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It takes a second before I understand why, and then my cheeks blaze with embarrassment. “My dragon,” I’d said. Curse him, Hokzuh caught it too. He raises a thick, bemused eyebrow, but at least he doesn’t refuse.

“Tomorrow,” he says airily. “I guarantee it.”

He looks to me to confirm. For appearances’ sake, I give a solemn nod. But if Hokzuh thinks I’ve forgiven him for abandoning Vanna, then he is fatally mistaken.

I stop listening as the prince and Hokzuh deliberate over logistics. I’m thinking about Oshli. How his expression, impassive as always, softened when he saw Vanna as a tiger. How his eyes flooded not with sorrow but with relief. Plain, pure relief.

Oblivious to the prince, Oshli is sitting cross-legged on the bricked path, with my sister’s furred head on his lap. Magic hums from his hands, hovering above Vanna’s injured side. It’s clear from his face that there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

“We’ll bring Oshli,” I interrupt.

Rongyo blinks. “Who?”

“Oshli.” I gesture. “The late shaman’s son. He came from our village with my parents.”

Rongyo frowns, as if seeing him for the first time. “He isn’t one of the palace healers?”

I can’t decide whether Rongyo is young or dense. “He is a healer, but he’s from Sundau,” I say as patiently as I can. “He knows Vanna well, and she trusts him.”

The prince’s gaze drifts to the butterflies flying over the shaman and my sister. Sensing Rongyo’s jealousy rise, I add, “He’s her sworn brother.”

It’s a lie, but it does the trick.

“Very well,” the prince agrees. “He may come.”

“No one is going anywhere.” The queen of Tai’yanan’s voice rings out from behind the trees. Modest in height but formidable in presence, she storms into the garden unannounced. “I forbid it.”

Rongyo whirls. “Mother!”

“The girl has bewitched you,” she says. “I forbade you from going to that accursed selection, and yet you went. You bid the hard-earned fortune of our people to win her hand, and you risked displacing Tai’yanan from Tambu’s fellowship of kings and queens. Yet in spite of my misgivings, I accepted her, and I permitted you to wed her. But now—”

The queen gestures to the royal temple, at its broken statues and crumbling arches. Servants are still gathering the dead, placing white sheaths of muslin over their bodies. There are so many the red-bricked path looks like it’s covered in snow.

All of a sudden, I cannot blame her.

“Vanna is to be my wife,” Prince Rongyo says. “She has been cursed, and I must find a way to undo that curse.”

“Will you endanger your people for a girl you barely know?” says the queen. “Look at these bodies, Rongyo. Have sense!”

I keep quiet, but I know that Vanna’s radiance has enraptured Rongyo too deeply. I’ve seen it in the village children and their parents, in Adah and Lintang, in the butterflies and birds and lizards even, in everyone whose lives are touched by my sister’s light.

There is no depth or nuance to Rongyo’s love; he will be loyal until the day he dies.

As Oshli will be.

As I will be.

“I cannot have sense,” says Rongyo, taking the very words from my thoughts. “Please forgive me. But I will go with or without your permission, Mother.”

The queen’s silence is fraught with anger, with disappointment. “If you will not listen, then I will act. King Meguh is dead. Queen Ishirya too. Shenlani ships are on their way now—for her head.” She points at me. “I will not have war on my shores.”

She glances at the guards, who quickly surround Vanna and me.

“Stop!” growls my sister.

She shields me with her body, and her light intensifies, forcing the guards to stagger back, their eyes watering. In my periphery, Hokzuh is staring at Vanna, squinting at the light in her heart that only he cannot see.

“You need not force us,” Vanna warns the guards. “My sister and I will leave, and we will not come back. We only ask for one ship.”