“You are nobody. You will be forgotten, and no one will mourn you.”

He takes another step, stopping right before me to slash his blade. Heat blooms across my cheek. I tuck my chin down instinctively, the nape of my neck exposed to him.

“And yet you kneel before me now.”

I reach for my waist, painfully slowly, praying that my bowed head hides my hand from his view.

“Pledge your allegiance to me, Delta of Dead River, and I will forgive your sins. Pledge yourself to the cause, and when we find the Verdant, I will share it with your pack instead of slaughtering them.”

My fingertips graze the tip of the knife handle.

“Submit to me, and call your troops off, or I will kill them myself.” He grabs my chin, forces me to look at him as he says almost gleefully, “Bay first.”

But by now the knife is mine. I yank it from my belt and thrust it up in one quick movement, burying the blade in the General’s neck. His falcon flaps away in surprise, screeching. The General makes a guttural noise as he straightens and staggers away from me, the blade still embedded in his throat. He touches the hilt, panicked. His eyes graze my torso, as though he is trying to read my brand through my clothes.

“My map leads nowhere,” I say. “Not without Asher’s. But we read our brands together, and we sailed across the wastes to the remnants of the Old World, to the secret it holds.”

“What . . . secret?” he croaks out, the words broken by my blade.

“There is no Verdant. There are no gods. Everything you believe is a lie.” I grab the hilt of my knife, twist, and pull it free. Blood gushes, coating the front of the General’s leather robe and turning it deep black. He takes a single step toward me, eyes wide and haunted. Maybe he can’t believe what I’ve told him. Maybe he’s shocked by his own mortality. Maybe he’s still waiting for the gods to save him when he collapses at my feet and doesn’t move again.

His falcon screeches from the balcony rail, then streaks into the sky.

Reed grabs at my hand, his breath coming in uneven bursts. “You have . . . to blow . . . the horn,” he grunts out, nodding to a curved instrument that hangs on the wall just inside the balcony. “One long. Two short. One . . . long.”

I slice at Reed’s shirt with my knife, cutting the sleeve off his injured arm. There’s a gaping cut above his elbow, so deep I can see bone. “Oh, gods,” I mutter.

“It’s fine,” he says, but his eyes roll, and I think he might be near passing out. “The horn . . . They’ll surrender . . .”

I tear the discarded shirtsleeve, creating two long strips of cloth, and tie them both above the wound as tightly as I can manage.