Page 178 of Sharpest Court

So I wrote the note to Valeria, signed my name, and left it with one of the guards who’d fought with my friends.

Then, as the sky grew lighter beyond the palace walls, I waited.

The orange streaks of predawn were creeping across the horizon by the time I coasted back to the throne room.

The golden tiles were now sparkling, the vases plumped with fresh honeysuckles to counteract the scent of sterilizing fluid. No staff members bustled around; no guards stood beyond the doorway. This room had been cordoned off, and my steady breathing echoed in the quiet as I tipped my head to the ceiling.

With daylight yet to approach, the dayglass appeared transparent behind the sunburst framework, whose tines drew in toward a central golden orb. My mind journeyed to another golden structure—the archway of the lovers’ embrace, back on Banarrat.

Pass under their arms, and you risk losing your own love.

Having carelessly walked under that arch, I now wondered if there was a dark truth in the omen . . . just as there was truth in the lovers’ tale itself.

I was still gazing upward, trying to pinpoint what I would only be able to see in the sunlight, when footsteps shuffled from behind.

“You should have changed out of those clothes,” Stian said, as gentle as ever.

I straightened, clearing my throat. “Is he—?”

“He has a long road ahead. But I believe the worst has passed.”

I closed my eyes and released a shaky breath. Keil would survive. That was all that mattered.

“Right now,” Stian said, his voice drifting closer, “I’m more concerned about you.”

My eyes felt gritty when I opened them. “I’m fine.”

He came up beside me, wearing a fresh tweed suit and smelling like the strong, bitter tea he liked to drink after our training sessions. “Arun was not the only one who could sense a lie.”

Was. How quickly he’d taken to speaking about his friend in the past tense.

You’d need to strike faster than an asp, Erik had told me once, guiding my hand over his own heart, but as fiercely as a cannon.

I had no doubt that was the technique Stian had used on Arun, as efficient as it was brutal.

I filled my lungs and exhaled a simple “Thank you.” When Stian glanced at me in question, I clarified, “For making the choice to save Keil.”

Stian held my gaze, his eyes softening. “There is no choice in love.”

Love. The word struck me as sincere. I’d seen that love for myself as he’d worked over Keil, pain shining in his eyes.

But that was not all I’d seen in him.

I glanced away from his inspection, looking instead to the spot where Mara had taken her last breath. She’d been injured at the settlement, oozing out from various wounds. But I was suddenly certain that the slash across her abdomen had been made after her arrival at the palace. And it would have bled her dry before her execution—before she ever got the chance to reveal her information.

Information she’d been gathering from the start.

If a person in Ansora wants to create a new identity, Keil had said, they go to Talon Inn. And that was where I’d spotted Mara rifling through the identity records, trying to find a person who did not want to be found. The same person she must have been questioning Zeke’s uncle about—a person who was somehow connected to Erik’s secret.

A person Mara had been seeking in Ansoran clinics.

Slowly, I looked back toward Stian. On the first day I’d met him, I’d thought there was something oddly young about his features, incongruous with the wrinkles around his eyes. Now I realized: It was because I’d already seen those features smoothed out by the prime of youth.

Yet it was only when Stian had snapped at the guard—and those features had shifted in icy wrath—that the truth had crashed over me, chilling me with its force.

Because I knew that wrath intimately. It was a wrath I had feared and courted and once tried to leash for my own use.

“He looks just like you when he’s angry,” I whispered, and the words hummed between us like the echo of fallen steel.