There were twenty Amikan soldiers in the Queen’s escort, men she had known long enough to trust. In particular, she had learned a fondness for their officer, Commander Crayn. With his sandstone eyes, his instinctive tact, and his willingness to question her decisions when they worried him, he suited her. He would keep her safe, care for her ordinary needs, and accompany her in silence when she wanted to be left alone.

Her fellow passengers were another matter. Oh, they were silent enough. But the character of their silence did not ease Estie’s impulse to fret.

Magister Facile was a self-tightening knot of anger and anticipated bereavement. She sat in her corner of the carriage like a woman who had closed a curtain around herself. To some extent, Estie understood the old woman. Facile was angry at her circumstances; angry at herself for growing old while the man she loved remained young; angry at whoever had poisoned that man. But she had a more immediate grievance as well.

King Bifalt felt that she had betrayed him. She had concealed Estie’s gift for sorcery from him while revealing it to Estie herself. Now he believed that Magister Facile had used his Queen-Consort for her own ends just as the Magisters of the library had used him. For that, Facile resented him. She had left her lover behind so that she could help him and Belleger prepare for the Repository’s war. That should have been enough to earn the trust of Belleger’s King.

But she did not say so. On the sole occasion when Queen Estie had questioned her, the sorceress had replied without unclosing her jaws, “I am cut off from Apprentice Travail.” Travail had been her lover before she had left the Repository to serve King Bifalt. He was the only representative of her home who had been able to hear her across the many leagues between them. “Magister Avail speaks in my mind. He tells me Travail still lives. He is only failing, not dead. But he cannot hear me.”

After that, Estie had given the old woman as much privacy as traveling together allowed.

The Queen’s other companion, the monk of the Cult of the Many, maintained a different kind of stillness. The man known as Third Father sat with his head bowed. Apart from his breathing, he hardly seemed to move. From time to time, he opened his eyes without looking around him. With his dun cassock cinched with white rope, his head shaved into a tonsure, and his posture of humility, he could have been an effigy of meditation.