Chapter 29: Amidari Chooses to Record Rather Than Recede

Queen Sera Amidari's Personal Chronicle, Volume Four, Entry Twenty-Eight.

Written at the water-throne's inner correspondence room, sixth hour of the morning, on the day the Syndicate fleet scattered.

I am going to write everything. Not the queen's account—not the diplomatic record, not the communiqué, not the protocol for which no protocol exists. Everything. In whatever order it arrives. I have been trained since my eighth year to compose in sequence, to move from premise through evidence to conclusion, to ensure that every document I produce could survive interrogation by a hostile reader and emerge with its architecture intact. I am going to set that training aside. I do not believe the hostile reader is the risk I am managing today.