Maybe that wasn’t even close to the truth.

Dagan’s farm looked different than I remembered as we approached, looking over our shoulders for more guardsmen. His home was dark save for one lone torch in the front and a candle flickering from an interior window in the back. There was no noise, either, except the occasional bleat of a sheep and the chirring of the cicadas as we crossed through the golden-brown emmer fields.

Dagan stopped, one hand on his dagger, his eyes watchful. Nanaea and I trudged up behind him.

“It’s so quiet,” she murmured, still blinking back tears.

“Yes, and I don’t like it. There are four boys in that home, and not one of them is making noise?”

“But a curfew out here at the farm?” Iltani plucked one of the stalks of emmer and placed an end in her mouth. “The only way to enforce that is with—”

“Gods! Get down!” Dagan pulled me to the ground, his arm around my waist. We lay together, Dagan’s chest pressed against mine, one big arm flung across my waist. “Iltani, lie low.”

She sat but refused to lie down, though Nanaea had curled into a ball, arms over her head.

“There are guardsmen around the house!”

“Selu save us,” I whispered. If there were guardsmen on the farm, that meant we didn’t have a safe place from which to work inside the walls of Alu. Anywhere else would be too close and exposed. Out here, nestled amid the crops with outbuildings scattered across the land, we would’ve been protected.

Not anymore.

Next to me, Dagan breathed heavily. He kissed my head absently, but his eyes roved around. “I’ll have to sneak up there. Someone is in my home, and I need to see who it is.”

“Now it’s my turn to say no! Guardsmen are likely living in there!”

“Well, where are my brothers? My ummum?” His eyes were anguished. “If anything happened to them…”

“I’m sure they’re okay, my love.” I grabbed his chin. “We just have to figure out what to do now.”

“I have to check on them. I only left Alu because I wanted to be with you. I should’ve forced all of them to come with us, too.”

Iltani lifted one shoulder, freckled from the sunshine. “You’d never have forced your ummum to do anything she didn’t want to do, Dagan. You know that. That woman is as stubborn as a mule looking at a new gate.”

“That’s true,” Dagan answered hoarsely. “But I’m going to find out where they are. There’s a path through the fields we plowed years back to make it easier to get from one to the other. I’ll take that to go check on them and I’ll stay down low. If I don’t come back in half an hour, leave here and go back to Wussuru. This night. Do not come after me. If they see any of you—well, besides you, Iltani—they will know that we’ve come back, and they will torture us until we tell them where Arwia is.”