“You have interrupted me twice,” Maram snapped. “Do not do it a third time.”

Aghraas brought her horse forward so that they were facing one another.

“I must tell you,” she said calmly, “that if you wish for someone weaker or more susceptible to rumor, you will not find her in me.”

“And if I demand it?” Maram said dully.

“You may demand all you like, Your Highness,” she said. “That is your right, after all.”

“Most people would endeavor to please me, Lady Falconer.”

“You will find, Your Highness,” she said, moving her horse so that they were side by side, “that I am not most people.”

Maram felt as if there were an iron hand around her throat. She struggled to say something in the face of Aghraas’s calm but could not. I am not afraid—if she was not afraid, then what else was there?

“We are nearly there,” Aghraas said, and Maram blinked as if coming out of a dream. “We can walk, if you like?”

She barked out a half-deranged laugh. “Certainly. Why not?”

She watched as Aghraas climbed from her horse, swung her leg over, and then froze as the falconer helped her down from her stallion, hands around her waist. She remained perfectly still as her feet touched the ground, and it was only fear of being labeled a coward that forced her to raise her head to look up. Aghraas’s eyes were serious when she met them, her mouth a flat, stoic line.

She liked it better when she smiled but had given her few reasons to do so in the last few minutes. She felt adrift, as if she were caught in a wave rapidly approaching a cliff and she had no recourse.

“Are all ornithologists as brazen as you are?” she said at last.

She did not like the small spark of light in her chest when Aghraas grinned.

“No, Your Highness. I am singular in that respect.”

They walked through heather and tall grass in silence. Their horses and guards remained on a hill from where both of them could be seen, but enough about the morning was strange that in a fit of madness Maram instructed them to remain behind. They had crested a second rise that sat atop a cliff. Its descending slope was gentle, and rolled down into a wide valley, hedged in by high hills. In its center was a brilliant blue lake that caught the early-morning sun’s rays.

“If you deign to lie down in the grass, Your Highness?”

Maram said nothing as she sank into the grass beside her and laid on her stomach. Aghraas produced a pair of binoculars; Maram watched as she scanned the valley and then stiffened, their lenses focused up above.

“See there,” she said, handing them over to her.