Adare paused. It would be easy to let it go, to leave the conversation on a note of uneasy détente and turn her attention to the challenges awaiting her to the south. There were enough dangerous people hoping to see her dead without adding the ’Kent-kissing Atmani to the list. On the other hand, Nira’s presence in the pilgrimage seemed too strange to be utter coincidence, as though she, too, were swept south on the same unsettled political tide that carried Adare. It was hard to imagine what an immortal leach might want with a crumbling city like Olon, but there was a chance that her unspoken goals coincided in some way with Adare’s. Unfortunately, the trading of secrets involved trading.

Don’t give, Adare thought grimly, don’t get.

“I’m raising an army,” Adare said. “That’s why I’m going to Olon.”

Nira pursed her wrinkled lips. “S’wrong with the four ya already got?”

“They aren’t mine,” Adare replied.

“Annurian armies. Annurian princess. Sound like yours ta me.”

“They belong to il Tornja,” Adare said, voice tight. “And he is not my ally.”

“Ah . . .” Nira let the syllable hang in the light breeze. “It’s like that, then.” She shook her head. “Civil war, girl. It’s nothing ta fuck with.”

“I’ve got no choice,” Adare said, more heat than she intended in her voice. “The kenarang murdered my father.”

Nira shrugged. “Your father sat on that ugly rock, but he was just one man. Lot more than that are gonna die, you go startin’ a war. Who’s gonna do the dyin’ on your side?”

“The Sons of Flame,” Adare replied.

Nira raised a bushy eyebrow.

“They hate the empire already,” Adare went on, trying to sound like she believed the words as they left her lips. Trying to believe them. “I just need to convince Vestan Ameredad that I’m a different type of Malkeenian.”

She fell silent, waiting for the old woman to berate her for shortsightedness, stupidity, or both, but Nira just sucked air between her crooked teeth. “Ameredad,” she said after a while. “Might be we’re not just on the same path, but in the same wagon, too.”

Adare frowned. “What do you want with him?”

“Maybe nothing. Can’t say till I see the man, till I see his face.”

“What’s that going to tell you?”

“Whether he’s the one did this to us,” the old woman replied, voice hardening.

Adare hesitated. A cold wind had picked up, whipping down from the north, churning the canal to a froth of chop and spray, whipping Adare’s face with her hair. Oshi turned from the water, shaking his head, tears coursing down his weathered cheeks.

“They’re gone,” he said, gesturing to the water. “The fish are gone.” His voice was lost, plaintive, pitifully weak against the gusts. “Did I kill them, Nira? Did I kill them all?”