“I don’t know,” said Safire.
But she did know.
Safire knew what it was like to be at the mercy of cruel men. She and her cousins still bore the marks of their terror. It was why Jarek was dead.
Safire had stopped tolerating abuse a long time ago.
Eris fell quiet beside her. She flicked her wrists, as if agitated, and for the second time Safire noticed the manacles there.
In the growing silence, Safire thought of the things Kor said.
“Is it true that you torched his ship?”
Eris tipped her head back, resting against the boards of the wall. Gone was that luminous otherworldly creature who’d found her on Jemsin’s deck. In her place was a bone-weary girl. If she cared that she was covered in Safire’s vomit, it didn’t show.
“Damn right I torched it.” Eris smiled a little as she said it. “I’ve never been happier to see a thing burn.”
But it was one thing to burn down a cruel man’s ship. It wasanother to burn down a temple full of innocents.
“And the burned temple full of children?” asked Safire. “Are you responsible for that too?”
Eris’s smile vanished. Her green eyes went dark as she looked away, the shame etched in the hard lines of her face.
“I am,” she said quietly.
The horror of it seeped through Safire. Suddenly chilled, she moved to put space between her and the murderer at her side.
If Eris was the empress’s fugitive, if she was capable of such an awful thing, then she needed to be delivered to the empress, where she could serve the sentence for her crimes and—more important—never find Asha.
Eris flicked her wrists again, this time gritting her teeth in pain.
Safire glanced down. These were nothing like the manacles Eris had locked Safire’s wrists in back on Jemsin’s ship. These looked... almost elegant. Two thin circles of pale, silvery steel.
Seeing where she looked, Eris plunged her hands into the shadows of her crossed legs—but not before Safire saw the skin around one wrist. Wherever the band touched, the skin was frost white.
“What are those? What’s wrong with your wrists?”
“Nothing,” said Eris, staring straight ahead.
They clearly weren’t nothing; they were hurting her. “Let me see.”
“Trust me, princess. There’s nothing to be done.”
“I told you to stop calling me that.”
Reaching across the space now between them, Safire pulledone of Eris’s hands roughly out of the shadows and into the light of the lantern hanging on the wall above them. Surprisingly, Eris let her. With her fingers gripping the girl’s forearm—which was eerily cold—Safire held Eris’s palm still while inspecting her wrist.
Safire had seen unnaturally white flesh only once before, in the desert back home. At night in the sand sea, the temperature dropped well below freezing, and if you weren’t prepared, you froze.
“Frostbite,” she murmured.
“Something like that.” Eris withdrew her hand and held up both wrists for Safire to see. “It’s called stardust steel.”
Safire had never heard of such a thing.
“It’s a weapon,” Eris explained. “Used by the Lumina. Or in this case, Kor. Who’s made some kind of deal with them.”
Lumina. The name given to the military class of the Star Isles. Safire had heard stories of the empress’s fearsome soldiers, who she used to keep order on the islands and to patrol her waters.
