“You could speak with him.”

Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so . . . squishy. Like all this mud.”

Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.

“It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”

She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.

“You, who seek your own father’s death.”

The bodies lay tumbled in a ditch not far from the Sythiah vineyards.

The rain had washed away any tracks. Still, Kestrel understood the story.

It leached into her: how the emperor’s company had seized the manor and dragged the Herrani who lived there out onto the grounds. Forced them forward. A girl in the ditch had lost her shoe. Her little foot was black with mud. The shoe . . . Kestrel searched for it in the rain, feeling a growing panic and need, as if finding a lost shoe could blot away the image of ashen corpses, the way a dead woman still gripped the child’s hand. The inching insects. A shoe could take away the smell, the rot of it strong in the rain. A shoe could keep down the bile that rushed up Kestrel’s throat.

But when she found the shoe, stuck in the root of a tree, the inner leather sole still held the shape of the girl’s foot. Kestrel could feel its imprint.

The shoe took away none of the horror. It planted it deep in the bottom of Kestrel’s belly, as solid as a grown man’s kick.

They crouched in the stubby vineyards with the other five Dacran soldiers. Risha eyed the manor’s kitchen yard, the house’s weakest entry point. Several of the house’s windows glowed through the night rain.

Kestrel licked her sour lips and gripped the satchel. She imagined the game tiles rattling inside their velvet bag.

She remembered dining with the emperor. A dessert served with a disintegrating sugar fork. How encounters with him had always felt like that: as though every tool at her disposal was crumbling in her grasp. She remembered how, on the imperial palace grounds, after a hunt, she’d realized that the emperor would steal or maim her dog simply because she loved it. My father needs for you to love him best, Verex had said.

You need to watch yourself, he’d said.

If you play against my father, you’ ll lose.

A light hand touched her arm. “I don’t know you well,” Risha’s voice was low. “But I know what Verex has told me about you, and what I see for myself. You don’t need to be gifted with a blade. You are your own best weapon.”

Kestrel stared back at Risha, who was almost pure shadow—a mere glint of eyes. Kestrel felt a slow, slight throb, a shimmer in the blood. She knew it well.

Her worst trait. Her best trait.

The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.

A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.

Later, at dawn, when the emperor pulled Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath and touched its tip to her throat, she remembered that Sythiah’s manor had always been a trap. The question had only been whether it was a trap she set for the emperor, or one that she’d fall into.

Kestrel touched Risha’s hand. “Thank you.”

The seven of them moved through the dark to the house.

The dawn broke bright. Clear sky. A sheen of water wavered over the road toward Lerralen, deeper in the cracks between paving stones.

Arin and Roshar had moved the army as quickly west as they could. They had reached the location Arin had chosen.

The first task: to unload the hundreds of sharpened staves Arin had ordered made.

The second: to drive them into the sodden earth bordering the road.

The third: to set their last sacks of gunpowder on the road. A snug and deadly little bundle.

And the fourth: to wait, to try not to think about Kestrel, about how she must have already reached Sythiah by now, and might have already played Bite and Sting against the emperor, and had won or lost.

The seven of them wound their way through the night-shadowed corners of Sythiah’s manor. Risha moved with ethereal fluidity, and when they encountered a pair of Valorian soldiers stationed in a hallway, her knife split their skin as smoothly as if cutting through cream. The Valorians made no sound. It was quiet enough to hear the drip of blood.

They accessed the upper floors and began checking bedrooms. Kestrel knew where they’d be situated—Herrani architecture usually had bedrooms face east or west. Risha crept in alone, her posture stiffening with annoyance when the other Dacrans made as if to accompany her. She let out a low hiss. They didn’t follow.

She’d return, her blade wetter than before.