A few questions ascertained that my cousin and his wife had arrived from Iftahar only this morning. Ciarra was resting comfortably with her new daughter in one of the lower storage rooms where a temporary bed had been erected. I dismounted and began giving orders, the fatigue of the journey held at bay by the euphoria of being home. I sent a runner with orders for the keep. Kellen and his man would share my room. I gave Tisala the room next to it, the only other finished room on that floor. Garranon, Oreg, Tosten, and I would share the library. My uncle would join my aunt in their customary room.

I sent another man to gather grooms to take care of the spent horses that were just beginning to filter through the gates.

“So is it war?” asked Stala after threading her way through the confusion to my side.

I hugged her once, tightly. “Not immediately,” I said. “But yes.”

“With all of Shavig behind us, we will still lose,” she said, teacher to student, not as if it bothered her. “But we can make him hurt.”

I shook my head. “We might do better than that. I don’t know if Beckram told you—I come bringing a royal guest to Hurog. We’ve rescued Kellen out of the Asylum so that Alizon can put him on the throne.”

She drew in a breath, then laughed. “That does change things, doesn’t it.”

“Maybe not enough,” I answered.

“We’ll make it be enough,” she said. “Now give me that horse; I’ll see she’s taken care of. You go in and get warm.”

ISPENT THE NIGHT ON A PALLET IN THE LIBRARY WITHOreg, Tosten, Garranon, and a wary street rat with Hurog eyes. I was going to have to find something for Tychis to do, something that would make him feel like one of us.

I was still thinking about it when I fell into a (thankfully) dreamless sleep. I awoke at first light, feeling like myself for the first time in a long while. I breathed in Hurog air and felt the familiar currents of magic that flowed through me, filling the terrible emptiness I’d felt away from Hurog and cleaning away the lingering effects of the potions Jakoven’s mages had fed me.

I stepped around my sleeping comrades and snuck out of the library without awaking anyone.

There was a council to call and rooms that needed to be prepared. But first I needed to ride.

The big paddock had four horses in it. A moon-colored mare with gentle eyes, two chestnut matrons whose years of foaling showed in their widened rib cages and loose-jointed stance, and a mud-dark, big-boned stallion who bugled and charged when I whistled at him.

“Miss me, Pansy?” I asked, opening the gate and haltering him. He shoved me with his convex nose and ran his fluttering nostrils over me as if to check for damage.