The masonry broke; an anchor block tore clear.

Ironfist slapped at his helmet, trying to free his head so he could see, but the great swinging block impeded him. But only for a moment.

As Teia fumbled, flinging paryl toward him, he tore away the pins on the gag and holding his head to the left.

He reached over to free his right arm—

—and finally Teia caught his spine, and his arms dropped.

“Teia,” he said tersely. “For Orholam’s sake. I know it’s you. That height. That chop across the wrist. Of the Shadows only you’re that short. It’s you!”

Teia’d grabbed the spine too low. He could still speak, and he was trying to crane his head to see his sister, but the helmet still blocked that from him.

“She tried to kill Gavin,” Teia whispered.

She shouldn’t have said anything. Shouldn’t have confirmed his suspicion that it was her.

“She was going to kill you.”

“I don’t care what she did! I damned myself for her!”

Too loud. Teia shifted her grip on his spine upward, perilously close to where she might paralyze his lungs and not just his voice.

She’d never handled two spine pinches at once. Had never known she could.

“Teia, no. Teia, no,” Ironfist whimpered, but Teia held. Soon it would be too late for him to do anything.

In those long minutes, as Teia’s courage faltered, she knew she should have thought of the Nuqaba’s betrayal of the Seven Satrapies, how that woman turning her back on her vows cost the lives of hundreds or maybe thousands in the Blood Forest and elsewhere as the White King’s armies advanced. Teia should have steeled her spine knowing that this woman had tortured and tried to murder Gavin Guile himself. She had tried to deprive Karris of her husband, and Kip of his dad.

But Teia didn’t think of them. She thought of that little slave girl being ordered to remind the Nuqaba she should be whipped tomorrow morning. She thought of the thick scars all the way down to the sleeping slave’s calves.

As the last spark of life fought to stay aglow in the Nuqaba’s eyes, Teia whispered, “Orholam is merciful… to the penitent. Burn in hell.”

Teia reached a finger out and held the Nuqaba’s right eyelid, Mercy, closed. The left eye, the evil eye, Justice, went cold.

The woman’s head lolled and sank, and she lost consciousness.

Teia stayed, though, as Ironfist wept and until the last ripples of water in the bathtub were stilled, averring that Haruru hadn’t breathed for a long time. She checked; the heart had stopped.

Blood pooled on the floor, and the bathwater was stained opaque.

It was awful.

But Teia was a soldier. She was a spy and a fighter. She was a free woman and a fierce friend. She could do awful.

Now Ironfist. She’d loused up in letting him know it was she.

But she couldn’t kill him. Even if he was a traitor.

She had no orders to kill Ironfist—and couldn’t have killed her patron Blackguard even if she had.

“You should shout before you break free,” Teia said, not yet releasing Ironfist. “If they find you standing over the body, they’ll think you murdered her rather than that she suicided.”

He gasped a desperate, disbelieving breath, but couldn’t speak.

“But take care what you shout. You’re the one angry and bloody and alone in the room with her. Blathering about invisible assassins will sound crazy, and will make the guilt land on you. You shout first, Commander, and when the chief eunuch comes in you’ll simply look like a bereaved brother trying to save his sister. You might even make it out of this alive.”

Chapter 63

“Tonight is the night,” the Third Eye said from behind him as he stood on the palace balcony. “There’s no way to delay it longer, my love.”

“That’s not true.” Corvan Danavis looked unseeing over his fleet. He wore his dress uniform tonight, all brass buttons, battle sash, and medals, most of them given him by a man all now thought dead: Dazen Guile. His mustache had grown out to something near its former glory, gold beads adorning each side. They’d thought General Corvan Danavis dead, too.

“We’ve talked about this,” the Third Eye said. “If we delay, others die as well. And in the end, it changes nothing. Someone once said, ‘Better to lose a scout today than a squad tomorrow or a city next week.’”

‘Someone’ had been he, of course. He tried to grin, but it failed.

“I would sacrifice the world for another day with you,” he said. He couldn’t turn and look at her, still. He didn’t want to waste this precious time with weeping.

She came to stand at the railing beside him. She put her sunburnt hand over his. She said, “Romantic… but if it were true, I never would have married you.”

“‘A man may weaken,’” he said. Now he was quoting her to her. It was the problem of both of them being leaders. They both had to sling grandiose horse shit sometimes. The quote ended ‘without it invalidating all he believes.’

Typical that his quote would be about giving others to death, and hers would be about extending grace to others’ failures.

“I hope this one will,” she said.

He turned to look at her for the first time tonight. She wore a white silk dress with black ties drawing it snug around the body he worshipped. She was terribly sunburnt, with blisters on her skin over scars from older blisters. Her power of Seeing required sunlight on her whole body, and she’d been Seeing as much as possible for this past year, desperate to save others’ lives by her own sacrifices. She’d known early on that there was no future in which she died of the skin cancers.

He saw the scars and railed against how they pained her, but they didn’t dim her beauty in his eyes. The scars were only proof of her love made visible in her flesh, like a mother’s stretch marks. Anyone who couldn’t see beauty in them was a fool.

Nor was she self-conscious about her red and tender skin.

At thirty-nine years of age, his wife was the mistress of her body and her self. She knew her strengths and wasn’t threatened by her weaknesses. She was a woman whole: able to cry or laugh or be silly or be seductive, and move from each in her own time, and move you with her. Her confidence made her far more appealing than even the few women Corvan had met in his life who might be objectively more beautiful, if such a thing as objective beauty existed.