“Are you here to pay your respects?” she asked. “Or report?”

“Report.” He withdrew the dead man’s opal from his pocket. “I do not know the monk’s name. I found him a day south of Tirla. An artisanal monk, caught in a battle.”

The woman sighed, a sound laden with regret, and plucked the opal from Aeduan’s palm. “It is the tier ten.” She frowned at the gem. “It is taking our lives one by one. A hundred of us have fallen trying to finish it.” Her gaze cut back to Aeduan’s. Piercing. Desperate, even. “No fortune is worth one’s life, Monk. Remember that.”

Then she bowed her head respectfully and melted once more into the shadows.

* * *

Aeduan returned to the common room. Curiosity propelled him. Curiosity and something harder—something almost like certainty, though he could not say how he knew.

It roiled in his gut. It made his strides slice long against the rain.

He had to shove through the monks clustered before the wall. Some snarled, some glared, just like the old days—and just like the old days, they all withdrew when they saw the blood swirling across Aeduan’s eyes.

Bloodwitch, they whispered. A demon from the Void.

Then Aeduan reached the lone paper staked to the planks. Such a simple beige sheet for such important words, and nailed above it were two more papers listing payments, as if the bounty had been increased not once but twice since first arriving.

SEVENTEEN

The early-evening sun bore down while Safi trailed the Empress of Marstok and Habim beside Lake Scarza. Naval ships groaned against their tethers and white sails floated for as far as the eye could see. Thousands of boats, yet still only a fraction of the full Marstoki forces. Most, Safi had learned, were moored on the southern coast or already at sea.

After Vivia Nihar’s departure, Safi and Vaness had traveled with Habim to the northernmost tip of the lake, where the navy kept their main headquarters. Safi had changed into an Adder uniform: black tunic, loose black pants, and supple black ankle boots. The only difference between Safi’s uniform and the other Adders’ was that the iron belt at her waist carried no weapons, and she did not have to wear the headscarf. Yet.

Rokesh and eleven other Adders moved around the group, spaced wide enough apart to allow Vaness to move unimpeded along the wide sandstone bulwark that overlooked the main docks.

“The Cartorrans want your Truthwitch,” Habim said matter-of-factly. Hands clasped behind his back, he examined sailors no differently than he had examined Safi and Iseult growing up. “Emperor Henrick grows bolder each day, Your Majesty. He taunts us, trying to see how close he can get before we attack.”

“And when they do get too close,” Vaness responded, no change in her iron stride, “then we will kill them.”

True, true, true.

“No,” Habim countered, “we will not.” He slowed to a stop, forcing Safi and the Adders to slow as well. “If we escalate the conflict, it will only give Cartorra—and Dalmotti—a reason to escalate as well. We are not ready for that, Your Majesty. We may be large, well organized, and well supplied, but that does not mean we will win.

“The bulk of your troops are Children of the Truce. They have no grasp of what war looks like, no understanding of what’s at stake, and little reason to care.”

Safi’s chest frizzed with the truth in that assertion—and it brought to mind a similar statement made on a similar evening only a month before. You have no idea what war is like, Uncle Eron had said.

And he had been right. Safi saw that now. She too was also a Child of the Truce.

As if on cue, an officer marched by on a lower parapet. He barked orders to a flag-bearer toting the standard. A young flag-bearer, not old enough to yet have whiskers. Not old enough to have even grown into his feet.

Safi winced at the sight of him; Habim simply sniffed; Vaness showed no reaction at all.

Moments later, they resumed walking, so Safi resumed following. They now discussed ground forces and supply chains, river routes and highway checkpoints. All subjects Safi had been forced to study—under Habim’s tutelage, no less—but for which Iseult had always been the better student.

Safi had known Habim her entire life, yet the man she trod solemnly behind was not the man she’d grown up with.

There were similarities, of course. The impatience that always cropped his words or the stillness on his face when he was displeased—that was Habim through and through. But everything else was new to Safi, from the stiff green-coated uniform with gold tassels to the way everyone bowed low at him. Above all, it was the references he made to places and past events that Safi had never heard of, but that resonated with trembling truth.

Was there any part of Safi’s life that had not been a lie? And how had she, the only Truthwitch on the entire continent, never once suspected?

At a warship with gleaming gold decks and scrabbling sailors in green, Habim and Vaness paused. In less time than it took Safi to wipe the sweat off her brow, two pages rushed in with a table and set it between Habim and the Empress. Then they scurried away while Habim removed a paper from his coat. After plunking two stones on either side to weigh it down, he motioned Vaness closer.

“This is a map of northwestern Marstok and the Sirmayan Mountains,” he explained. “Here you can see the main watchtowers. These three mountain passes must be better protected. A loss of any one of these towers will cut off supplies to Tirla. The city would fall within a week.”

Heat splintered in Safi’s shoulder blades. A warning of duplicity, and suddenly she was very alert and very keen to join this conversation. Neck craning, she tried to glimpse the lines and Xs Habim traced for the Empress. Yet all she saw was the map, exactly as described.

Except … the longer she stared, the more her vision seemed to blur. She scrubbed her eyes before squinting once more at the page.

And her magic blared hotter, scratching over her skull now. False, false, false. Then the map vanished entirely.

Somehow, Safi managed not to react. Somehow, she kept a bored, tired expression tacked in place. Her mind, however, was alight. And her heels—oh, how her heels suddenly wanted to bounce and carry her closer to the table.

Instead, she yawned. A great stretching of her jaw that would have earned a scolding as a child. She pretended to hide it. Pretended to turn away from the Empress, all while swishing just a few inches sideways. Then a few inches nearer to the table. Another yawn, another stretch.

Now the map was fully in view, and now she could see that it was no map at all.

It was a message.

Do nothing. We have a plan.

That was all it said. Safi read it three more times, but there was nothing else. In Mathew’s familiar scrawl—on a document clearly Wordwitched—there were only six words: Do nothing. We have a plan.

Hell-ruttin’ weasel pies. Safi couldn’t decide if she ought to laugh or cry at the message. Because really, Habim? He was really telling her to keep doing what she had already been doing, and he really expected her to just wait around for some unknown plan?

Safi had followed her uncle’s plan in Ve?aza City, and it hadn’t ended well. Twenty years in the making, a scheme that spanned the Witchlands, that was meant to stop the war from resuming and bring permanent peace to the empires—Safi had ruined it all in one night. Oh, she had done as ordered and followed the plan across the Jadansi on Merik Nihar’s ship, but then circumstances had forced her to deviate. Namely, her uncle’s ridiculous, unfair treaty with Nubrevna. And that deviation had landed her here, in Marstok.

It wasn’t her fault, though. It was the fault of a shoddy scheme with too many moving parts, as well as the fact that no one ever told her what in damnation was going on.

And Safi especially wanted to know about Iseult. Safi wanted to know where in the Witchlands her Threadsister was. She wanted to know if Iseult was safe. And above all, she wanted to know how Habim intended to get her and Safi together again.

“Nomatsis,” she said, but Vaness and Habim only ignored her, continuing their discussion of winter snows and transport. So Safi repeated a bit louder and more emphatically, “Nomatsis.”

This time, Vaness broke off. “What is the problem?” She offered the faintest glare Safi’s way. “What about Nomatsis?”

“You currently provide space for their tribes to congregate outside cities.” Without asking for permission, Safi strutted to the table, chin high. Her shadow stretched across the map, and she tapped where she thought Tirla had been. “Where will they go in the war, Your Majesty? What will you do to ensure that they are not targets of the empires?”

Vaness regarded Safi. The iron shackles at her wrists slithered and spun. The breeze off Lake Scarza wisped against her hair.