Adare spun to find the old woman standing just a few feet inside the back door, her brother hunched in the shadows behind her. She looked the same—stoop-backed, hair a curled halo of gray about her wizened face—but there was something in her eyes, something sharp and bright that Adare had never seen there. For half a heartbeat she just stared at the woman she had made her councillor, and then, behind her, just where il Tornja was standing, she heard the clatter of steel dropping to the wooden floor. She turned once more to find Fulton still holding his sword, or what was left of it.

The blade had been cut cleanly just above the hilt, the steel scar seared smooth. The length of the weapon lay on the pine boards at the kenarang’s feet, while around his neck floated a bright collar of flame. The slender line of fire throbbed, as though someone had slashed open the world and beyond it lay another world, one filled to the stars and beyond with unquenchable fire. Fulton took a step back, obviously baffled, but il Tornja didn’t move. His eyes, lit by the light of the burning collar, had gone hard as stones.

“What is this?” he asked, raising a hand to the ring, taking care not to touch it.

“You might call it justice,” Nira said, stepping forward from the shadows. “Or you might call it vengeance.” She smiled a tight smile. “Or you might just call it bad fucking luck. Doesn’t much matter, because either way, it’s gonna kill you.”

The kenarang turned his head just a fraction to meet her stare, narrowed his eyes, then, after a brief pause, said simply, “Ah. Rishinira.”

“Do I look different,” she asked quietly, “after all these years?”

He seemed to study the question. “You look stronger,” he said at last.

She barked a laugh, while Adare felt her own stomach shift queasily. The pieces fell abruptly, terrifyingly into place. Someone close to the center of power. A creature long given to schemes and machinations . . .

“What are you doing, Nira?” Adare asked slowly.

The old woman didn’t take her eyes from il Tornja. “Just finishing up a very tiresome errand.”

He was Csestriim. That was the only answer. Ran il Tornja was Csestriim. Her father’s killer was Csestriim. Somehow, impossibly, he was the Csestriim Nira had been searching for all these years, the one who made her nearly immortal. The brute fact smashed through everything Adare thought she understood about the world, and her mind refused it, kicked it away, grasped desperately for some other explanation. She felt as though she had looked into the bottom of a deep well and seen the sun.