When the hystor had been seen to, Tomas set down his cup of tea. “Disappointment is etched into your face. No luck?”

“More than I feared, but less than I hoped for,” Mydea said. “I know what language it’s in, but I’m afraid my father may be the only living person alive who can read it.”

“You could always ask him,” Tomas said.

Mydea snorted as she joined him. After they had parted less than amiably over the very matter? “You don’t know him like I do.”

“As you say,” Tomas said.

She flipped through the pages again, taking the time to study each letter. If it truly was Ilyosi, perhaps she might be able to recognize a letter or two, and pry open the whole thing with those levers…

Her eyes widened as she reached the last page of the journal.

On a page that had been blank the night before were words written in Ilyosi, except she could understand these as they were written in a legible form. It was a letter to her from Father, written down on his linked twin of a journal. He had bound both copies with mimicry, and whatever was written in one would appear in the other, for they shared the same essence.

“Your brother leads the lances to fight the Tuskar,” Father began without much fanfare. “We arrived at Jayderest yesterday, and knights from all the surrounding lands have joined our host without summons and in search of glory. Should the worst come to pass and your brother suffers grievous injury, I pray you take that opportunity to beg for leave from court and return home.”

It went without saying that if Aspyr died, Kolchis would fall into her hands with Chalsi still underage and not yet having passed her trials. In theory, there were still some cousins who might contest her right, but after the example Father had made of their families… Mydea grimaced.

For fear of the Everbloom, the laws ancient and imperial both agreed in a rare show of unity that inheritances could not be merged, and the House Imperial was certainly no exception. If she were to become the Lady External of Kolchis, she could not marry a skyborn prince who sought to command the very stars.

She shook her head clear of those dark thoughts.

Mydea read through his words again, thinking to answer, then frowned. Fresh to his seat, Aspyr’s rule was not so secure that many knights would join him of their own volition, nor did she think it was possible for so much to have changed in the days since she departed.

Was she missing something?

“You look even more troubled now,” Tomas said.

It’s obvious, Mydea thought, staring at him. Not all those sworn to Kolchis had left yet when Lady Lara came. A house external being invited to send a daughter to vie for a prince was par for the course, but what wasn’t was letting that house play host to the valet of said prince for some days. With so many eyes watching the spectacle that day, it was impossible that someone hadn’t overheard Tomas introduce himself or seen the star and storm on his clothes.

Only the plague would’ve spread quicker than the rumors.

Nor would anyone truly believe Kolchis had not known who Tomas was throughout his stay after Mydea had treated him so well. It was not unreasonable for others to think the Empress was showing them favor, or that Kolchis might soon be tied intimately to the House Imperial.

“Give us the room,” Mydea said, dismissing her maids. When they’d left, she turned to him. “Do you remember the day we left Aigis?”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“You did not have to reveal yourself as the prince’s valet then and there,” Mydea said. “Was it your intent to?”

“I could hardly have found passage with Lady Lara if I didn’t don the star and storm.”

Except she recognized you on sight, Mydea thought. This is the Imperial Court. Lying is all we do. “Whether it was your intent or not, I find my debts to you growing larger by the hour.”

“What debts are there to speak of over wearing my own clothes?” Tomas asked.

As for why he’d done it, hadn’t Tomas already told her earlier? Prince Jaeson considers the Empire’s security his foremost priority. Kolchis is an important house to the defense along the Aigean Range.

While there was no doubt in her mind that the prince was courting the houses external of the Empire with those words, there might be truth to it as well. Prince Jaeson was kin to the Lord Eminent Eyr of the Primemarch and Kingsgrave Castle. Hadn't their lands always been at the forefront of every war with New Thrage and her legions?

The bells housed in the Imperial Athenaeum resounded throughout the city, signaling to all that the ninth hour was at hand.

Tomas held out his arm to her. “Shall we depart? Court shall begin soon, and I know how much you despise tardiness.”

She took his arm gingerly. “Forgive me if I am being presumptuous,” she said, “but you cannot be courting me. I did not come to this city intending to marry at all.” To be involved with even the valet of a prince was to drag Kolchis into the costly business of the House Imperial. She could not saddle Aspyr and Chalsi with such a ruinous burden.

“Rest assured,” he said with a smile more amused than anything else. “In this our interests continue to align. We will not see much of each other after Prince Jaeson arrives.”

That, Mydea thought, keenly aware of her heart beating against her chest, may be for the best. It certainly kept her mind off the ever more heated glares from the other girls as they boarded a carriage in the Seraglio’s courtyard and joined the departing, impromptu procession. So numerous were the stoneborn and so long the line that one could be forgiven for thinking they were the provisions of a small army rather than just visitors to the Empress’ court.

Six monuments to Imperial power dominated the skyline of the Imperial City, rising from the rim like the hours on a clock’s face. The Seraglio itself stood between the splendor of the Starlight Tower and the spiked exterior of the Stormfall Dungeons. Mydea rather thought it was a pointed reminder to the skyborn and their allies that they lived on the knife’s edge.

The only difference between the favored and the forlorn was the result of their ambitions.

The path was paved from one end of the sprawling Imperial Palace to the other, yet their carriage was outpaced by the servants, soldiers, and scribes going about their business on foot. Traveling in a single file, all it took was one of the forward carriages in their procession pausing to put a stop to all of them.

“I would already be there if I were on Snowscorn,” Mydea complained to Tomas. At this rate, they might even be, gods forbid, late.

“You would also be in a fair bit of trouble with both the Whites and the Golds,” Tomas answered, using the strawborn slang for the Starguard and the Gatekeepers respectively. “Only those with special dispensation from Her Highness may ride horses winged or otherwise within Aelisium.”

One of those quirks of the Imperial City, and really only possible to enforce given the difficult logistics of getting an unwinged horse into the city in the first place.

“I’d walk then!” Mydea said, exasperated as the carriage shuddered to a stop yet again.

Tomas raised a brow at her. “In this heat? You’d be soaked before reaching the Empress.”

Keeping herself dry by drawing out the water would be a trivial exercise that even a freshman of the athenaeums could manage, but the stoneborn considered it in poor taste to use their magic in such a way. The whole point of having trained servants was so they could do the things nobles didn’t want to, and rumors might spread that one lived in abject poverty if they were publicly seen resorting to magic instead.

The most frustrating part of it all to Mydea was that the carriages weren’t normally this slow. It was the fact that so many had departed at the same time which reduced their speed to an infant’s crawl.

“Next time I’m leaving earlier,” Mydea said, crossing her arms beneath her chest.

“A wise choice,” Tomas said. “Really, if you think this is bad, you haven’t seen how things go when the carriages have to travel off pavement. These spoiled things have a habit of breaking down crying.”

“A true shame,” Mydea said. “A carriage which requires no beast of burden to move itself would have been a great boon for war.” Armies were much like sharks—they’d starve if they ceased moving, unable to feed and forage. One could not rely on overland supply routes for long to feed mages on the move, not when the very animals pulling those supplies needed to eat as well. Resupplying by ship and sea or raft and river was possible, but barring the insanity of Darwyn the Digger, those things were fixed in place.

The iron law of logistics was a harsh mistress not many mages could overcome, as Grandfather learned when he ventured into the Frostlands against the Tuskar. It would take prodigious talent and the right lineage to truly break that hold—Pleonexia had managed it a few times before with their signature spell, and Mylankolia too.

The better part of an hour had come and gone before Mydea’s carriage finally arrived beneath the shadow of the Starlight Tower. Tomas exited first, followed by Mydea, as their ranks within the Imperial Court dictated. She was stoneborn, but he was the trusted servant of someone skyborn.

All of that waiting for something that takes half a minute, Mydea thought sourly as she shook her leg discreetly to wake it. The stoneborn would only enter the Empress’ court one carriage at a time, and all others had to patiently wait their turn.