Upon the thinning air they rose. The rukh labored now—not from exertion but from the suffocation of altitude. The twins felt the sting of cold, insufficient air in pained lungs. The chained prince, swinging below, must be gasping and freezing—but he had been born to the Steles, and the twins believed he would bear the deprivation well.
Tsarepheth was a sinuous line of shimmering lights behind them. The elegant cone of the Cold Fire rose to vanish in clouds that still caught a shadowy edge of day. The twins lofted into those concealing mists, lost except for the wingbeats of the rukh, the occasional creak of the twists of chain in which the prince hung.
They broke from clouds into twilight, the Cold Fire’s sharp black rim rising like a stone circle from a misty sea. It was matched on the far side of a fog-filled chasm by the ragged peak of the Island-in-the-Mists, which dwarfed even the mighty volcano.
The twins guided their mount toward the Cold Fire, bringing the rukh down gently. It had been trained to land carefully with quarry—or passengers—in its claws. It settled between wing strokes that curled clouds at its feather tips, balancing at last on one foot as the other held the stake upright. The prince did not scream; it would be a pity if he had been killed in the rescue.
The twins uncoiled the saddle ladder and slid down it without touching the rungs.
Prince Tsansong dangled from the upright stake, chains around his waist and under his armpits, his hands pulled whitely against his belly by the shackles. He was wild-eyed, wild-haired … but unmistakably alive. He looked up, his face stilling, and observed their approach silently. There was still enough light in the sky to see by.
The twins reached over their shoulder as if drawing a blade from a back sheath and produced a pair of long-handled cutters. The prince watched carefully as they fitted the blades into the chains that bound his wrists and pushed the handles together. It was hard—Shahruz would have cursed in frustration at Saadet’s body’s limited strength, if he had not been so pious a man—but with a grunt and a heave they levered the arms shut. Metal parted with an unmelodious spang, but the chains still held the prince off his feet.
“Be ready,” the twins said in Rasan.
The prince, watching their veiled face, nodded. When they snipped the long wrapped chain, he brought his hands up as he dropped to break his fall.
You did not often see the brother of a Bstangpo on his hands and knees among cinders. The twins paused for a moment to stow the cutters in their pack again before they reached to help him up.
But the prince was already pushing himself upright, blood dark on scraped palms and spotting the knees of his jade-colored breeches. He rose with the poise of a fit man, for all that the twins could see that he was disoriented—as who would not be?—and inclined his head to them.
“I am in your debt,” he said in Uthman.
“You are,” the twins responded. “Please, follow me.”
* * *
Having lit a lamp, the twins led the prince away from the rukh. They descended the obsidian- and pumice-strewn slope of the volcano’s caldera more elegantly than the rukh had done, though the lantern’s light got caught in the thick shrouds of mist and illuminated little besides the treacherous, rolling stones directly beneath their feet.
When they broke below the mists, their clothes and hair were drenched.
“We’ll freeze when we leave,” the prince said, his first words since the admission of debt owed.
“There are dry clothes on the rukh,” said Shahruz, keeping their hand from the hilt of his sword. “Here, just ahead.”
The twins pointed to the stone table, just visible now at the light’s edge, atop a strange, circular rise. The prince glanced from their finger to the incongruous piece of furniture and back again. He cocked his head, reminding Saadet of the rukh when it was deciding whether it wanted to eat someone.
“Hmh,” he said. He looked at her. “You know that what you have done—freeing me—will lead to war.”
“It needn’t have,” said the twins. “But yes, now that your brother has declared your life forfeit, your survival guarantees it. Even if you were to vanish, to flee to another land, Prince Tsansong…”
The twins shrugged.
The prince smiled tightly. “I would not even need to raise a banner myself for partisans to flock to it. Others would do it in my name.”
“Anyone with a grudge against the Bstangpo,” the twins agreed. They bowed and extended an arm, indicating that the prince should precede them.
He stood his ground, however, and regarded them steadily. His nostrils flared, perhaps at the faint scent of sulfur that hung all around. “I begin to comprehend why it is exactly that a Rahazeen assassin comes to the rescue of a condemned second son.”