I splashed my face with water, washing the sweat and salt from my skin, trying to erase the image of Lia walking off with Kaden to his room.

Three more days. That’s what Sven always told me. When you think you’re at the end of your rope, give it three more days. And then another three. Sometimes you’ll find the rope is longer than you thought.

Sven had been trying to teach me patience back then. I was a first-year cadet and kept getting passed over for field exercises. No captain wanted to risk injuring the king’s only son. That three days turned into six, turned into nine. Finally it was Sven who lost patience and rode me out to an encampment himself, dumping me at a captain’s tent door, saying he didn’t want to see my face again until it had a few bruises.

And sometimes you’ll find the rope is shorter than you thought.

Here, I say, pressing my fist to her ribs.

And here, my hand to her breastbone.

I give her the same instruction my mother gave to me.

It is the language of knowing, child,

A language as old as the universe itself.

It is seeing without eyes,

And listening without ears.

It was how my mother survived in those early years.

How we survive now.

Trust the strength within you.

And one day, you must teach your daughter to do the same.

—The Last Testaments of Gaudrel

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

They weren’t coming. From the start, I had known their chances were slim, but every time I looked at Rafe’s face, I mustered new hope for his sake. These were not just soldiers coming to help free a wayward prince and princess. These were his friends.

Hope is a slippery fish—impossible to hold on to for long, my aunt Cloris would say when I pined for something she deemed childish and impossible. Then you have to hold harder, my aunt Bernette would counter to her older sister before ushering me away in a huff. But some things slipped from your grasp no matter how hard you held on to them.

We were on our own. Rafe’s friends were dead. It wasn’t a whisper in my ear or a prickle at my neck that told me. It was the rules of reason that prevailed, the rules of everything I could understand and see. They said it plainly. This was a harsh land with no forgiveness for enemies.

I watched Rafe each night, stealing a glance when I was sure no one was looking. While my movements within the Sanctum were still closely guarded, his had grown freer, and both Calantha and Ulrix had become less watchful. With calculating patience, he was cultivating their trust. Ulrix, while still a frightening beast of a man, seemed to have given up with his fist, and Rafe suffered no more split lips, almost as if he had judged Rafe an acceptable excuse of a man even though he was enemy swine. Ingratiating yourself with a beast like Ulrix was truly a work of skill.

Rafe drank with the chievdars, laughed with governors, spoke quietly with servants. Young maids brushed close, endeared by his stilted attempts at speaking Vendan, eager to refill his mug, smiling at him beneath lowered lashes. But a new identity, no matter how well played, would do him little good once the Komizar discovered he was lying.

It was as if, with the Komizar gone, everyone had forgotten Rafe’s looming death sentence, or maybe they just thought it would never come to pass. Rafe was convincing. Someone was always pulling him aside, chievdars probing about the Dalbreck military, or governors curious about his powerful distant kingdom, for though they ruled their own small fiefdoms here, they had little or no knowledge of the world that lay beyond the great river. They only knew it by way of the Rahtan who spirited past borders, or by Previzi wagons that shared its treasures. The treasures and their abundance—that was what intrigued them the most. The small infrequent loads brought by the Previzi weren’t enough to satisfy their appetites, nor, apparently, was the booty of slaughtered patrols. They hungered for more.

I wore my dress of leather scraps tonight. When I entered the hall I noticed Calantha speaking to a maid, and the girl came running over. “It would please Calantha if you would braid your hair.” She held up a small strip of leather to tie it with.

I saw Calantha watching us. Every night now, she insisted I say the blessing. It seemed to please some, but heavily rankled others, especially the Rahtan, and I wondered if she was trying to get me killed. When I questioned her motives, she said, “It amuses me to hear you say the words in your odd drawl, and I need no greater reason. Remember, Princess, you’re still a prisoner.” I had needed no reminder of that.

“You can tell Calantha I have no intention of braiding my hair just to please her.”

I aimed a stiff smile at Calantha. When I looked back at the girl, her eyes were wide with fright. It was a message she wasn’t keen to deliver. I took the strip of leather from her hand. “But I will do it for you.” I pulled my hair over my shoulder and began braiding it. When I was finished, the girl smiled. “Now your pretty picture will show,” she said. “Just as Calantha wanted.”

Calantha wanted my kavah to show? The girl started to run away, but I stopped her. “Tell me, is Calantha of the Meurasi clan?”

The girl shook her head. “Oh, I’m not to tell, ma’am.” She turned and ran away.

Not to tell. I think she already had.

The meal went as all the others before it had. I said the blessing to the humble bowed heads of a few and the scowls of many. The fact that it gnawed at Malich the most made it worth it to me, and I always made a point to slap my gaze on his before I began. But then the words took over, the bones, the truth, the pulse of the walls around me, the life that still dwelled in stones and floor, the part of the Sanctum that was growing stronger in me, and by the time the last paviamma echoed back, the scowls mattered naught to me.