Kaitha took a discreet but meaningful step back.

“Sorry,” said the solamancer, willing the fire away. “Taking the flame from a pyromancer is like trying to dig out a sandpit with a stick. I was out of my mind after Davos failed me. That’s why I blew off Throndar’s anniversary cow roast.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” said the ranger. “I know that must hurt. But the first part of healing is moving past it. So let the sprite go, and then let the matter go⁠—”

“And then I just move on?” Laruna asked. “Just like that?”

“In one sense. In another, we all do,” Kaitha said with a grin. “The horses are ready. Let’s not let troubles with men distract us from work.”

The solamancer nodded, pushed down her lurking anger, and dismissed the messenger sprite with a word and a wave of her hand. It winked out of existence with a tiny sigh, taking Throndar’s farewell with it. Together, the mage and the Elf headed back toward the horses. A thought occurred to Laruna as they passed the loot team’s sorting table and its array of distressingly moist treasures. “Speaking of troubles with men…”

Kaitha’s face hardened. “I was specifically speaking of not getting distracted by them.”

“Fair enough, but I wondered if we should ask around with all these guild workers here.” Laruna nodded to a cluster of clerks. “They hear a lot, and they might help with your search. Gorm said that people saw a Troll walking around Chrate a few months ago.”

“I’m not searching,” said the Elf forcefully. “I’m done. I’ve moved on.”

Laruna shook her head. “I know you’re angry, but he’s our friend.”

“Is he?” Kaitha asked. “I mean, I made a mess of things, but do you realize what I did trying to find him and tell him I’m sorry? I was the one who told Gorm about Chrate, and we went there for a month. I went to the Myrewood three times. The mountains, the desert, the Pinefells—I searched everywhere, and followed every lead. I gave up so much to tell him I’m…” She caught herself and looked down at her wrists, clad in simple leather bracers. “It’s apparent that he’s moved past our… whatever it was. I need to move on as well.”

“Maybe,” said Laruna.

“No, definitely.” The Elf swung her hand in an emphatic chop, as if to physically cut the debate short. “He didn’t show up, Laruna. I asked him to, I needed him to, and he wasn’t there. That’s how you know someone is… someone cares. They’re there when you need them to be. When it’s really important, and you really need them, they show up.”

Laruna recalled the kind Troll, and the steadfast protection he’d provided them in the wilderness. “He did show up, many times,” she suggested. “Maybe now he just doesn’t know you’re trying.”

Kaitha winced, stung by the idea. “Maybe.” She gave a hopeless shrug. “But after a while, it’s just too hard to chase someone that doesn’t want to be found. It’s over.” The Elf’s declaration was meant to sound final, but a tremble in her voice betrayed her. “It’s over,” she said again.

“Oh, why can’t lovers ever be together? Why does fate conspire against them? Why are the gods so cruel?” Queen Marja of Andarun wailed these rhetorical questions at a pitch that made the crystal chandelier hum and set teeth on edge. Yet the eruption was as short as it was shrill, and moments later Her Highness sank back into the strata of silk throws and cushions that covered the royal couch. The queen’s eyes remained locked on the pages of The Gnomish Knave by Tayelle Adamantine, her lips moving with a faint hint of a whisper as she read.

Preya Havenbrook, royal baker and Marja’s most trusted aide, didn’t need to hear the monarch’s words to know what they said. She stood silently next to the queen’s couch, patiently holding a silver tray with a filigreed cloche. It wouldn’t be long now, judging by Marja’s place in the latest book.

Preya could time her day by the pages. The contours of the queen’s favored stories all fit into the same, well-worn groove. Early in the book the protagonist and the object of her desire—this time a Scribkin duchess and a Tinderkin rogue—experienced an instant and undeniable attraction. Their lust was invariably complicated by circumstances such as prior engagements, other lovers, disapproving families, ongoing wars, infernal magic or—in the infamously complex The Warlock’s Daughter—all of the above. Yet it was never too many chapters before the lovers found themselves alone in a bedchamber, a barn, or some other conveniently private location to consummate their acquaintance.

As intense as the encounter was for the reader, it was invariably fatal for Adamantine’s characters. A sudden interruption would follow the private encounter with clockwork regularity. This led to a prolonged period of devoted pining, leading to a penultimate moment of hope when fate seemed to be about to allow the lovers their happiness. This glimmer of optimism always heralded some fatal misunderstanding, tragic confusion, insidious deception, or a patriarchal sorcerer hurling fireballs from the back of a manticore—it must be said that The Warlock’s Daughter stood out in many ways as a marked departure for the author.

Whatever the misfortune, Preya knew the outcome. It should be arriving any page now.

“No!” shrieked Marja. “Not Willam!”

Preya had studied patisserie under the notoriously strict Ovenmaster Barzi Ur’Plante, who was said to keep his kitchen so clean you could eat off the plates. Technically, the floors were probably also clean enough to eat from, but nobody would ever dare utter it for fear that word of the joke might be overheard by the ovenmaster. Seven years at the baking academy under Ur’Plante’s iron gaze had given Preya just enough discipline to not roll her eyes at the queen’s shock.

Of course Willam was dead. One of the lovers always died by chapter fifteen. The only thing left was for young what’s-her-name to realize that Willam had become Will-was, wax poetic about what would never be, and then take her own life.

The appeal of books about lovelorn suicide was a mystery to Preya. She and Mr. Havenbrook loved each other of course; it took a lot of love to stay together for thirty years and three children. They’d saved enough to buy a little cottage on Drakehead Lake and planned to retire there together. Certainly she’d grieve if the fates took her husband before their plans came to fruition, but a few months in a black veil after a modest funeral would be the extent of it; nobody would catch Preya Havenbrook yelling for a poisonous snake or a vial of nightshade. She’d take that retirement money and get herself a little apartment on the Teagem Sea, where the wine flowed freely and was poured by well-tanned young people in grass skirts. No doubt Mr. Havenbrook would pursue a similar hypothetical course of action should the fates be cruel, and good for him.

The characters in Ms. Adamantine’s books lacked this pragmatism. Invariably they would decide life couldn’t be endured without the person they’d just met a few weeks ago and turn grieving into a terminal exercise. It was for this particular reason that Preya was in the royal chambers and not the palace kitchens. She noticed a fatal-looking soliloquy on the pages of the queen’s book and readied her cloche.

“Oh, why? Duchess Anne,” sighed Marja. “Why?” She set the book down with one hand, while the other probed the air next to her. Her thick fingers found a couple of chocolate walnut tea cakes on Preya’s waiting tray.

The royal baker kept her head bowed. Her thoughts wandered past the guttural sounds of her morning’s work going the way of Willam and Anne. For Marja, the tea cakes were as much a part of the book as the love scenes or inevitable suicide, and she expected them to arrive with the same precision timing.

Preya startled when the queen suddenly stopped eating: judging by the weight, at least half a tray of tea cakes remained on her platter. With more than a little worry, Preya risked a glance at the queen and asked. “Do the cakes not please you today, Majesty?”

Marja’s face was cinched up like a drawstring bag, her mouth a tiny pout amid an expanse of caked foundation, running mascara, and chocolate walnut crumbs. Her red-rimmed eyes glared across the room.

Preya looked to see what had drawn the queen’s ire, but the chamber opposite the couch was empty save for a lady-in-waiting trying to shuffle out of the queen’s field of view.

Yet Marja didn’t notice her staff’s unease. “Life isn’t fair,” she said aloud.

“Indeed, Majesty,” said Preya, and meant it.

“My Johan was supposed to be here today,” the queen said.

Preya was well aware. Had the king been sequestered with Marja in the royal chambers, the royal baker could have spent the day working on plans for Alluna’s festival next month. Yet Johan had sent his apologies—again—sending Marja back to her novels and Preya back to the kitchen.

“Have I lost his eye?” she wondered aloud.

“Oh no, Majesty.” Preya joined the chorus of ladies-in-waiting denying the king’s lost interest. This was sincere as well; the king’s passion for his wife was infamous. The two could scarcely pass in the hall without creating a scene that would make Tayelle Adamantine herself blush. Such frequent and uninhibited displays of affection were shocking to most of the royal staff, most of whom had grown accustomed to royal marriages that were appropriately chilly and distant. The maids had a system of knocks and taps on the walls they used to track the movements of the royals and ensure that no unfortunate staff members got stuck in a room with the young newlyweds.

Mr. Havenbrook and Preya had enjoyed a similarly vigorous time in their marriage, back in her day. Yet Preya’s mother told her once that even the most pure and unassailable feelings had to change over time; that the metamorphosis of passion to devotion didn’t happen in spite of true love, but because of it. Love was the granite core of her marriage, the rock-hard center left over after a steady stream of long nights working, changing diapers, and bickering over bills had eroded the passion. Preya had once assumed that this shift was inevitable, though the queen’s books forced her to acknowledge that such love could also be cut short by a double suicide or a murderous warlock riding a monster.

“Well then, why does he stay away?” pouted Marja. “Why is he off with all of those heroes and stodgy businessmen?”

None of the assembled women were dumb enough to answer that. Preya gave a helpless shrug. Everyone knew the king needed to attend to his duties. The Heroes’ Guild needed help contending with the Red Horde and an active dragon. Business leaders required attention to matters of the economy. The king personally attended work on his top-secret project in the rearmost chambers of the Royal Archives, built in the mountain itself—the ones even the maids were forbidden from visiting.

Yet the queen took such mundane tasks as an affront. Once trapped in an unhappy marriage to the late King Handor, Marja had withdrawn from the world into an endless parade of romance novels, where heroes were always swarthy, bosoms constantly heaved, and love subjugated the laws of nature and bent history to its whim until it drove its victims to suicide. King Handor’s death and Johan’s proposal had given the queen the chance to return to reality, but it was apparent that Marja would prefer that reality come and visit her romantic fantasies.

Preya thanked the gods that true love wasn’t that way, but there was no helping someone who wanted it to be. Just as Marja’s steady diet of tea cakes had left her with the figure of a walrus, the queen’s addiction to romantic tragedies had left her unable to find any joy in a relationship that wasn’t either in a state of melancholy desire, simmering tension, or wild abandon. Johan’s distraction was intolerable to the queen—almost more so than her loveless marriage to Handor. At least a chilled marriage gave Johan a plausible reason to not show up whenever she longed for him to come and ravish her.

“Why does he stay away?” A single tear carved a gorge through Marja’s makeup as she read aloud from her book. “Wherever could he be? ’Tis not just his absence that pierces my heart; ’tis the question of whether his heart still beats for me, or whether it still beats at all. Oh ignorance! Oh mystery! You cut at me as a knife! I cannot bear not knowing!”

Chapter 2

Ignorance is a commodity.

In any economy where knowledge has value, ignorance does as well. Brokers make money by knowing key information; they make fortunes by ensuring that other brokers remain unaware or unsure of the same information until after critical trades. Governments rise and fall based on the careful cultivation and utilization of mass ignorance. The wealthy and powerful pay handsomely for secret messages, opaque business structures, or secure locations. And no location was more secure than Adchul.

The ancestral home of Arth’s most elite lawyer-monks perched atop a crag of rock jutting from the ocean halfway between Eagos and Chrate. Most of the island was surrounded by the monastery’s formidable walls, hewn from the same black granite as the sea-swept stones around it. Yet the isolated location, treacherous currents, and imposing fortifications didn’t give the fortress of Adchul its unmatched reputation for seclusion; rather, ancient rites and clauses of attorney-client privilege and universal nondisclosure shielded the monastery’s inhabitants. Any crystal ball or scrying pool set to peer at a spot within three miles of the island would only display a curt cease and desist notice.

Behind high walls and safely cocooned offshore in an impossibly complex web of shell companies, limited liability entities, and corporate structures, the lawyer-monks’ tenants were completely insulated from any outside threat—murderous, sorcerous, or litigious. It was perfect protection, provided you could pay for it.

Or, Duine Poldo reflected, provided they’d let you stay.

The Scribkin stared glumly out the window of his chamber. The sparse furnishings and bare stone walls suggested that it was the sort of accommodation that normally came with a set of striped leisure wear, included bread crusts and water, and offered daily entertainment that mostly involved hitting rocks with hammers. The window offered a view that was only marginally improved: black seas roiling beneath a gray sky all the way to the horizon.