“Is that a challenge?” She lifted up a pendant whose crude circle scribed a ward against mosquitoes, squinting at it contemplatively. “I could build a wirework kitten around this. Then would it be adorable?”

“Would this wirework kitten, ah, do anything?” Marcello looked worried. “Remember what happened that time when you thought you were just playing with your artifice tools …”

“No one was permanently damaged.” Istrella scooped the charms into her velvet bag. “Besides, I have to amuse myself somehow, since you still haven’t told me about this secret project I’m supposed to make in Ardence.”

Marcello flinched. I gave him my best Really, Marcello? look.

He glanced around at the busy room. “Not here. We’ll arrive at the garrison tomorrow evening; I’ll tell you then, when we have privacy.”

Tomorrow. My gut tightened. I’d longed to return to Ardence since my mother called me back to Raverra from my studies at the university, but now its approach brought me nothing but dread.

On our third day of travel, we made our way safely down out of the hills toward a green valley, which the River Arden crossed in a gleaming bracelet. Ardence adorned the river like a dowager’s jewel, its red roofs bright in the sun. Greater hills rose on the far side, climbing purple into the distance, until they eventually reared up into the Witchwall Mountains, visible as a faint smear of gray clouds on the far horizon.

When you cut to the heart of it, we were coming to threaten this place with destruction. To crack the red-tile roofs with the blue heat of balefire, and to scorch the verdant valley. When I made out the River Palace in the distance, its gilded domes looming over the city like a hen gathering her chicks around her, a vision flashed before me of it charred and broken, lying empty to the sky, a picked-over carcass. I shivered.

Rather than arriving in Ardence at dusk, we spent our final night of the journey at the imperial garrison, which crowned the last hill looming over Ardence. Garrison was a modest term for the sprawling castle, built to harbor thousands of troops. Its massive walls still bore scars from the endless petty wars that had raged between the city-states of central Eruvia before Raverra united them all under the banner of the Serene Empire. Since Ardence had been a peaceful part of the Empire for two hundred years, the soldiers were stationed there to protect Ardence, rather than menace it.

But that could change overnight. With Istrella’s modifications, the fortress’s cannons would easily be able to reach the city.

I tried not to think about that as I settled into my room and washed the dust of the road off in an artifice-warmed bath. But once I chased images of smoking holes in the city walls from my mind, Leodra’s penultimate words filled the gap: This plot isn’t what you think.