Mayu could see the queen weighing her options, calculating her next move.

“Bring her up!” Makhi shouted at last.

The Tavgharad emerged through the grate, covered in blood and muck. They dragged Ehri up behind them, keeping her arms restrained. She couldn’t have gotten far in the tunnels.

In the distance, Mayu heard the thrum of what might have been an airship engine.

Princess Ehri looked around, taking in Tamar, the queen, the unconscious doctor. “Did we … did we win?”

Queen Makhi began to laugh. “‘Did we win?’” she singsonged. “This is the fool who seeks to decide the fate of a nation? What do you think you’ve accomplished here tonight? There are no ministers here to witness my supposed crimes. By the time you rally them, I’ll have the khergud transported and this facility burned to the ground.”

“We’re not going to give you that chance,” said Mayu.

“I am a queen. Is that so hard to grasp? Do you think you can just march me back to the palace with your Ravkan bodyguard? They’ll hang you for a traitor. I have troops surrounding this building, and any messenger you send will be intercepted. So to answer your question, little sister: No, you haven’t won.”

“Look around you, Makhi,” Ehri said. “Is this what you want your legacy to be? Torture?”

“What you call torture, I call science. If I were building tanks like the Fjerdans or missiles like the Ravkans, would you find that more palatable? People die. That is what war is.”

Reyem slammed his fist into the wall, leaving a deep dent. “To be khergud is to die a thousand times.”

“You had no right,” said Mayu, rage coursing through her. “You are a queen, not a god.”

Makhi drew in a breath, looking down her nose at all of them. There could be no doubt she had been born to rule. “It was not my right. It was my duty. To make my country strong.”

“You need bear the burden of that duty no longer.”

They all turned. Leyti Kir-Taban, Daughter of Heaven and Taban queen, entered the laboratory, dressed in a gown of green velvet embroidered with roses the color of flame. She was surrounded by her Tavgharad, some of them with hair as gray as hers, and by Grisha in their gem-colored kefta.

“Grandmother?” Makhi said, blinking as if she might clear the image from her eyes. “But you were at your palace.”

“I am not quite the fool you think I am,” Princess Ehri said gently. “I never would have left our grandmother at the Palace of the Thousand Stars. I know you too well for that. As soon as Tamar’s scouts saw you had called for the khergud, we sent word to our grandmother’s hiding place.”

Mayu remembered the two riders dressed as peasants. To the queen, Tamar had said. Mayu had assumed she meant Makhi.