“Let me finish,” he said, and began to speak to her in Nasheenian instead of Tirhani. “They gave me the tattoos before I left. They are the record of my family, from the time we fell until the time I left them. Inaya—” He opened his coat and revealed a tunic with a long, scooped neck that bared most of his torso. She saw the familiar tattoos there, spidery lines that she had come to learn were Mhorian text. “Look to what you devour. Soon it will give you the power to transform all this. And when it does, all that my family is or has ever been will be at your disposal. We’ll wait for you.”

It was such an unexpected thing to say that she found herself speechless. Khos buttoned back up his coat. He walked to the door, knocked. Looked back.

For a long minute, they gazed at one another. His face was hard now, completely unreadable, the love and compassion neatly erased.

Had he come straight here after being summoned? Or had he met with her people first? Would he have been smart enough to do that? Or was this a message regarding some plan he had cooked up on his own?

“Goodbye, Inaya,” he said, in Nasheenian. It was the first language they ever spoke to one another. And the tone this time was not the forlorn, lovesick one he had used when speaking of bringing her home, but the resigned, hard-edged one he had used the day she told him she was leaving him.

“Goodbye, Khos,” she said.

The woman in the hall escorted him out.

They came for Inaya sometime later, and returned her to her cell. She sat down at the center of the ghastly space and wept.

The door opened. It was her unpleasant female jailer again. She carried something with her.

“Hush now,” the woman said, strangely compassionate after all this time. She passed Inaya two slips of regular paper and a long stylus. “At your husband’s request, you’ve been permitted to write letters home to your children. I advise you to make them quite eloquent. It may be the last your children hear from you.”

Inaya took the paper with trembling fingers. She wished she could think of some way out. Some opening they or Khos had given her that she could use to her advantage. But all Khos had to offer was what she already knew—“Look to what you devour”—yes, the food was toxic to her. It kept her from shifting. Was that all he really had for her? Why he had come all this way?

She cried as she wrote the letters. Just the act of writing such private correspondence to her children when she knew her captors would comb over them felt obscene. But Khos had been her last chance out. There would be no more offers. No more bargains.