We both tiptoed around the subject that loomed between us. He was Alanga. So was I. But I knew something else. “I must admit the Shardless Few helping to save the Empire puts me in a difficult position, Gio. Or should I stop calling you that? Should I call you by your original name?”

Everything in his demeanor shifted, went tense and jittery. He was an alley cat with his back arched and ears flat to his head. “What do you mean?”

I closed the trap. “Dione.”

He stood stock still. Opened his mouth as if to dissemble and then, deciding better of it, shut it. I lifted the journal. His gaze flitted to it and his face told me that I’d hit my mark. “You translated it.”

“Yes. You survived the massacre of the Alanga.” I judged his bitter expression. “No. He spared your life.”

Dione’s mouth twisted. “He thought he was being merciful, leaving me alive and with only one damaged eye. But it’s no mercy to live on – year after year after year – when all those you’ve loved are dead.”

A thousand questions swirled in my mind. I couldn’t stop them from escaping. “What do you want? Why stay hidden for so long? Where is your ossalen?”

He scoffed at me, his nose wrinkled with contempt. “I don’t have to answer your questions. I am not beholden to any Emperor.”

I pitched my voice low, soft. “What about a fellow Alanga?”

For a long time, he didn’t speak. He stared at me, and then turned his face to the window. “It’s taken me years of work. So many years. Another identity, another life. All just to bring them back.”

Another identity, another life. Was he speaking of his work with the Shardless Few? And then everything in me went still. I felt as though I were beneath the surface of the Endless Sea, water filling my ears. I reached a hand up to where I’d so often watched others touch. That spot on my skull. A spot that was unmarked. The Sukais didn’t tithe their own. And Jovis – he’d told me the story of his Tithing Festival, of the soldier who’d taken pity on his family and had only left him with a scar. Ragan – a cloudtree monk in a monastery, monasteries that were not under my father’s jurisdiction.

And the Shardless Few rescued children from Tithing Festival.

All of Gio’s lofty ideals, the insistence that the Shardless Few were here to bring about a better life for the people – had he ever meant them? Or was it just a front for what really mattered to him? To Dione?

“Those with shards taken can’t bond with ossalen,” I whispered.

He fixed me with a level gaze. “And you’ve just opened the floodgates by ending the Tithing Festival for good. So I should thank you for that.”