He played his tile.

The air reeked of sulfur and scorched horseflesh. The screams were so many and so loud that Arin couldn’t really hear them. Just noise. His ears buzzed.

Valorians floundered in their blood on the broken road. Ranger arrows continued to furrow the sky. A blasted paving stone, Arin saw, had smashed into a Herrani soldier’s face. Her body lay half in the mud, half where the road had been.

Arin couldn’t spot the general. The Valorian army was vast. Only a few ranks of cavalry had been decimated in the blast.

Another unit of Valorian cavalry moved forward into position.

Kestrel was losing. Earlier, the emperor had delayed in order to unsettle her, to revel in it, to spear her like a worm and watch her writhe. Kestrel’s tactic of delay was different. She took as much time as possible to draw the game out. Earlier, she’d wanted the game to be over quickly. Now she needed more time.

The four shiny tiles in the boneyard winked at her. She knew their values. The wolf—she could use that if it were in her hand. Or even the bee.

Her frustration rose.

The tears had dried on her cheeks, the skin tight with salt. She couldn’t help returning to what the emperor had said about her father. The memory of how her father had told her that she’d broken his heart.

If he were here, she would howl at him. He had broken her heart, over and over, for years. He’d tried to force her into the mold of his own idea of honor. What he wanted her to be. Not what she was.

Kestrel felt her spine straighten.

Damn his devotion to honor.

When it came her turn to pull a tile, she didn’t choose any of the marked ones.

“Steady,” Arin called. His horse tossed its head. His vanguard still held formation: those few files of broad ranks, running across the road and up to the trees.

The Valorian cavalry nudged toward them, looking ready to tear through Arin’s ranks. Arin watched the cavalry shape into a wedge. The left and right sides would pull up in the clash, and would try to flank the center ranks of Arin’s army by galloping up alongside the road once Arin’s vanguard had collapsed.

Yes, said death. Good.

The emperor pulled a shiny tile. Kestrel bit back a sound, glancing away so that he couldn’t read her expression.

The windows had lightened. For the first time, she registered their intricate patterns of stained glass. In the dead of night, they’d looked black. Now they blushed with faint color. She saw what they would soon fully show. Flowers, gods, the prow of a ship. A bird’s flung-open wings.

This was an eastern room. When dawn came, it would be glorious.

The armies clashed. The center of Arin’s vanguard coalesced around him. But the edges—as planned—disintegrated, the soldiers appearing to retreat into the forest.

The left and right flanks of the Valorian cavalry hurtled straight into the open spaces along the road that the edges of Arin’s vanguard had hidden.

Valorian horses impaled their stomachs on the sharpened staves Arin had had driven into the mud.

The emperor set down a fox. He examined the game in play. “Things don’t look so good for you,” he told Kestrel.

A movement amid all the others—the torque of bodies, the muddy struggle, collapse, rise, murder—caught Arin’s attention. On the periphery of battle where gutted war horses flailed, there was some rabbitlike thing. He couldn’t look directly; he was too busy kneeing his horse out of the way of a rearing Valorian stallion’s plunging hooves. Then grappling with the stallion’s rider. Distracted, Arin seized the rider’s arm.

Not a rabbit.

Much too large for a rabbit.

Still, that impression of something—someone—out of place. A softness. An innocence.

Arin felt the arm pop from its shoulder.

The rider screamed, but Arin wasn’t paying attention. He impatiently killed the Valorian. He’d seen, now, what that strange movement far off to the side of the road was, among the bloody staves.

It was Verex. He was struggling to free his leg, trapped beneath the body of his fallen horse.

He was easy prey.

Arin saw his soldiers see the prince . . . but not see him as a prince, not as the one they were warned not to kill.

This, a prince?

Covered in mud, his only visible feature that straw-colored Valorian hair, Verex tugged, all thin limbs and terror. He didn’t see the Dacran archer’s taut bow, arrow nocked and drawn.

Arin was too far away. He shouted No, but the word was lost in the roar of war.

The archer aimed, and released her arrow.

“I almost wish I’d lose,” the emperor mused. “It’d be a novel experience. Is it wrong for me to hope that, at least, this game will last longer? Improve, Kestrel, or this will be over too soon.”