Maya finished with my wound, concern growing as I addressed the Drephin's account in detail. We bid Erebus farewell and navigated the walkway exiting his estate, traveling beneath the series of trellises that housed the same creeping, flowering vine my mother was fond of.

  "Do you think it's true?" She asked, after a long silence, both of us squinting beneath the high sun.

  "The captured goddess?"

  "Yes."

  "I… don't know." I admitted, feeling less certain now than prior to entering the Timbermour estate. "Something about it doesn't feel right. You've spent time in his company, the man crows every accomplishment from the rooftops, however heinous. If all this time he had a goddess doing his bidding, I have trouble believing this is the first we'd hear of it. It also doesn’t track that he knows about the nexus. He's always been…" I grimaced, "overtly proud of the absence of a ley line near Whitefall. If he knew there was not only one, but many, all forming a central hub? I doubt he'd speak of it at all."

  "If the stories are to be believed, it would not be the first instance of a god setting their followers upon a well-maligned scapegoat towards selfish purpose." Maya mused. She turned to me, worry clear in her features. "Are you sure it's best to go through with searching the castle today? There's still time left to spare. It might not be the worst idea to delay."

  "We have no idea what we're dealing with. Not really." I shut my eyes. "And I'm beginning to fear what we might find."

  "Do you want to leave?"

  I started at that, staring at Maya, unsure if I'd heard correctly. "I… can't."

  "You can." She shook her head. "You can do what normal people do, when they realize they're out of their depth. You can walk away."

  "What do you want?" I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  "I want you to be okay. Whether it's here, untangling this cursed knot, or elsewhere, finding respite while the world burns down to the wick." She swiped at her eyes, her mouth tight. "It just… hurts. To watch you weather wave after wave and be unable to do anything but wait for the tide to wane. The things you've lost, the cruelties you've endured. Thoth whittled you down to the bone. For years. And you seem alright, fine, functioning, but how alright can anyone be after all that?" She raised her arms in exasperation, and dropped them at her side. "I'm afraid you'll break, and that this time I won't be able to put the pieces back together. That one more thing will tip the scale, and you'll be lost to me forever. And then we'll all be lost."

  "I'll manage." I dredged up a smile, pausing to take her hand. "Haven't you heard? We Valens are of hearty stock."

  She scoffed, blushing around her neck. "Don't quote my whispered words in broad daylight. Especially when I have yet to say them."

  I held her to me. "Let's just… endure it, for now. We're both good at that. At least until we discover the shape of things. And should it be truly unfixable—if our mystery goddess washed her hands of us and abandoned this plane entirely as Thoth feared, damning the nexus to failure—maybe we just wring the black beast dry. It would be easy to steal a ship, and sea-bound, the places we could go in three days are limitless."

  "That doesn't sound so bad." She admitted, seeming to calm.

  We parted simultaneously, as the sound of pounding boots reached my ears. Down the street, a thin man dressed in common garb sprinted as if his life depended on it. His gaze locked on me, and he altered course, rushing towards us.

  "Who the hells…" Maya started.

  "A soldier from my regiment. One of the drivers." I jogged to meet him, Maya following behind, already fearing the worst. "What is it? What's happened?" I called.

  "Thaddeus—" He panted, far too loudly.

  "Lower your voice." I hissed.

  The man panned his head to look around with a wince, then tried again, quieter this time. "Thaddeus... wants to speak with you."

  "Now he does, does he?" I asked, unimpressed.

  The man nodded vigorously, still clutching his knees and gasping for air. "Claims to know what you're looking for. Wants you to come see him first, says it's important that you do before anything else happens. Says… he wants… to confess."

  "Confess to what?" Maya asked the obvious question, her eyes narrowing.

  "Wouldn't say." The man gasped.

  "What happened?" I tried for clarity, having trouble even imagining the hardened spymaster speaking those words.

  "Nothing." The driver managed, grimacing as he held a stitch in his side. "Literally nothing. Isaac hadn't even started yet. According to him, the spymaster just kept drinking. Downing goblet after goblet like water."

  "So he gave you nothing and removed a sentry from his confinement at no cost?" My guts tightened.

  "No milord. I had a replacement. Beyond that he told us where he'd been staying. An old flophouse near the Cat's Saucer. Asked for some documents he stored there."

  "A trap." Maya said. "Some convoluted method of alerting his network."

  "That's what we thought. Only…" The soldier hesitated. "He was distraught, milord. Shaken. Like a man back from his first tour. We haven't sent anyone yet, on account of the possible fuckery. But Isaac didn't think he was lying. And Isaac hates the bastard."

  "Thoughts?" I turned to Maya.

  She worried her jaw with her thumb. "There's no dignity in espionage. On the surface, it seems promising, because it's an odd tactic to take off the jump… but…"

  "You don't like the timing."

  She shook her head.

  "Me neither."

  It was paralyzing. Because the situation was worse than it appeared on the surface. There was a chance Thaddeus's act was genuine. He always acted for the good of the kingdom, even if his actions and their outcomes were often unpleasant at best, disturbing at worst. He was also almost completely unflappable. When I considered the possibility of something happening within the city's walls that rattled him this badly, and tried to in turn imagine what it was, a sickness grew rancid in my gut.

  "I can't." I finally shook my head. "The regiment is preparing to sweep the castle grounds as we speak. Any delay could put them in greater danger of discovery—which could be exactly what Thaddeus wants."

  Maya nodded. "Then go. I'll search the flophouse, see to Thaddeus once I find what he's looking for."

  "Take a soldier from the regiment with you." I relented, still torn. "And make sure his cart stays in motion. A single vulnerability is all Thaddeus will need to slip through the cracks."

  "Got it," Maya said, jogging in the direction the soldier had come from. "Be safe," She called over her shoulder.

  "You too."

  /////

  The search teams gathered without issue. Sevran, Zinn, Mari, and Sera had done well to brief the men and keep them calm and out of sight, though the sense of anxiety ran high.

  We were operating out of an old storeroom, one dusty and cobwebbed from lack of use. And the plan was a simple one. It wasn't uncommon to see pairs of soldiers roaming the halls, either patrolling or coming and going from the training grounds. The idea was to double that number, spreading out the search while not drawing undue attention to ourselves. Sevran had plotted out routes, and had the men assigned to those routes study that route on a map of the castle as reference, noting any passage or locked door absent from the map itself and marking it upon their return for inspection later.

  Now, all there was to do was wait.

  But something the Drephin woman said stuck with me, echoing in my mind.

  How, exactly, was he taken? Torturers and deviants ply their trade into all hours of the night. It is always guarded. And there is only one way in and out.

  I studied the map with wary eyes. The dungeon was nowhere near the throne room, the area we'd focused our search. But in terms of sheer verticality, it descended far deeper than most areas in the castle, even the inner keep. Any incursion there would be discovered, eventually.

  "Starting to worry we may be searching in the wrong place."

  "Hm?" Alten wandered over to where I stood, tearing out a considerable chunk of his apple and chewing it as he approached the map, following my gaze. His expression darkened. "Dungeons? Again?"

  "Imagine you're a smokey monster of misery." I began, musing aloud.

  "Alright."

  "Now imagine you're starving, desperate for your next meal."

  "Not a difficult jump."

  "Why would you go to the trouble of traveling all this way..." I drew a line with my finger from the nearest sewer outlet towards the dungeons, then down the winding walkway, past multiple guard posts, down a considerable number of stairs until my finger landed on the dungeons proper. "To retrieve a single drephin? Especially bearing in mind you'd need to drag him back out."

  Alten blinked, then shook his head. "Not happening. Why bother? Plenty of people roam the castle grounds at night. Many alone. Far easier targets. Taking them would be child's play in comparison."

  "It'd be foolish, right?"

  He shook his head. "Outright stupid. Unless I had a hard-on for that drephin in particular. Or was being ordered to. Even then, it's a bad idea. Big risk, trivial reward. Better off eating someone else in the meantime and waiting for him to be moved practically anywhere else."

  "An incursion into the dungeons would be noticed quickly, for the same reasons." Sevran pointed out, approaching from the side.

  Zinn joined our number, looking equally grim. "Not to mention the utter forfeit of plausible deniability."

  Alten nodded. "Yup. Soft recon wouldn’t cut it. We'd need to go in hard and fast, stay on crowd control, keep anyone inside from leaving. And unless we're willing to slit a lot of throats—"

  "—Which we aren't." Sevran raised an eyebrow.

  "Then that's a lot of witnesses to speak ill of the well-meaning." Alten finished. "We'd be done after that. At the mercy of the crown."

  The sick feeling metastasized.

  Gil's voice rumbled in my mind.

  "I'm curious what you've done to instill such loyalty in your sister, in so short a time. Despite my insistence—which was considerable, given the circumstances—she refused to relay what the two of you were planning. I had to get it from Thaddeus, or risk breaking her. Regrettably, I did the former."

  "What's all this?" Sera said, bumping me with her shoulder as she gathered with the others around the map.

  From the way she stiffened, it almost looked like the healing was hurting her more, but I knew from experience that the sudden absence of pain could be just as unsettling as pain itself. In addition, you felt it more in the places that hadn't been healed.

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  "He really messed me up."

  I pressed my forehead to hers. "You could have told him what we were planning. I'd never ask you to endure this."

  There was a long pause, and for a moment, I thought she might be slipping away until her body jerked, and she blinked several times. "I didn't?"

  "A problem for another day." I took Sera by the arm, drawing her away from the others.

  "Should we begin?" Sevran called after me.

  "Hold for now."

  "Hey—where are we going?" Sera protested, turning back around to glance at the planning board behind her.

  I couldn't bring myself to answer. She seemed to sense the severity. That something was desperately wrong, though she couldn't quite gather what.

  In that we were much the same.

  "Do you trust me?" I asked, once we were as alone as possible, in the storeroom's corner furthest from the door.

  "What kind of question is that?" She bent her head to look at me, trying to get a read.

  I gripped her shoulders. "Just… answer. Do you trust me?"

  "Yes." She answered grudgingly, eyes sliding to the side.

  "Do you genuinely believe that I have your best interests at heart?"

  "Yes, Cairn. Fuck. You're scaring me."

  I hesitated. It was one thing to have suspicions. But speaking them into existence would make them real, forged in stone.

  Don't pretend. You can't help but untangle a knot even when it drops the rope that holds you. When signs and prophecies are screaming for you to stop, no matter how long you went on without noticing whatever it is, the moment you catch a glimpse it's all you can see. The forest, for the trees.

  "When father dragged you down to the dungeons—"

  "—The hells." Her eyes widened. "Do we have to talk about this now?"

  "It's important." I felt my grip tightening on her shoulders and forced myself to relax. "Listen. When it happened to me, I put on a brave face for the first hour. Maybe two. But it only got worse, and worse, and worse. Before the end of the first day I was screaming anything they wanted to know."

  "Elphion."

  "I say all this so you understand where it's coming from. And that I'd never judge you for it, one way or the other."

  "Let me go." Sera said, staring down to the floor beneath our feet.

  Slowly, I released her.

  "When father took you down to the dungeons, we'd only just turned our attention to the sewers."

  "As if I'd forget." Her mouth twisted bitterly, at the memory.

  "And when we found you after—"

  She turned her head to the side and trembled.

  "I know it hurts. That talking about it is like tearing open a barely healing wound—and it's so much easier to pretend it didn't happen. But it did, and we're here, and it may just be the only thing that matters." I drew a deep breath. "Did you tell him we planned to search the sewers?"

  "I don't know."

  "Think hard."

  Her brow furrowed, eyes searching. "It… was surreal. Like a nightmare. I couldn't believe it was happening." She sniffled and swiped at her eyes. "But I remember I was so certain he wanted to take it away from me. The first chance I'd ever had at glory, to truly prove myself, and he wanted to take it away. So, at first, I held. But the pain and exhaustion accumulated. I started losing consciousness, slipping in and out. And I felt afraid that instead of an interrogation, it was the excuse he'd always waited for. To rid himself of the half-breed bitch of a daughter he'd never been fond of. So eventually… and I'm not sure if I dreamed this, or if it was real… eventually I told him."

  I hugged her, then. Held her close. "I'm sorry. Gods, I'm so sorry. Damn it all. I was so caught up in my loss I lost sight of yours."

  Sera shook her head, fixing me with a heart-wrenching smile. "It wasn't like that. You held space for me. For my pain. Stood up to him for my sake—and gods know no one's ever done that before. Even when your world was unraveling around you." She looked around the room, at the regiment. "This is the most I've ever had. And I wouldn't trade it for the world."

  It came to me in pieces.

  The missing drephin.

  The stench of sewer.

  Sera's interrogation.

  The madhouse exercise that immediately followed Lillian's death, throwing the entire city along with my regiment into utter disarray under the guise of "testing" my ability to lead.

  Delaying our plans.

  "You almost fucking died, boy. And despite the infernal's mystical yammering and your bodyguard's cagey report, I had very little explanation as to why. Of course I looked further into your affairs. Of course that fucking mattered to me."

  Did it?

  Still deep in the throes of grief. I'd interpreted the heavy-handedness as misplaced concern. Doubt. That he'd been so overly worried for my wellbeing that it escalated into strong-arming my sister into revealing our plans.

  After all, he'd never tried to steal the glory as Sera feared, despite ample opportunity to do so.

  Could that have been nothing more than ego on my part? Wishing desperately to believe he saw something special in me? That he was impressed with my accomplishments?

  That I mattered to him?

  What if it was never about testing me at all?

  Slowly, I panned the room. It all felt so ephemeral, almost translucent, an afterimage of the sun on the verge of fading to nothing. As I searched the faces of the damned who threw their lot in with mine because they believed in me, trusted me to lead them, I realized the truth. I couldn't ask them to be part of this. It was too personal.

  And if I was right, the risk was simply too high.

  "What's the plan, chief?" Zin asked. He seemed to realize he was interrupting something and gave Sera an apologetic nod. "I… can come back."

  "No. Now's as good a time as any." I rubbed my forehead. "Send them home. Call it off. There's nothing here for us to find."

  /////

  A short time later, I walked through the castle grounds at a slow clip, Annette following behind me, skirts swishing across the grass and dirt. What felt like a lifetime ago, I'd assigned her to the research team, and they'd been in the library since the first light of dawn, searching for any information regarding our missing goddess.

  The princess blinked exhaustion from her eyes and surveyed our surroundings with a tired scowl. "I can't believe we didn't find anything about Lune. And there was little about Nychta and Nyx, let alone any threads to tie them together."

  "Don't fret, little sister." I ruffled her hair.

  Her mouth twitched. "You haven't told me where we're going."

  "That's because it's terrible."

  She laughed, and I felt the heaviness in my soul lighten, ever so slightly.

  "I suppose you have an established pattern of dragging me into the unpleasant." Annette fell silent then, little sound around us beyond the wind and the twitter of birds winding down for the afternoon. "You found something."

  Always so sharp.

  I tilted my head back and forth. "It'd be more correct to say there's a suspicion to confirm and leave it at that."

  "And you're not telling me because you don't want to bias the outcome."

  "Yes." I lied. "That's why."

  "Alright." Annette said, puzzling through that, as she always did, instead of letting it slide. "Why am I going with you, instead of Maya or Sera? Why have you left Alten and the others behind?"

  "Because depending on how this plays out, there's nothing anyone can do to protect me. Their presence would only put them in danger."

  "That doesn't change the fact that you'll be in danger, regardless. In fact, if there's guaranteed to be danger, it seems rather stupid."

  The judgement came so quickly and summarily that I barked a laugh. "It might be."

  Annette stopped, and I half-turned towards her. "Then let's just… not. You can send a runner, have someone here within the hour. Someone who isn't stuffed into a dress and will have no trouble running away."

  I shook my head. "The only way there's even a chance at getting the truth is if it's me, and me alone."

  Her brow furrowed. "So… you don't need me as an escort. You need me as witness."

  "Now you're getting it." I crossed the grass between us and held out my hands. She inspected them first, and then, seeming to grasp what I wanted—albeit unhappily—she placed her small hands in mine. With a gentle squeeze, I let go, crouching down to her eyeline. "You can trust Sevran. Maya and Alten too. I'd put my life in their hands a thousand times over. The rest of my banner lieutenants are probably fine, but if something happens, wait until it's safe, and seek them out first. Now…" I cleared my throat, grimacing. "We're about to go somewhere very unpleasant. And I don't know how it's going to play out. No matter what happens, I need you to keep your eyes and ears open, but beyond that, stay hidden. Be patient."

  "I can do that." Annette said, holding my gaze. "Not thrilled about the vagueness, but I can play the part. Can you at least tell me what you're afraid will happen?"

  "It's a binary. I'm—" I hesitated, piecing through how to say it. "Going to do something. And, to be fair, it may not draw any attention at all. It might go completely ignored and unnoticed. Should that happen, we can laugh over my stupidity, and I'll take you somewhere outside the castle to eat."

  "But if it draws attention… that's when things go bad?" Annette asked, searching me for any further hint.

  "Yes. That's when things get bad."

  "Well, it's barely any less vague. But I suppose it will do." She shrugged, still watching me closely.

  We walked in silence, every step upon the pavement echoing against the castle walls. The shadows of late afternoon grew long, dark claws stretching out from the elevated battlements, holding us in their grasp. Once we were in proximity of the square mouth that housed the dungeon, I turned to tell Annette to hide herself, only to find she already had, intuiting our destination from what little I'd spoken.

  "You can't come in here." One of the guards posted beneath the torches said.

  "Then stop me." I returned, without inflection.

  He bristled but made no move, so I ignored him, stepping over the grate and through the gateway, traversing the dimly lit hall to the endless set of stairs that led to lesser hells. The knowledge that I wasn't alone, that Annette was nearby, helped quiet my spirits. Though only a little.

  The moans and cries rose from below, just as they had before. And just as before, I reached the bottom, traversing the stone floor at a slow pace, circumventing all manner of cruelty, even as cold eyes watched, and desperate hands stretched out towards me.

  Coming down here might have been enough.

  But I couldn't get it out of my head. Sera called out the scent of sewer from the cell itself. We'd followed that trail to the sewer outlet at the edge of the city.

  What if we got it backwards?

  Without breaking pace, I snatched a large hammer with a long handle from a watching torturer's grasp, temporarily sparing the man tied to the table who whimpered mindlessly, his lower half a bloody mess.

  And with it, approached the wall that now blocked access to what had been the Drephin's cell.

  In retrospect it had been over the top, even for Gil. Walling a man in to die of starvation and thirst because he'd lost a prisoner, when half the denizens who worked the dungeons shared the blame. It was disproportionate. I remembered a conversation I'd heard in a tavern once, amongst the rangers, regarding brigands.

  "See, the crafty ones? They know we have dogs. And they know our dogs can sniff out corpses. So when they fuck up—slit a throat they shouldn't have slit, and realize it, they get creative. Bury the body deep, and then, put some rotting raccoon or deer on top of it. Dog tips us off, we dig, we see the animal, we smell the animal, the dogs get scolded. So, if you find a corpse you didn't want when you're looking for a body? Keep digging. Otherwise you might just walk right past the damn thing you're actually lookin’ for.”

  It'd be faster to do this with magic. But I wasn't sure how much mana I'd need, later, should worse come to worst. So, gripping it tightly, I raised the hammer and brought it down.

  THUNK

  It landed cleanly, knocking the first brick into the cell beyond. The stench of the torturer's moldering body assailed me, invading my nostrils, making me gag.

  I kept going, pulling the hammer up over my head and slamming it against the wall.

  THUNK

  THUNK

  THUNK

  THUNK

  It felt good to hit something. To feel the impact return, every strike waking me up, the shock traveling up my arms, into my shoulders, jarring, distracting from the one gods damned thing I didn't want to think about. Time passed quickly. In my peripheral, observers came and went, demons in the guise of hooded men, their blood drenched implements held casually at their side, same as any tool.

  By the time the bricks crumbled with a din of stone on stone, my sense of smell had left me. Fled entirely. I stepped through the remnants of the wall. The corpse was there, strewn out on its back.

  Keep digging.

  Automatically, almost compelled, I stalked over it and towards the back wall, stepping around the pit of refuse and picking up speed as I went. The hammer struck the stone with little impact, painfully rebounding off.

  "What. Exactly. Are you doing?" A gruff voice asked.

  I felt his presence, large and looming. I'd hoped so desperately that he wouldn't show. That my actions here would be ignored, that at most I'd receive a sidelong look or pithy comment. But he was here. Under almost exactly the same conditions as last time.

  "What does it look like?" I struck at the back wall again in a different spot, grimacing as it bounced off painfully.

  "Expending pointless energy." He growled.

  "Let's go with that." I moved to the right wall, focusing on the center, driving the hammer home again. There was more give, and I went at it with fervor, slamming the hammer's head against the weak point over and over. The brick came free, revealing the interior of the adjacent cell. They were closer together than I'd realized. I set the hammer down and wiped my brow, finally turning to look at the man himself.

  The expression on my father's face was unreadable. He loomed over the remnants of the shattered wall like a titan of yore. His lips parted and his voice vibrated in his throat. "My spymaster missed a meeting today."

  "Understandable." My smile was more snarl. "Gods know I've had difficulties tracking him down."

  The king's visage remained perfectly even. "Thaddeus does not miss appointments. Ever. I can only conclude that something has happened to him."

  I raised my eyebrows, breathing heavily. "Pity. Perhaps we should alert the guards to trawl the inns and scour the brothels. I'll just put this down and stop. I've only tried the back, and the right, surely there's nothing on the left—" I lunged for it, seeing him react a split second before the hammer struck home. Beneath the complaint of stone was the distinct echo of metal, ringing like a gong.

  "EVERYONE OUT!" My father roared. He turned his head, directing the sentiment towards the dungeon at large. "SEE THAT THE WAY IS BARRED. NO ONE GETS IN."

  The order was immediately acknowledged by the shuffling of footsteps, and an array of boots stomping up the stairs in barely restrained hurry.

  As he turned back to me, his face was still stoic. But I thought, just for a moment, I saw a flicker of resignation there. "So," he began, sounding very tired. "You want to see what it costs to win a war?"

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