“I can’t!” My voice gets more frustrated, and the other guards tense a little, their hands going back to their weapons. “Please. She’ll die here.” Up on the wall, two of the nearby sentries turn in our direction too, grateful for a little bit of drama to liven up their moods. Good.

“It’s the prison district,” the second guard snaps, growing impatient with me. “If she couldn’t handle being here, she shouldn’t have broken the law.”

The third soldier looks at the others, uncertain. “Come on,” she says, glancing at Jeran, whose beautiful face looks convincingly piteous. “Isn’t there anyone we can direct them to? Captain Mendal is still here for the night. They could talk to him.”

The first guard rolls his eyes and pushes us back again. “Get out of here,” he snaps. “If we stopped to indulge every desperate family member waiting around here at these gates, we’d never have time to piss in our pots.”

I repeat myself again, even more urgently this time, while beside me, Jeran stumbles. He grows weak against my shoulder, and I catch him as he slides faintly against me. I almost want to roll my own eyes at his performance.

The guards blink at him. “What the hell’s the matter with your cousin?” the first guard mutters.

“I’m sorry,” I say, helping Jeran stand. “He’s quite frail from a bad winter last year.”

The sympathetic guard starts up again. “I’ll go get Mendal.”

“Don’t you dare,” the second guard snaps, shooting her an annoyed glare.

Up on the wall, near the footbridge, I see a slight ripple of motion against the lengthening night. Adena and Aramin are on the move. The guards along the wall have all shifted in our direction now, intrigued by the spectacle of our inquiry.

“Get out of here, or I’ll make sure you both end up in prison with your aunt,” the first guard says, now drawing his gun and pointing it directly at us. “You can find out about her condition that way.”

The nice guard shoots him an annoyed glance before heading toward us. “Don’t mind Erik,” she tells me as she escorts us away from the gate. “He’s going to have a failed proposal on his hands soon. But you and your cousin need to leave. You can’t do anything for your aunt here.”

A part of me wants to talk to her some more. She reminds me of who I once was—stuck in this job, trapped in a world that wants me to tag along with its evil. I wonder if she knew Danna, if she would have been someone who’d speak up for me when I was first arrested or someone who would have stood quietly by.

But instead, I resist for a second longer as I pretend to struggle with Jeran’s unconscious weight.

When my eyes dart back up to the area near the footbridge, though, I notice that Adena’s and Aramin’s shadows are no longer anywhere to be seen. They’ve made their way into the prison, past the walls.