“Ojo,” a man says, his voice all breath. He’s Gorakian, with black hair so short it’s patchy in places. His face is gaunt and his eyes a rich deep brown. “Ojo Hoa.”

Hoa stares at him, bewildered, as he falls to the ground at her feet. It’s only when he lifts his head to say her name again that I realize he’s crying. For a moment, Hoa is at a loss, but after looking around the room she drops to the ground beside him and places a hand on his cheek before speaking softly in Gorakian, the words slipping together as seamlessly as drops of water in a stream. The man nods fervently, his eyes boring into hers. After a moment, Hoa rises, taking the man’s hand and bringing him up with her. Her eyes have turned to steel.

“It is not enough,” she tells me in Kalovaxian. I don’t understand what she means until she clears her throat and tries again. “It is not enough to bring food here. We must also bring them hope.”

* * *

—

Hoa insists on seeing the camp in its entirety, and all I can do is trail after her. I don’t know how she does it—how she can look at so much ugliness and pain without flinching from it. How she can ask to still see more. I don’t want to see more—I want to turn and leave and bring more food in a few days if I can, but I don’t want to understand this place the way she does. I can’t take it.

I follow her anyway as we go from house to house, walk down every street, and I try to mimic her grace, how she holds herself together in the face of so much misery.

“We must also bring them hope,” she said, as if it were a physical thing we could deliver in a basket tied with ribbon. As if it were easy to share with others when it’s hard enough to keep my own hope from dying.

When I say as much to Artemisia, she shakes her head. “Hope is contagious,” she says. “When you have enough, it spreads naturally.”

BACK AT THE HOUSE OF the Elders, I find Sandrin with his book again. Though he glances up at me when I approach, he goes back to reading immediately after. I almost think him rude, but I try not to take it personally. If the book’s well-worn condition is any indication, it must be an engrossing story. I gingerly sit down next to him on the mattress and wait for him to finish. When he does, he marks his place with a scrap of paper and sets the book aside.

“Can you read?” he asks me.

I blink. “Of course,” I say before biting my lip. “I mean, I can read Kalovaxian perfectly well. I can read some Astrean—my teacher told me I was advanced for a six-year-old, but now…well, I wouldn’t say I’m even average for sixteen. Astrean was forbidden in the palace. I was forbidden to speak, to write, to read.”

His mouth purses. “We will have to teach you, when there is time.”

I can’t imagine when there will ever be time for that, but I don’t say as much. It’s a kind offer, and I accept it with a smile.

“Your friend is quite popular,” he tells me. “Where is she now?”

“Hoa is helping with the food distribution,” I say. “The Elders were concerned it would cause a mob, but she’s keeping the crowd calm and organized.”

He nods. “She has a gift with people,” he says. “In Astrea, we would have said that she was a storaka.”

“A child of the sun?” I ask, picking apart the roots of the word.

“Who doesn’t love the sun, after all? Some people have that same energy about them—they draw others in, make friends out of strangers with a single smile,” he says. “You are not a storaka,” he adds.

I should feel slighted, but I can’t deny he’s right. I don’t have the gift that Hoa has. I am not an easy person to love.

He looks at me with appraising eyes. “There was a story in Astrea that you might remember hearing as a child, about the rabbit and the fox?”

Bits and pieces of it come back to me—there was a rabbit who wanted to please everyone, so she rolled in mud for a pig, stuck feathers to herself to please a chicken, painted spots onto her fur to impress a cow. Then she came to a fox.

“The fox said it would like the rabbit best in a pot of boiling water,” I say. “The rabbit hopped right in and the fox cooked her alive and ate her for supper.”

Sandrin smiles grimly. “There is no pleasing everyone without losing yourself,” he says. “And you are surrounded by foxes. What will make you happy?”

“It isn’t that simple,” I say, frustration leaking into my voice. “It isn’t just about me, it’s about them”—I gesture to the door, to all the hungry refugees in the camp—“and it’s about the people in Astrea wearing chains. My happiness is irrelevant if it comes at the cost of theirs.”

He considers this.

“And what does saving them cost you?” he asks.

“The cost is…,” I start before trailing off. “The cost is marrying a stranger with strong enough armies to take on the Kaiser.”

I wait for his admonishment, for him to tell me again that queens don’t marry, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pats my hand. “That is a difficult decision,” he says.

“It is,” I say, my throat tightening. I blink back tears, focusing on my reason for coming to speak with him. “Sandrin, do you know anyone who knows about Guardians?”

His hand falls away from mine and he sits up a little straighter. “What about Guardians?” he asks.

I hesitate, a confession about Blaise’s earlier outburst rising to my lips. I push it down and choose my words carefully. “There was a Kalovaxian girl I became friends with—or, I thought we were friends, I suppose. I’m not sure what we were, really. Before I left, I poisoned her and her father with Encatrio and it killed him, but she survived.”

Sandrin stiffens. “She survived,” he echoes. “But she is not the same.”

I shake my head. “She’s scarred by it and she has…she has Houzzah’s gift.”

He takes this in, his expression unreadable.

“It’s impossible,” I say when he remains quiet. “Houzzah would never bless a Kalovaxian. He would let the poison have her and be done with it.”

His smile is tight and grim. “To try to understand the reasoning of the gods is to court madness.”

“No,” I repeat. “I don’t believe it’s possible. I don’t believe…” I trail off because I have no choice but to believe it. I saw it with my own eyes—I felt the heat her touch left behind on the cell bars that separated us, hot enough to burn.

“What is to be done, then?” I ask. “A Kalovaxian with those kinds of powers…and she’s the Kaiserin now as well.”

“I have no answer to that,” he admits. “None you don’t already know.”

I swallow. “You mean I’ll have to kill her.”

It isn’t the first time I’ve been told this, but the last time, Cress was innocent. She was just a girl who liked pretty dresses and wanted to marry a prinz. It still feels like a fist closing around my heart, but it’s different this time. Sandrin is right—I knew somewhere deep down that killing Cress was the only way to stop her. All those nightmares that have been haunting me, they all ended with her ending my life, and dreams or not, I know there is truth in them.

I push the thought aside before Sandrin can see how much it affects me. “And…,” I trail off again, unsure of how to phrase my next question. Blaise was right; if anyone suspects he’s unstable, they’ll kill him. I’m not naive enough to believe that Sandrin is an exception to that.

“Have you ever heard of someone going mine-mad and surviving it?” I ask him.

Sandrin frowns. “That, in and of itself, is a contradiction. Mine madness by its very definition results in death. If it doesn’t, it isn’t mine madness.” He pauses. “But then again, I suppose death comes for us all in the end, so perhaps that isn’t fair. How long has it been?”

“It’s not…” I tell him. “It’s hypothetical.”

He doesn’t believe me, I can tell. For a second, I expect him to press me for details, but eventually, he shakes his head.

“Mine madness is not a disease, no matter how we might treat it like one. It’s the magic in the mines—some people can handle it, some people can’t,” he says.

“It depends on the gods’ blessings,” I say, nodding. This much I know.

He cocks his head to one side thoughtfully. “That is the most common explanation, yes. It has always been the one I have chosen to believe, but there are others. Less poetic ones. There are some who believe it comes down to other factors—a person’s blood, or their constitution. Perhaps it is all true, in a way.”

“If this is philosophy, I don’t think I care for it,” I tell him. “How can they both be true?”

“I’ve always thought that belief in something lends a kind of truth to it. In this case, we may never have a sure answer, so belief is the only truth we have.”

Frustration bubbles up in me. “That’s not an answer, it’s only more questions,” I say. “Have you ever heard of someone who’s gone mine-mad and survived?”

He eyes me warily for a moment before shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I’ve never heard of a case of mine madness lasting more than three months before the sufferer perished,” he says.

Perished. It’s a pretty word, prettier than died.