Safi does not go back to sleep. She sits up in bed, and the faded Hasstrel-blue covers slink off. Her white shift glows in the night, her chin-length flaxen hair matted and askew, her Threads green with curiosity. “Are you nervous about seeing the Emperor?”

“Yes.” Also not a lie. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” Safi says, and she clambers from bed, the wood groaning, to cross the exposed stone floor. If her bare feet freeze, she shows no sign as she curls onto the opposite side of the windowsill.

Cold radiates through the ancient glass. Warmth radiates off Safi. And not for the first time, Iseult wishes she’d lit a fire when she’d awoken. Her fingers and feet are going numb. Her nose too.

“Our plan will work,” Safi insists, and her Threads give way to green conviction. She curls her bare toes against Iseult’s stockinged ones. “We have done everything exactly as…” A pause. A swallow. A flicker of pained Threads. Then: “Exactly as Mathew and Habim taught us.”

Iseult’s chest tightens. Her nostrils flare. Mathew and Habim. The men who’d raised Safi and Iseult, training them in the art of battle and the art of words and schemes … and who’d betrayed Safi only days ago in Azmir.

Iseult bends forward and pats Safi’s foot. “They thought they were doing the right thing, you know. We have to believe that.”

But Safi isn’t having it. Her knees quiver, and her Threads quiver too, with sapphire loss. With tan confusion. Then she hops off the windowsill, a burst of energy and eruption of muscles so she can pace the floor. This is her childhood bedroom, one of the only inhabitable rooms in this crumbling wing of the estate.

As she lists out the pieces of their plan—carefully crafted, meticulously plotted—Iseult’s mind wanders back outside to the clouds and the distant mountains, mere shadows against the night. She doesn’t like the plan she and Safi have made, but it’s the best they have. Eron fon Hasstrel might hang for treason any day now; the only thing keeping him alive is Safi’s promise to marry the Emperor.

And marry him she will, for what better way to get close to him than on a wedding night? What better way to claim power than to incapacitate him exactly as he has incapacitated so many, including Safi’s uncle? Including the three Hell-Bards who have become her Thread-family?

Safi will imprison an emperor exactly as he has imprisoned so many Hell-Bards, and then she will sit upon the throne, finishing the plan Eron and Mathew and Habim began twenty years ago. Except Safi and Iseult will have done it on their own terms, without bloodshed along the way.