Tan fixed Hellelen with a stare. “Kaden is my pupil,” he said, “not my sovereign. I would tell you to leave him free, but, like a child, you dislike being told.”

The Ishien didn’t shut Kaden in a cell, but they didn’t trust him, either. Trant’s presence was evidence enough of that. Hellelen had ordered the other man to “escort and guide” Kaden while the rest of them, Tan included, bustled off down a different corridor, dragging Triste roughly behind.

“Escort and guide” sounded welcoming enough, but when Kaden asked to follow the others, Trant refused. When he asked where Triste had been taken, Trant said he didn’t know. When he asked to see the commander of the fortress, Trant muttered that the commander was busy. Kaden chafed to know what was going on, to begin unraveling even a part of the tangled conspiracy that had killed his father, but Trant didn’t know the answers, and he wouldn’t let Kaden near anyone who did. There was little to do aside from follow, and so Kaden followed, misgivings mounting.

The Dead Heart was unlike any fortress Kaden had ever encountered: no curtain walls or gates, no crenellations or arrow loops. The twisting passages and low ceilings, the utter lack of windows, suggested that the whole thing was underground, hacked out of the stone itself, lit by smoky lanterns and smokier torches, the air cold and damp, freighted with salt and sea. At junctures in the passageway, Kaden could sometimes make out the dull susurrus and slosh of the waves. When that faded, there was nothing but the scrape of boots, the irregular drip of water into cold pools, and everywhere the sensation of weight, of thousands of tons of rock pressing down from above, silent and invisible.

Only when they finally reached a narrow hall filled with long tables and reeking of salt and stale smoke did Trant finally stop, gesturing Kaden to a bench while he filled two battered trenchers with steaming white fish, then seated himself across the table. For a while Kaden thought the man intended to eat in silence, sucking soft flesh from the bones, prodding at his meal with filthy fingers as though it displeased him.

If Trant had a family name, it had not surfaced. Like the rest of the Ishien, he wore a heavy sealskin cloak over oiled leather over wool, and like the rest of the Ishien, a short blade hung at his hip. Matted, tangled hair hung halfway to his shoulders, and he had a habit of sweeping it from his eyes when he spoke. If he had bathed in the past week, the water had had little effect on the grime caked beneath his fingernails and into the wrinkles of his knuckles and wrists.