The Secret Romantic's Book of Magic E-Book

Kelly Andrew

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 511

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Enemies become lovers, rivalry turns to romance, and convenient marriages create true love in these 12 addictive Romantasy tales. Featuring Olivie Blake, Kelley Armstrong, Katherine Arden, Hannah Nicole Maehrer, Tasha Suri, Melissa Marr and more. Fall in love with these twelve gorgeous Romantasy stories from bestselling and beloved authors. Lost lovers return for a second chance – but what are their motives? Academic rivals compete for a prestigious position, but their sizzling chemistry might get in the way. A monster slayer posing as an unwitting sacrifice meets an intriguingly moral prince. From relationships caught in disparate timelines to ghostly ballrooms and dragons that need rescuing from princesses, this anthology gives you an inventive new spin on all your favorite tropes, and much more that you've never seen before. FEATURING BRAND-NEW STORIES FROM: Olivie Blake A. G. Slatter Tasha Suri Katherine Arden Kelley Armstrong Hannah N. Maehrer Melissa Marr Megan Bannen Kelly Andrew Kamilah Cole A. C. Wise Eliza Chan

Leseprobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

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Copyright

Introduction | By Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane

The Fall Guy | Olivie Blake

The Dubious Ladies of Mirador | Melissa Marr

Until December | Kelly Andrew

The King’s Witch | Tasha Suri

Designated Virgin Sacrifice | Kelley Armstrong

Second Class Magic | Kamilah Cole

Bamboo, Ink, Paper, Clay | Eliza Chan

Slay the Princess, Save the Dragon | A. C. Wise

San’t Marten’s Book of Mild Melancholy | A. G. Slatter

Good Deeds and Their Magical Punishments | Hannah Nicole Maehrer

The Larkspur | Megan Bannen

Rosebud | Katherine Arden

About the Authors

About the Editors

Acknowledgements

Also available from Titan Books

FANTASY

Rogues

Wonderland: An Anthology

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery

Cursed: An Anthology

Vampires Never Get Old: Tales With Fresh Bite

A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology

At Midnight: 15 Beloved Fairy Tales Reimagined

Twice Cursed: An Anthology

The Other Side of Never: Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy

Mermaids Never Drown: Tales to Dive For

CRIME

Dark Detectives: An Anthology of Supernatural Mysteries

Exit Wounds

Invisible Blood

Daggers Drawn

Black is the Night

Ink and Daggers

Death Comes at Christmas: Tales of Seasonal Malice

SCIENCE FICTION

Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

Infinite Stars

Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers

Out of the Ruins

Multiverses: An Anthology of Alternate Realities

Reports from the Deep End: Stories Inspired by J. G. Ballard

HORROR

Dark Cities

New Fears: New Horror Stories by Masters of the Genre

New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

Phantoms: Haunting Tales from the Masters of the Genre

When Things Get Dark

Dark Stars

Isolation: The Horror Anthology

Christmas and Other Horrors

Bound in Blood

THRILLER

In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology

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The Secret Romantic’s Book of Magic

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781835410912

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835410929

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: June 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION © Marie O’Regan & Paul Kane 2025

THE FALL GUY © Olivie Blake 2025

THE DUBIOUS LADIES OF MIRADOR © Melissa Marr 2025

UNTIL DECEMBER © Kelly Andrew 2025

THE KING’S WITCH © Tasha Suri 2025

DESIGNATED VIRGIN SACRIFICE © Kelley Armstrong 2025

SECOND CLASS MAGIC © Kamilah Cole 2025

BAMBOO, INK, PAPER, CLAY © Eliza Chan 2025

SLAY THE PRINCESS, SAVE THE DRAGON © A. C. Wise 2025

SAN’T MARTEN’S BOOK OF MILD MELANCHOLY © A. G. Slatter 2025

GOOD DEEDS AND THEIR MAGICAL PUNISHMENTS © Hannah Nicole Maehrer 2025

THE LARKSPUR © Megan Bannen 2025

ROSEBUD © Katherine Arden 2025

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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[email protected], [phone]

Typeset in Baskerville 12/18pt.

It’s no secret that, as far back as anyone knows, romance and fantasy have gone hand-in-hand.

You only have to think of the legendary Perseus’ love for Andromeda. Or Arthur and Guinevere, not to mention her dalliance with Lancelot. Indeed, many medieval romances relate the adventures of a knight as he tries to win the hand of his beloved by going on a quest – often defeating monsters, like dragons or giants.

Most recently, the term ‘romantasy’ has been drawn on to describe fiction that combines the two. Used as early as 2008 on Urban Dictionary, nobody can deny the explosion of such work in 2023–24, with authors like Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses) and Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing) leading the publishing charge.

So, after editing fantasy anthologies like Cursed, Wonderland, Twice Cursed and The Other Side of Never for Titan Books, it just seemed like a natural progression to delve into this particular realm.

To that effect, we’ve gathered together some of the best and brightest authors around today, with one remit: to deliver their own individual spin on Fantasy Romance. And boy, were we bowled over by the results!

In this book, you’ll find a very different spin on the damsel in distress story, as Kelley Armstrong (A Rip Through Time novels) introduces us to the ‘Designated Virgin Sacrifice’. While Melissa Marr (the Wicked Lovely books) touches on the gothic for her tale about a fantasy relationship that doesn’t begin the way you’d expect.

A dragon does indeed crop up in Wendy, Darling author A. C. Wise’s contribution, but again there’s more to the proceedings than meets the eye, and Kelly Andrew (I Am Made of Death) makes time to show us special powers that might take you anywhere.

In ‘The King’s Witch’ Tasha Suri (The Burning Kingdoms trilogy) explores the complexities of arranged marriages. Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Apprentice to the Villain) muses about just what it means to be a good person – in this world or a magical one – and Olivie Blake (Januaries) proves that trust can be a hard thing to come by in love, lust and fantasy societies.

The author of The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam, Megan Bannen, gives us a tale about luck – good and bad – will and predictions, where love is the key. Meanwhile, Eliza Chan (Fathomfolk) is inspired by a famous legend for her deeply moving piece, and A. G. Slatter (The Crimson Road) concerns herself with both the living and the dead.

Finally, Kamilah Cole (This Ends in Embers) tells us a tale of rivalry on a magical island that only appears every century… And Katherine Arden (The Warm Hands of Ghosts) warns us about searching for love in the echoes of the past.

We can honestly say we had a blast putting this one together and sincerely hope you, too, will fall in love with these adventures. Enjoy!

MARIE O’REGAN & PAUL KANEOctober 2024

The truth of the matter lives somewhere between devotion and foolhardiness, right at the midpoint of yearning and valor. Although don’t tell Mer that right now or he’ll die.

Mer, an otherwise rational being, has apparently been so destabilized by the sudden reappearance of Lady Lilari Barzya, Countess of Setain, in his life that he’s managed to achieve complete disregard for not only his vocation, but also the paltry matter of life and/or limb. Why, after all, risk everything Mer’s worked so terribly hard for – indeed, the variety of indignities he’s suffered by the profound personal compromise that is his loyal service to Moromaso, the Duke of Gonjain; to whom, by the way, Lady Lilari Barzya is now betrothed, rendering everything all the more upsetting – when he could have lived a long life unencumbered by disaster, disrepute, or distress? The only plausible conclusion one can draw from Mer’s split-second decision to intervene in LADY LILARI BARZYA(!)’s kidnapping is that he wants – he evidently craves – the opportunity to do something so hopeless and stupid it ruins him for life.

Is it clinical, perhaps? Madness, or the like? Is he just tired of catering to Moromaso’s ill-begotten imperial wealth, his craven lifestyle, the never-ending cycle of indiscretions that invariably become Mer’s job to dutifully sort? Is Mer bored, is that the problem? The nature of his work as an imperial scribe (soon to be ordained by the Aramisman Brotherhood, provided Moromaso keeps to his word) is highly methodical, mind-numbingly so. In order for Mer to perform his work, he must find a very quiet room – so quiet that nothing worth doing could possibly be happening within a radius of at least fifty feet – and he has to think about absolutely nothing except the task at hand. No wandering around in his memories of what LaDy LiLaRi bArZyA (he can’t keep doing this; when he’d known her, prior to the magical epiphany that has been Imalian imperial governance, she was simply Lilari, not a lady, not a Barzya, barely even ‘of Setain’) had once been. The efficacy of scribal magic depends, necessarily, on clarity of purpose – that is, single-mindedness to the point of forgetting even to breathe. Survival is not always a given. It is barely, truth be told, a necessity. Scribes fall down dead all the time.

Not that he’s going to say any of that to Lilari. Even after Mer, through a yawn, catches a hissing tone of danger from the drawing room when he arrives, concealed by the servants’ entrance, to deliver the nightly spells; even after he clears his mind as best he can from the dankness of the hidden corridor and scribbles the Imalian word for ‘explosion’ onto a slip of parchment; even after he slides the spell into the room, resulting in a very loud bang, a great deal of property damage, a dead intruder, and a very stunned Lilari – who says only “Mer?” in a barely audible croak that spiritually resembles Mer’s interior echoing of LLLLAAAADDDYYY LLLIIIILLLAAAARRRIIIII BBBBAAARRRRZZZYYAAA – even then, Mer still can’t think of a better explanation for his actions than a lie. Which is somewhere between cowardice and coping mechanism.

“Hazards of the profession,” he pants.

At the present point in time, Mer and Lilari have stolen a horse. One horse, singular, because Mer can’t actually ride a horse, and the scribe thing has its limits. For example, Mer can’t write down the word ‘horse’ in Imalian and expect to be capable of doing it (it would produce a horse). He could conceivably write the word ‘learn,’ but who knows how long that would take; too amorphous, not necessarily instantaneous. If he writes the word ‘ride’ there’s no real guarantee he’ll ever stop riding, and who knows how long his concentration would even hold before he simply dropped dead of exhaustion.

Really, this is the reason being a scribe is so stupid, and why Mer has continued working for Moromaso despite disliking nearly every bone in the man’s body, because entrance to the Aramisman Brotherhood at least presents access to magic that’s actually useful. Unfortunately, the Brotherhood is so exclusive it involves a rigid moral code that’s characteristically Imalian. What a dreary hellhole the continent must be. The pseudo-religious orders and purity of thought and noble service are compulsory requirements for initiation. (How else, Mer supposes, could the worldly, scholarly elite be joined by a lowly scribe, particularly one who exists only by the grace of a wealthy, pious patron?)

The point is, post-rescue, Mer lies. He claims his leap to action in Lilari’s defense is required by some imaginary scribal code of conduct. Heavily implying that he’s undergone reputable combat training at some or any point in his life. Flagrantly suggesting he might make a worthy bodyguard as they ride away from his mess and toward her prospective safety, a journey that spans the remaining shrouded hours of the night.

*   *   *

So deep in his lies is Mer that he hasn’t even considered whether Lilari might also be lying. Which she is. And this is the problem with imperial ethics, which Lilari would have gamely pointed out if Mer had asked. But instead, her mind was screeching MMMEEEEEEERRRRR!! as if all the angels in which her dead husband so improbably believed had touched down from on high with a personal blessing. A chance to turn back time, to try to set things right.

But that’s not what this is. It can’t be, and it won’t. Because for Lilari, the truth has no business in this equation. The only way out of this mess she’s made is a man, one who could conceivably be Dometico, and Mer’s the only one in line.

Ironically, Dometico wouldn’t have happened at all if not for Mer – Mer the beacon, Mer the silver lining of Lilari’s shadowed past. Isn’t that hysterical?

Anyway, they digress. Right now, as they ride strenuously through the night, Mer pretends to be capable while Lilari pretends to be innocent, and they both pretend not to be aware of the proximity of their beating hearts, hers felt through his chest. His through her spine.

*   *   *

More sad, undignifying truths: Mer doesn’t know how to use a sword or a knife or his fists. Theoretically, anyone with even a drop of proclivity for magic could do what Mer can, provided they were allowed – or so Mer would say, modesty being one of the core doctrines of the Aramisman Brotherhood. The Brotherhood puts a great deal of emphasis on service. The tenets of fraternity: loyalty (no empire could survive without it), service, and purity. In exchange for transcending to a higher plane of humanity, the Brotherhood are functionally sorcerers. Mer can write things down, sure, a glorified clerk. But the Aramisman Order is capable of real magic, the kind that doesn’t require a quiet room and proper hydration, and anyway, he doesn’t have anything worth staying for here.

Or at least he didn’t, until now.

No, he still doesn’t. Lilari is marrying his employer and Mer is still Mer, no matter what happens today.

Mer is thinking about all this (or rather, trying not to think about this) when he and Lilari finally stop in the crispness just before dawn. Presently, fog obscures the bustling port of Setain, as the Imalians call it. Eristoh is (was) a chain of islands whose ports make it so valuable – worth throwing money at or dying over, depending on who you ask.

When Mer wonders aloud why he and Lilari have returned to Setain for refuge, but not to Lilari’s estate there, he suffers instant retribution. “My husband has a son from his first marriage,” Lilari replies without feeling. She doesn’t even look at him. Instead, she pets the horse as if he’s the only male in the world with any compassion at all.

Ah. Of course, Lilari needs to marry Mer’s revolting boss (gods save him etc. etc.). Her husband is dead and now she has nothing. She couldn’t have inherited land or money, even if her husband had thought to set it aside. So, she needs one man to talk to another man and offer a substantial sum in transaction, or as substantial as can be expected when the person in question is a woman, a widow, and Eristo’ah, all of which count heavily against her price.

Which does beg a second question. Mer coughs, through which he manages vaguely to form the words: “Explain the… er… kidnapping?”

Lilari turns to Mer with a look of dark amusement. “You think I’m not worth kidnapping?”

“I didn’t say that,” offers Mer. Humbly, purely, idiotically. “I just meant—”

“No, put it in explicit terms, please,” she says. Her beauty is a savage otherworldliness, a momentary collapse in what is, or can possibly be, real. Her eyes, dark as the night, flash incandescent with fearsome fury. “I’m not worth any money, so why would anyone go through the effort of kidnapping me? Is that it?”

Mer wants to curl up and die, this goes without saying. “I beg,” he states, quite literally, “your pardon. I only meant—”

“I think we both know what you meant,” Lilari snaps, and strides dismissively away.

*   *   *

More sad, petty truths: Lilari isn’t insulted at all. It’s a perfectly logical question. It’s not a flattering question, but she can’t blame the man she’s leading to his death for questioning things when they don’t make sense. None of this makes sense! She still doesn’t understand why Mer even offered to protect her. Not that it matters what his reasons are, because at the heart of his unflattering assumption, he’s correct: she needs him.

Even if she wasn’t planning to set him up, the presence of a man, even if that man is Mer – which isn’t to say Mer is in any way unmanly – he has one of those Imalian beards, like Moromaso’s, only Mer’s is thick and virile and unruly, and the long hair that’s so fashionable on the continent is, on Mer, sleek midnight at the root and a careless, non-egotistical knot at the nape – which doesn’t sound sexy necessarily, so you’ll just have to trust her, that Lilari can see all kinds of carnalities in him – goodness, once you let them go these wretched truths simply overspill! – but Mer is also… visibly a scribe.

Which is to say, Mer thinks he’s getting away with something that he absolutely isn’t. But Lilari’s got secrets of her own, so, you know. A little truth, a little lies.

For example, the kidnapping. It wasn’t, per se, a kidnapping.

Well, listen. You know Adelion – the governor of what used to be Eristoh, which is now just more of Imalia. Everyone knows Governor Adelion is both zealously pious and corrupt as all hell, which is a common irony if not a pleasant one. Anyway, Adelion’s in charge of tax collection and of course he skims a little off the top. He’s a bully and he’s violent (it’s gotten incalculably worse since his wife was, ahem, murdered – the story is she fell victim to Dometico’s pirates, the ‘lawless scum’ who line the new Imalian ports and tradeways) and he’s got spies all over the thing that used to be a country that’s now the savage landmass in his care.

Adelion has one particular spy, Kasalka, who happens to have discovered something damaging about Lilari, a secret he’d tried to use against her in what could fashionably be called a bribe for his silence, until Mer blew him up. Now the threat of Kasalka is gone, but that’s arguably much worse. Because what comes after Kasalka is Adelion, and that is… very bad for Lilari.

What she needs now is Dometico, which Mer is not. But he’s here, which is the next best thing.

“Mer. A warning.” Lilari pauses abruptly. “This place… it’s not too welcoming to strangers.” Certainly not strangers who dress in Imalian fashions or wear their hair like Imalian aristocrats – she can’t understand how or when that happened, especially as Mer was once so proud to be precisely what he was. Anyway. “I’m going to need you to play along, okay? Don’t ask questions.”

Mer gives her a look, like, okayyyyy.

“Everything will be fine as long as you follow my lead,” Lilari says as they prepare to enter the grungy tavern with shuttered windows and clear evidence that all might not be well inside. So, another lie! But who’s counting. At the very least, part of that lie is true – things will be fine for the time being. She trusts Nicano Asco, even if he does have his lackeys assign three blades to each of their throats the moment she and Mer walk through the door.

*   *   *

“Well, well, well,” says a person Mer doesn’t recognize until they step into the dim morning light, which sluices entropically through the tavern’s shoddily-boarded windows. And then, gradually, awareness sinks in. Nicano Asco, wanted for trespass, felony robbery, felony burglary, assault on Imalian officers, and arson. He’s much handsomer than his wanted poster suggests, not that such things matter to Mer. Certainly they don’t matter more than the reality that Mer could bleed out from an incautious swallow. “Lady Lilari Barzya.”

(Mer marvels a little at how Nicano Asco seems to have no trouble saying her full name without wild interior strangulation.)

“Nicano,” says Lilari. She seems unbothered by the knives presently threatening their necks, possibly because she’s already survived one attempt on her life over the course of the previous twenty-four hours. Mer considers that, perhaps, he should do his best to become accustomed to danger, as it seems part and parcel with the consequences of his actions. “I need a favor.”

She’s doing a purring thing with her voice, something Mer recognizes as flirtation the way an astrologist might speculate about the stars. It seems strange now to think she was using the same tones with Moromaso hours earlier, on the other side of the study door from where Mer sat alone, trying not to feel things, attending to his pile of requested spells. (Most of Moromaso’s household has been replaced with spells, which are single-use, which really means that Mer inherited that work. Granted, it’s different work. He’s never scrubbed an antique Imalian fireplace grate and will probably never have to, thanks to his benefactor. But he does have to write the Imalian word for ‘clean’ about a thousand times per night. Or he did, until he wound up here, with Lilari, at knifepoint.)

The notorious criminal Nicano Asco begins to circle them slowly, something Mer recognizes as a tedious game that Moromaso also plays. The issue with mortal peril is that eventually, you adjust to it, which leaves room for other things, like annoyance with the peacocking of a man who could just slit your throat and be done with it. Which would at least express adequate respect for everyone’s time.

“So,” Nicano murmurs to himself. “This is the great Teorestro Dometico, is it?”

“Ha,” says Mer, because Teorestro Dometico is – much like Nicano Asco – a very famous criminal. A pirate of some sort, out for blood and bounty, though Mer’s only interest in him is as a kind of bogeyman who haunts Moromaso’s enterprises. It is Dometico who supplies Mer with his steadiest administrative tedium: the inscription of ‘safety’ for every trader Moromaso invites to the port of Gonjain.

Objectively speaking, there’s almost no chance that Mer could be the sort of brawler known for brutality and senseless violence. But is it just him, or does Nicano Asco look… scared?

By the time Lilari purr-whispers, “Nicano, don’t be jealous, it’s incredibly unattractive,” it occurs to Mer this might be exactly what she meant by following her lead.

*   *   *

Give or take some twenty knives later, after they’re deemed acceptably unthreatening and the nest of Nicano’s gang makes itself comfortable again, singing their bawdy tunes and getting characteristically drunk before mid-morning, Mer and Lilari are shown to their room above the tavern. Mer, not unpredictably, whirls on Lilari – who intends to say nothing, thank you very much.

“Why.” It’s the start of a sentence, but Mer’s voice is so terse and clipped that Lilari can only hear it in tiny chopped up bits, like pickings for a stew. “Does. NicanoAsco.” (This, meanwhile, is a single, ostentatious word.) “Think I’m. Some kind of. Master criminal?”

There’s a note of absurdity in there, as if even by asking, Mer has defied the usual constraints on reality and must therefore take several steps backward. He sinks into the mattress behind him, a faint look of confusion crossing his enviable features. Not that Lilari is thinking about Mer’s handsomeness at the moment, but truth be told, she loves a pretty thing, and Mer is very pretty. The way his lashes sweep across the high bones of his cheeks; the graceful look of his elegant fingers; the impeccable furrow of his scholarly brow. She enjoys this feeling, the one where she allows herself to admire a person, to wonder at the scent of salt and linen and the lovely ordinariness of a body, the way it can so easily be brought to pleasure. The way running a finger along the curve of one thigh can make anyone shiver, done patiently enough.

Lilari doesn’t even mind the thought of sleeping with her new betrothed, Moromaso, who is an objectively terrible man. An attractive one, to be sure – thick and brawny, with ice-blue eyes and girthy thighs. Lilari likes to think she’s capable of complex thought; for example, she can temporarily turn off the part of her brain that dislikes bullies in favor of the dumber, primal one that enjoys an expert cock. Yesterday, she was confident she could be perfectly satisfied with marriage to Moromaso, at least for the six or so weeks before things inevitably took a turn.

But then, today, Mer. Whose natural loveliness is undeniable, and lingers even when he scowls. It’s really for the best that she turns traitor. How else would she otherwise go on?

“Look,” Lilari begins, doing the thing where she says something with a lot of certainty so that nobody presses her or asks questions, a tactic that worked very well over the course of her marriage and on all the lovers she took during that time. “I think we can both agree that it’s better if nobody tries to kill us. No offense, but they might very well succeed.”

Mer mutters something like excuse me, I saved you earlier this evening in a display of impressive masculinity (Lilari doesn’t actually hear him, but she assumes based on experience and context cues). “I’m just trying to make things easier for us,” she lies before he can say anything else. “Nobody’s going to come for you if they think you’re Dometico.”

“Oh, really?” says Mer, with a dull blow of a glance. “Interesting. So, not the Imalian police, or the Imperial Navy, or Adelion, or—?”

“The truth,” Lilari cuts in, “is that Adelion thinks I have something that belongs to him.” That actually is true, sort of. “And unless I can get it back, he’s not going to leave me alone. Especially once he learns that Kasalka is dead.” There! That’s a cogent point. “Honestly, better for you to be Dometico than for you to be the man who killed the governor’s favorite attack dog.”

This is a very strong argument, such that even Mer seems to buy it.

Rather than imagining Mer’s head being separated from his body, as will ultimately transpire, Lilari tries to guess what matters to Mer at this stage of his life. She’s never known him this… obedient. Perhaps that’s not a fair assessment, given that she’s been away from him for half their lives, but she does feel as if she knows him, or that she used to know him, once.

Mer was an orphan (Lilari, by contrast, one of too many children) who seldom engaged with anyone, something Lilari observed whenever she came to the orphanage as part of her father’s routine ministry. Mer’s natural stoicism was why Lilari committed nearly everything he did say to memory, incidentally inscribing his every thought on the very meat and marrow of what she was. As a boy, Mer only ever spoke to come to the defense of others. He suffered no fools, and would say one word where other boys would use hundreds.

Mer, even at eleven or so, could be incisive to the point of humorlessness, as if in his estimation, nothing was ever funny. But Lilari always knew that wasn’t true – that in quieter moments, Mer had an easy smile, and a full and throaty laugh.

But this is not the time for remembering. There will be plenty of that later, and for ample guilt as well. Lilari clears her throat at the sudden piercing jab in her chest, brought back to the present circumstances.

“There is one other thing,” she says. “Dometico is… Well, he has a reputation.”

“Yes,” Mer agrees. “For carnage.” Pointedly, he whistles a little shanty about Dometico the monster, who makes the seas run red with blood.

“Well—” Lilari swats this away for the nonsense it is, not that she’s getting into it right now. The violence that colors the name Dometico is very necessary, even for someone who could conceivably understand the truth. “I mean more along the lines of Dometico’s… reputation.”

Mer looks blankly at her. “You just said that.”

“Yes, but—” Lilari tosses herself beside him on the bed with a sigh. “I’ll just say it. You’re going to need to, you know. Woo me.” Fuck me, she means.

It looks for a moment as if something inside Mer has briefly disconnected, like maybe his brain is no longer attached to his ears. “What?”

“Nicano and I were lovers for a time,” Lilari says. She can’t help a smile at the thought of it. Halcyon days, truly. How she longs for the inattentiveness of her dead husband, who didn’t believe her capable of real – or any – harm (because she was a woman and therefore incapable of complex thought). Moromaso, by contrast, will keep her locked up tight; it’s why Dometico is no longer an option.

A momentary sinkhole fills her chest. Then: “Nicano will only help us if he believes you’re Dometico, plain and simple. And you’re already testing the constraints of believability,” she adds with a lying sweep over Mer’s physique, as if his aesthetic is in any way disappointing aside from in this single, stupid regard.

Mer’s face is blank.

Lilari feels an impatience that is actually, definitely, guilt. Mer deserves better treatment, and a far better fate, but at what cost? Her life? Even if that was a price she was willing to pay for anyone or anything, how could she explain her predicament to him? The loneliness, the desperation, the unavoidable fallout from years and years of self-imploding lies?

“You said you wanted to help me, didn’t you?” she snaps. “I never forced you to come along.”

“Do you necessarily require criminality from your lovers?” Mer poses archly. “Nicano Asco the thief, Teorestro Dometico the murderer—”

“He isn’t—” Lilari grits her teeth, then gives up before she starts. “Fine, do as you like. I’m only asking for a bit of… mmmmm.” She moans, taking several thunking strides around the room, choreographing a prelude to lovemaking of the most desperate, rutting kind.

“Oh, Dometico,” she says, throwing her head back, “yes—”

“They can hear us,” Mer mumbles, his eyes fixed with apparent mortification on his lap.

“Well, precisely,” Lilari hisses at him. “Didn’t you listen to a word I said? Oh, Dometico, yes, there!” She gives a shrill, almost yelping sound, which startles Mer into looking up at her. “Okay, now you’ll want to—” She gestures for Mer to toss her gamely into the wall, but Mer seems to comprehend none of this. So Lilari does the work herself, yanking Mer up so that at least two sets of footsteps will be heard tripping over themselves. “Dometico, oh, ohhhhh—”

She feels her cheeks heat for real when Mer’s eyes slip down to the top of her dressing gown, the one she’s been wearing since Kasalka cornered her last night. It’s designed for maximum enticement, so as to procure her betrothal to Moromaso, and it’s very clear now that it works. Mer’s hardly breathing, which amuses Lilari, but also excites her, a bit. She’s spent so much time with shameless lotharios that she’s forgotten just how lovely restraint can be.

“It would be just magnificent if you’d contribute to the performance,” she says, managing to remember the context of their imaginary tryst.

Though the words come out… breathless, which she didn’t plan. She didn’t factor in the possibility that Mer might have an effect on her, not when she’s been so unmoved by so many people over so many years. But she can’t very well have Nicano overhearing, can she? So when she speaks, she murmurs in Mer’s ear, her lips warm and soft and practical beside his bearded jaw.

In answer, he lets out a barely audible groan. Oh god, but what a groan it is, all manly and rough and intoxicating in its ambiguity – in the fact that Lilari can’t tell if he’s acting or if it actually escaped him, slipping through the clutches of even his extravagant restraints.

“Yes, good, like that—” Another hot breath in his ear, meant to be reassurance, though it comes off as sultry praise, almost as if she’d like him to keep going, yes, yes, good, never stop. “Perhaps another, if it wouldn’t trouble you too much—”

She yanks him flush against her, and he trips. He falls, actually, into her, and they collapse together against the door with a satisfying thud. But because Mer is genuinely not expecting it, he fumbles for her waist to catch himself, to keep them both upright. The sound that leaves his mouth when he touches her is nearly feral, a strangled gasp that slips through his teeth.

“Yes, that’s perfect, you’re doing so well,” Lilari whispers. Mer chokes on something, maybe a laugh, maybe something deeper, darker, more intimate. He has his eyes closed now, one hand balled in a fist, the other floating carefully over her bodice. Ready to catch them again if necessary, but offering nothing more.

There’s a tenseness to his jaw and Lilari touches it softly, with a fingertip, before moaning again. “Oh, yes,” she whines. A sensual whine, a heady panting. “Yes, YES, YES—Now you’ll want to, you know,” she whispers to Mer mid-performance, gesturing wordlessly to the fact that by now, they’d be rutting straight into the wood with every intention for property damage. Mer looks blankly at her and she throws her head back, miming the throes of pleasure. “You know? Like… YES, DOMETICO, HARDER—”

“You can’t seriously think this is how I would do things.” Mer’s got a slightly hangdog look to him, a palpable disappointment. At first Lilari thinks it’s directed at her, clocking that she’s a shameless harlot after all, but then she realizes that isn’t it.

“I would never—” His eyes rise painfully to hers. Beautiful, pleading, sad.

Then his gaze caresses her lips. “Lilari,” he says, his voice brittle, as if he’s managed to fit half a lifetime of craving between the cracks.

For a moment, Lilari falls silent. She forgets the theater of it all, though she knows Nicano is still listening. She tries to imagine what this moment would be if it were the continuation of their playacted sex, but now she can only think of it as it is, which is also, somehow, sex. She can already see the two of them coiled up in sun-soaked sheets, the sweat glistening on Mer’s shoulders, the way he’d pull away just to stare at her, the kind of honesty that edges perilously close to fealty, or love. But that’s not the kind of sex she unilaterally decided they were having, and now she understands Mer’s disappointment, that she didn’t properly understand the way he would have done this with her if it were real.

She surprises herself when she leans forward and catches his lips with hers. Another sound escapes him, something helpless, impossible to commit to memory or articulation. Like chasing after fate and finally catching up.

He breathes into her mouth. She sighs soundlessly into his.

“I’m not—” he begins. “I can’t—”

Then there’s a knock on the door behind them.

“Open up, my bloodthirsty lovebirds,” says Nicano. “I’ve found that lost trinket of yours.”

*   *   *

The unspoken is becoming more noticeable, weighing on Mer as he considers the events of the past twenty-four hours – the real things and the false ones, the abject lies and their incidental truths. As is his practice, he feels the presence of the uncomfortable and instead edges blindly around it, as if he doesn’t see it and can’t be made to look. He focuses his attention on the information Nicano Asco has given them, which is that the thing Adelion wants from Lilari – the thing that can potentially save her life, Mer’s procurement of which would be heroically within the bounds of his forthcoming oaths to the Brotherhood, despite the impure thoughts he had while pressed against her – is located in the home of the Earl and Countess of Coricain, just north of the port of Setain.

“Your little problem was delivered to Lady Sabiyana Seraysra,” Nicano says with a glimmer in his eye, his gaze repeatedly straying to Mer’s. “And lucky for you, we happen to know she’ll be with the Medericos this evening.”

“How exactly is it that you know,” Mer responds gruffly, not quite managing to summon the questioning tones necessary for the conversation. He’s still struggling a bit through the physical effects of being so close to Lilari. Of toeing right up to his vows and lingering there, suspended on the tepid safety that is the distance between pretense and meaning. The difference between breaking and broken, at least by technical constraints.

“Between the two of us, Dometico, I think you understand the sorts of questions that should and shouldn’t be asked,” is Nicano’s reply before he saunters out the door. He’s put on ample bravado, probably for Lilari’s benefit, which is banal enough to Mer’s sensibilities to offer him space to focus.

Certainly more so than… other things, like the feel of a satin bodice, or being flush against that door.

“What are you writing?”

Lilari interrupts Mer’s train of thought then, which is best, as the spell he’s crafting might very well go awry if he thinks any harder about the thing he’s trying to avoid thinking about.

“What?” he asks.

“What’s the Imalian for?” she repeats, frowning down at what must be the sixteenth protective spell Mer’s written out. He doesn’t want to be caught at knifepoint a second time, so the words for ‘explosion’ and ‘armor’ seem equally relevant, under the circumstances. Lilari holds a blank slip of parchment in her hand, contemplating it.

“They’re spells,” Mer begins to explain, “you know, given all the mortal peril—”

“No, I mean – why Imalian?” she corrects him, and Mer looks blankly at her. “If you wrote them in Eristo’ah,” she clarifies, “would it not work?”

It’s been a long time since anyone around Mer has referred to his native language by its name. He has to fight the urge to look over his shoulder, however pointless that would be. “I was taught this way.”

“Well, yes, understood,” Lilari presses him, her presence a veritable chokehold on his ability to process thought. She has bathed, and smells of flowers and the sultry soddenness of freshly wet earth. “But haven’t you ever—?”

“I can’t write in Eristo’ah.” Mer feels embarrassed about admitting this, even though it’s not his doing. He was an orphan. And it’s illegal.

Lilari laughs. “But surely—”

Then she sees his face and stops laughing.

“How did you…?” She seems unsure what question to ask, specifically.

“There’s an exam for magical proficiency,” is what Mer says, because he doesn’t know how to answer the real question. “I wasn’t supposed to sit for it, obviously, but I had a patron.”

“Who?”

He winces. But what does he have to be ashamed of? It’s not as if he had a choice about who’d noticed him rather than leaving him to starve. “Adelion.”

He feels rather than hears Lilari suck in a sharp, critical breath. “Oh,” she says, and thankfully this line of questioning is over.

They’ve both succeeded, in the absence of the other, to the extent of their respective limitations. Lilari married a rich Imalian noble, positioning her to marry another. And if that isn’t power or freedom, it’s at least luxury, which is better than many other fates.

Mer had the equivalent happen to him. As the new patron of the decaying orphanage in which Mer lived, Governor Adelion paid for Mer to sit the scribal exams, and then assigned him to Moromaso for the duration of his noble service. What did Adelion see in Mer that no one else would or could? In the end, it didn’t matter. Mer spent a great deal of time around Adelion, which meant being grateful, despite never needing to ask Lilari why she’d run from him at the start.

But of course, Lilari heard the name Adelion as if Mer had spelled out I’m a traitor in calligraphic script, and why shouldn’t she interpret him however she likes? It doesn’t matter what she thinks. They’ll hardly speak after tomorrow. He’ll get back this stolen thing for her and then he’ll write the spells to warm her bath until he’s summoned to the Brotherhood, which had better be fucking soon.

The ride north from Setain is not very long, so Mer doesn’t have to think too arduously about the shape of Lilari’s waist below his fingers. He doesn’t have to think about the way her breath changes when his chest meets the line of her spine. He doesn’t have to think about the party they’re about to attend, which Nicano Asco is none too sparing about.

“You know those rich bastards,” he says in confidence to Mer just before they take their leave. “Everything is ever so cutesy and demure until they get behind closed doors.”

“Meaning?” Mer hazards to ask. He’s grumpy for unknown reasons, having seen Lilari and Nicano try to sneak a private moment, a heartfelt and/or lusty farewell.

But Nicano gives him a light smack on the arse, to which Mer barely withholds a disgruntled “oof.”

“Enjoy the orgy,” Nicano says, and kisses Mer full on the lips before winking at Lilari and sending them on their way.

*   *   *

It’s not like Eristoh is, or was ever, perfect. A preternaturally warlike bunch of clans can’t really be trusted with unified statecraft. But Imalians are just so hypocritical. There are so many rules, so many varying degrees to the hierarchy, who bows to whom, which titles are appropriate, which mistresses can be acknowledged and which ones nobody speaks of aloud.

They can be terrific fun, though, if you happen to be one of them. Which Lilari is with limitations, and which Mer thoroughly is not. Thank the gods he’s so handsome they probably won’t mind, Lilari thinks, assuming they don’t recognize him as Moromaso’s servant. Which is unlikely. All the Imalians populating the fresh spoils of empire are new to their titles, and eager to prove they rank too high to concern themselves with other people’s staff. Still, even the most horrid snobs can be occasionally astute.

“Stop fussing,” Lilari says as she adjusts Mer’s borrowed (stolen) clothing, grateful for the occasion of a masked ball and the fact that Nicano has an eye to current fashion. Imalians are incredibly fussy, especially the men. Layers and layers of brocade and velvets and silks, all of which are ill-suited for a life in Eristo’ah humidity.

Mer’s underlayers are already saturated with sweat. He keeps pulling at the voluminous tie around his neck, an Imalian symbol of dignity, which is characteristically ostentatious.

“Am I really necessary for this?” Mer asks – tired, Lilari supposes, of the meager stakes of her life and/or death. “And surely there’s no way I can just walk in and claim to be an enemy of empire—”

“They may eat with Adelion, but they fuck with Dometico. They’re gluttons, Mer, and they’re new to their money, and they’re bored.” Lilari is a little too rough as she secures Mer’s vest, and he releases a withering sigh. “Relax – it’s a masked ball, Mer. They won’t even be paying attention to you. You just have to get Sabiyana alone.” The final piece in her carefully laid trap.

“And then what?” prompts Mer, as Lilari snorts a laugh.

“I’m sure you can imagine what.”

She turns away, irritable all over again, though whether with him or herself is unclear. After all, she’s guilty of just as many betrayals as he is, if not more. She’s the one who lays with the enemy as a matter of survival. She hates Adelion and she still sat with him at her late husband’s table. Surely she will be on her best behavior when Adelion attends her wedding to Moromaso.

So why does she hate this thought so much – the one where Mer bends his studious neck obediently, performing the dutiful Imalian scribe beneath Adelion’s approving gaze?

Because Mer’s smart enough to know why she’s angry, and possibly that’s the worst of it. She’s had so many handsome idiots and beautiful sycophants over the past decade of her life. She’s forgotten, for the purposes of survival, that sometimes people who are good and clever and kind still bend the knee to monsters. It’s unbearable, this awareness of the truth, and frankly, she’s almost thrilled she’s sending him to his death!

She moves with clipped, unsteady anger until Mer reaches out. Not touching her, but the motion pauses her just the same.

She thinks an apology is coming, or worse. She braces herself for whatever it will be. The thing that leads her to forgive him. The thing that means she can want him again, because her anger is already so flimsy as it is.

Instead he says: “I’m a candidate for the Aramisman brotherhood.”

She scoffs: “What, you mean those hooded Imalian creeps?”

Mer mumbles something like assent and Lilari is relieved, overjoyed, to be able to hate him. Delighted to tell herself he has it coming, with the way the universe bends. “What absolute nonsense,” she tells him. “Aren’t those assholes completely celibate?”

Mer meets her eyes and she realizes he is angry. No, not angry. He’s hurt. She’s insulted him and it’s annoying, the way she feels sorry. The way she feels anything at all. Doesn’t he know the Aramisman Brotherhood is just another avaricious cult? Speaking of hypocrites! The Brotherhood claim to be sorcerers, but really, they’re bankers. They charge for their services and collect interest on the debts. They’re worse than Imalian nobles, which is saying something.

Ha, and Mer is angry with her? Lilari wants to scream. (She wants to ask forgiveness.) She wants to strangle him. (She wants him to lie with her in a world where survival doesn’t mean compromise; where inevitably they starve to death for their high-minded ideals.)

“Well,” she says, a spark of cruelty in her voice, “then I suppose you’ll be useless, won’t you.”

She turns away and he takes a breath so sharp she feels it in her lungs, like the puncture of a rib. “Come here,” he says. Softly commanding. Gently tempting.

As if in a trance, she pivots to face him. As if, in this moment or any other, he has only ever had to ask.

Mer scrubs one hand around his mouth, the thickness of his beard. The look he gives her is one of pure, slow delectation. His dark eyes follow the curves of her waist. Lilari feels a sudden, inescapable awareness of her nipples. His lips part and so do hers. He leans ever so slightly toward her and she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe.

Then she takes a step to close the distance.

Then another, because the first didn’t seem like enough.

“If what you want from me is the seduction of another woman,” Mer says calmly, “then yes, you’ll find me quite useless. I have only ever wanted one woman.” He leans away, such that she can grieve the distance. So that she can watch his eyes linger with palpable curiosity on the motion of her throat.

Then he leans forward again, his nose ghosting along the edge of hers. His lips tracing the curve of her cheek.

He turns his head to speak in her ear, one hand rising to span the edge of her jaw, the line of her throat. “If anyone had offered me a choice, I would have chosen you,” he says. “All of you.”

His thumb brushes the edge of her lip and she is ravenous, delirious.

“Mer.” It has a cooling sound, some semblance of refreshment. Like this moment, if she allows it to, can offer her some hard-fought peace.

So when he steps away, it’s like dousing her with a bucket of ice. She realizes, belatedly, that the pain is still there, in his face. On his lips.

“I rather think I’ll do fine in there,” Mer says, adjusting his ludicrous tie. “Don’t you?”

Right, she thinks, and catches her breath, recommitting to the fallout of her plan. After all, it’s too late now to stop it.

*   *   *

Mer regrets his behavior. To a degree. Not the things he said (which were true) or the things he did (honest, if misleading and unchaste). What he regrets is not doing more. He regrets not taking Lilari by the shoulders and saying for heaven’s sake, it’s not as if he wants this. How can she possibly believe this is anything but the best he could scrape together of a life? One hardly dreams of these conditions as a boy. Certainly Mer hadn’t, too haunted was he by dreams of a girl he hardly knew (you know which one).

Imagine if he said that. If he got down on his knees and said Lilari, fuck the empire and their promises of sorcery and power, I’ll die with you in poverty and treason if that’s what you ask. Can you imagine? If he said I’ll die for you, how could she say anything short of okay cool, then die? He knows there is no future here, even if half an image blurs the edges of all his thoughts. The partially materialized fantasy where he loves and is loved by the woman who was a friend long before she was a daydream. Who is, perhaps, the only friend Mer’s ever had.

But anyway, that isn’t real, and worse it’s painful, so now here he is in the Mederico family’s private drawing room, sweating straight through all these fucking brocades, pretending to be the kind of man who can sweep a lady off her feet. Which, worst of all, is going well.

“God, but you can’t even imagine how terrible it all is,” sighs Lady Sabiyana, who wears a delicate birdcage mask. She’s fingering the heavy jewel around her neck that Mer feels sure must be Adelion’s stolen trinket. Now that he thinks of it, he actually recognizes the jewel – he’s seen it before, in a portrait that hangs in Adelion’s house, around the neck of his late wife.

Mer ponders how he’s going to slip it from around the neck of this beautiful, horrible duchess and regrets not writing the word ‘seduce’ on a slip of parchment while his mind was more at ease.

“It’s as if I don’t matter at all, do you know what I mean? I’m just an object,” complains the wealthiest woman in three counties, “and you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it is here, the unrelenting heat. And the natives! And Vorcanto’s so utterly draining, all his unavoidable wants and needs, his constant desperation for reassurance—”

“Indeed, has anyone considered how you must feel,” Mer manages, adjusting the black silk mask tied over his face until it sops up some of the sweat beading at his forehead.

“Yes, but it’s that precisely!” says Sabiyana, as Mer ponders whether he’s capable of whatever Moromaso would do under these circumstances. Kiss her? Disrobe her? Colonize her homeland? He misses Lilari as he thinks this. He can almost hear her laugh.

Before he can say anything, though, someone enters the room behind them, and Sabiyana gives a horrified little gasp that Mer realizes is pure theater. But then she realizes it is her friend, the Lady Elemora Mederico, and becomes bored with it all yet again.

“We’re busy,” Sabiyana says, reclining into Mer to the point of altering his balance. He fumbles for the chair behind him as Sabiyana purrs, “Was there something you needed?”

Elemora, in sharp contrast to Sabiyana, is nearly panting with apprehension. “What are you doing in here? Never mind. Dometico’s just arrived,” she says, hurrying to stash what appears to be bottles of liquor in the nearby drawer of an antique Imalian cabinet.

“Dometico? The pirate?” Sabiyana straightens as if to augment her bosom, a look of delight on her features. “Where?”

Mer’s chest tightens. His hand moves to the waistcoat where he’s stashed the spells for escape, wondering whether he’s light-fingered enough to grab the necklace at the same time. He’ll have to find Lilari, too – why did they ever agree to separate?

He realizes abruptly they never even made contingency plans for if either of them got caught.

“Somewhere. Anywhere. How should I know?” Elemora’s eyes slip to Mer before dismissing him in the same glance, and he’s relieved about what that means for Lilari until it occurs to him that, actually, he’s the only one who’s taken on any kind of risk. It’s not a crime for her to be here. There’s the kidnapping danger, of course. But if she was worried about her safety, why leave Nicano Asco’s at all?

Hmm.

“Fix your face,” Elemora snaps at Sabiyana while Mer contemplates things very slowly in his head. “Adelion’s just ridden up to the gates—”

“Adelion?” Sabiyana straightens with alarm, her first real sign of apprehension. She scrubs at her garish lipstick, shoving Mer aside to check her appearance in the glass. “What’s Adelion doing here?” she shoots over her shoulder.

“How should I know?” Elemora is fretting, hiding things, pointlessly tidying the room. Sabiyana, meanwhile, is busy adjusting her bodice, pulling it up until it almost looks prim. “Someone must have tipped him off—”

A brief, unsolicited image: Mer finding himself one slip of parchment short as he was writing the spells for this endeavor. Another: whatever was slipped furtively from the folds of Lilari’s gown into Nicano Asco’s waiting hands.

“Who?” Sabiyana cries, then throws her hands up in an apparent wail of suffering. “Oh, those ignorant sluts! We’re all going to be in for such a tiresome lecture, not to mention all the blasted fines—”

“Whoever it was had better hand over Dometico,” Elemora agrees. “Otherwise who knows how much interest he’ll shove onto the next tax—”

With that, Mer dismally concludes his math. Lilari was never being kidnapped. Of course no one here would summon Adelion, who’ll employ all methods of pious usury now that he’s caught them in the act. And Lilari never needed something so banal as a necklace. What she needed was to pin Dometico’s crimes on Mer and then leave him behind for Dometico’s fate. But why? To save her real lover, the murderous pirate?

It doesn’t make sense, but at the same time, of course it does – the part where it isn’t Mer. Mer, stupid Mer, who burns with something now, a confluence of shame and grief. All this time she was everything to him, and of course he was never anything to her.

Why had he ever possibly believed he might be? Just because for a single moment in a burning room, she’d almost looked at him like she could dream another future in his eyes?

The door suddenly slams shut, burying Mer in the consequences of his actions. So resigned is he to his doom that he scarcely notices the figure that materializes in the room, half-hidden in the shadows.

“Ladies,” says a cool voice that, despite its unlikelihood, Mer recognizes instantly. “If you wanted Dometico, all you had to do was ask.”

*   *   *

Let it be known! Lilari did not intend to do this. Mislead Mer, firstly, but also, the bit where she spent years impersonating a pirate.

Or rather, as a pirate, impersonating a man.

The truth is, Adelion’s butcher Kasalka came to the home of Lilari’s new betrothed to deliver her a private warning, which was that he knew who she was and what she’d done, and that Adelion would soon find out unless she paid his ransom. The price: the jewel of Adelion’s kingdom. But of course, Adelion didn’t care about actual, literal jewels. Adelion cared about the trinket he’d kept behind bars, which Lilari had stolen a long time ago.

So, the big truth: Teorestro Dometico as a person isn’t real. Never was. But his influence is real enough, because Dometico has a specialty: he makes people disappear. Senseless tales of brutal murder are really the only way imperial police don’t keep looking when a body fails to materialize in the sea. What matters is what people believe, which is that Dometico is a monster, a seducer, and a heartless nightmare of a man, which is all very critical and convenient.

If Kasalka were to reveal to Adelion that Dometico was actually a disinherited former noblewoman named Lilari, well, suddenly everyone who’s ‘lost’ gets found. And it’s a hard life for an Eristo’ah woman under Imalian rule. Which is to say, Adelion’s murdered wife is Eristo’ah, and the truth is she’s alive somewhere, hopefully at peace.

“Dometico.” Lady Elemora Mederico’s eyes narrow. She’s not a bad person. Not nearly as annoying as Sabiyana, who’s vain and flighty and dull. But Elemora would happily sacrifice Mer if she thought he was Dometico, which was Lilari’s plan until… well? Now.

Lilari, prepared to flee the moment she saw Mer and Sabiyana slip away, had been besieged by thoughts of the way Mer looked at her. How he touched her, like she was treasured. Like, if it were possible to make themselves another future, he could already see it taking shape. And then Lilari had thought: What life am I saving here, exactly? She imagined herself a week from now. Moromaso’s wife, bowing left and right, kissing rings, without even the promise of Dometico for distraction. What will be left of me when the beacon of Mer goes away?

“What are you doing?”

It’s Mer, unhelpfully, as he was meant to take this opportunity to escape. Lilari wants to scold him, and meets his eye to signal something, possibly run, you idiot, run! But then she finds she can’t look away.

There is something so knowing in his gaze – a quirk of amusement, not mocking but sweet, as if he’s pleased and suitably chastened to learn she was never really in need of his help. In truth, it rearranges things for him, the realization that she resents his hypocrisy because she isn’t a hypocrite, just duplicitous! She’s a liar but not a traitor. In the look that passes between them, the one where they wordlessly exchange their respective tales of survival, they understand that the story which defines them is not one of cowardice. Because yes, survival, that’s all this is! And look how beautifully they’ve been doing it.

Without each other. For all these long, long years.

It was Mer who’d put this fire in Lilari’s heart, this desire for something close to rightness. This longing for the kind of purpose that is inextricable from sacrifice.

Where is Adelion’s wife now? Who knows. Nobody, and that’s the point. It’s her secret and Lilari plans to keep it that way, even if her own contrivances now demand that she do so with her life.

*   *   *

The march of imperial footsteps approaches – the sound of a dozen guards. Adelion. The doors burst open and Sabiyana screams, one hand flying to her necklace. Mer fingers the spells inside his vest, the swamp of it almost curdled by now. He faces his patron, who looks only at Lilari, piecing it together the way only a brilliant, cruel person can. Seeing the truth in what was once a clever but not quite convincing mask.

“Where is she?” he says in a voice loaded with the danger that sadism can pose. He won’t kill Lilari, not yet, not while he can still enjoy her suffering, and who could say when that kind of appetite will ever be sated?

Horrifically, Mer understands. He wants something from Lilari too, and how can that end? Thus far it is terrible, and consuming, and lifelong.

Admittedly, the end result is quite different. Mer loosens a piece of parchment from the fabric of his vest, holding delicately at the front of his mind to the promise of a different outcome. The welcome embrace of a very different life.

“She’s dead,” says Lilari. “And I’m afraid the dead are out of even your exhaustive reach, Governor.”

“Is she?” Adelion looks amused before letting his gaze travel to Sabiyana. “Where did the Duchess Seraysra get that, then?” Adelion steps forward, fingering the jewel around Sabiyana’s neck before he lets her go, turning to Lilari. “Sold, I imagine, to buy safe passage? With the right motivation, such transactions are easy enough to trace.”