“I have to know for sure if Indu is my father or not,” she said, her voice low. “There’s still a chance that my dad is . . . my dad.” She looked over at me. “The Inhemsk Project does DNA testing, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” I pulled my feet off the railing so I could sit up straighter. “But we don’t have his DNA.”

“No, but we have yours,” she countered. “We can check if we’re sisters.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I mean, I think so.”

“Good.” She smiled thinly, then downed her drink in one long gulp.

Bryn offered me another drink, but the length of the day—the last few days, honestly—hit me all at once. I declined and changed into my pajamas just before sacking out on the futon.

I woke up from a nightmare I couldn’t remember, but I was gasping and sweating, and it took a minute to shake the feeling that spiders were crawling all over me.

But when I realized I was safe in Bryn’s office, bathed in morning light, I took a deep breath, and I got up to open the window. I pulled over the desk chair so I could sit right in front of it and let the cool summer breeze blow over me. It also let in the stench of the city, mostly the horse manure this close to the palace stables, but the air felt good, cooling the drying sweat on my skin.

The thing about Bryn’s apartment was that the walls were very thin, but that wasn’t surprising. The complex was kingdom housing, similar to the tacky addition on the Mimirin, made for government employees. The biggest difference was that this was new and modern, because the old one had been destroyed in the war. At the Mimirin it was mostly docents and intellects, but here it was all guards and trackers.

From the other room, I heard Bryn and Ridley talking—her quieter but firm and calm, him a bit louder, anxious, uncertain.

“I’m not telling you not to do this,” Ridley was saying. “But you are talking about using part of your savings on something really spur of the moment.”

“I know, but this is important to me,” Bryn replied evenly. “I have to know who I really am.”

“But Bryn, you do know who you are,” he argued. “You’ve always known. You’re the most bullheaded troll I’ve ever met, and that’s not changing if you’re Kanin or Trylle or human, for Odin’s sake.”

“Really? You really believe it wouldn’t change anything if I was human?”

He was silent, then mumbled something I couldn’t hear, then louder, “. . . but that’s not okay. You shouldn’t lose your job.”

“But I would, and we both know it,” Bryn said.

“Do you think Indu is human?”

“Ulla doesn’t know for sure. She thought maybe Omte or álfar.”