“Heh. And in all that time, I’ve never known you put desire before duty. Perhaps it’s time you started. Put aside the soldier’s burden for a time. Lumestra knows you’ve earned it.”

Elzar’s advice, the reverse of what Viktor had so recently given Josiri, coaxed forth a dry smile. “And what if my father makes trouble?”

“What if he doesn’t? And what manner of leader can Malachi be if he’s nothing without your support? What manner of support can you offer if your body’s here but your mind’s away to the south, turning over every rock and stone in search of this Calenne? I think the Republic will manage without you for a time.”

Ordinarily, Viktor would have agreed. Though the Privy Council had always divided along roughly similar lines, that same division – the possibility of shifting allegiances – had stopped anyone, even Ebigail, having things her own way. Only now the numbers had thinned almost to nothing was lasting change possible. They’d thin further the next day when Josiri headed south. And if the architect of that change was Hadon Akadra and not Malachi Reveque . . .

Viktor turned again to the filthy window, to the tangle of streets that led away to Dregmeet and the harbourside. Tressia had never felt more fragile.

Elzar had counselled him to put desire before duty – to stop being a soldier for a time. But that wasn’t the solution, was it? The soldier saw the situation plainly. His father was a clear threat to the Republic – whether he intended it so or not – while Calenne offered no certainties, only questions that might never be answered.

Viewed from that angle there was only one solution, though even the soldier in him was loathe to embrace it. But love, especially of a distant and uncertain kind, was as nothing compared to duty. Sometimes one had to be sacrificed for the other.

It had cost Apara most of the morning and a good deal of the skin on her wrists to get free of the manacles, but get free she had. Most of that she owed to a perfunctory search that had divested her of talons and daggers but had somehow missed the cotter pins stitched into the hem of her tunic.

Not that she’d gotten a deal further once the shackles were off, not with the cellar door barred and bolted. She’d been over every inch of the filthy stone, searching for a way into the mists of Otherworld. She’d found nothing. But freedom was like death – it often came sliver by sliver.

At times, she wept. At others, her eyes grew so dry they stung. Each time she closed them, the afterimage of her mother’s face loomed, the eyes alive with horrified accusation.

She’d killed her.