One heavy eyebrow lifted. “I could force you.”

“I hope that you will not.” My heart pounded, but I let my mind touch the noorestone in the satchel at my hip. Its fire singed the edges off my anxiety.

She glanced beyond me—at the grand hall occupied by only her guards—and then nodded. “I am glad I arranged to meet you without an audience.” She stood, her gown rippling around her as she moved. Slowly, like a careful dancer, she came down the steps. One. Two. Three. “Otherwise, I would have had to make an example, and that is not what I want.”

We stood face-to-face, the Algotti empress and me. We were of similar height, but where I was lean from Mother’s constant fretting over my food, followed by decans in the Pit and fleeing across the Fallen Isles, the empress had a softer figure, filling out her gown in a way I would have described as pleasant if she hadn’t been the most powerful, and therefore dangerous, person in the empire.

“You’re younger than I thought you’d be.” She had the same accent as everyone else I’d met here—with longer and sharper syllables—although she spoke with a gravity the others didn’t possess.

No, she probably didn’t have the accent. Not here. In the empire, I had the accent.

She looked at my scar. “What happened?”

“Someone tried to bleed the Hopebearer out of me.”

“That is not a thing that can be taken unless you allow it.” A faint smile eased the weight in her eyes. “It becomes you.”

I resisted the impulse to touch the ridge of scar tissue. Instead, I nodded, and for a moment more, we just looked at each other, evaluating. What the other wanted. How hard she would fight for it. Our chances of success if neither of us was willing to bow to the other.

Then the empress turned and inclined her head. “Walk with me.”

I fell into step with her. She had a slow, stately rhythm, as though nothing could entice her to walk at a normal pace. But it gave me a chance to see the room, the beautiful galleries and gods and marble floor, and I stored away the details to tell the others later. They would like it, and if anyone was truly listening to our conversations, they’d quickly grow bored.

Then I would tell them about the first dragon, whose presence followed me throughout the wide chamber, twisting into the back of my mind.

Light sigils flickered as we glided by. What about listening sigils?

“Nine reports that your high magistrate intends to betray me,” Empress Apolla said at last. There was no accusation in her tone, no hint that she blamed all of the Fallen Isles for his duplicity, but I could still hear a question of my authenticity in there. Would I betray her if we struck a bargain? I hadn’t bowed, after all.

“He intends to bring armies to your shores.”

She looked straight ahead as we walked past a guard. “Perhaps he seeks only to defend himself. The Algotti Empire is vast, and he must be frightened of us.”