“They must be questioned about Arwia, my lord. And if they give her to us, maybe we will free them.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he tilted his head, studying us as if we were bugs.

“Or perhaps”—he winced with the pain his words were costing him—“if they do not give her to us, we will cut off their heads.”

They dragged us out of the bathhouse and around the splayed feet of the guardsmen still lying like corpses. But as we wended around their prone bodies, a muffled note of surprise broke from Iltani’s mouth. Because there were only three men lying there.

Gala was no longer propped against the doorjamb.

He was missing, and apparently not as lovesick as Iltani believed.

LESS THAN ONE year ago, I stood on this same carpeting in the extravagant throne room, marveling at the softness beneath my toes. The gurgling water in the fountains. The beautiful tapestries and murals adorning the walls.

The torches hanging on either side of the thrones looked different this evening than they used to. They were off-kilter in their sconces, splashing ragged, twisted shadows across the sandstone walls. Illuminating the bloodstains on the rugs from past punishments.

People had gone with the Boatman in this room.

Evil lived in this place.

Gudanna sat on Arwia’s old throne in a soft blue tunic, her swollen ankles encircled with copper bells. A heavy lapis lazuli headdress with gold rosettes sat atop her hair, and her dark eyes had been outlined with kohl. Her belly sat on her lap, and faint rings of sweat darkened her tunic under her armpits. I watched her for any signs of distress that her baby was trying to descend from its wicked mother’s womb, but outside of a faint grimace that could mean everything or nothing at all, she was still.

Uruku sat on the central throne—the one reserved for the lugal—his hair slicked away from his sickly face, the bronze headdress hammered with the lion and blooms of Lugal Marus. He hadn’t even bothered to change the emblem, perhaps recognizing on some lower level of his baser self that he was usurping a city-state that did not rightfully belong to him.

Dagan stood on my right, his nose bloodied, eyes bruised, back lashed in stripes. He’d been beaten in the dungeons, where we’d been hung against the wall for many hours to try to get me to talk. They’d end the torture if I told them where Arwia was. They’d end his suffering. Dagan’s eyes had found mine again and again, and through each strangled cry that came out of his mouth, he’d told me to hold firm. Not to speak. He could bear it. I’d cried in agony for him, but it was less pain than knowing that Dagan, whom I loved with all that I had in me, who wanted my hand more than anything in this world, was hurting.