The silver-haired nobleman rose from his chair and reached for the candle to blow out its flame. A few hour's sleep would make him better able to face the morrow....
... From her place on the narrow balcony of the nobleman's apartment, Dylara watched the candle flame perish under the man's exhalation. This time, she thought, I will not wait so long for him to fall asleep. She watched him cross the room and disappear from sight into the sleeping quarters beyond, waited for the space of a hundred heartbeats to be sure he would not come into this room again, then very slowly, her heart in her mouth, she began to move with extreme stealth across the floor toward the corridor door.
The journey seemed to take hours although two minutes were all that passed before she reached out to remove the heavy bar Vokal had dropped into place when his last guest was gone. With trembling fingers she set the thick length of wood against the stone flooring and slowly swung the door open a crack.
Light gleamed dully from down the corridor. With great care she widened the distance between the door's edge and its frame. When the space was large enough, she put her head out cautiously and looked along the corridor.
Standing there, watching her with wide eyes, was one of the palace guards!
Shock held both Dylara and the guard momentarily paralyzed—then Dylara, the first to recover, was into the corridor and running swiftly in the opposite direction.
Behind her she heard the guard shout a command. But before he could do more, she was around a bend in the corridor and racing toward the stairs she knew were further along....
... Vokal, not yet completely asleep, leaped from his bed at the sound of a sudden hoarse cry from outside his apartment. When he arrived at the open door—a door he had only moments before barred from inside—he found a knot of palace guards already assembled there.
"What has happened?" he demanded sharply.
The man regularly stationed outside his door explained in a few words.