“Thanks, Jock,” she said, her eyes still on the reports. “Julius, move the main convoy to the base of the pass. Thanks.” The former company notary, now functioning as something like an imperial chancellor, was also the keeper of Kronmir’s master map, an enormous and not terribly accurate rendering of the whole of the Nova and Antica Terra in Kronmir’s own hand, with hundreds of small pins and flags to indicate . . . almost everything: herds of bullocks, water sources, the known location of imperial couriers, either birds or people; some untagged pins of which only Kronmir and Syr Alcaeus had known the meanings. But before he’d left, he’d instructed her in its use, and now she used the messages to move the pins, or that’s how she saw it. She and Julius, and Michael and Gabriel, and Alcaeus back in Liviapolis, were the only ones fully privy to the meanings of the flags; Kronmir had begged her not to commit any of it to parchment or paper.

Jock knocked on the solar’s outer door. Master Julius nodded at her and dropped the curtain over the map, and the empress casually closed the heavy leather folder that held the day’s uncoded imperial courier messages. Kaitlin was the closest thing she had to a friend; Clarissa de Chartres was one of her closest allies.

Kronmir had said “no one” and Blanche knew he meant it.

Clarissa entered first with two ladies; one the fierce-faced older woman who’d attended her before, the other young, blond, pretty, and eager; she curtsied so deeply that Blanche was afraid she’d fall on her face.

“The Demoiselle Isabella,” Clarissa said.

“The Duke of Mitla is dead,” Blanche said.

Clarissa shook her head. “I am so envious of your . . . servants,” she said.

Blanche shrugged prettily. “It may have been disease,” she said.

“The will of God perhaps?” Clarissa asked. She smiled.

“The will of Gabriel Muriens?” Kaitlin said. “Honestly, I’ve put up with three years of him and he generally gets his way.”

Clarissa looked at her hands in her lap and smiled again.

“You know, you could be a veritable demon from hell and that innocent face would confound us,” Blanche said to Clarissa, who raised her eyes and laughed.

“I know,” she said. “No one ever imagines I have a bad thought.”

Kaitlin shook her head. “Unfair,” she said. “I apparently look like I’m nothing but bad thoughts.”

“What brings you two at this difficult hour?” Blanche asked.

“The smell of quaveh,” Kaitlin said. “And pregnancy. And because today we have our sword lesson with Michael and I’m to remind you, Majesty.”

“Send me Michael when you have time,” Blanche said. She was still getting used to sending for people as opposed to going for them in person, an action that caused chaos among everyone’s servants.