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It was a bluff, and a pathetic one, at that. They both knew that there was nobody else he could ask.

“Fine,” Sevraim conceded. “You can leave it to me.” His dark eyes narrowed. “But you do realize that, for the rest of this month, the twins and I will be arguing with you over your decision to go back to Nenavar alone? You’ll never know peace.”

“I haven’t known peace since I got married,” Alaric retorted. “So—nothing new there, as far as I’m concerned.”

A few days later, Alaric’s father’s eyes followed him through the mists of shadow magic that inked the hall.

“At last,” said Gaheris, “my son shows his face.”

A sennight had passed since Alaric returned from Nenavar, a sennight spent mostly shut away in council meetings or investigating rebel activity when he wasn’t training with his legionnaires. A sennight of rebuffing Gaheris’s summons with any convenient excuse that came to mind.

Butthis—Alaric could no longer let this lie.

There was a weak chirp from the lone sunlit corner. Tracking the sound to its source, he was pierced by shock and unease.The sariman looked ill, its head tucked limply against its chest. Feathers littered the floor of the cage; what remained on its thin body had lost most of their iridescence.

“The weather doesn’t suit it, I believe,” Gaheris said lightly.

“Draining it of its blood on a regular basis certainly didn’t help,” Alaric snapped.

“The suffering of one creature in exchange for the greater good. You are well aware of that.”

Alaric forced his thoughts away from the sickly animal. He’d come here for a reason. “I need to talk to you about the exclusion list.” Commodore Mathire had presented it to him earlier that morning: a breakdown of the villages on the Continent that were heavily suspected of sympathizing with the Allfold rebels.

Gaheris smirked. “I wondered if that would finally bring you to me. What of it? Is it not simple common sense to deny Kesath’s enemies passage on our ships?”

“It’s cruel,” Alaric stonily insisted. “These are not listed individuals but entire towns. I won’t leave innocent civilians stranded on account of mere whispers.”

“We’re not stranding them. They’re free to evacuate as they please. Just not on our vessels.”

“Whosevessels, then?” Unlike Nenavar, where it seemed nearly every household owned at least one coracle, Kesath had allocated most of its raw shipbuilding materials to the war effort. Yet even coracles had not been able to save that village at the foot of Aktamasok when the Voidfell caught it unawares. The smell of rot, of all that death … As Alaric envisioned it spreading over his native land, he forced a surge of bile back down his throat, swallowing anger and frustration like a mouthful of thorns.

“Father, I’ve seen the destruction of the Void Sever firsthand. If the light-and-shadow barrier doesn’t work,” he triedto explain, tried to get Gaheris to see reason, “everyone left behind will die.”

He searched the Regent’s face, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man from before the war. The man who had sometimes smiled at a dry remark from his wife, who had sometimes ruffled Alaric’s hair. But there was only ice and resolution.

“The Night Empire will not shoulder the burdens of those who conspire against us,” Gaheris declared. “That is my order.”

When it came to dealing with his father, Alaric knew that it was about picking his battles. This one wasn’t atotalloss; if anything, it gave him added incentive to succeed in holding back the Voidfell. But it still rankled.

“Very well.” He looked at the sariman in the cage again, at this wilting reminder of those sun-drenched isles, and some helpless impulse, some shout into the endless abyss, made him add, “But if you don’t wantthiscreature to die, you will entrust it to my care until it is strong enough to withstand more experiments.”

Gaheris sneered. “I doubt your meager talents extend to zookeeping, my boy.”

Alaric stood his ground. “It needs fresh air, more light, and rest. You can’t unlock its secrets if you kill it.”

“Perhaps I can,” Gaheris mused. “We’ve run all the tests we could on feathers and blood samples. Perhaps its bones are the key. Or its heart.”

“No.” The Shadowgate roared through Alaric, his eyes flaring silver. But he caught himself, forced himself to speak more calmly as the Regent stared at him. “Father, don’t waste the sariman the way the Sardovian guerrillas wasted their stormship. Don’t burn it all to the ground before the endgame.”

It was another way to buy time. He held his breath until Gaheris finally gave a measured nod.

“Have it your way. But if the bird ends up dying despite your efforts, it will be onyourhead.”

“Naturally,” Alaric muttered.

As he left his father’s hall, it occurred to him that it had almost been too easy. Gaheris never backed down once the course was set. But perhaps his Enchanters had truly run out of ideas. Alaric could hope that was the case; for now, he’d gotten what he wanted.

Thus it was that he found himself locked in a staring contest with the sariman later that afternoon in his chambers. He’d had the cage placed by the window and its inhabitant was stretching its bald neck toward the sun. Studying him with copper eyes.