Adare nodded, meeting her eyes. “You’ve protected him all this time—for what? So you could find a man, kill him, then die? Did you keep going all these centuries just for this?”

“Pretty much.”

“There is another end to this story,” Adare said, praying to Intarra that the woman would see, would understand, that the long years had not burned out of her the capacity for hope.

Nira stared at her, jaw set, then turned her eyes to the kenarang. For a long time she just watched him, studying the man’s face as though it were a page from a book in some barely remembered language.

“I tried to fix it,” he said quietly. “The world we broke”—he gestured toward Adare—“building Annur was an effort to put it right.”

“Annur can bugger itself bloody,” the old woman replied, lips drawn back from her jagged teeth.

“Do we fight, sister?” Oshi asked again, staring at il Tornja with an almost rabid intensity. “Is it time at last?”

Nira looked over at him, watched as her brother’s cheek twitched and his fingers clenched and unclenched around the grip of some unseen weapon. He shook as though palsied, and though he had stopped speaking, his lips continued to shape silent words. Slowly, moving for the first time since Adare met her with a weariness appropriate to her age, Nira raised a hand and set it gently on Oshi’s shoulder. “No,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

Then, as abruptly as it had bloomed, the collar of flame around the kenarang’s neck seemed to . . . twist. The air around it went strange, dark, and then it vanished. Nira sagged against her brother, the strength drained from her legs, but her voice was strong when she spoke, her eyes bright.

“The collar isn’t gone,” she said. “Just hidden. It will move with you, shift with you, travel with you so readily you don’t even know it’s there. You’ll be the freest slave in the world, but you’ll be my slave. At a word from me, at a thought, it will tighten and end you.”

Il Tornja cocked his head to the side. “Using your power like this, Rishinira . . .”

The woman hacked a jagged laugh out of the air. “Will do what? Make me insane?”

“Indeed.”

“Then you’d better figure out a way to make me better again before I lose my mind. A little more encouragement for you to help my brother. Ya don’t want a crazy woman holding your leash, I can promise you that.” She turned to Adare. “You think you need him? Use him. But when you’re not using him to save your little empire, he will be working to fix my brother, bending all his long life’s learning to making right what he has broken.” She raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that how it will be?”

The kenarang nodded, a thoughtful, measured gesture.