The corpse took my heartsglass in a skeletal hand. I looked down to see a swirling miasma of black instead of silver. “No,” I choked out.

“You cannot hide who you are, Tea, my poppet. There is black in all our hearts. We hide it well enough and bring it out on harder nights, when we think no one sees.”

“I don’t want it!”

“There are worse things than black heartsglass, Tea. Silver is just as capable of hate.” She leaned closer then, dead lips against my ear. “Trust your enemies little,” it whispered, “and trust your friends even less.”

I came awake, sweating profusely despite the mild breeze coming in through the half-open window. It was dawn, and the space beside me was empty of Kalen. I twisted and saw him putting on his Deathseekers’ armor.

“Kalen?”

He glanced at me and tried to smile, but his face was grim. “I was hoping to let you rest longer,” he said.

“What do you mean? What happened?”

“There was another suspected Blight attack. This time, it happened in Knightscross.”

“Lady Altaecia was in error,” Lord Garindor told me. “Black heartsglass is not proof of darkrot.”

We stood in the room that once belonged to the bone witch, and it struck me how ordinary it was. The closet was heavy with hua of different kingdom styles and colors, and the dresser overflowed with an alarming assortment of cosmetics and perfumes. Books filled the shelves of one wall, and other paraphernalia lay neatly stacked in piles at one corner: silk handkerchiefs with Arhen-Kosho motifs, jade from Daanoris fashioned into plain rings, even an ancient gor-fa knife from Drycht—no doubt presents collected from clients she entertained at the cha-khana. A black armband, similar to what most Deathseekers wore, lay carefully folded on her nightstand. It was a room befitting a teenage asha, untouched at Mistress Parmina’s orders.

“The darkrot is a subversive magic,” my kinsman continued. He had, quite unfortunately, volunteered to accompany me, but now idled in the doorway, uncomfortable at stepping into the room of a woman not in his family, even after all his time in Istera. “That subversive magic corrupts Dark asha with no outward sign of its taint. History shows that most Dark asha bore no black heartsglass when they succumbed to it.”

“Black heartsglass,” I said, “is more in keeping with the Faceless.”

“That is true. But that is not a sign of darkrot either. If you remember, from Tea’s own telling, Hollow Knife had to achieve the black before he could create shadowglass, as they call it. Many associate this with evil, for most Faceless bear that stigma. But black heartsglass only means that a practitioner of the Dark has survived some traumatic experience, often the death of a loved one.