Relics of Ruin

Book 2: Books of the Usurper

by Erin M. Evans

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

From a rising star in epic fantasy comes the captivating second novel in a trilogy featuring an unlikely team who must find a way to work together and solve an empire-spanning mystery to defend the last place they call home.

The conspiracy at the heart of the empire has been revealed. The Archivists played a key role in solving a brutal murder and uncovering one of the empire’s longest kept secrets. Now, what’s left in its wake are a series of unearthed artifacts, one shaken city, and the shocking truth not dared spoken aloud. 

Just as the empire has begun to regain normalcy, another mystery unveils itself when a stolen ancient relic is found. Only no one knew that it was missing from its sacred vault in the first place. And now that the real one has been recovered, who replaced it with a fake?

With Quill and Amadea at the heart of another mystery, they will need to quickly follow the clues that all lead back to this new relic.

Because all the while, an old enemy is gathering strength beyond the Salt Wall and the Archivists might come to find there’s nowhere left for them to go but over.

"Detailed and mysterious, a place to explore and relish. Highly recommended!" ―R. A. Salvatore, author of "The Legends of Drizzt"

For more from Erin Evans, check out:

Empire of Exiles

Release date: April 30, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 448

Sample

Year Eight of the Reign of Empress Beneditta

An imperial relay station on the road south of Ragale, the Imperial Federation of Semillan Protectorates

(Twenty-three years later)

In the fading light of evening, Quill considered the array of charms spread out on the peddler’s blanket: Iron thistle flowers. Iron long bones and arrows. Iron masks with serene, implacable faces. He pointed at one, a creature, its teeth bared in a horrible grin.

“What’s that one?” he asked.

The peddler craned his neck to see. He was an elderly Orozhandi man with charms wrapping his down-curved dark horns nearly to the tips. His third eye sat half-open and weary at the edge of his white hairline, but his smile was wide and joyous, showing a gap in his lower teeth.

“Ah! It’s called a ‘jaguar,’” he said. “If you are Beminat, they’re lucky. And iron, of course, so this one is lucky even if you’re not Beminat!”

“Oh,” Quill said. “I’ve read about those. It’s like a cat?”

“A fierce cat,” the man said merrily. “A big cat. It could maybe eat a changeling!”

For a century, the Salt Wall had stood, a barrier against the changeling threat that had destroyed the world, a monument to the magic of the sorcerers who had sacrificed themselves in its creation. In those days, people had known that salt and iron were poison to the shape-changing creatures that might otherwise have replaced their loved ones, sown discord in their communities, brought down their civilizations. They had worn iron charms like these to prove their safety or to test a stranger’s, but the accessory had fallen out of fashion in Quill’s grandparents’ youth.

How things had changed.

Several other travelers had stopped and purchased the hitherto unstylish iron charms as Quill carried in his and Richa’s travel gear from the relay station’s enclosed courtyard to the inn—one trip for the bags, and two for the crates full of documents he’d secreted out of the tower of Parem in Ragale a week ago. The documents might hold the secrets to what Primate Lamberto, his former mentor, had been doing when he agreed to assist not only the fabled changeling hunter of the Usurper’s coup but a man claiming to be Redolfo Kirazzi himself, back from the grave.

A second coup, staged beyond the Salt Wall. This one riddled with changelings.

The Imperial Authority had quickly hidden everything they could about it, sworn Quill and the others to secrecy, and continued on as if it could be safely ignored.

And now people were buying iron charms again.

“I have amulets for the saints as well,” the peddler said. “Do you need protection?”

Like you wouldn’t believe, Quill thought. To be fair, though, nothing else had happened in the intervening months. They were approaching winter, the turn of the new year, and there had been no other attacks. No incidents of unexplained murders, no new breaches in the Salt Wall. The assassin they’d called “the Shrike” was dead, and so was the changeling pretending to be Redolfo Kirazzi, and Primate Lamberto besides. The tunnel beneath the Salt Wall they’d been intending to use had collapsed, its contents burned. The Imperial Authority was aware of everything that had happened—most everything.

But the Shrike’s words to Quill before her death wouldn’t let him relax: I hope he never told you he was an innocent in this… Lamberto was never blackmailing me. I was paying him.

Whatever was happening, whatever the primate had been hired to do, it wasn’t finished. The risk was still there, the coup incomplete. Someone on the other side of the wall still held the reins.

Quill lingered over the rows of painted saints’ medallions, some portraits of the Orozhandi sorcerers in life, some their posed skeletons. He recognized Saint Asla of the Salt, the Martyr of the Wall prominently among them, her hands spread to raise the salt out of the earth and the sea, by the strength of her affinity, her tiny beatific face still fleshed, her bare bones silvery. He wondered if Yinii would like one. Or, really, if she would like one from him.

“Do you make these yourself?” he asked.

“The saints’ amulets yes,” the peddler said. “I cast them of lead, paint them. The iron charms are the gifts and blessings of Thunzi of the Iron. I make a pilgrimage to the maqu’tajii once a year.” He pressed his hands together in a fist and bowed against them, honoring the absent sorcerer.

Quill’s Orozhandi had improved a little over the last two months. He knew enough to know “maqu’tajii” was the word used for sorcerers who weren’t Orozhandi and therefore didn’t quite fit into the connection the horned people felt their own sainted sorcerers made between their gods and their people. Holy enough to visit, to honor, to resell the tokens made from the magic of their affinity. But not saints.

“I’m seeing a girl who counts Saint Asla as her personal saint,” he said to the peddler. Then: “Sort of. I’ve been away. And she’s been busy. She works at the Imperial Archives. We both do, I suppose.”

The peddler blinked up at him, bemused, as if he couldn’t imagine what Quill meant. He reached over and picked up one of the amulets, laying it across his wrinkled palm. “This is Saint Hazaunu,” he said. “Of the Wool. The guardian on the clifftop. The eye that watches the weft and the sentinel that guards the flock. A most holy lady.

“This is my saint,” he added in a lowered voice.

Richa came up behind Quill, carrying the last of the boxes of Primate Lamberto’s papers. He wore the deep-blue uniform of the Vigilant Kinship, the watchful order that kept safe the cities of Semilla from fire, crime, and destruction. The silver-gray fur of the long cloak’s collar fluttered against his close-cropped dark hair and his tan cheeks as a cold autumn breeze snaked down the entryway to the courtyard.

“You all right?” Richa asked.

“Shopping. Do you want an amulet?” Quill asked.

Richa frowned at him, as puzzled as the peddler had been when Quill had brought up Yinii. “No, I’m set. We need to get these locked up,” Richa said, lifting the box of papers. “Excuse us, esinor.”

Quill rolled his eyes and bought the jaguar pendant from the man, then followed Richa into the inn that made up one wall of the relay station. The building was almost a small fortress, arranged around a central courtyard with a fountain at its center, a design formed in far-off ancient Khirazj. They dotted the network of roads that ran throughout the empire, improved by engineers brought by the Datongu and the Beminat when they’d fled to Semilla a hundred years before. The pale walls that rose up two stories to a red-tiled roof were Semilla itself’s favored style, although the Ashtabari innkeeper had hung nets festooned with small charms from the corners, to bring luck and safety and good fortune.

After he and Richa deposited the last of the boxes in the relay station’s storeroom, where they’d be locked up safe overnight, they collected their servings of pilaf studded with smoky meat, pistachios, and dried fruit.

“Haven’t been here in a while,” Quill said as he sat down.

“You stop at this station often?” Richa asked.

“I have,” Quill said. “When I was traveling with Primate Lamberto and… Karimo.” A flush of sorrow washed over him, but it was easier now to talk about his murdered friend. “But the primate hated staying in these station inns. We’d usually stop in one of the villages back toward Ragale if we were heading to the capital.” Richa nodded, and Quill went on. “It’s a nice one. Fountain and all. And the peddlers—I wonder if they sell much here?”

“That’s for them to say,” Richa said slowly.

“Do you think I ought to buy Yinii one of those amulets?” Quill asked as he scraped up the last of his supper. “There were some nice ones.”

The older man sighed. “Does she need one?”

“Seems like a nice-enough present. I think. I don’t actually know,” Quill admitted. “It might be the kind of thing your aunt gives you when you take your oaths. Do you know?”

Richa prodded at his rice. “I don’t.”

Richa was many things, in Quill’s estimation: he was a dedicated vigilant, caring about the safety of the city even when it went against his superiors; he was steady, thoughtful, and unruffled in a way that Quill envied sometimes; he was clever and good at figuring things out, people and problems.

He was also, however, a horrible traveling companion.

“You should get Amadea a gift,” Quill said pointedly. “She likes those little animal figurines.”

Mentioning the archivist superior had worked before to spur Richa into conversation, and Quill was pleased when Richa sat up, his mouth working a moment, before he said, “How are you liking working at the archives?”

Quill wrinkled his nose. “I barely have. The training was fine. It’s not that complicated on paper. It’ll be what crops up day to day that’s tricky. Amadea said they’re going to set me up with Tunuk when we get back, and I don’t get the impression he likes me much.”

“Give him a chance,” Richa said. “You didn’t meet under the best circumstances.”

Quill looked down at his plate, a sudden plunging grief yanking on his chest. Karimo’s death was a horrible thing to face, but in his madness, Karimo had killed Tunuk’s nest-father Lord Obigen yula Manco.

“Fair,” Quill said. He dragged his spoon through the dregs of the sauce. “It was sort of strange. Being back in Ragale. Being in the tower with all the Paremi and… not being one. Made me sort of wonder if I made the wrong decision rescinding my oath.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Do you ever feel like that? Like you shouldn’t have sworn to the Kinship?” When Richa only shook his head, his eyes on the pilaf, Quill pressed on. “How did you decide to join the Vigilant Kinship?”

Richa looked up, his expression… oddly still. “Why?”

“Making conversation?” Quill said. “We hardly talk while we’re riding. I’m going mad. Give me this: ten minutes of talking. How did you come to take your oath with the Kinship?”

Richa drew a long breath through his nose, looking up over Quill’s head, and for a moment, Quill wondered if he’d somehow hit on something Richa was more sensitive about than what was going on with Amadea, and Quill nearly apologized.

But then Richa looked down, smiled vaguely, and said, “It’s not that interesting. I saw a need in the city, and I had a need for myself—I wanted a vocation, and that was something I cared about. Probably similar to you and the Paremi or the archives.”

Quill made a face. “Not really. To begin with, my mother pointed me at the Paremi. Did you have family in the Kinship?”

“No.” The older man stood, still smiling vaguely. “I’m going for a walk before I turn in. Feeling antsy.”

Quill stood as well. “Mind if I come out with you? I think I do want that amulet after all.”

They went back out, but the peddler was gone, the courtyard still and quiet but for the nickering of horses in the stable opposite the inn’s entrance. Quill followed Richa to the gates and went up to the vigilants posted there, a trim dark-skinned woman pulling down the iron grate that barred the entrance and an Ashtabari man, his mottled green-and-gray tentacles coiled under him as he leaned on a spear.

“Do you know where the peddler who was selling amulets went?” Quill asked.

“The old man? He just left,” the woman said. She nodded at the half-down gate. “You can probably catch him.”

Quill frowned. “He doesn’t live at the relay station?”

“Nah,” the man says. “Just sells here.” He nodded to Richa. “We’re locking the gate so we can take our duty breaks. Pull the bell if no one’s here when you get back.”

“Much obliged,” Richa said, ducking under the grating. Quill followed him, trailing several steps behind, until they were out on the wide road.

“If I don’t see him, maybe I’ll just walk with you,” Quill said.

Richa stopped and turned, raising a hand. “Quill, I know you need to talk, but I… I am used to the peace of my own silence. I just want a walk.”

“All right,” Quill said. “I wasn’t going to stop you.”

Richa blew out another breath. “You didn’t ask for my opinion, but we’ve been at this long enough that I think it needs to be said. You clearly miss Karimo. You need a friend. And, Quill, I think highly of you, but you and I are… in very different places in our lives. And even when I was twenty, I didn’t really want to talk about what the first consuls were advocating for when they… did the thing you were talking about yesterday.”

“All right,” Quill said again. “We can talk about something else—”

“I need the quiet of my own head,” Richa said, “and I’m sorry I’m not giving you what you need here, but it’s not… if you want to talk about Karimo, I can talk about Karimo—I’ve lost people, and I know it’s hard. But I’m not going to talk about what you think I should be saying to Amadea or what you want to buy Yinii, and I don’t want to talk about anything right now, all right?”

It was more words than Richa had said to him in days. Quill stiffened, disliking how abruptly Richa had cut into something Quill himself hadn’t been completely sure of. Disliking how sharp that hurt was, he took a step back, and Richa started to say something, maybe apologize.

Quill raised a hand. “That’s fine. I’ll just—”

Rising voices cut off Quill’s reply. Both he and Richa turned toward the sound.

Down the road, out of the range of the relay station’s lamplight, a tangled shadow writhed, like a many-armed monster. It took a moment for Quill’s eyes to pick out the details of them in the shine of the moonlight: two people struggling, shouting.

And then Quill’s heart nearly leapt from his chest as the moonlight caught the knife between the two.

Richa took off running, and what could Quill do but chase after him? A scream rang out, and the mass of shadows split into two—one falling and one running for the forest that lined the road.

“Get the vigilants!” Richa shouted back at Quill as he sped after the fleeing form.

But Quill was coming up to the fallen body—the peddler—and there was so much blood. He dropped down beside the old man, his hands going to the wound on the man’s stomach, trying to hold the man’s guts back.

Quill was kneeling on the road, but suddenly he was sure he was also in the yula Manco house, in the aftermath of Karimo’s attack. The old man stared up at him, panting, his third, parietal eye wide, seeing the shape of Quill’s body heat in the darkness.

“You must,” the old man gasped. “You must…”

“Don’t worry!” Quill said. “It’s all right!” And in his mind, he was on the floor beside Karimo again, trying to put his throat back together, while a little part of him said, That didn’t work before. This isn’t working now.

Quill screamed for help. He must have. Where were the people in the relay station? Where was Richa? Where was the man with the knife?

“You have to… save her…” the peddler gasped.

“Who?” Quill gasped back. Yinii, he thought numbly. Amadea. The empress. The Shrike. “Who?” he managed around his panicking brain, his hands sunk into the wet of the man’s gut. “Who?”

The man’s day-eyes fluttered open, but when he looked at Quill, they did not focus. “In the woods,” he said. “Upon the hill… Beyond the white rocks… You must protect her.” He coughed, rackety and desperate, and blood spattered from his mouth, then poured. Quill automatically reached to push it back, to hold it in, and felt the man’s last breath rattle across his hand.

Quill stood up. He couldn’t catch his breath. He ran a bloodied hand through his hair, growing loose and shaggy since he’d begun the process to renounce his vows as a Paremi. Where was Richa? Where were the vigilants from the relay station?

Where was the woman he needed to protect?

Richa burst out of the same woods, furious and scowling, holding a small Borsyan cold-magic lamp in one hand. “Lost the bastard,” he said. “Where are the vigilants?” He stopped, taking in Quill, the blood, the dead man on the road. “Shit,” he said.

“We have to go,” Quill said. “There’s someone in the woods. A woman. That might be where the killer went. He said she’s in the woods, up the hill, beyond the white rocks.”

For a moment, the world felt too large, the sky unable to contain Quill to hold him down—the horror endless and the problem impossible and Richa was about to say, Look, you’ve been through a lot. You’re still figuring this out. It feels like Karimo, but do you really think a dying man raving about a woman in the woods makes sense? We should go back. We should wait for day. You should not be involved.

But Richa cared beyond his basic duty, Richa wasn’t ruffled by the unexpected, and Richa might not want to unburden himself to Quill, but he looked back toward the woods, scanning the tree line as if looking for a hint of a rise, and believed Quill. “Come on,” he said, and plunged toward the woods.

The energy that surged in Quill to move, to do, to stop all this madness seemed to grip Richa just as strongly, and the younger man kept his eyes on the ghostlike patch of silvery fur as Richa moved ahead of him through the gloom and moonlight, along a path Quill couldn’t see. In the woods, up a hill…

The white boulders were deep in the shadow of an ancient fir tree with deep, craggy bark, but even there they glowed faintly as if the moonlight sought them out. Richa stopped in the little clearing there, looking up the steep slope the boulders were set into.

Richa handed Quill the glowing orb. “Stay here.”

He started to climb, scaling the smooth-sided rocks as if they were a ladder and moving up the bare earth slope beyond. Quill looked around, suddenly aware of the possibility of the man with the knife. He moved closer to the rocks, closer to Richa. Surely the vigilant, trained and dedicated to the protection of the Imperial Federation, had a knife on him? Quill only had a little blade for sharpening styli…

As he searched the woods, the rocks, the shadows, he found the gap between the rocks and the little cave beyond. In the woods, upon the hill, beyond the white rocks…

Quill squeezed through the gap, sweeping the light around the space beyond. The cold-magic lamp spread a thin bluish light around the small space. The ceiling had been dug out enough for Quill to straighten up, the beams of the tree’s roots standing out here and there, and the peddler had dug into the hill, pounded the walls smooth.

There was a bed, a box full of dishes, a box full of battered books. A knife on hooks on the wall. A marked-up map. Portraits of saints everywhere. A cushion before the largest portrait of the saint, a quiet personal altar. The stink of a seldom-washed body.

There was no woman in the little dirt room.

Quill let out a breath. No rescue, no action—just standing in a dead man’s home, all his things waiting for him to take them up again, the scent of his living fading already. The shock of Quill’s adrenaline drained away, leaving him weak and grieving.

The portraits of the saints—fleshed and skeletal—stared down at him, and it took Quill a moment to realize they were all the same one. The woman with the shepherd’s crook and the date palm. Saint Hazaunu of the Wool. In different hands and shifting styles, but the same woman. He approached the portrait over the little altar, stepping around the cushion. Her three black eyes regarded him solemnly.

This is my saint, the man had said. The one he’d chosen to venerate, to pray to for his own cares and worries. Quill swallowed and wondered if Saint Hazaunu knew, somewhere, somehow, that her follower had died. He turned away.

The ground beneath his foot gave a hollow thump.

Quill stepped back, shining the light downward. The ground was pounded dirt, but—he stomped against it again—here there was something beneath the dirt. A box, a chest, a wooden barrier—his imagination raced ahead, picturing some frightened hostage hiding beneath. He set aside the cold-magic light and started digging his bloodstained fingers into the dirt.

“Quill?” Richa shouted. “Quill?”

“In the cave! Between the rocks!” He found the wood quickly, swept it free to the edges. He took out the little penknife and fitted it into the uncovered groove, the grit of the dirt grinding the fine edge.

“It’s all right,” he said to the possible girl. “It’s all right.”

Richa came up behind him. “Did you find—”

Quill levered the penknife up against the edge of the box, snapping the blade but breaking the wood free. He grabbed the edge and pulled up, scattering more dirt across the floor, and looked down into the darkness he’d just revealed.

There was, indeed, someone in there.

Only they were very, very dead.

A skeleton lay curled on its side, its hands clasped before its face, as if sleeping. The bones of each browned finger glinted with caps of gold. The horn that curved away from the down-turned face sparkled with charms, and fine wires wrapped the arm bones, strung with pearls. Pillowed beneath its skull were pages of parchment intricate with layers and layers of writing.

The peddler’s medallions flashed through Quill’s thoughts again, the gem-encrusted faces in the Imperial Archives’ Chapel of the Skeleton Saints.

In the woods, up the hill, beyond the white rocks, lay the lost bones of an Orozhandi saint.

Amadea Gintanas, archivist superior of the southern wing, sat in the prison tower of the imperial compound, reminding herself she was not twenty years away, young and fearful before the sorcerer known as Fastreda of the Glass—forcing herself to keep her attention on Fastreda Korotzma where she sat now, aged and isolated, tapping her glass leg against the chair and facing one of Amadea’s specialists on the other side of the little table.

Fastreda’s eyes glinted—one blue and whole, one paler and fashioned of glass. The scar that took the eye raked up her face from the middle of that cheek, full of crystals and ending in a tuft of spun glass that tangled in her red-blond curls.

“So,” she said, her smile still cruel, still dangerous, as she poured coffee into tiny wooden cups, “do you have an answer for me this time, little shredfinch? How did I know I was a sorcerer?”

Yinii bowed her head, horn charms jingling as she brushed her clasped knuckles to the closed third eye on her brow. Her reddish hair had been braided into a knot at the nape of her neck, her dark blue archivist’s tunic neatly pressed for the occasion.

“Maqu’tajii,” she said. She looked so small, so delicate sitting opposite Fastreda—Amadea was abruptly aware Yinii was only a little older than Amadea herself had been, when she had been afraid and uncertain and used by powerful people like Fastreda.

But at the same time, Amadea thought of Yinii two months ago, caught in the spiral of her affinity, swathed in terrible power and endless ink. A specialist could speak to the worked material they held an affinity for, uncover flaws and histories and find ways to improve it. Amadea knew Yinii could date a scroll, could tell if fading ink could be protected, could identify writers by the faint trembling of the lines, could name the components—where the pigments had come from, what the solvent had been. She was a talented specialist and a very intelligent young woman. But an affinity strong enough to crumble wood into char, to pull water through stone, to dismember an enemy and distill her into gruesome ink…

How did you know you were a sorcerer?

“Oh no, little shredfinch,” Fastreda had said when Yinii initially asked. “You must tell me the answer to that.”

That first time Fastreda turned her question back to her, Yinii was startled—guessed without thinking.

“You couldn’t control the spiral?” The pulling force of affinity magic, the dangerous tide that Amadea had to stay alert to, making certain her specialists weren’t dragged into madness.

Fastreda snorted, waved that away. “Ah, I see you’re just being nosy. No, goat-girl, there is no spiral for the sorcerer. You cannot control it any more than you can control the air around you, and it’s only the weak who pretend otherwise. Go home. Think about this question.”

Yinii returned to the archives, keeping to her rooms. Her hands—the touch of her affinity—she wrapped in cotton gloves. A few weeks later, she and Amadea returned. Fastreda poured the coffee, offered cakes, and asked again, “How did I know I was a sorcerer?”

“You could feel it, all the time. Calling,” Yinii blurted. “It’s supposed to come and go, but you heard it all the time.”

Fastreda rolled her gaze toward Amadea. “This is not my responsibility, my sparrow. To hold your specialists’ hands and tell them they are going to be all right because they enjoy their affinities. Perhaps you are no shredfinch. Go home.”

Another month had passed, and that morning Yinii had come to Amadea in her office, where Amadea was fretting over letters from Ragale and the palace, and asked for a third time to see Fastreda.

Amadea was powerfully reminded of old Borsyan stories, tales from Fastreda’s ancestors’ homeland. The hero always gained his gifts from entering the Black Mother Forest, appeasing her crow-winged daughters and fulfilling their tests, and thereby bearing magic out of the strange, otherworldly wood. There were always three tests in those stories. Three tasks, three trials, three questions.

In the little wooden room in the tower of the Imperial Complex, Yinii lifted her head and tried a third answer: “You knew you were a sorcerer because the sand answered when you called the glass.” Her voice was fragile, her little hands weaving together in anxious patterns. Amadea held her breath.

But Fastreda’s disappointment pinched her face. She looked Yinii over, as if she were a dried-out joint of meat. “If you are this curious,” she said, “there is an easy answer.”

Yinii blinked up at her, her green eyes fearful and hopeful. “What is it?”

Fastreda held up a pinky finger. “Cut it off. Or a toe if you like. When it lands as only flesh, you’ll know. Only sorcerers’ bodies transmute.”

Yinii made a soft sound of alarm.

“Fastreda,” Amadea said sharply.

“What?”

“We’ve come to you for help,” Amadea told the sorcerer sternly. “Frightening her is not helpful.”

“What she is might be frightening,” Fastreda said. “You know this.”

Amadea made her face a mask to hide the thoughts that split her mind in two.

What she is might be frightening. You know this—because Amadea was an archivist superior, and how many specialists had she shepherded through their affinity magic, through the difficulties of its surges and droughts? Even if she had never worked with specialists whose powers approached the strength and reach that made someone a sorcerer, Amadea understood that if Yinii’s abilities were that strong, it would not merely mean she was quicker at dating inks and identifying handwriting. The glass specialists in the archives could note inclusions and mineral stains, sense the marks of the furnaces and the molds—the best could re-fuse cracked artifacts.

Fastreda could stand on a beach and raise an army of glass soldiers if you asked nicely, reshape them as they shattered. If Yinii were a sorcerer, managing her affinity would only be the beginning.

But: What she is might be frightening. You know this—because Amadea had not always been an archivist superior, and when she’d known Fastreda of the Glass, it had been because she was a young girl held up by Redolfo Kirazzi as the true heir to the throne. She was dosed with memory-altering poisons, placed in danger, threatened and praised in turn. And when the coup had collapsed, when the Imperial Authority had spared her but made clear that she remained a danger and would not be allowed to imperil the empire again, Amadea had fled to the archives and remained hidden.

Until two months ago, when a changeling wearing Redolfo Kirazzi’s face had lured her out, had promised her the world, had shown her the bodies of four changeling doubles, each wearing her face exactly.

What she is might be frightening—a lost princess… a hidden monster… something worse.

Did Fastreda know who Amadea really was? Amadea’s memories rushed over clandestine meetings, Redolfo’s inner circle, Fastreda Korotzma in conference by candlelight. She was as close to the Usurper as anyone alive. If Amadea asked, she might let something slip.

If Amadea asked, she might have to know the truth.

“What do you think, my sparrow?” Fastreda asked. “Is she something frightening? Or just a little… strong?”

“I think we should leave,” Amadea said, standing. “Yinii?”

“No,” Yinii said. “I want to ask something.”

The Orozhandi girl raised her gaze from the table, the charms wired to the horns that curved back from her round face all tinkling as she moved. She drew a deep breath, her shoulders rising with the effort, and turned her green eyes on the sorcerer.

“Is it very terrible? Your power?”

Fastreda’s sly look turned curious. “This is the wrong question. I cannot be more or less than the glass. That would mean I am not myself. What I was before it woke up… that is gone. The glass i