Kaden forced himself to look at the scars for three heartbeats, forced himself to keep his face calm, impassive. That the Ishien were sick, broken, was growing clearer and clearer, but he could feel a hard truth in Matol’s words, and unbidden, the memory of the skeletons in Assare filled his mind, the small, clutching hands, the skulls. If the Ishien were broken, it was the Csestriim who had shattered them.

“Enough talk,” Tan said, gesturing to the door.

Matol shook his head. “We’re waiting for someone. Someone I want her to see.” He narrowed his lids, looking slyly from Tan to Kaden, then back. “I told Rampuri not to mention it, but I suspect he told you something about our other prisoner.” He stabbed Kaden roughly in the chest with an extended finger. “Didn’t he? Didn’t he?”

Kaden held his breathing steady. Inhale. Exhale. In and out.

“What other prisoner?”

At first glance, the other prisoner appeared neither deadly nor immortal.

The Shin warned their acolytes about the dangers of expectation, the power of anticipation to distort both sight and memory. Kaden had, accordingly, avoided putting a face to the Csestriim menace. They don’t look like monsters, he reminded himself as he waited for the prisoner to be hauled up from the deeper dungeons. They were able to pass as human. Even the man’s name was unremarkable: Kiel. It might have been the name of a baker, a fisherman.

He’d been shocked to discover that the Ishien already had a prisoner, one of the immortal beings they had hunted for so long, but once he accepted the notion, he thought he was prepared for anything. When the guards kicked open the door, however, and shoved their charge through, hands bound before him with a stout length of rope, Kaden realized he’d been expecting something after all, something harder, more formidable.

Kiel was an old man, stooped and hesitant, a faint limp marring his already uncertain gait. Scars puckered his face and hands—a delicate tracery of white lines punctuated by blunt, ugly weals, the result, Kaden surmised queasily, of heated steel. The Csestriim looked dark-skinned, but when he put a hand to his face to scrub the tangled hair from his eyes, Kaden realized that most of the darkness resulted from layers of filth and grime. The man’s apparent age, too, was an illusion—cleaned and healthy he might look only halfway into his fourth decade. Even so, he was a far cry from the formidable monster Kaden had unknowingly expected.

Then he raised his eyes.