“Who are you?”

“Your translator. Are you going to let him go?” He nodded at the guard, who had gone unconscious in Arin’s grip.

“What will happen to me if I do?”

“Something nicer than if you don’t. Come, youngling. Do you think my queen would have bothered to send someone who speaks your language if she meant you harm?”

Arin let the guard slide to the floor.

“Good boy,” said the skull-faced man, and lifted a hand. Arin thought it was to touch his scar, or maybe to place a palm to his cheek as Herrani men did. That gesture wasn’t appropriate with a stranger, let alone someone from another country, yet Arin decided to allow it.

The man wore a heavy ring, and the hand went not to Arin’s face but his neck.

The ring stung Arin. It drove in a little needle that fuzzed the blood.

Arin’s limbs became lead. Darkness climbed up his body, opened its wide mouth, and swallowed him whole.

* * *

Someone was weeping. Her tears fell warm on his brow, his lashes, his mouth.

Don’t cry, he tried to say.

Please listen, she said.

He would, of course he would. How could she think that he wouldn’t? But when Arin tried to answer her, there was only a rustling of air in his throat. He thought of leaves. He remembered the punishment of the god of music, how he had been cast into the body of a tree for one cycle of the pantheon: one hundred years of silence. Arin felt his skin splitting into bark. Twigs burst from him. Leaves grew. They stuffed his mouth with green. The wind swayed his branches.

Arin opened his eyes. Water dropped in. He blinked, and realized that no one had been weeping over him after all. He was on a boat beneath the rain. He was trussed up and flat on his back in a slow-moving, narrow vessel not very different from a canoe.

The rain stopped. A dragonfly with wings as large as a bird’s swept over him. It shimmered red against the suddenly blue sky.

Arin strained against his bonds.

The boat shifted, and a face leaned over him. The eastern man’s mutilations were starker in open daylight. He tsked. “Didn’t it occur to you, little Herrani, that the queen might have sent me to translate an interrogation of a not-so-friendly nature? You’re too trusting.”

With a fingernail, he flicked open a tiny compartment on the underside of his ring. He touched Arin, and the skull and the sky and the red dragonfly were gone.

* * *

The emperor was furious. He showed it in certain ways.

To the Herrani minister of agriculture, who had been the one to break the news of the infested hearthnut crop, the emperor sent a personal invitation to a theatrical performance of the conquest of Herran. Tensen had a front row seat and was spattered with animal blood during the killing of the Herrani royal family.

The court used flattering ways to soften the emperor’s mood. This irritated him with disastrous consequences. Many aristocrats found that their sons and daughters had abruptly “decided” to enlist in the military, and were sent east.

“Just stay out of his way,” Verex told Kestrel.

“It’s no one’s fault that gall wasps ruined the crop. He can’t blame me.”

“He blames everybody.”

But to Kestrel the emperor was unfailingly kind—doting, even, until the day that he announced that she was to attend a military parade at the end of the week. “Your father is coming home.”

In her mind, Kestrel was a girl again, clambering onto her pony to ride out to meet her father, to be the first to see him so brave on his horse, gloriously grimed by battle. She wore a child-size sword he’d had made for her. He smiled to see her. He called her his little warrior.

“Careful, Kestrel,” said the emperor. “You can of course be yourself around me. There is no need to hide anything. But society won’t understand such obvious happiness on your face, not when your father’s been injured.”

“He’s hurt?”

Kestrel asked, she asked what felt like a hundred times, a thousand times, how her father was, how badly he’d been hurt, where, how. Was he coming to Valoria to rest or die?

The emperor shrugged and smiled and said that, really, he didn’t know.

* * *

A black snake wound through the city. From the palace battlements, Kestrel could see the snake flash little scales of gold. She strained hard to discern the front line of the black-clad soldiers. It felt as if someone had clamped a hand down over her nose and mouth. Her fear had an airless quality.

Verex gently touched her arm.

The emperor noticed. His expression was unreadable. Verex stared back, defiant, and Kestrel felt a little better.

The battalion marched up the mountain, the boots of more than a thousand soldiers striking down on the stone road. Black flags and gold swallow-tailed pennants snapped in the wind. Kestrel took a small spyglass from her skirt pocket.

“Undignified,” the emperor said. “Do you think your father will want you to see his face before he sees yours? Is he an enemy, that you would peer at him? You will show respect for my friend.”

Kestrel flushed. She put the spyglass away.

They were the only three on the battlements: the emperor, the prince, and the lady. The rest of the court had collected in the inner yard, filed according to their rank, stiff and silent. Many of them knew what it meant to fight. The rest thought that they did. They all stood to attention.

Then Kestrel heard the shifting black troops march closer, and she could see, at the head of the line, one man on a horse, leading the rest.