Kaden hesitated. Triste glared at him, tears standing in her eyes, then looked away. Not, however, before he had carved a saama’an of the rage and fear, the betrayal etched in her expression. He took a deep breath, then twisted the cloth once more before finishing the knot. A goat could slip free of such a loose knot, but Triste was not a goat, and he refused to cinch the rope any tighter. Still, the whole thing felt wrong. I’m not hurting her, he reminded himself. And if Tan’s right, all this is crucial. The thinking was sound, but he could feel what the Shin called the “beast brain” prowling, agitated, inside the steel cage of reason.

He straightened from his task, then, at the monk’s direction, pulled her to her feet. She swayed unsteadily. Tan’s naczal never left her neck.

“That way,” he said, gesturing with his head toward a gate on the far side of the island. “The girl first.”

“You don’t need to do this,” Triste began. She ignored Kaden, spoke through him to the older monk as though he didn’t exist. And for all the good I’m doing her, I suppose I don’t. He was surprised to realize the thought stung, and he went to work on the emotion, grinding it out as one would grind a stray ember from the hearth beneath a heel. Tan did not respond, just pressed slightly with that spear of his until Triste stumbled forward.

“Which one leads to the Dawn Palace?” Kaden asked carefully.

Maybe the older monk was right, maybe Triste was Csestriim, and evil, and bent on some nefarious purpose; in that case, Kaden would do what was necessary. Could he bring himself to kill her? He tried to imagine it, like butchering a goat, a quick pull on the knife, blood urgent as breath, a final spasm, and it would be done. If it turned out that Triste was in some way responsible for the slaughter at the monastery, for the deaths of Akiil and Nin, for Pater, for his father, he thought he could do it. But if she was not, if it were Tan whose vision was clouded, well then, the time might come when acquiring his own knowledge of the network of gates would prove crucial. “Are they marked in some way?”

“None leads to the Dawn Palace,” Tan replied. “Nin spoke the truth about the Malkeenians and the kenta, but the Csestriim built more than one network. Your lineage knows nothing of this island, these gates. Nor do the Shin.”

Kaden frowned. “Then how do you . . .”

“The knowledge of the Ishien is older than that of the Shin, more complete.”