The outer neighborhoods of Annur may have been quiet, the people frightened inside their homes by the sight of an approaching army, but the streets of the city center were awash with the usual hum and clatter. Wagon-drivers goaded along their oxen and buffalo; shopkeepers hawked their wares from windows and doorways; porters shoved their way forward through the throng, some bent nearly double beneath bolts of cloth, baskets of firefruit or coal, loads of fresh-cut lumber still smelling of sap. Alone, Adare would have found it nearly impossible to move through the press, but then, she was hardly alone.

Adiv’s guards ringed her in a loose net, along with Fulton, Nira, and Oshi, who rode at her side. Adiv himself rode in front of the procession, trusting to the crowd to part before the pennons flapping behind and above him. Lehav had remained behind with the Sons of Flame, the implicit threat of the army one more blade to hold at the Mizran’s neck. By the time they reached the Godsway, word of her entry to the city had spread. Men and women had halted their conversation and commerce to stare, then bow their heads at her passage. If the Mizran Councillor intended to murder her, he had certainly picked a strange way to go about it, and as they progressed farther and farther into the city, Adare’s confidence rose.

Nira, however, was less sanguine.

“He’s a leach,” she hissed, leaning over in her saddle to speak almost directly in Adare’s ear.

Adare stared. “Adiv?”

The old woman nodded. “Strong, too. Dangerous.”

“My father appointed him Mizran Councillor,” Adare said, shaking her head.

“Then your father appointed a leach.”

Adare studied Adiv’s back, the knot in his blindfold. “How do you know?”

“Live a few hundred years, you pick up a few things.”

The revelation was a shock. Leaches were perversions, twisted creatures, and Nira’s own identity, the awful powers she held in check, still chafed at Adare like a sharp stone in a shoe. For all that she had begged the woman to be her councillor, she still found herself stealing glances at her several times a day, found herself wondering if she had made an awful mistake, had invited a serpent into her home. In a way, Nira’s identity made Adiv’s less shocking, and yet the thought that a leach sat near the very top of the ziggurat of Annurian power, that he served the kenarang, that he, of all people, had been dispatched to the Bone Mountains to recover Kaden, set her heart hammering.

Nothing for it now, she said, trying to sit straight in her saddle, to look unworried, imperial. Thousands of eyes were on her, and though she intended to see il Tornja’s head parted violently from his shoulders, it would do no good to let the citizens of the capital read her fury on her face.