“You wear King Audric the Lightbringer around your neck, but you don’t deserve to.” His gaze traveled back to her face. “He’d be ashamed of you if the Blood Queen hadn’t killed him. He’d be ashamed of anyone who helps the Empire.”

“If the Blood Queen hadn’t killed him,” Eliana said evenly, “then it wouldn’t matter, would it? Maybe the Empire would never have risen. Maybe we’d all be living in a world full of magic and flying horses and beautiful castles built by the saints themselves.”

She clasped her hands, regarded him with exaggerated patience. “But Queen Rielle did kill him. And so here we are. And I wear his image around my neck to remind myself that we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where good kings die and those foolish enough to hope for something better are killed where they stand.”

She ignored them both after that and devoured her stew in silence.

• • •

Her mother found her later that night, when Eliana was cleaning her blades in her room.

“Eliana,” said Rozen, panting slightly, “you should rest.” Even with her prosthetic leg, it took her some effort to get upstairs unassisted. She leaned hard on her cane.

“Mother, what are you doing?” Eliana rose, helped her to sit. Her daggers and smoke grenades lay across the floor, a tapestry of death. “You should be the one resting.”

Rozen stared at the floor for a long moment. Then her face crumpled, and she turned into Eliana’s shoulder.

“I hate seeing you like this,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for this. I’m sorry I taught you… I’m sorry for everything.”

Eliana held on to her, stroking her messy knot of dark hair. She listened to Rozen whisper too many apologies to count.

“Sorry about what?” Eliana said at last. “That Grandfather taught you how to kill? That you taught me?”

Rozen cupped Eliana’s cheek in one weathered hand, searched her face with wet eyes that reminded Eliana of Remy’s—inquisitive, tireless. “You’d tell me if you needed a rest? We can ask Lord Arkelion for time—”

“Time for what? To bake cookies and paint the walls a fresh color?” Eliana smiled, squeezed her mother’s hand. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

Rozen’s mouth thinned. “Eliana, don’t play coy with me. I can see right through that smile of yours. I taught you that smile.”

“Then don’t apologize for teaching me how to keep us alive, all right? I’m fine.”

Eliana rose, stretched, then helped Rozen to her own bed. She made her a cup of tea, kissed her cheek, helped unstrap her leg for the night—a finely crafted, wooden apparatus that had cost Eliana the wages from two jobs.

Two executions. Two slaughtered souls.

When Eliana returned to her room, she found Remy waiting for her, hugging his knees to his chest.

She crawled into bed beside him, struggling to breathe through a sudden tightness in her chest. Grief crashed upon her in waves. Dry-eyed, she let them pull her under.

Remy said quietly, “I don’t hate you,” and allowed her to hold on to him. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on only him—the twin scents of flour on his clothes and ink on his hands. The sound of his voice singing her “A Song for the Golden King.” It had been Eliana’s favorite lullaby as a child—a lament for Audric the Lightbringer.

Remy’s small hands stroked her hair. She could crush him if she wanted to. And yet, given the chance, her bony bird of a brother would face off against the Emperor. Even if it killed him.

And I have a warrior’s strength, she thought, but the heart of a coward.

A cruel joke. The world was full of them.

“I can’t bear it,” she whispered, her voice muffled against Remy’s shirt.

“Can’t bear what?” Remy asked quietly.

“You know what.”

He said nothing. He was going to make her say it.

She sighed. “Killing people. Hunting people. Being good at it.”

“You like being good at it,” he pointed out.

She didn’t argue. “It’s getting worse out there. And I still have no answers.”

“The missing women?”

“Who’s taking them? And where? And why?” Her fingers curled around his wrists. She imagined pulling him down into the safe, dark world under her bed and never letting him leave.

“You’re afraid we might be next,” he said.

“I’m afraid we could be. Anyone could be.”

“You’re right.” Remy lay down beside her, his eyes close and bright. “But all that matters right now is that you’re here, and so am I.”

Eliana held his hands to her heart and let him sing her into a fitful sleep.

• • •

The next job arrived several days later on Eliana’s doorstep.

Packaged in a brown paper parcel, it was marked with the address of the city’s most expensive tailor.

Eliana took the package and gave the messenger three silver coins. The pale-skinned man wore the plain brown tunic of an apprentice, and at first glance looked as ordinary as anyone. But Eliana knew at once that this man was no tailor’s apprentice.

She thanked him with a silent nod and returned to her bedroom. From her window, she watched him walk down the street, crowded with Garden Quarter shoppers.

He walked almost perfectly. But Eliana had learned to watch for a certain stiffness in the way adatrox moved—every so often, a tiny, unnatural tic accompanying shifts in direction. A slight dimness in the eyes, delayed movements of the mouth, the brow. The subtler parts of the face that told you what the person inside was thinking.

It was as though the Empire’s soldiers moved not by their own will, but by someone else’s.

She hoped she never found out why the adatrox could seem normal one moment—laughing, talking, yawning—and then, without warning, fall perfectly quiet and still. Statue still. A shadow falling over the face, clouding the eyes. It could last an instant or for hours.

Whatever the Empire did to its legions of soldiers, she hoped it had not been done to her father, wherever he was. If he was still alive.

She placed the parcel on her bed and paused for a moment, readying herself.

She often heard of potential jobs when visiting Remy at the bakery or while attending one of His Lordship’s parties with Harkan. She would allow some favored son or daughter of the Empire to kiss her in a curtained corner, whisper secrets to her. Then, later, she and Harkan would fall together into bed until they no longer felt so unclean.