She looked up from the dog and at Verex, at his long, thin frame, the hunched shoulders, the shock of pale hair, the large, liquid eyes.

She wondered what would happen if she took his free hand. She wondered if he would imagine that Risha, not she, held his hand, and if this was how Kestrel’s marriage to him would always be. She saw herself and Verex holding each other. She felt, almost, the kindness of it … and she felt, surely, its cruelty. Its claim on them. Its crime as they each pretended the other was someone else.

“I will never keep you from Risha,” she said.

“I wouldn’t do this to her,” he said. “If—”

There was no need to finish. They both knew what the emperor was capable of doing to the princess if Verex defied him.

“We could remake the world,” Verex said. “Would it be so bad, to rule the empire together?”

It had been a question Kestrel hadn’t allowed herself to ask. Now she did. The question kept asking itself, an echo with no answer.

“We can do this,” Verex said, “if we wait. If we’re careful. Kestrel, can you be careful?”

* * *

In her mind, Kestrel played the tiles.

The emperor.

The water engineer.

The physician.

A favor.

Herran.

Valoria.

She noted the new engravings. She arranged them in different orders. She sought a pattern and came up empty. She mixed the tiles again. But the emperor made it hard to think. She flipped his tile so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

Its other side, however, wasn’t blank. It showed her father’s face.

What game was this?

What did Kestrel think she was doing?

Hadn’t she lost enough? Hadn’t she done enough? She remembered Verex’s advice.

The riddle of the engineer and physician wasn’t hers to solve. She needed to stop.

Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game.

Now.

40

First, Arin made the molds. One, the size and shape of a child’s marble. The other, long and thin and cylindrical. He made two of each kind from fired clay and set the twinned halves aside. He heated lead in the forge’s fire until the metal oozed red.

Arin had been a blacksmith, but blacksmiths rarely work with molds. His clay molds cracked. Hot lead spilled. There was nothing to do but let everything cool into a misbegotten heap and shove it to the side.

It was maddening. And surprising, how Arin realized that he needed those hours in the forge, how work he was once forced to do was now his. He loved that feeling of making something. He smoothed fresh clay, curving it, hollowing it out with a measured tool. He watched new molds bake in the forge’s fire.

When they broke again, he almost didn’t mind. He would make more. One day, they would be right.

* * *

Arin had told the queen and her brother not to enter the forge. Roshar did anyway, his arm still heavily bandaged, the little tiger padding behind him.

“I think”—Roshar surveyed the disarray—“that you should have taken that dagger and been happy with it.”

Arin handed him a list. “Supplies.”

“My, how the lowly have risen. I’m not your messenger boy.” He read the list. “What do you want that for? What are you making?”

“Your queen’s something more.”

Roshar laughed. “She asked you for ‘something more’? I doubt that this”—he flourished the list at Arin’s latest disaster—“was what she had in mind.”

The tiger nipped Arin’s ankle. He gently nudged its face away. “Roshar, why are you here?”

“I’ve named the cub. I named him after you.”

“Roshar.”

“When Arin grows up, you’ll be sentenced to death by tiger in the Dacran arena. Arin will eat you alive.”

Arin looked at Roshar’s feral grin, and at the soft, mazed face of the tiger. The fire caught its eyes.

Roshar said, “I came to tell you that we burned the plains yesterday.”

Arin glanced up. The green paint that lined Roshar’s eyes made them look narrower, bright. Roshar’s smile changed. It dug in deep. “Casualties?” Arin asked.

“Many.”

“Good.”

“Not quite good enough for you, I’m afraid. You gave sound advice, I admit, but that won’t buy your alliance. I don’t see how this will either.” Roshar looked contemptuously at the items littering the forge’s worktable.

Arin was tempted to explain his idea. “Do you remember the weapons in Risha’s dollhouse?”

Roshar’s expression closed. “Do you remember that seal on your pretty dagger? That knife is a lady’s weapon. Don’t think we don’t know whose.” He shoved at a broken mold. Ceramic dust scraped across the table. Yet Roshar saved the real damage for what he said before leaving, the tiger at his heels. “Don’t wonder, Arin, why we won’t ally with you.”

* * *

Another article of clothing arrived for Arin. A pair of trimmed gloves. Tensen’s woven code told him that the Moth had uncovered a connection between the water engineer and the emperor’s physician. Sarsine reported that conditions in Herran had worsened. Had Arin secured an eastern alliance? the knots asked. He should return home.

Tensen, despite Arin’s insistence that Kestrel have no colored thread, managed to work her in anyway. Firstsummer had almost arrived, Tensen said. She was a glowing bride. Be happy for her, Arin, said a knotted line as bumpy as a badly healed scar.