The route Niccola led them on through the lowlands was one Isaiah was only passingly familiar with. She followed main roads at first, but quickly took to smaller paths: between houses, along the fences of farms where chickens ran clucking to the fence—they'd both finished their sweetbreads, and Niccola took a moment to boast to the birds about it—and beneath the shading trees of green spaces. When the paths narrowed too much to walk side by side, Niccola took the lead. What ensued was an awkward moment of deciding whether Isaiah should rest a hand on her shoulder or follow by some other means, cut short when Niccola declared, "Well, if we're going to fake-court one another, we might as well keep up the image," and grabbed his hand without further ado.

This did prove most effective. Niccola forged ahead again, her skirts swishing like water against the grass. Isaiah quickly learned to read what she was seeing based on the tension in her hand, just as he could by the way Pekea's claws tightened or loosened against his shoulder. Niccola tugged more quickly when the path ahead was clear, and held tighter, holding him back if it was rocky. At one point, her hold tightened inexplicably on a smooth road.

"Is your face known in Madeira?" she asked in an undertone. "There is a woman in Madeiran dress ahead."

"Good. The faster news gets back to Madeira that I appear to be courting, the more my mother might leave me alone."

Her pause betrayed a desire to ask further, but she simply pulled him onward again. They had reached the quieter western end of the lowlands, where people tended to converge from rather than to. Isaiah strained to pick up locational cues. He was rewarded by the hour-time song of shrine bells.

"And here's the path," said Niccola, halting. "You might want your cane for this one."

He untucked it from beneath his arm and found soft earth in the direction Niccola was standing. Trees rustled overhead. Their sound was a tribute to their density even with the sun behind a cloud, robbing Isaiah of the chance to read their shade.

"Should I trust that you have no plans to murder me in the forest at the end of this trail?" he said, a joke, but one he wanted her response to.

"I would never meet your family if that was the case, would I not? Also, you bought me sweetbread. And despite my disposition towards anyone who had a hand in my sister's disappearance, I am not actually fond of murder."

"How civil of you to be so discerning."

"If you met my sister, you might understand."

There was a subtle pain in her voice that she did not entirely manage to mask, though she certainly tried.

"Is she kind?" said Isaiah quietly, as they stepped onto a trail through the low trees. These were not Talakova trees, or even Talakova-adjacent. More like tall shrubs, though that did not stop Calisian citizens from compulsively clearing them in most places.

"She is... young. Ten years my junior. But she was always the more sensitive of the two of us."

Isaiah kept his silence, giving her space to continue.

She did. "She would cry whenever a bird died, especially in the rookeries. There were always casualties among the spring chicks. Phoebe would cry over each of them, and have to bury them each on their own. She had a whole ceremony to let the adult crows say goodbye. Yet she never stopped visiting. She would spend the night beside any crow that was dying, simply to comfort it. She had the family magic, so she could speak to them, but I suspect she would have done so even without that."

"She sounds like she has a strength to her."

"Of a kind. She would fight for the birds, but never for herself. I was her guardian. Especially after our parents..."

She cut short whatever thought she'd been about to express. Isaiah's attention sharpened.

"Say more," he said. "Are we out of earshot of any settlements?"

"There are none in this patch. Not anymore."

With that statement, the tight-pressing brush around them opened, giving way to an open space where crickets chirped softly and low trees rustled all around a ring scarcely wider than Isaiah's own room. His cane met a wall when Niccola guided him forward.

"It's a ruin," she said.

Isaiah stowed the cane in favor of a hand. His touch met mossy stone: a foundation. It was all that remained of the building.

"I don't know of what," continued Niccola, as she plopped down on the wall and swung her legs over it, stepping down easily inside. "But I've never found tracks here, and the trail back there is my own. Your people really do not like anything that isn't open sky."

Isaiah smiled. "Do yours differ?"

"We have small forests like this all over Varna. The crows adore them."

He followed her over the wall. The ground inside was soft; the ruin was an old one, for soil to have accumulated on its floor to a depth indistinguishable from forest ground. Niccola patted it, and Isaiah sat beside her. She kept her silence for some time more.

"The Catastrophe is happening again, Isaiah," she said at last. "Only I think Varna is the Madeiran palace this time, and I don't know who the perpetrator intends to frame. If anyone at all."

A crow's attempts to poison palace wine in Madeira triggered the last Catastrophe. Niccola was saying her parents were murdered.

Before he could respond or question her roundabout way of saying it, she added, "I see the crows adore the trees here too."

The flutter of wingbeats abetted her coded warning. Isaiah's skin crawled. It was almost certain that this was just a wild crow, but Calis's history with such an assumption had brought Varna to ruin before. The bird in the trees did not depart. Isaiah rearranged his thoughts to determine how best to code his next question. Speaking in riddles felt safer when the trees might have ears.

"What evidence do you have about the wine?" he asked. When Madeira's royals were nearly murdered two generations back, the youngest princess caught the crow in the act.

"Our wine rack is as empty as the rest of the kitchens. I found dead ants in the tea drawer not long after my parents' passing. Neither my sister nor I drink tea, but the recipe was never found to my parents' satisfaction."

"Was it missing an ingredient?"

"Only an exotic one if so."

"Ingredients can come from far in the Ring of Thirty. All the way across it, or all the way down."

An unknown poison, foreign enough that it was not identified in an autopsy. Varna was not as cut off from the rest of the Ring of Thirty as they were from Calis—the messenger-crows they bred were known everywhere—which left only the Talakova's depths as a source.

"I suspect it was exotic," said Niccola. "Beyond twenty-two and a half spans, as the crow falls."

That was the farthest anyone had ever ventured into the Talakova. The unsettling implications of the statement chilled the air between them. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, Isaiah could not help but shiver.

"I am the only walker in my family," he said slowly. "They never stray far from their homes or caravans, and the shade is not to their liking." They wouldn't have retrieved such a poison.

"I should like to meet them sometime."

"You shall have to, if this alliance is to be taken at all seriously."

"Are there any I should know not to speak about at the dinner table?"

Any suspects. Isaiah winced at the slightest prickle in her voice. "If there are, I am not aware of them either. I can promise you that."

And I can apologize a hundred times for the one my family kept silent two generations back, remained unsaid. Isaiah reached across and found Niccola's hand where it had stopped plucking the grass beside her. She returned his squeeze, and the breath she'd been holding caught as it escaped her. She wasn't withholding her words. She was withholding tears.

There was nothing to be said. Nothing that should, at least, in a place where crows could lurk and carry messages. In a realm where a necromantic had once nearly instigated war using her power to speak with them.

"We'll fix this," he murmured at last. The words carried the weight of both their realms. The implications of another necromantic in the Calisian royal family were immense to the point of being terrifying, but seeking to uncover that enemy couldn't be the wrong course of action. No matter what his mother said. Not when the alternative led someone like Niccola to tears at the loss of her entire family. Family, it was clear, that she valued much more deeply than Isaiah did his own.

She must feel as lost as he did.

There was a reassurance in that that he hadn't felt anywhere else. He talked to Verde and Margaret about matters of the royal palace, because they gave good counsel and Isaiah respected them both deeply. Yet even he did not trust them to understand the full breadth of inter-realm politics that his mother so often invoked in her arguments to shut down his. Niccola was not a commoner. She was another royal, functional queen of another realm, a status that ranked above even his own. She'd seen the dark underside of Calis's failure with Dinah, and while that might bias her judgment, she was still here. In Calis. Speaking with him honestly. It was more grace than Isaiah's parents had ever extended in the opposite direction.

"We need to follow your trail," he said at last, when Niccola had let her tears fall in the quiet of the forest, then squeezed his hand again and failed to release it. Getting her into the palace to see his family would be her only way of identifying whoever was in the sketch she carried. Right now, that was the only major lead they had.

"Do you think it paints well?" she replied, voice still a little shaky. For the first time, the code escaped Isaiah. Sensing it, Niccola added, "It would make good decoration for your palace walls. They were as bare as mine back home."

The allusion to Varna's lack of resources spurred another twinge of guilt, but Niccola's tone was not accusatory. Her meaning set in a moment later, and kicked Isaiah's mind into high gear. Paintings. She did not need to meet his whole family in person, an undertaking that would require a family event on the scale of a wedding. One thing Calis retained on its bare palace walls was its paintings of royals both present and past, a vanity that dovetailed with their hereditary fixation on appearances. He knew which hallways they were mounted along. And that, in the snap of a finger, dropped the next obstacle like a load of Talakovan wood.

"We do love a good painting," he said. "It would be mounted right along the entrance hall, for everyone to see when they came in."

Niccola's hand tensed, then twitched, conveying what she did not verbalize. "I am sure it would look beautiful. You should show me the location when I come to meet your parents."

The mention of his parents brought anxiety crashing down on Isaiah's next thoughts. There was no way to get Niccola into the palace through the front doors without meeting his parents. They rarely left the palace even for diplomatic matters, preferring to send crows or messengers to those they corresponded with. Isaiah had met townsfolk in the lowlands who'd never even seen his father, the more reclusive of the two—an ironic state of affairs when his father cared nearly as much about how the royal family was perceived as his mother did. His mother, at least, made no secret of the fact that she saddled Isaiah with the role of public image for the palace. It gave her more excuses to control his life.

So they would never find the palace empty—not soon, anyway. On the other hand, Isaiah's mother would rain fire if he did not make it clear soon that he was courting someone. He had no idea how long this mask would hold, but it would be better to give the impression now and buy time than to keep everything under wraps until his mother started meddling.

"I can tell them you are coming over," he said, though those words sank dread in his stomach like he'd swallowed lead. "How would you prefer to be introduced?"

"Demi-queen of Varna," she murmured under her breath.

Isaiah's throat would not loosen enough to allow a reply as panic locked every muscle in his body. The moment Niccola revealed herself with that title, his life in the palace was over. His mother's voice already rang through the back of his mind, in the low, deadly tone she used when he'd pushed too far.

"I will think of something before I come," said Niccola. "I'm not ready to blow my cover just yet."

The realization that he was still safe—for now—took some time to trickle through Isaiah's body. Niccola lifted his hand, which had gone frigid.

"Is something the matter?" she said. "You're shaking."

"I'm fine." He pulled away, and she released his hand. The air hit it like winter. Once comfortable, the inside of the ruin now chilled him to the bone even though Niccola gave no sign of cold. She would suspect him, he was sure of it.

"Let me know what you plan to say before you arrive," he said. "I need to know how I should corroborate your story."

"How might I get in contact with you?"

"If you are able to write in reverse, doing so on the back of stiff paper with a firm hand will create a message I can read. You can send it by crow, if mine is recovered by then."

"It would be easier to simply meet with you," said Niccola. "How often do you come to the market?"

"As often as I can."

"I can find you then. Ten o'clock on Tuesday? I can come over the next day."

That was in two days' time. This was happening.

"I'll arrange it," he said, and though their whole intention was to solve the mystery he'd said they would fix, the words still felt like the first nails in a coffin of his own construction.