“What’s the matter with you?” he yelled.

I stared at him in disbelief, still choking on my own breath. “Do you expect me to congratulate them for murdering her?”

His chest heaved, but he forced a slow deep breath. His hands were fists at his sides. He lowered his voice. “It wasn’t their intention, Lia.”

“Do you think it matters what they intended? She’s dead”

“War is ugly, Lia.”

“War? What war, Kaden? The imaginary one you’re waging? The one Greta didn’t sign up for? She wasn’t a soldier. She was an innocent.”

“Lots of innocents die in war. Most are Vendans. Countless numbers have died trying to settle in the Cam Lanteux.”

How dare he compare Greta to lawbreakers. “There’s a treaty hundreds of years old forbidding it!”

His jaw hardened. “Why don’t you tell that to Eben? He was only five when he watched both his parents die trying to defend their home from soldiers setting fire to it. His mother died with an ax to her chest, and his father was torched along with their house.”

Rage still pounded in my head. “It wasn’t Morrighese soldiers who did it!”

Kaden stepped closer, a sneer smearing his face. “Really? He was too young to know what kind of soldiers they were, but he does remember a lot of red—the banner colors of Morrighan.”

“It must be very convenient to blame Morrighan’s soldiers when there are no witnesses and only a child’s remembrance of red. Look to your own bloody savages and the blood they spill for the guilty.”

“Innocents die, Lia. On all sides,” he yelled. “Pull your royal head out of your ass and get used to it!”

I looked at him, unable to speak.

He swallowed, shaking his head, then swiped his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.” His eyes rested the floor, then on me again, his anger now subdued by his infuriating practiced calm. “But you’ve made things more difficult. It will be harder to keep you safe from Malich now.”

I drew in a false breath of shock. “A thousand pardons! I wouldn’t want to make anything harder for you, because everything is so stinking easy for me! This is a holiday, right?”

My last words wobbled, and my vision blurred.

He sighed and stepped toward me. “Let me see your hands.”

I looked down at them. They were covered in blood and still shaking. My fingertips throbbed where three nails had been torn past the quick, and two fingers on my left hand were already swollen and blue—they felt broken. I had attacked Malich and the others as if my fingers were made of tempered steel. They were the only weapons I had.

I looked back at Kaden. He had known all along that they had killed Greta.

“How much blood do you have on your hands, Kaden? How many people have you killed?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked the question before. He was an assassin. His job was killing, but he hid it far too well.

He didn’t answer, but I saw his jaw tighten.

“How many?” I asked again.

“Too many.”

“So many you’ve lost count.”

A crease deepened at the corners of his eyes.

He reached for my hand, but I pulled it away. “Get out, Kaden. I may be your prisoner, but I’m not your whore.”

My words left a deeper wound than the ones on his neck. Anger flashed through his eyes and shattered his calm. He spun and left, slamming the door behind him.

All I wanted was to collapse into a ball on the floor, but just seconds later, I heard a soft tap on the door, and it eased open. It was Dihara. She entered carrying a small pail of scented water with leaves floating on top. “For your hands. Fingers fester quickly.”

I bit my lip and nodded. She sat me down in the lone chair in the carvachi and pulled a short stool up for herself. She dipped my hands in the water and wiped them gently with a soft cloth.

“I’m sorry if I frightened the children,” I said.

“You’ve lost someone close to you.”

“Two people,” I whispered, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the Walther I knew back again. Out here I couldn’t do anything for him. For anyone. How little the worth of my own fleeting happiness seemed now. Even the barbarians would have had the good sense to back down from the combined force of two armies. The prospect had frightened them enough to want to dispose of me. Was that how Kaden had planned to eliminate me, an arrow through my throat like Greta’s? Was that what he had regretted so deeply that night we danced? The prospect of killing me? His words, we can’t dwell on the maybes, came back to me, bitter and biting.

Dihara pulled away a piece of hanging nail, and I winced. She placed my hands back in the pail washing away the blood. “The broken fingers will need bandaging too,” she said. “But they’ll heal quickly. Soon enough for you to do whatever you need to do.”

I watched the herbs floating in the water. “I don’t know what that is anymore.”

“You will.”

She took my hands from the pail and carefully wiped them dry, then applied a thick sticky balm to the raw skin of the ripped nails. It immediately eased the pain with numbing coolness. She wrapped the three fingertips in strips of cloth.

“Take a deep breath,” she said and pulled on the two blue fingers, making me cry out. “You’ll want them to heal straight.” She wound them together with more cloth until they were stiff and unbendable. I looked at them, trying to imagine saddling a horse or holding reins now.