Qinnitan wrapped her arms around Pigeon, tried to stop him shivering. “But…” Faced with this empty, emotionless man, she could think of nothing to say. Somehow she had known this day would come—she had only hoped it would take longer than this brief couple of months. “You won’t hurt the boy?”

“I won’t hurt him if he does nothing stupid. But he is the autarch’s property, so he goes back, too.”

“He’s not property, he’s a child! He did nothing wrong.”

The merest hint of a smile stole across the stranger’s cold face, as if he had finally heard something worth his getting out of bed that morning. “Sit down and put your legs out.”

She started to argue, but he had closed the distance between them in an astonishingly swift step or two, and now stood over her, the knife only inches from her eye. She sat back on the stairs and extended her feet. He put the end of the knife gently against her throat and held it there with his thumb on the other side of her windpipe, then looped a piece of cord around one ankle. When he had tied the other end, a length of the cord about the distance from her wrist to elbow stretched between her two legs, leaving her neatly hobbled. He took a long dress out of the sack—it was something she had seen some of the chambermaids wearing—and dropped it over her head, then yanked her to her feet. When she stood, the hem of the dress almost touched the dusty tiles, hiding the cord completely.

“Does the boy understand speech?”

Qinnitan nodded, dully, hopelessly. Even if the others went looking for her, she had just realized, it would be to the countinghouse tower on the other side of the palace grounds.

The pale man turned to the boy. “If you try to run away, I will cut off her nose, do you understand? The autarch won’t care.”

Pigeon looked at the man with narrowed eyes. If he was a dog, he would have growled, or more likely, simply bit without making a noise. At last he nodded.

“Well, come along then.” The man landed a single kick that made the boy whimper wordlessly and scramble awkwardly onto his feet so his bonds could be cut. Pigeon rubbed his wrists, unable to look at Qinnitan for the shame of having been part of her capture. “No tricks,” the man said. “It would waste time if I have to kill or cripple either of you, but it wouldn’t change anything important. Move along now.” He pointed to the doorway. “We don’t want to keep your master waiting. He’s much less patient than I am, and much less kind.”

Qinnitan stepped out into the light of the deserted courtyard, the cord chafing her ankles at each constrained step. She was too shocked and empty even to cry. The space of a few heartbeats had changed everything. Only a few dozen yards away in Kossope House she had friends, a life, all the things she had wanted so badly, but they were all lost now. Instead, she belonged to that madman again—the terrifying, utterly heartless Living God on Earth.