“Do you mean if I agree to become a reeve and that eagle dies, that I’ll die?”

“You already are a reeve.”

“Is this how you force people to agree to become reeves? Because they think they have to? We’re no better than slaves. I’d have better luck walking to Olossi and trying to get a husband from those foreigners. At least I’d be my own mistress, able to do what I wanted.”

“Who knows what disgusting customs those out-landers have,” said Volias with a smirk. “You’re better off with us. Not that you have a choice.”

They walked into a garden so fancy that Nallo gawked. It had its own pool, with fruit and nut trees along either side, reflected in the still water. Aui! There was even a fountain of burbling water, just like in the tales! Avisha would have gushed over the many herbs and other flowering plants burgeoning out of troughs and terraces. A pavilion overlooked the far end of the pool. That pest Siras was seated on the steps leading up to the covered porch, and when he saw them he leaped up and brushed his hands on his trousers as if he’d been eating.

“I guess Tumna didn’t rip your head off, then, eh?” said Siras with a big grin as they reached the porch. “Not like she did to Horas. Not that he didn’t deserve it, mind you. He was rotten all the way through.”

“The hells!” said Volias. “Siras, you’re a bigger horse’s ass than even I thought.”

Nallo halted with a foot on the porch and one on the step below. The marshal turned, balancing on one foot with a sandal half pried off the other. He grunted with irritation, a man who has just been caught out in a lie.

Rain spat through the pretty garden. In the distance, thunder rolled and faded.

Rip your head off.

They had all known that the eagle was a killer who had murdered its own reeve.

When she got really mad, her tongue lit and she couldn’t stop herself. “That’s why everyone came to watch. Was it a good show? Or is everyone disappointed she didn’t rip my head off, too? Does it happen often? Because if I were an eagle, you three would all be in little pieces by now, but I wouldn’t eat a single scrap of bloody flesh because your foul taste would make me cast it all back up.”

Her heart was sucked dry, and her blood was raging. She walked away.

Volias called, “Here, now, Nallo—”

The marshal interrupted him in that smoothly dishonest voice she should have distrusted from the first. “We didn’t say anything because we didn’t want you to fear her before you had a chance to understand eagles. And Tumna in particular.”

“No one told her?” yapped the young one in a tone that couldn’t have made him sound stupider if he’d been a novice entertainer acting a part.

Ignoring every soul who tried to talk to her, she strode through the compound until she found the cot she’d been assigned. She grabbed her bundle of useless odds and ends, the worthless rubbish of her life, and walked out the gates of Argent Hall, never to return.