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So, the big truth: Teorestro Dometico as a person isn’t real.

Never was. But his influence is real enough, because Dometico has a specialty: he makes people disappear.

Senseless tales of brutal murder are really the only way imperial police don’t keep looking when a body fails to materialize in the sea.

What matters is what people believe, which is that Dometico is a monster, a seducer, and a heartless nightmare of a man, which is all very critical and convenient.

If Kasalka were to reveal to Adelion that Dometico was actually a disinherited former noblewoman named Lilari, well, suddenly everyone who’s ‘lost’ gets found.

And it’s a hard life for an Eristo’ah woman under Imalian rule.

Which is to say, Adelion’s murdered wife is Eristo’ah, and the truth is she’s alive somewhere, hopefully at peace.

“Dometico.” Lady Elemora Mederico’s eyes narrow. She’s not a bad person. Not nearly as annoying as Sabiyana, who’s vain and flighty and dull. But Elemora would happily sacrifice Mer if she thought he was Dometico, which was Lilari’s plan until…well? Now.

Lilari, prepared to flee the moment she saw Mer and Sabiyana slip away, had been besieged by thoughts of the way Mer looked at her.

How he touched her, like she was treasured.

Like, if it were possible to make themselves another future, he could already see it taking shape.

And then Lilari had thought: What life am I saving here, exactly?

She imagined herself a week from now. Moromaso’s wife, bowing left and right, kissing rings, without even the promise of Dometico for distraction.

What will be left of me when the beacon of Mer goes away?

“What are you doing?”

It’s Mer, unhelpfully, as he was meant to take this opportunity to escape. Lilari wants to scold him, and meets his eye to signal something, possibly run, you idiot, run! But then she finds she can’t look away.

There is something so knowing in his gaze – a quirk of amusement, not mocking but sweet, as if he’s pleased and suitably chastened to learn she was never really in need of his help.

In truth, it rearranges things for him, the realization that she resents his hypocrisy because she isn’t a hypocrite, just duplicitous!

She’s a liar but not a traitor. In the look that passes between them, the one where they wordlessly exchange their respective tales of survival, they understand that the story which defines them is not one of cowardice.

Because yes, survival, that’s all this is!

And look how beautifully they’ve been doing it.

Without each other. For all these long, long years.

It was Mer who’d put this fire in Lilari’s heart, this desire for something close to rightness. This longing for the kind of purpose that is inextricable from sacrifice.

Where is Adelion’s wife now? Who knows. Nobody, and that’s the point. It’s her secret and Lilari plans to keep it that way, even if her own contrivances now demand that she do so with her life.

***

The march of imperial footsteps approaches – the sound of a dozen guards.

Adelion. The doors burst open and Sabiyana screams, one hand flying to her necklace.

Mer fingers the spells inside his vest, the swamp of it almost curdled by now.

He faces his patron, who looks only at Lilari, piecing it together the way only a brilliant, cruel person can.

Seeing the truth in what was once a clever but not quite convincing mask.

“Where is she?” he says in a voice loaded with the danger that sadism can pose. He won’t kill Lilari, not yet, not while he can still enjoy her suffering, and who could say when that kind of appetite will ever be sated?

Horrifically, Mer understands. He wants something from Lilari too, and how can that end? Thus far it is terrible, and consuming, and lifelong.

Admittedly, the end result is quite different. Mer loosens a piece of parchment from the fabric of his vest, holding delicately at the front of his mind to the promise of a different outcome. The welcome embrace of a very different life.

“She’s dead,” says Lilari. “And I’m afraid the dead are out of even your exhaustive reach, Governor.”

“Is she?” Adelion looks amused before letting his gaze travel to Sabiyana.

“Where did the Duchess Seraysra get that, then?” Adelion steps forward, fingering the jewel around Sabiyana’s neck before he lets her go, turning to Lilari.

“Sold, I imagine, to buy safe passage? With the right motivation, such transactions are easy enough to trace.”

Mer reads on Lilari’s face that this is, unfortunately, true, and an unforeseen consequence.

The plan was different when Mer would be the one caught with the necklace, because then it was meant as a device to frame him.

Mer doesn’t actually know the answers to any questions Adelion might ask – but Lilari does, and the word ‘confess’ on a slip of parchment can make a terrible difference when it counts.

So shortsighted, Mer thinks, shaking his head at Lilari, at her foolish, wonderful bravery. Changing the plan on a whim to save Mer’s life was a dangerous move, hardly masterly. A grave and disastrous error.

Which Mer understands, because he’s willing to risk the same.

When Adelion takes a step toward Lilari, Mer leaps boldly between them, the parchment now clutched tight in his hand. “Lilari, run!” he shouts, and resigning himself to the end, he throws the spell at Adelion’s feet – close enough that Mer, too, will be met with the blast.

Adelion’s face goes white. His hands rise helplessly to shield his face. The paper kisses the ground, and then…

Nothing.

Moments pass, and…

Nothing.

The spell is too sodden with sweat, Mer realizes. The painstaking handwriting has all but washed away, smeared by the disgusting eccentricity of Imalian tradition, and by fabrics that don’t fucking breathe.

“Well.” Adelion turns to Mer with mirth in his eyes.

“I’d intended to deal with you later. You’re still very useful to me, you know.

More so now that I have compelling reason not to share you with that idiot Moromaso, or to pass you along to the Brotherhood.

And as for you,” he says, with a menacing step toward Lilari, “you will tell me where she is, or you will die begging me for mercy—”

“Like hell I will, Imperial scum,” spits Lilari, and Mer, unthinkingly, lunges forward to take her hand.

It’s another moment of disaster, one in which he blurts aloud the one thing that comes to his mind.

A thing he almost never allows himself to think, because it has so long been gone from him, from even the outer edges of his reach.

Safety , he thinks in Eristo’ah. He clutches Lilari’s hand and whispers devoutly, in the language they spoke as children, “Home.”

It’s as if he called down a wildfire. As if all the gods of his birthright have finally answered.

As if they’ve only been waiting to be given this one chance to let these false idols burn.

***

The truth is, it was probably a long shot anyway, the idea that Mer could have joined the Brotherhood, what with all that magic for others to exploit. And as for Lilari, well, there are a lot of deaths, and marriage can sometimes be one of them. So really, it was all for the best.

After the mysterious fire that night, Moromaso is the new governor, which complicates things, given his familiarity with both Mer and Lilari, but conditions could certainly be worse for two wanted murderers.

After all, Moromaso’s spent so many years reliant on his loyal scribe – how can he possibly summon the effort to hunt down criminals now, in addition to the tedium of statecraft?

And crime is really out of hand these days in all the port cities.

The coasts are positively festering with pirates.

The looting’s gotten so bad that many Imalian nobles have gone back to their imperial court, seeking refuge in their country of manners.

These new lands, they’re just so savage and unruly.

You can never really be sure whether one Dometico or another will choose today to scour the seas.

“So, who gets to be fearsome today?” Mer calls across the room, which Nicano Asco has so generously provided in exchange for permission every now and then to watch. Mer’s beard is trimmed now, though his hair is still tied in a scholarly knot at the nape of his neck.

Lilari turns to look at him. Not a lady, not anymore. Wedded and bedded, though. Mer happens to like keeping to the solemnity of vows.

(That other future they both foolishly saw: it’s honest and simple. Precious and shared.)

“Don’t be stupid, Mer,” she chastises him fondly, reaching out to cup his cheek. “I’m always the fearsome one. You’re just wonderfully combustible.”

The truth of the matter lives somewhere between devotion and foolhardiness, right at the midpoint of yearning and valor. Although don’t tell Mer that right now. He’s going to bed.