The footman fidgeted. “I wouldn’t recommend that, my lady. I believe that both brother and sister will be out for a great deal of time.”

“I’ll wait.”

And she did. She was determined to sleep on the parlor divan if she must.

The fire throbbed low. Her tea grew cold.

She remembered Jess frowning in her sleep. She remembered crushing the glass petal of Jess’s necklace against the marble mantel.

Was Jess’s silence—her absence, her lies—because of that broken gift? Maybe that was Kestrel’s offense. But she had told Jess, and Jess had forgiven her. Hadn’t she?

Or …

What had Ronan told Jess? Kestrel had thought his pride would keep him from ever telling his sister about his marriage proposal to Kestrel on Firstwinter night—and his rejection, and whom Kestrel had preferred over him.

Dread ate at her. When the clock struck the third hour, she shifted against a cushion. It released a trace of Jess’s perfume. A white flower from Herran. It bloomed behind Kestrel’s eyes.

The scent was fresh.

The parlor had a view of the road. Kestrel could see her own carriage, and her escort waiting inside it.

Kestrel fought the realization. She didn’t want to understand. But she did … she envisioned so clearly how Jess had been sitting on this very sofa when Kestrel’s carriage had pulled up. Jess had left word with a footman. Then she’d retreated to another part of the house. She was waiting there. She was waiting for Kestrel to leave.

The perfume watered Kestrel’s eyes.

“I’ll return another day,” she told the footman on her way out, but when she stepped into the carriage, Kestrel glanced up over her shoulder and caught a flutter of fabric in a high window of the town house. A curtain had been drawn aside. Someone was watching her.

The instant Kestrel looked at it, the curtain fell.

* * *

As Kestrel walked through the barbican, she overheard palace guards laughing.

“Where’s he disappeared to these days?” one of them said.

“The kennels,” answered another. “He’s been playing with puppies in the muck. The perfect place for our illustrious prince, if you ask me.”

Kestrel stopped. She returned, and approached the guards. They weren’t afraid, which meant they thought she shared their contempt.

She looked at the guard who had spoken last. Kestrel slapped his face. In the shocked silence that followed, Kestrel clenched her stinging hand and walked away.

* * *

Verex was holed up in one of the kennel’s pens, sitting on a nest of filthy straw and nursing a puppy with a rag sopped in milk. The puppy was peacefully floppy in Verex’s hands, its skin wrinkled and loose, eyes closed.

When Verex saw Kestrel, he almost looked like an animal himself, cornered and wary. “Don’t say it,” he told her.

“Say what?”

“Whatever you’re going to say.”

She leaned over the barrier of the wooden pen. “Will you show me how to do that?”

The hand holding the rag lifted in surprise. Milk dripped onto the puppy.

Kestrel entered the pen, sat next to Verex on the straw, and held out a cupped hand.

“No.” He brought her left palm up to meet her right and form a bowl. “Like this.” He eased the little animal into her hands. It was a yielding warmth, soft and boneless. Its whole body moved with its breath. Kestrel wondered if she’d been like this, as a baby in her father’s arms, and if he had been quieted and comforted to hold her as she held this creature.

“It’s a runt,” Verex said. “Its mother won’t nurse it.” He showed her how to nudge the milk rag into the puppy’s mouth.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

The prince fiddled with a bit of straw. “Oh, I figured it out. It’s not hard to guess what my father holds over you.” He caught her startled look. “Not when you know him like I do. He’d have this hound’s neck snapped even if its dam nursed it after all. He doesn’t like weaklings. But he loves to discover a weakness. And now your governor is gone.”

She kept her blurred eyes on the puppy. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I wanted to say.”

“But it’s the truth. You love him. That’s your weakness. One way or another, it’s why you agreed to marry me.”

Kestrel smoothed a thumb over the soft flip of one tiny ear. She looked at the puppy, blind and asleep even while sucking at the milk.

Verex said, “No one likes to be used.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to use you.”

“Honestly, I expect to be used. This is the court. I never thought … well, I’m my father’s son, aren’t I? Of course my marriage would be arranged. Of course I wouldn’t get to choose. I know that I’ve been angry. I know that I am, and that it eats at me, but … I would have understood, Kestrel, about the engagement. I understand you now. You could have told me why.”

“Do you think that why really matters?”

“Don’t you?”

“Verex, I’ve done something horrible.” The puppy’s ribs rose and fell as Kestrel told Verex about her plan to poison the horses of the eastern plains, and why she’d suggested it.

He was silent. One hand twitched in the straw. Kestrel thought he meant to take the puppy away from her, but he didn’t.

She said, “I’ve heard that you don’t agree with the war in the east.”