“Is this necessary?”

“Not at all,” the stooped, thickly bearded physician replied. “If you wish for the pain to return, that is entirely your prerogative.”

Vorona’s snarl would have crowned her the alpha of any wolf pack, but she took the mug of bitter muck and choked it down. All her protestations aside, she eagerly awaited the concoction’s numbing effects. Some days, it was all that made her leg or her ribs bearable.

The journey from Llael to Khador had passed in a fever dream of agony and infection—the most horrific experience in her life, made marginally more tolerable by the fact that she could remember only a fraction of it.

The first few days, once she’d finally reached a surgery with the necessary physicians and equipment to tend her injuries, were almost as bad. Not only was survival a hit-or-miss proposition, but it might well have been the less attractive option.

It was weeks, now, since her leg had been sewn up, the many pellets of shot dug from her flesh. The surgeons told her, again and again, how astonishing her progress had been. Vorona, herself, felt no surprise at all; of course she was stronger than this. She had a ways to go, yet, but she knew—she knew—she would manage it, and more.

She had to. For Khador, too much was at stake for her to fail.

Only when she’d awakened and proved so resilient, when her recovery had progressed a good ways, had anyone bothered to inform her of all that had transpired. Garland’s recovery of the documents was a canker on her soul, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

No, her ever burning, searing hatred was reserved for one Oswinne Muir, and the nation of Ord.

Everyone believed that the Cygnaran baron had somehow escaped Leryn almost a week after Vorona was injured, a week after the playwright had led his “cultural delegation” across the fields of battle and back home. But Vorona, Vorona knew better. She’d been in Leryn; had eyes throughout the city; spent long days watching Surros Manor.

And there was no. Godsdamn. Way! that Halcourt and his household of imbeciles had come up with a viable escape plan and snuck from the city unaided. Nor was it remotely likely that Cygnar had succeeded in inserting yet another team of operatives into Leryn so soon.

Which meant the baron and his sycophants had departed earlier than the evidence suggested. And so far as Vorona could see, that allowed for only a single possibility.

The pain held at bay by her fury as much as by the elixir, she forced herself up, stepped carefully across the room to stand beside a hardwood table. Atop it, a basin of water, a bowl of fruit, and various toiletries. She leaned on the wood, and fumed.

So, Ord conspired with the enemy while hiding behind their neutrality? That worthless, rodent of a nation, crouched—as it should be—at Khador’s feet? Oh, they would learn the price of deception, would come to envy the fate of Llael!

Not yet, no. Vorona knew the ways of politics, of diplomacy. Her theories alone wouldn’t convince the high command to move, nor was she prepared to risk an international incident on a hunch, no matter how certain.

But she could turn Section Three—and perhaps the Prizak Chancellery, if she spoke convincingly enough—to uncovering the truth. And then, when she had her proof . . .

“Doctor Dvoynev, kindly fetch my coat. I believe I’m up to paying Kommandant Kosorokov a visit. We have much to speak of.”

“Oh, certainly.”

The voice was far too close behind her, and very definitely not the doctor’s.

Even wounded, slowed by the drug, Vorona lashed back with a high elbow that should have crushed cartilage, cracked bone. Instead, she felt a hand slap against her arm, deflecting the attack—at the same instant a lance of fire pierced her side.

She felt herself spasm, the air flood from her lungs in a silent scream, her bladder release. Her head rebounded from the table’s edge as she fell, and she recognized a peculiar sensation—a strange pressure in the midst of the pain—as a length of steel sliding out of her right kidney.

Flopping very much like a trout smacked from its upstream leap by a hungry grizzly, she flipped herself over to stare into the face of her murderer.

“That . . .” She could no longer tell if she was actually speaking, or if her lips moved in silence. “That’s not . . .”

“Not possible?” The man placed the knife that had killed her beside the corpse that had once been Doctor Dvoynev. She recognized the blade that had slain the doctor as one of her own.

Probably hid a pouch of Cygnaran gold swans somewhere on the body, just for good measure. It’s what she’d have done . . .

Her assassin carefully wiped the blood from his hand and then stroked his neatly trimmed goatee. “I shouldn’t be here? This place is too secure?” He tsked his tongue a few times. “Did you imagine his Majesty recruited me solely for my intricate storytelling and witty dialogue? Getting in wasn’t that difficult. Getting out ought to be child’s play.

“Oof. ‘Child’s play’? Such a cliché. I really need to come up with a more original line when I file the report on all this.”

“Why are . . . in Khador . . . ?”

He knelt, inches out of reach—just in case she had one last strike left in her. “We’re not at war, remember? One of my troupes is performing An Orgoth Goes a’Courting over in Volningrad. I figured I’d make a brief detour to scenic Rorschik. Should be back before anyone knows I’m not just snoring off a wild night in a private room somewhere.”

Now he did hunch inward, his face so near her own. “Sounds like I almost waited too long to come calling. Did you really think we wouldn’t suspect your suspicions? That we could afford to let you live with them?”

“You . . . You can’t hide . . . hide what you’ve done from us . . . forever.”

“My dear Vorona . . .” said Oswinne Muir, “I think you’ll find that we can. Or rather, I suppose, you won’t. Dead, and all that.”

Something wet gurgled in her throat as she tried to retort, and then, blessedly, the pain began to fade.

Alas, the heat of her rage, and the light of the world around her, went with it.