Gemma had decided to hate him for exactly one hour.
It seemed fair. One hour for every year he'd let her believe he was just Aros, a tired man who mended nets and knew too much about knives. She counted it out in footsteps on the road to Skariz, through the fog and up into the hills, walking between two of Broko's people and refusing to look back at him.
Kevis. She turned the name over and over like a stone in her pocket. Kingslayer.
She had heard the word before. Everyone had. Old men said it in taverns when they were drunk enough to be brave. Mothers in Seborn used it to frighten children into bed: Go to sleep, or the Kingslayer will come and take your crown. Gemma had never had a crown. She'd always thought it was a stupid thing to threaten someone with.
She tried to picture it: Aros, with a sword, standing over a king. She couldn't. She kept seeing him crouched by the stream, telling her to be careful, his hands wet and steady.
The hour ran out somewhere on the last hill. She was still angry. But hating him had turned out to be harder than she'd planned, and much more tiring.
"You could just ask him," Broko said, falling into step beside her. He'd been watching her the whole way, she realized. Grinning, of course. He seemed to do everything while grinning.
"Ask him what?"
"Whatever it is you've been chewing on since the crossroads. You've got a face like a goat working on a boot."
Gemma glared at him. "Is it true? What you called him?"
Broko's grin softened, just a little. "That's not mine to tell, girl. Some stories belong to the man who carries them." He nodded up the road. "Besides. You're about to hear a version of it whether you want to or not."
Skariz rose out of the mist like something that had been drowned and pulled back up.
It was built into the side of the hill in crooked layers, house on top of house, the pale stone eaten by centuries of rain until the edges of everything looked soft. Roofs sagged. Balconies leaned out over the narrow streets like ribs. From the gutters hung long tongues of copper shaped like open mouths, and the water that dripped from them was black and thick, pooling in slow trails between the cobbles.
And the walls were humming.
Gemma felt it the moment they passed through the gate. It came up through the soles of her boots, a slow, steady pulse, like the breath of something asleep beneath the stone. It was the same hum she'd heard under the square in Calad, but older, fainter, worn thin.
"The Priesthood blessed this city a long time ago," said one of Broko's men, noticing her hand pressed flat against a wall. "Poured the Light right into the bones of it, before the Knights took it back. Some say that's what keeps the houses from falling down. Others say the city listens. Remembers everything you say."
Gemma didn't answer. She was listening too.
Under the hum, so faint she might have been imagining it, someone was crying.
It was the same woman she'd heard inside the sword. The sound didn't come from these stones so much as through them, as if every place the Light had touched was connected and the woman was at the far end of all of it.
Gemma took her hand off the wall. She had to. It felt like eavesdropping on a grief that wasn't hers.
But another thought had come with it, and it wouldn't leave her alone.
On the road, the ring had refused to come. She'd tried a dozen times and felt nothing, like reaching into an empty jug. Here the jug was full. The hum had soaked into every stone, and when she breathed in she could feel it lean toward her, the way the fire had leaned in Calad.
She cupped her hands low against her stomach, where no one would see.
It came at once. No fear this time, no blood, no fight. A thin pale circle drew itself between her palms and held there, steady as a coin on a table, and she understood why the road had been different. Nothing had refused her. There had just been nothing out there to take. In the fish market she'd had to drag it out of the air. Here she only had to ask.
She tried for a second ring. It came too, smaller, shaking at the edges, but it stayed.
"Hey." One of Broko's men was looking at her hands.
Gemma closed her fingers, and the light went out like a pinched wick. The man blinked, frowned, and decided he hadn't seen anything. At least she hoped he had.
"Late," said a voice from above them. "And wet. Broko, you said dawn."
A young woman was sitting on a balcony over the gate, legs dangling through the rails, a board balanced across her knees. She had red-gold hair tied back with a strip of leather and ink stains up to her wrists, and she was looking down at them with the expression of someone who has been kept waiting and intends to mention it.
"Dawn of some day," Broko said. "Diana, these are the guests. Guests, this is Diana. She draws things."
"I map things." She swung herself over the rail and dropped down to the street with a lightness that surprised Gemma, the board tucked under one arm. Up close, Gemma saw that it wasn't a board at all, but a flat leather case, and that it was crammed with sheets of paper covered in lines. "Everyone who comes through that gate, I want to know which way they came. Which roads are open. Where the patrols are. Where the Priesthood's put new notices." Her eyes went to Gemma's hair, then to Aros, and her eyebrows rose a fraction. "I'm guessing you passed a few of those."
"One," Aros said. It was the first word he'd spoken in an hour.
Diana pulled out a sheet and a stub of graphite and made a mark. "Which crossroads?"
While Aros told her, Gemma edged closer. "Can I see?"
Diana didn't look up. "Maps cost."
"I'll tell you about the farm where they set the dogs on us last spring. It's on the hill road, and it isn't on that one."
Diana's eyebrows went up. After a moment she tilted the case toward her. Gemma's mother had sold bread in Seborn for twenty years and had never once given anything away for free. Neither did Gemma.
She had never seen anything like them. She'd seen maps before, crude ones nailed up in taverns, all fat rivers and towns drawn as little houses. These were different. Every line was careful. Every road had its width, every hill its slope drawn in tiny strokes. Villages she'd walked through with Aros were there, and towns she'd only heard of, and the coast road, and the black farmlands, and Calad with its harbor like a bitten coin.
And then the coast. And then the sea.
And then nothing.
The ink stopped a finger's width beyond the shore, at a jagged line Diana had labeled in small neat letters: The Reef. Past it, the paper was empty. Not blue, not marked with waves, not decorated with sea monsters the way the tavern maps were. Just blank.
"Why is there nothing past the reef?" Gemma asked.
Diana glanced at her. For a moment she looked careful.
"Because there's nothing there," she said. "That's what the Priesthood teaches, anyway. Dromo is the world. Beyond the reef there's only the sea, and beyond the sea there's only the edge of the Light." She tucked the sheet back into the case. "And because drawing anything past that line is heresy, and I like my hands attached to my wrists."
"Do you believe it?"
Diana smiled, but it wasn't really an answer. "I believe in what I can measure."
Gemma looked at the case under her arm and thought of the man in Calad. Benat. I don't doubt the Light. I doubt you.
Then something else caught her eye, and every thought about the reef went out of her head.
One of the maps had slipped halfway out of the case. It showed a city on the water, drawn in more detail than any of the others: a sprawl of houses built on top of older houses, piers like ribs reaching into the sea, cranes standing over the harbor. Diana had drawn the tunnels underneath in dotted lines, layer after layer of them, like the roots of something that had been buried and rebuilt too many times to count.
Gemma knew that city.
She had never been there. She had never seen a drawing of it. But she had seen it every night for a month, in the moment just before sleep, when the voices went quiet and showed her things instead. Houses stacked on drowned houses. Nets hanging like dead skin. And somewhere underneath it all, a circle of light at the bottom of a well, pulsing slowly, waiting for her.
"That one," she said. Her voice came out strange. "What is that one?"
Diana followed her gaze. "That's Bondrea," she said. "Why?"
Gemma didn't answer. Behind her, Aros had stopped moving.
The church of Skariz stood at the top of the hill, where the streets ran out of room to climb.
It had been a temple of the Light once. Gemma could tell from the shape of it: the tall narrow windows, the dome, the carved sun over the doors with its rays chipped away one by one until it looked more like a wound than a star. Fire had been through it at some point. The stones above the windows were still black. Half the stained glass was gone, and the gaps had been patched with boards, and the dome had a crack running through it wide enough that Gemma could see a slice of grey sky.
"Home," Broko said, with what sounded like real affection.
Inside, the pews had been dragged against the walls and replaced by long rough tables covered in maps, broken muskets, coils of rope, and candles melted into strange shapes. The air smelled of wax and rust and wet stone. Thirty or forty people stood in the nave, men and women in mismatched armor and patched cloaks, and every one of them was facing the far end, where an altar had once stood.
A man was speaking there. His voice was not loud, but it filled the church the way water fills a bowl.
"...for even the purest flame needs shadow to be seen," he said. "Remember that. The Light was never meant to blind us. It was meant to reveal."
Gemma had expected someone older. A grizzled soldier, maybe, like the ones in Seborn who sat outside the tavern and told lies about the war. This man couldn't have been much past thirty-five. He was tall and pale, the pallor of someone who rarely saw the sun, with long dark hair, almost black, tied loosely at the back of his neck. His robes were faded crimson and black, fine cloth gone threadbare at the seams, and thin silver chains hung from both his wrists. Not jewelry, Gemma thought. They looked like reminders.
His eyes were the strangest part. Pale grey, almost colorless. When he spoke, he didn't blink.
Then those eyes found the doorway, and the man stopped in the middle of a sentence.
He looked at Broko. He looked at Diana. He looked at Gemma, and she felt the look land on her hair like a hand.
Then he looked at Aros, and smiled.
"Well," he said softly. "The wind brings us old legends after all."
The crowd turned. Gemma felt forty pairs of eyes move across her and settle on the man beside her.
Aros didn't move. He stood exactly as he had stood under the arcade in Calad, one shoulder half turned, as if he had nowhere better to be. But Gemma was close enough to see his jaw tighten, and close enough to see his right hand drift toward the small of his back, toward a knife that wasn't there anymore.
"Found him on the coast road," Broko announced cheerfully. "Had a knife on me in two heartbeats. You win the bottle, Talon."
A few people laughed. Talon didn't. He came down from the altar slowly, his chains whispering against each other, and the crowd parted for him without being asked.
"Brothers and sisters," he said, and his voice rose, and Gemma understood with a sick little lurch that he was not speaking to Aros at all. He was speaking to them. To the room. "Many of you were children when the war ended. Some of you weren't born. You have heard the stories in taverns, in whispers, in songs the Priesthood hangs men for singing. Stories about the man who walked into the palace of Valeo the Third on the night of the burning, and walked out again with the king's blood on his hands."
The church had gone completely silent. Somewhere far up in the cracked dome, a pigeon shifted its wings.
"The man who shattered a throne," Talon said, "and with it, the lie that kings are chosen by the Light. The man who made the Priesthood afraid. They told us he was dead. They told us he had burned with the palace. They lied about that, too."
He stopped an arm's length from Aros and spread his hands, like a priest presenting a relic.
"Aros Kevis," he said. "The Kingslayer."
The crowd didn't cheer. The sound it made was lower than that, closer to what people do in a temple. Someone near the front touched two fingers to their chest in an old salute. A woman by the tables put a hand over her mouth. A boy no older than Gemma stared at Aros as if he expected him to burst into flame.
Aros said nothing at all.
Gemma waited for him to say it again. Wrong man. She waited for him to laugh it off, the way he'd laughed off a hundred questions on a hundred roads. She waited for him to look at her.
He didn't. He looked at Talon instead, and whatever lay between those two men, Gemma couldn't read it.
"You got better at speeches," Aros said quietly.
"And you got older," Talon answered. Then his pale eyes slid back to Gemma, and his voice dropped so that only the three of them could hear. "And you must be the girl the fire bowed to."
Gemma didn't answer him. She couldn't. She was looking at Aros: at the scars on his face, at the grey at his temples, at the hands that had dipped into the stream beside hers and fed her soup when she couldn't hold a spoon. She tried one last time to picture those hands on a king's throat.
This time, she could.
"You killed a king?" she said.