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I would have to be more careful with my one good hour. I had a cold feeling I had already learned it too late.

Chapter 24

“A little to the left,” Selene said from somewhere above my head. “No, my left. Stop wobbling, or you’ll have us both on the cobbles.”

I had Selene’s weight pressed into my shoulders, her boots digging through the wrap I had bunched there for padding. Braced against the wall of an outbuilding on the unfashionable edge of the barracks district with my hands flat to the stone, I held a grown woman steady so she could press one eye to a window the size of a serving plate.

This had been her idea. I wanted that on the record.

“What do you see?” I asked through my teeth.

“A corridor. A bench. Some sort of stick in the corner.”

“Riveting.”

From the low wall across the lane, where she had settled herself in the morning sun with a twist of paper full of seeds, Rainthorn cracked one between her teeth. Spitting the husk, she addressed no one in particular. “You young things and your schemes. A hearing on a matter as delicate as a captain of the vanguard, and you reckon they’d hold it in a room with a window onto the street, at a height a determined woman could reach if she stood on a friend. That’s the thinking, is it?”

“It is better,” Selene said with immense dignity from her perch, “than sitting on a wall eating seeds and telling other people how their schemes will fail.”

“Somebody has to. The seeds are good. You want one?”

“I cannot reach you. I am on Liora.”

“I’m aware of where you are, dear. The whole lane is aware of where you are.” Rainthorn cracked another seed. “I can’t climb walls, no more than I can reach the high plants for the brew these days, no more than I can squint through a keyhole at a captain. I know the things I can’t do. That’s the one gift of getting old, you stop wasting the day on them. What I can do is sit here and tell you this won’t work, which is advice, the one thing I have left to give away for nothing, and the two of you are far too busy to take it.”

She was right, which was why my arms were shaking worse than Selene’s weight could account for. We had a familiar for this exact reason, and we had sent him at first light.

“Selene,” I said. “Come down. Rainthorn’s right. This is mad. We sent Tsuki onto the grounds hours ago. He can go where we cannot, yet here we are in the open on the edge of a barracks playing acrobats. If anyone comes round that corner, we are two noblewomen and an herb-seller breaking into the emperor’s army. Let us wait for Tsuki and not get ourselves arrested before the day is properly started.”

“Extraordinary,” Tsuki said from the roofline above us. “You send me to infiltrate an imperial barracks, and somehow the most reckless part of the whole operation is still the three of you.”

He came down the wall headfirst, pouring himself over the stone like water finding a crack. Flowing onto the top of Rainthorn’s wall, he sat up to fix us with the look of a creature who had done a hard morning’s professional work only to find the amateurs busy at play.

“I leave you for one watch,” he said. “One. And I come back to find my lady standing on my other lady, peering through a scullery window. That is a scullery, by the way. You have been spying very bravely on the room where they keep the mops.”

Selene, halfway down off my shoulders and far less graceful than she had gone up, made a sound of pure disgust. I squared my shoulders and rolled out the ache.

“What did you see?” I asked. “The truth, Tsuki, not the performance.”

He cleaned a whisker, unable to resist making us wait, before he spoke. The play went out of his voice, which was how I knew it mattered.

“The emperor came himself,” he said. “Down to the headquarters, where the captain was waiting. He didn’t send for him. He came down, and the men in the yard weren’t expecting that, they went stiff as posts when they saw him. He didn’t go straight in, either. He stood out in the yard a while first.” Tsuki’s eyes locked onto mine. “The whole time, he kept watching the sky. Looking up over the wall, at the trees, back at the sky, like he was waiting for something to come flying to him. Whatever it was, it didn’t come, and the longer it didn’t, the worse he got. Once he looked dead at the eave I was crouched on, and I froze, cold all through, certain he’d spotted me. Then his eyes moved past, and I understood he wasn’t looking at a squirrel at all. He was looking for something else, something that wasn’t there.”

I did not know then what he had been watching for. I know now. But Tsuki could not have known, and he only frowned before continuing.

“I’ll tell you what was strange, little sisters. He didn’t carry himself like an emperor with a province gone restless. I’ve watched worried kings. They go sharp and quick. They snap at people. This one was slow, heavy, looking as my first lady looked the winter her sister died.” He paused. “He looked sad. An emperor, in his own barracks, sad, watching the sky.”

The morning was warm, yet I felt cold standing in it.

“He went inside,” Tsuki said, “and I got round to a window. He and the captain talked, though not for long. I couldn’t hear through the glass, but I could see them. The captain looked honestly baffled, and the emperor had that same heaviness on him. There was one moment he leaned in close and asked the captain something that seemed to cost him, and the captain shook his head, no. Then two more came in. More captains. Same plain silver and grey, same pendant at the throat, same as Auden, grave about it, both of them. The whole room shifted when they walked in. Even the emperor went still. Five of these captains in the order, and three of the five were under that one roof this morning. The moment the three stood together in front of him, whatever he’d come down meaning to do, he stopped. There were a few words, then all three captains walked out and went their own ways, leaving the emperor standing alone in the room.” He shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t tell you which to follow, they went in three directions.”

Silence fell over the lane, save for a cart rattling past the end of the street.

Then Rainthorn, who had not stirred from her wall, went still in a wholly different way. I followed her gaze upward.

A bird was coming over the rooftops from the direction of the palace. The unnaturalness of it reached me before I could name what was wrong. It flew too steadily, too straight, holding a hard line toward the barracks without the dip and veer of a real crow, almost hanging on the air between wingbeats. Only as it passed low over the lane did I catch the rest, it carried three legs beneath it where a bird should have two.

“Don’t look at it,” Rainthorn said quietly, which naturally made all three of us look. “I said don’t. Eyes on the ground, on your shoes. Let it go past.”