Something was going on with Cercitis's children, and she didn't like it.

For two days now, she stalked the Caeles as much as her duties allowed. Like a lost eidolon, she hovered over Provincia Sicarii, more a bodiless mental imprint than a living, breathing woman.

She tried getting news from Gemma and Epileus, of course, but they ignored her every message. Sidus likewise did not respond to her cautious questions about his siblings' whereabouts. That was not surprising, as most Praetors didn't let conservatory students have contact with their parents until graduation, lest family loyalties supplant loyalties to Praetor, curia, and provincia. Still, it left her anxious that even her older two children ignored her. All three declined her invitation to meet beneath the jacaranda trees, the first time her children had ever rebuffed her without any explanation.

Initially, she feared the lack of response meant they had been arrested, even Sidus, who was too young for her to involve in the grim task she had assigned Epileus and Gemma. However, the Compendium showed all three wandered freely about Urbs Hostiae and returned to the conservatory dormitory or their domus each evening.

Something else was afoot. Her stomach fluttered with nerves as she considered what it might be. The fact Sidus appeared somehow involved drove her worry to new heights. The sixteen-year-old possessed strong gifts as a starholder, and as a Trueborn, he outranked both of his older siblings. Worse, he studied with Domi at the conservatory. If he decided to stop Gemma and Epileus to protect a classmate, there was little his Empowered siblings could do.

Unable to learn aught concrete from her children about the task to which she had set her older son and daughter, she resorted to gossip.

Rumors drifted like whispering clouds in the Caeles above Urbs Hostiae. There had been an attack. A terrorist attack. A schoolyard fight. A lovers' quarrel. A high-ranking Trueborn child had been stabbed. No, a Pullatus servant. No, a Trueborn who had once been a Pullatus. The boy had not been hurt. No, he was dead. Wrong, the victim had been stabbed, but was healing well and would recover fully.

She found it difficult to sort fact from fiction, but some pieces of the story stayed consistent no matter which whispers she listened to in the Caeles. Arborators still sought two assailants who used spellblades instead of their own promenia, making them difficult to identify. The crystal blades contained lifeholder promenia, and so the Arborators visited every sorcerer of that lineage within Urbs Hostiae and questioned them under compulsion. All denied knowledge of the crime or the weapons' origins.

She supposed she ought to be relieved. Instead, anxiety gnawed at her. How was Sidus involved? Would Arborators come for Epileus and Gemma? Would her older two children try again to do what needed to be done, or had they abandoned their task?

She only knew two things for sure. Domi remained very much alive, and he suffered from a shoulder injury. Poor Daedalus complained in confusion of painful swelling in his own shoulder, where blood, prometus, and fluids gathered to heal a wound that didn't exist. Not on him, anyway.

"I think perhaps a spider bit you," Cercitis lied and prescribed an anti-inflammatory salve.

That night, as she and Astricus lay entwined in one another's arms, she said, "I need to go to Urbs Hostiae and see this done right."

He held her closer and nodded against her breast. "I wish I could go with you."

"I do too," she said, but they both knew he must stay home. As the captain of Daedalus's royal guard, he could not arrange sudden trips away with the same ease.

"What are you going to do?"

"Bring him here," she said. "I should have done so before. It will be quieter."

The next morn, she visited her medicinal herb garden and plucked petals, leaves, and tender shoots from three choice plants. Other than the rare medicine flower, no night-side species could be eaten as food, but a growing variety contained poisons that, when used with care, possessed various useful applications.

She packed an overnight bag and left her floor-length paenula and tunica behind in the palace. Instead, she donned a simple knee-length layered tunica, charcoal gray on the bottom and lighter marble gray on top. Chewing bitter leaves in front of the mirror, she nodded as her gold-banded emerald laurel faded.

It proved a cumbersome affair to travel by skychariot as a middle-class Pyrrhaeus. Magicless commoners could access the Compendium to buy travel passes using public artifacts set aside for such a purpose, but as a sorcerer, Cercitis had never availed herself of one. Today, however, she found herself standing in line to use one of the alcoves.

Set in the rough granite base of the hill on which Vola Apertus's skyhaven perched, the two portals sat ready for commoners to use. An endless line of Pyrrhaei peasants too poor to afford a personal Caeles stone waited to access the public portals. Cercitis waited with them, sandwiched between a young woman with several laughing, scampering kids and an old man with a deep cough.

At last, she entered the rocky alcove and nodded as black promenia, colored for Pyrrhaei eyes, bubbled up from the cistern below the hill. She sat on one of the tattered but comfortable cushioned chairs within the niche.

As commanded generations ago by some long-dead Lightbearer, the moment she sat upon the chair, black promenia swirled around her and then surged into her. She blinked and found herself adrift in the Caeles's silver mist.

The experience paled in comparison to what a Lightbearer felt when doing the same, but the magic functioned well enough for commoners' needs. Daemon guides emitted by the Caeles hovered in the thick fog, ready to assist if she needed help accessing travel passes, the library, the post, or other services available to citizens.

Cercitis ignored the magic entities, purchasing a travel pass to Provincia Sicarii, lodgings in a simple Urbs Hostiae inn, and two return travel passes back to Vola Apertus. After a moment of consideration, she made it three. She suspected she had a son she needed to deal with.

When she arrived in Provincia Sicarii, Cercitis chewed a dose of tender shoots to reverse her suppression. Cloistered in her room at the inn, she spent a few hours reviewing the Compendium and watching her target's movements.

Promenia possessed an excellent memory, but the memory was strange. The magic recalled everything that happened around it and to it, including every encounter with a Lightbearer's prometus. However, ages ago someone, some ancient mindholder perhaps, directed promenia to only make certain kinds of things the particles remembered available for people to review.

If a sorcerer commanded promenia in advance to recall an upcoming performance of the Regum Chorici, the opera would stay available in the Caeles for generations, rendered in glorious detail for people to enjoy.

But if the same Lightbearer forgot to make arrangements and asked promenia to remember the performance later, the particles would reproduce naught but hazy details for about a day after the event. The vague outline of a stage. Shadows of dancers, singers, and an audience. Warbling notes, which sounded more like something played underwater than true music. And a day later, nothing. The promenia would not even recall that there had been a performance.

Yet if Cercitis met a tenor in the Caeles, the promenia environment would display countless memories it collected, unbidden, over the years, tinging his mindvoice with echoes of his music.

And so, when she began to track her target and form her plan, Cercitis could not rely heavily on past information. But she could ask the promenia to begin paying attention to her target's movements. Which, it turned out, were extremely limited.

Her eyes narrowed in thought. Domi lived in the Silvula Salutis greenhouse, and even before she reviewed the promenia memories that filtered to her throughout the day, she suspected the boy and Sidus had met each other. Arcus served as her son's lineage instructor, but Aix was his aedificans and attended to most details of the boy's day-to-day education and care. If Domi also studied under the eccentric Gardener's wing, the boys must attend classes together.

Sure enough, the promenia recalled that not only had the two boys met, but Sidus was with him every time Cercitis received an update that day. She expected to find them together during classes, of course, but the Compendium also showed them together later in the day, which surprised her. Even when the injured boy retired to his room in the greenhouse cottage, perhaps to rest his injury, Sidus followed. Worse, after Dimming, Cercitis's son stayed the night and remained with Domi until early the next morn, when a servant delivered herbs from the conservatory's lifeholder, Arbita.

Cercitis scowled. Yes, she would drag Sidus back home with her until this was sorted out, whatever the consequences for removing a student from the conservatory without Praetor Cerasus's permission. She did not know how her son was involved, but the boy would find himself uninvolved very soon.

With a frown, Cercitis leaned back and plucked the vial of petals from her room's small table. Lifeholders, botanists, and herbalists referred to flos oboeditionis as the "blossom of obedience" or the "starholder bud." But on the streets where the night-side species sometimes sold for fifty times its worth as a vile drug, people called the herb the "zombie flower." The blood-red petals offered no effect unless subjected to high heat for at least seven minutes. For up to thirty hours, the infusion prepared from well-boiled blossoms turned a person into a docile servant.

She bit her lip as she calculated. Originally, she intended to use the flos oboeditionis on only Domi. If she now dosed Sidus as well, though, she would need to move quickly before the herbs wore off.

Early the next morn, she stood before the mirror in her room and summoned promenia with a grimace. Cercitis did not consider herself a vain woman. Still, as she drew fat from her face, reshaped her nose, and forced half her glossy black locks to fall out, she discovered she cared more about her appearance than expected.

Eternal Radiance, she looked hideous, but at least Sidus would not recognize his own mother in this sickly hag.

She hoped.

Twenty minutes later, she had donned her short double tunicas, dosed herself anew to hide her laurel and reduce her prometus, and boiled a strong infusion of both the petals and suppressant shoots. If she meant to do this, it needed to be now.

She arrived twenty minutes before the Compendium claimed Arbita's servant visited Domi yesterday. Two Armati guards greeted her at the greenhouse door. "Tea today?"

Her heart leaped into her throat. What kind of herbs had Domi's physician been giving him?

She forced herself to offer a calm nod. "Aedilis Arbita says his wound has healed enough now for milder herbs." She dipped her chin to the pair of mugs. "These are restorative. She thinks the other boy might benefit as well. He's been here with Promerenti Domi so much, she said the poor kid hasn't gotten enough rest."

The Armatus nodded in bored acceptance of the explanation and gestured her through with a flick of his fingers.

She tried not to dash in her haste. Instead, she strode with casual, sedate steps into the greenhouse; through rows of trees, planters, and seed plots; and to the cottage at the rear of the garden.

As she stood outside a pair of hanging privacy screens, she drew a deep breath. Doubts circled her mind despite her effort to steady herself. She wished she had taken extra time to leech pigment from her skin, change her eye color, and alter her cheekbones. Would her disguise hold up under scrutiny? She lacked the time to go back and make a better one.

"Promerentis?" She kept her tone meek, like the way the Pyrrhaei servants back at the palace spoke. "I've brought your herbs."

Fabric rustled inside, and she faced her son. Two years older than when she saw him last, he had sprung up from a gangly kid to a tall youth. He peered at her with tired eyes and no recognition.

Sidus raked a hand through tousled wavy hair and squinted at the tray. "You're early," he said, his voice groggy. The boy lifted a brow at the second mug.

"Aedilis Arbita says, 'Tell him one's for him, and he's to drink it all,'" Cercitis said, trying to remember how the other lifeholder sounded years ago when they both attended school together.

Sidus yawned around a sleepy chuckle and then, tipping his head back, gulped the tea down. "She's such a nag," he said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I told her I'm getting enough sleep."

He paused, gaze growing vague.

Cercitis had not expected the herbs to be quite so swift acting. It took five seconds for his crimson laurel to fade into bronze skin. Good. Without prometus, he would be untraceable.

Heart pounding even though she was confident the herbs would not harm him, she handed Sidus the second mug. "Give this to Domi. After he drinks it, tell him to dress in a high-collared, hooded paenula and come to the skyhaven without delay. You do the same. Wear one of his paenulas. Tell anyone who asks that the two of you are going for a walk and will return by breakfast."

He nodded with a dreamy gaze, turned on his heel, and disappeared into the cottage.

It was tempting to stay and ensure that the two boys would comply, that the herbs would work. But it would be more suspicious if she lingered. She needed to be far away long before Arbita's real servant arrived.

Cercitis turned and headed straight to the skyhaven.

Thirty minutes later, she handed three passes to the skychariot attendant and guided both boys into the skychamber, just an average servant escorting two young Pyrrhaei gentlemen home to Vola Apertus.