It crumbled a little in her grasp. Its scent was sweetly smoky. She stood there longer than necessary, inhaling the gift of a gift. It occurred to her that if she used it, and Arin used it, her skin would smell like his.

She tucked it carefully in her saddlebag, wrapping spare clothes around it so that it wouldn’t be broken.

“Come with me.” Arin. Eyes illuminated. “I want to show you something.”

Kestrel followed without question, though the army’s midday rest was nearly over. They took their horses.

She kept stealing glances at Arin as they rode toward a grassy hill. He caught her at it. “A secret,” he said, and smiled.

It felt as if his smile became hers. His secret, too. The day itself: the satin sky, a speckled yellow feather that spiraled down on a breeze to catch in Javelin’s mane. She held all this inside her the way a jewel holds light.

They dismounted at the foot of the hill. Kestrel noticed stone steps, overgrown with green, leading up the slope. It occurred to her that the entire hill, rare for this terrain, might have been man-made.

“What is this?” she asked. The stairs, as far as she could tell, led to nothing. The hilltop seemed bare.

Arin plucked the yellow feather from Javelin’s mane and tucked it behind her ear. “A temple. At least, it used to be.”

She touched the feather’s ticklish plume, the slight scratch of the quill. She explored it, trying to ignore her plea sure at his unexpected gesture. “Is that your secret?”

“You wouldn’t ask”—Arin’s grin was mischievous—“if you didn’t guess that it is not. Come see.”

The steps were broken in places and wobbled beneath Kestrel’s feet. When they reached the hilltop, she could see the jumble of marble that had been the temple’s foundation. Perhaps it had been destroyed after the conquest; the Valorians had razed all Herrani temples to their gods. But these ruins looked ancient. The marble was bleached bone white. The carvings, polished smooth by time, were blurred and mostly indecipherable, like a dream after one has woken.

“It’s greener here, isn’t it?” Arin’s voice was hushed. “Than the rest of this region.”

“Yes.”

There were birds’ nests in the nooks of broken marble. A lizard darted over a fallen pillar. The place appeared at once ghostly and yet full of life. When Arin stepped into the center of the ruined temple and knelt, Kestrel thought it was to pray, but he was clearing away vegetation. “I recognize some of this.” He was eager; his words tripped over each other. He seemed unaware that she wouldn’t understand what he meant. “But other parts . . . I thought I knew all the stories.”

Kestrel came to kneel beside him. A face glittered up at her beneath strands of ivy. Startled, she pulled the greenery away.

It was a mosaic. An entire, immense tiled floor stretched out of sight beneath the vegetation. Kestrel palmed away dirt. The face flared in the sun, its tiled features slippery and cool. The man—woman?—had wings fanned wide, a peacock’s colors. Scaled skin. Carnelian claws.

Kestrel tugged more ivy free. Gorgeous, impossible creatures appeared. An enameled snake with six tails. A horse made of water. A woman whose hair appeared to be paper scrolls written in a script close to Herrani, but with so many alien elements Kestrel couldn’t read it. Some of the figures looked only vaguely human. A string of eyes crowned a brow. One long, violet-skinned body had no limbs. Gold spilled in a ribbon from the lips of a god.

They were all gods. They could be nothing else.

“Maybe we should go back,” Arin said, but he didn’t mean it. His mouth was reluctant. He licked his thumb and rubbed a tile clean, not raising his gaze, the sun tumbling in his messy hair. A wide blade of light cut across the bridge of his nose, warming his neck and shoulders. He moved, and the sun caught his face in full.

Her limbs were light, as if with fear. Her blood seemed to float. She said, “Not yet,” and saw his sudden happiness.

She helped him clear the vegetation and expose the entire mosaic to the sky.

Every chip of her being slid into place, into the image of a lost world. The boy discovering it. The girl who sees it spark and flare, and understands, now, what she feels. She realizes that she has felt this for a long time.

Lapis lazuli, kiln-fired glass, onyx and gold and shell and ivory. Jade. Aquamarine. Kestrel barely saw where each tile of the mosaic joined, the taut line of contact. Piece to piece. She pressed her palm to its surface and imagined its image imprinted on her skin.

Later, Kestrel wished she had spoken then, that no time had been lost. She wished that she’d had the courage that very moment to tell Arin what she’d finally known to be true: that she loved him with the whole of her heart.