Before her lungs could cinch with panic at that thought, Vivia darted into the waves. The lake embraced her, warm and welcome. Shivering and alive. Grounding in a way that true ground never was.

This water didn’t care about fathers or mothers or distant best friends. This water didn’t care about messages from empresses or speeches stolen away. The water cared only for this moment and this place. It flowed where the land allowed it. It changed as the seasons demanded. And it never fretted if it couldn’t be what others wanted.

Vivia’s eyes fell shut. Her magic skipped outward, greeting the fish and the salamanders, skating past boulders and roots, through fissures and over grooves. Her senses moved upstream, they moved down, and she felt and reached for anything that might be out of place, for anything that wasn’t right inside the plateau.

Yet all was well, just as it had been since she and Merik had saved the city two weeks ago, and second by slippery second, Vivia returned to her body. Gone was her panic, replaced by the power of tides and the strength of storms.

She was Vivia Nihar, Queen-in-Waiting of Nubrevna—chosen and bound to these eternal waters. She could face down entire navies, she could ride a waterfall from mountain peak to valley’s end. She could battle almost any man or woman and be named victor.

And Stix was right: it was time that Noden and the Hagfishes bent to a woman’s rule.

So Vivia made her decision. She would travel to Azmir. Today, just as Stix had suggested, and she would negotiate trade with the Empress of Marstok.

And Vivia would do it for herself, she would do it for Nubrevna.

NINE

The fifteenth chimes were singing by the time Iseult, Aeduan, and Owl reached Tirla. City of a Thousand Names, they called it, for every few decades, a new nation or empire laid claim to its sharp roofs and crooked streets. Since Marstok had conquered it, they had named it Tirla, after the long lake beside which it rested.

A setting sun canted down, turning whitewashed buildings to gold. Iseult would have found it beautiful were she not drowning beneath the children’s shouts, the merchants’ calls, the donkey brays and endless hammer of hooves—not to mention the soldiers’ barks or the blacksmiths’ bellows or the creak-creak-creak of wagon wheels. The din buffeted her from every direction.

For every noise, there were just as many people. Bodies, bodies, bodies everywhere she turned, and each moving beneath their own distinct Threads, their own erratic, emotional lives. Iseult’s relief at the presence of humanity had quickly been overwhelmed, and now she wished she could just stop. Close her eyes for a single moment and enjoy at least one less sensory onslaught.

But that was not an option. Not yet.

For the final mile into the city, she had walked with her arm underneath Aeduan. Owl hadn’t liked that. Aeduan had liked it even less, and Iseult had liked it least of all. It took so much of her focus to keep him upright and to keep Owl from wandering off—not to mention ensuring she and Owl were properly hidden beneath hoods and scarves. She knew the laws in Marstok were more forgiving than others when it came to Nomatsis, but that did not mean she wanted to test them.

Legal protection could not eliminate centuries of hate.

As it was, Iseult veered out of the crowds at the first inn she saw. A dangling sign declared The White Alder, and a second sign below claimed Vacancies. Even better, the inn was built mostly of tiny white bricks and terra-cotta tiling. As far as Iseult was concerned, the less wood, the better.

As Lady Fate would have it, though, once inside the crowded stable yard, she came face-to-face with a long-dead, sun-bleached alder standing majestically at the heart. She eyed it warily as she passed. She also paused at the front door to check that … yes, yes, her hood was firmly pulled down across her face. She turned to Owl. The girl’s lips puckered into a scowl, her glare even fiercer than Blueberry’s had been, but Owl did not resist when Iseult tightened her scarf. Nor did she argue when Iseult murmured, “Stay close to Aeduan, and do not speak.”

A hum of clay red annoyance twined through the girl’s Threads, and with it came a flash of pale contempt, as if she were thinking I rarely speak, foolish woman.

Iseult supposed she had a point.

They ducked beneath a low entrance into a noisy dining space that was, to Iseult’s relief, also white stone. Oak tables with matching chairs filled the space, and though she couldn’t see it, she sensed a small fireplace at the end of the room. It tugged against her, like a lodestar to a magnet. Heat itched up and down her fingers.

Cool as a Threadwitch, she reminded herself before striding purposefully for the nearest expanse of bar counter. Here a woman with black hair piled high atop her head carefully carved a ham. She did not glance up at Iseult’s approach.

Nor did she shift her attention when Iseult said, “We need a room for the night.” She merely continued cutting the ham, juices oozing with each slice and her Threads a focused green.

So Iseult coughed. Then tried again, more loudly. “We need a room for the ni—”

“I heard you.” No pause in the woman’s cautious shave. No shift in her Threads. “We’re full.”

“Your sign says otherwise.”

“Well, the sign is wrong.”

Iseult’s nose twitched. She’d so rarely had to do this without Safi at her side, and she doubted her usual threat of chopping off the woman’s ears and feeding them to the rats was going to work in this situation.

Then again, Iseult’s mentor Mathew always said, Money is a language all men speak.

“I can pay,” she began.

“Not enough.” The woman’s carving did not miss a beat. Her Threads, however, fluttered with irritated red. “We’re an expensive establishment.”

“How expensive?”

“Fifty cleques a night.”

Iseult didn’t need Safi’s magic to know that was a lie. The woman was marking up the price; her Threads made it clear she wanted Iseult to leave. But Iseult had something to prove now, and Moon Mother save her, she was about to waste a lot of coin just to make a point. Just to defend her own people.

Safi would be proud.

From the folds of her coat, she eased out a silver taler and slid it onto the counter. Then she offered her best attempt at a smile. “How about twice that?”

Instantly, the woman’s Threads erupted with suspicion. She straightened, knife rising—not quite a threat, but not not a threat either. “Did you steal that?”

“No.” Iseult’s voice was perfectly still, her expression perfectly blank. She was Threadwitch calm through and through. “It was payment for … sewing.”

“Oh?” The suspicion in the woman’s Threads spread wider. “I thought sewing was a man’s work for the ’Matsis.”

Ah. Well, that was unexpected. Of all the innkeepers for Iseult to encounter, she had to find the one who actually knew something about Nomatsi culture.

“It is,” she said as evenly as she could. Give her what she expects to see. Give her what she expects to see. “I … learned the skill from my father. But my father was killed by raiders, and now my family and I”—she motioned to Aeduan and Owl—“are just looking for a place to stay a few nights. We’ll leave soon, I promise.”

A thoughtful grunt, and slowly the woman’s Threads melted. First into the bright cyan of understanding, but tinged with midnight blue grief. Then at last, a wave of pink acceptance.

Iseult’s good fortune scarcely lasted a heartbeat, though, before Aeduan started coughing. A great explosion of air and sound that sent nearby patrons spinning toward him, a blanket of horrified Threads.

The same horror rushed over the innkeeper’s Threads, and her face sank into a scowl. The knife tilted back to its threatening slant. “No plague.”

“It’s not the plague.” Iseult pitched those words loud enough for the innkeeper and the nearest patrons to hear. She even rolled her eyes in the most Safi-like way she could manage. “If he were sick, then my sister and I would be sick too. That’s how disease works, you know.”

The woman did not like Iseult’s tone, but she also didn’t argue.

“He was injured in the raider attack,” Iseult went on, “and the wound hasn’t healed well. In fact, if you could point me to a healing clinic, I would be grateful.”

After a moment of consideration, the woman’s Threads blurred back to acceptance. A curt nod, and she finally set down the knife in exchange for the silver taler still gleaming on the dark counter.

“There’s a clinic a few blocks east of here,” she said, crooking down to grab a key. “But it’s unlikely you’ll find anyone to help. Almost all our healers have been pressed into service and sent to the border.” When she stood again, the dark sorrow was back in her Threads. “I know what it’s like to lose someone to raider violence. Here.” She offered Iseult the key, and also a pile of bronze coins. “Room thirteen. Third floor, third door on the left.”