Valyn inhaled slowly, but whatever he’d smelled or thought he’d smelled was gone. There was only the ragged, rusted edge of the leach’s fear, fear he held firmly in check.

The shaman frowned, but did not respond.

“More?” Huutsuu asked.

He shook his head. “He has told us what he knows.” After a long pause, Long Fist turned to Valyn.

“I trusted Sanlitun,” the Urghul leader said quietly. “Although he led a soft people, he understood something of hardness. Now . . .” He held a hand toward Valyn, palm up, as though offering something precious but invisible. “Your father is dead, murdered, and I believe we share a common foe.”

“Meaning what?” Valyn asked, his legs suddenly unsteady beneath him.

“Meaning that together we can avoid a war.”

Despite Long Fist’s words, the sounds of martial readiness shivered the air: the drumming of hooves, shouts of men and women, cold clatter of steel on steel. Just a shield, the shaman claimed, but thousands of mounted warriors were never just a shield. Full-scale war had not come to Annur in generations, and now, according to Long Fist, the decision to halt it lay in Valyn’s hands.

“And how do we avoid war,” he asked carefully, “when il Tornja, the kenarang and regent both, is bent on it?”

The shaman smiled, revealing those bright, sharpened canines. “You kill him.”

24

The burn was not a burn. Not, at least, like any burn Adare had ever seen. The intricate tracery of red scar looked more like the swirls of henna that brides from Rabi and Aragat inked onto their skin, a thousand ramifying twists and whorls snaking around her arms and torso, down her legs and up her neck like tiny red vines spreading into her hair. Unlike vines, however, unlike ink, the burn was a part of her. When she flexed her arms or fingers, those burns shifted with the flesh, the scar-smooth skin catching the light until it seemed to shine, to glow. The wounds throbbed, but the pain was cold and bright rather than chafing. Still, when Adare tried to get out of bed, she felt her legs turn to water and her mind fade, all thought blotted out in a great wash of light.

It was a day before she could cross to the window and another before she could reach the door, but on the third morning, despite the wobble in her gait, the brightness stamped on her sight, she insisted on seeing her Aedolians. Lehav and Nira had assured her over and over that both men had survived the ordeal, but Adare needed to witness it herself, to stand in the same room with them, to touch them and hear them speak.