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Oh. The god sounded disappointed.

Revni followed Sulvi at a run. Something new was brimming in Revni’s veins. A rightness that allowed her to forget the rest. What did it matter who else she could have become? She had felt before like she’d been following a beat—Isfolj, Isfolj, Isfolj—but now the rhythm was reckless and unhinged. There was no name, no center, only blood fisting her heart off-key, air squeezing her lungs. Eavus wasn’t good. Revni was no one. None of it mattered. None of it made sense. Only killing the prefect. Only stopping everyone and everything from causing any more suffering. They surprised a guard coming out of a room. Revni drove him through. He looked nothing like Eavus—brown-skinned, curly hair—except he had the same soldier’s build. His scream had the same pitch.

Doors slammed. People shouted. Something more was happening—maybe whatever she had seen brewing on the streets—but Revni was blind to anything but the peace of fate, of racing behind Sulvi down another thin hallway, waiting to see who else the gods put in their path. Her vision blurred and sharpened. The hallway opened to a balcony—a courtyard full of ferns below. Another soldier appeared.

When the gods offered you opportunity, you took it.

Sulvi jumped out of the way. Revni remembered Eavus’ quick step-in, the one that had disarmed her. Her sword went in and out. She shouldered the body over the side. This was what it was, to bask in a god’s love. Was this the bjerluk her father had fostered in her? You, and not you. Her brain somewhere else, like when that slaver had stripped her. At the sight of more soldiers, that voice in her reared higher—Mine—and Revni obeyed. Gods, what a privilege. A spear drove forward, and Revni smacked it aside. Another strike, another fall. This was how life should be—easy. Eavus had it right from the beginning. Do what you’re told. Surrender to someone else’s will. No wonder Eavus took refuge in taking orders. Revni was so tired of fighting herself, so tired of weighing every choice against an impossible scale. Red tinged everything—the corners of her vision, the edge of her blade.

Sulvi led her through a room with a lavish, curtained bed, and then through another, where a doorway at the back opened to a set of dim stairs. A servant’s hall. They hurried down, slamming through the door at the bottom, and screeched to a halt. Five, six, no seven people stopped what they were doing and looked up, and for a small moment Revni wondered what they must think—two Isfolj girls, one bloodied and panting and braided, the other chubby and soft and holding a soldier’s knife.

Revni’s eyes roved the room, looking for an exit. It was too big to be a kitchen. It was the biggest room Revni had ever seen in her life. Torches burned in corners, next to holes cut into the mud walls that must be ovens. Three wooden tables held bread and pans and fresh-cut onion. Baskets and baskets lined the shelves and walls: vegetables, fruit, grain. Her stomach growled at the excess. Right there, near the back door—that was an entire basket filled with dead birds. Were they going to eat all of those today?

“How do we get out?” Sulvi asked.

Everyone just stared. They didn’t look Aleterian—they had pale skin, pale hair, pale eyes. Revni couldn’t tell what tribe any of them might have been from, or maybe none of that mattered once you had a job in the prefect’s kitchen.

“Prefect.” Revni pointed her sword toward the back archway. It was the only way out she could see—the walls were likely thick to keep in any smells or errant fires. Protect the rest of the house.

“Prefect?” Sulvi asked, stepping forward.

At her movement, the bodies jumped in unison, scurrying back or away, giving the invaders room. One jumped forward—a thin, wiry boy with blond hair that fell into his huge, frightened eyes—and Sulvi made a horrible groaning whimper. The boy looked as surprised as she did.

He pulled the knife out, staring at the blood.

“Sulvi!”

A knife plunged through Revni—an invisible one, a terrible, barbed thing. Sulvi’s hand hit the shelves, pulling one off the wall. Revni barely caught her. Small jars shattered around them as Sulvi’s weight took them both down, an explosion of powdered herbs. The world was brown and green and spiced. Revni couldn’t see.

“Revn—” Sulvi choked on blood. Lung wound. He must have gotten between the ribs. Revni choked, too. She couldn’t breathe.

The other servants were scrambling—a few had slipped through that same door Revni and Sulvi had come from, the thumps of their feet on the wooden stairs echoing and diminishing, while others were tripping over jars and baskets to escape. A large woman pointed a shaking finger at the exit, finally answering Sulvi’s question. The woman had a cloth tied over her hair, the strands at the front flecked with gray.

Revni blinked the ash from her own lashes, but it wasn’t ash, it was cinnamon and pepper. The world was burning. The world was drugged. Something stung.

“We’ve got to go, Sulvi.” Revni forced the words out, her eyes hot. “I can’t leave you here.”

Revni wedged her shoulder under Sulvi’s armpit to get her standing—a sudden memory of carrying Eavus—but Sulvi couldn’t manage. She lurched, gripping the large wooden table. Blood burbled from her mouth, the way it had from Revni’s mother. The boy that had killed her was still standing there, still as a statue, still holding the knife.

The boy came to life. He dropped the knife. He tried to run.

Revni leaped over the table. Not her legs, not her sword. Only a fire in her muscles and a force against resistance. The sword drove in so hard it came out his front. Revni couldn’t see or feel anything but the boy’s weight on the end. There, and then gone.

“The river,” Sulvi breathed.

Revni spun, her eyes so filled with tears she couldn’t focus. Rivulets of cinnamon were running down her cheeks. Salt and sharp in her mouth.

“Take me across the river.” And then Sulvi fell.

A howl ripped out of Revni instead of a word, taking her heart with it. Revni crawled over the table, her knees scattering onions, falling off the side and clutching at Sulvi. Powdered, warm, soft. The air tasted of a feast. She pulled Sulvi, dragging her—she couldn’t leave her here—but that only reminded her of those limp bodies being shoved into cages, boys on shores, the crunch and crumple and sigh of collapse after collapse after collapse. Revni sobbed, and dropped her.

Sulvi, who had wanted to turn back. Sulvi, who had followed. Sulvi who had teased and promised and smiled. Sulvi, who was a farm girl, who only wanted to go home.

We can make a new world, she had promised. But this was worse than the old one.

Sulvi’s breath hitched and stopped. Her eyes were glass gems—shiny and still. The large woman knocked a jar as she scrambled for the stairwell—Revni hadn’t realized she was still there—and the god that had gone silent tugged Revni’s strings.

Take, he whispered.