Silence. A moment during which I’m certain I’m wrong.

Then the whisper of footsteps behind us, all around us. Far ahead, a powerful silver-faced figure emerges from behind a tree, his thick white hair half-hidden by a hood. He doesn’t look any different than he did months ago, when I first snuck him out of Serra.

Two dozen men surround us, their uniforms impeccable, Gens Veturia colors worn proudly. When I step forward, their backs snap straight and, as one, they salute.

“Blood Shrike.” Quin Veturius salutes last. “About damned time.”

* * *

Quin orders Harper to stay with his men, then leads me through the crumbling house built into the mountain and into a series of caverns. It’s no wonder Keris hasn’t found the old man. These tunnels are so extensive it would take months to explore all of them.

“I expected you weeks ago,” Quin says as we walk. “Why haven’t you assassinated Keris yet?”

“She’s not an easy woman to kill, General,” I say. “Especially when Marcus can’t afford for it to look like an assassination.” We trek upward until we emerge onto a small, flat plateau, walled in on four sides but open to the sky. It is home to a hidden garden, wild with the beauty of a place once lovingly cared for but left alone for too long.

“I have something for you.” I pull Elias’s mask from my pocket. “Elias gave it to me before he left Blackcliff. I thought you’d want it.”

Quin’s hand hovers over the mask before he takes it. “It was a nightmare to get that boy to keep it on,” he says. “I thought he would lose the damned thing one day.”

The old man turns the mask over in his hand, and the metal ripples like water. “They become part of us, you know. It is only when they join with us that we become our truest selves. My father used to say that after the joining, a mask held a soldier’s identity—and that without it, a bit of his soul was stripped away, never to be recovered.”

“And what do you say, General?”

“We are what we put into the mask. Elias put little into it, and so it offered little in return.” I expect him to ask me about his grandson, but he simply pockets the mask. “Tell me of your foe, Blood Shrike.”

As I relate the attack on Navium, the loss of the fleet, even the presence of the statue, Quin is silent. We walk to a pond in the garden, bordered by paint-chipped stones.

“She’s up to something, General,” I say. “I need your help to figure out what it could be. To figure her out.”

“Keris learned to walk here, before I moved her and her mother to Serra.” He nods to a barely visible path that leads to a pergola dripping with ivy. “She was nine months old. Tiny little thing. Skies, Karinna was so proud. She loved that girl to bits.”

He raises his eyebrows at the look on my face. “You thought my dear late wife was the monster from whom Keris learned? Quite the opposite. Karinna wouldn’t let anyone touch a hair on that girl’s head. We had dozens of slaves, but Karinna insisted on doing everything herself: feeding her, changing her, playing with her. They adored each other.”

The idea of a sunny-haired baby Keris is so far from what she is now that I can’t conjure the image. I force myself to hold back the dozens of questions in my head. Quin’s voice is slow—almost halting—and I wonder if he’s spoken to anyone about this.

“I wasn’t there for them early on,” he says. “I was already a lieutenant general when Karinna and I married. The Karkauns were pushing hard in the west, and the Emperor couldn’t spare me.”

He sounds . . . not sad, but almost wistful. “And then Karinna died. The Emperor didn’t give me leave, so it was a year before I returned home. By then Keris had stopped speaking. I spent a month with her, and then it was back to the battlefield. When she was chosen for Blackcliff, I was certain she’d die in the first week. She was so soft. So much like her mother.”

“But she didn’t die,” I say. I try not to tap my foot in impatience. I wonder when he’s going to get to the point.

“She’s a Veturia,” Quin says. “We’re hard to kill. Skies know what she dealt with at Blackcliff. She didn’t have your luck in friends, girl. Her fellow students made her life hell. I tried to train her, like I trained Elias, but she wanted nothing to do with me. Blackcliff warped her. Just after she graduated, she allied with the Nightbringer. He is the closest thing she has to a friend.”

“He’s not her friend. He’s her master,” I murmur, remembering the jinn’s words. “What of Elias’s father?”

“Whoever he was, she cared for him.” We are past the pond now. Beyond the edge of the plateau, low, rolling hills ease into the flats of the Tribal desert, blue with the approach of dawn. “After Elias was chosen, she was unnerved, worried she would lose her commission. I’d never seen emotion like that in her before then, or since. She said she let the child live because his father would have wanted it.”

So Keris loved Arius Harper? His file was scant, but the Commandant always hated Elias so much, I assumed his father had forced himself on her.

“Did you know Arius Harper, General?”

“He was a Plebeian.” Quin gives me a curious look, mystified by the sudden change in topic. “A Combat Centurion at Blackcliff who was reprimanded repeatedly for showing mercy to the students—kindness, even.”