Adare hesitated, tried to think. If she was going to lead Annur, she needed to be able to reason even as her mind reeled. If half of what the man claimed were true, a quarter of it—if he had fought in all those battles, had counseled the greatest of the Malkeenian emperors—then she could use him. No, she amended silently, she needed him. Despite her father’s tutelage, despite the hundreds of tomes she’d read on politics and law, finance and governance, she had no idea how to handle the threat posed by Long Fist, no idea how to manage the various borders, no strategy to keep peace down in the Waist. Letting il Tornja live was a danger, a risk, but risk was everywhere. The man was a well-honed tool, one she could turn to her advantage, to Annur’s advantage. . . .

“Stand aside, Adare,” Nira said.

Slowly, Adare shook her head. “Hear me out. For my sake, and for yours.” She raised her chin toward Oshi. “For his.”

Nira hesitated, then spat on the floor.

“You have a hundred words.”

Adare didn’t pause. “He can fix you.”

“Horseshit,” the old woman snarled. She looked past Adare at the kenarang. “Go ahead, try to ride her lie.”

Il Tornja shook his head slowly. “I will not. I don’t know how to cure you.”

Adare cursed him silently. Why he had chosen this particular moment, after a lifetime of lies, to cleave to the truth, she had no idea, but she pressed ahead regardless. “You might not know, but you have ideas.” If there was one thing she’d learned about Ran il Tornja, it was that the man had ideas. On politics. On war. On love. He might not know what had gone wrong with Oshi and Nira, but he’d had hundreds of years to wonder. “You have theories,” she said.

He watched her from beneath hooded eyes, then chuckled. “I do,” he replied.

“And now that you have the last two Atmani here,” Adare said, gesturing to Nira and Oshi, “it’s possible you can help them.”

He hesitated. “There is always a possibility.”

“Fuck possibility,” Nira growled. “It was possibility that broke us in the first place. I will have my revenge, and see an end to this.”

The words were rock hard, sharp as chipped obsidian, but Adare could see something in the old woman’s face, the first crumbling of doubt.

Adare tried to speak directly to that doubt, driving her argument into the hesitation like mason’s spikes hammered into a stone’s seam. “You can make that decision for yourself, Nira, but not for your brother.”

“Don’t go lecturin’ me on what I can and can’t do. I’ve been makin’ his decisions since before your fucking empire was born, girl.”