Kestrel lifted her hand to knock. Her knuckles stuttered against the wood.

The emperor opened the door. The captain of the guard reached around him and dragged Kestrel inside.

47

At first, Kestrel couldn’t quite see. She was straining against the captain’s grasp, her breath coming in terrified gulps, and he and the emperor were tall. It seemed that she saw nothing but the rich cloth of their shoulders, their chests. Then she heard her father’s voice: “Please.”

The captain let go.

Kestrel saw her father now. He stood in the far corner of the room, on the other side of a dark spill of blood. Tensen lay on the floor. His green eyes were child’s marbles. The body was already rigid. On the general’s sleeve was a short line of blood from where he must have wiped his dagger before sheathing it.

Kestrel met her father’s eyes. They were as cold as the dead man’s. She opened her frostbitten mouth, and she was numb, too numb to speak, so she screamed.

The captain covered her mouth. Her father looked away. She froze.

“We’re trying to keep this as quiet as possible,” the emperor told her. “No one but us will know what you’ve done. It can’t be public. I won’t let your father be so dishonored.” The emperor took Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath. “This is mine. And that”—he held out the unfolded page of sheet music—“is yours.”

Her letter. “No,” she tried to say against the captain’s salty palm, but he gripped her jaw, and the emperor lightly touched the captain’s hand so that it turned Kestrel’s face to meet him.

“No?” said the emperor. “Kestrel, if there were a trial, your letter is confession enough.” His voice was filled with regret, but it wasn’t for her. “I could kill you now. What a serpent you are. What a poor reward for a man like your father. He came to me.”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. They trickled over the captain’s knuckles.

“He came, and told me the truth, no matter what it cost him. He set no terms. No pleas for mercy or mitigation. He simply gave me the truth of your treason. Of all the lessons you could have learned as empress, the most important would have been this: loyalty is the best love.”

Kestrel tried to look at her father, but the captain held her face firmly. She struggled. She tried to break free. The captain caged her in.

The emperor spoke again. “That kind of love tends to tarnish after the execution of one’s child. So I can’t repay Trajan’s loyalty with your blood, or turn you over to my captain and his messy art of questioning. Something else you would have learned—had you chosen to learn from me—is that your father has my loyalty, too. I will protect him as he has protected me. This means that you’re going north.”

To the tundra. The work camp. She dragged in air.

“Did you think I had no clue?” said the emperor softly. “I’ve had the Herrani minister followed for some time now. He was seen meeting with a Valorian maid. I asked myself whether that maid could have been you. Whether it was really possible that you might betray your country so easily, especially when it had been practically given to you. But people are capable of anything.”

Kestrel’s words were strangled beneath the captain’s hand. She wasn’t even sure what she was trying to say.

“Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish,” the emperor continued, “that the court will ask too many questions. This is the tale I’ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles. After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ll be dead. You’ll be mourned.

“You might forget, in the tundra’s mines. I hear that people do, down in the dark. I hope that your father does. I hope that he forgets you, and your shame.”

Kestrel bit the captain’s hand. He didn’t even flinch, but the blood in her mouth made her lose herself. She twisted. The sounds she made under the captain’s hand were like an animal’s.

“Let her go,” said her father.

She ran to him. She skidded in the blood and fell against his chest, clinging, weeping. “Please don’t do this,” she sobbed, though he already had.

He didn’t touch her. “I wanted to trust you,” he whispered. “I tried. But I couldn’t lie to myself hard enough.”

She made fistfuls of his jacket. She pressed her face against his chest. Her shoulders jerked and heaved. “I didn’t—”

“Mean to? How do you not mean treason?”

“Please,” she begged. It seemed to be the only word she could say.

“I left your suite. I found the minister. I searched him. I read the letter. I killed him. And even then, I doubted. Even then, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that this would be you.”

“Papa, please.” She choked on her tears. “I love you.”

Slowly, carefully, he unhooked her hands from his jacket. The captain, sensing his moment, moved toward them.

The general’s voice came low, so that his words were only for him and his daughter. “Kestrel,” he said, “you have broken my heart.”

48

Dawn burned on the water.

Arin had been lucky. He’d slipped from the palace immediately after parting from Tensen. The elegant fortress had seemed absentminded, its energies turned inward, focused on something else.