Jonnah was quiet as they passed the Guard at the stairs. He stayed silent as they climbed the three flights up to her floor. When they reached her door, Guelida said, “I’m glad we had this talk.”

“Inside.”

After a brief hesitation, Guelida let him in. She really was ready to be done with today, but she trusted Jonnah not to be wasting her time. “What’s going on?”

He closed the door and leaned back against it. He looked tired, worn. It was a little unnerving, and entirely the result of coming down off a long period of being boosted.

“Did you know?” he asked.

“Know what?”

He studied her face, his grey eyes unreadable. He waited.

Whatever game he was playing, Guelida had no patience for it. “I actually do need to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be—“

“My mother.”

Now she was completely confused. “What about her?”

Only now did his face relax and a tension Guelida hadn’t noticed was between them drained away. “You really didn’t know. Well, that’s something, at least.”

She and Jonnah had grown up together. They’d been friends, enemies, allies, rivals, in all the ways you were with the people closest to you in those formative years. Which meant Guelida wasn’t used to—and had no patience for—having no idea what he was talking about. “Seriously, I need you to make sense.”

“My mother has been made into a treaty provision. King Darius will deliver her to Aravene for justice.”

Guelida didn’t know what to say to that. The idea was so absurd. “Come on, Jonnah. You know better than to listen to rumors.”

“Not a rumor. Fact. Anison saw it there himself.”

Which cut through Guelida’s next thought, that someone had misunderstood what they’d read. Anison might do his best to avoid politics, but he knew how to read. Still, “There has to be a mistake. I’ve been in almost all the talks about what we want and what they want, and I swear to you, mother never talked about Miyelle once.”

“Maybe you’re not as inside her confidence as you thought.”

Guelida’s mind whirled through implication after implication, recalculating every political angle she’d thought she understood. “This changes…I can’t even…fuck.”

He pushed a hand back through his hair, a gesture of exhausted frustration. “Yeah. That’s about how far I got.”

It was one straw too many. Guelida’s brain had been working overtime for weeks, and now, with this, it simply stuttered to a stop.

Which was probably fine. Jonnah lived here the same as she did. He knew the players, the politics, the personalities. There wasn’t anything she could say that he didn’t already know. The one thing she did say, she hoped he knew, but she still had to speak the words. “I had nothing to do with this. If I’d known, I would have stopped it. Somehow.”

“Which is probably why they didn’t tell you.”

Jonnah moved into the room, collapsing into a chair to sit with his elbows on his knees and face in his hands. More than exhausted, he looked defeated, and this wasn’t anything she was used to seeing on him. She didn’t like it one bit.

She thought of Bastyen on the road today, of his casual mention of Miyelle and vaikenbonds. Knowing this—this treaty provision that Bastyen had to know about—it only deepened her conviction that Bastyen and his father were playing a game. That the Kardenel prince wasn’t half the fool he appeared.

“What can I do?” Guelida asked.

That earned her a watery smile as Jonnah looked up. “There’s the directness I missed.” He sighed. “I don’t know. Probably nothing. But I needed to tell you. I needed to know….”

He didn’t finish, but Guelida understood. He’d needed to know that she hadn’t betrayed him. That she hadn’t sacrificed years of friendship for political expediency.

Friendship. It was such an inadequate word. He’d been there, part of her life, for as long as she could remember. In recent years, as General Anison’s two proteges, they’d become even closer. In a different world—one where he hadn’t been the son of a traitor and she the daughter of the queen, or a world where Guelida’s struggles with her own gift hadn’t forced her apart from everyone...well, there was no sense thinking about it, was there? This was the world they lived in.

This was the world. “Go get some sleep,” she said, as kindly as she could. “Nothing gets easier from here on out.”

“I know.” The hopelessness in his voice—Guelida wished there was something she could offer. Some promise she could make.

There was nothing. Nothing that wouldn’t be a lie. So she stood there silently and watched him go.