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High in the dark galleries where the old lamps had stood cold and unlit for generations, a light flared.

First a single flame woke far up in the gold height, standing bright where no human hand had touched it. Then another caught along the gallery, followed by the entire high ring. Lamp after lamp caught fire in a rising tide of light, washing over the dead fixtures that the clergy had abandoned long ago. The gods of the water-country, the homeless, lesser spirits, were answering a rite performed with a living body rather than mere words. In the only language they possessed, they were declaring that they had heard, and that they had come.

The four clergymen turned pale. One fell to his knees. They had recited this ritual a hundred times in this very hall without an answer, yet a girl in a river-robe had danced it once, and the dead lamps fifty feet above were burning bright.

I did not look at the lights. There was something in the temple far more compelling than gods building a home.

Auden had left the drum. He crossed the floor and stopped directly in front of me, so close I had to tilt my head to look up into his face. The new light spilled down soft and golden over the two of us, washing away the rest of the vast space. He did not touch me. His hands remained at his sides, though I could see the strain it took to keep them there, the same quiet discipline that had left a folded blanket in the dark without asking for anything in return. He was waiting for the smallest sign before closing the remaining distance.

“I have never seen a rite performed with life like that,” he said, his voice low and uneven. He paused, trying again. “I did not know it could be like that. Any of it.” His eyes moved slowly over my features. “I did not know a person could be like that.”

The urge to step into his space was so intense it terrified me. The old, cautious voice inside my head warned me to run, reminding me how dangerous it was when a man looked at me with such focus. But that warning felt distant now, drowned out by the pulse of the drum lingering in my blood, the impossible lamps burning overhead, and the warmth of his body a hand’s breadth away. For once, I did not retreat. I did not take a step back. I stood on the sharp edge of the moment, closer to another person than I had allowed myself to be since the marble, the water, and the wreck they made of me. I looked up at him in the golden light of the gods I had called, and for a single breath, I allowed myself to want him.

Neither of us moved. We did not need to. We were already closer than touch.

I would have stayed on that edge for as long as the flames burned, but the heavy doors burst open.

I did not hear the wood swing back. I heard the hard, measured rhythm of iron-shod boots crossing the marble floor without slowing. The golden warmth of the moment shattered. Through the side entrance came the master of the palace guard, clad in black steel, leading a column of armed men. They did not pause at the threshold to pay respect to the sanctuary. They marched straight into the holy light with hands resting near their sword hilts, their eyes fixed on Auden.

The lamps lit by the homeless gods shone down with impartial radiance on the cold fist of the empire entering the room. Without a word, Auden shifted his weight, placing himself a half-step in front of me. I stood behind him in my blue river-robe, the pulse of the drum still fading in my veins, and watched the cold world I had forgotten for one hour march in to claim him.

Chapter 23

The warmth went out of the room as heat leaves a body, from the edges in.

A moment before, there had been only the two of us and the gods’ new light coming down gold from the high galleries, with Auden a hand’s breadth away and the drum still going somewhere under my ribs. Now there were boots on the marble, a dozen of them, the flat, hard tread of armed men who did not slow for sacred ground. At the head of them stood the master of the palace guard, a broad, hard-used man in the dark leather and mail of the watch. The cold of the empire came across that floor and put itself between me and the only good hour I had been given since my cottage.

Auden moved. He did not seem to, but when the guard stopped a few paces off, Auden was a half-step in front of me. His body was turned so that I was tucked behind the line of his shoulder, and he had done it without a word, without taking his eyes off the man in front of him.

“Captain.” The master of the guard gave him a short nod, careful, not quite deference and not quite the lack of it. “You’re to come with us. Order from the palace. You’re wanted close. The south’s gone restless and His Majesty wants his captains to hand, not scattered through the lower wards on temple business. You’ll be quartered in the barracks till it settles.”

I did not understand all of it, but I understood enough. They had come to take him.

“On whose order?” Auden’s voice stayed level, which somehow made it worse than if he had shouted. “I answer for my movements to the emperor, and to him only in war. There is no war. There is no unrest in the south that I have heard of, and I would have heard. Who signed it?”

The master of the guard did not want this work. I could see it on him. He was a man being made to put a leash on a creature he had been raised to think of as standing above the leash, and his men felt it worse than he did. They stood in a loose, uneasy half-circle, their hands held carefully away from their weapons, their eyes not quite meeting his. Every man in that ring knew what the silver veil-pendant at Auden’s throat meant. It meant he had been trained past any one of them, and most likely past all of them at once. Armed or bare-handed, he could have put the whole dozen of them down on the marble before the first had cleared his scabbard. They knew it, and he knew it, and the knowing sat in the room like a held breath. They had not been raised to collect a man who wore that pendant. They had been raised to stand behind him and be glad he was there.

“His Majesty’s seal,” the master said. “That’s all I’m given, Captain. I don’t ask the why of it. I’d take it kindly if you didn’t make me ask you twice.”

There it was, the whole shape of it laid out on the cold floor. None of them wanted this. Auden stood higher than every man in the room and all of them knew it, yet it changed nothing, because the thing reaching for him was not the guards on the floor. It was the seal behind them. It was Drystan, the emperor himself, whose will not one of these men dared so much as turn over in his hands. Against that, the captain’s rank, the gods’ fresh light, and the rite we had only just woken counted for nothing at all. The empire had decided it wanted him, and the empire did not have to say why.

I stood behind Auden’s shoulder and understood, before I had the words for it, that they were taking him. The one steady thing I had found in this whole marble city, the man whose stillness had taught my own body how to hold its shape, was being carried away because the empire had walked in off the night. I could no more stop it than I had been able to stop any of the rest of it.

That was the fear. My body, which had never learned the difference between fear and grief and fed on both the same, answered it the only way it knew.

It started in my hands: a prickle along the nailbeds, the old hardening, the curve trying to push its way back into fingers the strong brew had made human only that morning. I understood with a cold lurch that the brew was no wall against this, that fear opened the door as surely as grief did. Here, in the palace temple, in good light, a dozen of the emperor’s men were an arm’s length from me. If I slipped here, I was finished, and so was Selene, and so was every thread that held me to this city.

I did the work I had taught myself on the worst nights. I drew my hands together and held them low and still against the front of my robe, out of the lamplight, fingers curled in where no one would catch the shape of them. I breathed slow and low, as the temple had drilled into me, making a still place to stand inside while everything in me wanted to bolt. I held. The prickle stayed a prickle. The gold did not rise. It cost me everything I had, but no one saw, and that holding was the only power I possessed in the whole room, the power not to become what I was in front of the people who must never know it.

Auden was going to refuse them. I could feel it gathering in the set of his back, the man deciding to plant his feet and make them carry him out by force if they meant to carry him at all. The master of the guard saw it coming too and went tight around the eyes, because that was the moment it could turn, the moment blades might come out in a temple over a captain who would not be told.

“I think there has been some mistake,” said a voice from the doorway.

She came in without hurry, taking the slow, certain steps of a woman walking into a room she had already decided belonged to her.

The envoy. Vasstent of the north, grey-clad, sharp as a blade left out overnight in frost. I knew her at once, though I had only ever seen her across the width of the great hall, because there was no mistaking that stillness, the watchfulness of a woman who had spent decades in rooms where the wrong word cost a kingdom. She had been here, I understood. She had been at the rite, somewhere in the cold gold dark at the back of it, watching, and she had waited through the whole of it for exactly this, patient as a creature crouched at the edge of a waterhole.

The master of the guard turned, and when he saw who it was, something loosened in him. Some of his certainty vanished, because here was a variable his orders had said nothing about.