Annick studied Valyn for a heartbeat or two, then nodded, slipping out the window. If she felt uncomfortable hanging from her fingertips while standing on the tiny ledges, she didn’t show it. In fact, she moved smoothly and efficiently over the stone, pausing every so often to free a hand and spool out the cord, then moving on. It was a simple solution, almost laughably simple, but when she was finished, Kaden could see how the thin line might tangle a climber or provide some warning.

“If it’s other Kettral who are after us,” Annick observed, dusting off her hands and reclaiming her bow from where it leaned against the wall, “they’ll expect the cord.”

Valyn nodded. “They’ll expect everything we do. That’s no reason to make it easier on them.”

“The sturdiest section of floor is over there,” Gwenna said, gesturing without looking up from her work stringing charges. “If you’re going to hunker down in one spot, that’s where I’d do it.”

Annick crossed to the area the demolitions master had indicated, then nudged at a pile of debris with the toe of her boot.

“Anything interesting?” Valyn asked.

“More bones,” she replied.

He shook his head. “Any sense of what killed these poor bastards?”

The sniper knelt, running a finger along the pitted surfaces.

“Stabbed,” she replied after a moment. “Blade nicked the third and fourth ribs in each case, probably ruptured the heart.”

She might have been talking about shearing goats, those blue eyes of hers glacially cold in the dim lamplight. Kaden watched as she went about her work, trying to read her curt movements, to see the sniper’s mind in the constant sweep of her gaze, in her tendons as they flexed with the motion of her wrists, in the angle of her head as she turned from one rib cage to the next. What did she think, looking at those old, brittle bones? What did she feel?

The monks had taught Kaden to observe—he could paint any member of his brother’s Wing with his eyes closed—but to understand, that was another matter. After so many years surrounded by the stone of the mountains and by men who might have been carved from that stone, he had little sense of how to translate words and actions into emotions; no idea, even, if his own attenuated emotions bore any resemblance to those of others.

He still felt fear, and hope, and despair, but the sudden arrival of the Aedolians and Kettral, the arrival of people who were not Shin, made him realize just how far he had traveled along the monks’ path, how fully, in the course of those long, cold mountain years, he had filed smooth his own feelings. He was Emperor now—or would be if he survived—the ostensible leader of millions, and yet all those millions were animated by feelings he could no longer understand.