I looked him in the eye. His amber stare was just like mine. “It’s what you made me for, is it not? To be the sacrifice.”

A smile ghosted across his lips, then vanished as he glanced toward the owl and shook his head to remind me that the courts heard and saw everything he heard and saw, just as he could hear and see through the eyes of his Hunt. “All the others before you died. So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free…”

His voice faded as on words left unsaid, for there were words he dared not say within the hearing of the owl because he was not the owl’s master. The owl was spying on him.

But I could guess. All the others before you died, because they failed. So you are trapped, because they could not understand and thus act. You will never be free unless I am also free.

As a young man in the mage House, Vai had known in his heart all along that he might as a magister gain the power and glory granted him because of his magic, but he would not be free as long as his village was bound in clientage. A prince among slaves is still a slave. Freedom cuts in every direction. No one is truly free, if even one person lies in chains.

I knew what I had to do.

As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in silence, his expression a mask of ice.

Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at once.

The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the colors and patterns they could dream of.

In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved the salt of mortal blood and being.