Raj Ahten had taken Castle Sylvarresta with nothing more than his glamour and fewer than seven thousand knights and men-at-arms. True, he brought Invincibles, the heart of his army. But it left many questions unanswered. Raj Ahten had millions of men who could march at his command.

Where were they?

Gaborn wondered as he read. The tales of Raj Ahten’s battles contained no hidden knowledge. The Emir had laid bare Raj Ahten’s tactics, but a good spy could have gleaned as much information.

Gaborn skimmed the Emir’s poetry, found it dull, mere doggerel, each line ending in a full rhyme, each line perfectly metered.

Some poems were sonnets that enjoined the reader to seek for some virtue, in the way of poems given to young children who are learning to read. Yet in the sonnets, the Emir did not always rhyme flawlessly. Sometimes he ended in near rhyme, and on a swift reading, Gaborn found that the near rhymes leapt out at him.

It was not until reading ten pages that Gaborn stumbled on the first of these near rhymes, in an odd poem, a form called a sonnette menor.

Now Gaborn focused on that poem, for it held Sylvarresta’s name in the title.

A Sonnette for Sylvarresta

When the wind strokes the desert in the night,
so that veils of sand obscure the starlight,
we lie on pillows by the fire to read
In books of puissant philosophy.

Ah, how they clear the mind, focus the eye,
Of mortal men who linger, love and die!

Gaborn rearranged words in each line, seeing if he could form sentences that might convey some hidden meaning. He found nothing.

He wondered at the words, longed for the days when men from the North could have traveled openly in Indhopal. He’d recently heard a trader bemoan those times by saying, “Once there were many good men in Indhopal. Now it seems they are all dead—or perhaps just frightened into evil.”

Five poems later, Gaborn came upon another poem in the same form, yet its near rhymes came in the first two lines.

Gaborn thought back to the near rhymes in the previous poem: “Read, philosophy.” Now the near rhymes here: “Behind, spine.”

He thumbed through the next five pages quickly, found another near rhyme, with the words, “Room, of dream.”

“Read philosophy behind spine. Room of Dreams,” he muttered. His heart pounded. The teachings that the Days learned in the Room of Dreams were forbidden to Gaborn’s kind. Surely, the Days would destroy this chronicle if they found the Emir disseminating such knowledge among Runelords.

Thus the Emir’s warning: “Show it only to those whom you trust.”

Gaborn glanced at the remainder of the book. The last section was dedicated to philosophical musings—treatises on the “Nature of a Goodly Prince,” exhorting would-be kings to mind their manners and avoid slashing their father’s throats while waiting for the old men to die off.