Sufiyan offered Quil a pastry. “Your leash is loose, and you’re fed,” he said. “Let’s focus on why we’re here.”

  “To satisfy the unending greed of a ne’er-do-well acquaintance I’ve been saddled with for eighteen years,” Quil said, even as the shadow disappeared again, dropping from a rooftop into an alley.

  Sufiyan shook his head. “You’re here to generously purchase a token of appreciation for the closest thing to a brother you have, to mark the auspicious occasion of his eighteenth yearfall. You unthankful boor.”

  “You’re forgetting Tas. I’ve known him since birth.”

  “I meant the literal closest. Since I am standing three feet from you, and Tas is skies-know-where.”

  Zacharias.

  His name was a whisper carried on the wind. Quil looked up, surprised. No one used his given name except Aunt Helene, or Suf when he wanted to be irritating. The prince turned to Suf, but he was busy fondling a ruby-studded dagger that probably cost a month’s pay for the entire Fifth Legion.

  “A fine yearfall gift.” Sufiyan flipped the dagger deftly between his fingers. His weapon of choice was a bow, but like Quil, Suf was trained to use anything to defend himself. Once, when some Illustrian twit had mocked Sufiyan’s parentage, he knocked the man unconscious with biting nonchalance and a clay flute.

  “My prince.” The dagger merchant nodded to Quil. “I thank you. My family is Plebeian—” His weathered face filled with pride as he looked over his goods. “I received a Prince’s Gift to start my business.”

  At this, Quil perked up. He’d established the grant last year, after seeing so few Plebeian traders in the markets.

  The merchant offered the dagger. “Take it, with my compliments.”

  But Quil shook his head and dropped his voice. “There’s a woman behind me—Mater Candela. Richer than the Empress. She collects shiny things. I expect you to charge her double and get away with it.”

  The merchant grinned and slapped Quil on the shoulder. “You’re a canny Plebe at heart, my prince. Always knew I liked you.”

  Quil’s chest warmed at the compliment. He wondered sometimes how his people saw him. As the quiet son of a monstrous man, perhaps. Or a shadow beside an incandescent empress. Canny Plebe. Quil preferred that to either of the others.

  A silver mirror gleamed the next table over, and Quil glanced in it long enough to make sure he still had tabs on the shadow trailing him before offering it to Sufiyan. “More fitting, no? Since you’re obsessed with your face.”

  “I got the looks; you got the royal title. It’s only fair.” Sufiyan examined his reflection. “Speaking of royalty. Have you talked to your aunt yet?”

  The prince shook his head. Once, he’d told the Empress everything. Now he didn’t know how to begin a conversation with her. They disagreed on too much—especially his future.

  “The last time I said the word abdicate”—Quil moved on from the jewel merchant, Sufiyan following—“she didn’t speak to me for a month.”

  “You’re twenty, Quil,” Sufiyan said. “Keep dillydallying and you’ll have a crown on your brow, an empress who bores the hair off your head, a brood of bawling babies, and no desire to hear the word abdicate yourself.”

  An empress…A face flashed unbidden in Quil’s mind. Short dark hair, wary eyes, and a rare smile. Ilar’s quiet self-assurance had fascinated him from the moment he met her. She was never boring. She’d have been a great empress.

  But she was dead. Had been for more than a year. Grief reared its unwelcome head, but Quil was no stranger to it. He pushed it down deep, where his other secrets lived.

  From one of the many drum towers that speckled the city, a series of booms thundered out. Quil translated easily. Fourth Legion, Second Infantry Patrol, report to South Cothon Barracks. The prince frowned.

  “Isn’t the Fourth Legion supposed to be in Antium?”

  “Maybe they’re bored of freezing their backsides off and came here for some sun.”

  Zacharias. Get out of the square.

  The prince jumped at the voice—as sharp as if someone had shouted in his ear. Sufiyan chattered on, oblivious.

  “Skies know I wouldn’t want to run patrols in that freezing hellscape—”

  Quil clenched his scim, the long, narrow blade as much a part of him as his own arms. He’d long ago been taught that if he heard voices in his head, he should pay attention.

  And there was something familiar about the voice. It sounded impatient—almost peevish.

  “Suf…” Quil edged toward the square’s exit. “Let’s—”

  A scream from the edge of the crowd. Then another.

  Zacharias, you fool child. Get out of there!

  “Stay here,” Quil ordered Sufiyan, before shoving through the crowd toward the screams. He was past the edge of the market before he finally saw what everyone was clustered around.

  A boy. Around thirteen, in too-big clothing and tattered boots. He was unremarkable but for the hole in his chest, and the smoking ruin of his heart within it.

  Quil reared back, his memory flashing to two other bodies he’d seen a year ago. Then to the report from this morning about the Masks.

  Both soldiers were murdered in the same manner, their hearts burned as if with a hot poker.

  The killer was here too. In this crowd.

  If you won’t get yourself out of there, get Sufiyan out!

  The voice snapped Quil from his shock. He found Sufiyan behind him and guided him toward his guards, who were shoving the crowd aside to get to their prince.

  “What the hells is going on?” Suf tried to look over Quil’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  “Someone’s injured!” a marketgoer cried out. “A boy. He was just a boy.”

  Sufiyan’s brown skin went sickeningly pale. “A—a boy? How old? Quil, what—”

  There was a time when Sufiyan would have been steady as an oak, observing the situation himself with a caustic remark at the ready. But like Quil, Sufiyan had changed in the last year. He hid his sorrow with jokes and smiles. Tried to forget his shattered nerves in the arms of lovers, in the sweat of scim training. Quil, however, had known Sufiyan Veturius since his birth. Something broke inside Sufiyan a year ago. Quil hated that he couldn’t fix it.

  But he could make sure it didn’t get worse.

  “My prince.” The guard captain reached Quil. “It’s not safe here for you.”

  “Take Suf to the palace.” Quil lowered his voice and locked eyes with the guard, cutting off his protests. “Not a request.”

  The guard captain sighed and signaled to the other Masks. In seconds they were gone.

  Quil made his way back to the body, to a Plebeian woman wiping away tears as she looked at the dead boy.

  “Pardon me,” Quil called gently to get her attention. “Did you know him?”

  She shook her head. “He lived on the streets. Took care of some of the younger children.”

  The woman glanced over, mouth twisting as she recognized Quil. “You Illustrian bastards,” she whispered. “You don’t give two figs about us. He’s not the first to die like this.”

  Quil brushed off the insult, focusing on the last thing she said. The Masks had also died with their hearts burned to cinders, though that knowledge was carefully guarded. “How—”

  But the woman disappeared into the crowd. Before Quil could follow, the voice cracked through his mind.

  Enough! I need to speak with you. There’s an apothecary on the southeast corner of the square. Meet me inside. Hurry. I haven’t got all bleeding day.

  Quil weighed the risk of answering this voice against his own curiosity. The latter won. When he stepped into the darkened building moments later, scim drawn, a hooded figure emerged from the shadows behind the apothecary’s dusty counter.

  “Put that big knife away, boy.”

  Quil recognized the woman instantly.

  “Bani al-Mauth.” The prince sheathed his scim and bowed. Chosen of Death. She’d been a runaway, a revolutionary, a slave, and a murderess.

  Now she was a holy figure who guided restless spirits from this life to the next. She took the pain that anchored them to the human plane and cast it into another dimension—the Sea of Suffering—so the ghosts could move on in peace. It was a task that confined her mostly to a haunted wood on the edge of the Martial Empire. The Waiting Place, it was called, for the ghosts unwilling to move on from it.

  Quil had met the Bani al-Mauth many times. Often when she visited Empress Helene. But mostly when she came to the Tribal Lands to see her family—including Sufiyan, her grandson, and his parents, Laia of Serra and Elias Veturius.

  Of course, he’d seen her more recently, too. But almost as soon as he thought about it, the woman growled at him.

  “Dash that thought from your head, boy.” She must have read his expression. “You know better. You know the cost.”

  He knew. But sensations still crowded his mind—things he didn’t want to remember from that night months ago. The mountains. A cavern. The iron tang of blood. So sharp, as if he’d walked into a slaughterhouse.

  Which, he supposed, he had.

  “You.” He forced the thoughts away—he’d gotten better at it since he’d last seen her. “You were following me.”

  “Thought you’d catch on quicker. Been shadowing you since the palace.”

  Well, that was embarrassing. “Should I get Sufiyan?” Quil’s face heated. “He’d want—”

  “My grandson and his family want nothing to do with me,” the Bani al-Mauth said. “I came to get your help.”

  “My help?” Quil shook his head. “You’re the one who knew about the dead boy, not me. How?”

  “Felt it coming,” she said. “Tell me what you know about the others who died like him.”

  Quil met that dark blue stare. The Empress had told Quil to speak to no one of the Masks’ deaths. Especially not Sufiyan or his family. She didn’t have to tell Quil twice. Sufiyan’s little sisters were only fifteen and thirteen. And Laia and Elias had been through enough.

  But the Bani al-Mauth was different. When Quil was a child, she arrived in Antium and demanded to speak to the Empress. Quil was visiting from the Tribal Lands and expected his aunt to reject such an abrupt summons. Instead, she’d cleared her evening.

  “Maybe we should go to Aunt Hel together,” Quil offered, but the Bani al-Mauth waved away the suggestion.

  “Your aunt’s acting like everything is fine. She’s doing nothing about the murders.”

  Quil’s hackles rose. He might resent Aunt Hel, but he’d be damned before he would let anyone else say a word against her. “Those dead Masks were young and Illustrian and they were murdered in the Tribal Lands. She kept it quiet because she knew it would look like the Tribes had killed them. She didn’t want Illustrian families out for blood.”

  “I’m not talking about the Masks,” the Bani al-Mauth said. “I’m talking about the children. Ruh was the first—” Her voice caught, but she cleared her throat. “Then your girl—Ilar.”

  Quil’s chest twisted at the sound of their names, which conjured their faces, their scents, their voices. Stop. Don’t think of them. Bury it.

  The Bani al-Mauth went on. “Two more children were found the next day in Nur. Street urchins with no families. A dozen more, after that, all over the Tribal Lands and the southern Empire. And then for months, nothing. Until now.”

  Fourteen children dead. Quil hadn’t known about a single one. The store, already dusty and dim, felt much colder.

  “Three died in Serra a few weeks ago,” she said. “Two in Navium. Four as far north as Silas. All under age twenty, all with the same gaping wound, their hearts shriveled to gray ash. Those are the deaths I’ve heard about.”

  “There were six Masks, too.” Quil’s stomach churned as he remembered the report from the morning. “Two found yesterday in the borderlands. You speak to ghosts. Don’t you know about them?”

  The Bani al-Mauth considered him. “Not every ghost comes through the Waiting Place.”

  “That wasn’t an answer.”

  “You remind me of your aunt. Pain in the arse, that girl. Sharp as a scim, though. Heard more than she let on. You do too, I’d bet.”

  “I didn’t hear about these kids,” Quil said. “She never said a word.”

  “You do something for me,” the Bani al-Mauth said. “You ask her why, the next time you see her. And one more thing.” Her tone lost its edge. “How are you, boy?”

  A simple question. One that elicited a waterfall of thoughts.

  Quil didn’t often let himself think about Ruh and Ilar. But he did now: Ruh’s hands when he told stories about shadowy ghuls and evil tale-spinners. Ilar’s laugh, shy like she was out of practice. The way she saw past his reserve and drew him out with her questions, as if nothing he said could bore her. Tell me about the palace in Antium. Tell me about getting lost in Navium’s harbor. Are there truly whole streets of kite makers in Serra?

  “I’ve done as you asked,” Quil said. “I try not to think about it.”

  “What of your magic? Will you get training from the Jaduna?”

  Quil tensed at the mention of the Jaduna. “You told me to forget what I saw that night,” Quil said. “In return, I don’t want to talk about the magic. Ever.”

  The Bani al-Mauth shrugged and shook the dust from her cloak. “As you wish. I must return to the Waiting Place. Speak of this to no one. And, boy…”

  She cocked her head. The shadows of the apothecary appeared to nibble at her edges.

  “Watch your back. The air is wrong. The ghosts are restless. Something’s coming.”

  No, Quil thought as she faded into the dark. Something’s already here.

  3

  Sirsha

  Sirsha knew she shouldn’t have stayed in Raider’s Roost as long as she had.

  The settlement festered like a forgotten canker in the foothills of the Serran Mountains, a cesspool of liars, thieves, and worse.

  Now Sirsha stood in one of the Roost’s miserable, rain-soaked alleys in the dead of night, surrounded by a gang of miscreants. She was weaponless and—irritatingly—bootless, with nothing but her wits standing between herself and complete destitution.

  Or possibly death. But she was, at this moment, primarily concerned with destitution.

  She’d spent the last seven years saving up every penny from every job so she could leave the accursed Empire forever. She wanted warm weather, clear water, and a nice little inn to run in the Southern Isles. She wasn’t about to lose her dream to a pack of poorly dressed halfwits.

  “Give us the money, tracker,” said the head thug, a pale weed of a girl called Migva. She packed a meaner punch than one would suspect, and she shook out her hand—sore from the beating she’d dealt Sirsha. “I’m tired and hungry and sick of hitting you.”

  Sirsha glanced behind her, to the shack she’d lived in for the past few months. It was an ugly, ramshackle sort of place, held together by spite and dirt, like most of the Roost. She’d rented a room in it from a hulking gem dealer too scary for even a Roost rat to cross. They’d worked out a trade: between her other jobs, she tracked down items or people he was interested in, and he ran off anyone who might want to rob her. In a lawless place like the Roost, it was a cushy trade.

  Everything was dandy until the gem dealer’s lover caught him cheating with the handsome tea merchant from up the lane. An hour later, the gem dealer was dead, his lover fled with his gems. Now the vultures circled.

  “I told you, I don’t have—uff—” Migva swung her fist low, and Sirsha landed on her knees, gasping. Her sopping, dark hair slapped across her forehead, and mud oozed between her socked toes. Skies, was there anything more disgusting than the feeling of wet sock?

  “You’ve searched me a dozen times,” Sirsha said. “I don’t have anything.”

  “You must think I have dung for brains,” Migva said. “You hid it. If you don’t tell us where, I’ll leave you in pieces all over the bleeding Roost. You’re a filthy foreigner. No one will help you.”

  Sirsha glared at Migva through her non-swollen eye. The Roost rat came off as a petty thief, pecking at the crumbs left behind by bigger crooks. Clearly, Sirsha had underestimated the hag. Migva was smarter than anticipated. Nastier, too. Up close, she had that hungry glint that Sirsha knew well. The eyeshine of a predator, of someone who’d learned to hurt and kill out of necessity long ago, and found she enjoyed it.

  Not for the first time, Sirsha wished her magic was useful for more than just tracking down jewel thieves.

  A scrawny boy stood beside Migva. Last month, he’d tried to sell the gem dealer fake rubies. Sirsha convinced the big man not to kill him.

  “You. Boy,” Sirsha said. “I saved your miserable life when you were swindling the gem dealer.”

  The boy shifted from foot to foot, dagger shaky in his hand. “Migva, maybe we—”

  Migva spun, drawing her blade across the boy’s throat so fast that his blood was soaking into the mud before Sirsha understood what happened. She weighed her life against her savings. Would she enjoy spending years scraping together enough gold to leave the skies-forsaken Empire? No. But would it be better than getting thrown to the crows for their morning meal? Most certainly.

  “The money’s in the back bedroom,” Sirsha said. “In a safe behind the painting of the ugly dog. Now that I think about it, the dog looks a bit like you, Migva. Did you ever sit for a painting—”

  Sirsha doubled over when Migva leveled a kick at her belly. But even with her face in the muck and a broken rib or two, she smiled at the snickers from Migva’s gang.

  “What are you waiting for?” Migva roared at the thief closest to her. “Get in there!” The boy glanced at his dead companion and scurried inside. Half a minute later, he emerged.