Dragon shite.

I must have set it down when I was bathing. Or when I was talking to Balon. Or when I was cleaning up, lost in a dizzy hum of happiness that my erstwhile suitor would soon be arriving. Really, it could be any number of places. I get out of bed and run my fingers over the mattress and blankets, looking for the knife, but my fingers encounter nothing but bedding. I do a blind search of my room as well, but it’s fruitless. I head downstairs and fumble through the darkness, searching the kitchen and then by the door.

I can’t find it. Not without some light to guide me.

Panicked, I return to my quarters and find my strikers and the box of candles. It’s empty except for two. Two lonely candles are left to last me the rest of the year. My panic increases and I clutch the candles in my grip. Do I dare light one? For something as frivolous as finding my knife? Or do I simply wait for it to surface again? After all, I can’t leave the tower. There’s only so many places it can be and I’m bound to find it at some point.

The loss of it hits me hard, though. It feels like I’ve just been abandoned by my only friend. Without the knife, I can’t check to see if Erynne and the baby are well. I can’t ask if someone’s coming to get me, or if the war is over. It doesn’t matter that the answers are unsatisfying. What matters is that I have some sort of connection to the outside world, and I feel lost without it.

Carefully, I put the candles back down and decide to search the tower again. I go over my room as best I can, handspan by handspan, shaking out every dress and blanket. Still nothing. It’s not until after I head out of my quarters to go search the kitchens that a new idea occurs to me.

What if Nemeth took it?

He was indignant that I touched his food, after all. What if he stole my knife as some sort of petty revenge? I pause on the stairs and then sit on the landing to his floor. I’ve never explored it or even stopped here, not after that first day. He made it clear that the first floor belonged to him, and I’ve done my best to honor that and give him space.

Not today, I decide.

Hands out, I feel in the darkness, hunting for the door to his quarters. His floor should be laid out similar to mine⁠—

A squeak of distress escapes me when my hands run into something hard and unyielding…and warm. Skin. Nemeth’s chest. I draw back, biting my lip.

“What are you doing on my floor?” he asks, tone ominous.

“I’m looking for my knife. Did you take it?”

“Why would I take your knife?”

“Because it’s magic. And because it’s mine, and you know it would bother me if you stole it.”

There’s a pause. “You said you didn’t have magic.”

“I don’t. I do, however, have a magic knife.”

“What sort of magic?”

I sputter. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“Then I’m not going to tell you if I have it.”

Infuriating, horrible man. No, not a man, a creature. “So you did steal it. Why?”

“I didn’t say that.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and spins me around. “Ten steps ahead of you are the stairs down. You should go. You don’t belong on this floor.”

I brace my feet, my stubborn nature rising. “I’m not going anywhere until you give me back my knife.”

He tries to guide me forward, but I push back. Nemeth clearly wasn’t expecting that response, because I smack into his bare chest again, and he grabs my shoulders, pinning me in place so I don’t topple in the darkness. It’s like he’s pinning me against his body, and I breathe hard, thinking about the naughty questions I asked the knife. If Nemeth touched himself to me. If Nemeth touched himself to me often.

Yes, and yes.

“Is this all a ploy to get me here to your chambers?” I ask, voice wobbling. “Are you so lonely that you can’t simply ask for company? You have to resort to stealing?”

With a disgusted sound, he pushes me away from him. That warm presence at my back is gone, and I’m adrift in the endless black. I automatically put my hands up in front of me, trying to find a wall. “You flatter yourself,” Nemeth says. “And I didn’t take your paltry knife.”

“Fine,” I call out. “No need to be nasty about it. Prick.”

I take a step forward, only to be lifted off my feet as if I weigh nothing, and then am set back down again, facing a different direction. A low, silky voice murmurs in my ear, “You’d fall down the stairs if you kept on as you were.”

Oh. My skin prickles with awareness at his kindness in moving me, at the easy way he hauled me into the air, but most of all, that deep, decadent voice in my ear.

Then he ruins it. “A smart woman would be looking for her lost belongings with a candle lit, instead of accusing her neighbor.”

Disgusted, I make a face at the shadows and find the wall, leaving with as much dignity as I can.

Chapter

Seventeen

Isearch all day and still don’t find my knife. I give up at bedtime, a candle for the briefest of moments so I can administer the injection of my medicine, and then blow it out again. That quick glance shows me that I’m low on my potion, and I’m going to need to make a fire. I’m going to have to burn my sled, and then I’ll be out of wood, just as I’ll be out of candles.

Things are getting desperate.

I lie in the darkness and contemplate my options. Balon won’t help me. He’s made it clear that he’s going to show up when he pleases, talk of nothing but court gossip to me, and then leave again. I have to make things last until the solstice next year, when new supplies will be delivered.

And as I check the root cellar for the dozenth time in the last few days, I come to the realization that I don’t have nearly enough supplies. Either I’ve been deliberately sabotaged or whoever is in charge of supplying me needs to be removed from their post. That, or I’ve managed my supplies so very poorly that I’ve gone through a year’s worth of goods in a season. It doesn’t matter. What matters now is that I need to take action.

I can run out of everything and starve. I can let my potion run out and die. I can bargain with Nemeth for some of his supplies.

Or I can kill him, just as Erynne suggested, and take everything.

The thought sits with me all day. I don’t think of myself as a murderer, but I also don’t immediately dismiss the idea. I don’t like the idea of starving while he sits all pompous in the shadows, but he’s got a name. We’ve had conversations.

It’s hard to kill the enemy. It’s doubly hard when you know their name.

I don’t have many options, though. I feel naked without my knife, even though there are other blades in the kitchen. It’s that my knife was my consultant, my companion, my advice giver. I search for it all over again the next day, and I think about Nemeth and how I would kill him.

I don’t have the supplies for poison. I don’t have the strength or stealth to take him by surprise in his bed.

Maybe a seduction? He’s dismissive of me, but he also watched me bathe and didn’t seem in a hurry to leave. I could seduce his goods out of him, I decide. And if that fails, I can invite him to my bed and then kill him.

Then I’d have no problems with food or wood to last me through the year…but I would be sharing the tower with a dead body.

For the hundredth time a day, I want to just get up and walk out of the tower. To somehow get the doors open and unbricked, and race out into the fresh air. Damn the favor of the Golden Moon Goddess. Damn the crops that would surely be destroyed if the goddess is angered. Damn it all and just take my freedom.

Thunder crackles overhead, loud and booming enough to make me jump. It’s as if the gods are reminding me that I’m at their mercy. Figures. It’s the first storm I’ve heard since arriving, violent enough to make the walls shiver each time the thunder peals and lightning strikes. Rain hammers on the tower, violent and furious, and it seems like fate when something wet drips onto my forehead.