She’d scrawled something on the back of Purity’s envelope. Iron Circlet. She looked at her hand and wondered how it had done that.

Iraji stood on his toes and bobbed in alarm. He was carrying a stack of books. “My lady, might I suggest, if it’s not too forward, that you take a moment for yourself? I understand, from your service jacket, that you love to read. I brought some titles you might find fascinating.”

“You’re distracting me,” Baru said, dully. “Go away, I have a coded letter to decrypt.”

Iraji huffed. Then he sat down across from her, picked up a book entitled Born of Salt and Stone, licked his fingers, and opened to the front page. “Are you allowed to read that?” Baru squawked, catching the subtitle: Upon the Young Apparitor. “Does he let you read books about him?”

“Of course I can read about him,” Iraji said, airily. “Don’t I comfort his ego as well as his body?”

Baru hrmphed and moved her chair so her body would block the lantern light.

Iraji moved his chair back into the light and kept reading.

“Ooh,” he said, cupping his chin. “That’s fascinating. How scandalous … my goodness. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Prick,” Baru muttered, and then she reached for On the Nature of the Eastern Supercontinent (from the Satamine Report). Her hands did exactly as she wished. She opened the book and a shiver ran from the crown of her head down to the cable of her calves: like cold water, poured from above.

*   *   *

AFTERWARD, renewed, she saluted her new colleagues.

To my peers of the committee … Power was the opposite of the sea. It flowed upward, away from the commons, toward the peaks. Show her a city with a council of five hundred, and she would find the demagogues who divided them in two. Show her ten friends: some would be spoken of, and some would do the speaking.

Why? Why? She wanted to know. And if the Oriati had lasted a thousand years, how had they kept so much power in their commons?

Was it a tradition they had? An idea?

Or was it in their blood?

I have completed my initial review of Apparitor’s documents, she wrote. We clearly face important strategic challenges.

And each of those challenges was an opportunity, a fang in Tain Hu’s ghost maw.

A resurgent Stakhieczi monarchy. The steel people north of Aurdwynn had united under their Necessary King. Usually they starved, or turned on each other. But this time, with secret help, they might crash down on Falcrest.…

Backlash from our ongoing efforts to destabilize the federated governments of Oriati Mbo. War was coming, Baru had no doubt of that. Falcrest had gained the whole Ashen Sea and the Oriati federations couldn’t stand for it.