“I can take you today,” Kell said as Alize descended the stairs the next morning. He was not yet dressed in his Sargon armor. As Alize furrowed her brows, he shivered. “Not to see your sisters, not today, but I can take you the prison to see the records.”

Alize could not quite decide how to respond to Kell. Were it not for his attention to Davram, she would find it easy to dismiss him entirely. She had woken in the middle of the night to hear the Sargons fighting because Kell refused to let Davram drink. Davram had been very unkind but Kell had not relented. Alize could not help but recognize that even if Kell’s regard towards her had cooled, he remained a generous friend to Davram.

Kell had rehung the swords on the walls, leaving no evidence of their quarrel the previous evening. Alize’s mortification, however, remained almost tangible.

Though Kell held her gaze, he flinched under it. The silence swelled as he awaited Alize’s response.

She gave a curt nod.

Inside the covered market, a dozen merchants unloaded their wares from overburdened donkeys. They set down the crates down with an even rhythm, leaving little puffs of cinnamon in the air for the pedestrians to pass through.

“I want you to know what happened,” Kell said in Alize’s ear as he indicated herbs for the shopkeeper to package for them. “And of course you’ll hear their side too.”

Alize nearly missed his words. Her eyes danced over the herbs and spices amassed in pyramids of bright reds and yellows. A dried green stalk she did not recognize left thistles in her thumb.

Kell waited for Alize’s selection before offering his coins to the shopkeeper. Only when they had left the shop did he continue speaking. “As the Parousia army approached the Temple, I told Prince Jorin that the Hrumi had no incentive to provoke us when they already faced the Kogaloks. Before I left him to find Onder, he told me he would direct the army to focus on the Kogaloks alone.”

Alize knew the next part of the story. Kell had arrived with Davram and Onder to help her fight the Conjurer Omurtak at the Temple. Beneath the Temple’s massive arch, Onder had sacrificed himself to help her defeat the Kogalok Conjurer.

Alize winced with the memory. Never in her life had she imagined receiving such a favor from even a Hrumi, and that made Onder’s kindness all the more generous. She still did not know how to honor it, nor how to honor his death.

Kell interrupted her thoughts. “But when I returned from the Temple, Jorin was dead by a dagger strike and the army had captured almost two hundred Hrumi.”

“Two hundred?” Alize nearly stumbled beside Kell in the narrow market corridors.

“Yes.”

Two hundred women rested imprisoned. Alize remembered her heart’s creeping weariness in the citadel’s cold confines. She could not picture the faces of her sisters in the limp captive light, stagnating between pitiless stones.

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Kell inhaled. “And there were casualties on both sides, too many, because we were both fighting the Kogaloks besides.”

So Qaaru’s words were true. Alize’s imagination invoked the battlefield, strewn with bloated corpses. Who would have buried them?

“You mean to tell me…” Alize faltered, “Did any Hrumi escape capture or death?”

“We don’t know,” Kell admitted after a pause. His sideways glance held more sympathy than Alize cared to see. “We haven’t received any reports of kidnapping, but then again, the entire government is in disarray because of the princes’ war.”

“Or perhaps the kidnappings are misrepresented,” Alize muttered.

Kell grimaced but continued. “The women we captured, they were battle worn, injured, humiliated and furious. Above all, they swore up and down that they had not killed Jorin. Until,” Kell shifted his sac on his shoulder, look more uncomfortable with each moment, “until about two weeks ago, when Essa came forward.”

Alize’s heart surged into her throat and she glanced at Kell sharply. This story could not have a happy ending. Essa had been alive only two weeks earlier, alive and making decisions. Alive and implicating her sisters. Alize could not imagine a reason for that. Unless Essa had one.

She and Kell emerged from the covered market. The prison loomed before them, smug and unperturbed. In the sky above, cirrus clouds lashed like a rib cage strung on a wispy spine.

Alize watched Kell furtively. Sadness settled on his face. Alize’s eyes traced the long cut across his cheek. It looked more inflamed than when she had first arrived.

“Essa confessed, Alize,” Kell murmured, “Not to having killed Jorin herself, no, but to the Hrumi responsibility for the crime.”

Alize washed cold. If the Hrumi had truly killed Jorin, Essa would have believed it dishonorable to deny it. She had the strength to face those accusations with integrity, either way.

“Then it had to be true,” Alize whispered. Still she saw Essa in her mind, as she had lived in the autumn. Essa, debating whether Hrumi could choose to forge a different future then their perpetual war with the princes.

“Except that the other Hrumi prisoners still deny it,” Kell sighed, “and they accuse us of coercing Essa’s confession.”

“Did you?” The thought had not even occurred to Alize and her words were breathless with abrupt horror.

But with her question, Alize could feel the space grow between her and Kell, nourished with that instant of her doubt.

“No.” Kell spoke with such clarity that the rebuff almost took solid form. He swallowed, and the fleeting hurt Alize had seen on his face disappeared, consumed by something colder. “We had not even asked anyone to come forward.”

Alize softened her tone. “But Essa volunteered to shoulder the blame.”

“She did.” Kell’s answered. Alize could not guess what emotion made his voice so tremulous. “And Icar sentenced her. For murdering the High Prince of the Parousia, she would be dismembered and left to bleed to death.”

Alize started to gag but her memory quelled her reaction. “But - she wasn’t. I saw her body intact.”

“Kelesh,” another Sargon approached, “You’re late.”

Kell and Alize hastened their steps to follow him.

“But then, what happened to her?” Alize asked, wary of the second Sargon’s attending ears.

“They found her dead in her isolation cell,” Kell uttered, “the morning of her execution.”

Alize flashed her gaze to Kell to catch his expression, but he had donned his Sargon helmet. The metal mask completely subsumed the man she knew, leaving her to face a fully formed nightmare.

A nightmare that shrugged. “Icar was enraged, but at least he had something to hang from the ramparts.”

No amount of Alize’s speculation could penetrate Kell’s metal mask. She had lived her whole life in fear of a Sargon helmet and the menacing fate it promised. But as she and Kell descended into the prison’s stifling darkness, Alize allowed herself to glimpse in it something suspiciously like mercy.