She frowned into her tea. Her mother and father, and now this Orfelian⁠—they were playing a game of bluffs, the lot of them. They could lie to her as much as they liked. Laya knew how to play this game too. She did not possess her father’s smile, but she liked to think she had inherited his cleverness. And, unlike the others, she knew who would be the first to crack.

Two

Letters From the East

Dear Nelo,

My comrade, my dream, my love⁠—

For the hundredth time, I find myself thinking about how much easier it would be if I, like you, were dead.

I sound like an ungrateful, sorry sap⁠—which we both know I am. Allow me to start again.

I write to you from Maynara, the land of gods and spirits; the same Maynara in the tales they told us when we were boys. I never believed in those myths. I was wrong, as I have been wrong about so many things.

All of Maynara vibrates with a magic too ancient to name. It whispers in the wind that rustles through the nipa palms. It hums through the cracks in the stone walls that line the palace. The queen can erect islands with a jerk of her fingers. She granted me protection in exchange for my services. And I will serve her willingly, as I’ve served so many masters before her.

I sold my soul to buy more time on this unforgiving slab of earth⁠—a gift, my love, I wish I could offer you.

Has it truly been a year since the rebellion fell? I whisper your names every night as a kind of penance: Nelo, Israh, Elazar, Rufina. No incantation will bring you back from the killing fields. They told me what happened in Orfelia after I fled. How the Salmanticans hunted you down and shoved you in front of King Orfelio’s firing squads. How, unlike me, you stayed true to your word and kept fighting until your last breath.

I was a coward, Nelo. I could not watch you perish, and now I am haunted by your death. When I close my eyes, I hear your rousing war songs and raucous laughter. When I dream, I see you, muzzled like a dog, knee deep in mud before a row of bayonets.

One year since you died, and I have not stopped running since. I have survived thus far by sheer luck and an aptitude for chemical synthesis⁠—what too many fools have dubbed alchemy and what you used to call my remunerative gift. Precioso is more a curse than anything. Without the money it gave me, I would not have thrust weapons into your hands and dreams inside your head. Precioso is the reason you are dead.