Salma, Prince-Minor Salme Dien: the only Commonwealer student to attend at Collegium in living memory. He had been sent there because the Commonweal had lost its war with the Wasp-kinden, and Prince-Major Felipe Shah had foreseen that the Lowlanders might become allies against a common enemy. The boy had come to Collegium in his grand finery, with his exotic manners and his golden skin and his inimitably mocking smile.

That year at the College, he and Tynisa had danced around each other like two moths circling the same lantern, closer and closer and yet… always when she felt she could reach out and find his hand extended back towards her, he was away again. She wove her webs but never caught him. Always his dance took him away from her, until it was she who followed him, trying to match his steps.

But she would have had him eventually, she knew. Given time, shielded from distraction, he would have been hers. This was an article of faith with her.

But Salma had been distracted along the way by a Butterfly-kinden dancing girl who seemed to change her name every other day, but these days just called herself Grief, as though she had some kind of monopoly on that emotion. Tynisa had never believed in magic, but she found that she could readily concede that Salma had been enchanted by the glow-skinned Butterfly witch.