She couldn’t bring herself to mention the prince’s ambitions and the part he meant Elen to play in them. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell Kem, but that it was all so outside of her experience of the world that she wasn’t sure how to start.

“Oh, of course,” he said. “If the viper is poisonous, it would be a perfect, invisible way to murder … well … someone who might be standing in your way to the position you think you deserve, if you were that sort of person.”

She laughed wryly. “I see I can’t put anything past you anymore, Novice Warden. Kem, this whole business has got to stay a secret between us two until I have figured out the situation we are in and where it leaves us. What we can reasonably hope to do, to be safe.”

“I know that!” he said with a flash of annoyance. “By the way, I’m still mad at you.”

He punched her lightly on the shoulder to make a jest of the words, but a pinch in his eyes told another story.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she agreed judiciously.

He rubbed his chin, and then his eyes, before looking compassionately into her face and saying, “Are you sorry you took me to Three Spires?”

“Because of the haunt and all that happened because of him? No. Never be sorry for any moment of happiness that falls into your life, however fleeting it might be and however it may end. Cherish it. I’m glad I met him.” It hurt to speak the words, even as they rang true in her heart. “I’m glad to be alive, Kem, and I miss your mother so much. I wish she were here with us now. Well, maybe not here, at this particular Vigil. It would have upset her so much to stand in this place again, to look back toward the north. My dear Ao. The bravest person I’ve ever known.”

He grabbed her wrist—unthinkingly, and without the least sign of fear, he grabbed the arm that was the viper’s path into the world—and pulled her to the north-facing window.

The causeway stuck out like a pier built into the deadly mist of the Pall, its broken end rimmed by a railing built of hallow-wood. Beyond the gap, almost hidden by the heavy haze, rose the turtle-back rock where she’d sat all day, under the hot sun without water to slake her thirst. Beyond the rock, the haze obscured all, which meant it wasn’t possible to see the continuation of the road beyond the gap. Anyone would believe the turtle-back rock was the last piece of solid land before the Pall swallowed everything. That the road terminated at the Vigil. That this was the end of the empire, the end of the inhabitable world.