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Ines Okafor had walked the spine corridor of the *Halcyon Reach* for eleven years, and in all that time its walls had never surprised her. Seventy-two hundred people lived inside its curved steel, and every panel, pipe and hatch was logged in the ship's master registry. So when her maintenance drone, Pell, stopped at the end of Corridor Nine and chirped a sharp two-note warning, she assumed a coolant leak.

It wasn't a leak. It was a door, flush with the wall, its seam so fine that the bare lamp light barely caught it. Ines pressed her palm against the cold metal. It hummed faintly, the way a sleeping machine does.

"Pell, scan it."

The drone's lens whirred. "No registry match. No blueprint. Structural age reading: indeterminate. It was built, Ines, but not by us."

The last dragon of Verrin Vale did not come to the palace with fire or thunder. She came on a grey morning in late autumn, folded small into the shape of a tired old woman with a satchel of ink-stained letters, and she asked the chamberlain for work.

Her name was Ysolde Cindermaw, though she had gone by Mistress Sooth for two hundred years. Her wings had become a shawl. Her claws had become spectacles. Only the faint scent of cloves and hot stone clung to her, and the chamberlain, who had a cold, sneezed twice and waved her in.

The royal library was a tower of pale oak and dust-gold light, its shelves rising past the reach of any ladder. The old librarian had died in summer, and the books had been drifting into disorder ever since. Ysolde walked the aisles with her hand brushing the spines, and where her fingers passed, the volumes stilled and slid into their proper places like obedient swallows.

Prince Taddeus, nineteen and bored, found her at the far window. "You're not the usual sort of applicant," he said.

Marisol Dane arrived at Hollis Bakery before dawn, as she always did, her boots crunching frost on the cobbles. The shop smelled of yeast and cinnamon. Her apprentice, Tobin, was still asleep upstairs, and the ovens ticked as they warmed.

On the cooling rack sat a single round loaf, dusted with flour, its crust crackled gold. Marisol frowned. She had shaped every loaf the night before, and she had counted them twice. This one was new.

She broke it open. Inside, pressed into the crumb, was a folded slip of paper, dry as parchment. Symbols marched across it in tidy rows: a crescent, a bell, three dots, a key. Beneath them, in careful ink, were the words: Ask the mill about the flour.

Marisol pocketed the note and went to the mill across the river. Old Peder Wahl, the miller, rubbed his floury hands and said nothing for a long while. Then he showed her a ledger. Every Thursday for a month, a sack of rye had been delivered to the bakery under her name, paid for in cash by someone she did not know.