“I’ve made a horrible mistake.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and the anguish there was bottomless. “And I can’t undo it. I can’t put life back into him.”

It was all true. I couldn’t belittle him by denying it. “I know.”

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, dragging in an uneven breath that bordered on a sob.

I had no words to comfort him. I had no comfort within me to offer. So I leaned slightly toward him until our foreheads barely touched. It was a solid and reassuring warmth: he was alive, too.

“I know,” I whispered again.

Our coach bumped and rumbled through the long, golden countryside. The fields lifted up into rolling hills, with tall, dark cypress trees walking in lines like pilgrims. In the morning, mist lay in the folded valleys between the hills, anointing the land with grace and mystery.

Leodra’s undelivered warning sunk hooked claws into my thoughts, refusing to let go. Every mile passing beneath our wheels brought us closer to Ardence, where an unknown enemy waited. I had no loose end with which to start unraveling this web, and it was far from reassuring that I couldn’t see the spider.

I tried to distract myself by chatting with Istrella about artifice and about places she might like to visit in Ardence. I caught Zaira staring at us once or twice, though she quickly turned her gaze out the window. Once, I saw her smoothing the creases from a charcoal self-portrait of a smiling Terika, which her fellow Falcon must have given her before she left the Mews.

Marcello kept pace with the coach on his mare, coordinating our handful of guards, on higher alert since last night. Occasionally our eyes met through the window glass, and even across half the dusty road I could read the pain and worry in his face.

When we stopped for lunch at a roadside hostelry, I found myself momentarily alone at the table with Marcello as Zaira, Ignazio, and Istrella examined the warding charms the proprietor, a minor artificer, was selling at the bar. I gathered my courage to tell him something I should have days ago.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

His eyes flicked up from the deep-scarred wood of the tabletop. “For what?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “For what I said about you during the Council session.”

An odd, sad smile passed across his face. “I can’t hold the truth against you. A man like me would be a fool to think he could court the Cornaro heir.”

Words backed up in my throat like flotsam. I had so much I wanted to ask, to map out the territory of might-have-been that stretched between us.

Istrella plopped down next to him, spilling a handful of rune-engraved wooden pendants on the table. “Look! Aren’t these adorable?”

Marcello’s brows lifted. “Only you would think artifice could be adorable, Istrella.”