“Then when the Emperor finds out what we’ve done, and he will, who do you think he’ll take his wrath out on?” Alberdina countered. “It’ll be the ones who stay behind. The farmers and the laborers left, well, he might leave them alone, or he just might put everyone to the sword and move in an entire new population. But you? A known member of Kordas’s household? Anything you can imagine, it’ll be a hundred times worse.”

“So I don’t have a choice.” She felt like crying. What had Kordas and Isla gotten her into? She hadn’t asked for any of this.

“Well, you could always betray us,” Alberdina said coldly. “Then he’d probably marry you off to some old reprobate in his Court that’s gone through four wives already and is looking for a fifth. You’d still have the life of a lady. If that’s what you want, you can get it. Kordas is probably right in thinking that once we close and burn down those Gates, the Emperor won’t be able to find us, so betraying us probably won’t do us any harm. And it isn’t as if you have the ability to tell him where we are.”

Hearing it put that baldly just made her want to cry even more. She hadn’t asked for this! Was that really much of a choice, either hard labor in the wilderness, or being handed off to some nasty old man as a “reward” for telling the Emperor how everyone had fled to escape him?

Wasn’t there a third option?

But she couldn’t think of one.

“Just think of how Isla and Kordas have been feeling all these years,” Alberdina persisted. “Knowing that at any moment, on the Emperor’s whim, everything could be pulled out from under them. That at any moment, the Emperor’s troops could come pouring in, taking literally everything and almost everyone, all to feed his ego and his war machine. And everyone that was left would be starving on scraps and forced to build things back up again just so the Emperor could sweep in and take it all again. I’ve seen it happen to entire baronies. When the Emperor moves in, he takes every person under the age of fifty and over the age of thirteen, he takes everything that can be ridden, eaten, or drunk, and he sweeps out again.” She paused, and Delia wondered what else she was going to say. “I don’t think he’d spare you a second time, and your pedigree wouldn’t save you. He might leave Kordas. He might not. Kordas was educated at the Palace, so he knows the basics of military strategy. The Emperor’s wars need officers as well as soldiers.”

Delia felt cold and numb.