Amara looked up to see Aria Placida sitting with her back against the wall, beside the pool. Her face was sunken and pale, and she looked as if she could barely hold up her own head, but her eyes were clear. To Amara’s surprise, High Lord Antillus Raucus lay beside her, stripped of his armor, with an enormous, ugly purple scar wrapping around his waist like a belt, and the cauterized stump of his arm ending obscenely a few inches from his shoulder He was breathing unsteadily and clearly unconscious.

Isana’s hands withdrew, and Amara pushed the mush in her mouth mostly into one cheek. “Firecrafting,” she said, holding up the stone. “Signal flare. Need to get it into the open. I convinced Aquitaine to give me the Windwolves’ contract. They’re up high, waiting to get us out of here.”

“Windwolves?” Aria asked.

“Mercenaries in service to the Aquitaines,” Isana said. “They’re mostly Knights Aeris.”

Amara nodded. The movement made her a little dizzy. “Followed us, far enough back and high enough up that they wouldn’t be detected by Invidia. They’ll know where we are, generally, but we have to signal them our exact location.”

“No good,” came Araris’s voice. It sounded as if his words were rattling around the interior of a metal pipe before they left his mouth. “These holes were where the blade-beasts were being kept for a rainy day—but they don’t open beneath the sky. There’s some kind of structure above us. If we threw the rock out, it might not be visible outside—”

Three wax spiders abruptly plunged down through both holes. Araris cut them all into quarters before they touched the ground.

“—the building,” he finished, never altering the cadence of his words. Then he turned to look at Isana, and Amara noted that the metallic surface of his skin seemed cracked, rusted, and pitted over the right side of his chest and his right shoulder. She realized, with a shudder, that the “rust” was blood seeping out through the cracks. Evidently, the crafting did not make him entirely impervious to harm. He met Isana’s eyes for a moment, then said, to Amara, “Give me the stone.”

Amara felt the First Lady stiffen. “No. Araris, no.”

“Only way,” he said quietly.

“I forbid it,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”

“If we all stay, we all die,” he said in a quiet, firm voice. “If I go, there’s a chance some of us will live.” He turned his right hand palm upward, and said, “Countess.”

Amara bit her lip—and tossed the stone toward him.

He caught it and rolled his shoulder, wincing. Then he went to stand beneath one of the holes and look up at it. It was ten feet or more to the ceiling. “Hmmm.”