Prince Sartaq leaned against the building wall a few feet behind her, his gaze on the looming Torre. Twin swords peeked above his broad shoulders, and long knives hung from his belt. He’d changed from the finery of dinner back into his flying leathers—again reinforced with steel at the shoulders, silver gauntlets at his wrists, and a black scarf at his neck. No, not scarf—but a cloth to pull over his mouth and nose when the heavy hood of his cloak was on. To remain anonymous, unmarked.
She sheathed her knife. “Were you following me?”
The prince flicked his dark, calm eyes to her. “You didn’t exactly try to be inconspicuous when you left through the front gate, armed to the teeth.”
Nesryn turned toward the Torre walls. “I have no reason to hide what I’m doing.”
“You think whoever attacked the healers is just going to be strolling around?” His boots were barely a scrape against the ancient stones as he approached her side.
“I thought to investigate how they might have gotten in. Get a better sense of the layout and where they’d likely find appealing to hide.”
A pause. “You sound as if you know your prey intimately.” And didn’t think to mention this to me during our ride this morning, was the unspoken rest.
Nesryn glanced sidelong at Sartaq. “I wish I could say otherwise, but I do. If the attack was made by whom we suspect … I spent much of this spring and summer hunting their kind in Rifthold.”
Sartaq watched the wall for a long minute. He said quietly, “How bad was it?”
Nesryn swallowed as the images flickered: the bodies and the sewers and the glass castle exploding, a wall of death flying for her—
“Captain Faliq.”
A gentle prod. A softer tone than she’d expect from a warrior-prince.
“What did your spies tell you?”
Sartaq’s jaw tightened, shadows crossing his face before he said, “They reported that Rifthold was full of terrors. People who were not people. Beasts from Vanth’s darkest dreams.”
Vanth—Goddess of the Dead. Her presence in this city predated even Silba’s healers, her worshippers a secretive sect that even the khagan and his predecessors feared and respected, despite her rituals being wholly different from the Eternal Sky to which the khagan and the Darghan believed they returned. Nesryn had walked swiftly past Vanth’s dark-stoned temple earlier, the entrance marked only by a set of onyx steps descending into a subterranean chamber lit with bone-white candles.
“I can see that none of this sounds outlandish to you,” said Sartaq.
“A year ago, it might have.”
Sartaq’s gaze swept over her weapons. “So you truly faced such horrors, then.”
“Yes,” Nesryn admitted. “For whatever good it did, considering the city is now held by them.” The words came out as bitterly as they felt.
Sartaq considered. “Most would have fled, rather than face them at all.”
She didn’t feel like confirming or denying such a statement, no doubt meant to console her. A kind effort from a man who did not need to do such things. She found herself saying, “I—I saw your mother earlier. Walking alone through a garden.”
Sartaq’s eyes shuttered. “Oh?”
A careful question.
Nesryn wondered if she perhaps should have held her tongue, but she continued, “I only mention it in case … in case it is something you might need, might want to know.”
“Was there a guard? A handmaiden with her?”
“None that I saw.”
That was indeed worry tightening his face as he leaned against the wall of the building. “Thank you for the report.”
It was not her place to ask about it—not for anyone, and certainly not for the most powerful family in the world. But Nesryn said quietly, “My mother died when I was thirteen.” She gazed up at the near-glowing Torre. “The old king … you know what he did to those with magic. To healers gifted with it. So there was no one who could save my mother from the wasting sickness that crept up on her. The healer we managed to find admitted to us that it was likely from a growth inside my mother’s breast. That she might have been able to cure her before magic vanished. Before it was forbidden.”
She had never told anyone outside of her family this story. Wasn’t sure why she was really telling him now, but she went on, “My father wanted to get her on a boat to sail here. Was desperate to. But war had broken out up and down our lands. Ships were conscripted into Adarlan’s service, and she was too sick to risk a land journey all the way down to Eyllwe to try to cross there. My father combed through every map, every trade route. By the time he found a merchant who would sail with them—just the two of them—to Antica … My mother was so sick she could not be moved. She would not have made it here, even if they’d gotten on the boat.”
Sartaq watched her, face unreadable, while she spoke.
Nesryn slid her hands into her pockets. “So she stayed. And we were all there when she … when it was over.” That old grief wrapped around her, burning her eyes. “It took me a few years to feel right again,” she said after a moment. “Two years before I started noticing things like the sun on my face, or the taste of food—started enjoying them again. My father … he held us together. My sister and I. If he mourned, he did not let us see it. He filled our house with as much joy as he could.”
She fell silent, unsure how to explain what she’d meant by starting down this road.
Sartaq said at last, “Where are they now? After the attack on Rifthold?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, blowing out a breath. “They got out, but … I don’t know where they fled, or if they will be able to make it here, with so many horrors filling the world.”
Sartaq fell quiet for a long minute, and Nesryn spent every second of it wishing she’d just kept her mouth shut. Then the prince said, “I will send word—discreetly.” He pushed off the wall. “For my spies to keep an eye out for the Faliq family, and to aid them, should they pass their way, in any form they can to safer harbors.”
Her chest tightened to the point of pain, but she managed to say, “Thank you.” It was a generous offer. More than generous.
Sartaq added, “I am sorry—for your loss. As long ago as it was. I … As a warrior, I grew up walking hand-in-hand with Death. And yet this one … It has been harder to endure than others. And my mother’s grief perhaps even harder to face than my own.” He shook his head, the moonlight dancing on his black hair, and said with forced lightness, “Why do you think I was so eager to run out after you into the night?”
Nesryn, despite herself, offered him a slight smile in return.
Sartaq lifted a brow. “Though it would help to know what, exactly, I’m supposed to be looking for.”
Nesryn debated what to tell him—debated his very presence here.
He gave a low, soft laugh when her hesitation went on a moment too long. “You think I’m the one who attacked that healer? After I was the one who told you about it this morning?”
Nesryn bowed her head. “I mean no disrespect.” Even if she’d seen another prince enslaved this spring—had fired an arrow at a queen to keep him alive. “Your spies were correct. Rifthold was … I would not wish to see Antica suffer through anything similar.”
“And you’re convinced the attack at the Torre was just the start?”
“I’m out here, aren’t I?”
Silence.
Nesryn added, “If anyone, familiar or foreign, offers you a black ring or collars, if you see anyone with something like it … Do not hesitate. Not for a heartbeat. Strike fast, and true. Beheading is the only thing that keeps them down. The person within them is gone. Don’t try to save them—or it will be you who winds up enslaved as well.”
Sartaq’s attention drifted to the sword at her side, the bow and quiver strapped to her back. He said quietly, “Tell me everything that you know.”
“I can’t.”
The refusal alone could end her life, but Sartaq nodded thoughtfully. “Tell me what you can, then.”