Isaiah's room was on the second floor of the palace. Something clinked at the bottom of the door as he shut it. Niccola looked down to find a smaller trapdoor pinned open in its bottom corner, no doubt for Pekea. Isaiah motioned Niccola away from it. She complied, puzzled, and he crouched and flipped it shut without latching it, so that it could swing freely. Niccola immediately identified his motive. Their conversation would be less audible from outside without an open hole in the door.

"I presume you heard about the death in the lowlands," said Niccola as soon as he straightened up again.

"In full detail. How much do you know?"

"I saw the body."

He fell silent for a time. When he moved again, it was away from the door. "Where would you prefer to sit?"

Niccola glanced critically around the room. "You have only one chair."

"I have asked my parents for a second one before, but my mother is of the opinion that it would be wasted on me for as long as I live alone. Pekea does not count, despite her love of robbing me of this one."

"I'm fine with the floor if you are."

He responded by pulling a pillow from behind the dragon on the chair—she chirped in protest—and tossing it to Niccola with unnervingly accurate aim. He himself took a reading pillow from his bed and set it against the wall. Niccola dropped hers on the carpet and sat facing him as he picked his way down the buttons of his formal vest. He pulled it off and discarded it with little ceremony.

Niccola could not resist a tease. "Stripping down for me already?"

His grimace drove home the commonality they had discovered last night. It lightened Niccola's heart to see it, despite all the mixed feelings that ought to take precedence. Those feelings were not gone, but there was something humanizing about seeing the crown prince of Calis in plainer clothes. They were more equal that way.

Isaiah tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Niccola's eyes darted to his throat, where she could easily lunge with a knife if she meant him harm. He was trusting. Perhaps too trusting, to be sitting like this alone in the presence of someone who had already professed to mean his family harm.

"You are awfully calm for someone hosting a potential assassin," she said.

"You presume I am unable to defend myself."

That answer caught her off guard. Her startled silence surely gave it away, but Isaiah's expression had not changed when he opened his eyes and looked down again. Removing his vest, Niccola realized, was not just for informality. He was more free to move this way.

"In the market, you said you suspected a Talak for the disappearances," he said.

It was half a question. Niccola answered both the spoken and unspoken halves. "I still do, but no longer a Talak alone."

"Is this connected to the lead you said you had on your sister's disappearance?"

He remembered every word they'd spoken at the ball. Niccola expected to feel a flare of distrust towards him for hoarding that information, but what struck her instead was an odd kind of reassurance. It was not trust, but she was glad not to have to explain everything to someone on whom her cover rested. It also showed he thought her worth listening to.

"It might be," she said. "When my sister went missing, I took a possession of hers to a diviner, in search of any clue regarding her whereabouts. What he gave me in return was the name of your realm and the face of a woman who has something to do with my sister's disappearance. I do not know what role she played, if any; whether she was an innocent bystander, or whether she had an active hand. I suspect the latter."

"Why did you come to the ball to find me?"

"Because you bear a familial resemblance to one another."

Isaiah's whole body tensed. Niccola's hand jumped to the knife in her bag as he got up, but he only moved to the door and rested a hand against it, listening. When he confirmed the hallway empty, he locked both the door and Pekea's escape hatch.

"Never let my parents hear that from you," he said quietly when he turned around. "You will find yourself investigated, and deported if you are lucky."

It was as good as confirmation of her suspicions. Calis had covered up a necromantic in their palace once, and they would do it again. Niccola opened her mouth, ready to return fire, but Isaiah cut across her.

"I do not know of another necromantic in my family. Believe me when I say I have taken pains to investigate every member since Madeira began reporting disappearances a year ago, then Drevo shortly after, and believe me when I say I would not have risked my neck to do so if I did not believe it a possibility, or did not care."

"Your realm has always cared," said Niccola coldly.

"For all the wrong reasons. I am not my parents. I rank lives above appearances."

"Yet you have not told them your suspicions?"

"They have the power to strip every modicum of freedom and choice from my life. I have deemed it more impactful to retain my position and access to the palace archives than to find myself locked in a room for the rest of my life while my mother chooses my bride and dictates what I can or cannot do for my people. I do not expect you to sympathize, but you will find yourself in a tight spot indeed if you refuse to understand."

Heat and cold seethed together in Niccola's chest. This was the fate of her realm he was talking around. "Then fight them," she snapped. "Or get help behind their backs. You have the authority to make decisions on compensations in the lowlands, and if that is the case, I can only presume you have access to the palace treasury. Hire private investigation if you cannot do it all yourself. Talakova knows, your realm has the money for it."

"Actually, we don't," said Isaiah shortly. "Calis crawled out of an economic collapse shortly after I was born. It has barely recovered."

Niccola froze, halfway to her next argument. She would have shot him down had she not already noticed the barrenness of the palace.

Isaiah continued before she found a different angle of attack. "My parents were the first in two generations to convince Madeira to lift the sanctions they imposed on us after Dinah was exposed. It has been hard enough for me to wring the treasury for compensations."

"Last night's ball would have looked fine on a compensation note, I'm sure."

Bitterness ripped Isaiah's expression. He spun away from the door, and Niccola was sure he would have thrown something if he'd had something to throw. Instead, he strode to the window and dropped his weight on its sill, head down and fists clenched against the stone. Niccola got to her feet. Isaiah tensed, but she had no intention of approaching him. She stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the room, waiting.

"I can't do this alone."

He said it so softly, Niccola nearly missed it. She raised an eyebrow, but there was something more to Isaiah's words. Something she couldn't decipher.

"You want my honest answer?" he said. "That's my honest answer. I can't find a necromantic or fight for compensations if I'm kicked out of the palace, and I'll be disowned if I refuse the marriage. I'm not opposed to it if I can find the right person, so my parents seized their opportunity to show the realm how 'wealthy' we are"—he spat the word like it tasted foul; like he too disapproved of the ball's extravagance—"and to prove the security of their lineage. It was my only leverage to get the ball, rather than being matched to the only Madeiran noblewoman who'd deign to live in Calis, as if pandering to our neighbor was more important than finding someone I can rule beside. I can't do this alone, so I wanted to at least use the marriage to find that someone. If you were offered one way out of a situation like that, would you not take it?"

Niccola didn't know what to say. This was not what she had expected from the Calisian prince. This was not what she had expected from Calis at all.

She knew Calisian nobility and their obsession with appearances. It was that very fixation that had led them to downplay the threat of Dinah, a sister to the throne two generations back, as she became increasingly convinced that magic was the way to power. Her family exiled her to the lowlands under loose house arrest and thought their job was done. Instead, she cut a deal with the Talaks for a barrower line as useful as it was familiar: the ability to speak with crows, sealed with a blood offering that would guarantee necromantic status eventually. Blood offerings always did.

She hid all this from her family. Hid it so successfully, she was able to recruit crows from the comfort of her own cabin, to assassinate nobles and turn the realms in this corner of the Ring of Thirty against one another. When a crow was caught slipping poison into Madeira's royal wine, Varna was stormed. And not just stormed. Decimated.

The raids turned up nothing, but Madeiran presence in Varna did not withdraw until Calis was exposed. Dinah's family tried to eliminate her in secret, but failed on their first attempt, blowing their cover as having known for some time that Dinah was both a necromantic and the one behind the assassination that had led to Varna's invasion. On the second attempt, Dinah was captured. She was imprisoned and left to lapse, followed by a ceremonial release of her now-harmless crow form three moons later.

Even with Varna proven innocent, it had taken a generation to negotiate the expulsion of Madeiran military from the realm, then another to rebuild. Calis had seen far lighter punishment. And now, with the Varnic queen and king dead by what Niccola suspected was murder, the crown princess by barrower line nowhere to be found, and disappearances destabilizing the realms thanks to likely necromantic presence, history threatened to repeat itself all over again.

But Isaiah was not the perpetrator. If Niccola believed him on this, he was caught in the middle just like she was.

"What will you do if the necromantic is Calisian?" she said.

Isaiah grimaced, but did not reply.

Niccola's barely-fledged hope folded its wings under a renewed cloak of distrust. "What will you do?" she repeated, more demand than question now. "Command the Calisian military after them? Turn them over to Madeira? If you tell me you'll try to keep it a secret like your great-grandfather did—"

"I am not my great-grandfather," snapped Isaiah, with a force that shocked Niccola into silence. The anger and disgust that flashed across Isaiah's face faded the next moment, though, into something more conflicted. He jerked his head away, so she could not see his face.

Niccola gave him the silence as a chance to reply, and when he did not, repeated once again, "Then what will you do?"

"I don't know."

Her lip curled. If he would not command the Calisian military, nor seek help from the Madeiran one, she had no reason to trust that he would do anything meaningful about the necromantic. His responses were a paradox. He was competent, and seemed committed to the cause of catching and ending the necromantic threat. Yet he would not commit to doing so with one of the two main forces at his disposal.

"Do you have control of the Calisian military?" she asked. "Would they follow you if you asked?"

Isaiah didn't answer for a long time. "They would," he said at last.

"You sound doubtful."

No answer.

"Are you doing this alone?" said Niccola.

"Yes. Do you see my situation now?"

Alone. He'd already said he couldn't do this alone. Trying to negotiate with Madeira even if he did stand at the head of Calis would be ineffective at best, political suicide at worst; Madeira was thrice the size of Calis in a good year, with a political ego to match. It was primed to lash out if it got wind that its smaller neighbor was hiding another necromantic. So too were Isaiah's parents, who retained the power to simply remove him from the throne. They were too old to bear more children, but would have legal license to enthrone any extended family member if Isaiah was "proven" unfit to rule. That designation would take only the kind of lies the Calisian royal family excelled at. And with small realms like Calis and Varna each ruled exclusively by their royals, Isaiah had nobody powerful on his side.

Niccola wondered what story lay behind his uncertainty regarding the Calisian military. He had good reasons available to explain his reluctance to take control of it. Protection of political appearances was one; it would reflect terribly on Calis if its prince staged a military coup against his parents, whatever the threat at hand. Yet he'd already let weakness show in her presence. Unless that was all a ploy to get her to trust him, he did not seem to share his parents' fixation on appearances.

Another thought trickled into Niccola's mind. Isaiah had already warned her off speaking a word to his parents—not once, but twice now. Perhaps they were the missing piece. Even that, though, raised questions: Niccola failed to see how they could keep such control of a prince her own age, and so beloved by his people.

"What is your goal, then?" she said. If he would not elaborate on his own, she would prod him until he offered up details that assuaged her own suspicions.

"Immediate, or long-term?"

"Both."

Isaiah finally lifted his hands from the windowsill. Niccola returned to her spot and waited for him to return to his before they both sat. Isaiah dropped his head again and ran both hands over his hair, looking beaten. Then he just twisted his hands together and stared at them, unseeing.

"In the short term, I just need someone to work with," he said. His voice nearly broke, and he steeled it again. "I'm under no illusions that the way I'm working right now is sustainable, and if I am being honest? I'm lost. I don't know where to go from here. I need someone to plan with. Someone who isn't my family."

"You have Verde."

"He sells to the palace."

Ah. That wouldn't work, then; he'd be choked out of business and likely stripped of his position in the community if he got involved in something the royal family's monarchs opposed. Niccola liked the gruff but cheery coppersmith too much to wish him such a fate.

"Finding a partner is what I plan to use the marriage for," said Isaiah. "And by extension, the ball."

So he had not been twisting the truth when he'd said he was not opposed to marriage. Niccola had her doubts, though, about whether this was truly the choice he'd have taken if his hand had not been forced. Also by his parents. Her questions around them intensified.

"Did you find candidates?" she asked instead.

"Some."

He didn't look enthusiastic, but there was a deeper pain there, too.

"You understand the expectation most people have in relationship," he said, when Niccola remained silent. "The kind of intimacy. Physically. In bed." He couldn't keep his face from twisting. "I don't want to sacrifice something I don't want to give, but I will if I have to. If it's a way to be in relationship with someone who is perfect in other ways."

Something ached in Niccola's chest.

"And long-term?" she said, a distraction from a heart sliding too close to empathy.

Isaiah didn't answer for the longest time.

"I want an alliance with Varna," he said at last.

Niccola bristled on reflex, but after everything he'd just told her, she could give him the benefit of the doubt. Whether or not she'd be willing to entertain whatever he said was a matter she would leave until after she'd heard him out.

Isaiah continued, "I want to formally apologize to their... to your realm and its royal family for what happened in Dinah's time. For the role we had in it. I want to extend some kind of compensation if I can, though that won't be likely until my parents stop sitting on our coffers. Then I want to pool our resources and our people's skills, and our political power, to solve this threat and stand up to Madeira. I know you'll probably call me crazy, but that is my ultimate dream. To make up with Varna's royal family, and to negotiate peace."

Had he said it even half an hour ago, Niccola would have called him crazy. But though the words took shape at the edge of her mind, they came no further. He was speaking openly. He knew she was nobility, but not how high she ranked. And he was not speaking for appearances.

Isaiah laughed bitterly, something much more vulnerable cutting into his voice. "It is crazy. I know your realm has every right to hate us. We deserve it, and I'm perfectly aware that I'm a fool with more dreams than power, and more power than trust from you, let alone the Varnic royalty. Talakova knows how I'm even going to find a way to talk to the Varnic royal family. My parents are already about to close the border. Again."

"You want to talk to Varnic royalty?" said Niccola quietly.

This was the most foolish thing she could do in her present situation, but something about Isaiah's admission, apology, and willingness to sacrifice more than he should had struck a chord with her, deeper than she cared to admit.

Isaiah's head remained down. He didn't answer, like saying it the first time had already been too painful.

Niccola took a breath and let it out again. "What if I told you you already are?"