They camp on a dune. Below, the oasis glitters with the false patience of water that has watched too many men die for it. Palm crowns sway in the late wind like bored spectators. And beyond that—where the air begins to thicken with incense—Qixi-Lo sits in the basin like a pale jewel dropped into green.

  Except Puripal cannot stop staring at it.

  He sits with his knees drawn up, cloak pulled tight, watching the city’s silhouette darken as the sun slides lower. From here, the domes catch the dying light, turning it to bruised gold. The towers look sharp enough to cut the sky.

  It feels like a stage set.

  “Something’s wrong,” Puripal says quietly.

  Ta lies on his back nearby, one arm under his head like he’s lounging in a festival field instead of the edge of a siege. He squints toward the city and makes a sound that is almost a laugh.

  “What,” Ta says, “aside from everything?”

  Puripal doesn’t look at him. “The wind.”

  Ta lifts his hand and lets sand pour through his fingers. “It’s our desert,” he says. “The wind is always wrong.”

  Puripal’s gaze tracks the palm trees. Their fronds move, but the shadows under them do not shift the way shadows should. The smoke from a cookfire at the oasis rises in a straight column for a few heartbeats… then breaks sideways as if someone has cut it with a knife.

  “You’re imagining it,” Ta says.

  Puripal finally looks at him. His eyes are flat and bright at once, like water over stone.

  “I’m rarely wrong about this kind of things.”

  Ta shrugs. “Congratulations. You’re insufferable.”

  Lanau stands a little apart from the others, hair loose, charms clicking faintly as she moves. She doesn’t sit. She doesn’t rest. She keeps walking small circles near the edge of the camp, like a tethered animal trying to decide where the trap is.

  Her nostrils flare.

  “Something is wrong,” she murmurs.

  Puripal’s attention sharpens. “You feel it too.”

  Lanau doesn’t answer directly. She plucks a pinch of sand, rubs it between her fingers, and frowns at the way it clings.

  “It’s sticking,” she says.

  Up the dune, Naci is already barking orders.

  “No one undresses,” she says. “No one takes off boots. Armor stays on. Straps stay buckled.”

  A Banner groans somewhere in the line, exhausted and heat-sick, and earns a look from Horohan that could split bone.

  “You want to sleep,” Horohan says pleasantly, “sleep on the other side of the world.”

  Dukar checks the perimeter. Borak’s eagles perch on saddles and spear hafts, feathers ruffling as they stare into the darkening basin. Jinhuang sits close to Fol, the two of them murmuring. Lizi sharpens her knife with slow, angry strokes, eyes on the city as if she expects it to spit out enemies like teeth.

  The Banners are tired. Even the myth-bright ones sag with the day’s ride clinging to their shoulders. Their horses lower their heads and breathe hard. The desert has been chewing on them all afternoon, gnawing patience into raw nerve.

  And still Naci makes them stay ready.

  Because she feels it too, even if she won’t name it.

  There is a pressure in the air, like the moment before a storm breaks.

  Dusk comes. The heat bleeds out of the sand in slow, bitter sighs. Shadows stretch long and thin. The oasis below begins to smell stronger—water, rot, date syrup, smoke, and something else: camel musk, sharp and oily.

  Lanau stops pacing. Her head turns, slowly, as if a voice has whispered her name from behind.

  Then a horn blares—low and brutal, a sound like a throat being torn open. The dune’s far flank erupts with movement as shapes rise out of sand that should be empty.

  Camels.

  Not a few, not a scouting pair—an entire crescent of camel cavalry, pouring over the ridges and down the slopes, their long legs moving with horrifying speed. They come on with the patient momentum of a falling wall.

  Riders sit high on their backs, wrapped in cloth and leather, faces masked, eyes glinting. Spears jut forward. Bows lift.

  The first volley rips into the camp.

  A Banner goes down with a sound that is mostly surprise. Another takes an arrow in the throat and tries to shout anyway, blood bubbling through his teeth like laughter that has forgotten it’s dying. A camel swings its head, screaming, spittle flying. The animal’s bellow is so loud it vibrates in the ribs.

  “FORM!” Naci roars, and the word hits the camp like a slap.

  Banners scramble up, boots kicking sand, hands grabbing weapons. Horses rear as camels surge too close—horses hate camels. They hate the smell, the sound, the tall wrongness of them. A steppe horse would rather face a wolf than a camel’s rolling, furious eyes.

  Horohan is already moving, sword drawn. She charges toward the first rider who tries to break through the line, and her blade takes the man’s spear arm clean off at the elbow. It spins through the air, still gripping the haft, as if unwilling to let go of its job.

  Dukar slams into a rider’s flank with his own weight and steel, dragging him down from the saddle. They hit the sand hard. The rider’s head cracks against a rock hidden beneath the dune.

  Borak’s eagles launch. They swoop low and vicious, tearing at eyes, at exposed fingers, at the soft places under scarves. One rider screams as one rips his ear half off; another flails as another eagle claws his cheek open, leaving three bright furrows.

  Puripal tries to see the shape of the attack, tries to find the center like he always does.

  But they are surrounded. The riders appear from ridges Puripal swears were empty moments ago. A line of camels emerges from behind a cluster of palms at the oasis edge—palms that looked too far away to hide anything. Another wave crests the dune behind them, where their own scouts should have seen dust, movement, breathing.

  “How—” Dukar snarls between strikes, shoving a rider back with his shoulder. “We should have seen them—”

  “We should have smelled them,” Horohan spits, stabbing upward into a camel’s throat when it tries to crush a Banner under its knees. The animal collapses with a wet, terrible gurgle, spilling its rider into the sand.

  Naci fires her white musket once. The shot cracks the dusk open. A rider’s head snaps back, skull shattered, and he tumbles like a broken doll. She has no time to enjoy it. The reload is too slow. The attack is too close.

  Jinhuang is dragged backward by Fol as a rider tries to snatch her from the edge of the chaos. Jinhuang kicks like a furious cat, heel connecting with the man’s ribs. He grunts, surprised, and Fol uses that heartbeat to smash his own spear butt into the rider’s face.

  Ta ducks under a spear, slashes a tendon, kicks sand into a man’s eyes, then mutters, “Absolutely rude,” as if the enemy has interrupted his nap.

  And through it all, Puripal’s confusion deepens into something colder.

  Lanau turns in a slow circle, lips parted, eyes wide—not with fear, but with realization.

  “This is the wrong place,” she whispers.

  Puripal looks at her. “What?”

  Lanau’s gaze fixes on the “city” below—the domes, the towers, the walls gleaming faintly even as dusk thickens.

  A camel rider lunges toward her, spear angled for her chest.

  The spear passes through where she was and hits nothing but air. The rider stumbles, off balance, confusion flashing in his eyes.

  Lanau lifts both hands, palms outward, fingers splayed. Her charms rattle once, sharp as teeth. She draws in breath, and the air seems to draw with her, as if the world itself leans in to listen.

  She speaks—not loudly, but with a tone that cuts through noise the way cold cuts through cloth.

  The sand at her feet trembles.

  Then the “city” flickers.

  One dome wavers like a reflection in disturbed water. A tower blurs, bends, becomes a palm trunk for half a heartbeat, then snaps back.

  Lanau’s eyes narrow. She bites her thumb hard enough to draw blood, smears it across her tongue, and spits into the wind.

  The spit hangs for an impossible moment, suspended, glittering red in the air like a tiny floating wound.

  Lanau snaps her fingers.

  The suspended blood bursts into mist, and the mist spreads outward in a sudden wave—thin, shimmering, almost invisible unless you’re looking for it.

  The mirage shatters.

  It isn’t a dramatic explosion. It’s worse. It’s a quiet correction, the world snapping back into what it truly is.

  The domes vanish. The towers dissolve like smoke. The pale walls become nothing but open desert and low scrub. The oasis remains—real water, real palms—but it is smaller than it looked.

  And far, far beyond it—another shimmer, another line—the real Qixi-Lo sits on the horizon like a distant wound, a day’s ride away at least, watching them with indifferent stone.

  Around them, the battlefield changes shape as well.

  Where riders looked like dunes, they become men. Where shadows looked like empty sand, they become packed camel ranks, tucked in hollows and behind ridges with impossible precision. Where the “city’s” lights seemed to explain the world, there is now only the cold truth: they have been lured to the wrong oasis and ringed like animals.

  Naci turns, eyes blazing, fury sharpening into comprehension.

  “We’ve been played,” she snarls.

  Horohan spits blood, grins like a wolf.

  Puripal’s stomach drops in a way it hasn’t since childhood.

  And then a voice rises from all sides of the battlefield at once—from dunes, from palms, from the throats of the dying, from the very air that Lanau has just torn open.

  “HERE YOU ARE, TRAM?RYGDEL!”

  The words slam into the fight like a gong. Even the camels flinch, ears twitching. Even the eagles hesitate mid-swoop, wings beating in sudden uncertainty.

  Lanau goes still.

  Her face drains of color, not from fear, but from recognition.

  A shape steps out of nothing in front of her—one moment there is empty sand, the next there is an old woman standing with her feet planted as if the world belongs to her.

  Dolma.

  Her hair is gray and braided with bone charms. Her skin is cracked from wind and sun, eyes bright with a cruel, amused patience. The air around her hums as if it is holding its breath in reverence.

  Her gaze sweeps over Lanau, pauses, and her mouth twists.

  “Oh,” Dolma says, with faint disappointment. “It’s just you, my disciple.”

  Lanau’s jaw tightens. “I’m not your disciple.”

  Dolma’s eyes narrow, as if focusing on something behind Lanau’s face. “You carry my language badly,” she says. “But you carry it.” Dolma smiles, showing teeth that look too sharp for her age. “Then Tram?rygdel hides behind children now.”

  Lanau’s breath hitches at the name. She lifts her chin anyway. “Tram?rygdel didn’t feel like coming.”

  Dolma’s gaze flicks, briefly, toward the chaos where Naci’s Banners are holding a line against camels and steel. Her eyes glint with old resentment.

  “He never wants to come,” Dolma says. “He always wants to be free of consequence. Free of the mess he makes.”

  Lanau’s hands curl into fists. “He didn’t make this mess.”

  Dolma laughs softly, and the sound is like dry grass catching fire.

  “I will make him pay,” Dolma says, and her voice carries through the battle as if the wind itself is her throat, “and all of Tepr, and the princeling for what happened to Noga Khanzadeh and his wives.”

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  The camels scream and spit and shove forward with their tall, wrong bodies, trampling fallen spears, stepping on the dead with the indifference of animals and armies. Muskets bark. Arrows hiss. Sand jumps in little fountains where iron finds it.

  Naci’s Banners hold anyway. They hold because Naci is there, and her rage is a flag.

  But the circle is too tight, the enemy too many, and now there is Dolma.

  Dolma’s shape stands where Lanau revealed her—an old woman on clean sand that should be churned by blood and hooves, her feet planted as if the battle cannot touch her. Her eyes gleam with a cruelty so familiar it almost feels like family. When she speaks, her voice arrives from everywhere at once: from the hollow in a camel’s chest, from the wind slipping between teeth, from the space behind a person’s spine.

  “Children of the dunes,” Dolma purrs, and the camel riders flinch as if kissed. “You have waited long for this. You have bled for this.”

  Her voice is honey poured on a wound.

  The riders straighten. Their fear thins. Their anger sharpens.

  The morale shift is physical. It is not an inspiring speech; it is a hand shoved into the nervous system of an army, squeezing until they remember only one desire: kill. Men who were hesitating step forward. Men who were about to fall back shove their camels into the line. A rider who took an eagle’s talons to the cheek stops screaming, bares bloody teeth, and laughs like he’s been granted a blessing.

  Eagles wheel overhead, confused by the wrongness in the air.

  Lanau’s eyes widen. Her fingers curl and uncurl at her sides, charms clicking like impatient bones.

  She tries anyway.

  She lifts her hands and speaks into the sand, trying to stitch the air back. A gust answers her, flinging grit into faces, knocking a rider’s aim wide. For a heartbeat, the ring stutters.

  Dolma chuckles.

  Lanau digs deeper, voice tightening. The palms at the oasis edge shudder, and the water surface ripples as if something under it has blinked. A camel rears. A Banner uses the opening to drag a wounded comrade free, blood leaving a dark trail like spilled ink.

  Then Dolma speaks one word—soft, contemptuous—and the ripple smooths.

  Lanau’s words hit Dolma’s presence like fists striking smoke.

  “You’re pushing,” Dolma says, amused, her voice sliding into Lanau’s ear like a cold finger. “That’s adorable.”

  Lanau’s jaw clenches. “Shut up.”

  “Language,” Dolma scolds. “Your teacher would be ashamed.”

  Across the sand, Horohan cleaves through a camel rider and shoves the corpse off her blade with her boot. Blood sprays her cheek. She grins, feral.

  “Lanau!” she roars over the chaos. “If you’re going to argue with the ghost, do it faster!”

  Lanau doesn’t look away from Dolma. “I am doing it faster!”

  Dukar barrels into a knot of riders, shoulder first, dragging one down and stabbing another through the ribs when he tries to raise a spear. He’s breathing hard, sweat and sand making mud on his face. He looks up, sees Dolma standing untouched in the middle of hell, and a flicker of old superstition passes through even him.

  “Why is she—” he starts.

  Puripal parries a spear, rips it sideways, and kicks the rider’s knee out. The man drops with a howl. Puripal’s blade flashes. Blood darkens sand.

  His eyes flick to Dolma again, calculating.

  Ta ducks under an arrow that should have taken his ear and says, “I hate shamans.”

  A rider swings a curved blade at Ta’s head. Ta leans back and lets it pass, then stabs upward with the bored precision of someone pinning a note to a board. The rider gurgles and falls.

  Lizi appears like a thrown knife. She doesn’t approach through the obvious path; she uses chaos as cover, slipping behind camels, ducking between legs, moving where no one looks because everyone is too busy surviving. Her face is smeared with soot and sweat.

  She comes up behind Dolma’s form and drives her knife forward with both hands, aiming for the base of the skull—the kill stroke she has practiced on men who begged and men who never saw it coming.

  The blade meets… nothing.

  It slides through Dolma like through fog. No resistance. No blood. Not even a ripple.

  Lizi stumbles forward, off balance, and for a heartbeat she looks genuinely offended—as if the universe has broken the rules of stabbing.

  Dolma’s head turns slightly, slow as a cat.

  “Oh,” Dolma says, as if noticing a fly.

  Lizi bares her teeth. “You’re not real.”

  Dolma smiles.

  Then she vanishes.

  Not in a dramatic burst, not with sparks and smoke. She simply isn’t there anymore—like a thought interrupted. Lizi whips around, knife up, heart hammering, eyes scanning for a body to punish.

  Dolma reappears ten strides away, standing on a dune crest, serene as a priestess at prayer while men die below her.

  Lizi spits sand. “Coward.”

  Dolma’s laugh comes from above, below, inside. “Child.”

  Lanau grabs Lizi’s sleeve, yanking her back before a camel’s swinging head smashes her ribs.

  “Stop,” Lanau barks. “You can’t stab her.”

  “I can stab anything,” Lizi snarls, yanking free.

  Lanau’s grip tightens. “Not this. She’s somewhere else.”

  Lizi’s eyes flick to Dolma. “She’s standing right there.”

  “She’s not,” Lanau hisses, breath ragged. “It’s a projection. Like what Konir did in Noga’s camp eight years ago.”

  Horohan pivots, sword dripping, and barks, “If she’s not here, how is she making them insane?”

  Lanau doesn’t look away from Dolma. “Because projection isn’t harmless,” she says. “It’s a hand through a curtain. She can speak, she can press, she can—” she swallows, feeling the weight of her own limits— “she can lead.”

  Horohan wipes blood from her mouth with the back of her wrist. “How can we counter it?”

  Lanau’s mouth twists. “Dolma could touch and hold Konir through the projection,” she admits, voice bitter. “She could anchor him. Pull him. Break him.” Lanau’s shoulders tense. “I don’t have the power to do that.”

  Dolma’s voice blooms around them, delighted to be included in her own critique.

  “It would have been the first thing I taught you,” Dolma says, sweet as poison, “if you stayed my disciple instead of crawling after the cunning and useless Tram?rygdel.”

  “I am not your disciple,” Lanau spits again, louder now, forcing the words into the air like stakes.

  Dolma sighs theatrically. “You keep saying that,” she replies. “It’s adorable. Like a puppy insisting it’s a wolf.”

  Naci snaps her head toward Lanau. Her face is streaked with grit; her braids whip. She reads Lanau’s expression fast—the frustration, the strain, the contained dread.

  “We can’t kill her,” Naci says, not as a question.

  Lanau’s throat works. “Not like this.”

  Naci’s gaze flicks over the battlefield.

  They are being pressed. The camels’ sheer mass is pushing Banners backward into the bowl of the oasis, toward water that will become a trap. Nemeh himself still doesn’t show; the attack has the impersonal cruelty of a prince who sends other people to do the dying while he watches to see what breaks.

  Dolma’s morale-hold keeps the riders coming even when eagles tear at their faces, even when men fall from saddles and die in the sand.

  Puripal’s eyes meet Naci’s. There is a quiet exchange there—two commanders counting lives like coins.

  “This is unwinnable,” Puripal says, and there is no drama in it, only fact. “Not here.”

  Borak appears at Naci’s shoulder, panting, spear slick with blood. “I can punch a hole,” he says. “But we’ll lose people.”

  “We’re already losing people,” Naci replies.

  Fol rides up, face flushed, eyes wide, sand stuck to his lashes. Jinhuang is with him, jaw set, spear clenched in her hands with an ugly determination that looks a lot like Naci’s when she was younger.

  Jinhuang’s voice is tight. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Stay close,” Naci says.

  She lifts her spear high.

  “BANNERS!” she roars, and the word slams into her soldiers like a drumbeat. “WE CUT OUT!”

  She points toward a section of the camel ring where the riders are thickest, because the thickest places are sometimes the weakest—overconfident, crowded, slow to pivot.

  “Borak!” she barks. “Eagles—eyes!”

  Borak whistles once, sharp. His birds dive immediately, blinding. They rake cheeks, snatch scarves, claw at bridles. Camels bellow, heads tossing.

  “Fol!” Naci snaps. “You’re my right. Jinhuang, left. You do not drift.”

  They nod. “Yes, Khan.”

  Naci swings up into the saddle and draws her white musket with her free hand. She fires into the densest part of the ring—not at bodies, but at a camel’s knee joint. The shot cracks. Bone splinters. The animal collapses sideways, a screaming wall of flesh and panic. Riders jerk their mounts back, suddenly uncertain, suddenly crowded.

  “NOW!” Naci roars.

  They drive forward as one.

  Borak’s spear punches into a rider’s chest and keeps going; Borak uses the body like a lever to shove another man off his saddle. Fol swings his weapon with raw, heavy power, cracking a rider’s collarbone, then yanking him down by his scarf. Jinhuang stabs low, aiming for camel legs the way steppe hunters taught her.

  For a heartbeat, the desert shows them a sliver of escape: open sand, a line of dunes leading away from the basin. Hope is a dangerous thing; it makes men rush, makes formations break.

  Naci doesn’t let them break.

  “KEEP THE LINE!” she screams. “DO NOT TURN INTO HEROES!”

  Horohan laughs—a wild, delighted bark—as she hacks a spear in half and shoves the rider backward into his comrades. “Too late!” she yells. “I’m already a myth!”

  Dolma watches them punch through her ring with mild interest, like a woman observing ants find a new path around her foot.

  “You run,” Dolma calls, voice spilling across the dunes. “Run, little mountains. Run, little thieves. I will still find you.”

  Lanau’s eyes burn. She wants to answer. She wants to spit a curse that will crack Dolma’s teeth in whatever place her body truly sits.

  But she doesn’t have that power yet.

  The Banners begin to funnel through the breach, dragging wounded, hauling those who can’t walk, leaving blood in the sand as payment. Puripal barks orders, voice cold and steady, turning chaos into movement. Dukar takes rear guard with a handful of Yohazatz warriors, cutting down anyone who tries to follow too close.

  Naci raises her spear.

  “Fall back!” she commands, voice ringing over the screams. “We regroup on the high dunes—now!”

  ...

  Qixi-Lo’s palace sits on its oasis like a jeweled scab.

  In a high chamber with lattice windows and a view of the oasis, Khan Regent Nemeh drinks liquor with an old woman who looks as if she has already been dead for years and simply never bothered to mention it.

  Dolma sits cross-legged on a cushion as if she owns it. Her hair is a white snarl tied back with a strip of leather. Her fingers are stained with herbs and ash. A small bowl of black liquid rests beside her knee—not wine, not tea, something that smells faintly of burnt salt and bitter roots. Around her throat hangs a string of carved bone beads that click softly when she laughs.

  Nemeh lounges opposite her in a half-sprawl that tries to be relaxed and ends up looking like a boy practicing adulthood. His robe is rich—embroidered sleeves, a sash with metal-thread stitching—yet he has thrown a steppe cloak over it as if fur can change his blood. His hair is braided in a warrior’s style; the braids are too precise, too symmetrical, like a court clerk’s idea of exotism.

  Between them, a low table groans under the weight of food no one is hungry for: dried dates, roasted lamb sliced thin, sugared nuts, a bowl of salt that glitters like crushed glass.

  Dolma tips her cup back and drinks.

  Nemeh watches her swallow and says, with forced casualness, “So. How many men did you break tonight with your ghost trick?”

  Dolma smacks her lips. “Ghost trick,” she repeats, delighted. “That’s what we call it now? Here I thought I was performing sacred vengeance for the offended spirits.”

  “You were performing,” Nemeh says.

  Dolma’s eyes narrow, amused rather than angry. “Oh, little prince. Don’t pout. You’re the one who hired a shaman. If you wanted dignity, you should’ve hired a philosopher. They also lie, just more slowly.”

  Nemeh’s jaw tightens. He lifts his cup, drinks, winces at the burn. “I didn’t hire you. You came.”

  “I came because the desert has memory,” Dolma says, as if explaining a simple fact like gravity. “And because your enemies are my enemies. The world is so small when you count bodies instead of titles.”

  Nemeh’s fingers drum once against the rim of his cup. “You want Puripal.”

  Dolma bares her teeth in something that isn’t quite a smile. “I want his bones. I want his name to taste like rust in the mouths that say it. I want his brother’s ghost to spit on him.”

  Nemeh looks away toward the window. The oasis below is a dark patch of life. Palm fronds shiver. Lanterns bob along the walls like nervous fireflies.

  “And you want Tepr,” Dolma adds, tilting her head. “You want Naci. You want Puripal too, dragged through your streets so you can show everyone your teeth and pretend it is justice.”

  Nemeh’s nostrils flare. “I want what is mine.”

  Dolma’s laugh is soft and ugly and affectionate, as if he is a child insisting the moon belongs to him because he can see it. “Ah. ‘Mine.’ The favorite word of every man who has ever started a war.”

  Nemeh’s eyes flash. “Careful.”

  Dolma flicks her fingers, dismissive. “Careful? Look at you.” She gestures broadly at the room—the carved pillars, the silk hangings, the guarded door. “You sit in a palace drinking good liquor while your camel riders bleed in the sand. You’re safe as a pearl in a closed fist. And you tell me to be careful.”

  Nemeh’s mouth twists. “I am not safe.”

  Dolma’s gaze slides over him, weighing. “No,” she agrees, and there is something almost approving in it. “You are not safe. You are only sheltered. There’s a difference.” She taps the floor with one knuckle.

  Nemeh’s hand moves unconsciously toward the dagger at his belt. He stops himself. He hates when she notices his instincts.

  Dolma reaches for a date, bites it slowly, and speaks around the sweetness. “Tell me again,” she says, “how you are a steppe warrior.”

  Nemeh’s eyes harden. “I am Yohazatz royalty. I ride. I hunt. I—”

  “You wear fur in a stone house,” Dolma interrupts. “You braid your hair like a man who sleeps in the open, then you close your shutters because the wind is ‘unpleasant.’”

  Nemeh’s cheeks color. “A war is—”

  “A war is where the people bleed,” Dolma says, and now her voice is sharper. “Not where the maps sit. You want to be the equal of Noga, but you are hiding behind walls like a frightened merchant.”

  Nemeh’s smile turns thin. “Do not speak of him like you knew him.”

  Dolma’s eyes glitter. “Oh, I knew him.” She leans forward, bones clicking at her throat. “I knew his wives. I knew their songs. I knew the way they braided each other’s hair. I knew the way Noga sat by a fire and listened to people who thought they were invisible.” Her gaze sharpens further. “And I fought with them. Imbecile.”

  Nemeh’s lips part, ready with excuses, with politics. Nothing comes out. Dolma watches him fail to find a story that doesn’t taste like ash.

  “You want his legend,” Dolma continues, almost gentle now. “You want the world to say, ‘Nemeh is strong like Noga was strong. Nemeh is brave. Nemeh is worthy.’ But you don’t lead your army.”

  Nemeh’s hand curls around his cup until his knuckles pale. “I command.”

  Dolma’s smile is a blade. “From here.”

  Nemeh stands so fast his cup sloshes. Liquor splatters the table like a small, angry offering. The guards outside shift, hearing the movement, the thud of boots on carpet. He feels their attention like hands reaching toward weapons. He hates being perceived.

  Dolma watches him rise and says, bland as a clerk, “Careful. You’ll spill more than your drink.”

  Nemeh inhales through his nose. The air tastes of incense and old stone and the faint metallic tang that always creeps in when blood is close.

  “I will go,” he says.

  Dolma’s brows lift. “Go where?”

  “To the battle,” Nemeh snaps, as if it should have been obvious. “To the dunes. To the riders.”

  Dolma tilts her head. “To get sand in your boots?”

  Nemeh’s stare could pierce armor. “You wanted a steppe warrior. You wanted the equal of Noga. Watch, then.”

  Dolma’s eyes narrow. She looks pleased and irritated at once, like a teacher whose student is about to prove a point in the most self-destructive way possible.

  Nemeh strides to the corner where his armor rests on a stand: lamellar plates polished, leather straps oiled, a helm with a cloth veil meant to keep sand from the eyes. The pieces look used, but not used enough. Too clean. Too intact. Like a sword kept as decoration.

  He begins to strap it on.

  The first buckle catches. He yanks it tighter than necessary. The leather bites into his fingers. He doesn’t flinch. He has learned not to flinch in front of wolves. He has also learned how to look like a wolf himself, even when he feels like a boy trying on his father’s skin.

  Dolma leans back on her cushion, watching with open amusement. “Oh,” she says, “look at you. So heroic. The palace prince becomes a dune prince. Should we write a ballad? Should we get you a sad flute?”

  “Shut up,” Nemeh growls, fighting a stubborn strap.

  Dolma takes another sip. “It won’t help.”

  Nemeh pauses, breath sharp. “What won’t help?”

  Dolma’s gaze drifts to the window again, to the darkness beyond. “Going,” she says. “It won’t make them love you.”

  Nemeh’s hands still. Slowly, he turns his head, eyes bright with fury. “You say I will never be his equal.”

  Dolma shrugs. “You can’t be.”

  “Because I was born after him?” Nemeh spits.

  Dolma’s smile returns, thin and cruel. “Because you still think being loved is something you can take by force.”

  Nemeh’s throat works. He straps on the next plate with brutal efficiency, as if he can silence her with leather and iron.

  Nemeh takes a step toward her, armor creaking. For a heartbeat, the room is a knife’s edge. Guards outside hold their breath without realizing they are doing it.

  Nemeh stops.

  He realizes what he is about to do—strike an ally, an old shaman. He realizes Dolma wants him to. Not because she cares about bruises, but because she loves watching men show their true shape when they think no one important is looking.

  Nemeh forces his hand to relax.

  Dolma’s mouth curves with satisfaction, as if he has performed exactly as expected.

  He turns away from her and snatches up his sword, The Golden Scourge.

  Dolma watches and says, almost kindly, “If you die out there, at least it will be an interesting death.”

  Nemeh’s head snaps up. “Do you think I will die?”

  Dolma’s smile widens. “Everyone dies.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Dolma sets her cup down. Her fingers hover over the black bowl beside her knee.

  Nemeh’s eyes narrow. “What are you doing?”

  Dolma’s tone brightens with sudden cheer. “Divination.”

  She dips two fingers into the black liquid and paints a thin line across her own palm. The liquid is thick, almost oily. It catches the lamplight and reflects it like a tiny, dark mirror.

  Then she takes a handful of dried herbs from her satchel—crushed leaves and seeds that smell of smoke—and sprinkles them into the bowl. They swirl, then settle. Her eyes go distant, focusing on something that isn’t in the room.

  Nemeh stands rigid in his half-fastened armor, suddenly aware of how loud his breathing is.

  Dolma murmurs under her breath, words that sound older than the palace, older than the city, older than anyone’s right to be alive. The air in the chamber seems to tighten, as if the shadows are leaning in to listen.

  Nemeh feels, against his will, the cold edge of superstition creep up his spine. He hates it. He hates that part of him still believes in omens and curses, still feels the weight of names spoken in the wrong tone.

  Dolma’s fingers twitch. The bone beads at her throat click softly. Her lips part.

  For a moment, her expression shifts—something flickers across it that might have been surprise, or delight, or recognition.

  Then her mouth stretches into a grin so broad it looks almost painful.

  Dolma looks up at Nemeh and, seeing whatever the black bowl shows her, bursts out laughing.