And Arin had accused her of selfishness. In the capital, he’d thought words like power hungry, and shallow, and cruel. He’d said as much to her face. He’d blamed her for the deaths of the eastern plainspeople.

Her stricken expression, clear in the rushlights of that filthy tavern. The white line of her mouth.

He had ignored it. Misread it.

He’d missed every thing that had mattered.

Sarsine grabbed his wrists and tugged the hands from his eyes. He looked at her, but didn’t see her. He saw Kestrel’s wasted face. He saw himself as a child, the night of the invasion, soldiers in his home, how he had done nothing.

Later, he’d told Sarsine when the messenger had come to see him.

No, I won’t, he’d promised Roshar when the prince had listed reasons not to rescue the nameless spy from the tundra’s prison.

“I was wrong,” Arin said. “I should have—”

“Your should haves are gone. They belong to the god of the lost. What I want to know is what you are going to do now.”

He had long avoided the general’s estate.

Sarsine’s words ringing through his head, Arin rode Javelin through the unlocked gate.

A yellow-throated thrush called from a low bough. The uncut grass of the meadow reached up to the horse’s hocks. Arin walked Javelin through the green hiss of it, away from the villa, which he wasn’t yet ready to see, and up a hill, through a grove daubed with small, ripening oranges. They’d be hard and dry if he plucked and peeled them. Not ready yet. But their scent made him want them now.

He made a clicking sound with his teeth and tongue, nudged the horse with his heels. Javelin flicked an ear and picked up the pace, gusting a short breath through his nostrils, pleased to go more quickly.

Arin kept clear of the larger outbuildings. The thatched cottage that had belonged to Kestrel’s nurse, just west of the overgrown garden. The empty stables. The empty slaves’ quarters. The windowless barnlike shape of it, the paint white and flaking in the sun. Arin kept Javelin on his determined path, but turned a little in the saddle for a backward glance at the last building, his sword shifting against his hip as he did so.

He reached the forge and swung off the saddle, dropped his boots to the ground. He loosened the stallion’s girth and let him go. The grass was high and good. A horse’s heaven.

Arin’s boots were loud on the flagstones. There were smithies in the city he could have used, but this one—perversely—felt like his. Things were as Arin had left them last winter. Inside, tools hung where they should. The anvil had a skin of dust. The hearth was long dead. The coal scuttle full.

He built a fire in the forge, worked the bellows, and watched flames snap to life. When it was going strong, he left the fire to burn. He’d be back. The fire would have to burn a while for what he wanted. In the meantime—he forced himself to think it—he should go see the house.

The general’s villa—Kestrel’s—had stood empty since Arin had killed Cheat last winter. As the leader of the Herrani rebellion, Cheat had claimed the house as his and lived there because it was the best, and because it was the general’s. Maybe even because it was Kestrel’s. Arin didn’t know when Cheat’s malevolent fascination with her had begun. Arin swallowed hard to remember it.

His hand was tight on the sword’s hilt. He looked at his clenched knuckles, looked again at his father’s sword, pulling out an inch of it to see the gleam of finely tempered steel in the sun. Then he dropped it back home into the scabbard and he went inside the house.

Past the portico, the entry way’s fountain was silent and scummed over. Bugs walked the water’s green surface. Painted gods stared down at Arin from the walls. Other creatures, too: fawns, a leaping stag, birds. He caught a glimpse of one frescoed bird arrested in midflight and remembered seeing it for the first time over Kestrel’s shoulder, on the day that she’d bought him.

Inside, the house was mostly bare. He’d thought it would be, but had never thought that it would look like this.

After Arin had signed the imperial treaty that seemed to promise Herran freedom, the Valorian colonists surrendered their homes in this territory. Ships came to empty the houses of Valorian possessions. There were disputes over whose was what. Arin had waded in, brokered the negotiations, but had ignored Kestrel’s house. The Herrani family who’d owned it was long dead. When a Valorian ship entered the harbor to empty the general’s villa, Arin pretended that the ship and house didn’t exist. He’d assumed that every thing had been taken. He was almost right.