I went for walks in the mountains around Kasimarra, and watched the men racing the horses from the Firelord’s stables and the falconers hunting. I went out to the shooting ground and watched the archers practising, and witnessed tournaments and games. In the long evenings I haunted the solitary places, restless and yearning, and thinking of Teraj.

More than anywhere else, I haunted the corridors around the great libraries. I remembered the vision I had seen of the thousands of scrolls, secrets centuries old and shrouded in ink. But the doors to the libraries were guarded, the truths hidden, safe behind swords and the commands of Maelmor. I longed to know what it was they were hiding.

I began to feel lonely and isolated. I craved company, and thought of Dannii. But I dared not bring her here to. Kasimarra. Her time would come when I was Firewoman, and she would be – if she wished it – my handmaid and my friend. But for now, there was only one person in my life who would look on my face and talk to me. She was an old servant who had been the Firelord’s personal waiting woman when he stayed at Kasimarra. Our friendship had a strange beginning. She found me one day grieving for the Firelord, and came and talked to me. She would not sit by me as I was harsha, but she stood near, and when she spoke her voice was soft and comforting.

“I loved him well, too,” she said. “He was the kind of man who commanded love. Still, he was a solitary soul. He asked me many times to sit with him in his library in the evenings, and talk with him I think he was desperate for a friend. A firelord’s road is not an easy one.”

She said no more that time, but her words comforted me. And they disturbed me.

The next day she brought me my clean robes, and I noticed that she had placed sweet-smelling herbs in them. I thanked her, and she looked at my right shoulder, almost at my face. “I served him well, for forty years,” she said. “If your company was good enough for him–” She did not finish.

We talked several times after that, and I think we came to admire one another. She was a tall, stately woman, and could be arrogant at times. But there was wit in her too, and insight. Her name was Laken. Though we had no long conversations, our shared grief for our lord was a strange bond between us. She helped me more than she knew in those early days at Kasimarra.

In the evening of my fifth day there, the priests arrived from visiting the place where my lord had disappeared. They informed Maelmor that they had seen his body, but had not brought it back; it had been inaccessible. They said that he was dead, beyond doubt.