“What about down below?” Valyn asked, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder.

“Same,” Annick replied. “Most of the bones have gone to dust, but it’s clear enough what happened. Quick work, efficient—no cuts to the arms or legs, no doubling up, every strike a kill. Whoever did this, they were good.”

She rose to her feet and shrugged as though that settled the matter.

Triste, however, was standing a few paces away, mouth open, staring. She had been silent since reading the script on the lintel, lost in her own thoughts or exhaustion as she followed the rest of the group up the stairs and down the long hallway. Annick’s words seemed to jar her back into the present.

“Good?” she asked, her voice cracking as she spoke. “Good? What about this is good?” She spread her hands helplessly, gesturing to the small skulls, to the gaping doors leading back the way they had come. “Who would murder children?”

“Someone thorough,” Pyrre observed. The assassin was leaning against one of the window frames, arms crossed, tapping her foot idly, as though waiting for the rest of them to quit dithering.

“Thorough?” Triste demanded, aghast. “Someone goes through an orphanage stabbing kids in their sleep and you call it good? You call it thorough?”

Annick ignored the outburst, but Valyn put a hand on Triste’s shoulder. “Annick was just making a professional assessment,” he began. “She doesn’t mean that it was good. . . .”

“Oh, a professional assessment,” Triste spat, shrugging away from Valyn’s touch. She was trembling, slender hands clenching and unclenching. “They murdered all these children and you want to make a professional assessment.”

“It’s what we do,” Valyn said. His voice was level, but something raw and untrammeled ran beneath those words, something savage kept savagely in check. His irises swallowed the light. “It’s how we stay alive.”

“But we could sing dirges,” Pyrre suggested. The assassin held a perfectly straight face, but amusement ghosted around her eyes. “Would you like to sing a dirge, Triste? Or maybe we could all just link hands and cry.”

Triste locked eyes with the older woman, and, to Kaden’s surprise, managed to hold the gaze.

“You’re loathsome,” she said finally, casting her glance over Annick, Valyn, and the rest. “Skullsworn, Kettral, Aedolians, you’re all loathsome. You’re all killers.”

“Well, we can’t all be whores,” Gwenna snapped, glancing up from her charges.

Despite the size of the room, despite the gaping windows and shattered roof open to the sky, the space was suddenly too small, too full, bursting with the heat of raised voices and the blind straining of untrammeled emotion. Kaden struggled to watch it all without letting it overwhelm him. Was this how people lived? How they spoke? How could they see anything clearly in the midst of that raging torrent?