Without another word, the monk slipped out the door on bare, silent feet, leaving Kaden alone holding the rough cup. Urgency pressed down on him like the air before a storm, heavy and pregnant. It was possible Matol and his men were outside even as he waited, watching the chapterhouse, preparing to enter, possible they had already captured Kiel and Triste. . . .

Calm, Kaden told himself, lifting the cup to his lips, taking a small sip, holding the water on his tongue, moving it around the inside of the mouth, then feeling it snake down his throat, cool against the heat that burned inside him. He waited three heartbeats, took another sip, and the anxiety retreated. A moment later Iaapa stepped into the room.

“A visitor from Ashk’lan,” he said, round face creasing into a smile. “It is more than a year since we have welcomed a brother from the Bone Mountains.”

Aside from Phirum Prumm, Iaapa was the only fat monk Kaden had ever seen, a short man with skin pale as milk and ears that stuck out as though tacked to the sides of his spherical head. He shared no physical resemblance with Scial Nin, the abbot of Ashk’lan, but there was a similar distance in the gaze, a stillness of the body, that suggested many years spent in the discipline of the Blank God.

“What is the word from the other end of the world?”

Kaden hesitated, the pushed ahead. “The word is bleak. Ashk’lan is destroyed and the monks are dead.”

Another man might have reeled at the account, raged against it, demanded evidence or explanation. Iaapa simply pursed his lips, waiting silently for Kaden to continue.

“I can’t tell you the whole thing,” Kaden said. “There’s no time. Soldiers came for me, Aedolian guardsmen commanded by Tarik Adiv, my father’s Mizran Councillor. It seems to have been part of a plot to destroy my entire family.”

“And the monks?” Iaapa asked finally. “We take no part in the politics of the empire.”

“Adiv was thorough,” Kaden replied bleakly.

“Then we will need to send others to Ashk’lan to rebuild.”

There was no mention of mourning, but then, the Shin did not mourn. A part of Kaden felt as though he had abandoned the bodies of the monks at Ashk’lan, but the monks themselves did little more for their dead, carrying them up the trail to the high places where the wind, weather, and ravens could break apart the final illusion of the self. After just a few weeks with people who held their selves and their survival sacrosanct, Kaden had forgotten how lightly the monks who raised him regarded the powers of Ananshael.

“How have you returned here?” Iaapa asked.

“I don’t have time to explain. Men may be coming for me even now.” Kaden glanced around the small room. “My brother, Valyn. Has he come here? It would have been weeks ago, most likely.”