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face.
    “Don’t even say the word
trust
. You sent me away to a school run by hags. Offered me to your Emperor when he snapped his fingers. You brought me halfway round the world to marry a coffin-worshipping blood-drinking Black Rag—”
    “For Rin’s
sake
lower your voice!”
    “You denied what I told you about Syrarys.”
    Isiq closed his eyes. Syrarys, the beautiful consort who had shared his bed for a decade, had been exposed two days ago as Ott’s lover and spy. She had made a deathsmoke addict of him. She would have killed him as soon as Thasha wed.
    “You laughed when I said the Shaggat Ness was aboard,” said Thasha, “and that Arunis planned to use him against us. You’ve watched everything I warned you about come true—and you
still
think I’m a child.”
    With slow dignity, Isiq dried his face with a sleeve.
    “I also watched your mother fall through a rotten balustrade. Four stories, onto marble. She’d been waving to me. She reached out as she fell. She was twenty-six, with child again, although we’d told no one. That child would be twelve, now, Thasha. Your little brother or sister.”
    He could tell she was shaken. Thasha knew, of course, how her mother had died, that horrid fall from a theater balcony. But Isiq had never told her he’d witnessed the accident, or that Clorisuela had been pregnant at the time.
    “You’re all I have left,” he said. “I can’t watch you die before me as she did.”
    Thasha looked up at him, tears glistening in her eyes. “Don’t watch,” she said.
    Then she raised her gown and swept away down the path. “Thasha!” he cried, knowing she would not turn around. He huffed after her, cursing his stiff joints, the throbbing in his head that had only worsened since the removal of Syrarys’ poison, the red silk shoes he’d consented to wear.
    Silk. It was like going out in one’s socks—in women’s socks. How was it that no one had laughed?
    “Come back here, damn it!”
    In a heartbeat she would be gone forever. There were things yet to say. Humility to recover, love somehow to confess.
    “Where are you?”
    He would confess, too. Before the Mzithrin prince, that irritating king, the whole distinguished mob. Stand before them and declare that the Shaggat lived, that the wedding was a trap, and Arqual ruled by a beast of an Emperor.
I am guilty. She is not. Exempt her from this infamy; let it be me whom you punish
.
    But of course he would do no such thing. For beneath his daughter’s gown hung the necklace—his late wife’s gorgeous silver necklace. Arunis had put a curse on that silver chain, and had sworn to strangle her there on the marriage dais should anyone interfere with the ceremony. He had demonstrated that power yesterday, though Isiq would never have doubted it. This was, after all, a man who had come back from the dead.
    He had been hanged. Everyone agreed on that point: Arunis had been hanged, nine days on the gibbet, and his body chopped into pieces and tossed into the sea. Chadfallow had described the execution in detail; he had been there. Yet through some black magic Arunis had cheated death. For twenty years there had been no hint of him, no rumor. Like Sandor Ott, he had astonishing patience. And only when the spymaster was at last ready to deploy the Shaggat, his master weapon—only then did Arunis suddenly return, and strike.
    “Do you hear the horn, Thasha? We have five minutes! Come back!”
    What fools the sorcerer had made of them all. Under their very noses he had left the
Chathrand
in Ormael, rendezvoused with Volpek mercenaries, and raided the sunken
Lythra
. With Pazel’s forced assistance, he had retrieved an iron statue known as the Red Wolf. The statue itself was no use to him, but within its enchanted metal was the one thing he needed to make his Shaggat invincible: the Nilstone, scourge of all Alifros, a cursed rock from the world of the dead.
    Yesterday, in an unnatural calm, the mage had demonstrated his power