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With a sigh, Bri sat back, looking at the windows instead of Alie.

“Maybe that’s not the right way to put it.

It’s not that I don’t believe He’s Apollius—I mean, the alternative is that Bastian is pretending to be a god, and I don’t see that happening.

But I don’t—” She tapped her lacquered nails on her teacup, searching for words. “I don’t think this is… good.”

Relief was a flood, so palpable Alie almost slumped over in her seat. Part of her wanted to tell Bri everything, try to explain the entire debacle, but she just settled on “Me neither.”

That seemed to relieve Bri, too. She nodded enthusiastically.

“All our lives, we were taught to believe that Apollius was coming back. That His return would bring a new, perfect world. And we never got specifics, I guess, but I assumed a perfect world would be one free of war. One where people weren’t hungry.

” She shrugged self-consciously. “You know, I think most of this newfound piety is people being afraid. We have proof of the Shining Realm now. Everyone wants to be allowed in.” She looked to Alie.

“Does He talk about it? The Shining Realm?”

He didn’t. Apollius had never mentioned it, not as a reward for those who were sufficiently worshipful, or as the place He’d bided time waiting for Bastian. Alie shook her head.

Bri glanced away again at the full light of morning in the windows. “I wish He would,” she said softly.

They ate quietly. This was the gift of long friendships: the ability to be silent with each other and have it be comfortable. The way that simply the presence of the other person was a strut that could hold you up.

When Alie was finished, she stood, walked behind Bri’s chair. She wrapped her arms around the other woman’s shoulders and settled her chin into the notch beside her neck. Bri leaned into her embrace.

The comfortable silence probably would have persisted had Lore’s ring not fallen out of Alie’s pocket.

It bounced once on the marble floor in a way that made her wince, and came to a stop in a shaft of sun, gleaming.

She felt Bri straighten from her arms and had to fight against holding her still, trying to keep her from seeing. No such luck.

“Is that…” Bri breathed.

“Yes,” Alie said, because what use was lying?

Their spell broke. Brigitte straightened fully, her lips working over questions that never gained sound. Alie nearly tripped trying to retrieve the ring, snatching it off the floor with so much haste that it almost went spinning away again.

When she turned around, Bri was standing, her delicate brows low. “Alie,” she said, “why do you have the Queen’s engagement ring?”

She’d gone about this all wrong. There might’ve been a way to salvage it, maybe saying that Apollius had given it to Jax to give to her, but now that she’d acted this way there was no chance Bri would believe her.

She stood there in the light, her fist clenched tight around the Mount-mined diamond, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

But she didn’t need to. Another benefit of long friendships was not needing words to communicate, the other side of that comfortable silence.

“Come on,” Bri said, turning to head toward the stairs that led to her room deeper in the apartment.

Alie had been in Bri’s room thousands of times.

She was messier than Alie, her clothes left in luxurious piles rather than put back into the closet, at least until maids came and rectified the situation.

A small table was pushed in front of the window, strewn with tools that Alie didn’t recognize but assumed had something to do with Bri’s jewelry making.

One of them, a metal tube with a disk of glass at one end, reminded her of a telescope.

Bri cleared a pair of slippers off a velvet chair for Alie, then sat on the bench in front of the table. “You stole it,” she said. “And I know you have a reason. You’ve never been light-fingered.”

You aren’t going to believe me , Alie almost said, but that was a stupid thing to think at this point. They’d seen plenty of unbelievable things just this week.

“I need to find something,” she said, hoping that Bri wouldn’t pry too much, hoping the sixth sense of friendship would extend this far.

“And apparently this ring can tell me where it is. But I can’t figure out how .

” Now that she’d allowed herself to talk, her frustrations came in a flood.

“The instructions were to hold it up to a window at sunrise, but I tried that, and it didn’t show me anything. ”

“I’ve heard of this before,” Bri said, an eager light in her eye. “Putting a message in a piece of jewelry, I mean. It’s not the stone itself that’s engraved, it’s the setting.”

“Then why would it matter if it was sunrise?”

“Any type of bright light will probably work.” Bri turned to the desk and picked up the instrument that looked like a small telescope.

“The stone needs to be illuminated to see the setting behind it.” She held the tool up to her eye, twisted it to make some minor adjustment, then reached out and opened the curtains over the window. She held out her hand.

Despite everything—their long friendship, their love, their comfortable silence—Alie hesitated. The ring weighed in her pocket like a chain on an ankle.

She’d kept hope, but Alie knew the chances of this working out in her favor were slim.

They were going up against a god, and even if they were all haunted by the ghosts of other gods, every possible step forward seemed like grasping at increasingly thin straws.

If she handed over the ring, if she let Bri become part of this, was she damning her, too?

Bri read her thoughts. She twitched her fingers, quirked her mouth. “I won’t ask any questions. Promise.”

With a shaky breath, Alie dropped the ring into her palm.

The diamond sparkled as Bri turned it over in her hands. “You know,” she said, almost to herself, “I figured something strange was going on when he gave her this. I couldn’t have imagined just how strange, though.”

“I don’t think any of us could,” Alie replied.

Bri snorted a laugh, fitting the ring into a metal mechanism that kept it upright, handling it gently.

She cranked at a lever on the side of the machine, bringing the ring up to the center of the open window.

Morning was in full glow, and the sun blazed through the golden stone, casting gem-faceted shadows on the walls.

Bri fit the scope into her eye and leaned in close.

“Oh,” she said. “There it is.”

She offered the scope to Alie. Alie’s hand nearly trembled as she took it.

“It’s not a map, though,” Bri said, frowning.

Alie put the tool to her eye. She stared into the diamond, peering through the golden depths to the symbol etched on the setting below, so small it was hard to read even with magnification.

A word.

Tomb.