“Y-you are mistaken,” I stammered. “We are not Anointed Ones. I’m a birinsinku.” The veil hung thickly over my head and shoulders. This boy couldn’t know who we were. Well . . . the marks glowing through my robe might give me away. But Thaddace’s mask was still in place. Either way, we needed to keep moving. I advanced briskly, intending to pass him, but the boy fell to his knees in front of Thaddace, staring up at him with translucent eyes.

“Bless me,” he whispered. “Please.”

“You’re being silly,” I snapped at the child, beginning to panic as the boy clutched Thaddace’s tunic. “Let him go.”

“Please—”

“Shh!” Thaddace hissed, glancing around the empty hall. When no one came to investigate, Thaddace tried to shake the boy off, but the child began to wail: a high, keening sound.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered.

“Can’t be helped.” Thaddace shrugged and sighed. “Transitions of power are always hard on peasants. I’ll just give him what he wants.”

Hair rose on the back of my neck. The child . . . smelled. Not like an unwashed body, but like earth and decay, or the rotting musk of burial mounds, steaming in wet season.

Something was very, very wrong.

Thaddace bent down, holding out his hand to touch the child’s head. “By the power of the Ray, formerly vested in me, I bless—”

I heard the knife before I saw it. The scrape of metal against leather as the boy slipped it from his boot, and the soft, wet hiss as a line of crimson bloomed across Thaddace’s throat.

My vision dimmed as blood soaked Thaddace’s collar, and he sputtered and gasped.

“Run,” he told me, but my feet had lost all feeling.

“Long live the Empress Redemptor,” Thaddace gurgled, hand locked around the boy’s wrist. With a stagger, Thaddace turned the knife back toward the child. The boy did not resist, eerily calm as his own blade impaled him.

Then Thaddace collapsed on the tiles, dead before he hit the ground.

I backed away, shivering from head to toe. No. Thaddace could not be dead. Thaddace was mine, and I was Tarisai Kunleo, and no one I loved would ever . . .

The thought faded to white noise as the boy stood over Thaddace’s body, removing the knife in his own chest. He did not bleed.

“You’re not human,” I whispered. “What are you?” He didn’t look like an abiku. No all-pupil eyes, no pointed teeth or ash-gray skin. Besides, the abiku did not kill humans unless the Treaty was breached, and I still had two years to make my sacrifice. So if not an abiku, then . . . what?

The creature cocked his head. “I am your servant.”

“You killed Thaddace.” The world was spinning. “Why? For Am’s sake, why?”

“Thaddace of Mewe murdered the late Emperor Olugbade,” the creature replied. “The Empress Redemptor was aiding a crown traitor.”

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I sobbed. “My mother made him. Thaddace wasn’t going to die; I was going to save him—”