You don’t belong.

When Enrique had found work as Séverin’s historian, it was the first time he had dared to believe otherwise. He thought he’d found his place. Séverin was the first to believe in him, to encourage him … to offer friendship. With Séverin, his ideas found root and his scholarship soared to the extent that even the Ilustrados and their nationalist groups whose ideas could one day reshape his country, had let him in, and though he was nothing more than a member on the fringes writing his historical articles, it was more than he had ever been given … and it made him hope for more.

A fool’s illusion, in the end.

Séverin had taken his dreams, and used them against him. He had promised that Enrique would always be heard, and then silenced him. He had taken their friendship and bent it to his needs until it broke, and Ruslan had picked up the pieces and fashioned it into a weapon.

All of which had left Enrique here: utterly lost in every way, and almost certainly not in the right place.

Enrique reached up, gingerly touching the bandage covering his lost ear. He winced. Since they had left the Sleeping Palace, he had tried not to look at himself, but his reflection in the lagoons of Venice found him anyway. He looked off balance. Marked, even. Before, when he was in the wrong place, at least he could hide. But his cut-off ear was a declaration: I do not belong. See?

Enrique shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t afford to lose himself in pity.

“Come on … think.”

He looked around the cemetery, frowning. The length of the Isola di San Michele cemetery was little more than five hundred meters, and by now they’d circled the perimeter twice. This was the third time they were walking down this path lined with cypress trees. Just ahead, the path would curve into a row of statues of the archangels, who would turn their Forged heads to watch them pass. On the cemetery plots, the granite tombstones stood tall and elaborately curved, many of them crowned with wide crosses draped in Forged roses that would never lose their scent or shine, while the mausoleums bore little decoration on their exterior, hardly anything that would put Enrique in mind of a god with either no head or multiple heads.

“On the island of the dead, lies the god with not one head,” recited Enrique, turning the words over in his head, “… show the sum of what you see, and this will lead you straight to me.”

“Did you say something?” asked Hypnos.

“Me? No,” said Enrique quickly. “I’m just, er, reviewing the matriarch’s riddle for clues … again.”

“You still said something,” pointed out Zofia.

“Yes, well,” said Enrique. He could feel his face start to turn red. “The interpretation affects what it is we’re looking for and such. It’s quite a vague sentence.”

“I thought we are looking for a god with ‘not one head,’” said Zofia, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds specific.”