On many a hot and sleepy afternoon, when Bel’s disc warmed the land and everyone else crept off to find a cool place to nap, little Charis had beckoned Annubi from his stuffy cell to stroll among the blue shadows of the columned portico where the seer would tell her stories of long-dead kings and instruct her in intricacies of the seer’s art. “It is a useful skill for a princess,” he would say, “practiced discreetly, of course.”

But the little girl had grown, and the curiosity had faded. Or, if not, it lay asleep in some hidden corner of her spirit.

“Ah, Charis,” he said, momentarily rearranging his frown. “It is you.”

“You need not be so abrupt, Annubi,” she said, sidling up to him. “I will not detain you from your oh-so-important errands. I only wanted to ask you who had come.” She took his hand in a familiar gesture and they continued along the gallery.

“Has something stirred you from your lethargy?”

“Sarcasm is not a royal attribute.” She mimicked his dour expression. Usually it made him laugh. Today, however, Annubi scowled at her from under his overgrown eyebrows. “Have you been using the stone again without my guidance?”

She laughed. “I need no silly stone to see what is before my own eyes. I saw the ships enter the harbor. And the palace is like a tomb, it is so quiet around here.”

Annubi’s lips curled at the corners. “So, at long last you have mastered the first principle: the second sight is no substitute for a sharp eye.”

“Do you mean,” Charis asked as they began to walk along the gallery, “that the second sight would not have shown me more?”

“No, child.” The seer shook his head slowly. “But why bother to learn the second sight if you will not use the first?”

“I thought the Lia Fail saw everything!”

Annubi stopped and turned to her. “Not everything, Charis. Only a very little.” He raised a cautionary finger. “If you ever hope to be a good seer, you will never trust the stone to reveal what your own eyes should have seen.” He paused and shook his head. “Why do I tell you these things? You have no real interest.”

“And you still have not answered my question.”

“The ships are from your uncle. As for your next question-why they have come? Can you not guess?”

“Is Belyn here?”

“I did not say that.”

“You say little enough, it seems to me.”

“Think! What year is this?”

“What year?” Charis looked mystified. “It is the Year of the Ox.”

“What year?”

“Why, 8556 years since the world began.”

“Bah!” The seer made a face. “Leave me.”

“Oh, Annubi!” Charis tugged his sleeve. “Tell me! I do not know what answer you want.”

“It is the seventh year”

“A council year!”

“A council year, yes, but more precisely, a seventh council.”

The significance eluded Charis momentarily. She gazed at Annubi blankly.

“Oh, leap into the sea and be done with it!”

“The seventh seven.” It came to her then. “The Great Council!” she gasped.

“Yes, the Great Council. Very astute, Princess,” he mocked.

“But why should my uncle come because of the Great Council?” Charis wondered.

Annubi lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug. “Some things are better studied in private before airing in public, I suppose. Belyn and Avallach are close-as close as two brother kings may be. But kings they are, and who can fathom the heart of a king?”

“Is there trouble between our people and Belyn’s?”

“I have told you all I know.”

“Oh, when did you ever part with more than the least little kernel from your vast store?”

The seer smiled wickedly. “A little uncertainty keeps everyone awake.”

They had reached the entrance to the great hall. Two palace ushers stood before the huge polished cedar doors. Upon Annubi’s approach one of them snapped to attention and pulled on a braided cord; the door swung open soundlessly. The seer turned and said, “Enough kingcraft for today. Go back to your dreams, Charis.” He entered the great hall. The door closed and Charis was left outside to wonder what was going on within.

She gazed at the doors for a few moments, then moved off. “Annubi treats me like a child,” she muttered to herself. “Everyone does. Nobody takes me seriously. Nobody ever tells me anything. Ah, but I know a way to find out.” She turned and looked back at the closed doors and saw a challenge to her ingenuity. “Should I?” she wondered. By the time she had reached the end of the corridor, she had already made up her mind.

Flitting like a lithe shadow along the darkened mazework of lower rooms and corridors Charis came at last to a narrow red door. Without hesitation she put her hands on the door and pushed it open. The room within was lit by a single lamp hanging from a chain by the door. With practiced movements she drew a beeswax taper from a wicker basket, lit it from the flickering lamp, and made her way to the round table in the center of the room.

On the table, resting on a base of chased gold, sat the Lia Fail, a stone of murky crystal the size and shape of an ostrich egg. Charis placed the taper in a holder and stretched her hands to the egg, peering into its depths. The veins in the stone were dark, like blue smoke, and turgid, like the silted waters of the River Coran; it was, Annubi liked to say, the smoke of possibility and the fertile thickness of opportunity.

She composed her thoughts as she had been taught, closed her eyes, and recited the incantation for seeing-once, and then twice more. Gradually she felt the stone warm beneath her hands. She opened her eyes to see that the smoke-tinted veins had thinned, becoming transparent wisps that seemed to writhe and dance like a sea mist fading in the sun’s first rays.

“Seeing stone,” she addressed it, “I seek knowledge of what is to be. My spirit is restless. Show me something…” She paused, thinking how best to phrase the request. “Yes, show me something of traveling.”

She remembered Annubi’s injunction to always be discreetly imprecise when addressing the oracular stone. “The seer comes to the stone to be instructed, not to dictate,” Annubi often said. “Therefore, out of respect for fate’s handmaidens one makes vague the request so as not to seem presumptuous. Think! What is opportunity but possibility made flesh? Would you shun a bouquet because you sought a single flower? It is always better to allow the stone to be generous.”

The mists within the crystal egg swirled and coalesced into indistinct patterns. Charis studied the shadows, her brow puckered in a frown of concentration, and in a moment defined the shapes: a procession of horses and men making way through a long forested avenue; a royal procession it seemed, since it was led by three chariots, each pulled by double matched teams of black horses, each with a black plume on its head.

Hmph! thought Charis. A tedious parade. Not what I had in mind at all. I should have asked about the council.

The shadowy shapes dissolved then and Charis thought the stone would go dim. Instead, the shapes reformed and she saw a road, and on the road, his sturdy legs stumping rhythmically, a man unlike any she had ever seen before: a man of frightful mien whose body was covered with fur. His craggy, beard-covered face was blistered from the sun and his filthy hair stood out wildly from his head. This terrible man carried a long staff, swinging it as he went, yellow fire blazing from its top.

This vision faded in its turn and the stone went cold once more. Charis retrieved her candle and carried it back to the door, blew it out, and replaced it in the basket. She then pulled the enameled door open, stepped out into the passageway, and slipped quickly away.

King Avallach greeted his brother informally while seneschals offered bowls of scented water and clean linen to wash away the fatigue of travel. Wine was served and the two took their cups and strolled together in one of the small gardens adjacent to the hall, leaving their envoys to exchange court gossip.