He saw his own hands pushing Dulcinea into the study wall and reaching for her—and then other hands, seizing him and dragging him away when she screamed. He saw his brother Cleon, his fair stolid face transformed by rage, lifting the sword their father had carried in the war. And then the poker, its red-hot tip the final thing he saw before he was swept away by a tide of guilt and pain— But this time, in the nightmare, he saw something else. Dulcinea’s pale silken hair became coal-black, her cornflower-blue eyes the green of summer leaves, and for a single agonized moment Faanshi stood before him. Her face glowed with empathy he didn’t recognize for what it was until it vanished, leaving her sweet young features hard and set, as he’d never seen them be before. Faanshi! Her name leaped up in his chest, the desperate shriek of a wounded rook, but it never made it to his voice. The sight of the sunlight fading from her eyes, of her turning away from him in cold rejection, struck him as surely as the sword and the poker.
