We came into Ma-Halad’s station just before midnight on an unseasonably cold spring night. The air swept down the tall, snow-capped Jalah mountains. It did more than bite; it chewed us alive. My thin coat did me little good. My only real protection from the wind was the bodies of the Qin soldiers flanking me on either side. When the train stopped, they shackled my hands and feet together, and I made my way through the station, bound like a criminal. The Qin settlers gawked at me. The displaced, indentured Chalir discreetly looked away. They were tahrqin, too, but they were beaten and corralled just like elves. They stood tall and dark, wrapped head to toe in black linen. All you could ever see of the Chalir were their tahrqin eyes, which were always large and luminous and burning with cold hatred. The only elves I saw were technicians working on a broken train, and even they were transient. The second that train was up and running, they fled back west. I had nursed a hope on the train that Sorcha and Shayat would come for me, that it was possible for them to come for me. But I was so far from home and in a place so carefully guarded that I was out of their reach. None of Sorcha’s sweet talking would work this far out. Shayat, as prodigiously mercantile as she was, could not scrape together enough coin to bribe her way to me.

The soldiers took me to the barracks, where they brought me to General Muladah al Shahjin’Diladdi, the one Qin historians lovingly call the Butcher of the East. He was a young man, then, not yet forty. He was extraordinary. He had a flashing, violent intelligence that shone like a candle in the dark. He was young but had an air of worldliness about him that made him seem timeless, like a war god. He was magnetic, effortlessly charismatic, the type that could and did lead fevered men gladly to their deaths: a siren of sorts. There was a part of me that wanted to let him lead me, too, wherever he wanted to go. He was the kind that makes a man crave to submit, to give, to follow. He had the westernmost room on the top floor of the barracks. The room held a simple cot and tables littered with maps. When I was brought in, he stood staring out at the night, at the moon, peering west like he could see all the way to the Exalted’s tower. He was a deeply religious man; when the soldier shoved me across his threshold, he performed a warding to cleanse himself of my very presence. The Butcher of the East held out his hand to my captor. “His papers.”

The soldier handed him my papers. The general took one cursory glance and threw them on a table. “Forgeries.”

“Sir?”