She couldn’t hide her surprise. “You never give Sam gifts.”

Arobynn shrugged, picking at his nails. “Oh, Sam will be paying for the suit. I can’t have my second-best completely vulnerable, can I?”

She hid her shock better this time. A suit like this had to cost a small fortune. Materials aside, just the hours it must have taken the tinkerer to create it … Arobynn had to have commissioned them immediately after he’d sent her to the Red Desert. Perhaps he truly felt bad about what happened. But to force Sam to buy it …

The clock chimed eleven, and Arobynn let out a long breath. “I have a meeting.” He waved a ringed hand to the tinkerer. “Give the bill to my manservant when you’re done.” The master tinkerer nodded, still measuring Celaena.

Arobynn approached her, each step as graceful as a movement of a dance. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m glad to have you back,” he murmured onto her hair. With that, he strolled from the room, whistling to himself.

The tinkerer knelt to measure the length between her knee and boot tip, for whatever purpose that had. Celaena cleared her throat, waiting until she was sure Arobynn was out of earshot. “If I were to give you a piece of Spidersilk, could you incorporate it into one of these uniforms? It’s small, so I’d just want it placed around the heart.” She used her hands to show the size of the material that she’d been given by the merchant in the desert city of Xandria.

Spidersilk was a near-mythical material made by horse-sized stygian spiders—so rare that you had to brave the spiders yourself to get it. And they didn’t trade in gold. No, they coveted things like dreams and memories and souls. The merchant she’d met had traded twenty years of his youth for a hundred yards of it. And after a long, strange conversation with him, he’d given her a few square inches of Spidersilk. A reminder, he’d said. That everything has a price.

The master tinkerer’s bushy brows rose. “I—I suppose. To the interior or the exterior? I think the interior,” he went on, answering his own question. “If I sewed it to the exterior, the iridescence might ruin the stealth of the black. But it’d turn any blade, and it’s just barely the right size to shield the heart. Oh, what I’d give for ten yards of Spidersilk! You’d be invincible, my dear.”

She smiled slowly. “As long as it guards the heart.”

She left the tinkerer in the hall. Her suit would be ready the day after tomorrow.

It didn’t surprise her when she ran into Sam on her way out. She’d spotted the dummy that bore his own suit waiting for him in the training hall. Alone with her in the hallway, he examined her suit. She still had to change out of it and bring it back downstairs to the tinkerer so he could make his final adjustments in whatever shop he’d set up while he was staying in Rifthold.

“Fancy,” Sam said. She made to put her hands on her hips, but stopped. Until she mastered the suit, she had to watch how she moved—or else she might skewer someone. “Another gift?”

“Is there a problem if it is?”

She hadn’t seen Sam at all yesterday, but, then again, she’d also made herself pretty scarce. It wasn’t that she was avoiding him; she just didn’t particularly want to see him if it meant running into Lysandra, too. But it seemed strange that he wasn’t on any mission. Most of the other assassins were away on various jobs or so busy they were hardly at home. But Sam seemed to be hanging around the Keep, or helping Lysandra and her madam.

Sam crossed his arms. His white shirt was tight enough that she could see the muscles shifting beneath. “Not at all. Though I’m a little surprised that you’re accepting his gifts. How can you forgive him after what he did?”

“Forgive him! I’m not the one cavorting with Lysandra and attending luncheons and doing … doing whatever in hell it is you spent the summer doing!”

Sam let out a low growl. “You think I actually enjoy any of that?”

“You weren’t the one sent off to the Red Desert.”

“Believe me, I would rather have been thousands of miles away.”

“I don’t believe you. How can I believe anything you say?”

His brows furrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. None of your business. I don’t want to talk about this. And I don’t particularly want to talk to you, Sam Cortland.”

“Then go ahead,” he breathed. “Go crawl back to Arobynn’s study and talk to him. Let him buy you presents and pet your hair and offer you the best-paying missions we get. It won’t take him long to figure out the price for your forgiveness, not when—”

She shoved him. “Don’t you dare judge me. Don’t you say one more word.”

A muscle feathered in his jaw. “That’s fine with me. You wouldn’t listen anyway. Celaena Sardothien and Arobynn Hamel: just the two of you, inseparable, until the end of the world. The rest of us might as well be invisible.”

“That sounds an awful lot like jealousy. Especially considering you had three uninterrupted months with him this summer. What happened, hmm? You failed to convince him to make you his favorite? Found you lacking, did he?”

Sam was in her face so quickly that she fought the urge to jump back. “You know nothing about what this summer was like for me. Nothing, Celaena.”

“Good. I don’t particularly care.”

His eyes were so wide that she wondered if she’d struck him without realizing it. At last he stepped away, and she stormed past him. She halted when he spoke again. “You want to know what price I asked for forgiving Arobynn, Celaena?”

She slowly turned. With the ongoing rain, the hall was full of shadows and light. Sam stood so still that he might have been a statue. “My price was his oath that he’d never lay a hand on you again. I told him I’d forgive him in exchange for that.”

She wished he’d punched her in the gut. It would have hurt less. Not trusting herself to keep from falling to her knees with shame right there, she just stalked down the hall.

She didn’t want to speak to Sam ever again. How could she look him in the eye? He’d made Arobynn swear that for her. She didn’t know what words could convey the mixture of gratitude and guilt. Hating him had been so much easier … And it would have been far simpler if he’d blamed her for Arobynn’s punishment. She had said such cruel things to him in the hallway; how could she ever begin to apologize?

Arobynn came to her room after lunch and told her to have a dress pressed. Doneval, he’d heard, was going to be at the theater that night, and with four days until his exchange, it would be in her best interest to go.

She’d formulated a plan for stalking Doneval, but she wasn’t proud enough to refuse Arobynn’s offer to use his box at the theater for spying—to see who Doneval spoke to, who sat near him, who guarded him. And to see a classical dance performed with a full orchestra … well, she’d never turn that down. But Arobynn failed to say who would be joining them.

She found out the hard way when she climbed into Arobynn’s carriage and discovered Lysandra and Sam waiting inside. With four days until her Bidding, the young courtesan needed all the exposure she could get, Arobynn calmly explained. And Sam was there to provide additional security.