The cup of water sat on the flat of Kai's spearhead, and it would not stop trembling.
He stood in the open sun with the spear held straight out at shoulder height, channeling his Taqa through the shaft. Steady. Calm. Without anger. Old Richard watched from his crate with his eyes half-closed, a mug of something that smelled like varnish in one hand.
The water rippled.
"Again," Richard said.
I hate this, Kai thought.
You hate it because it's working, the voice replied. Honestly, I hate it too. You're much more fun when you're furious.
"Rage is a borrowed horse," Richard went on, as if he could hear them both. "It runs fast, and it throws you exactly when you need it most. I want you walking on your own legs."
Kai breathed out. Let the thought of Helverton go. Let the crows go.
The water lay flat as glass.
Richard grunted, which was the closest he ever came to praise, and went back to his varnish.
* * *
The salt trader arrived at dusk, a sun-blackened man named Pell with two mules and more news than salt. Oliver gave him a seat by the fire and a bowl of Gully's stew, and Pell paid for both the way traders always did, by talking.
"Mourning's over in the capital," he said, chewing. "A whole month of black banners for the third prince, and then the proxy emperor took them down in a single morning. Back to business, he said."
Kai kept his eyes on the fire.
"Funny thing, though." Pell lowered his voice, as if the capital might be listening from three hundred miles away. "The queen never wore black. Not one day. They say she walks the palace in crimson and tells anyone who'll listen that her son isn't dead."
She knows, Kai thought. Somehow, she knows.
He had started letters to her a dozen times and burned every one. A dead prince was safe. A living one was a target, and so was anyone who knew he lived.
"And the south?" Oliver asked.
"Worse." Pell set his bowl down. "Count Otavi isn't a count anymore. He crowned himself Magister of the South, sole ruler, right there in Atunmbra. Eight cities and thirteen towns kneel to him now."
Edrik frowned from the shadow of his wagon. "Eight? There were eleven."
"There were." Pell's face drained of color. "Helverton's nothing but a crater and bones. Merthen they emptied for that ritual of theirs, every last soul. And Colrisa..." He shook his head. "Some imperial prince rescued a few hundred people out of Colrisa last year. Two weeks later, the Death Panel marched the rest of the city out into the hills. Nobody came back."
The fire popped. Across it, Kai felt Wren glance at him, then quickly away.
Two hundred and thirty-seven, he thought. I saved two hundred and thirty-seven people and I called it a victory. And they took the whole city because of it.
He waited for the voice to say something cruel, or clever, or both.
For once, it said nothing at all.
"Barazia's not waiting to be next," Pell went on. "The old duke in Midory is calling up levies. Watchtowers all along the Rift's western edge, patrols on every road. Word is he means to close the whole belt before winter."
Old Richard snorted. "I told you. Watchtowers."
Oliver reached into his coat and drew out the folded contract. He held it so the firelight caught the black wax seal: the closed eye inside a ring of thorns. "You travel the roads, Pell. You know this mark?"
Pell looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked away.
"I know a rumor," he said carefully. "New money's been rising this past year. Families nobody heard of three years ago, buying titles in the capital, building ships nobody saw being built. They say one of them uses that mark. Which one, I couldn't tell you. And I wouldn't go asking."
Kai glanced at Old Richard.
The old man wasn't looking at the seal. He was looking into his mug, very still, and he did not say a single word for the rest of the night.
* * *
Two hundred miles north, in Midory, Duke Welson Tairanesse stood over a map of Barazia with his fists planted on either side of it.
He was seventy-one, broad-shouldered and white-bearded, and he still stood like the soldier he had been fifty years ago. Around the table sat the men and women who held his state together: Marshal Reede of the levies, Admiral Tessaly of the coastal fleet, three of his castellans, and, at the far end, the only person in the room without a uniform.
Elara Nithralis had been invited because the Nithralis trading house was paying for a quarter of the watchtowers. She suspected the duke had also invited her because she was the only one who told him things he didn't want to hear.
"Twelve towers along the western edge," Welson said, tracing the line with a thick finger. "Garrisoned by spring. Reede, how many levies can you raise by then?"
"Nine thousand, Your Grace. Eleven, if we strip the northern farms."
"Strip them." Welson moved his finger into the Rift. "And this. I want every armed band inside our borders registered or driven out. Mercenaries, smugglers, I don't care what they call themselves. If they carry steel in Barazia, they answer to Barazia."
"The Rift crews won't like it," Admiral Tessaly said.
"The Rift crews can like it or leave."
Elara waited until the murmurs had settled before she spoke.
"Your Grace. Towers will stop an army. They won't stop money." She laid a single sheet of paper on the map. "My house traced the people who bought up the southern grain four months before Otavi rebelled. The trail leads to three houses, all of them newly risen. Titles bought within the last two years. Fortunes that appeared from nowhere."
Marshal Reede frowned. "Merchants gambling on a war isn't treason, my lady."
"Merchants who knew the war was coming before the war did," Elara said, "are something else."
The room went quiet.
Welson studied the paper for a long time. "Keep pulling that thread, Lady Nithralis," he said at last. "Quietly."
The council broke up an hour later. Elara was the last to gather her papers, and so she was the only one who saw the duke stop at his desk on the way out.
There was a small portrait there, no larger than a hand: a dark-haired young man with a spear across his shoulders and an impatient half-smile, as if he'd been made to sit still for far too long.
Welson touched the edge of the frame. Just once.
"His mother says he's alive," he said, without turning around. "Everyone else says she's mad with grief."
Elara hesitated. "And what do you say, Your Grace?"
The old duke was quiet for a long moment.
"I say I've buried a lot of soldiers," he said. "And I've never once been allowed to bury my grandson."
* * *
The crate was loaded at dawn.
It was the size of a coffin, bound in black iron, and heavier than it had any right to be. It took six of the Bedalshiies to lift it into the lead wagon, and every one of them wiped their hands on their trousers afterward without quite knowing why.
Kai understood when he touched it. Even in the climbing sun, the iron was cold, cold like a cellar in deep winter.
Veyra walked around it twice, slowly, running one gloved finger along the seams. "Interesting," she murmured, in the tone she usually saved for Kai's blood.
"Code says we don't open it," Oliver said flatly.
"I wasn't going to open it." She didn't stop looking. "I was going to think about opening it. Very hard."
Edrik leaned on the wagon's side. "Ten coins says it's a dead lord's treasure. Twenty says it's the dead lord."
Nobody laughed.
Wren wouldn't come within ten paces of it. When Kai asked why, she only twisted her sleeves and whispered, "It's... it's listening."
They travelled by day, as the contract demanded, deep into the red canyons. At sunset, they made camp beneath an overhang, and the crate was covered with a heavy tarp so no light would touch it.
Kai took first watch.
The night was warm. The fire burned low. Somewhere above the canyon, a nightbird called and went silent.
Then Kai's breath began to fog.
He looked down. Frost was spreading out from under the tarp, white and delicate, crawling across the sand toward him in slow, branching lines. It reached his boots and kept going. It curled around his feet. And then it stopped, and lay still, and Kai realized with a jolt what he was looking at.
On the ground, where his shadow should have been, the frost had drawn one.
The exact outline of a man with a spear, stretched long behind him as though he stood in the light of a moon that wasn't there.
In his chest, the cold thing woke all at once.
Oh, the voice whispered, and for the first time since Helverton, it sounded afraid.
It knows me.