the crowd, and for a second Arlow thought he would go unnoticed, but then that dark-eyed scrutiny wheeled back and landed directly on him.
In the moment that their eyes met, Arlow perceived the change in his friend’s features—the anger and betrayal—and his windpipe constricted. If he was hated by Ko-Jin, always easy-going to a fault, then there was no going back. No chance to change course.
He, Arlow, had made his bed. Time to sleep in it.
He drew in a breath and belted, in a loud baritone that echoed through the otherwise still hall, the chorus of a well-known Dalish drinking song:
“Oh, take me where the drinks are strong,
The land of barley, malts, and foam,
Oh, take me where I do belong,
To the place they call the Spirits’ Home!”
The song was greeted with a moment of silence before several bystanders broke into nervous laughs. Arlow groaned internally, regretting his choice of signal. It had seemed funny to him at the time, but there could be nothing humorous at such an occasion.
The collective sigh of swords drawn from sheaths silenced the laughter.
The whiz of a loosed arrow sounded, and a bolt blossomed in the king’s chest. The ruler of Trinitas looked down at the shaft in one final moment of confusion before toppling face forward from his throne.
Bray shut her eyes and swallowed, willing her nausea to subside, willing her hands to cease their tremors. Sweat slithered down her temple. She wandered up an unfamiliar hall in the Chiona living quarters, her eyes darting from room number to room number.
Yarrow, beside her, walked with the air of a mouse amongst cats. His anxiousness seemed to have increased since dropping Ko-Jin off at the palace, leaving him the only Cosanta on the Isle.
“Could you try to look less…shifty?” she asked him.
His dark brows shot up, and then with a visible effort he relaxed his shoulders and assumed a look of nonchalance. His feigned casualness was even more conspicuous than his open paranoia.
Bray snorted, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Remind me not to bring you undercover, will you?”
The apartment they sought appeared at the end of the hall, and without question she took his hand and phased them through the locked door.
“Why?” Yarrow asked in a whisper as they entered.
“Your acting leaves a bit to be desired.”
He laughed shakily as his eyes scanned the chamber. The late afternoon light illuminated an ordinary sitting room: a leather couch, desk, bookshelf packed with leather-bound tomes, and an empty hat stand atop a maroon rug. The door to an equally commonplace-looking bedroom stood ajar.
“Huh,” he said, rubbing his eye. “I thought it would look more…”
“Villainous?”
He nodded, though even that movement seemed a great effort for him.
“Why don’t you sit?” Bray asked as she opened the top drawer to the desk and began sifting through its contents.
“And leave you to do all of the snooping single-handed?” he asked, though he thunked down on the couch even as he said it.
Bray flicked a concerned glance at him before returning to the drawer. His stomach wound had been healed, but he, Ko-Jin, and herself had been, for the past week, quite sick. Kellar said it was withdrawal, that it would pass. It seemed whatever drug Ko-Jin and Yarrow had been given had greater side effects upon leaving the system than her own.
“Yarrow, I’m a professional,” Bray said, as she skimmed a yellowing letter. “I don’t snoop; I investigate.”
He sank deeper into the couch. “My apologies.”
They remained quiet for a time as Bray read through a stack of old correspondences. Most of them were mundane in nature, saved more out of negligent housekeeping than importance, she suspected. The place hadn’t been used in well over a decade and a half. Likely there was nothing to find.
She opened the second drawer and extracted a worn, decorative wooden case that bore the word ‘Asher’ in embossed letters. Her trembling fingers unclasped the cover, revealing a family photograph rendered in a deep chocolate brown.
The corners were black and light dots freckled the image, but the four figures remained clearly transfixed. Bray brought the image closer for inspection, her gaze taking in each face. The father—tall, handsome, and mustachioed—appeared to be stifling a laugh, his dark eyes glittering with eternal mirth. His wife perched at his side, petite and pretty. The eldest child, a girl in a frilly frock with ringleted hair, beamed broadly, revealing a missing tooth. The face of the last family member, a small boy standing before his father, caused the hairs