Three weeks after Coral Deep, Mira Ashwren learned that carrying a piece of a god around her neck did not, contrary to every instinct she'd have expected, make her brave.

It made her careful instead. It made her listen to every creak of every unfamiliar floorboard in every roadside inn they stopped at, made her sleep fully dressed with her boots laced against the possibility of a fast exit, made her keep the fused shard-mass wrapped twice in oilcloth against her skin so that its faint, constant warmth wouldn't wake her from what little sleep she managed. It did not make the fear go away, not even slightly. If anything, three weeks on the road had only taught the fear to be patient — to wait, quietly, for the exact moment she let her guard down even a fraction, and then remind her, sharply, why she couldn't afford to.

"You're doing the thing again," Doran said, dropping into the bench seat across from her at a tavern that smelled of woodsmoke and yesterday's stew. "The listening thing."

"Someone has to."

"Ketrin's already outside doing the listening. I was inside doing the eating, which I'd argue is the more important job most days." He slid a folded, water-stained map across the rough table, weighting one corner down with his empty tankard so the draft from the door wouldn't catch it. "The Ashfell family kept records the Order never bothered to burn when I left — mostly, I suspect, because nobody in the inner temple expected the traitor's own son to still hold the keys to his mother's private study. Four shards remain unaccounted for. Here's where three years of stolen paperwork tells me they're likely hidden."

Mira unfolded the map carefully, mindful of a tear already running along one crease. Four marks stood out in old, faded ink against the pale vellum: a desert ruin somewhere south of the Karsk Waste, a monastery cut directly into the flank of a mountain called the Vane's Tooth, a storm-wracked scatter of islands the map simply labeled, unhelpfully, Unclaimed, and — closest of all, and by far the most unsettling — a mark sitting directly atop the capital, Athrenmoor, the Order's own former seat of power, now home to half a million people who had not the slightest idea what might be sleeping in the cellars beneath their feet.

"We start with the desert," Doran said, tapping the southernmost mark. "Fewest bystanders to accidentally get killed if the recovery goes badly, and it usually does."

"And if the Order reaches it first?"

"They won't, not this one. Halvorren's disgraced — he barely escaped Coral Deep alive, and word from what's left of my old contacts is that his own hunters are turning against him for the failure. The inner temple doesn't forgive setbacks gracefully. Last I heard, he's been locked out of the Order's central councils entirely, which ought to buy us time, assuming he doesn't do something reckless to earn his way back in."

The tavern door slammed open hard enough to rattle the window glass. Ketrin came through it fast, blade already drawn and held low, her face gone paler than Mira had ever once seen it — paler, even, than the night at Coral Deep with her own blood still drying on the chapel floor.

"They found us," she said, voice tight and controlled in a way that was somehow more alarming than panic would have been. "Not the Order. Something considerably worse."

Behind her, through the open door, the street outside had gone utterly, unnaturally silent — the particular, listening silence that settles over a place right before something enormous finally stops bothering to pretend it isn't there.