“I’ll tell you what it is,” Trant said, leaning far over the table, eyes wide. He waved Kaden closer with his knife, close enough that Kaden could smell the reek of his rotting teeth. “It’s a blessing, is what it is. A blessing.”

Kaden hesitated. All the talk of Hunters and Soldiers seemed to be making Trant more and more agitated. He rocked front and back, as though seated atop a lame horse, and watched Kaden with febrile intensity. Suddenly, the wisest course seemed to be finishing the meal in silence, saying and doing as little as possible to disturb Trant further. But then, if Kaden was going to forge any kind of trust with the Ishien, if he was going to convince them to work with him, to share what they knew, he needed to understand them, and at the moment, the only person who could explain the workings of the Dead Heart was Trant.

“What makes the Hunters Hunters?” Kaden asked finally, carefully. “How do you decide?”

“Decide?” Trant laughed bleakly, scratching suddenly at a vicious scar on his forearm. “We don’t decide any more than you decided to have those eyes. Some men have it inside them. It. The blessing. Some don’t. Just . . . don’t.” He paused, eyes darting off toward the roof, as though reliving something. “Learned that clearly enough in the purging.” He seemed, abruptly, to be talking about himself.

“The purging?”

Trant sucked in a great breath, then bared his teeth. “The purging. The passage, we call it, sometimes. Sometimes just the pain.” He shivered, his whole body trembling. “The ’Kent-kissing pain. It’s how they sort the Hunters from the Soldiers, how they see who has the gift.”

“What is it? The purging or passage?”

“What? What? It’s what it fucking sounds like, is what. Pain on top of pain piled on pain. Weeks of cutting and burning,” he continued, almost shouting as he pulled open his jerkin. A web of scars stretched across his chest, old, brutal wounds that had healed poorly. Kaden jerked back, but Trant was too absorbed in his account to notice. “Cutting,” he said again, drawing the word out as though tasting it, “and burning, and breaking. The fucking breaking. Drowning. And cold. Again and again, over and over until you shatter,” he said, stabbing at his own skull with a finger. “Until you break up here.” He shivered himself still, then turned his eyes on Kaden. “The pain,” he said again, more quietly, as though that explained anything.

Kaden stared for a moment, corralling the horror stampeding through his chest, taming it. “Why?” he asked finally.