But he hated the softer part of him, the one that whispered, over and over, Forty years. Forty years. Forty years.

Forty years of this feeling. This unbearable tightness, of being caught in a cage of helpless rage and grief.

Because some part of Nicholas was listening. Some part of him heard the truth in the old man’s words, and was reaching, grasping for the solution presented to him. Nicholas had the oddest feeling that he was back on his deathbed, a fever wracking his brain. There was a haze about the man, an unreal quality.

“You seem to believe that I am blind to my own faults,” Ironwood said. “But I improved the world. I did my part to fix it, after years of fighting between the families. I brought us stability and order, and brought the worst of the travelers to heel. As long as the astrolabe is in play, we will never have peace.”

“Is that why you let your sons die?” Nicholas asked sardonically.

The man rasped a hand over his chin, his shoulders sagging. “I have been asked to sacrifice so much, and I have come so far, and still…still we die out, like an inferior species. I wonder from time to time what my life would have been like, had I not been tasked with this role. I think I might have been a merchant, a sailor. You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you? How vast the world is, when you cannot see anything but water on the horizon?”

“Stop it,” Nicholas said. “I know what it is you’re doing—”

“The moment I knew you had that inclination, that you were a natural…I recognized myself in you,” Ironwood said. “My father. His father. All forged in the same fire. And when you fought so hard to leave our family’s service, I knew for certain; for a true Ironwood cannot bear stagnation, or to be held against his will. You made your brother seem like nothing more than a yearling. He never had the grit he needed to manage the family—that grit which has kept me searching for the astrolabe all these long years. That which brought you here tonight.”

Nicholas startled at the word brother. As long as he had known the man, he had never heard him use that phrase, without qualifications.

“I am nothing like you,” Nicholas said. The old man rose to his full height, looking him in the eye.

“You have not yet lived a full life,” he said. “You have not accumulated the triumphs and the sorrows. When you are my age, you will look back and see a stranger, and then all you will have to your name will be your convictions.”

He believes he has done right by us all, Nicholas realized. There was nothing false or scheming about his words. He had spent years as a child cowering in the servants’ hall and shrinking back at the sight of the man as he strode through the house. Like a soldier, his swinging fists always seemed to enter the room first.

In his youth, when he traveled with Julian, he had seen a calculating emperor who demanded tribute from his followers and tribulation from his enemies. And now he saw…an inverse of himself. A warning of what might come from rationalizing the lapse of his own morals, compromising his deepest values with the false promises of just this once and never again.

“You are my true heir,” Ironwood said. “You alone. I was a fool for squandering your potential for so many years. We can begin again. I am not as young as I once was, and there are so many now who would betray me. I need your assistance in certain tasks, as a guard, as my eyes in places I cannot be.”

I cannot kill him. Sophia and Li Min were right, but their reasoning was flawed. To give over to the baser instincts of revenge would hand the old man a victory; it would undo Nicholas utterly, splinter him more and more with each year. He could not damn himself with this. There was nothing so important as being free from this man, his poisonous words and bloody legacy. If that meant his own death, then at least he might escape this man’s pull that way, and deny him an heir.

His grip on the dagger tightened, until he felt the dragon on its hilt imprinting its shape into his skin, lending its ferocity.

“You say these things like you know where to find the astrolabe,” Nicholas said.

“I do. It’s found its way into the Witch of Prague’s hands,” the old man said. “I received the invite to the Belladonna’s auction only yesterday. We only need to bid now and it’s ours—I have far more secrets to tempt her than anyone else who may come.”

The words swept over Nicholas’s skin like fire, blistering through the layers of muscle and bone. The Witch of Prague, indeed. What a fool he’d been. If he’d known at the beginning of their appointment that she was the original bad penny, he would have parsed her words more carefully. In the last report I received, yes, a Thorn was still in possession of the astrolabe….

So precisely phrased. If he hadn’t been blinded by his own desperation he might have been able to dissect what she didn’t say. In the last report. Not presently.

The woman was a fearsome creature, choosing and evaluating her words with the mind a jeweler would pay to buying precious stones. Loathsome, of course, but there was no denying her cunning; if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d poisoned him, he might even respect her for it, just that small bit. No wonder she had survived Ironwood’s rule. She was that rare, dark thing that thrived by tricking the light into passing over it, that fed only on shadows and deceit.

“You need time to think on this, I know,” Ironwood said. “But we haven’t any. You—I must tell you something, and it cannot be shared outside of this room. I will not have panic in our ranks, and I know logic prevails for you as it does for me.”