“No,” Fulton said, voice still as a stone. “You will not refuse him.”

“Ah, fuck,” Birch said, glancing away.

“This is what we are for, Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch’s first name. She hadn’t even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there’s no saying what the zealots will do to her.”

“There’s no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees,” Birch pointed out. “We can’t save her if we’re dead.”

“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”

“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.

“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying.”

Adare had Intarra’s irises, but the guardsman’s gaze burned. Adare could argue, fight to save them both, but she knew already that she was not going to argue. She had known, even as she spoke of confronting Lehav, that Fulton would refuse her offer, known that his duty would weigh heavier in the scales than her guilt, known that her suggestion was empty as air even as she spoke it. She had watched it all coming from a long way off, watched it just as she’d watched the black storm move in. She’d seen it all coming except for the sick pit of self-hatred that gaped inside her, that ate at her guts, that would never, ever heal.

For just a moment, the sight of the Everburning Well distracted Adare from the killing that had to happen there.

Over the last few nights of the pilgrimage she had stared at the column of light bisecting the horizon, white and pale as a thousand moons, blotting out the meager pinpricks of the stars to either side. For sixteen centuries, the Everburning Well had been a beacon for the faithful and a warning to unbelievers both, an eternal symbol of Olon’s sanctity, the origin of the faith, and the reason Annur’s pilgrims had chosen this crumbling city over a dozen others.

Despite Adare’s flaming irises and the alleged ancestry of her own family, she had always been skeptical of the gods. Divine favor was too easy to claim, too difficult to disprove. Anything could be the work of the gods—a fallen sparrow, an unexpected flood, a single tree flowering earlier or later than the rest. The stories were all too old, the evidence too scant.