ina graciously accepted my apology, but my situation is more complicated for it. I now know that she confides in Lady Reiling, and that some of that knowledge passes on to Karl, captain of the guard. He seems an intelligent man, and discreet enough to keep our secret close, especially since I know his. But the strangest part is that by meeting him, I feel I have joined a ring of secret-sharers.
Fina confessed to me that a king had indeed visited her, King Theran of the southern realm of Kossaria. But all had not been as it appeared in my dream, at least not according to her telling of the story (and corroborated by Lady Reiling). She was brief, and left out many details, but she stressed that she was not intimate with him. And although I already doubted the vision, one moment captured me. As I stood there, holding her in my arms, drinking in her beauty, wanting everything I had thought I knew to be false, she said:
“Do you love me? Then have faith in me. Trust me, not a vision born of Kean’s poisons.”
My faith in the starscopes was shaken. However, though they may have been wrong (or perhaps just misleading) in this case, there was no reason to discount everything they had shown me. The problem was that so little of the vision made sense to me.
The morning after I had read the starscopes, despite my distress, I had sent a message to Dalbach to arrange a meeting at his first available convenience. Today I met with him to tell him what I had seen, and all that I did not understand. Perhaps he could make sense of it. And if the signs pointed to danger, his steady hand would be ready to guide the duke.
ina met me in my workshop. Her attendants asked me for paints, and I wrote down what they wanted. Then she sent them away.
“Kean left this place a mess,” she said.
I shrugged. “It’s not the only mess I’ve had to deal with.” I began to shelve some of the bottles Kean had left out.
continuous scarlet flame painted the sky. It was a dusk like I had never seen. The band was touched by the flame, and it gleamed red like an open wound.
A vulture croaked forlornly, and its fellows nesting in the cliffs joined it in a guttural chorus. Cattle milled through the fields off the south side of the castle.
I shivered. My skin prickled, as if spirits watched. Despite my fears at what the starscopes could tell me, a vague feeling spurred me on. Kean, and then I, by our intentions had ordained it as a night of revelations, and it was as if, once decided, a great confluence of gods and fates had invested me with finishing the task. The spirits of the land and sky knew the night was auspicious, and I would make it otherwise at my own peril.