I made my way to the Emperor’s cabin, trying to think of excuses to linger, to look around. She might not have brought the sword with her, but I had the feeling she liked to keep her secrets close. Like her father had.

The guard I’d assigned to the door nodded to me, and I waved her away, dismissing her from her post. I rapped on the wood. No one responded. I frowned. She’d said she was staying behind to help prepare for Reshi’s funeral, and the guard hadn’t indicated that Lin had left. “Mephi, check the mess hall just in case, would you?” He bounded down the hall and returned only a moment later, shaking his head. I knocked again, louder. Nothing.

A thousand possibilities ran through my mind. She was sleeping, she was dead, she’d been taken captive. I pounded on the door loud enough to wake the dead. “Eminence?”

Still no answer. She wasn’t sleeping.

I rattled the knob, found it locked. The air in my throat felt like a solid, twisting thing. I’d agreed to steal from Lin and now something had happened to her. I shoved a shoulder against the door. It bent with my weight but didn’t give way.

The thought of someone holding a knife to her throat, of someone cutting her, filled me with a dread I couldn’t name. They were impossible things. I needed them to be impossible things. If she was dead, she’d never give me one of her wry looks again, her sharp retorts, or laugh at one of my jokes as though I were actually funny. What if one of those assassins was – right now – holding a blade above her chest?

I took a step back and then rammed into the door, hard. The wood around the latch cracked, the door gave way.

Lin sat on the edge of her bed, a flask in her hand, her gaze clouded. Thrana cowered at her feet, something between a whine and a growl in her throat. I lowered my hands so the beast wouldn’t feel threatened and tried to make sense of the situation.

She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t under attack. She wasn’t asleep.

“Eminence?”

Lin didn’t respond. It was as though she couldn’t hear me at all. She stared at the wall, her lips slightly parted, her hands limp at her sides. She’d done the same thing when I’d seen her in the cave below the palace – drinking from a flask and then going blank. I took a hesitant step into the room and reached for the flask. It looked like one of the clay containers the cook kept fish sauce in. Nothing overly strange about it.

The Emperor blinked. Her gaze focused on me. “Jovis?” She frowned and looked at the broken door. “Is something wrong?”