Many soldiers found difficulty in returning to civilian life, and the Sons of Flame were no different. In fact, they were worse, their martial experience compounded by single-minded religious fervor. In drafting the Accords, Adare had hoped the Sons would simply melt away—join the bakers’ guild, or ship out with a fishing fleet. It was idiocy, in retrospect. Her father would have recognized the problem, would have avoided it, but her father was dead, and if she didn’t clean up her own mess, it would soon start to stink.

There was no outright rebellion. In fact, it seemed at first that the Sons of Flame had simply drifted off, dissipated, like smoke before a stiff breeze. Then Adare received the first reports from her tax collectors on the road to Olon: the soldiers were headed south. Not in a single group, to be sure. Not marching down the road in rank and column. Had they been so bold, she could have sent the legions after them for defying the terms of the Accords.

No, the Sons of Flame were moving south in a nebulous body—half a dozen here, two or three there, retaining their armor and weapons while discarding the banners and uniforms. Hundreds and hundreds of men like Lehav, leaving Annur. Evidently one of the bastards, a man she’d never heard of, named Vestan Ameredad, was behind it all, urging the men to regroup quietly in Olon, the ancient seat of Intarra and the site of her first temple, to leave Annur for a holier city farther from the grasping claws of the Malkeenians. The exodus of soldiers seemed to have kindled similar sentiment in the more devout civilians as well. Hence the weekly caravans to the south.

It was a disaster, Adare thought, staring at the crowd pressed around her, a disaster for those leaving their homes and for the empire itself. She had incited something perilously close to open rebellion in the very streets of the capital.

And the irony, she thought grimly, is that without this ’Kent-kissing rebellion I’d have no stones left to play against Ran.

What she was planning felt like madness, a desperate gambit to leverage the instability of the empire itself in order to reclaim the Unhewn Throne for her family, and yet it wasn’t really the end of the Malkeenian line that worried her. Despite her own eyes, Adare had no illusions about Malkeenian sanctity. Over the centuries, her family had furnished dozens of emperors, some capable, some less so. The idea of leaving the empire to il Tornja, however . . . that seemed both a dangerous and cowardly course.