Lysander, Hush, and Cold Sun ran into the village of the dead at sunset on their fourth day out of Oroi Iri. The grassland was scorched black for a mile around the place, a fire left to burn out of control.

Pernicious sidled and grumbled beneath Lysander as he forced the half-demon warhorse to walk through the smoldering ruins. Half-charred corpses lay where they’d fallen, several still smoking, but the cloying scent of charred meat wasn’t enough to cover the stink of Water Lily corruption.

Hush turned one over. If the sound of the blackened flesh crunching or the feel of it flaking apart beneath her fingers bothered the silent physician, she didn’t show it.

“We’re less than a day behind them now. We don’t have time for you to play with the bodies,” Lysander said, taking a bitter sip from his ivory flask to rinse the taste of ash and charred meat from his mouth. “A Mortal Aura killed them. Wouldn’t’ve guessed that white-haired fop had this kind of range in him.” Lysander shrugged. “As far as I know, it’s only the Water lily grandmaster that can muster this level of carnage. He must have advanced.”

On the back of his war ram, Cold Sun’s mouth gave the barest downward twitch. Most people would never have seen it, but then most people had hardly any perception to speak of and still fewer had spent as much time among the Uktena as Lysander had. He recognized the concern it signaled in the big man as if he’d fallen to his knees and clawed at his face in despair.

“Is my sister in battle among the bodies?” he rumbled. Koida was no blood relation to the big Uktena, but he had adopted the brat after fighting alongside her in many bloody conflicts and training her to use her lavaglass blade.

Hush’s eyes glowed red with her Acute Insight. After a few moments’ inspection, she shook her head. Cold Sun’s hulking form relaxed fractionally.

“Too valuable to her brother.” Lysander thumped his ivory flask against his chest in contemplation. “Or just too damned lucky.”

“She does not realize the danger of the game she plays,” Cold Sun said.

“I’d say if she didn’t realize it before they laid waste to this village, she does now,” Lysander said.

Over a week had passed since they’d woken to find Koida gone from the oasis on the edge of the Blushing Sands. A scrap of paper in Pernicious’s empty stall was all they’d found.

I’ll send him back. Please wait for him.

They’d tried to follow her, but Hush’s tracking had barely taken them a hundred yards into the desert before the ever-present wind had scoured away her tracks.

“We can conclude where she is going from every rash statement she made before she pretended to see reason,” Cold Sun had said. “She will return to the murderer and attempt to retake my brother Raijin’s Ro.”

Hush had agreed, suggesting they start immediately for the Library.

“Can’t say how long it’ll take her brother or the leech to put themselves back together this time,” Lysander had argued. “If we go after Koida now and find they’ve already left the Library, we’ll have wasted three days’ ride and put ourselves that much farther behind them. Better we wait than run after maybes and perhapses.”

Cold Sun had debated Lysander’s conclusion for several more minutes, citing everything from Koida’s probability of running out of water in the Sands to her inability to pay enough attention to find her way with such hotheaded, one-point focus as she was known for, but Lysander had an advantage that the Uktena didn’t: he wasn’t bound to logic. He dug in his heels like that bloody half-demon warhorse.

“For whatever reason, that Water Lily bastard wants his sister with him,” Lysander had said. “He hasn’t stopped trying to capture her since we first took her away from the palace. The second Koida finds him, he’s got what he’s been working toward all this time—and where do you think he’ll fly with her?” He fluttered his fingers like little birds. “Back to the royal roost.”

“If you are certain of that, then we should leave for Boking Iri.”

“I am certain, but I’ve got two reasons we ought to wait. One, there’s not enough room on your ram for three of us, and no matter which of us runs along behind, we’ll always be slower than if we’ve got a pair of tireless demon beasts to carry us. And two, she may send along some sort of message. If we miss that, we’ve done ourselves in again. You two can do as you like; I’m waiting here for that dogmeat demon to come back.”

That had closed Cold Sun’s mouth. Hush had just looked at Lysander as if she knew what he was really thinking. Maybe she did; the blasted woman had perception nearly as powerful as his.

Truth be told, the princess brat had grown on him. She was spoiled to the core, but if she could get her way by using people’s assumptions against them—like their assumption that they could trust the frail, exhausted princess to fall into bed while they were wrapped up in the necromancer’s notes—Lysander couldn’t hold that against her. He felt the way mentors from the unnamed path must feel sending an inji-in-training out into the world for her first kill, waiting to see how she would implement her plan and execute her target. True, Koida was about twelve years older than his first time, but that didn’t make it any less interesting.

They had stayed in Oroi Iri until Pernicious trotted back into town alone. With Hush too nervous around demon beasts—especially ones as rotten as their masters—and Cold Sun smelling too much of his war ram to safely approach, Lysander had taken it upon himself to search the destrier. The princess’s two-word message had been scratched into the side of one massive brimstone hoof:

Sun Palace.

“Why was this village destroyed?” Cold Sun asked, his red mud-slicked ropes of long hair sliding over his shoulder as he twisted to survey the damage. “All others they passed by without incident.”

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Lysander slipped the flask back into his robes and probed the ruins with tendrils of perception. For the most part, the bodies in the village showed signs of being poisoned by a Water Lily’s Mortal Aura. Inside the shell of what looked to be a small, enclosed forge, however, lay a pile of assorted human pieces—a torso, an arm, a head. From the burn patterns spreading around it, Lysander guessed the smithy was where the fire had originated. The building itself looked like as if it had been burned and more as if it had exploded from within.

He wrestled Pernicious until they pulled alongside the crumbled wall, Hush following at a careful distance. The stench of Water Lily clung most heavily there, laying like a dense fog around the smithy.

The half-demon whickered in annoyance and leaned into the stonework, trying to crush Lysander’s foot, but he yanked his leg out of the pinch and kicked off the beast’s back.

By the time he made it inside, Hush was already crouched next to the dismembered body parts. The silent physician lifted an arm, inspecting first the place where it should attach to a shoulder, then the nails and the palm of the hand. She did the same with the torso and the head, turning them over, dusting ashes away, poking and prodding.

Finally, Hush turned her face up to Lysander. Above the white cloth, her dark almond eyes were troubled and her brow creased with a frown. She sent him impressions of confusion and medical impossibilities.

Lysander smirked. “Haven’t figured it out yet? Why these odds and ends don’t have any marks of life? They weren’t born, they were grown.”

She leveled a flat glare on him, waiting for an explanation.

“Don’t tell me the wise physician has never encountered a flesh artisan before.” He nodded at the navel-less torso, then the ragged, overlong nails of the dead hand without a speck of dirt or sign of natural wear. His brows twitched, a facial shrug. “I admit, I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a flesh forge with my own eyes, either. That’ll be the ewer, I imagine.”

He leaned over the edge of the dead but still-warm forge and touched the handle of a covered iron urn. A little cooler than his own body temperature. The contents sloshed as he dragged the vessel closer.

As soon as it was within her range, Hush reached over his arms and pulled the cover off. The smoky air was overpowered by the sharp tang of timony solution.

Blue liquid rocked back and forth inside the urn, a patch of bloody flesh floating on the waves. It looked to have once been a perfect square, but tiny bubbles effervesced at the patch’s edges, adding new uneven flesh all around it.

Hush felt the side of the urn, then sent him impressions of heat loss, an interrupted process, and a project that would never see completion. She was right. Already the bubbles at the edges of the flesh patch were slowing.

A heavy, gritting tread in the ashes and deep breathing indicated that Cold Sun had joined them.

“The Uktena have gathered very little information of flesh artisans,” the younger man said in his low rumble. “Though we have learned that they are widely regarded as evil for circumventing nature, and therefore attempt to hide their activities.”

“I’d say she didn’t keep it quiet enough.” Lysander gestured to the only complete body in the ruins of the shop, a young woman slumped beside the forge. To call her “complete,” however, wasn’t quite accurate. Not with her face burned neatly away from her skull. “The question is what our bastard prince wanted with a flesh artisan. Not regrowing his own parts fast enough after that Library fire? Or looking for something he couldn’t make himself?”

Hush twisted the dead woman’s hand around to inspect the flesh of her wrist. A neat square had been sliced out of it. She went back to the cooling metal urn and fished out the flesh patch.

Cold Sun’s lips twitched downward. Clearly he wouldn’t have gone in with his bare hands as Hush had.

The silent physician turned the patch over to its skin side, showing a match for the sun-browned tone of the dead woman’s arm. Hush rubbed her thumb over the ghostly spirit tattoo inked into the flesh.

The Deep Root character for Water Lily.

Hush suggested the woman had known she was dying and made a final attempt at growing herself a new body, not realizing the forge would run cold before it was complete.

“If both Yoichi and this woman were following the same Path, then they were in league.” Cold Sun rumbled, eying the shattered ruins of the shop. “It is not logical for him to have destroyed her shop before she could move her soul to a new body.”

“Maybe he didn’t have the links on him to pay for what he got here,” Lysander guessed. “Never did like the white-haired dandy, myself, but you can’t argue with making sure your unpaid debts don’t come back to haunt you.”

They left behind what remained of the flesh artisan and her grisly shop. Cold Sun called his demon war ram with that series of claps specific to his beast. Lysander took another swig of clover liquor and braced himself for another fight with the spoiled destrier. If there wasn’t so bloody far left to go, and that half-demon wasn’t so damned certain it could eventually beat him, Lysander would’ve given up and run alongside Cold Sun’s mount days ago.

Hush went still in the doorway of the shop. Her sudden motionlessness sent vibrations through Lysander’s perception, but he pretended not to notice until she nudged his arm.

He turned to face her. “Find something else disgusting to stick your hands in, wise physician?”

Hush ignored this and tapped what remained of the wall beside the door. In the near-perfect hand bought with a lifetime of calligraphy masters, a tiny parade of characters had been scratched into the form of a three-line verse, the letters mostly obscured by the top of a half-charred barrel.

Stronger than ever. Stay away. I’ll find you in waterfall forest.

The barrel was just the spot for a princess to sit outside while her half-brother had his new lower body attached. Had she used her weak stomach as the excuse? Lysander hoped so.

He canted his head. “I’ve read worse poetry.”

Hush wasn’t amused. She sent him an impression of Koida warning them against a danger she was ignoring.

“I doubt she’s ignoring it,” Lysander said. “Cocky little brat probably figures she’s hard enough for the challenge.” He nodded at the message. “She obviously thinks she’s cleverer than he is.”

Concern creased Hush’s forehead.

Lysander stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled to Cold Sun. The Uktena warrior joined them a moment later.

“Will your people have moved to their winter encampment yet?” Lysander asked.

Cold Sun gave a minute nod. “After the usurper’s destruction of our summer camp, it would be wiser than rebuilding with the few days that remained in the season.”

The winter camp was nestled in the northern parts of the lower reaches, much closer to Boking Iri than the Uktena’s summer camp. A night’s hard ride from the Sun Palace by Lysander’s estimation.

“Your sister in battle,” he said, using Cold Sun’s preferred address for Koida, “left us a message, either thinking we’re dumb enough to follow it blindly or hoping as much. Hush and I can get into and out of the Sun Palace unnoticed without a problem. Getting her out and away—with that chunk of ice Raijin’s body is in, if that’s what she’s after—is going to prove more effort. I’d feel a lot better if we had a strong backing force waiting for us in the woods above Boking Iri. Any chance at all the Chief will consent to send help?”

Cold Sun looked south.

“My father gave Koida a weapon to protect herself in spite of her crippled Ro. If she chose to put herself in danger in spite of his help, it would not be wise of the Uktena to risk tribesmen retrieving someone who had proven herself so rash.” With a nudge of his bare knees, the young warrior turned his well-behaved demon ram toward his people’s encampment. “However, Chief Jaguar Three-Eyes would not leave his brother in study or the wise physician to be killed while rescuing her and my brother Raijin’s body. If you can bring my sister Koida out, the Uktena will aid in your escape. I will make certain of it.”