THEY SPOKE FOR THE LAST TIME AT THE EDGE OF TOWN, NOT TOO FAR from Klein's bakery. Romhalde was quiet, the sun having just barely risen, the snow sparkling in the predawn light.

"This is it," said Heinrik, all of them crouched in the snow behind the crumbling remains of a pub. "I hope you're all ready."

Mun drew circles in the snow with a pale finger, eyes glowing, mediating their conversation. "Ready, Sergeant," she replied.

"Ahmed? Hassan?" Heinrik nodded at them. "Ready?"

Ahmed flipped a stray curl out of his eyes. "I was born ready."

Hassan smirked. "And I was born handsome." He coughed. "But yes. I'm ready."

Heinrik spared him a smile before he set his gaze on Leonor. "What about you, mäuschen?"

She didn't have the energy to snap at him for the unwanted endearment. She could've closed her eyes and fallen asleep, right there in the rubble and snow. She hadn't rested as well as she'd hoped. "As ready as I'll ever be."

"Good," he breathed, swallowing. "Alright. Ahmed, Mun, we do things as planned. Mun, let me know if I'm putting too much strain on you. Ahmed, if anything goes wrong, take Mun and go."

"But what about you?"

"They can't hurt me."

"They're Solnayans. They'll find a way."

"It'll take them a while," he promised, though for a brief moment, terror skittered across his face. He was probably thinking of Major Dorokhov, who'd pulled five children from their beds only to slaughter them in the streets. "I trust you'll all find a way to save me. As for you two," he said, turning now to Leonor and Hassan, "Don't do anything rash. Lie low until no more smoke comes from the mansion's chimneys. That's when you'll know that Dorokhov is dead. I'll put out the fire in his hearth myself. How's your gait, Hassan?"

"About normal."

"Then trail Leonor wherever she goes. If you can't go any longer, hole up somewhere until you see the signal."

"Do you really think they'll all just come flowing out into the streets?" Ahmed leaned forward, frowning. "Do you really think they'll help us?"

"I think they're about as sick of this war as everyone else is. They want to see this occupation over."

"Heinrik..."

"Ahmed. Do you remember the oath we swore when we joined the king's army? When we became the Adlerauge?"

Ahmed's frown grew. "I pledge my loyalty to King Wilhelm of House Eberhardt, fifth of his name. I swear to defend this country on all of its borders, from land to sea."

"I will crush Leisenstracht's enemies wherever they may fight," continued Hassan.

"I will obey all orders given to me for the sake of every Leis man, woman and child," quoted Mun.

"I swear my allegiance to the fatherland, my trust to my superiors, and my dying breath to His Majesty, who has given me new life in his service," Leonor said. "Now and forever."

"We all agreed to join for a reason, didn't we?" Heinrik could melt snow with his gaze. "Some of us were promised riches. Security. The chance to stand alone. A future. Even if our ends are different, our means are all the same. We fight for what we want. And if we don't fight, we get nothing at all."

"Your mother ate honey when she was pregnant," Mun stated.

Heinrik blinked, taken aback. It clearly wasn't a response he'd expected. "What?"

Mun punched his shoulder. "You talk sweet."

At first, no one said anything. They all stared at each other, unsure of what to do next.

But Hassan let out a quiet snicker, and then they were all laughing, Mun trying desperately to keep the noise they were making under wraps. Leonor couldn't help but crack a smile, even though her guts were knotting together in her abdomen.

Heinrik was the first to sober. He cracked the tiniest of smiles. "It's been a privilege," he whispered.

Leonor had the strangest urge to throw her arms around him. They'd slept back to back all night, but she still felt the need to embrace him, to forget that they were probably going to their deaths. She didn't know if they'd ever see each other again.

This is war, she told herself. You can't be certain of anything. You have to act before it's too late.

He looked over at her, and she couldn't breathe. This was the boy who'd approached her that first night at Quellfluss. He'd been surrounded by admirers and well-wishers, recruits who meant to elevate themselves next to a von Griffin. He could've stuck with them and been happy. Instead, he'd approached Leonor in the canteen. You looked lonely, he'd said. She'd meant to strike him until she realized that he'd been right.

The worst part of it all was that even after feeling lonely every day until Heinrik von Griffin took that seat beside her, she still felt alone whenever he left.

He stared at her for a beat longer, as if expecting her to do one last thing. His lips were twisted with hopeless melancholy.

But she waited too long. In the end, he stood. "Move out."

Ahmed, who'd been fingering his jade prayer beads, stuck them in his pocket. He took Mun's hand, then Heinrik's, and the three of them walked into a fold of absolute darkness, disappearing completely.

"Well," she said to Hassan, throwing him a cursory glance as she hiked the rifle up her shoulder, "let's get moving."

✵ 

Romhalde, as far as Leonor was concerned, was a ghost town. With the sun having just barely crept over the horizon, the streets covered in a fine sheen of snow, she could've mistaken it for having been abandoned the day she'd left with hopes of joining the army. Windows were shuttered. Storefronts were boarded up. Remnants of blown-apart brick littered the ground.

Hassan's voice was soft at her side. "Where are we going?"

"Into the void," she told him, peering out of the shadows of the alley, tuning into the weave. There was a patrol three blocks away. She'd need to wait a moment before crossing to the next street over.

He gave a nervous laugh. "Right. No, really. Where are we going?"

She blinked the strings away and put a hand on the strap of her rifle, Ipatiev's ushanka warm on her head. Hassan's white teeth pierced the half-light, his smile lopsided with anxiety.

"In the centre of town, there's an orphanage." She was careful to keep her tone clear of inflection. "Behind it, there's a narrow alleyway that's good for spying out of."

"How narrow? Not that I mind being pressed up against you..." He cleared his throat. "...or anything, but I think that boss might have a problem with it."

Leonor looked down. Even with her bulky coat, she wasn't exactly ripe to cuddle up to. "Why would Heinrik care?"

"You two are so close."

She looked at the weave again. They were safe to move. "It's not like that at all," she mumbled, grabbing his wrist and pulling him from the alley. They dashed across the street, pressing themselves into the shadows of the old library, the worn red sign trembling in the winter air. An icicle fell from it, shattering on the cobblestone.

"Your leg?" she asked.

Hassan swallowed, chest heaving. "Fine," he bit out. "Just a bit..." He winced. "Painful."

"I'll try and go slower."

"No," he urged. "Really. I'm fine."

She glanced sideways at him, her grip on his wrist slackening. "Are you sure?"

He looked down at his boots, and after a moment, he shook his head. "I'm a little worried about Mun. If I feel like this with a scratch, how does she feel with a bullet in her shoulder?"

Leonor contemplated that, letting go of Hassan's wrist. "You do know that her brothers used to shoot her with arrows, right?"

"Better than anybody."

"Then you know that she'll be fine."

"But it was a bullet this time."

"Bullets are self-sterilizing," she informed him, not knowing if it was entirely true. "She's going to be fine. Ahmed and Heinrik are with her." Leonor motioned for him to follow her. "If you're done..."

"You're not really good at giving advice, are you?"

She sighed and kept walking, keeping to the places where the sun hadn't yet hit—and yet, even as the sun continued to rise, the streets were void of people besides the occasional patrol, even though Leonor estimated it had to have been past seven in the morning. In her childhood, the residents of Romhalde would be out and bustling by six-thirty, shopkeepers tending their wares, children making their way to school.

But there wasn't a whisper of movement anywhere.

Had Heinrik's plan worked? Had Herr Klein managed to rally Romhalde into a rebellion? Would they stream into the roads and make a beeline to Duke Berengar's mansion, where a contingent of Solnayan troops would await them?

"The smoke," Hassan whispered.

"What?" She whipped her head around, trying to see over the line of the houses around her. "Has it stopped?"

"No. Sorry." He smiled apologetically. "Will we able to see it from your hiding place?"

"It's not my hiding place," she snapped. "Not mine specifically at all."

Hassan withdrew. "I didn't mean to offend you—"

"I'm not offended." She exhaled sharply. "Yes, we'll be able to see it from there. There's a direct sightline from across the square to the mansion."

"Oh. That's great." His shoe scuffed the cobblestone. "Say, Leonor..."

"What is it?"

"Where did you used to live?"

Everything within her froze, even if her body kept moving, winding through foul-smelling passageways between the shops of Romhalde's tiny commercial district.

At her lack of reply, Hassan continued, "Were you born here, or just raised here?"

"Why do you care?"

"I don't know. I thought we were friends."

She paused, and he paused with her. He wasn't as tall as Heinrik, but he still dwarfed her, brilliant green eyes luminescent even when he wasn't looking at the weave. A sliver of light highlighted the tip of his tall, curved nose.

Why was she making time for this? For him?

"Raised," she muttered finally. "No more questions. Let's go."

"Let's go," he agreed.

As they moved, Leonor saw a map of Romhalde in her head, keeping track of their route. They'd started off in the southeast corner of town, close to Klein's bakery, and had headed west, for the orphanage. They couldn't have cut across the farmlands—too open—and not the centre of town, either, where a massive bell tower cast a shadow over the square. Barricades lined the area, and when she'd looked at the weave earlier, it was a mess of gathered patrols, convening on the bell tower to keep track of where everyone in town went—not that anyone was anywhere but home right now.

She reckoned that they were a street or two away from the industrial district by the smell of burning coal in the air. The factories were closed, the smokestacks and furnaces' operations halted, but nothing could rid the area of the traces of progress that remained. She'd grown up with the smell in her lungs, ingrained in her so deeply that just being here made her see the grey snow that used to fall in the winter, covering the ground in piles of soot and ash.

"We've just got to cut across this street here," she breathed. "Do you see that alcove?"

"Yeah. Is that where we're headed?"

She nodded. "There's a crack that we can slip through."

"Are you sure we'll fit?"

She shrugged. She hadn't grown much since departing this place, much to her chagrin, but she supposed that being small was useful for some things after all. She gave Hassan a quick once-over, listing her head.

"You'll have to hold your breath."

His jaw went slack. "Indefinitely?"

"As long as it takes for you to slide through that crack."

She squinted, bringing the weave into view. There were the patrols, perhaps five streets north, braving the cold under Dorokhov's orders. There was nothing of note back the way they'd came, which meant that no one had been tailing them.

"Go," she said, and together they sprinted to the alcove, ducking into the shadows that it so graciously draped onto them. Then, feeling around on the brick behind her, she told him, "Watch me."

The crack was even smaller than she remembered. She sucked in a quiet breath, slipping into the narrow pathway, darkness growing around her until all that remained of the outside world was a small line of light, which was quickly blotted out by Hassan.

"This is tight," he wheezed.

"Best not to talk," she warned, taking the path inch by inch. "You might get stuck."

She heard a frantic gulp, but nothing more as they squeezed their way through the crack and into the alley behind the orphanage. Leonor emerged unscathed, but Hassan wasn't so lucky; he'd come out with two scratches on his cheek, breathless and wheezing.

"Please tell me there's a way out of here," he gasped.

"There's a way out of here."

"And it's not that crack?"

She shook her head. He threw his head back, thanking her.

Even if the rest of Romhalde had changed, this place had not. The wall that made up the backside of the orphanage was covered in faded chalk drawings and scratches in the brick made by rambunctious children. She could see herself, seven and frail, sitting with a rock in her hand and trying to decide, if at all, what she would write. Her small, pale head had been bowed, tiny hand shaking as she brought the rock to the brick, writing her name in the only alphabet she knew. A boy had come up behind her, taking her by surprise, forcing the last letter of her name into disarray.

She swallowed and took a step towards the wall, searching for her name. It was faint but there, nearly all scribbled out, written in jagged Solnayan. It was barely visible amid the rest of the names carved into the worn, once-red bricks. Her last name wasn't there. At the time, she hadn't even had one yet. All she'd taken with her to Romhalde was her name, as unassuming as the rest of her. Leonor was not a Solnayan name, and she'd known of two others that shared her name in this orphanage alone.

She blinked her past away as easily as she might blink away the weave, sliding her rifle down her shoulder, taking it into her hands. "Come around this way."

Hassan followed her as she made her way around the building, a canvas tarpaulin draped from a locked window onto the fence that surrounded the east side of the building. The wood of the fence had been eaten away by time, browning in places and coated with a layer of ice. The ground was mercifully free of snow here; Leonor knelt, pressing the barrel of her rifle into one of the cracks between the planks of the wood. Hassan followed suit, wincing when he put too much pressure on his bad leg.

"Do you see it now? The mansion?"

Hassan squinted through the cracks in the fence, right before his face split into a brilliant grin. He'd found what she'd been staring at: the street, barricaded, that led directly to Duke Berengar's former residence. The mansion was as grand as ever, white paint gleaming in the morning light, elegantly carved moldings visible even from town, its windows dark and trees bare. The chimney atop the dark roof was still spitting smoke, the grey ash trailing into the sky.

Hassan looked up at the canvas that hid them from sight. "Will any of the children find us here?"

Leonor shook her head. "There are no doors into this alley. And anyway," she continued offhandedly, "Frau Pfeiffer punishes anyone who finds their way back here."

"Frau Pfeiffer? Does she run this orphanage?"

Leonor grunted her affirmation.

"Why does she punish them?"

Leonor gestured to the area they'd just come from. "A boy was killed back here," she explained, gazing down the sights of her rifle. Hassan froze in her periphery. Both he and his brother were superstitious, believing in spirits and ghosts and other such manifestations of the dead. She didn't believe at all, but her back still felt cold. "It was a long time ago."

"How?" whispered Hassan.

She could feel the weight of that rock in her hand, the solidity of it as she had carved her name into that brick. It was as real as the rifle in her hands, as real as the war that had stolen so much from them all.

"I don't remember," she responded, keeping watch over the smoke, the square, the area around the bell tower. "It was..." She breathed in, her lungs stinging from the cold. "It's like I said, Hassan. It was a long time ago."

He made a show of shivering. "Great. Thanks for the nightmares. And, by the way, leaving it up to the imagination? Not helping."

She pressed her lips into a firm line, saying nothing, practically turning to stone as she crouched in wait of Heinrik's signal.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Twenty.

"What are they doing in there?" whispered Hassan, tugging the hood of his coat up to protect his reddening ears. Enganans weren't exactly made for cold weather.

"Heinrik knows what he's doing. He'll give the signal."

"But—"

"He'll give the signal," she said, more forcefully this time.

But as twenty more minutes passed, and those forty minutes turned into an hour—she'd been counting—the beginnings of doubt curled like venomous snakes in her stomach. The smoke from the mansion still wafted unerringly into the clouds. The patrols continued. No one had left their homes.

She searched the weave, desperate. It was hard to tell who was who in the swarming mess of twitching that was Duke Berengar's mansion. If Heinrik, Ahmed and Mun were still in there, she couldn't be sure.

A sharp crack split the air, followed by two more, then four more. Hassan jerked where he crouched, startled by the sudden noise, tumbling into Leonor's side. She nearly fell over, losing her balance, but instead of meeting the ground, a breath huffed in her ear and she met a warm body.

They all toppled over together, landing in a heap on the cold earth. Hassan was heavy on her left arm. The person beneath her was swearing in what she was sure was Altanese. Peering down at her, green eyes glowing, was—

"Ahmed," she breathed. "Where is Heinrik?"

His face twisted. "I'm sorry. He told us to go."

"And you left him?!"

"You don't understand," Mun croaked from beneath her.

"I don't?" Leonor rolled off her, getting to her feet to point an accusatory finger at both of them. "He told you to go and you went. You left Heinrik in Dorokhov's hands." Her rage was blinding her. Heinrik was bulletproof, but Heinrik was still human, after all. They could shove a white-hot poker down his throat. Feed him poison. Set him aflame. No matter what she'd been told about the Solnayans while in training at Quellfluss, she knew they were not stupid, Dorokhov least of all. They would find Heinrik's weaknesses and kill him. "He's as good as dead!"

It was then that she noticed the tears on Ahmed's face. She paused in her vitriol. "What?"

"Dorokhov wasn't there," he told her softly. "It was an ambush. And Heinrik—" He drew in a shuddering breath. "Heinrik couldn't use his powers."

Leonor blinked. "I don't understand."

"Leonor," Mun said, her eyes wide with shock. "He was shot."

Ahmed turned away, hiccupping to hide his sobs. Mun wouldn't move from her place on the ground. Hassan began invoking the names of every god he knew. And Leonor—Leonor couldn't move. She couldn't even breathe, because she knew, she knew, that there was no way out now.

They were doomed.