Marek offered no resistance as he was dragged from the room – not even a word of protest. Apara envied him his peace, fragile though it might have been. Another death laid at her door, even though she’d done nothing more than raise the alarm. If only she’d chanced by the cellar a minute later. Little would have changed, but she wouldn’t have been the one to deliver another man to his death.

Lady Kiradin set a hand against the window frame and stared out across the night-shrouded garden. She seemed smaller, shrunken – as if for the first time she bore every one of her advancing years.

“It’s too soon.” The words came as a breathy, urgent mutter. “I’m not ready. She mustn’t . . .”

The windowpane rattled beneath the impact of a thin fist. Lady Kiradin spun on her heel, renewed fire in her eyes. “Find her.”

Apara blinked at the impossibility of the request. “How? I don’t know where she’s going. I’ve never seen her face . . .”

A hand swept out. A porcelain vase flew from the table top and shattered against the floor. “Must I do everyone’s thinking? She’ll go to Malachi Reveque! Fools always flock together! As for her face, you’ll know it when you see it. Kill her, and anyone she speaks to.”

“But she’s your daughter!”

“Not any longer.”

Apara shrank back from the lady’s fury. Other worries crowded in. Sevaka had a head start. Even the raven-cloak couldn’t close the distance in time. She had to get ahead of her quarry. That meant risking the paths of Otherworld. Fearful as she found the idea, it paled beside the prospect of lingering in Lady Kiradin’s company.

A chorus of throaty, canine snarls split the night air. The first screams came soon after.

Sevaka fled through streets emptied by curfew, navigating by sparse streetlights and what little of the moon breached oppressive clouds. She longed only for the strength to keep moving.

Keep moving. But moving where? No one in the extended family would offer shelter – her mother had too long a reach for that. The same was true of her old shipmates – even assuming the Triumphal still lay at anchor.

Her pulse quickened. What use was it being free of one cage only to roam another? And Tressia was a cage. It waited only for her mother’s cold hand to reach down and scoop her up.

Ribald voices chimed ahead, the soft mutter of bored men on lonely duty. Sevaka gathered her stolen cloak and clung deep to the shadows.

Two constables appeared at the end of the alley, one chuckling at the other’s murmured witticism. She could go to them. Beg for protection. No. If she couldn’t trust the navy to offer sanctuary, what hope of salvation with Captain Horden’s constabulary?