Her gaze fell to his hands. They were curled into fists, but she could see an edge of pink skin where she’d healed him. Her own hands curled, her fingers brushing lightly over the spot where she could still feel his touch on her palm, feel the incandescent flame that had smothered between them. He hadn’t screamed then. Not until he was on his knees.
Sarai had liked that. Satisfaction had settled over her like the ash on today’s wind, clear to see for anyone who knew her. The Destroyer hadn’t liked it, though. The sound of his anguish had unsettled something deep within her, a feeling like bones grating against each other. The feeling hadn’t stopped until she’d healed him.
You’re going soft, her sister had scoffed. In the mirror, the Destroyer tore her gaze away from her guard and set her jaw. She was fire, she was mercury, she was death. She was a weapon in the hand of her empress. She was not and could never be soft.
She snapped the wardrobe’s door shut hard enough to rattle the mirror as it swung out of view. “My crown,” she said flatly. It wasn’t often that she gave Tal orders—he wasn’t a servant—but she needed to see her crown in his hands, needed to reassure herself that the oath it kept still held.
Without comment, Tal stepped to her bed, where her discarded crown hung on a cant off a bedpost. He picked it up with both hands. It was a barbed, twisted thing, reminiscent of brambles and rose thorns, and she always looked suitably elegant and terrifying when she was wearing it. She didn’t like the way he gripped it now, though—like it was a thing he could break.
Her heartbeat finally settled then, going slow and cold like a viper’s. Her thoughts cleared. Her worries crystallized into ice: frozen and still, clear facets open to her study.
She leveled her gaze on Tal, coolly watching his approach. When he reached her, she held out a hand, the same one that had burned him earlier. He flinched. She raised one eyebrow and waited. After a moment his grip on the crown eased and he dropped it into her hands, lowering his eyes.
He turned to pace back to his corner. She let out a quiet breath. He was still hers, then. Still unable to harm her no matter how he might wish to.
Something was wrong with him, though. Something was different about today. Or perhaps…perhaps something was different with today’s assassin. The Destroyer paused, her hands half-raised with lifting the crown to her brow, casting her mind back to when the assassin had stood before her. The girl’s sharp, high cheekbones and strong facial features marked her as having ancestry from one of the Skyteeth mountain tribes. Perhaps she was from the same ward as Tal, then, maybe even someone he knew from his life before. An ex-lover? A childhood friend, maybe? Or simply a face that brought back memories of his past?
Whatever it was, there was something off about that girl. The Destroyer would have to endeavor to find out what.
She set the crown on her head and stepped toward the door. She would interrogate the prisoner now. She would not wait until her trial and inevitable sentencing, could not afford to sit back and do nothing during the time it would take for the leisurely return journey to the Alloyed Palace. If Tal was somehow connected to the assassin, she needed to know about it.
As she reached for the knob, a timid knock sounded from the other side of the door. A servant stood in the hallway, half-bent already in an obeisance, tugging at the fingers of his white gloves in agitation. One finger was stained a watered-down brown.
“What?” she demanded, faintly irritated. “Have you brought more tea to douse me with?”
His head jerked upward like a startled doe’s, and his gaze skimmed over her outfit. His eyes widened when he noticed she was wearing new clothes. “My—my lady,” he stammered. “I was unaware that the tea spilled on you and not only the carpet, I offer my sincerest—”
She stepped past him into the corridor, cutting off his apology with a hand wave. He flinched, because a hand wave from her was not usually the forgiving gesture it often was from anyone else, but she didn’t spark her powers, only strode onward without comment. This servant was a misfire, if she remembered correctly, one of the unlucky souls who’d been born to a Smith lineage but held no magic of his own. Such outcasts were sloughed from the ranks of the nobles and given roles as palace servants or army officers. He was right to fear her, as she could easily fire him—either in the job-related sense, or in the burning-to-ash sense—but fortunately for him she had more important matters to attend to at the moment. And she never had found pleasure in unnecessary violence anyway. It was the fear of others that she craved, and that was accomplished neatly enough through the bloody assignments her sister doled out.
The man scuttled along behind her, trying to find the words for whatever message he was supposed to be relaying to her.
She saved him the trouble. “My sister requires that I attend Lord Albinus immediately.”
His features sagged in relief as she slid open the door to the dining car and stepped through. The air was cooler here than the rest of the train, curling over her shoulders in eddies that whispered of mountain blizzards as the train climbed toward the cloud-capped peaks of the Skyteeth. This car was walled with windows from floor to ceiling. It was meant to give the effect of openness to the beautiful scenery as they passed, and it did, but it also made for
