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  Alizhan was grateful that Thiyo was a planner. She’d been too focused on the task at hand. She wasn’t quite sure what time it was, but the harbor wasn’t far. They had plenty of time if they could get out of the palace unseen.

  But she didn’t want to flee Nalitzva without a translation of the book. What good would it be to return to Laalvur without the one thing they’d crossed the ocean for?

  “Merat talked to me at length about the trade in wai and raw venom,” Thiyo said to Ilyr. “She wanted to import it. I didn’t want to work with her. She was upset. I thought it was some trivial offense I had given, so I didn’t count her as a real threat. But she’s here now, and obviously involved in something. It’s possible she perceived me as an obstacle and had me disposed of.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Ilyr said. “I had every prison in the city searched, Thiyo. You weren’t in any of them.”

  “She makes people forget!” Alizhan said. Her frustration was enough to force herself upright to glare at Ilyr. “Are you not listening?”

  Next to her, Merat stirred. Ev was still staring into space. Alizhan pulled at Ev’s sleeve. “We have to go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere. You infiltrated my wedding under false pretenses. You broke into my private quarters to commit burglary. You attacked a citizen and trusted friend of mine. You’re obviously not who you say you are. For all I know, you’re involved in some plot against the throne.”

  In response to more tugging on her sleeve, Ev nodded at Alizhan, looking like she’d just woken from sleep. They both stood rather unsteadily. Alizhan almost took a step toward the door, and then she saw the book in Ilyr’s hand. Damn it.

  He wasn’t going to let them go. Ev was too foggy to win a fight. Alizhan’s hand twitched. She could touch him and knock him out. She’d done it half a dozen times in the past month. She hadn’t been half-drunk, high on venom, or in terrible pain any of those times, let alone all three of those things, but she’d done it. She could do it again. If she had to. Probably.

  Thiyo’s voice was like silk. “What’s your plan, Ilyr?”

  When had Thiyo moved so close to Ilyr? Alizhan had kept her eyes closed for too long. They were almost nose to nose. Ilyr was a little taller and a lot broader, but his posture was passive. His hands hung at his sides. Thiyo’s closeness startled him, but it was a pleasant surprise. He felt a little unprepared.

  Thiyo splayed his good hand over Ilyr’s chest and let his fingertips trail down a little.

  Alizhan corrected her earlier assumption about Ilyr’s feelings: Ilyr wasn’t unprepared. He was disarmed.

  Behind her, Ev came alive with surprise and concern. It was her first clear reaction since Merat had touched her. Of course she was worried. It was Ev’s natural state. Reassured, Alizhan returned her attention to the scene in front of them, which kept them both rapt.

  “Plan,” Ilyr repeated. Then he straightened up and said, more forcefully, “I don’t need a plan, I’ll just call the guards and let them sort things out. I have to get back to the feast. People will be wondering where I am.”

  “Call the guards,” Thiyo mused. “Let them sort things out. Plenty of empty cells in the city.”

  “Yes,” Ilyr said, and Alizhan wouldn’t have heard the hesitation if she didn’t already know that Ilyr’s guard was back up.

  It was too late. He’d said the wrong thing.

  “So you didn’t throw me in prison the first time, but you’d send me back,” Thiyo said.

  “I—”

  “No,” Thiyo said, as calmly as ever. He stroked his hand down Ilyr’s chest, and then caressed his cheek. His touch couldn’t possibly carry the pain that Merat Orzh’s had, and yet Ilyr flinched. “You’re going to let Ev and Alizhan walk out with the book. Then you’re going to call the guards and have them arrest Merat for breaking into your private quarters.”

  “And where will you be, while this is happening?”

  “What’s left for me here, Ilyr?”

  Earlier, Alizhan had found conversation with Merat confusing. Faced with Merat’s blankness, she’d missed her sense of what was going on underneath. Now, observing Thiyo and Ilyr talking, Alizhan’s sense of their feelings only confused her.

  She heard Ilyr answer, plaintive but certain: “Me.”

  A moment later, he added very softly, “You shouldn’t have to ask me that.”

  Even though Thiyo was often hard to read, Alizhan expected to feel a response, a wave of emotion if nothing in words. Whether that emotion would be relief and gratitude or something sharp-edged and bitter, she couldn’t say. But there was nothing. He remained tense and watchful. When Thiyo’s silence stretched uncomfortably long, it finally occurred to Alizhan that Ilyr hadn’t spoken that thought aloud at all. It had been such a clear, isolated thought that she’d mistaken it for speech. Alizhan heard “Me.” Thiyo had only heard “You shouldn’t have to ask me that.”

  “You’re right,” Thiyo said icily. “We both know the answer.”

  “And why should I follow your orders?” Ilyr said. Thiyo was still leaning in close, and Ilyr was distracted and distressed. Never could think with him touching me, he thought ruefully.

  Thiyo said nothing, but he must have done something really good with his face because Ilyr snapped right out of it.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “You said you didn’t publish those poems. You said you wouldn’t.”

  “You said you didn’t throw me in prison and have me tortured,” Thiyo said. “Prove it by arresting the person who did.”

  “And ignoring these two… thieves?”

  “They’re only taking back what you took from them,” Thiyo said.

  Ilyr tore his gaze from Thiyo’s face and examined Ev and Alizhan again. With a sigh of disgust, he backed away from Thiyo and stepped toward them, offering them the book. Ev took it from his hand.

  “Five minutes,” he said to them. “That’s all you get.” Then Ilyr turned to Thiyo, and switched to a language Alizhan assumed was Hoi. He was obviously hoping for some privacy. Alizhan could offer him no such thing. The words meant nothing to her. But if longing were smoke, all five of them would have suffocated.

  Thiyo replied in that same language, a breath of cool, clean air cutting through the clouds.

  Thiyo’s departure left the room cavernously empty. Ilyr was unhappily familiar with the feeling. The palace had been an echoing mausoleum for two weeks. Now, alone in his study, only the sound of his heart hammered at the walls.

  Was he doing the right thing?

  Even when they only spoke for a few minutes, Thiyo had the power to make him question himself.

  Ilyr took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his face.

  Before Thiyo, Ilyr had long been a dutiful son, a good prince who planned to be a good king. He’d learned all the lessons, followed all the rules, and upheld all the traditions. When his parents had informed him of his betrothal just before he’d left for the islands, he’d sworn to be a good husband despite what was buried in his heart. Ilyr had thought himself motivated by duty, by virtue, by righteousness. He could never, ever have admitted to himself that he was a rule-follower only because he’d never found a reason to break the rules.

  And then he’d met Thiyo.

  Ilyr had cast aside all his plans and begged to stay in the islands. They’d spent one blissful, secret, stolen year together in Hoi, and then duty had come calling. And instead of promptly returning home alone to wed his betrothed, Ilyr had made what was, until this very moment, the most ill-thought-out and impulsive decision of his life. He’d arrived in Nalitzva with the beautiful and mysterious Lady Lan on his arm.

  Ilyr had spent every triad—no, every shift, Thiyo caused trouble even while he slept—of Thiyo’s first few months in Nalitzva explaining away some new breach of decency and propriety and etiquette, offering public apologies with a solemn face and then laughing with Thiyo in private.

  A
t some point, the illicit delight of this double life had transformed into a burden—gold into lead, an unwanted alchemy—and it had strained both of them. There was no good solution. Ilyr began to avoid Thiyo. Far from home and bereft of his one confidant, Thiyo had turned to Aniyat.

  It still rubbed Ilyr raw to think of that betrayal. Yet here he stood, having broken the rules for Thiyo again. Was this forgiveness, or just habit?

  A groan interrupted his thoughts. Ilyr belatedly remembered he wasn’t alone. Still prone on the blue rug in front of his desk, Merat put one dainty hand to her face, touching her temples.

  Unsure of what to say to arrest someone he’d considered a trusted friend, Ilyr fell back on decades of etiquette education. “My apologies, Lady Orzh, but you are trespassing.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her tone was still colored with pain. “I am very sorry about that. Before we discuss this any further, would you be so kind as to help an old woman get up off the floor?”

  “Of course.”

  He crossed the room and bent down to offer her his hand.

  Her grasp startled him with its vicious tightness. Merat Orzh pulled herself up so she could look him in the eyes, and somehow the pain gripping his hand became pain gripping his mind. The past few minutes blurred and faded.

  Merat stood, dropped his hand, and patted him on the shoulder in a gentle, grandmotherly way. She had to reach quite a long way to do it, being so small. What was she doing here again? For that matter, how had Ilyr gotten here?

  “Are you quite all right, Your Highness? You look a little dazed. You really ought to call the guards before those thieves get away.”

  12

  Lyrebird shift, 7th Triad of Rimersha, 761

  TSARDEYA AND I READ EVERYTHING we could find about the workings of the world. He thought my interest in “superstition,” as he called it, was foolish, but he indulged it. He believed the secret to predicting the world’s movements would be found in natural histories and observations. I wanted to pursue other avenues as well, in case the secret lay in someone else’s senses or someone else’s touch. Who could say what kinds of magic existed in the world? There was so little documentation. I could not explain to Tsardeya that I believed so strongly in magic because I myself possessed it, so I allowed him to think of it as my pet interest.

  Though I didn’t reveal my abilities to Tsardeya, I held him in close confidence on all other matters. He delivered you—with Parneet’s grudging assistance. He was a great help to me in that first year, although it crushed me every time I saw him hold you. Arav should have held you. You should have known your father.

  And then something happened just before the second anniversary of your birth. Tsardeya tried to pick you up while you were crying and snatched his hands back in pain. He might have dropped you. He might have killed you.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I took you away from him—physically and mentally. The next time he came to visit, I gave you into the care of a servant who kept you out of sight. He didn’t ask after you that time, nor ever again. It was for the best. I trusted Tsardeya with the world, but you meant more to me than that.

  That servant also reported that touching you left her in pain, so I dealt with her, too. My fears for you were coming true. Like me, you were a Lacemaker.

  My own parents had never told me anything about my earliest childhood, and Lacemakers are so secretive that there was no way to know if this was a normal phase. I could touch you, but no one else could. You walked and talked like other children, but you could never live among them. It hurt me to see you so isolated. I redoubled my efforts into researching magic. What types existed? How could they be controlled? Could I cure you?

  Tsardeya, having forgotten you existed, thought I had lost the thread of our research. He tried to persuade me to give up what he thought was a fruitless investigation. We argued. I refused to see him for a few months.

  He wrote me letters. Lovely, charming, smart letters. I relented, knowing I’d accomplish more with his help. But I feared keeping him too close to me. At home, you were underfoot all the time. Salacious rumors about what I did in private with my favorite priest were already circulating in pamphlets. Having a man around endangered my reputation. What if it caused someone to discover you?

  I persuaded Tsardeya that he should continue his studies of natural history and observations of nature at a distance, and sent him to Estva.

  13

  Ladies Don't Carry Swords

  IS THIS THE END?

  HOW dare Ilyr ask that question, in that tone, as if he hadn’t been the one to ruin things? If this was the end, it was Ilyr’s fault. Aniyat’s fault. Merat Orzh’s fault.

  Not Thiyo’s fault.

  Thiyo pulled open the door on the opposite side of the study and stepped into Ilyr’s bedroom, unable to look at the massive bed of glossy dark wood with its sheets the color of the Night sky. How often had he slipped out of those sheets while they were still warm? How often had he crept out of this room and stolen down the corridor outside? He’d known the servants’ schedules by heart, since he always left Ilyr’s room during the servants’ shift, when the rest of the court was asleep.

  “What did you say to him?” Alizhan asked. She and Ev had followed him into the bedroom.

  Thiyo pushed aside the heavy blue curtains and opened the balcony doors. He stepped out. “I congratulated him on his wedding.”

  “More importantly, who was that woman?” Ev said. She and Alizhan crowded onto the balcony with him. Below them was a private shade garden with high stone walls. Above them, the slope of the slate roof.

  “Merat Orzh,” Thiyo said. “I told you about her earlier.”

  “You know what the strangest thing is?” Ev said, ignoring him and addressing Alizhan. “When I first saw her, I thought it was Iriyat. She was too old, of course, but—”

  “Iriyat?” Thiyo interrupted. “I was thinking she looked like Alizhan.”

  “But she was white,” Alizhan said.

  “Something about the shape of your face, though. Or maybe it was the eyes.” A note of apology entered Thiyo’s voice as he realized these details would mean nothing to Alizhan.

  “She felt like Iriyat,” Alizhan said and shivered. Thiyo was about to bring up Iriyat again, to remind them he still had questions, but Alizhan’s attention switched to the book. She took it from Ev’s hand and shoved it into the bodice of her dress, muttering, “This damn thing is good for something after all.”

  Thiyo had planned to jump down from the balcony, then somehow get up over the garden wall. The palace was a long rectangular building, with the great hall in the center and two wings extending to either side of it. One long side of the rectangle faced the light, and all the public receiving rooms were on that side, along with a grand, tree-filled courtyard where the palace met the city. The private quarters of the palace were on the shade side, and Ilyr’s shade garden seemed an ideally quiet, dim place to make an escape. Once over the wall, it would be a long walk across the grounds, but it would be easy to avoid encountering anyone in the vast expanses of lawns and hedges and gardens. At the edge of the grounds, they’d have to go over or through the external wall, and then out into the city. Thiyo would probably need his right hand to deal with the walls, and the prospect was painful.

  If Alizhan could see this plan in his mind, she was ignoring it.

  She stepped onto the half-height stone wall of the balcony, grabbed the edge of the roof, found footholds in the palace wall, and boosted herself up. Watching her, an eerie recognition rolled through Thiyo. His body knew those movements—she’d climbed up a wall and shimmied through a window in that memory. Alizhan had been clambering up great heights and sneaking onto roofs her entire life.

  At the peak of the roof, Alizhan paused, silhouetted in the low, cool light. Balanced on a narrow line of tiles high above the ground, with her skirts hitched up to her thighs, Alizhan was possessed of all the poise and confidence she’d lacked at the party. Nothing in her pos
ture betrayed fear or uncertainty. She looked like a natural.

  It occurred to Thiyo that he had, perhaps, not asked enough questions about Ev and Alizhan’s lives before they’d shown up in his cell.

  Two silk slippers, one stuffed with Alizhan’s remaining white glove, slid down the roof and landed softly at Thiyo’s feet, which were still sensibly planted flat on the balcony.

  She probably would have dropped her blue silk gown down after her slippers if she could have unfastened it herself. She hadn’t been shy about changing clothes in the prison hallway or Erinsk’s shop. Thiyo guessed it wouldn’t have bothered her one bit to steal over rooftops and through alleys in nothing but her shift. Thiyo spared a moment of silence for her gown, Erinsk’s own creation, undoubtedly already ruined by this endeavor.

  “Are you coming?” Alizhan called softly.

  “How does she intend to get down?” Thiyo asked Ev, aware that their five minutes was running out, and even more painfully aware that clambering up roof tiles wasn’t an occupation for a man with only one good hand.

  “A tree on the light side, I imagine.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, I hope you get to the harbor safely.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Thiyo shrugged. A careless gesture to mask how terrifying he found the question. He wished he could answer home, but he didn’t know where that was anymore. He held up his injured hand. “Can’t stay here. Can’t go up there.”

  Before Ev responded, Thiyo chucked Alizhan’s slippers off the balcony and beyond Ilyr’s garden wall. It wouldn’t be so unusual to find discarded items of clothing on the grounds of the palace after a feast.

  “Smoke and fire,” Ev said, and Thiyo wasn’t sure what he’d done this time, but whatever it was, it was making her sigh. Ev stepped up onto the stone railing, then gestured at the space on the railing between her body and the palace wall. “Come here.”