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He walks back into the keep. Lyr’s pot of barley broth is bubbling on the fire. Damon wrenches at it and throws it across the room.

He tips over the table and smashes the chairs. He goes upstairs and rips the beds to pieces.

He’s always had a skill for destroying things.

Then he stamps back downstairs to the ruins. All the things he never deserved are gone now. Even Lyr.

Did he ever even have Lyr?

Was Lyr only ever a trap sent by a Hevelikar witch?

He thinks of those glowing runes on Lyr’s chest. His name in Ur-Ambolk. Did that mean this whole thing, even his own feelings for Lyr were just the meddling of the witch that covered Lyr’s body in scars?

He had once thought Lyr was a greater hero than he would ever be, a braver warrior. Lyr who had suffered so much cruelty and still met the world with a lightness and a kindness that made Damon’s heart melt. But was it real? Was all that true? Lyr had deceived him. Deceived him in the worst way. Damon’s head spins. It hurts too much. He finds the flask of sour red from the night before, unsmashed. He drinks it all and then goes to the cellar in search of more.

Damon passes the next few uncountable days drunk or sleeping. He hates every thought that crosses his mind while sober and awake so he avoids it. Once or twice he thinks to eat some of the hard bread the enforcers had left him, but mostly all he consumes is the sour wine that stops him thinking.

On the day he wakes with a pounding head and furred tongue to find the wine all gone he roars with rage and curses Zai with every foul word in every language he knows.

What now?

In a blind confusion, he searches through the sacks and jars and pots in the cellar, thinking, there must be something, something…

He finds the pot of sofi that Lyr had brought with him. Sent by Doroth Zain. From Zai as man. From Zai himself.

This must be what Zai wants from him.

He scoops all of it out with his fingers, a gritty grey paste. He swallows it.

With luck, it’s enough sofi to keep him asleep forever. That’s his last thought as he passes out on the cellar floor.

He dreams of war. He dreams of Black Eyes, the whore mother he never met. His father only ever called her Black Eyes. Damon doesn’t even know her real name. Did even Rafus know it?

He dreams he is six or seven in his bed at the Rose Palace. Lukas had just come to live with them. Lukas misses his mother. She’d doted on him before she died. A washerwoman called Suri. She died and Rafus had made the generous gesture to take Lukas in. She’d had a daughter too. Suki. But Suki had not been Rafus’s child. Damon cannot remember what happened to Suki. Rafus’s generosity did not extend to her.

Lukas struggled to adjust to life as one of Rafus’s sons. He’d lived wild before. Running around the back corridors in the servants’ quarters of the Rose Palace, doing as he pleased while his mother worked. Now he was expected to spend his days like Damon’s. Being educated. Learning letters and Magaar grammar and numbers and the history of the empire.

Damon is six or seven. Lukas had been crying for his mother and Damon had spoken sweetly to him until he slept. And now Lukas was sleeping and Damon was wide awake. Wide awake when his father opened the door of the bedchamber. He sees Damon’s open eyes and comes into the room.

“Black Eyes,” Rafus tells Damon, that night, “was my favourite woman. My woman of women. Perfection. Of all the women I’ve ever had, and there have been many, Black Eyes was the most beautiful, the most elegant, had the sweetest smile, the fiercest eyes. You are my firstborn son, Damon. No matter what. No matter that I was not married to your mother, you will always be my most precious child. The child of my truest love. I should have married her. It is my deepest regret.”

Seven years later, Rafus had sent Damon to slavery and war, to avoid punishment for his crimes.

If Rafus hadn’t done that Damon would never have met Lyr. Lyr who betrayed him and lied to him. Lyr who was a talisman of the Hevelikar.

Lyr who was sent to destroy him.

Lyr with whom it was never real.

Damon wakes on his belly lying on his ruined bed. Weak, wintery sunshine is coming from… somewhere. A window. He is not in the cellar. He groans in pain. His head is pounding but he’s used to that. He realises in fragments that he is in one of the bedchambers of the keep. How did he get here?

Someone else is in the room. Someone spoke when he groaned. Someone said, “He’s waking up.”

“Lyr?” he says, turning his head.

It is not Lyr. But he is not disappointed when he sees who it is. A tall woman with a strong heavy jaw and her hair shaved to the bone.

“Good Day to you, Sire,” she says with a white-toothed grin. “Found you half dead in your cellar.”