II.

“It’s a bit cruel, isn’t it?” Nessa insisted, hands coming to a stop against the apple she was peeling. Kiran’s brows perked, but she didn’t dare interrupt her task for the sake of conversation. Not with cookwife Fiona looming so close by.

“What is?”

“What they call him. Piebald, like an animal.”

Kiran glanced up to find Nessa sitting on the edge of the table, apple and knife cradled in her lap, gaze settled somewhere in the middle distance. It was a familiar look. Nessa had always been prone to daydreaming.

“Get back to work,” Fiona snapped, cracking a rag in Nessa’s direction. Both orphans jumped and bowed their heads over their apples again.

Cookwife Fiona was typically a kind and thoughtful woman. In the winter, she would let Kiran sit by the hearth and warm her aching spine. She turned a blind eye when Kiran snuck into the kitchen to escape Vesta Enna’s constant demands. But the sudden appearance of a royal caravan had put Miss Fiona on edge just as it had the rest of the sparehouse.

Kiran watched the woman’s ruddy cheeks as she considered the ingredients laid out before her. Despite Prince Capra’s insistence that he wouldn’t burden the sparehouse, it went unspoken that they still owed him some sort of devotional. The best Ciltigan had to offer was good apples.

The best cook in Ciltigan was still just a Ciltigan, and the best apples in the country were still just apples.

“Just make sure you get all the peel,” Kiran urged, speaking up enough for Miss Fiona to hear over the cookfire. “I doubt he’ll eat them, anyway, it’s more important they look good.”

“How do you know he won’t eat them?” Nessa groused, trimming a sliver of red skin she’d previously missed.

“You saw him,” Kiran began, brows raised as she plucked another apple from the basket. “The only thing that man eats is venison and bull meat.”

Nessa snorted despite herself, throwing a hand over her mouth. Miss Fiona scowled at them over her shoulder, fists still poised on her hips, but her lack of verbal admonishment was as good as approval. Kiran allowed herself a little smile.

The door flew open, Vesta Enna crushing the moment beneath her heels as she swept into the room. A trio of the usual Gales crowded in behind her, bringing with them a suffocating, nervous energy. Vesta Enna wasted no time.

“His Grace has requested chevon for supper.”

Goat?

Kiran scowled openly behind Vesta Enna’s back, ignoring the sidelong look of warning Nessa shot her.

“You are to assist in the butchering, Fiona.” Vesta Enna waved her delicate fingers in the general direction of the back yard. “To the barn. Do not make them wait.”

Miss Fiona hesitated, standing by the hearth with a quiet, dumbstruck expression on her face. The sparehouse had exactly one goat: an old shegoat called Tilly, dependable for milk but with an attitude that could curdle it just as reliably.

“But, Vesta,” Fiona croaked, startled by the absurdity of the situation she found herself in. “It’s close to first frost and it’ll take us months to afford another milk-maker half as good as Tilly.”

“Enough!” The Gale stiffened, her tense shoulders matching the thinning of her lips. “Do as you are told.”

Miss Fiona was neither one of Vesta Enna’s nightingales nor one of the orphans under her charge. She had always been one of the few entities in the sparehouse who could stand up against her—now was no different. Kiran watched as the woman opened her mouth to protest, a sinking feeling in her stomach making her fingertips prickle.

“I’ll go,” Kiran announced, already halfway out of her seat at the table.

Vesta Enna looked at her with her usual mixture of disdain and mild surprise, as if she had only just realized Kiran was in the room.

Miss Fiona fell silent, confusion choking off her previous protests. Kiran took the opportunity to slip behind her and take a butchering knife off its peg.

“Very well.” Whether it was the opportunity to escape confrontation with the cookwife or impatience that fueled Vesta Enna’s acquiescence, Kiran couldn’t say. Either way, she was thankful for it. She waited for the Gale’s customary wave of dismissal all the same. “Go on, then.”

Kiran gave a small nod, avoiding Fiona and Nessa’s eyes as she ducked through the exterior door and out into the night. The autumn air was crisp and smelled of rotting leaves, filling her mouth with the taste of decay as she limped down the yard toward the barn. A small circle of ram-headed soldiers crowded around the opening of the structure, torches held high against the thick evening gloom.

Her hand tightened around the grip of the butcher’s knife. She had no idea what she was going to do, only that Miss Fiona was right.

Tilly was the only thing that got the children of the sparehouse through winter. How many squealing babes had been saved with Tilly’s milk throughout the years? Vesta Enna certainly wasn’t going to suckle them.

And now a prince wanted to eat her for dinner, just to satisfy a craving?

“Halt!”

One of the soldiers turned to face her, pivoting in one graceful, sudden movement that reminded Kiran more of a dancer than a warrior. She started but held her ground, a stubborn scowl settling on her round face.

“Vesta Enna sent me from the kitchen,” she said, flatly, holding up the knife in her hand.

The soldier followed the blade with his gaze, eyes glinting where the ram’s should have been. His hand was on the hilt of his sword.

“Let her pass,” came a voice from within the open barn.

The prince.

Her downturned lips and furrowed brow made no indication of fading as the soldier stepped aside, making way for her to enter the familiar shelter.

She’d slept more than her fair share of nights in the hayloft before climbing the ladder had grown too painful for her back. Anything to escape Vesta Enna when she could. Now, illuminated by torchlight and half-filled with soldiers in full blackpate, it felt like a whole other world. She passed through their protective circle into the belly of the barn. It was palpably warmer within. The gentle shifting of sleeping animals was notably absent, replaced with the occasional sound of disquiet.

Baran Capra stood at the other end of the barn, bare again to the hips and unarmed at the waist. Paradoxically, he wore a stole of yak’s hair draped over his collars. His robed page stood at his side, hands clasped politely in front of him.

And then there was Tilly, where she always was, roped to her corner, chewing at the remnants of an apple core. Kiran could see that her eyes were wide and anxious even in the dim secondhand torchlight.

Who could blame her? Kiran shared the sentiment, she just couldn’t afford to show it.

The prince surveyed her for a moment—gaze visibly scraping across the sidelong tilt of her torso, the way she kept her weight to one leg—and then waved a hand in a manner that reminded Kiran all too much of Vesta Enna.

His page elaborated for him. “You may proceed.”

Kiran stepped forward, moving carefully through the fresh hay toward Tilly. Eogan would have just mucked the whole barn before nightfall. Where was he now? Would he think she was foolish, or join in on her scheme?

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The furrow in her brow deepened as she forced her buzzing thoughts away. She had to focus.

She positioned herself between Tilly and the men, giving the goat a reassuring stroke. Tilly’s neck muscles were taught beneath her coat. Kiran swallowed hard and steeled herself. If the soldier at the entrance was any indication, they would make a butcher’s block out of her before she finished turning around…

But turn around she did, knife raised high, eyes squeezed shut.

“No!”

Time stood still.

She convinced herself that the silence that followed was the cloaking embrace of death.

It was less painful than she imagined, dying.

Then someone laughed.

“No?”

Kiran dared to open one of her eyes just enough to peer out at the world. Baran Capra was watching her in disbelief…and, to her mortification, amusement. She couldn’t pull her gaze away from him, but she could hear the murmurs of his men. They thought it was funny, too.

He took a pair of steps forward, strides easy as liquid. Even the silk of his robes was silent. It felt impossible for someone so large. She stared up at him as he came to a stop at the other end of her knife, his shadow painted across her by dancing torchlight.

“What do you mean, no?”

Silence fell over the barn.

“I—” She hadn’t planned this far. “I mean no.” Kiran reaffirmed her grip on the butcher’s knife, meeting his gaze against her will. His lavender eyes looked like menacing garnets in the twisting light.

“Are you refusing to do the task ordered of you, or refusing to allow it to be done at all?” His deep, smooth voice still harbored levity, a match to the upward crook at the corner of his lips.

Was he playing with her on purpose?

“You’re not killing Tilly,” Kiran blurted, voice wavering. She hated the way her own body betrayed her. As resolute as she was in her determination to keep Tilly safe, she didn’t exactly make a habit of standing up to princes.

“Tilly?” He repeated, white brows dancing upward.

“Yes.” She shrugged a shoulder to gesture vaguely behind herself. “The goat.”

“I assumed,” he hummed, pressing his lips together into a look of amusement at her expense.

The knife was leaving her fingers. Her wrist was being twisted, sharp, up and out—

She yelped, searing heat dancing up her spine. He had grabbed her and pulled upward, contorting her with the hold he had on her wrist. The world went black with pain, only to be replaced by a million tiny, dancing stars.

He held her captive with one hand and danced the butcher’s knife across his knuckles with the other. It looked like a toy in his grasp. Maybe it was.

It took a long time for the barn to come swimming back into the forefront of her mind. Kiran panted against the continued throb echoing through her back.

Still, she met his gaze again, scowl all the deeper.

“You’re—” She swallowed against her own ragged breath. “—not killing Tilly.”

He watched her, brows raising in what she could only interpret as exasperation. Eventually, he released her wrist, tossing the butcher’s knife aside. It landed in the hay with a dull thud.

“All this over a goat,” he scoffed.

Kiran barely heard him, consumed with the relative relief of her spine falling back into its usual crooked place. At least her hands were free to clutch at herself.

Baran Capra’s face might have been beautiful if it hadn’t been contorted with such annoyance. He looked down his nose at her, not just because he was so tall.

“Fine.” He waved his hand back toward the entrance of the barn. “Take her.”

Kiran braced herself for his soldiers closing in on her, but it never came. Instead, the prince was watching her with an expectant expression. She blinked.

“Well, go on, then,” he continued, gesturing toward the goat. “Get her out of here.”

What the hell was he playing at?

Kiran looked past him toward his soldiers. The only answer they provided was a thick, obedient quiet. His page, too, was standing to the side, gaze averted.

She felt like a fox about to step into a bear trap.

Even so, she half-turned back toward Tilly, working to undo the rope that bound her without taking her eye off of the prince and his men. No swords or arrows came flying through the air to sink into her skin. In fact, the barn continued to be possessed of a pointed kind of silence. She fumbled at the knot but eventually pulled the rope free, leading Tilly out of her corner.

But the prince didn’t move out of her way. When she ducked to the side in an attempt to take her leave as ordered, he stepped right into her path.

She stared up at him, hating that her fear was visible in her face. It had to be.

His lips curled into a smile that made her stomach fill with ice.

“If you can carry her.”

Carry her? He knew she was—that her back—

Kiran gaped, casting around for any sign that he was joking. Surely he was joking.

But his men were still and silent and the prince, for his part, remained right where he was, looking down at her as if she were a mildly amusing speck of mud on the toe of his boot.

Kiran Sept had many vices for a sparehouse orphan. Pride, it so happened, was one of them.

She felt her head go hot with rage. Her tongue loosened, despite all better judgement.

“At the sparehouse, they think it’s cruel, what they call you,” she hissed, hands tightening into fists around Tilly’s lead. “But it isn’t half cruel enough.”

Whatever killing blow she might have expected as recompense for her disrespect, she never received. Instead, Baran Capra only took her anger in stride, perking his brows to indicate Tilly at her side. He was toying with her. He had all the power and he knew it.

She glared at him as she turned before taking stock of the hefty shegoat. Carrying amphoras of water back and forth from the creek was one thing. Jugs didn’t kick you when you tried to handle them. Had Tilly ever been carried? What was more—how much did she weigh? Kiran’s back still ached from being twisted around in his grasp like a child’s wooden top, too.

But she was nothing if not stubborn.

Her spine howled a long, sharp note against the string of her nerves as she lowered herself to take Tilly in her arms. The goat wiggled, kicking out a back leg that forced Kiran to release her first attempt at a grasp. She heard one of the prince’s soldiers laugh somewhere in the gathered crowd, but did her best to ignore it. Her cheeks still warmed with shame.

She tried again.

This time, she stretched her back to its limits, ducking her head beneath Tilly’s belly and hauling the goat onto her shoulders the way she’d seen Eogan move sheep a thousand times.

For better or worse, the animal seemed stunned into compliance for a time. Kiran grasped at the goat’s ankles, straining against the gritty sensation of her back bones grinding against one another. Her breath was ragged and shallow by the time she managed to stand upright.

Whatever Baran Capra or his men thought, she couldn’t be bothered to find out. Her vision was narrowing, the world turning into a sliver of its former self as she focused wholly on making it to the entrance of the barn. When that thought became too much, she focused on each step instead. One right after the other. All she had to do was keep moving, keep ignoring the feeling of white-hot iron sinking deeper and deeper into the small of her back…

The ground rose up to slam against her, solid and cold and unforgiving. She caught a goat’s hoof to the jaw in the fall.

When Kiran recovered enough to look up, Tilly was bounding up the lawn toward the sparehouse, an indignant scream in her throat and her rope lead trailing behind her.

Baran Capra’s men were laughing, dispersing from their tight formation like schoolboys in the aftermath of a ringing bell. One clapped another on the shoulder. They set off in the direction of their makeshift camp, following the orange glow of their cookfire.

The prince was the last to follow, his page at his side. He cast a glance back over his shoulder, briefly meeting her gaze in the darkness.

Kiran was slumped against her own knees in the cold, struggling to catch her breath, but she was clear-headed enough to recognize that he was no longer laughing.

Whatever amusement had lived in Baran Capra’s expression had been replaced with something else.

Not anger, necessarily, but Kiran didn’t have the tools to recognize it at the time.

Fear.