He sighed. “I allow no such abuses in the territory I administer, in so far as I hear of them. But as justiciar over Orledder Intendancy, I cannot rule otherwise than to return the youth to his legally recognized sire. Kem is Manor-born. The Manors do not release control over those born into their halls. Especially not those born into a ruling kin-line.”

She closed the curtains on that terrible night, shut it away again, and steadied her breathing. “What if I had told you the truth about Kem when we first came here?”

The intendant’s body tensed as he considered her words. As he remembered how they’d met in the midst of a Spore outbreak.

How he’d seen his daughter on the other side of a moat as Spore irrupted through the village. How he’d splashed across, so desperate to save his beloved girl that he didn’t stop to think that it was already too late. How no one in his retinue had dashed after him to pull him back because they were all too terrified by a horrific twisting growth of Spore that had somehow been carried inside the protection of the moat. Before their shocked eyes, Spore had devoured people and animals and plants alike into a towering, whistling, dome-like web that throbbed as it leaned toward them—yet was unable to reach them across the barrier of water.

Then, a stranger, a girl no older than his eldest child who was about to die, had gone into the moat after him. Elen had caught up to the intendant and dragged him back just as he’d been scrambling up the moat’s interior wall. She had spotted Spore crawling along his sleeve and readying to bury itself in the flesh of his hand. At that moment, she’d had a choice: to shove him forward to die with his daughter and the villagers—because it was far too late to rescue them—or risk discovery to save him.

Shoving him forward, in the sight of all, would only make her look like a murderer. So partly, the choice she made was self-preservation. But mostly, it was because he had spoken so kindly to her and Aoving when they had been brought to his desk the day before, to receive a three-day pass to stay in the local Heart Hostel, according to the law of the empire. That kindness fell like rain onto parched ground.

So, acting on gut instinct, she had released the viper as she pulled him back, and it had twined down his arm to eat the Spore. He alone had seen it. By the time they’d gotten safely back to the outer shore, the viper had crawled back into her body.