“I didn’t say anything,” Illya said, baffled. He looked at her more closely. “Are you … all right?”

Beru put her head in her hands. “Yes. Sorry. Just a headache.”

Illya didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then, quietly: “The god’s talking to you right now, isn’t it?”

Beru glanced up at him sharply. She hadn’t told anyone the extent to which the god’s influence on her had worsened. Not even Ephyra, though she knew that her sister suspected something was wrong. But if there was anyone she could talk to about what it felt like to have a monster lurking inside her, it was Illya.

Illya watched her, firelight flickering across his face. “You know, supposedly my ancestor Vasili spoke to the god.”

“The Raving King?”

“The myth goes that he scried into the past and talked to the god in the time before the Prophets killed it.”

“What did the god say to him?” Beru asked.

Illya poked at the dying fire with a stick, sending a spray of sparks winking through the air. “Oh you know, just that it was his destiny to defy the Prophets and rule the Novogardian Empire. Something to that effect. But whatever it was, it supposedly drove him mad.”

Beru peered into the fire. “You think I’m going mad?”

He shrugged, looking for a moment so much like Anton. “Do you?”

She was too exhausted to do anything except laugh. “I don’t know. Probably.” After a stretch of silence, she said, “It’s getting louder. Harder to block out its voice. And now that the collar’s off, it’s like I’m seeing everything through this dense fog. I can make out the shapes, people and feelings I recognize, but they’re … warped.”

Illya shook his head, his lips curled into a half smile.

“Is that funny to you somehow?” Beru asked.

“It just sounds like how I used to feel,” Illya replied. “About everything, really. Like I knew there were all these things I was supposed to feel—love and care and affection—but instead I just felt this anger. This … hate that never went away. No matter how much I tried to bury it beneath charm and good manners, it was always there, warping everything.”

Beru pulled her knees to her chest and set her chin there. When she’d first met Illya, she’d thought she would never understand him, even as she had relied on him for help.

Now, she saw herself in him, and it scared her.

“So what happened to all that anger?” she asked at last.

He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “It’s still there.” He let out a breath, which fogged in the chilly evening air. “All the time.”

“But you’re helping us.”