A song of great sorrow descended over Shadovane. In the song was contained mortal pain and longing, a dirge to fill the silence. A spirit crept through the streets, invaded dipidated shacks and spun threads around those who y on lumpy mattresses filled with sour straw and old cotton. Whole families y in single rooms, and with her coming, sleep took them.

  She traveled through the streets, inching along and spreading satin threads throughout to drive those destitute common folk into the dream, for in dreams y the truest expression of her power, and this night called for a greater silence.

  A column of priests, soldiers, nobility and their servants marched into a narrow, closed on the city on the st stretch of their long journey from the imperial capitol, Mirrhvale. With them came a being who was just a boy in her memories, a boy born into the body of a man, who had grown into himself swiftly and become something entirely unfathomable to those mortal beings, as close to a god as they could conceive.

  He came in her wake; the dream, a st mercy paid to those who had struggled too hard for his sins. He came to visit upon a wife who was no empress, a wife who did not love him but hated him, for their marriage was not born of kinship or closeness, and no true attraction lingered in their souls. In him, an infatuation with the one whose essence she carried. In her, a politically necessary coupling, one of many traditions she detested.

  She entered the pace, traveled down pristine halls and up staircases, into reaches where servants slept, and drew them down into sleep also. The dreams they had may haunt them, but they were not new to nightmares. And in those dreams y memory, which had been suppressed, concealed behind a veil she cast open, for those briefest of moments while her power held.

  The dream came first to Sami, who slept off a recent transformation within a storeroom in the pace bows. Though the woman slept, her eyes remained open, and others watched in wakeful silence as she rested. Others with their own agendas.

  She was just a girl. Her dress was a simple thing of linen; dyed blue and cut like a gunnysack, the hem dangled around her ankles. Dirt and grass stains were ground into the knees and back of it, the byproduct of her wrestling with a brother a year older than her. The brother sat on a low stoop outside a barrel-sided house with a tiled roof. A window near the open door let onto a kitchen, and the savory aroma of a stew her mother had been cooking suffused the air as thin threads of steam drifted into open air from their source, a pewter pot on the range.

  Cattle dogs caromed about the city outskirts, and fields broke against that first line of houses of which hers was one. Dirt avenues traveled between her home and the fields, where cattle and sheep grazed, brayed and lowed and huddled together.

  A proud bull was sequestered in his own field. Its coat shimmered bck in the evening sun as it tested the air with curved horns. Alone, it grazed, for it was not yet time for breeding. Those cows had only recently birthed their calves.

  Dust licked at the horizon in the distance, and she jumped up from where she had been toying with the grass. She craned her neck, a futile effort to get a look at who was coming, whether it was her father and his horsemen come back from wherever they had gone.

  Horses and riders materialized at the far end of the field, coming round onto the road and slowing. In their midst was a carriage drawn by a pair of stallions, the stock that had given Trom its name. The wagons loomed bck as a shadow on behind them, and she wondered who it carried.

  Her father did not travel that way. He had never been one to ride covered, even on his treks into the deserts in the south. When she and her brother were permitted to go with him to Shadal, they were taken in a wagon drawn behind his horse, together with their effects, but he preferred to travel light, to carry with him only as much a burden as his horse could tolerate. A bedroll, a change or two, his weapons.

  As they neared, she noted he was not among them, that though the other figures looked familiar, and road tromite horses, he was not in their midst.

  She wondered at that. It was not common for him to send his men ahead of him. She had never known him to do so before.

  The riding party and the carriage rolled past the field and along that first line of houses, and the wagon came to rest near her home as the rest of the riders disembarked for reaches far removed from them. Her mother peeked her head through the doorway as a fox-faced driver with long limbs and a hump in his back hopped down from the doorway, and called out to them as he opened the door.

  “Sami, come here.” She lifted her son onto her feet. “Go inside.”

  A bouquet of tiny, white flowers was painted onto the wagon side, and a man dressed in a garish, five piece suit climbed out of the wagon, ignoring the offered hand of his driver. Top hat, coat and trousers were all canary yellow, the shirt underneath was pinstriped and a powder blue pocket square peaked out from its customary pce. His mustaches and beard were a sooty gray, shot through with darker streaks to remind of fleeting youth. Age lines crinkled the corners of his eyes, and he walked with a slight limp, though he went without a cane.

  She goggled at him. He looked like something come straight out of a story book, one of those posh schisters from the stories of Anastasia her mother sometimes read to her.

  He smiled at her as he passed, but that smile did not warm his cold, silver eyes. His gaze slid over her, up to the house and her mother.

  “Come inside, Sami. Come get some supper with your brother.”

  She looked over her shoulder, stepped away from the stranger. Her mother stepped out of the house, her hand hidden behind her back, and Sami wondered at that, too.

  “Don’t make this ugly, Loraine.” The man said. His hand cmped down on her shoulder, and he moved in front of her. “Put her in the carriage for now.”

  The driver plucked her off the ground.

  “Let go of me!” she screamed. She bashed him over the head with tiny fists, kicked at every part of him she could reach. “MOM! MOOM!”He tossed her into the wagon.

  “Now, Hugo, I think we have a misunderstanding. If Markus is with you, maybe we can—“

  “I’m afraid Markus is dead.” The man in the suit cocked his head to the side, his gaze unfocused. “He’s been dead for quite some time.”

  “I know you for your lies, Hugo. If he’s dead, who killed him?”

  “Well.” He nodded. “Yes, that’s right. I did.”

  Her arm thrust out from behind her back, and she dropped the kitchen knife she had been holding.

  He looked down at it, where it y in the grass.

  “Oh, come now. You didn’t think you could do me in with that little thing.” He drawled. “Surely you have something else up your sleeve.”

  The driver closed the carriage door, and locked it.

  She kicked at the door, screaming as muted conversation passed between the man in the suit and her mother. As her mother’s voice rose in pitch, and she began speaking very rapidly.

  “It is unfortunate, isn’t it.” He said, as the fight leaked out of her. As she stopped kicking. The tears streaming down her cheeks were accompanied not by screams but whimpers.

  “Mom. Please. Don’t let him take me!”

  “I quite liked Timothy, but you must understand a man in my position cannot simply let something like this slide.”

  “So you’re taking my daughter?”

  “I’m fttered that you have so much faith in me.” He said. “Yes, I think I will. As for you and your son….”

  Red glow painted the shade drawn over a window in the carriage door. Footsteps over gravel, the wagon rocked as the driver resumed his seat.

  The door swung open, and Hugo climbed in. He took his seat, revealing a st image of Sami’s home.

  Her mother y in the yard, her limbs spread at odd angles around her. Her home was abze.