Shai to smile at the worst insults and snap at the minor ones. That way, no man would know your heart.

“So how am I to be kept in line?” she asked. “We have established that I am among the most vile wretches to slither through the halls of this palace. You cannot bind me and you cannot trust your own soldiers to guard me.”