"She's right," the fox said without turning. "You both need rest. I'll keep watch."
Hakan looked at me. I looked at him. The candlelight was low and the room was small and everything outside these walls was enormous and terrifying and closing in.
He pulled me against his chest. His arms tight, his face pressed into my hair. I felt the tension in his body — that rigid, locked-down quality of someone who has been braced for catastrophe so long they've forgotten how to stand any other way. Slowly, very slowly, some of it eased.
"Melo was right," he said. "About you being brave and foolish."
"She was describing both of us."
"She was being generous."
I laughed, and felt him smile against my hair, and outside the window the city was dark and dangerous and moving toward amorning that was going to ask more of us than either of us was ready for.
But we were here. We were still here.
That would have to be enough.
* * *
I left at first light.
The palace gates were open, which meant the rumors hadn't reached the guards yet. That wouldn't last. I slipped through the servants' entrance on the eastern wing, the one behind the rose garden. I'd discovered it at fourteen. Some secrets you keep not because they're important but because you might need them someday, and someday had apparently arrived.
My father's wing was two floors up and to the north. I knew the way by heart — had walked it a thousand times, running toward him when I was small and frightened, walking toward him as I got older and learned that some fears you approach slowly.
I turned the corner toward the main staircase and almost collided with Healer Sema.
She was a small woman, gray-haired, with the permanently worried expression of someone who had spent fifty years keeping important people alive. When she saw me, something moved across her face — relief tangled with something I didn't want to name.
"My lady." She caught my arms, steadying us both. "You're here. Good — we sent word, but I wasn't sure —"
"Sent word about what?"
Sema's expression answered the question before she did.
"Your father collapsed during a council meeting two days ago. His light — the divine core of it — it's dimming. We've never seen it in a god before. We don't entirely know what it means." She searched my face. "He's resting now. We finally got him settled an hour ago, and waking him would set back everything we've managed. He's been asking for you."
The floor felt uncertain beneath my feet. I put my hand against the wall.
"Is he dying?"
Sema was quiet for a moment too long.
"We don't know," she said. "It's not imminent, my lady. But he needs rest. He needs calm." She stopped herself. Then, carefully: "There are people in this palace who would use this. Who are already using it. Whatever business brings you here this morning, if it's the kind of business that would reach Lord Serkan's ears —"
"It won't."
She looked at me with the expression of a woman who had worked in palaces long enough to know that it always did.
"Let him sleep," I said. "I'll wait. I'll be here when he wakes."
She nodded, squeezed my hands once, and moved away down the corridor.
I stood alone in the hallway outside my father's rooms and listened to the silence on the other side of the door.
He was there. Sleeping, maybe for the first time in days, and I could feel the faint warmth of his light through the wood the wayI'd felt it my whole life — the particular golden warmth of Gün Ata, constant as sunrise. It had never occurred to me to wonder what it would feel like if it went out.
I pressed my palm flat against the door.
