Nina glanced behind her. Hanne’s parents, Jarl and Ylva Brum, trailed them by only a few yards, drawing admiring glances as they walked along the quay—both of them tall and lean, Ylva in warm brown wool and red fox fur, Brum in the black uniform that filled Nina with loathing, the silver wolf of the drüskelle emblazoned on his sleeve. Two young witchhunters followed, their faces clean-shaven, their golden hair worn long. Only when they had completed their training and heard the words of Djel at Hringkälla would they be permitted to grow beards. And then off into the world they would merrily go to murder Grisha.

“Papa, they’re setting up for some kind of show,” Hanne said, gesturing farther down the quay to where a makeshift stage had been erected. “Can we go watch?”

Brum frowned slightly. “It isn’t one of those Kerch troupes, is it? With their masks and lewd jokes?”

If only, Nina thought glumly. She longed for the wild streets of Ketterdam. She’d take a hundred bawdy, raucous performances of the Komedie Brute over the five interminable acts of Fjerdan opera she’d been forced to sit through the previous night. Hanne had kept jabbing her in the side to prevent Nina from nodding off.

“You’re starting to snore,” Hanne had whispered, tears leaking down her cheeks as she tried to keep from laughing.

When Ylva saw her daughter’s red face and wet eyes, she had patted Hanne’s knee. “It is a moving piece, isn’t it?”

All Hanne had been able to do was nod and squeeze Nina’s hand.

“Oh, Jarl,” Ylva said to her husband now. “I’m sure it will be perfectly wholesome.”

“Very well.” Brum relented and they made their way toward the stage, leaving the disappointed wool seller behind. “But you’d be surprised at the turn this place has taken. Corruption. Heresy. Right here in our capital. You see?” He pointed to a burned-out store- front as they passed. It looked like it had once been a butcher shop, but now the windows were broken and the walls stained with soot.

“Only two nights ago, this shop was raided. They found an altar to the supposed Sun Saint and one to … what’s her name? Linnea of the Waters?”

“Leoni,” Hanne corrected softly.

Nina had heard about the raid through her contacts in the Hringsa, a network of spies dedicated to liberating Grisha throughout Fjerda. The butcher’s wares had been thrown into the street, the cupboards and shelves stripped to unearth hidden relics—a finger bone from the Sun Saint, an icon painted in an amateurish hand that clearly showed beautiful Leoni with her hair in coiled braids, arms raised to pull poison from a river and save a town.