A mist prowled the city in the morning. It settled over the shop awnings with a measured weariness, pulling them downwards to drip on the customers and form puddles in the entryways.

Kell guided Alize through the main square with one hand on her elbow. Through the fog Alize caught the pungent smell of the freshly cut wood and the steady swell of hammers. She peered into the throng where several men assembled a platform structure.

“What are they building?” she asked.

Kell had barely spoken to Alize that morning. For her part, Alize assumed Kell planned to honor his pledge to let her see the Hrumi, despite his threats the night before. His distance, she decided, was a coping mechanism for his own misgivings. She intended to avoid contributing any further.

Kell cleared his throat. He had not shaved and stubble grew thick across his chin and cheeks. The circles under his eyes looked darker. “Last night palace guards caught two traitors spying on Prince Icar. Rogue Sargons serving Prince Nadar.”

Alize furrowed her brows. Then the platform represented some type of consequence. The Hrumi had stories of executions in the provinces. Alize hesitated before asking, “So they’ll hang them here?”

“No, no.” Kell answered dismissively, “The Parousia province doesn’t hang anyone.” Kell nodded to a passerby before focusing his gaze to Alize.

She noticed he had turned a little green.

“They’ll burn them.”

Even once they arrived in the prison, Alize struggled to control her shaking. She had never heard of such an execution, and she wished she could blot the image from her mind. But it reverberated too clearly from her own memories at the Temple. She remembered the fire bursting from within her core, a heat so intense it turned her body into sheer pain. It had cooked her like meat, until she herself became only agony.

The mist clung to her skin but the damp could not douse the sensation of fire within her.

Alize would not wish such suffering on even the Deku.

Kell looked grim. When they entered the prison, the families in the waiting rooms hurled questions at him but he pushed Alize past with a light touch on her back. She wanted to reach out to him, to offer him reassurance somehow. But she did not know the vocabulary, especially under the prying eyes of so many other people.

“Icar wants to see you, Kelesh.” Alize recognized the smug voice of the Sargon Aghta behind his metal helmet as she and Kell pressed down the dank corridor.

“I already know I have to report to him this evening,” Kell replied tersely.

“He stressed I make it clear that he wants you sooner than that.”

Alize wondered if she imagined the taunt in Aghta’s voice.

“Fine.” Kell forcibly pushed Alize towards the dungeon.

She resisted him on instinct, but regretted her scowl before it even fully formed on her face.

Kell snapped at her nonetheless. “Just move!” His face flushed with exasperation and anger.

Suddenly Alize realized it probably looked a lot like her own.

The center of this storm seemed more fraught with dangers than either extreme. If she and Kell could not stand there safely, how could they hope to convince anyone that it could be a sanctuary?

Kell escorted Alize to the dungeon, but recused himself from accompanying her within.

“Well,” he flicked his eyes to her face, “I wish you success in all your endeavors.”

Now that she stood so close to her goals, Alize felt her confidence waver. How could a single person think she could alter this lumbering war between the Sargons and the Hrumi?

Standing with Alize, Kell had not yet donned his Sargon helmet, and in the prison his bare face looked almost disturbingly exposed. And Alize reminded herself that this was his work, long before she had even considered any sort of truce with the princes. But Kell believed it possible. At least, he thought it was worth trying.

Alize caught his wrist, unsure if she meant to confirm his strength, or provide him some of her own. Both, she decided. “Kell.”

Slowly, Kell raised his gaze to meet Alize’s.

Alize squeezed her grip. He deserved her support. No part of her doubted that. “This will all resolve, somehow.”

Kell faltered in his smile. “It’s nice to hear someone else say that for a change.” He twisted the key in the lock and hauled the door open.

Alize swallowed and stepped inside.

The door creaked behind her and Alize nearly choked on the air she inhaled. It stank of unwashed clothing and skin, and human refuse. Windows lined only very tops of the walls, their glass coated with grime and dust. They filtered the sunlight into narrow streams that illuminated isolated spots across the corridor floor. The area behind the bars received no direct sunlight. The space drowned in the unnatural night, obscuring the dim silhouettes stirring within the cold stones.

At first Alize saw only flickers of movement in the semi-darkness but as her eyes adjusted she began to discern individual faces. She squinted, pressing herself to the chilly bars that framed entry to the divided cells.

The action reminded her of her room in the citadel. There the Deku had sought over and over again to appease her, to placate her in her prison.

They never realized their most fundamental mistake. No one can be mollified within the confines of a justice not meant to serve them.

“Orina.” Alize called the name softly, watching as the Hrumi turned her head. “Turin. Bexta. Dahaisha.” Now she had the attention of all the captives, but she did not know the name of the woman who rose to her feet and approached the barrier.

“Alize!” Someone else spoke, slender Zabbai, an eastern clanmember who had gone through the dagger-binding ceremony the same year as Alize. “Nocturne! Fergana, she’s one of us! It’s Alize!”

“A collaborator, you mean.” The approaching woman’s voice was abrasive enough to rub flesh raw.

Alize scarcely heard her. “How many survived?” she asked, her eyes searching through the darkness. Many women rose, joining her at the bars. Alize pressed her hands to their faces, grateful for each sister she saw. She would never have done that in the forest – the Hrumi did not encourage gratuitous affection – but her exuberance overwhelmed her until she found herself wiping her eyes. “Sisters, I have missed you so much.”

The sister Fergana opened her mouth to reply at the exact moment a small white glow dashed towards Alize, alighting in her chest.

Alize jerked in surprise. She had not even seen which woman had sent it.

But as she stood, more echoes flew towards her. Many left Fergana to seek Alize instead. They were bright attestations that her sisters accepted her, that they had understood her argument with Celile. That they did not resent her for it, despite the heavy consequences.

But though she relished the faith of her sisters, Alize stumbled under the echoes’ weight. Holding them no longer felt organic as it had been before the Temple battle. Instead of melting into her, they sat bulky in her chest, like she had taken too large a swig of water.

These were far fewer echoes than Alize had held in the Temple, but already she could feel the swelling heat in her core. She tried to ignore the gnawing terror that accompanied it.

When the room darkened once more, Alize bowed, stretching her palms upwards in the ceremonial sign of subordination.

The echoes returned to Fergana, who hissed as if Alize had threatened her.

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And perhaps, unintentionally, she had.

“We heard your story, slayer of Celile.” Fergana muttered, arriving in the front of the crowd and dispersing all the other women. “And what reasons can explain why you did not come to us earlier?”

Alize studied Fergana, growing uneasy. Fergana’s pale skin revealed her wrinkles, though she looked barely old than Celile. Alize could not guess whether it her hair was auburn or brown. Her eyes rested on Alize, dark in the prison’s restless shadows.

“Subterfuge requires planning.” Alize answered, her tone appropriately deferential.

“How delightfully ambiguous.” Fergana scrutinized Alize with narrowed eyes. “But your Sargon, he comes to us nearly every day.”

“He is none of mine.” Alize demurred. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“The Western clan members know him. They tell us Celile would have killed him if you had not stopped her. And he,” Fergana regarded Alize curiously. “He had a very long story about what happened to you. We understood only that he had killed you at the Temple.”

“No,” Alize balked. Anyone concluding that to be the case had surely not listened very closely. She debated her words, knowing she needed use Hrumi vocabulary if she wanted them to listen. Despite everything Kell had done for her that night, she could not admit to her sisters that a Sargon had risked his life for her. They would deem her a traitor for believing it.

“The Sargon joined me in the Temple because he fought the same Conjurer. Was Sosje captured? She can tell-”

“No one here bears that name,” Fergana responded flatly.

Alize resisted knotting her brows. Why did it fall to Fergana to answer that question? Her other sisters shifted in the shadows, but no one volunteered anything further.

And Alize’s doubts, her fears, pressed close. She had placed so much hope in finding Sosje. “Did any clan members escape the Battle?”

Fergana’s expression seemed frozen in distaste. “How could we possibly know that?”

Then it yet remained uncertain whether Sosje or any other sisters had even survived. The thought pained Alize, layered above the other despairs she carried. It felt like enough weight to push a mountain back into the earth.

“And,” Fergana continued, “we lost another twenty-three women before we ended our hunger strike here. Twenty-four when they soultrussed Essa.”

Alize let Fergana’s words replay in her mind. She could hear Kell defending himself against her assumption of Essa’s soultrussing. The Sargons do not soultruss.

And Alize remembered Essa’s body on the ramparts.

She bit her cheek. “Essa is dead, not soultrussed. I saw her body.”

“That proves nothing, sister, besides your own gullibility. A soultrussed body can still be killed.”

Alize’s resentment flared at Fergana. Her words should have haunted Alize, should have blossomed doubt and a sense of bitter betrayal. It was true that the Sargons could have killed the body after the soultrussing process, but Alize found she trusted Kell’s avowal about Essa’s death. Kell’s story, his claim, had never changed from the first day he told her the Sargons did not soultruss the Hrumi. It was the Hrumi who had been hiding information from her.

Yet Fergana could not see that. Fergana’s condescension echoed Viken’s, who dismissed Alize’s anger against the Deku the same way Fergana pitied her compassion for Kell.

They both implied she did not deserve to decide for herself.

But confronting the specters that dismantled her beliefs had made Alize gentler in her condemnations against the people who lashed out at her. The truth, she realized, had made her safer. It rendered the world predictable. In a way, that gave her power.

Like a meadow rebounding from the wind, Alize let that confidence reinforce her, strengthening her to fight for her convictions.

She bent her head, trying to appease Fergana without conceding anything. “Essa would rather we mourn her than allow her death to divide us.”

“Don’t you dare tell me what Essa would have wanted!” Fergana exclaimed, her pale face turning splotchy, “She wanted defenses from soultrussing she suffered!”

“Yet she volunteered,” Alize replied. Fergana could not win this game with logic.

“To protect the rest of us! And still the Sargons soultrussed her under false pretenses.” Fergana grasped the bars before her, drawing her face as close to Alize’s freedom as the prison would allow. She adopted a lower, harsher tone. “The Sargons believe that such inhumanity can be justified. And you,” she began to raise her voice again, losing her crafted restraint, “you defended the Sargon responsible for her brutalization! Where were you, Sargon-champion, after we faltered on the battlefield, after the army burst us asunder, after we lost so many women, sacrificed for our integrity?”

“You do not know,” Alize warned, “the battles I have fought in my absence. And I am not yet free.”

“Then you admit you work for the princes?”

Alize gasped, but collected herself. When she answered, her voice was calm and clear. “No.” In Fergana, Alize saw a woman who heard only what completed her own mangled version of the events after the Temple Battle. To her, all the details, the nuances, and the contradictions sounded only like noise.

Alize could feel her impatience swell. She and Fergana could not be so far apart as this, to find only divergence. “I’m telling you, I saw Essa’s body. Kell – the Sargons found dead in her cell on the morning of her execution.”

“But the Sargon, he intended that she would die, yes or no?”

Fergana’s question resounded with meaning she had not intended. Alize would not lie, though the truth seemed to misrepresent Kell’s actions even more.

“Yes,” she muttered, hoping that her honesty could make the conversation less accusatory, if Fergana could trust Alize’s words if not her implications.

“And this Sargon intends to punish the Hrumi, collectively, for a crime we did not commit.”

Fergana made no reference to Kell’s own constraints – Prince Icar, the families, Essa’s own confession. Alize bristled, “He never wanted to punish the Hrumi-”

“What do you call this, Alize? I didn’t kill their prince. Am I being punished, yes or no?”

Still her frustration mounted, blazing like a fire. Alize struggled to keep her voice calm. “You are.” But it could be so much worse, and you can’t even see it.

“Because,” Fergana declared, “the Sargons will never rest until all the Hrumi are punished, yes or no?”

Alize could feel Fergana’s seething smugness. She believed that the Hrumi, and no one else, could allege ill-treatment. There was no other truth she wanted to hear.

Alize staggered at the realization. When did Hrumi righteousness eclipse our virtue?

“Yes or no, Alize,” Fergana repeated.

Alize wanted to answer her, wanted to cultivate a trust, however small. But Fergana asked questions without understanding. More than that, her questions seemed to blatantly discourage any actual learning. She sought only to control the conversation.

“It’s not that simply,” Alize objected.

“It is exactly that simple,” Fergana’s voice cut like a sharpened blade. The blood would seep forth slowly, at first. Then it would begin gushing.

And only Alize seemed to see the peril.

“Have the Hrumi done anything,” Fergana spat, “to deserve the Sargons’ punishment?”

Alize glared at her.

Fergana continued, “If you say yes, then you think all the Hrumi deserve to be soultrussed. If you say no, you admit that your Sargon’s crimes cannot be defended.”

Alize could feel a frenzy of anger churning under her skin. Her clothes clung to her, damp with sweat. “Then I say neither.” She would not permit Fergana that satisfaction or that validation.

“So you mean no.”

“I mean neither.” Fergana’s simplified version of truth removed all the information. It lost all its meaning. And in doing so, Fergana was surrendering the only power she actually had.

“You must choose one. Yes or-”

“Neither,” Alize reiterated, her ire sneaking into her voice. “Kell seeks a solution for this war as urgently as you do. He believes I am helping him.”

“He doesn’t seem the fool to me,” Fergana retorted. “More likely you are playing both sides. I hope it is not at our expense.”

“You are unwise to threaten your only ally in this city,” Alize growled, “I am a Hrumi. I have but one allegiance and I will always honor my heritage.” Her words emerged without her consideration. Had she reflected first, perhaps they would not have sounded so assured. A winter in the citadel had stolen that confidence.

“Yet while you deliberate, your Sargon has begun to succeed in soultrussing our sisters.”

Alize blinked again against the darkness, looking into the shadows. For the first time she noticed the blank gazes of several women who sat unmoving, even as the others bustled around them. And she remembered Kell’s words after she returned from the Emptiness.

“Is it yet temporary?” Alize asked.

“Yes,” Fergana responded, though Alize could tell the question surprised her.

As it should be. Alize had not known the consequence of being separated for so long from her dagger. No Hrumi had a reason to know.

“And everyone is suffering?”

“Ask your Sargon," Fergana spat at her.

Suddenly Alize’s frustrations boiled over, “This assault is of our own making! I too have lost my dagger and have undergone the same separation, the same absence. This has nothing to do with the Sargons! These are consequences of our own dagger binding tradition!”

“Nothing?” Fergana retorted, “Just look on Inna! Do you know what she has suffered at his hands, because he thinks he deigns to dictate her identity?”

Alize bit back her response and examined the sister Fergana indicated. She lay on her side, her knees curled into her chest and her gaze despondent. She looked too young, barely older than twelve. She met Alize’s eyes for a brief moment before shutting them entirely.

And Alize recognized her from Kell’s description as well as Melis’s.

“The mother that claims her,” Alize began, “may be deluded, and she may be forceful in her beliefs, but she is a monster that the Hrumi made. And she’s not the only one.”

“The Hrumi vanquish monsters, not create them!” Fergana hissed.

“Not to the provinces! To them, we are the aggressors and their own actions are defensive,” Alize exclaimed, feeling disgusted with her own words. She had not come here to defend Kell’s agenda, but it coincided with the only message that could save her sisters. “If we can understand their motivations-”

“I already have the truth!”

Alize could feel her rancor making her whole body burn. “You want to survive? Learn to listen! If you cannot work with that Sargon, you will never leave this prison!”

Several women gasped at Alize’s proclamation. She watched their faces change, the hope fading to a much narrower spectrum of emotion ranging only from fury to despair. Alize’s heart sank. Her words could bear no comfort to their exhausted spirits. She had threatened them. She had crushed the only thing that might save them.

Their curiosity.

Growing desperate, Alize tried to rephrase her words, to soften the urgency. “The Sargon can’t help you when he has to fight you.”

Fergana jerked forward. “You defend a fantasy, dear sister. It is cheap rhetoric.”

Alize detested Fergana’s reaction. Fergana would trade all her chances for redemption just to have the satisfaction of believing herself right. And even though Alize understood it, she could not support it. Indeed, she could scarcely bear it.

Alize stammered her words, desperate for them to pierce this barrier Fergana had constructed so dutifully. “Only with the Sargon can we devise a strategy to free you from Parousia.”

“Poor Alize,” Fergana lilted, “to believe in the goodness of a Sargon, you must be a fool indeed. For all your faith, he has convinced you to play by Icar’s rules.” Her voice turned cold. “Make no mistake whose side you have taken.”