“They’ll find out what you’re doing,” I insist. “They’ve learned a lot about sussing out secrets while you were away. He has the know-how and Fione has the sheer cleverness to sniff out any plot you might have.”

“If that’s true,” Varia says with a sigh, “why haven’t they done so already?”

Because they’re enamored with you, I want to say. They love you like a sister, like a lover. They look up to you.

Except Varia knows that already, doesn’t she? She’s using their love to her advantage. She’s using everyone’s love, utilizing the past like a smokescreen. I must be the only one in Vetris who doesn’t think the utmost of her. It’s the only thing Gavik and I will ever have in common.

I turn on my heel and leave the room. Before I reach the door, Varia’s voice rings out from the bathroom. “Lucien will recover in several days time. If you cared to know.”

Warm relief floods me again, for the second time. “I didn’t,” I call back.

From the fading apartments behind me, I hear something that sounds faintly like a weary snort, and then, “Juvenile.”

The next morning, I wait for my carriage on the balls of my feet. It doesn’t take a polymath to realize that the number of guards stationed in the palace has soundly tripled now that a war has been officially declared. The watertells around both the palace and the noble quarter are constantly going off, spewing great sparkling fonts into the tense air as messages are passed back and forth. The nobles themselves are strangely absent from walking the palace’s gardens, and that disturbs me more than anything. They’re creatures of habit, no matter how bad things get. If they’re restricting their decadent, unaffected selves, the war must truly be here.

When the carriage comes, I watch the preparing city out the window. The ornate tailoring and jewel shops of First Street are closed, the lights off. The bakeries still deal in bread, but in a hushed way, as if they are irrationally afraid that making too much noise will summon the witches from over the wall and straight to them. The smithies and the temple are the only ones who dare to make sound above a whisper—the blacksmiths pounding mightily on their anvils and the priests crowing about the justice and retribution of the New God.

It’s there on the temple steps that I finally find the nobles, clinging fervently to the priests’ robes, begging their reassurances that they’ll be safe in the coming war. The commoners, meanwhile, are bidding their enlisted children and spouses and siblings tearful, hard goodbyes. I try not to think about their faces bloodied by my kind, scarred like Y’shennria has been scarred.

But they will be. It’s only a matter of time.