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She had just reached the door when Thomil said, “Sciona…”

Something in his tone was strained, and she turned back. She didn’t recognize what had changed his voice until she saw it in his face. It was fear.

“Thomil?”

“I…” The words seemed to take a moment to push past Thomil’s pride. “I don’t want you to do this.”

“What do you mean? People in the Kwen are dying every moment this goes unaddressed. If there’s a way to save what remains of your home, this is how it starts.”

“I know!” Thomil growled, then shoved a hand back through his hair to clutch there in uncharacteristic distress. “I just…”

“Just what?”

He shook his head, eyes cast down.

“Honesty, Thomil,” she prompted. “After everything, I don’t think we need to keep secrets or mince words with each other. Out with it.”

“I’m afraid they already know.” When he looked back at her, his winter eyes were cold with dread. “I’m afraid of what that will mean for you.”

“For me?” she said in surprise. “Thomil, the other mages wouldn’t—well, sure, some of them would hurt me”—Renthorn would almost certainly bludgeon her to death with the Stravos Collection if he thought he could get away with it—“but I’m not going to the ones who hate me.

I’m going to Archmage Bringham. He’s put his hard-won career on the line for me more than once.

I can guarantee you, I’m not in any danger from him. ”

Thomil nodded. He had, after all, seen her interact with Archmage Bringham. He knew how close they were. But for whatever reason, he didn’t relax.

“You have a better idea?” Sciona pressed, impatient with Thomil’s lack of enthusiasm. These were his people she was trying to save.

“No,” he conceded, still disturbingly fearful. “Just promise me one thing.”

“Anything.” She supposed, for all she had put him through, she owed him one promise.

“If you bring everything you’ve told me to Archmage Bringham and he already knows—”

“He won’t.”

“Alright, but if he does, you have to play along. Pretend to buy his cover story. Whatever he wants you to believe, act like you believe it and go about your business like nothing is wrong. Don’t ask questions. Don’t antagonize.”

She gave Thomil a wry smile. “Does that sound like me?”

“Sciona!” His voice was so raw with emotion that it wiped the smile from her face. “These mages flay human beings to turn on their lights and heat their tea in the morning! If they are doing this knowingly, will they think twice about disposing of one mouthy junior member of their own order?”

Sciona chewed on his words for a tense moment. She couldn’t find fault with his logic. And yet everything in her rejected it.

“Swear to me on your god and your mother’s grave,” Thomil demanded.

“Alright,” she sighed and pulled on her best reassuring smile. “I swear by God and my mother’s grave: if Bringham and the other archmages are covering the truth, then I’ll play along with them. Happy?”

“I’ll be happy when I see you alive and whole tomorrow morning.”

Sciona smiled for real then, taken aback at Thomil’s words and the earnest note in his voice.

“That’s sweet,” she said, and it didn’t come out as jokingly as she had meant it. “Until tomorrow, Thomil.”

“Until tomorrow, Highmage.”

Thomil eventually found Carra on the roof, perched on the ledge beneath the water tower, staring out across the harsh metal skyline.

“Carra,” he said, wishing for the hundred thousandth time that he had an ounce of Arras’s gravity. “What you did back there was incredibly stupid.”

“I’m not apologizing.” She turned on him, glaring arrows. “I didn’t survive Blight and the camps to bow and scrape to a mage.”

“Excuse me, young lady. You’re only alive because I learned to bow and scrape for you. Do you think you’d be here if I had spat in Tiran’s face every time I was disrespected?”

Thomil rarely held this over Carra’s head. It wasn’t fair. But there was fairness, and there was reality, and the reality was that Kwen as headstrong as Carra usually ended up on the wrong end of a city guard’s rifle.

“It’s not right,” he softened, “but this is how we stay alive. We compromise.”

“You want me to lie still and let a mage step on me?” Carra demanded, bringing her legs back over the edge to stand and face her uncle.

“No.” Thomil wanted her to be able to scream her heart above the wind. He wanted to tell her she had nothing to fear from Sciona Freynan or any mage. She was the descendant of hunters, and the world was hers. But this was Tiran, and he loved her, and he couldn’t.

“Then what do you want from me?”

Thomil didn’t know how to answer. As always, Carra’s defiance had him caught between pride and total crushing fear.

He was relieved that she hadn’t ended up like so many girls of the Kwen Quarter, dressing Tiranish, sanding down their accents with hours of practice, and hoping desperately to move up in society by marrying Tiranishmen, who would treat them like servants in exchange for tenuous protection.

At the same time, he feared that if Carra kept running her mouth as she did, she was going to get herself killed, and the Caldonnae would be gone.

Of course, if she made herself small, she wouldn’t really be Caldonn—and they would be gone all the same.

At times like this, Thomil looked at Carra and felt himself standing again at that shoreline between Blight and starvation. As always, there was no winning for their people.

“I just want you to be smart,” he said impotently. “Be careful. Acting on your every emotion the way you do is going to get you into trouble.”

“You always said that girls like me were the only ones who survived the hard winters out in the Kwen.”

“Yes. But in this city, girls like you get themselves killed.”

Something twitched in Carra’s glare—hurt—and Thomil realized he had been too blunt.

“Daughter of Arras, do you think your father was a great hunter because he charged at caribou shouting his head off? He knew when to listen, when to wait.”

“So, what are we waiting for?” Carra demanded. “For that mage to betray you again the second things don’t go her way? For her to turn her magic on us?”

“I know it’s hard to believe—and I won’t ask you to believe it—but Sciona is genuinely trying to help us.”

Carra’s face twisted in disgust. “Sciona? I didn’t realize you two were on a first-name basis. That’s rather bold of you, isn’t it, Uncle? Not very deferential.”

“She’s on her way to talk to her mentor, to gauge how much the archmages of the city really know, and—” Thomil took a breath, realizing his voice had gone slightly unsteady. “Hopefully, she’ll come back with an idea of what must be done next.”

Carra was peering at him with stormy eyes, as penetrating as her mother’s had ever been and so much more judgmental. “You’re worried.”

“Yes. I am.”

“Because you still like her?”

“So accusatory!” Thomil chuckled to cover his nerves.

“That’s not a ‘no.’” Carra grimaced. “Gods, Uncle, what is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.”

Thomil was starting to think that something inside him was broken.

He had made exactly two attempts at courtship in Tiran’s Kwen Quarter.

Brodlynn, the friendly Endrasta secretary who had worked the desk at his previous job.

Then, years later, Kaedelli, the textile worker with a laugh like bells, who had briefly lived with him and Carra.

Both romances had quickly deteriorated. Both had been Thomil’s fault.

Because he knew—or he feared?—that whatever happiness he found in companionship, he wouldn’t be able to keep it.

It could never grow into a family or a future.

Somehow, it would all end in blood and the icy void of loss.

Thomil didn’t want to be such a pessimist; Maeva would have said that was a wretched way to live. But, given his experience, it was hard for him to be anything else… At least, it had been until Sciona Freynan and her impossible notions of changing the world.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” Carra demanded. “She’s a mage.”

“She’s…” Different? Was that the word Thomil wanted?

It seemed falsely simple. Sciona was just like any other mage in so many critical ways—her fanaticism for her cruel god, her blindness to those beneath her, her arrogance, her devastatingly damaging actions.

But in the one way, she was distinct from anyone Thomil had ever met.

“She’s hope.”

“Hope?” Carra repeated.

“She’s proven that she can change her mind,” he said.

“So?”

“So, if there’s one person who can take that energy and change this skewed world—one person with the power and the mind to do it—it’s that woman.”

“Huh.” Carra didn’t sound convinced.

“You don’t have to agree with me,” Thomil said. “Just don’t stab her, alright?”

“Fine,” Carra said, “but only because I won’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you just sent her to spill her little heart to the other mass murderers, right?” Carra pressed her hands mockingly to her chest. “That must be why you’re up here babbling your usual lines to me, yeah? ‘Cause she wouldn’t listen to them?”

Thomil shook his head. “What lines?”

“You know,” Carra said impatiently. “In this city, girls like that get themselves killed.”