When they passed the eleventh floor, Lilia’s chest hurt. She hated that Tira had hindered her in so many ways. She tugged at Roh’s tunic. “We can’t go up there. That’s the Kai’s quarters and the Ora libraries. Drudges aren’t allowed.” She took a moment to catch her breath.

“Do you want to see it or not?” Roh said. “The Kai’s sick, so they’ve moved her a couple floors down. There’s nobody up there. Do you want to know what that mark means or not?”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because you have to see it.”

Roh came to the top of the steps. They were in the corridor outside the Assembly Chamber, where the Kai often met with the elder Oras and clan leaders. Lilia had never seen it, but she knew it by the markings on the door.

Roh pushed open the door, an ancient construction of amberwood banded in iron and marked with the Dhai characters for “come together.” Lilia crept after him.

Inside the chamber, a massive round table of black walnut dominated the room. As they were at the top of the temple, the ceiling here was a tapestry of colored glass. The hourglass of the twin suns made up its center, directly above the table, illuminating it like some divine shrine to Oma. Lilia moved further into the room and saw the whole sky represented in the glass: the double suns, sometimes called Shar, the little red sun, Mora, and all three of the satellites – blue Para, green Tira, purple Sina. At the very edge of the patterned glass, closest to a second archway leading to a sitting room, was a fourth star, nearly black. The elusive Oma. Lilia did not see it represented often. Fingers of blackness followed it, like a great, spiny growth had crawled into the glass. On the other half of the ceiling were the moons – little Zini, irregular Mur, and great white Ahmur and its hazy tiara of satellites.

“Li,” Roh said.

Lilia pulled her gaze from the ceiling. Roh stood next to the great wooden table, pointing at the middle of it.

She saw a mosaic of patterned stones at the center of the table. It was a map of Dhai.

Roh tapped a section of the map at the edge of the woodlands, all the way on the other side of the country, past Mount Ahya, along the Hahko Sea. A jagged dart of green stones there made up a finger-length peninsula. Set just to the left of the peninsula was a piece of jade carved into the precise shape of the figure that Lilia’s mother had pressed into her flesh. It was shocking to see it, after all this time. She’d half thought she made it up, along with everything else that happened that day in the woods.

“You going to tell me what it means now?” Roh said.