Tap, tap, tap.

The Dowager Empress glanced up from her thinking. Once again she had been Nawawala in a memory long passed, and now the sound of someone at her study door had roused her from those daydreams.

“Come in,” she called, pulling herself back together, and a seventeen taon old boy stuck his head around the door.

“Hey, Grandmama,” he smiled, politely. Though the Empress was not his grandmother but in fact his great grandmother, he called her “Grandmama,” since he had never known his own grandmother, her daughter and his father’s mother, and since his mother’s parents had...