“You are an exile.” Aia had arrived in the company of a beautiful horseman named Ihuake Ro, each of them carrying their ducal banners as they fled the Masquerade. “You have no land.”

“If my sister’s children die then I have the claim to the Duchy Nayauru,” the woman said, through dark and fulsome lips. The most infuriating thing about her was her utter indifference to his eye. She held herself with poise and confidence, but without the cave whore’s desperate invitation. Atakaszir knew better than most Stakhi that desperation was the keen whistle of death. “What other option have you, Your Majesty the King? What else can you show your brave men and your engineers to sustain the necessity of your existence? You must have a prize out of this winter’s debacle. You must show them a little piece of sun and fertile soil.”

She was right. He had no alternative. Failing revenge on Baru, which would save his honor, he would need a token of hope: which would not honor him, but at least give him something to bargain with, the merchant’s craven power.

“Is it true you need a hundred men to satisfy you?” he asked her, for she was so obviously Maia.

She laughed. He liked the laugh. It reminded him of his bannermen, joyful and unconsidered. Not like the terrified girls the other Mansions had tried to bride to him when they thought he was ascendant. “I don’t need any men to satisfy me,” she said. “My heart is set on a return to the land I love, Majesty, with the steel avalanche at my back. Give me that and you will have my faith.”

The steel avalanche. The avalanche camped out in the dry lake bed called the erbajaste, waiting, waiting, for word to march. He could turn around now and see them, their spears wavering in the hot dry air.

If he wanted to survive that army he would need an Aurdwynni bride and he would need to invade. Now.

But the masks were still out there. The Falcresti who had taken his brother and bottled up the eastern sea, blockading the Stakhi from their fish. And Atakaszir knew the appalling treachery of those people, for Baru Cormorant had taught him.

When he invaded, when the steel avalanche crashed down into Aurdwynn’s northern duchies of Lyxaxu and Vultjag and Erebog, the Masquerade would use Aurdwynn as an enormous firebreak. Plagues would spread. Forests would burn. Millions would drown in a mud cauldron of pus and shit as the laughing Falcresti bet on who would die last.

If only he had some way to guarantee they would not interfere—

A low horn blew from the slot pass that opened onto the col. Atakaszir’s heart seized a moment, for he remembered the day the news of disaster had come from Sieroch. And just as on that day, a kite rose up in signal.