Word must have traveled ahead of Arin, or loped along the banks of the canals.

Grappling hooks spun out over the water and snared Arin’s launch. One bit into his arm and tore a small red line.

Arin’s boat was dragged to a pier, where he was quickly seized.

24

The prison wasn’t terrible. He had a tiny window with a view of the sky.

Arin had tried to explain when they’d hauled him off the boat, but even though his language felt close to Dacran, like a thin skin was all that separated them from understanding him, the easterners regarded him with the same uncomprehending frustration Arin felt.

Their black eyes were lined with sunset colors. Both men and women had closely cropped hair, and wore the same loose white trousers and shirts. When a sudden rainfall plummeted down with a violence that bounced raindrops off the paved bank of the canal, it soaked through the white fabric, revealing trim muscle.

Kestrel’s dagger was taken. At the sight of an imperial weapon, something hardened in the air between Arin and them.

A woman had asked him a curt question.

“Look at me,” Arin had said. “I’m no Valorian.” The Dacrans could see his dark hair, the gray Herrani eyes. They must know that he had been their enemies’ slave.

But his last word had made matters worse. The tension tightened.

“Please,” he said then. “I need to speak with your queen.”

That was understood.

There was a sudden surge toward him. His arms were wrenched behind his back. His hands were bound, and he was dragged away.

In his cell, Arin passed his hand over the rectangle of blue sky. He blocked it, revealed it, blocked it again. Then he let the color fully in. The walls of his schoolroom in Herran had been painted this shade. Arin thought of the times when his father came to listen to his lesson in logic, and told the tutor to leave. He would take over from there.

The quiet pleasure of that memory tried to keep Arin company. When it slipped away, Arin knew that he was afraid.

A foreigner armed with an imperial dagger, asking to see the queen?

Arin had been so stupid. But not quite stupid enough to be able to ignore what might lie in store for him once someone opened that prison door.

Arin rubbed at his cheek, felt the raised and tender scar. He was no stranger to pain. The Valorians had shown him the ways a body can betray you.

When Arin was a slave in the quarries, Cheat had tried to teach him about it, too. It was for Arin’s own good, he’d said. Arin should learn to resist it. Cheat had cut Arin’s inner arm with a sharp stone. Arin had gasped at the blood. He’d dragged at Cheat’s grip. “Stop,” he’d said. “Please.”

“All right, all right.” Cheat finally let go. “I don’t want to do this, either. What can I say? I’m too fond of you.”

And Arin, who had been twelve years old, felt ashamed and grateful.

There were various ends to the story of this eastern prison cell, this window. Most of them weren’t good. Arin didn’t know how he would do under torture.

He remembered telling his plan to Tensen. He’d travel to the east. He’d gain the queen’s sympathy and help. Easy. In his memory, Arin’s own voice sounded almost blithe.

No, not quite.

Arin had been eager to leave the capital. Desperate. He had needed to escape, and he knew whom he was fleeing. How could Arin ever trust his instincts, when Kestrel had proven him so grievously wrong? Arin should have known that sailing to the east was a bad idea. He swore that from now on, he would doubt everything he was tempted to believe.

There were footsteps, multiple ones, approaching the other side of his solid cell door.

Logic is a game, came the memory of his father’s voice. Let’s see how you play.

There was a window in his cell.

A prisoner would be drawn to it, like an insect to light. Like he had been.

Whoever was coming would expect to see him near it.

Arin moved away.

He positioned himself in the path the door’s swing would take. When it opened, and someone began to step forward, Arin slammed the door back against him. Arin hauled the man close and choked an arm around his neck.

The guard cried out in his language.

“Let me go,” Arin said, even though it was he who held the man tight. “Get me out of here.”

The Dacran wheezed. He scratched Arin’s arms, his face. He spoke again, and Arin remembered only then that he’d heard more than one set of footsteps.

The other set belonged to a man standing in the doorway.

“Do something!” Arin thought the guard in his grasp must be trying to say. Because the second Dacran was oddly still. Arin peered, not understanding what kept him back from the fray, or from bargaining for the safety of his friend.

The silent man took one step into the cell. The light caught his face. Arin’s grip on the guard tightened.

The man in the doorway had a skull’s face. The tip of his nose was gone, the nostrils unnaturally wide slits. A scar that grazed the upper lip showed that the knife had gone downward to cut off the nose. The man’s ears were nothing but holes.

“You,” the man said to Arin in Herrani. “I remember you.”

25

The day before Kestrel had bought him.

The eastern slave who had tried to run away.

The emperor will get what he deserves, he had told Arin.

“I see that you, too, have earned your marks,” said the Dacran as he stood in the cell’s doorway. “But you still aren’t as good-looking as me.”