“No regrets?” Treila whispers. “None at all? So loyal to your master?”

Voyne doesn’t look away. “He deserved it,” Voyne she says. “After Carcabonne.”

Treila’s brow creases. Some of the tension bleeds out of her hands. “Carcabonne?” she asks, confused. “What are you talking about? What does Carcabonne have to do with anything?”

“Your father died because of Carcabonne.”

“My father died so Cardimir would look strong,” Treila spits. But her hands have slipped entirely from Voyne now. She gets up, backing away. Something is strange about her hands. One finger, Voyne realizes, is gone. Frostbite, from that winter?

Or something else?

Where are they?

“My father,” Treila says, “was trying to save our people from starving.”

Voyne takes the measure of her infirmity. Makes her fingers twitch. Her calves tense. It’s not enough. “And what did your father do, to buy the grain he smuggled in?” she asks. Didactic, the way she remembers talking to Treila in those golden months between when she had paid in horrors to win back Carcabonne and when she again spilled blood.

“Salt. He shorted Cardimir his salt. Sent the rest to—to Etrebia.”

She is so certain.

“No, he didn’t,” Voyne says, and shoves herself upright. She gets as far as sitting, then has to sag against the nearby wall.

Across from her, Treila is quivering, taut as a bowstring. “He said we’d sent them salt,” she repeats.

“He gave them Carcabonne.”

For a long time, Treila doesn’t move. Her eyes go unfocused. Voyne wonders what she’s thinking about. What she remembers. Carcabonne had been only three months before they’d met. Voyne had been fresh off the field of battle, not newly made a hero but certainly newly shined, when she’d arrived at Treila’s father’s house. She’d spent much of her recuperation there. And then the king had come to visit, and brought with him the findings of his spymasters, and everything had gone to shit.

Voyne thinks, mostly, of Carcabonne itself. Of the blood. The fire. Etrebia had already held the fort by the time Voyne and her soldiers arrived to take it back; all of Carcabonne’s knights had been slain, all its people slaughtered or hauled over the border and sold into slavery. They had come very close to all-out war that winter. But they’d been lucky, heard the first whispers of treason early enough to stop Etrebia from stealing anything else.

It had just taken a while to discover who had sold them out.

“You’re lying,” Treila whispers, finally.

“No,” Voyne tells her.

“Nobody said anything about Carcabonne. When you killed him. When you cut his head off, you said—you said it was the salt—”