I’m walking past a dark alley tavern when I see a familiar figure in a gray robe backed against a wall by half a dozen angry men. Gavik. The men palm wooden clubs and the hilts of swords, the air thick and tensely wound, like an invisible nest of threads pulled tight enough to cut.

“—not as dense as you think we are!” One of the men gets in Gavik’s gaunt face. “I saw you with my own two eyes, that night in the black market!”

The men behind him shift, some of them nodding along, others grunting. Gavik refuses to blink—staring down at the shorter man over his nose. Is the man talking about the night Gavik made the raid on the black market here in Vetris, the one Lucien showed me? The one that traded vital food and supplies beneath the radar to escape the crushing taxes Gavik had enacted?

“Don’t waste your energy on the wrong man.” Gavik sneers, his words slurring as if he’s…drunk? I squint, and sure enough, I see him tottering from one leg to the other. “Whyever would an archduke be here, in a disgusting alley, with a disgusting pack of sniveling dogs?”

“That’s it!” the man in his face barks, pulling out a club. “Get him, boys!”

The men descend like ravens on a corpse, the dull smacking sound of heavy blows meeting flesh resounding. Gavik, as self-contained as he is, as I always saw him be in the palace, isn’t immune to the pain. Pain is the great equalizer. It makes us all look foolish and weak. It makes us all cry out the same, and Gavik is no different. He bellows like a wounded buck, and in the glimpses between the men’s flying limbs and flashes of swords, I see him gnashing his teeth, blood and spittle running down his chin.

I wait.

Varia’s magic is too strong even for me—I can’t bring out the monster much further than a few claws and teeth. I’m sure letting the archduke wander free among the people of Vetris means Varia’s taken precautions against him turning, but one can never be too sure with the hunger. I’m the only one who could feasibly stop him if worse came to worst.

But…neither do I stop the men. All I can see is the boy I first met when I came to Vetris, his terrified face as he was forced to ascend the stepladder into the water coffin on Gavik’s orders and drown. My wrist aches with the phantom memory of the pain when Gavik, that same fateful black market night, ordered one of his men to shoot me with a crossbow.

“I wonder if the West Star is out tonight,” I murmur lightly, looking up at the glittering sky between the alley’s roofs. The cries of pain ricochet, and I almost laugh.