“This is a great deal of work for something you’ll never use,” Gaotona said.

“Sometimes, that is the way of life.”

Gaotona shook his head.

“I was hired to destroy the painting,” Shai blurted out.

She wasn’t quite certain what drove her to say it. She needed to be honest with Gaotona—that was the only way her plan would work—but he didn’t need this piece. Did he?

Gaotona looked up.

“ShuXen hired me to destroy Frava’s painting,” Shai said. “That’s why I burned the masterpiece, rather than sneaking it out of the gallery.”

“ShuXen? But . . . he’s the original artist! Why would he hire you to destroy one of his works?”

“Because he hates the empire,” Shai said. “He painted that piece for a woman he loved. Her children gave it to the empire as a gift. ShuXen is old now, blind, barely able to move. He did not want to go to his grave knowing that one of his works was serving to glorify the Rose Empire. He begged me to burn it.”

Gaotona seemed dumbfounded. He looked at her, as if trying to pierce through to her soul. Shai didn’t know why he needed to bother; this conversation had already stripped her thoroughly bare.

“A master of his caliber is hard to imitate,” Shai said, “particularly without the original to work from. If you think about it, you’ll realize I needed his help to create those fakes. He gave me access to his studies and concepts; he told me how he’d gone about painting it. He coached me through the brush strokes.”

“Why not just have you return the original to him?” Gaotona asked.

“He’s dying,” Shai said. “Owning a thing is meaningless to him. That painting was done for a lover. She is gone now, so he felt the painting should be as well.”

“A priceless treasure,” Gaotona said. “Gone because of foolish pride.”

“It was his work!”

“Not any longer,” Gaotona said. “It belonged to everyone who saw it. You should not have agreed to this. Destroying a work of art like that is never right.” He hesitated. “But still, I think I can understand. What you did had a nobility to it. Your goal was the Moon Scepter. Exposing yourself to destroy that painting was dangerous.”

“ShuXen tutored me in painting as a youth,” she said. “I could not deny his request.”

Gaotona did not seem to agree, but he did seem to understand. Nights, but Shai felt exposed.

This is important to do, she told herself. And maybe . . .

But he did not give her the plates back. She hadn’t expected him to, not now. Not until their agreement was done—an agreement she was certain she would not live to see the end of, unless she escaped.

They worked through the last group of new stamps. Each one took for at least a minute, as she’d been almost certain they would. She had the vision now, the idea of the final soul as it would be. Once she finished the sixth stamp for the day, Gaotona waited for the next.

“That’s it,” Shai said.

“All for today?”

“All forever,” Shai said, tucking away the last of the stamps.

“You’re done?” Gaotona asked, sitting up straight. “Almost a month early! It’s—”

“I’m not done,” Shai said. “Now is the most difficult part. I have to carve those several hundred stamps in tiny detail, melding them together, then create a linchpin stamp. What I’ve done so far is like getting all of the paints ready, creating the color and figure studies. Now I have to put it all together. The last time I did this, it took the better part of five months.”

“And you have only twenty-four days.”

“And I have only twenty-four days,” Shai said, but felt an immediate stab of guilt. She had to run. Soon. She couldn’t wait to finish the project.

“Then I will leave you to it,” Gaotona said, standing and rolling down his sleeve.

Day Eighty-Five

Yes, Shai thought, scrambling along the side of her bed and rifling through her stack of papers there. The table wasn’t big enough. She’d pulled her sheets tight and turned the bed into a place to set all of her stacks. Yes, his first love was from the storybook. That was why . . . Kurshina’s red hair . . . But this would be subconscious. He wouldn’t know it. Embedded deeply, then.

How had she missed that? She wasn’t nearly as close to being done as she’d thought. There wasn’t time!

Shai added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravan’s romantic inclinations and experiences. She included it all: the embarrassing, the shameful, the glorious. Everything she’d been able to discover, and then a little bit more, calculated risks to fill out the soul. A flirtatious encounter with a woman whose name Ashravan could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a woman now dead.

This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shai to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravan had not always been emperor.

She had to extrapolate, lest she leave the soul bare, without passion.

So private, so powerful. She felt closest to Ashravan as she teased out these details. Not as a voyeur; by this point, she was a part of him.

She kept two books now. The formal notes of her process said she was horribly behind; that book left out details. The other book was her true one, disguised as useless piles of notes, random and haphazard.

She really was behind, but not so far as her official documentation showed. Hopefully, that subterfuge would earn her a few extra days before Frava struck.

As Shai searched for a specific note, she ran across one of her lists for escape plans. She hesitated. First, deal with the seal on the door, the note read in cypher. Second, silence the guards. Third, recover your Essence Marks, if possible. Fourth, escape the palace. Fifth, escape the city.

She’d written further notes for the execution of each step. She wasn’t ignoring the escape, not completely. She had good plans.

Her frantic attempt to finish the soul, however, drew most of her attention. One more week, she told herself. If I take one more week, I will finish five days before the deadline. Then I can run.

Day Ninety-Seven

“Hey,” Hurli said, bending down. “What’s this?”

Hurli was a brawny Striker who acted dumber than he was. It let him win at cards. He had two children—girls, both under the age of five—but was seeing one of the women guards on the side. Hurli secretly wished he could have been a carpenter like his father. He also would have been horrified if he’d realized how much Shai knew about him.

He held up the sheet of paper he’d found on the ground. The Bloodsealer had just left. It was the morning of the ninety-sixth day of Shai’s captivity in the room, and she’d decided to put the plan into motion. She had to get out.

The emperor’s seal was not yet finished. Almost. One more night’s work, and she’d have it. Her plan required one more night of waiting anyway.

“Weedfingers must have dropped it,” Yil said, walking over. She was the other guard in the room this morning.

“What is it?” Shai asked from the desk.

“Letter,” Hurli said with a grunt.

Both guards fell silent as they read. Palace Strikers were all literate. It was required of any imperial civil servant of at least the second reed.

Shai sat quietly, tense, sipping a cup of lemon tea and forcing herself to breathe calmly. She made herself relax even though relaxing was the last thing she wanted to do. Shai knew the letter’s contents by heart. She’d written it, after all, then had dropped it covertly behind the Bloodsealer as he’d rushed out moments ago.

Brother, the letter read. I have almost completed my task here, and the wealth I have earned will rival even that of Azalec after his work in the Southern Provinces. The captive I secure is hardly worth the effort, but who am I to question the reasoning of people paying me far too much money?

I will return to you shortly. I am proud to say that my other mission here has been a success. I have identified several capable warriors, and have gathered sufficient samples from them. Hair, fingernails, and a few personal effects that will not be missed. I feel confident that we will have our personal guards very soon.

It went on, the writing covering both the front and the back, so that it didn’t look suspicious. Shai had padded it with a lot of talk about the palace, including things that others would assume that Shai didn’t know but that the Bloodsealer would.

Shai worried that the letter was too overt. Would the guards find it to be an obvious forgery?

“That KuNuKam,” Yil whispered, using a native word of theirs. It roughly translated as a man who had an anus for a mouth. “That imperial KuNuKam!”

Apparently, they believed it really was from him. Subtlety could be lost on soldiers.

“Can I see it?” Shai asked.

Hurli held it out to her. “Is he saying what I think?” the guard asked. “He’s been . . . gathering things from us?”

“It might not mean the Strikers,” Shai said after reading the letter. “He doesn’t say.”

“Why would he want hair?” Yil asked. “And fingernails?”

“They can do things with pieces of you,” Hurli said, then cursed again. “You see what he does each day on the door with Shai’s blood.”

“I don’t know if he could do much with hair or fingernails,” Shai said skeptically. “This is just bravado. Blood needs to be fresh, not more than a day old, for it to work in his stamps. He’s bragging to his brother.”

“He shouldn’t be doing things like that,” Hurli said.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shai said.

The other two shared looks. In a few minutes, the guard change occurred. Hurli and Yil left, muttering to one another, the letter shoved in Hurli’s pocket. They weren’t likely to hurt the Bloodsealer badly. Threaten him, yes.

The Bloodsealer was known to frequent teahouses in the area each evening. Almost she felt sorry for the man. She had deduced that when he got news from home, he was quick and punctual to her door. He sometimes looked excited. When he didn’t get news, he drank. This morning, he had looked sad. No news in a while, then.

What happened to him tonight would not make his day any better. Yes, Shai almost felt sorry for him, but then she remembered the seal on the door and the bandage she’d tied on her arm after he’d drawn blood today.

As soon as the guard change was accomplished, Shai took a deep breath, then dug back into her work.

Tonight. Tonight, she would finish.

Day Ninety-Eight

Shai knelt on the floor amid a pattern of scattered pages, each filled with cramped script or drawings of seals. Behind her, morning opened her eyes, and sunlight seeped through the stained glass window, spraying the room with crimson, blue, violet.

A single soulstamp, carved from polished stone, rested facedown on a metal plate sitting before her. Soulstone, as a rock, looked not unlike soapstone or another fine-grained stone, but with bits of red mixed in. As if drops of blood had stained it.