Miro tilted his chin, acknowledging the compliment. “Now you will always have a way to look at her, even when…”

A chill ran down my spine. I had commissioned this portrait of Cirri so that I could see her when she had joined the ancestors, and all at once, the beauty of the paint unsettled me.

I was looking at future pain, at a gravestone. What good was paint when I didn’t have her? How could I have ever believed this would suffice compared to the living, breathing woman?

A low rumble reverberated through my chest.

He sucked in a breath. “I apologize, my Lord. No one wants to think of that now, in the present. Please forgive me.”

“You’re forgiven.” But my voice was dangerously deep, the anger of a fiend quivering deep inside me. What good was it? I’d rather have her, alive and warm and laughing, in the flesh.

It was a waste of talent. A waste of paint. I had been wrong to ask for this.

“It’s completely finished?” I asked, and Miro nodded.

“Signed and sealed.” He gestured to the signature on the bottom; he even had Edda’s writing style, and from a distance the signatures would appear identical. “I’ll have someone deliver it, my Lord. Where—?”

“The upper levels of my tower.” I needed to leave here, to stop looking at that face, because the next time I studied it with a hunger for every detail, Cirri would be in her grave. It sickened me now, the realization that I had not commissioned a beautiful memory, but a future quagmire of agony to wallow in. “Truly, Miro—Edda would be proud of you. You’ve got her eye.”

A quick, dark smile crossed his face. “I’m sure she would. I painted most of it from memory. Your wife doesn’t enjoy sitting still.”

“No, not unless there’s a book in front of her,” I agreed, finding it easier to speak with my back to that thing.

“Perhaps…” Miro examined the portrait, his gaze flicking to me. “We should do yours as well. A matched pair, as you are now.”

“Why?” Who on earth would want to look at such a thing?

Miro reached out, touching the edges of the canvas. “I know my mother painted you before you turned fiend. But when you hang Cirrien’s portrait next to yours, there will be no truth in that set, will there?”

I frowned, forcing myself to look at my wife’s image again. It was easier to think of it sitting next to mine the way I had been, rather than now.

My knuckle rubbed against my jutting cheekbone, felt the peaks beneath the skin of my face.

“No,” I said abruptly. “This is not a face that should be committed to an image. Let hers sit next to the old one. The only person to care will be me. Have it delivered, Miro. You’ll get your pay.”

I turned my back on him, no longer willing to look at the thing, nor to imagine the absurdity of that beauty next to my ugliness. What a joke it would be.

A stormcloud hovered over me all the way to the library, sickness and dread washing through my veins. Why did I have it made? What were all of Edda’s paintings, if not epitaphs in themselves? So few of them depicted anything pleasant or beautiful—she had spent the last years of her life painting the truth as it was, the truth we saw every day, and the cold fact was, the truth was horrendous.

Much better, I thought, for Cirri’s painting to sit next to a beautiful, long-dead lie.

But in the library, I found nothing. No lover to warm me and dispel the cold cloud of regret in my bones. Her table was empty but for neat piles of books, though her fragrance still hung in the air.

Along with something else; my nostrils flexed, tasting a thick, cloying cloud of jasmine perfume and the reek of a man’s sweat.

Kajarin had been here… but where was my Cirri?

I looked in my tower next, finding no sign of her, but Visca waited for me outside the door when I emerged. She leaned against the walls, paring her nails with a sharp dagger.

“Why is everyone lurking in the halls today?” I grumbled, and Visca raised a brow.

“I don’t lurk,” she said loftily. “I simply wait with great patience for the perfect moment to ambush my prey.”

I squinted at her. “That’s—”

“Come on, my lad. Let’s have a chat.” Visca slapped my shoulder, steering me down the hall. “Up on the wall, now, if you don’t mind.”

We crossed through the stableyard, where Cirri’s old maid was toiling to muck out stalls, coated to the knees in horseshit and mud. She watched us pass with furious, red-rimmed eyes, and I gave her barely half a glance in acknowledgement.

Bruise my wife, muck out shit. Seemed a fair enough trade to me.

Visca was ahead of me, climbing up the wall hand over hand, climbing with practiced grace. I followed, and when I reached the top, she was already leaning against the far wall, almost directly where Wroth had stood only a night ago.

“Tell me what you see, what you smell,” she said quietly.

As always, most of what I saw was a hundred thousand pines, their pointed tops poking through the sea of mist below. The mountains in the distance of either direction, encompassing the Rift like a long, narrow bowl. A few birds; an overcast sky.

This was not what Visca was looking for. My nostrils widened, taking in the scents I’d come to expect from the Rift’s forests: sharp pine, the delicate rot of the mast under the trees, the coolness of the air. A trace of urine from a passing fox; the carrion musk of a badger’s den.

“Not so much a hint of warg,” I said, as quiet as she had spoken. “I would’ve expected at least a trace, a scout.”

“Exactly.” For once, Visca wasn’t smiling or cocky; she stared over the mist with her mouth downturned in a grimace, eyes squinted at the corners. “Not a single one, when we’ve been harassed constantly for months? I don’t like it.”

“No.”

“It’s deliberate, that’s for certain.”

“Yes.” I breathed in again, and the air tasted natural, normal. No taint whatsoever. “But why?”

“Could be they’re trying to lull us into a false sense of security.”

I frowned at the mist myself. Thanks to Wyn’s bloodwitchery, Cirri would be protected at all times—even if, ancestors forbid, a warg made it over the walls.

“Or… they want me to come hunt. Hakkon knows I would investigate this sudden silence.”

Visca drummed her fingers on her dagger’s hilt as she thought. “That would make sense. Lure you out, and while the fiend is away…”

“The wolves will play.”

Even as I considered Hakkon’s motives for suddenly withdrawing his scouts, I felt the itch to go hunt, to stalk up and down the Rift until I found the warg-sign I knew was out there.

“When did the nightly visits stop?” Perhaps the presence of Wroth, two fiends so close to the Forian border, had made Hakkon rethink his tactics…

“A week ago. That scout you chased to the eastern border.” Visca sighed. “It’s not because of Wroth, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“How well you know me.” So this was a tactic to lure me out, and not because of our combined presence. I snorted. “Surely he doesn’t believe I’m so stupid as to leave her unguarded.”

My commander lifted one shoulder in an easy shrug. “It’s a fair enough gambit, isn’t it? But it makes you wonder what they’re up to where we can’t see them.”

A prickle ran down my spine at the thought of a bloody messenger appearing on our doorstep, with news of the worst kind—a not-uncommon occurrence before the Forian king signed a writ of peace and put an ‘end’ to the war. “The usual, no doubt.”

“Either way, I still don’t like it. It’s easy enough to keep you here in the keep, but I want to send out extra patrols, put more guards in the eastern villages.” Visca glanced up at me, long enough for me to read the worry hidden in her eyes.

“Done. Yours is the final word on that front.”

“That means fewer knights in the keep,” she reminded me, and it was my turn to chuckle.

“If I, and those things Wyn made, can’t stop a warg from getting in, a few extra legions won’t make the difference. Send them out. Better the Rift-kin have their protection than us.”