My laughter carries on the wind, curling around them, caressing their skin like a kiss, before I am completely gone.

The Messenger is waiting for me, perched on the edge of an old gabled roof, so still he might be one of the city’s weathered gargoyles.

“Femi—”

“What did you think you were doing?” His voice is a snarl.

His barely controlled anger hits me like a wave, and I take a step back. “You took your sweet time,” I retort sharply.

“Aye, and if those two fools had not intervened, I’d have arrived only to sing a death song over your corpse.”

Femi turns, and it strikes me that there is something odd in the way he is standing.

“You took an oath that you would not seek her out, that you would not attempt to rescue her. Beating you to death was the most merciful thing the Fleshers might have done if they had discovered you were a girl. But the Tiger is afraid of nothing and no one. Law or no Law, he’d probably take you, just to see what the other Lords would do. He’d feed you the poppy, and turn you into …”

I blanche at his words.

“You swore you would not do this, Nina,” Femi says again. “You cannot help her. Not this way.”

Though I know his words are true, a storm of rage rises within me. “How can you speak of oaths while she is in there—you who swore you cared for her!”

It is as if I have slapped him across the face. He stops, trembling and towering over me in anger, his face turning hard and cold.

“It is because I care for her that I promised to protect you. It was the last thing she asked of me, Nina—the only thing she asked of me. If she’d asked me to flee with her, I’d have gone. If she had asked me for Death the Endless, I’d have given her a blade.” He swallows and looks down, cradling his hands. “And even though she did not ask it of me, did you really think I wouldn’t try to find her? I who hear all and see all that happens in the Guilds. Did you think I wouldn’t have called in every debt, paid every coin and jewel in my possession, to try to save her? Did you think I would not come for her myself?”

They broke his hands. Azelma’s terrified voice lances my brain.

I look in fear to his hands. He stills as I reach out and push back the long sleeves of his cloak to find a tangle of misshapen fingers, little more than gnarled claws, bruised, twisted, and broken.

“I am Aves, the Elanion, Messenger to the nine Guilds of the Miracle Court,” Femi says in a trembling voice. “But seeking to steal from a Guild Lord could not go unpunished. It is the Law. And only because I am trusted, only because I am Tomasis’s blood-born brother and he pleaded for me—for this alone I was spared.”