“Then we’ll make sure it doesn’t kill people,” I said. “If the conflict with Ardence is resolved peacefully, she won’t have to build it.”

No spark of hope kindled in his expression. “I don’t have that kind of influence, Amalia. Maybe you do, but I’m just a soldier. If they declare a war, I fight it. I have no power to make peace.”

“Then I’ll make it for you.” The urge to protect him flared up in me, brighter than the luminaries kindling in the hall. “We’ll make it together.”

I reached out to squeeze his shoulder, in a reassuring sort of way, as a friend might. But I accidentally touched his hair, and then somehow my fingers slid up around the back of his neck, tangling in the black waves.

His eyes widened in surprise. “Amalia,” he breathed.

Marcello’s arms went around me, tentatively, as if I might be a creature of sea and fire that could dissolve into wrath or laughter at his touch. He didn’t hold me so much as frame the idea of me between his arms.

“I don’t want you to think—” he began earnestly.

“Then I won’t,” I promised. For now, I didn’t need a future for us, no moment beyond this sliver of dusk, with the luminaries waking on the walls around us like evening stars.

I buried my face in his shoulder and just held him. He was warm and solid and real, his pulse pounding in his throat by my temple, his arms settling more comfortably around me with the inevitability of a spring rain.

It was glorious. I wanted to stand there forever, just like that, and forget about Ardence and Zaira and Vaskandar and weapons of war made by the hands of children. But every second we stayed like this was another second begging for discovery.

“Is this …” Marcello began awkwardly. “Are we …”

I laid a finger on his lips and, with the slow reluctance of the sun rising from the sea, stepped back out of his embrace.

“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “If you talk about a dream, it isn’t real.”

Laughter echoed down a corridor, and approaching footsteps. It was a full minute before the handful of chattering Falcons and Falconers passed through the hall, but Marcello and I still stood there in silence, a few feet apart, staring at each other.

The next morning found me uncommonly distracted as I sat in the back row of the thousand-seat Assembly Hall in the Imperial Palace, ignoring an intricate and impassioned argument over proposed new restrictions on the Loreician silk trade. The afternoon recess came as a relief from the bright, sharp-edged shards of memory and worry sifting through my mind.