I heard a noise and whirled around.

A woman stood at the other end of the passage.

I was so shocked I didn’t have the sense to be afraid at first. Her face was hazy in the shadows, and her long hair fell in twisted strands all the way to the floor.

And then I knew. Deep in my gut, I knew who she was, though all the rules of reason told me it was impossible. This was the woman I had seen in the shadows of Sanctum Hall. The woman who had watched me from the ledge. The very same woman who had sung my name from a wall thousands of years ago. The one pushed to her death, and the namesake of a kingdom determined to crush mine.

This was Venda.

I had warned Venda not to wander too far from the tribe.

A hundred times, I had warned her.

I was more her mother than her sister.

She came years after the storm.

She never felt the ground shake,

Never saw the sun turn red.

Never saw the sky go black.

Never saw fire burst on the horizon and choke the air.

She never even saw our mother. This was all she had ever known.

The scavengers lay in wait for her, and I saw Harik steal her away on his horse.

She never looked back, even when I called after her.

Don’t believe his lies, I cried, but it was too late. She was gone.

—The Last Testaments of Gaudrel

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

She looked at me, her head angled to the side, her expression unreadable—sadness, anger, relief? I wasn’t sure—and then she nodded. Ice crept through my veins. She recognized me. Her lips moved silently, mouthing my name, and then she turned away and the shadows swallowed her.

“Wait!” I called and ran after her. I searched, turning in all directions, but the stairwell and landing were empty. She was gone.

The wind, time, it circles, repeats, some swaths cutting deeper than others.

I braced myself against the wall, my head pounding, my palms damp, trying to explain her away, searching the rules of reason, but it settled into me as true and real as the chorus of cries I’d heard in the heavens the day I buried my brother. The centuries and tears had swirled with voices that couldn’t be erased, not even by death, and Venda’s was a song that couldn’t be silenced, even by being pushed from a wall. It was all as true and real as a Komizar who clutched my neck and promised to take everything.

“The rules of reason,” I whispered, a mindless chant that still tumbled from my lips. I didn’t even know what it meant anymore.

I took a shaky step forward in the dark, and my boot knocked something exactly where she had disappeared. It made a strange hollow sound. My fingers slid along the wall, and instead of more stone, I found a low wood panel. With a gentle push, I slid it open and found myself under a dark sweep of stairs in the middle of the Sanctum. Bright light splashed the hall in front of me, and I was grateful for a world of hard edges, heavy footsteps, and warm flesh. All things solid. I looked back at the wood panel behind me, questioning my brief descent down the hidden stairway, and wondered what I had really seen. Was it real and true or only terror at being trapped? But the name she had mouthed, Jezelia, still juddered through me. Guards walked by, and I slunk back, hiding in the shadows. I had escaped one trap and fallen into another.

This was the busy hallway that led to the tower where the Komizar said he had a secure room for Rafe. I was about to step out when three governors approached and I had to duck back down. All I needed was a free moment to dart out and run up the stairs, and I was certain I could find Rafe’s room, but the hall seemed to be a main thoroughfare. The governors passed, then several servants carrying baskets, and finally the quiet held. I pulled my hood over my head and stepped out—just as two guards rounded the corner.

They stopped short in surprise when they saw me.

“There you are!” I snapped. “Are you the ones who were ordered to leave firewood outside the Assassin’s room?” I shot them both an accusatory eye.

The tallest of the two glared back. “Do we look like barrow runners?”

“We aren’t filthy patty clappers,” the other one snarled.

“Really?” I said. “Not even for the Assassin?” I put my hand to my chin as if I were memorizing their faces.

One looked at the other, then back at me. “We’ll send a boy.”

“See that you do! The weather’s turned cold, and the Assassin wanted a roaring fire by the time he returned.” I turned and walked away in a huff, climbing the stairs. My temples pounded as I expected them to come to their senses, but all I heard behind me was their grousing and shouting at a poor hapless servant down the hall.

After one dead end, two close calls with the wrong rooms, and a quick exit through a hall window, I walked along a ledge that was sufficiently hidden from the view of those below. Peeking through windows rather than opening doors proved to be a safer way to explore, and only a few windows later, I found him.

His stillness struck me first. His profile. He slouched in a chair, looking out an opposite window. The smoldering, calculated stare that had made me uneasy the first time I saw him made me apprehensive again. It breathed menace and frightening reserve, a bow stretched, loaded, aimed, waiting. It was the stare that had made platters in my hand tremble as I set them down before him in the tavern. Even with my slight side view, the ice of his blue eyes cut like a sword. Neither farmer nor prince. They were the eyes of a warrior. Eyes bred with power. And yet last night he’d made them warm for Calantha when she sat close and whispered to him, made them spark with intrigue when the Komizar asked questions … made them hooded with disinterest when I kissed Kaden.