This was his only future, and when it ended, when his task was done, there would be nothing but a vague, blurry world of his life spent with Jinia. But even there, something whispered of oblivion, inviting him into a world of imagination, like an island surrounded by the Abyss.

Abyss. That was a word he’d heard spoken as a curse and as a prayer, as if two faces hid in the darkness, and who knew which one groping hands might find?

He could have told the guards about his thoughts, to show that they weren’t thoughts anyone would expect from a child. But something held him back. He was beginning to suspect that being seen as a child was in itself a kind of disguise, one that he might be able to use, come the night when he did murder.

Perhaps the dying gods had warned him against revealing too much, but he was not convinced of that – in any case, he’d told Lady Sandalath nothing of his plans, and he was certain that the First Son and the Azathanai would both remain silent on the matter. He had no choice but to show himself to her as only a child, a friend of Orfantal who, with her and with Wreneck himself, was all that remained of House Drukorlat. Jinia was another, of course, but she too had become Wreneck’s secret, his way of protecting her from anyone and everyone.

It was complicated, and troubling, and the lady’s need to hold him close, so tight that sometimes he could barely draw a breath, just made him uncomfortable. He had no desire to stay in this keep.

He reached a portal that opened on to the landing of a spiral staircase. The light spilling in from the oil lamps set in the niches in the corridor behind him did not reach far, and by the first turn of the stone steps Wreneck found himself in darkness. He continued upward.

Towers interested him. He had never been higher than a single level above the ground, and that had been in Lady Nerys’s estate, and the house had been burning down around him and Jinia. Climbing trees had shown him how everything changed when seen from any height, but often the thick canopies of other trees blocked most of his view downward. From atop a tower, he believed, there would be nothing to impede his view.

Everything below, when he reached that height, would be familiar, and yet each thing would be transformed in his eyes, becoming something new. This notion seemed to displease the dying gods in his head.

At the level just below the top floor of the tower, he came to a landing and found himself facing a blackwood door. Beads of water ran down its furrowed face. The pool at its base had spread out over the flagstone landing, cold enough to form slush here and there, and thin, crackling layers of ice. Standing before the door, he could feel waves of cold coming from it.