“Father?” Kestrel called. Her voice rose higher. “Father?”

There was no answer. Had he been too shocked by what he had heard … suspicious? Was he refusing already to speak with her?

She rushed to the door and fumbled it open. The hallway was empty. Arin had vanished. An overturned bucket had spilled its foaming water. It was soaking Kestrel’s shoes. She stood in the puddle for a moment, her feet wet and cold. Then she felt wildly along the corridor’s carvings until she found the wooden button in the center of a blown flower. The panel slid aside, and light from the hallway illuminated the hidden room. It was empty.

What did this mean? Kestrel wondered whether her father could have left sometime after his watch had struck the hour, but before Arin had arrived. Had everything she’d said to Arin been for nothing?

She pressed fingertips to her temples. Her mind teemed with possibilities, her pulse soared, and she wasn’t thinking so much as scrambling from one thought to the next.

Kestrel returned to the music room and picked up the fallen pen. She wrote Arin a letter. She wrote it on the sheet music, running words right over the notes. The ink flowed and smeared as Kestrel told Arin the truth, from the treaty to her engagement, from the Moth to her love, from the eastern horses to the poison that was killing his people. She wrote feelingly, fiercely, the nib of the pen sometimes puncturing the page.

The words came easily. In a bare minute, the letter was done.

* * *

It burned in her skirt pocket like a hot coal. Kestrel went to her father’s suite—he wasn’t there, his valet didn’t know where he was—and then finally to her own, where two maids were so perfectly normal that their ordinariness was dizzying to Kestrel. She made an excuse and ducked into her dressing room. Alone, she tucked a masker moth into her sleeve. The buttoned fastening at the wrist kept the moth safely inside, and she wished fervently that she had done this earlier. If only she’d had a moth in the music room. She could have slipped it to Arin. A sign. She would have been subtle—a sleight of hand was all it would have taken, an absentminded rub of her wrists, and then the reveal.

Kestrel had a three-tiered plan of what to do when she found Arin. If she found him alone, and trusted their privacy, she would speak. Yet … would he listen? She remembered that clarity in his voice as he had finally and fully given up on her, the coolness of his touch … a lightness. That light, cool quality had been relief. She knew that. If she tried to speak with him again, he might very well just walk away.

Please, read this letter, she’d say, and place it in his hands. If all else failed, or they weren’t alone: the moth.

There was a tap at the dressing room door.

Kestrel opened it to see one of the maids: a very young girl. Quiet, softly plain. “My lady,” the maid said, “forgive me, but you seem upset.”

“I’m fine.” But Kestrel’s voice was strained.

“Should I send for the prince?”

So this was the maid in Verex’s employ. Kestrel realized that regardless of why the arrangement had begun, at some point Verex had asked the maid to watch over her, and to tell him if Kestrel needed help.

How like Verex. How like her friend.

It gave her courage. “No,” she told the maid. “Truly, I’m fine. Everything will be fine.”

* * *

At first, Kestrel felt better. She left the imperial wing behind her, clinging to her plan as if it were a guiding hand. But as she took a tightly wound marble staircase down, careful not to rush, careful to smile at a passing courtier and to ignore imperial guards stationed at the landings of each floor, that guiding hand grew cold. When she reached the wing that held suites for the lesser sort of guests, that hand felt like a fistful of bones. If she let go, they would scatter and roll.

Kestrel stole a glance behind her. No one seemed to be following her.

She turned down one last hall. The day’s last light seeped in from a lone window. It cast the hallway into lurid orange.

Kestrel stood before the door. Could it really have been this easy? But then, the hidden room behind the screen had been empty. And the general was her father. He had taught her how to ride. He loved her. She knew it. Wasn’t it a betrayal of him to fear that he had reported the conversation in the music room … if, indeed, he’d even witnessed it?

You have been betraying him all along, whispered a voice inside her. You are betraying him now.

Yet she knocked at Tensen’s door. With a jittery gratitude, she heard someone stirring inside. Footsteps neared. The handle clicked. The door widened, and so did Tensen’s eyes when he saw who stood before him.

She didn’t wait for him to speak. She slipped inside.

45

“You shouldn’t be here,” Tensen said.

Kestrel ignored him. She threaded through the small suite, ignoring the very existence of privacy as Tensen trailed after her, protesting. She even entered his dressing room.

She rounded on Tensen. “Where’s Arin?”

“I told you,” Tensen said warily, “no one knows where he is, and I assure you that I haven’t hidden him in the wardrobe.”

“Well, he’s closer than you’d think, and he hasn’t been in Herran’s city, or he would be dying.” She explained what she knew about the poison flowing through Herran’s aqueducts. The news made Tensen grow still. Stony. Telling the news had the opposite effect on her, because beneath her own words she heard the murmurs of everything Arin had said to her in the music room, and what she’d said back.