I rode out to the construct encampment under a flag of truce with only Jovis, our ossalens running alongside the wagon. I couldn’t trust anyone else with what I was about to offer Nisong. I glanced down at our hands, next to one another on the bench, yet not touching.

He cleared his throat. “So were we planning on eating or did the dirt beneath my fingernails dissuade your appetite?”

I shook my head, smiling despite myself. One of Urame’s servants had handed in a basket from the kitchen. I uncovered the contents to discover flaky, savory pastries that smelled strongly of curry. I took one and handed the basket to Jovis. It was filled with beef and potatoes, the curry mild, the pastry slightly sweet. Brushed with honey.

“Those who say Gaelung is a backwater clearly have no taste,” he said with a sigh. He gave me a sidelong look. “Do you actually have something to offer her or were you just going to…?” He mimed thrusting a hand out, grasping, and pulling toward himself.

It wasn’t the last secret that I had, but he might guess at the last one if I revealed this one. But he was right, I needed to start learning to trust the people close to me if I didn’t want to end up like my father. “My father… he was growing something in the caves beneath the palace. A replica.”

Jovis’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “A replica of what?”

I squeezed my eyes shut tight, took in a deep breath. “A replica of himself. Not a construct, a true replica. No shards. Don’t ask me how it’s done; I don’t quite understand it myself. All I know is that he cut off one of his own toes to create it. But if my suspicions are correct, Nisong isn’t just calling herself that out of some attempt to lend herself legitimacy. She might be my father’s attempt to re-create his late wife. He’d told me he’d burned her body before he could use any part of it to make a replica, but he might have tried to put her memories into a construct. It would explain why he killed her family. He didn’t have Nisong’s blood to use in the memory machine, but the blood of her relatives might have worked. He would have needed a lot of it.” Would he make the connections? Would he wonder about the daughter of the Emperor, rarely seen outside the palace walls?

He frowned and my heartbeat thudded against my ribs. “How did she get to the north-eastern reaches of the Empire?”