Their progress through the city was slow. The roads were steep and narrow, made less for the convenience of society and more for the purpose of slowing an enemy’s progress up the slopes to the palace.

No new ships had arrived. Kestrel shouldn’t have expected to see one Herrani-made anyway. It was green storm season. No sane person would sail between the Herran peninsula and the capital.

The harbor wind chapped Kestrel’s lips.

“What are we doing here?” said the maid through chattering teeth.

Kestrel could hardly say that she was looking for a boat that had brought Arin. Time was running out for him to make the longer but safer trek through the mountain pass, which had been cleared after the treaty with Herran had been signed. The ball loomed at the end of the week. Most guests had already arrived. But not him.

“Nothing,” Kestrel said. “I wanted the view.” The girl blinked: her only sign of annoyance to have been dragged down to the harbor. But Kestrel wasn’t allowed to travel without an escort. She had hundreds of engagement gifts—a pen made from the ivory of a horned whale, ruby dice from a colonial lord who had heard of Kestrel’s love of games, even a clever collapsible tiara for traveling … The list of pretty presents was long, but Kestrel would have gladly traded them all for one hour of privacy outside the palace.

“Let’s go,” she said, and didn’t return to the harbor.

* * *

She dined with senators. Over the rim of her wineglass, Kestrel watched the Senate leader, who looked oddly tan for winter, murmur something to the emperor.

What were you doing, she remembered the captain asking Thrynne in the prison, eavesdropping outside the doors of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate leader?

It suddenly seemed that Kestrel’s cup wasn’t filled with wine but blood.

The emperor glanced up and caught Kestrel staring at him and the Senate leader. He lifted one brow.

Kestrel glanced away. She drank her wine to the bottom.

* * *

Her father sent his apologies. He couldn’t come to the ball. He was mired in fighting near the border with the eastern plains. I’m sorry, General Trajan wrote, but I have my orders.

Kestrel stopped rereading the scant black lines of writing. Instead, she stared at all the blank space left on that one sheet of paper. The white of it hurt her eyes. She let the letter fall.

She’d never even considered it a possibility that her father would come—not until the moment that she had held his letter in her hands and ripped it open.

That blinding hope. That drop into disappointment. She should have known better.

She remembered the letter’s last word: orders. Kestrel wondered how far her father’s obedience to the emperor would go. What would the general have done in Thrynne’s prison cell? Would his knife have cut as easily as the captain’s, or worse, or not at all?

But when she thought of her father and imagined him in the captain’s role, Thrynne wasn’t there in the prison in her mind. She was the one in chains. What were you doing, the general asked, bargaining with the emperor for a slave’s life?

Kestrel shook her head, and no longer saw the prison or her father. She was looking out a window in one of her rooms high above the palace’s inner ward, facing the barbican, where visitors would enter.

She palmed away the window’s frost. The barbican’s gate was shut.

Come away from the window, she heard her father order.

She stayed where she was. The glass fogged.

‘No’ doesn’t exist, Kestrel. Only ‘yes.’

The view had clouded over.

She left the window. There was nothing to see anyway.

* * *

The days wore on.

There was a performance for the court. A Herrani singer. His voice was acceptable. But higher than Arin’s. Thinner. Kestrel became angry at the way this unknown man’s voice scraped the bottom of his register. This music was inferior, thready stuff. It had none of Arin’s strength, his lithe resilience.

Kestrel hoarded the memory of Arin’s song. It was honey in the hive of her heart. As the performance continued, Kestrel began to worry that the music she was hearing now was going to replace what she remembered of Arin’s voice. He would never sing for her again. What if she could no longer even remember how he had sung for her once? She curled her fingers under the edge of her chair and gripped hard.

Finally the performance came to an end. The audience met the singer’s silence with a dull silence of their own. No one clapped—not because everyone else had been able to judge the music’s quality and found it wanting, but because they saw no point in applauding a slave, even after remembering that he no longer was one. And Kestrel, who had never forgotten what this man was and was not, certainly had no intention of applauding either.

* * *

Her music, too, was a problem. The piano brought little comfort—and what comfort it gave turned out to be false. Kestrel began to craft something that she thought was an impromptu, as difficult as she could make it. Then the notes nudged aside, twined together, and left spaces that she couldn’t fill.

This was no impromptu. Impromptus were for soloists. This was a duet.

No, not quite a duet … only half of one.

Kestrel brought the lid down on the keys.

* * *

She invented a solitaire version of Bite and Sting. She played against a ghost. She played against herself. The boneyard—the stock of tiles left on the table after players drew their hands—dwindled until all the pieces were faceup like a final truth that she should have been able to decode. The tiger bared its teeth. The spider wove its web. Mouse, stonefish, viper, wasp … the black engravings on the ivory tiles became suddenly sharp in definition, then blurred before her eyes.