Mawyndulë bent down and jerked the necklace from the emperor’s throat, then returned to the throne. Like a magician working a party trick with a tablecloth, he snapped away the mantle and exposed the box beneath—the same one Farilane had seen in Sephryn’s home.

“You should run,” Kolby whispered.

“He can hear you,” Farilane replied.

“I can, indeed,” Mawyndulë said, with a chilling glee in his voice. As old as he appeared, and as ancient as Farilane knew him to be, his voice carried all the giddiness of a child.

He lifted the box, fumbled with the little key. Rotated the container and fumbled some more.

“Problem?” Farilane asked.

Mawyndulë threw the box down. It struck the floor hard, made a pathetic attempt to bounce, then fell over the edge of the dais steps. It rolled down and stopped. “This isn’t the horn!” he growled through clenched teeth while brandishing the key.

“Of course not,” Farilane said. “Didn’t I just tell you that?” She could see the bear about to roar, watched his claws fan out.

She threw the dice again. “But you have the key, right? All you need is the real box: the one with the horn, and I have it.”

“You’re lying.”

She had no defense against that argument. This would either work or it wouldn’t. She switched from dice to cards, and she was about to play the one matching pair she had. The first was that she was confident that Mawyndulë had used magic to monitor her on her twelfth night at the cliff; the second was that The Hole, the inner sanctum where she’d found the pages, had been protected by Orinfar symbols, making it impossible for Mawyndulë to see exactly what she had found.

“I’m not now, but I did at our first meeting. Your instincts were right. I found the horn in Alburnia.”

“You told me you found a book. You even talked about it with Kile. I heard you. I’ve been watching you.”

“I did find a book, but that’s not the only thing I found. You didn’t see me in the last chamber, did you? Ever wonder why? There were Orinfar runes down there. Yes, I mentioned the book to Kile, but I didn’t tell anyone about the box. You don’t watch me all the time or you would have seen me studying it.”

This was a big gamble but a logical one.

“If you had already found the horn, why did you go to Dibben?”