Boris had left for Theran with the royal party that he had assembled for the trip while I was busy with the syllabus work. As part of the royal party he took Ferland, Alfred and Uther with him to participate in high level talks about security, trade and debt financing. The palace was quiet with all of them gone, allowing me and Uraia to spend more time together. I asked her about her time growing up in the village and why she had really left. She told me that as a child she'd had a friend named Reala and that the two of them had been inseparable. As they got older their bond got stronger and Uraia made the mistake of misinterpreting the bond they shared as romantic attraction. Uraia tried to kiss her one day and Reala recoiled. Talk about Uraia not being normal began soon after. Following this Uraia was looked upon by the other villagers with suspicion and she became withdrawn, keeping to herself in the isolation of the Northlands as much as possible until she reached the conclusion that she had to leave.

By telling me about all of this Uraia was revealing to me a side of herself that I never knew existed. I had always only known Uraia as an unshakable tower of strength, but now I was discovering that that strength was the product of many years of fear and loneliness that she was only able to cope with by hardening herself against the world that wouldn't accept her. With me she was able to be herself without fear of judgment; being able to do that for her, while miniscule in comparison with everything that she had done for me, gave me a greater feeling of fulfillment than I had gotten from anything that I had done as queen. We also talked about her position on the Governing Council as the Okwari representative and whether she wanted to remain in the role given what Bandor had said to her. She told me that at present it made little difference as Bandor had not made any decisions about how the Okwari would engage with the rest of the kingdom, as such her position on the Governing Council was purely symbolic. Uraia wasn't happy in this role; what she wanted, she told me, was to be by my side, to play her part in ensuring that my reign continued unthreatened for as long as my body drew breath. We decided that Uraia would return to her post as the captain of my Royal Guard and I would find a new post for Klara. The role of the Okwari representative on the Governing Council would remain inactive until Bandor had reached a decision about how he would like to proceed.

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Uraia and I departed for the royal convoy two months after Boris and the convoy had departed the capital city for Theran. My estimation was that enough time had passed for them to be close enough to Theran that I would only have to travel with the convoy for about a week until we reached Theran's capital city, Avondrea. In those two months I was able to complete the syllabus for the lower levels of school including a history syllabus that covered the history of the first settlers' injustices against the Okwari. The higher level subjects required specialized knowledge that I didn't possess enough of to craft a syllabus. When I returned from Theran I would need to seek out individuals that had the knowledge and the expertise that were needed to craft educational courses for fields of study like engineering and agricultural science, as well as individuals that could help me with something that had been gnawing away at me ever since I had decided to dispatch with the nobles. It bothered me that there wasn't a universal set of laws governing the kingdom. The only laws that existed in the kingdom during the time of the nobles were the laws that the nobles created that applied only to their individual fiefdoms. These laws were arbitrary and more often than not punitive in nature. With the elimination of the nobles and the unification of the kingdom under the authority of the throne, a new legal code was needed that recognized all Aseronians as being equal under the law.