The messenger didn’t arrive from the south for another two days, and when he did, he didn’t come to tell us what had happened in Rahasabahst. We learned of his arrival by stumbling upon his horse in the stables, and we found him in the great hall, eating some stew. A tall, blunt man who moved his mouth from side to side as he chewed and lost bits of his supper in his long beard. He didn’t know who we were, of course, so he didn’t stand when Princess Iyedraeka entered the room. Vaenahma moved to his side and told him to correct this oversight.

  “Stand,” they said.

  The messenger looked up at them and squinted. “What are you, then?”

  “A lieutenant in the Garrison of the Courtly Palaces. Stand.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  Vaenahma seemed angry. We had all been angry for days. Our anger was a soup of boredom, worry, and frustration. Princess Iyedraeka’s face was drawn, and Martiveht looked oddly abstracted. I saw Vaenahma’s hand go to their sword and intervened. “You have news of Rahasabahst?”

  The man turned his head to stare at me. “‘Was told to deliver it to the commander.”

  “He’s drunk in the cellar. Deliver it to me.”

  “And who are you, then?”

  “Listen,” I said. “This is Princess Iyedraeka. You are in the presence of royalty.”

  That got the man to his feet. He leapt up so quickly that he spilled his stew. It splashed up onto his robes. He dabbed at it with a piece of bread while also trying to straighten and salute. “I didn’t know,” he said to Vaenahma. Not to me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tell your news.”

  “King is back in the palace,” he said. “White Cats came down and freed him from the shrine, then the two dukes’ army came down the river.”

  “Chahsaeda?” Iyedraeka asked, and the fact that she just blurted it out, without any elegant preamble, revealed the depths of her agitation.

  “Is that the prince, then? The other one, I mean? The one who didn’t revolt?”

  “You seem curiously ill-informed,” Vaenahma commented dryly.

  The man shrugged. “Came up from Taeltaht for the corvee. They made me a ranger yesterday. I can ride, you see. Set me on a horse and told me to follow the river so I wouldn’t get lost.”

  “And Prince Dasuekoh?” Iyedraeka asked. Not ‘my husband,’ or just ‘Dasuekoh’ without a title. She was done with him, that much was apparent.

  “Slouched back to Kaikoelahtu with his wife.”

  “I am his wife.”

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  This discomfited the man even more. “Thought he was married to a bandit queen.”

  Iyedraeka didn’t deign to answer him. She turned to me with a swish of skirts. “Captain, we’re leaving.”

  I felt relief sweep over me, and didn’t question her. Martiveht and Iyedraeka had been packed and ready to go for three days at that point. I and Vaenahma had nothing we needed to take except for our swords. We went down to the wharf without even saying goodbye to the old uncle, and we were off.

  It was stupid and dangerous for us to take to the river. The only boat we could find was an old canoe, and it was still raining. It didn’t matter. We needed to get to Rahasabahst, and we needed to get there by the quickest route.

  Boating in the rain is a miserable business. The wet wood of the paddle rubs against your palms and turns them red, and you worry over the threat of blisters. The water soaks through your clothing and accumulates in the seat of your pants, and buried memories of swaddling clothes make you feel infantile and foolish, so that you’re tempted to overcompensate by pulling on the paddle with greater ferocity, breaking the rhythm that the other paddler is depending on. I was in the front, so at least I didn’t have to see the miserable slouch of Iyedraeka and Martiveht’s shoulders, or the way that the rain bedraggled their hair. It was autumn, and the rain carried a chill within it, but the river was low after the long summer, and we had to paddle out towards the middle to avoid hidden stones and fallen branches.

  We came to Doefrit’s Bend in the late afternoon. The rock formations stared down at us. The ribbons on the bridges hung lank in the rain. We steered the canoe down a channel that ran between stone outcroppings and past an abandoned wharf. An old man was smoking in the door of an inn. He lifted a hand to us, and we shouted, asking for news.

  He didn’t want to shout back. Instead, he came out onto the bank and stood as close to us as he could get, and the smoke from his pipe became thin as rain fell into the bowl. “Only a few messengers, riding up and down the road,” he said. “They say that the king is safe in his palace.” He glanced behind him, at the huddling buildings and the houses on the bluffs. “Do you think there will be punishment?”

  “Punishment?” I asked.

  “The rangers were here, and they attacked the king at the shrine. They were here for several days.”

  “And you gave succor to the enemy,” I said. I was surprised by how angry I sounded.

  The man shrugged miserably. “They had money, just like anybody else.”

  “Spend it. It may be your last.”

  This worried him, but there was something else that was preying on his mind. “There are ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “I saw my son last night. I took him to the shrine six years ago, when he died. Why isn’t he still there? What business does a ghost have walking free of a shrine?”

  Martiveht gave a little hiss. Vaenahma stared at the man, their face blank, their expression calculating. “No business,” I said, my tone softened by the man’s fear.

  We paddled away. I glanced back as we turned through the channel and saw him standing there, unmoving in the rain. His pipe had gone out.

  An hour later, we were in Rahasabahst. The walls rose gray and gloomy above the river, and I saw soldiers standing on the parapets of the River Gate. The docks of Viepahrik District loomed up on our left. We passed them by and received barely a glance from the stevedores and ship captains who had resumed the work of commerce as soon as the revolt was ended.

  We paddled past Tarahnvae District, picking up our pace, anxious to be home. We passed the House of Song. All of the laundry had been taken in, and the house’s many roofs seemed strangely naked. We passed the street that led up to my own house, and I gazed up it with longing, wishing, irrationally, that my grandchildren were standing on the bank and waving at me as we went by.

  We came at last to the King’s Quay and steered the canoe towards the dock. There were guards standing along it. King’s Guards, in their rain cloaks and high helms. They watched us with dulled faces. But the person who met us when we stepped out of the boat was a reedy, mustachioed bandit with a drawing of a white cat pinned wetly to his robes.