Dagan reddened. “I know that. But—”

“No! I am going to find her. If you’re here, she can’t be too far away.”

She wasn’t. She was back in Wussuru under the Koru’s and Nasu’s watchful eyes until we returned. But Assata couldn’t know that!

“Please, just wait and let us see if the poison will work. If not, we will try again! Listen to us!”

At once, her face went hard and she gripped me violently by my arms, her fingers digging into the nerves above my elbows. I winced and tried to pull away. “No, you listen to me!” She shook me. “I cannot sit by any longer and debate this. I will rescue my son and if she has to die, then that is what Selu wants. She was supposed to have died in that tomb, anyway.”

“Assata—”

“No, Healer’s Daughter. Don’t argue with me. I can make this difficult or I can make it easy. Tell me where she is and I will free Dagan’s ummum and my son from whatever is”—her voice broke—“happening to them.” She shook me again, desperately.

In a blink, Dagan’s dagger was out of his sheath and aimed at Assata’s heart. He grabbed her upper arm, pinching the skin. “Release her.”

Assata’s eyes hardened as she stared Dagan down. “I can disarm you and have your throat slit before you blink. You forget who I am.”

“Please, Assata.” My chin trembled in pain, and after a moment, her face fell. She dropped her hands, and Dagan sheathed his dagger. I rubbed my arms where she’d hurt me, and she stepped back, numbly shaking her head. She was hanging on by a thread at the most.

“The whole reason we are here is to rid Alu of his terrible reign.” I tried to touch her shoulder, but she flinched away. “If we put Arwia back on the throne, she will release Warad and Shiptu. Will you delay going to find her until we can do it? Help us, even?”

Assata raised her chin, her eyes wet, but filled with a bit of command she must have had on a battlefield in another lifetime. “You may choose to do anything you’d like, but I have already wrestled with my conscience for weeks, each one a reminder of my child rotting in a dungeon, likely tortured. Starved. I won’t wait another second.”

“But I’ve given him the poison! Can you simply—”

“No!” she shouted, then glanced toward the door leading into her tavern. She leaned close to me, every word a lash. “I’m getting her and turning her in, and whatever will be, will be.”

Her spine went rigid. “Now go. I’ll give you an hour to get out of the city. After that, I’ll track you down and find out where the nin is by any means necessary.”

“Assata, please listen—”

But she shook her head, gave us one last, hard look, and shoved the door open into the subdued noise of the tavern.