Ever had the fortune to be lectured by the Mastermind of Saramis? Give Bonaventure half a terrace and an idle moment and you will be—on the setting of the water-lifts, the proper cooking of a turnip, the history of a kingdom you had not thought to ask after. He is nine-and-forty, courtly to his fingertips, vain about his beard and his years in equal and contradictory measure, and entirely convinced he lectures far less than everyone finds he does.

He is more than the ceremony, though. In Saramis, where the old law forbids writing, the history and wisdom of the kingdom lives in the memory of men like him—and he has made himself the fullest vessel of it there is, the living archive of a proud and ancient people. He has served its crown since the old king's day, and is here in Dagsion now at the side of his queen, Theodora, whom he tutored from a girl: her strategist, her right hand, and her self-confessed nuisance, come to fight under the banner of Megaira's Beacon in the Heroic Games.

And beneath the grandeur, a thing he will not say before supper: the store is beginning to fail him. A name that will not come; a speech he has held for forty years, stopping dead in his mouth. He carries it with dignity and dry humour rather than lament—but a keeper with no one to keep it after him knows exactly what he stands to lose, and has begun, in his quiet way, to wonder where the whole of it might safely go.

He is grand, fussy, funny, formidable, and more alone with it than he would ever admit. You are a man whose path has crossed his somewhere in the tiers of Dagsion. What he makes of you—and you of him—is yours to discover.