It was the middle hour of the night a couple of months after the first Integrated Council. The blue moon was high, but Matei had not yet gone to bed. He had passed the evening alone in his private drawing room—the room that had once been Emperor Korvan's most-used chamber, where he spent his time poring over letters and accounts and working well into the darkness. But for hours, Matei had not done any work; he had simply been sitting in a chair next to a pot of tea long grown cold, gazing into the flickering hearth and wondering how he could begin to handle the immense challenges that faced him.

There was the matter of ensuring the smooth function of the Integrated Council, something that seemed less and less likely with each meeting. Discussions often reached a fever pitch, with nary a matter being agreed upon without dispute. Matei took solace only in the fact that, as of yet, no one had died—but he thought it too much to hope that future sessions would not result in bloodshed.

Mhera's idea to engage their allies in Myori on a broader scale had at least produced fruit—edible fruit. As caravans continued to trickle in from the countryside, their letter to Myori, a stable nation and a great exporter of grain and other goods, was answered with a ship full of supplies and the promise of an ongoing trade relationship to keep what was needful flowing into the Holy City. Although anxieties had eased and more of the normal trade and work of the city resumed, food security and commerce continued to weigh heavily on his mind.

And there was the question of the archmage. Part of him wondered why he was so unsettled by the thought of the archmage at large, but he remembered the part Jaeron appeared to have played in the war. If he truly had murdered Uaran, Uachi's brother, could it be that he had done so intentionally, striking the spark to the tinder of decades of heightening tensions and resentments? But why? What could he have stood to gain? And where had he gone, almost certainly in possession of a supply of bloodstones sufficient to equip a small army of his own?

A yawn interrupted Matei's thoughts, drawing his attention to how fatigued he was—in mind and in body.

"I should go to bed," he said aloud, although there was no one to hear him. With a sigh, he stood up and stretched until his spine gave a series of satisfying cracks. As he straightened again, he scanned the room. It was becoming familiar, this place, with its warm red and gold furnishings and its comfortable, quiet atmosphere. Matei's eye fell upon the wooden writing desk where Emperor Korvan must have sat of an evening, writing letters to allies and enemies throughout the world well into the night.

Matei had rifled through the folios on the shelves and through various other deposits of letters and papers, but he hadn't yet delved into the depths of this writing desk's drawers. Curious to know whether there was anything of importance in the desk, Matei picked up his cup of icy tea and crossed the room, sipping the brew without truly tasting it. He set the cup aside when he came to the desk and tried the drawer, but it was locked. Crouching down, Matei studied the little lock, wondering if he might be able to break it. When he touched the metal hasp, it was hot to the touch.

Magicked, then.

With a frown, Matei laid his fingers along the lock, ignoring the heat, and closed his eyes. He channeled a dart of energy; the force of it rushed through his blood, a sensation that was at once delicious and uncomfortable, and then burst from his fingertips in a snap like an electric shock. When he tried the drawer again, it opened.

Inside one drawer was a healthy supply of writing materials—parchment, ink, fine quills, envelopes, and the tools for sealing in wax. In the second drawer were a few leather folders containing sheaves of paper.

Matei took the first of these out and opened it, leafing through the letters inside. They appeared to have been written by many hands. Matei recognized the signature of Ambassador Joris, Mhera's father, and a quick skim of the text of his letters revealed that they had to do chiefly with affairs of state: negotiations, trade, treaties and so on. Others were from unfamiliar people: noblemen, council members, wealthy merchants of Karelin and beyond. There were even two letters signed with an elaborate device: HIGH QUEEN CORATSE JA'ALLA OF HOUSE OLAPERIAN. He puzzled over the name, wondering whence the missive might have come. To his knowledge, in Tyrria the queen was called Odelta, and Myori was a more tribal society with chieftains instead of kings. Perhaps it came from the continent of Narr. Although it was in its entirety a part of the Penruan empire, Narr remained divided into kingdoms, most of them with their own royal houses to manage local government.

Curious now, Matei opened the second of the leather folders, thinking that he should see what all the emperor had left behind and then decide what to familiarize himself with first.

All of the papers in the second folder seemed to have been written by the same person in a neat, diminutive hand. They did not look like letters; they looked more like ledgers, or a journal. Each page contained dated entries, some just a line or two and others many paragraphs long. Matei leafed through the first couple of the papers without too much interest, and then he noticed a note on the back. It seemed that the pages had been folded together in sets of two or three or four pages; the remnants of wax seals clung to the edges of some of the papers. And the clean, outermost side of the parchment bore the direction: "Deliver with care to His Most Exalted Imperial Majesty, Emperor Korvan of Penrua, from His Devoted Servant, Abbess Anma, Daughter of Zanara."

"Abbess." Matei turned over a few more pages and found another such inscription on the back of the next small bundle of entries. "I wonder what you wrote in your little diary that was interesting enough to send to the emperor. 'Cold today. Lots of water. Send wine.'" Smiling, Matei picked up one of the pages and began to read the first full dated entry.

A vision of an endlys Field of waving grass, dotted with flowrs of Blood Red, upon the Field being a woman black of Hare and in a corse robe but unlike the gray of the Daughters; and the woman being possest of a bundle of the flowrs, but having no Eyes. To which I askt, has she Eyes closed, or has she no Eyes, to which Sister Mhera replied, she has no Eyes, but only dark wells, and she does not ceese to weep.

As he had read the first line, Matei had, in part of his mind, begun constructing a wry comment for his own amusement about the holy mother's faculties of language, but as he read further and realized that he held in his hands a journal of his cousin's visions, his wit dried up. He found himself feeling like an intruder, as if he were reading her private letters or her diary without permission.

Matei laid the page face down and reached for another, but his hand stopped, hovering over the parchment. It felt—wrong.

He recalled how Mhera had confessed to him once, when they had been children. They had stood together in the Sovereign Square before the statues of Katyander and Broycan, and she had told him with obvious fear and sorrow that she had Seen his mother, dead. Matei had not believed her, and he had as much as dismissed her vision and her concerns.

Not long thereafter, Esaria had died.

Many years later, when Matei had taken Mhera captive and brought her into the heart of the Duskwood as his blood-bound companion, she had gathered the courage to tell him again what she had Seen—this time, a vision that impended great danger for them and all the others in Hanpe. She had sat on a fallen tree, white as linen, looking frail and terrified. He still remembered how her hands had shaken. She'd feared he would use her powers against her, feared he would use them to hurt her, her uncle, her family.

He had promised her that day that she need never fear he would abuse her powers. He had promised her he would not make her use her gift. Although this—her visions, recorded for the emperor's private review—was something they had never discussed, he still felt it was an intrusion upon her privacy to look at these records. Mhera had sent her visions to the emperor, whether by choice or not, but as far as Matei was concerned, they were secret.

Queasy, Matei piled the sheaves of paper together again and slid them back into the leather folder. He would put them away; they were not his to see without the permission of the empress. He might find time to ask her about them, and he would respect her decision about whether to share them with him.

Nevertheless, as he put the folders back into the drawer and slid it closed, he thought of something odd. Laying his hand against the lock and working the spell to lock the drawer again, Matei could not help but think of Ealin, the raven-haired apprentice from the Mage's Keep, standing in a field of red flowers with deep, black pits for eyes.

Hmm...I wonder what else is in those journals of Mhera's visions?

Do you think Matei will really keep his eyes off of them, or will he succumb to temptation and read them? And what will happen then?

We might just find out, but first: there have been some pesky rumors and questions circulating around the palace, and in the next chapter we'll address them head-on...