“You have that habit only with me.”

He didn’t deny it.

“Your scar doesn’t matter to me, Arin.”

His expression turned sardonic and interior, as if he were listening to an unheard voice.

She groped for the right words, worried that she’d get this wrong. She remembered mocking him in the music room of the imperial palace (I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding? Not your looks, surely).

“It matters because it hurts you,” she said. “It doesn’t change how I see you. You’re beautiful. You always have been to me.” Even when she hadn’t realized it, even in the market nearly a year ago. Then later, when she understood his beauty. Again, when she saw his face torn, stitched, fevered. On the tundra, when his beauty terrified her. Now. Now, too. Her throat closed.

The line of his jaw hardened. He didn’t believe her.

“Arin—”

“I’m sorry for what happened in the village.”

She dropped her hand to her lap. She hadn’t been conscious of lifting it.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” Arin said.

The crowd’s anger toward her had been unsettling, but not surprising. It wasn’t only that that troubled him. “What exactly did happen? With the mother and her baby.”

He tunneled fingers through his hair and rubbed the heel of his hand against his brow. “A misapprehension.”

“That you’re god-touched?” Kestrel had heard the rumors.

“No, that’s true. I am.”

She stared.

“But I don’t think the mother would be happy if she knew which god.” He glanced at her, catching her surprise. “My twentieth nameday was on the winter solstice.” The start of a new Herrani year. “But I’m older than that by the way Valorians reckon time. I was born nearly two full seasons before. My mother waited to name me. It was her right, the priests didn’t disagree. The nameday is meant to celebrate not only the baby, but also the mother’s recovery. Women recover differently, so the mother decides when. But in the year I was born, each new mother found a reason to wait until the year turned. You know, don’t you, the way we mark time? Each year belongs to one god in the pantheon of the hundred, each hundred years measures an era. The sign of each god rules once every hundred years. My year—my birth year—belonged to the god of death.”

“Arin,” she said slowly, seeing his anxiety, “do you think you’re cursed?”

He shook his head.

“Your mother named you in the following year. That’s your year, then, isn’t it? Herrani celebrate the nameday, not the birthday. It shouldn’t matter when you were born.”

“It matters.”

“Why?”

“My whole family. I survived. There’s a reason.”

“Arin—”

“I didn’t know then that I was marked.”

“Arin, the only reason for what you suffered is that my father is a monster and he wanted your country.”

“It’s not so simple. I hear the god of death in my head. He advises me, comforts me.”

Kestrel wasn’t sure what to believe.

“I don’t know what his blessing means,” Arin said. “Do you see? When I look at what happened to me. What I’ve done. What I do. His favor is hard.”

“Maybe the voice you hear is your own,” she said gently, “and you just don’t recognize it.”

He made no reply.

She didn’t like his belief that death had marked him. His fear—and pleasure—troubled her. A deep, alien satisfaction lurked in his eyes. “Isn’t it possible that you’ve made this up without meaning to?”

“I’m his. I know it.”

“And the baby in the village?”

Arin winced. “It would have been a sin to deny the mother. I couldn’t. You understand, don’t you? I should have told her, but if I had and she withdrew her request, that might catch the god’s attention, and what might he do then? If she’d known it was the god of death, she never would have asked.”

Kestrel tried to set aside his intricate understanding of cause and effect. It felt beyond her, and dangerous, operating on the whims of an unpredictable deity. “The mother knew whose blessing she sought,” she said. “It can’t be that hard to guess your age, give or take a year. Which god ruled your nameyear?”

“Sewing.”