“Forgive me.”
“I have been too forgiving.” Sabran snapped her book shut.

Ead felt the flutter of a heart against her own. Soft and quick as a butterfly.

He gave Loth a sunny smile. “And if all else fails, I shall flirt with the Donmata Marosa until she opens her heart to me.”
Loth shook his head. “Knave.”

Berethnet sovereigns were prone to what the Inysh called grievoushead—periods of sadness, with or without a discernible root. Carnelian the Fifth had been known as the Mourning Dove, and it was rumored at court that she had taken her own life by walking into a river.

“They may not force worship,” Margret mused. “Perhaps they share a mutual respect with the Easterners.”
“Do you hear yourself, Margret?” Loth said, appalled. “They are wyrms.”

Faced with those eyes—the eyes of the witch—Ead knew she could not withhold the revelation any longer. After eight years of lies, she owed Sabran this truth.
Underneath the stars, she gave it.

When they reached the end of the corridor, Sabran buckled at last. Loth wrapped her in his arms as she sank to the floor and sobbed as if her soul had been ripped out.

Sabran drew her close, and Ead kissed the Queen of Inys as she would kiss a lover.

“Which of you offended the Principal Secretary?”
Loth sensed, rather than saw, Kit jab a thumb at him.

He had also been trying to melt the knife of grief that had been buried in his side. A knife that had finally led him away from the crucible, back to the comfort and oblivion of wine.

Ead leaned in to kiss her brow, but before she could, Sabran caught her face between her hands and pressed her parted lips to hers. When they broke apart at last, Sabran smiled a true smile, rare as a desert rose.

To thank Snow-Walking Maiden for caring for him, the great Kwiriki carved her a throne out of his own horn, which was called the Rainbow Throne, and made her a handsome consort, Night-Dancing Prince, out of sea foam.

For the first time, she saw Sabran Berethnet for who she was beneath the mask: a young and fragile woman who carried a thousand-year legacy on her shoulders. A queen whose power was absolute only so long as she could produce a daughter.

For the first time since the ambush, the Queen of Inys smiled.
“Ead,” she said, “I am not quite sure what I did without you.”

Vinegar and fish and acrid smoke formed the rotten posy of Perunta. Kit kept up a smile, but his eyes were watering.
“How refreshing,” he managed.

The nightgown slipped from her shoulder, farther, until it came to rest around her hips, so Ead could trace the pathway of her spin and fold her hands at the arch of her back.

When he moved, so did Ead. She dropped in silence from the beam above him. Her bare feet lit upon the marble. As the cutthroat stepped into the Great Bedchamber, dagger aloft, she covered his mouth and drove her blade between his ribs.

The only Firstblood that now remained was what lived in Sabran, and in Tané.

She reached out a hand. Head down. Eyes shut. Her hand was steady, but the rest of her was quaking. Cold scale brushed her fingers. She dared not look. She must. When she did, two eyes, as bright as fireworks, stared back from the face of a Lacustrine dragon.

When she had lain beside Sabran and listened to her secrets. When she had stowed the rose behind her pillow.