“Don’t be dramatic,” Sairché said.
He laughed. “You are a little mad these days, aren’t you? You can’t please everyone, and displeasing the wrong person-”
“Have you forgotten the story of His Highness, Prince Levistus?” Sairché asked. “You can seduce the king of the Hells’ own wife, kill her when she refuses you, corrupt his only daughter, thunder around stirring up discontent, and in the end-so long as Asmodeus sees a use for you in the future-come out alive.”
“And frozen in a glacier for all time,” Lorcan said.
“Frozen and alive is still alive,” Sairché said. “Still possible to come back.”
“And what do you have to offer His Majesty that would rival an archduke?”
Lorcan said. “If we fail-”
“We shall simply have to fail less spectacularly than someone else,” Sairché said. “Asmodeus cannot afford to destroy perfectly good pieces in this game and he knows it. Better to keep us in play.”
“But which is worse? Alive and under his notice,” Lorcan asked, “or dead?”
“A very good question,” Sairché conceded, and she headed down the stairs, trusting that her brother was, if nothing else, too curious to stab her in the back just yet.
The snow had started falling again, great fluffy clumps that melted away as soon as they landed on the blood-slicked courtyard. There was no covering the carnage. There was no washing away the deaths of the prisoners.
They are dead, Farideh’s thoughts repeated, over and over like a terrible chant, they are all dead. This is what your bad decisions have wrought.
The shadar-kai had to shove the prisoners in, like cattle into a slaughterhouse. They passed by in a blur-angry, afraid, staring up at Farideh as if she were a monster. She could not tell them that this was safer.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the young man staring up at her, the old woman clutching her throat, the little genasi girl screaming and screaming.
I cannot save them, Farideh thought. I cannot save anyone. Not even myself.
She stared down at this-the last group for the day, Rhand had promised-the excuse hollow and dusty in her own thoughts. She ought to be planning. She ought to be counterattacking, she ought to be figuring out how to outmaneuver Rhand, she ought to be clever-if there were one thing Farideh could do in a fight, it was think ahead, so why didn’t she? It sounded so much like Mehen’s voice, her heart ached to ignore it. She could be as clever as a general out of one of Mehen’s bedtime stories, and Rhand would still win, because he held too many lives in his hands.
Every time she tried to outthink him, to pull herself out of the shock and grief for the sake of the prisoners who still lived, that truth lay as plain and ugly as the sticky gloss of blood the snow couldn’t wash away. Every time she hesitated, the guards reached for their weapons, their excitement shimmering off of them like the heat off the cobblestones in the city of Proskur seven summers ago.
I should have cast, she thought as she named the Chosen. I should have leaped down into the pit, put myself between the swords and them. I should have attacked Rhand, pushed him into the pit. I should have run, she thought, and still she named the Chosen.
As each of those acts played out in her thoughts, the result was the same: The guards would react. Rhand would react. And with so many against her, she would fail, she would suffer. More people would die. She would die and Sairché would win. Havilar would be lost. It was as if she had already taken the wrong path seven and a half years earlier and there was no turning off it now.
Action was wrong. Inaction was wrong. She could not win without losing. She pointed to the last Chosen in the group-a human woman with her brown hair in long plaits. She glared at Farideh, a condemnation Farideh let soak through her. She deserved every bit of it.
“There now,” Rhand said. “That wasn’t so bad.”
True, Farideh thought bitterly. There were more uncomfortable ways to damn your soul. If she could have hoped to find lenience for the Chosen she’d sorted before she knew what was going on-despite the fact she’d known well enough that Rhand was a villain-there was nothing, no justification, no appealing artifice, to lessen the deaths of the third group of prisoners, nor the Chosen she’d doomed afterward.
The tiefling woman’s ghost appeared, hovering just behind Rhand, faint as Farideh’s breath on the cold air. The ghost stared at her successor as she always did-cool and stern-before gesturing at her swirling locks. Farideh slipped the ruby comb from her pocket, jamming it heedlessly into the smoothed hair of her crown.
Now you see what he’s capable of, the ghost said. Now you see you must fight fire with fire.
Farideh shook her head, knowing better than to answer. There were too many complications, too many ramifications. Rhand might not win, but she would always lose. And more importantly, innocent people would lose as well.
Do you know who you are? the ghost said. What you can master? You have let a weakling-a robber, cloaked in magician’s robes-outwit you by playing on soft feelings. He cannot afford to lose these people-you know that and so does he. Steel yourself-a few more dead, a score of dead, it is nothing compared to what he’ll do. He cannot afford to lose you.
Farideh turned from her, to look at Rhand where he stood giving arcane directions to his apprentices. He looked up at Farideh and smiled unpleasantly.
You have no choice, the ghost said. You fight or you die.
“Come,” Rhand said. “My guest wishes to speak to you.”
Even terror at facing the Nameless One again could not break through Farideh’s numbness. She stared down at the snow landing on the blood-dark cobbles. It cannot be worse, she thought. You are trapped. They are trapped. You cannot save them.
And no one, she thought, remembering Lorcan’s cold fury, remembering Havilar’s refusal to meet her eye, is going to save you.
Maybe it was better that way.
Rhand took her by the arm, and there her gloom found its limits, and a spark of rage and revulsion seared through the fog. But she didn’t fight as he led her up the stairs, trailed by Nirka and her unsheathed knives.
“She won’t be happy,” Rhand warned. “She’ll want punishment.” He lingered on the word in a way that fanned that spark of rage. She owed the dead Chosen-but she did not owe Rhand or Shar.
At the top of the stairs, the shadar-kai woman stopped and went no farther. Farideh stepped out of the threat of her knives and into the grasp of the Chosen of Shar’s powers-worse than the prior night. It wrapped her like a cloak of lead and threatened to stop her feet. Images of the massacre rose up with every step-the woman with the cut throat, the elf a shadar-kai had beaten with his spiked fists, the sound of the little genasi girl screaming. The Chosen whose ties to his god had been snapped with one sword stroke.
You fight or you die, the ghost’s words murmured in her thoughts. Had the ghost not fought? Had she died fighting? The Nameless One’s power smothered her curiosity. It might matter, but Farideh couldn’t recall why. Only that she would like very much to stop, to sit, to curl into a ball.
Rhand stopped beside the door opposite his study, his breath growing unsteady, his eyes wild. The room beyond was far larger than her own, with a long table covered in maps and scrolls in addition to the bed and chests and chairs. A similar closet stood in the corner, its open doors displaying a similar variety of fashions-though far more were puddled on the floor, tried-on and cast-off.
The Nameless One sat beside the wide, open windows, and a cold breeze cooled Farideh’s burning face. The strange glyph of power that marked the girl was not drawn in light but deepest shadow, glittering with traces of violet and blue. She looked Farideh over with colorless eyes, and numbness gripped the warlock, snuffing out fear and rage and every other thought.