After a circuitous route through Annur’s southern streets, they reached the Godsway. After Olon, where even the largest thoroughfares twisted unpredictably between towers and falling palaces, where to leave the main streets was to step into a labyrinth of alleyways so narrow that Adare could almost touch both walls with her hands, the Godsway felt more like a geological feature, a massive, sword-straight rift bisecting the city, than it did a road built by men. Storefronts lined both sides of the street, merchants and craftsmen selling everything from firefruit, to bright-plumed birds, to small, intricate altars of wood and stone. Down the center of the avenue, set on stone plinths twice her own height, huge statues of the young gods and the old watched over the city—Intarra and Hull, Pta and Astar’ren, Ciena and Meshkent and their children set one after the other. The people of Annur used the statues as they might any other landmark—“Go to the butcher just north of Eira.” “I’ll meet you by Heqet’s feet”—but Adare felt the stone gazes of the monuments as she rode beneath them, hard and unforgiving, and after glancing up a couple of times, she kept her eyes forward.

After the congestion of the city and the stares of the gods, it was a relief to finally approach the red walls of the Dawn Palace. Intarra’s Spear loomed over it all, slate gray in the fading light, the top of the tower lost in cloud. Adare resisted the urge to crane her neck to peer up at the thing. It was her palace, after all, her home. It would not do to be seen gawking.

The huge cedar doors of the Godsgate remained closed, of course. No one, not even emperors, presumed to use the gateway ordained for the passage of the divine. The Great Gate beside it, however, was flung open wide, flanked by what must have been a hundred palace guards at stiff attention. She had fled the palace in the drab wool of a servant, but was returning in all the splendor of a Malkeenian princess. Somehow, it seemed too easy.