When she came to, she was lying on her side on a scuffed floor in front of a wooden fence. Her hands were tied in front of her with stout fireweed cord. Her ankle and head ached. What was a fence doing inside a house? She looked through the fence and saw a line of small kennels, like one would use for an adolescent dog. The room was mostly dark. A thin line of light came in through ventilation slits high up on the ceiling. The stink of the place was overpowering. It smelled like urine and old feces and unwashed bodies. Ghrasia gagged.

She heard a thump and looked to the other end of the room. The assassin sat at a broad, bloody table. The remains of Halimey’s body littered the floor, tangled in his blue tunic and trousers and gray coat. The assassin was hacking up hunks of the boy’s leg on the table.

A massive wave of terror seized her. Ghrasia tried to sit up. She punched it back down and breathed through it. She heard a soft whimpering sound from the kennels.

“They haven’t eaten in days,” the assassin said. “They’re very hungry.”

Ghrasia tried to think of something clever. The door lay between her and the assassin. She saw a large, intricate padlock on it, the sort that only came on crates from Dorinah. No one used that type of lock in Dhai. They required an exacting series of actions to remove them, pushing sliders and rotating pins in the correct order.

“How long have you been here?” Ghrasia asked. Talking made her head hurt more, but she suspected not talking would ease the headache far sooner than she wished.

“Many years,” he said. “My brothers and I.”

“Where are your brothers now? They help you farm this place?”

“There are a dozen of us,” he said. “We have worked in Raona longer than you could imagine. You are not the first to find us. Only the most famous.”

He raised his cleaver. “I am a good boy. Loyal to the Kai. But she did not say we’d be killing our own people. No, she did not say.”

“Kai Kirana is long dead,” Ghrasia said.

“Your Kirana is dead, yes. Not mine.”

Something moaned from the kennels. It didn’t sound like a dog.

“They all made me the messenger,” he said. “Passing their notes to one another. But I’m more than that. Stronger.” The cleaver came down. Bone crunched.

Ghrasia flinched. “That boy was a friend of mine,” she said.

“He was weak.”

The assassin threw a hunk of Halimey’s thigh over the fence. It landed with a wet thud on the floor. She heard more whimpering from the kennels. An excited stir of movement.