“That’s the Last Prophet,” the boy’s father whispered to him. “He’s the one who’s going to save us all.”

He was staring at Anton with watery, awed eyes.

Anton’s face wilted a little. “Time for me to go, I think.”

The children’s whines and moans of disappointment followed Anton as he walked away.

The father’s gaze fell on Hassan. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all right,” Hassan assured him. “It wasn’t you.” He turned to the other kids. “Good game, everyone. Don’t go spending your winnings all in one place.”

The kids gathered up their buttons and scrambled to their feet. He noticed that their clothes were patched, that the few of them with jackets had mismatched buttons. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why they were betting buttons on dice—they would need them to stay warm in the winter.

Hassan’s gaze returned to Anton’s retreating form. He would bet all the buttons on his coat that Anton could have easily won if he’d wanted to.

Hassan jogged after him, trailing him until Anton stopped beside the wooden fence that blocked off the sharp drop down into the river.

“This is just a guess,” Hassan said, “but you didn’t have a lot of happiness in your childhood, did you?”

Anton blew out a breath, an edge of humor in his eyes. “That’s one way to put it.”

Hassan remembered the strange mix of kinship and alienation he’d felt playing with the Herati refugee children. He had felt a responsibility to them. He thought of little Azizi, trying to steal meat to bring to his mother. The deep care and protectiveness he had felt for those kids was the same obligation he had as king of all Herati people, young and old.

But when he watched Anton play with these children, it was different. Anton wasn’t a guardian of these children—he was one of them. He knew exactly what it felt like to play in a dirty street because you had nowhere else to go, to wonder where your next meal would come from, if it would come at all.

“It was good, what you did for those kids,” Hassan said hesitantly.

“Letting them have a handful of buttons?” Anton asked bitterly. “How generous of me.”

“Not that,” Hassan said. “Just … being with them. Seeing them.”

Anton turned his gaze on Hassan. “We should help them.”

The deep cavern of grief that Hassan had learned to ignore in his chest seemed to open a little wider. He wanted to tell Anton that he had said the exact same thing the night before, that he agreed with him, that they should find a way.

Instead he said, “The best thing we can do for these people is to do what we came here to do. Find the Prophets, stop the Age of Darkness, take away the Hierophant’s power.”