“We should get back on the road before they start following us,” Raze says quickly. He’s right. But one of us is going to have to give in eventually—and it isn’t going to be me.

Olani seems to realize that if she doesn’t intervene, we’ll stand here in silence until it’s too late and we’ve lost our head start. She speaks first. “Three months ago, I caught Raze trying to break into Leira’s locked room. I was working for her on commission, but she was considering me for a more permanent position, and turning him in would have put me in her favor.”

“But you didn’t,” I say, looking between them. Raze’s face is turning redder again.

“No,” she agrees.

Isolde is getting impatient. “Why?”

Olani smiles a little bit, and I can see the easy friendship between her and Raze, something warmer and deeper than simple alliance. A twinge of envy gnaws at the pit of my stomach—I’ve never understood how people just become friends. “He offered me something better. And besides, I already kind of knew Raze from—” She glances at him and stumbles over the end of the sentence, making me think there’s more there. “From before.”

There’s a pause. Raze cringes, takes a deep breath, and says, “Leira kicked me out at the beginning of the year. I wasn’t the heir she wanted, so she decided I wasn’t worth the effort. Threw me out on the street with nothing. I knew that room was important to Leira. To our family. But she wouldn’t tell me what was in there, and once...once I realized that I was never going to earn my way in, I decided to...you know.”

“So I let him go, and we started planning a smoother heist. It would have gone perfectly,” Olani adds, a little bitterly.

“But you wouldn’t have had a changeling to activate it,” Isolde points out.

“Right,” Raze says in a flat voice that’s hard to read, glancing at me.

I look down at the compass in my palm. It trembles slightly, as if it’s straining to point to the road, reminding me to get going!

There’s a long, heavy silence.

Isolde scowls, crinkling the blood starting to dry on her face. “So what now?”

“We find this fortress or whatever it is,” Raze says confidently. “I reclaim the Mortal’s Keep and my place in the Wild line. You take your share of the treasure. Leira gets knocked down a peg. Everybody wins.” He grins, head tilted, and I can see the fantasy playing out behind his eyes. “Well, everyone except Leira.”

I’ve been mostly silent, trying to file all this information away, but now I speak. My voice is quiet, so I’m surprised when it makes everyone turn to look at me. “You expect us to just go along with all this? Being hunted like prey wasn’t part of the agreement.”

Raze shrugs. He’s starting to look like himself again, humor creeping back to the corners of his eyes. “The agreement doesn’t matter. You need this as much as we do.”