"He's handed me a double-edged sword," Minerva said numbly. Water dripped from her hair to leave damp stains on her bathrobe. "And I have no idea what to do with it."

Kaolin continued wringing out Minerva's locks with a heated cloth, kept warm from a miniscule amount of fire power. "There is only one viable option."

"Which is?"

"Wield it, of course." With her matter-of-fact tone, Kaolin could have almost convinced her.

"And if I end up dead because of it?" Minerva asked with a raised eyebrow. She caught Kaolin's wrist with her hand and looked up at her.

Her maidservant's brush strokes faltered before she answered, "Only a minor inconvenience."

Kaolin would never learn how much she agreed with that sentiment. Dying was a minor inconvenience. Living however—well, that was the major one.

And it was the pain of the death that terrified her most—the transition between the two.

Minerva released her grip on Kaolin—her maid resuming her work—and touched each of the items on the vanity one by one. A silver letter opener. A crystal flask of perfume. A traditional hair ornament—a kanzashi—crafted into the shapes of delicate metal cherry blossoms. They were all old gifts. Not to her, but from her.

For Edina.

"Going out into the lower ring of the city will be dangerous." Kaolin set the brush down and sectioned off parts of Minerva's hair to braid, weaving in the kirukkan stone chain as she went.

Minerva pinched the side of the chain Kaolin wasn't using taut, so that the stone wouldn't rest too low on her forehead. "I've been in the lower ring before."

"Not as the Pyro Heir, you haven't."

"If the Hydro embassy could make it to the palace without incident, my failure to appear to the people would be an act of cowardice and nothing else."

Mala shifted from where she'd been napping beside the vanity and chair. With a glance at the manticore's bound paw, Minerva laid a gentle hand on her guardian's head. "Mala is almost healed and will be a last line of defense should the other security measures you've taken prove to be inadequate."

Sharp tugs on her hair as Kaolin gathered it up into a bun signaled to Minerva that her maidservant had not been placated with being put in command of the protection of her person. If anything, it had caused her understandable anxiety.

"What if someone else happens to recognize you?" Kaolin roughly speared the kanzashi through Minerva's hair.

"Paint and powder. You're a master of it," Minerva answered.

Kaolin sniffed, but the curtness of her movements lessened.

They didn't speak while Kaolin brought out and applied the aforementioned cosmetics—aside from her telling Minerva how to turn her head or to summon a flame for better light. Under Kaolin's delicate application, Minerva watched her scars vanish; the dark circles below her eyes fade. When she raised her fingers to brush her cheek, Kaolin slapped her hand with the brush.

"Don't ruin it," Kaolin said softly.

Her tone, almost begging, reminded Minerva of the Kaolin she'd met years ago. In a way, her old acquaintance had grown as jaded over the years as she had. But still, Minerva could see the lingering remnants of the girl who wanted nothing more than to be an artist, who catalogued faces she wanted to paint as other people noted strangers whose faces they found attractive.

Yet, Kaolin had been her own worst critic.

There had been one morning after staking out the Inari mansion and its guards, where Kaolin almost walked out on the job. On her. All over a simple portrait.

Minerva had squatted beside the spy over the thick piece of parchment. The brush strokes were careful, but even Minerva could see that the materials did not help in doing justice to the skills of the artist. As for the face, she could vaguely recall its owner, but was mainly concerned with how well the guard in question handled his sword.

"Does it look like him?" Kaolin had asked. Ink smudged her forehead, though she'd managed to keep her sleeves from being stained. "I can't help but think his nose was slightly crooked. Maybe he broke it in some tavern brawl, but making it true to life would spoil the aesthetic."

Minerva had scrutinized the drawing for several seconds before answering honestly. "I have no idea."

Her careless words had been the feather on the pack that broke the tokas back. Black splotches bloomed over the half-formed face as Kaolin knocked the inkwell over. "You don't even care, do you!" she screamed. "You don't know beauty when it stares you in the face. All that man is to you is another liability to take care of! Another dead body on the bloody pile!"

Minerva flinched from the force of the memory. Heat rose in her and breath filled her lungs in quicker gasps just as it had then.

Kaolin looked up from where she'd been reapplying Nola's healing ointment. "Is it still hurting? I thought it'd been looking better since yesterday."

Minerva ignored the question about her wound. It would be fine. "Do you remember your last painting?"

Kaolin's expression turned sour as she corked the jar. "I should think so. It was a complete failure."

"And what I said to you then ...?" Minerva prodded.

"Clothes first," Kaolin ordered. "You're going to catch a cold sitting there half-naked."

Not until the last cuff was smoothed and dagger tucked away did Kaolin answer. "We had an argument." She stared at her hands in her lap, as if disappointed that she now had to speak with nothing for them to do. "I was angry."

"At what?" Minerva adjusted the white sash around her waist so it wouldn't dig into her side.

Kaolin pursed her lips. "Maybe then I thought I was angry at the portrait, but now I think I was angry at you." The lamps in the room flared with sudden heat. "I said you didn't care about beauty, but it was more than that."

A hollowness emptied out Minerva's gut, as if she'd vomited without the actual physical act of spewing her guts. She had a feeling she knew what Kaolin would say next.

Her maidservant appeared almost guilty, but continued her point regardless. "I was angry because you only seemed to care about killing."

Minerva lowered her head. "Do you still think I'm like that?"

Kaolin hesitated, her words a cruel but unintentional mockery. "I have no idea."

They both knew the unspoken danger for assassins and those who grew too fond of killing. There was always a price to pay.

"I must think you're somewhat like that now, or else I wouldn't have come to you," Kaolin said. "But I do remember what you said then too—and it kept me from quitting on you."

Though she tried to hide how much Kaolin remembering meant to her, Minerva knew from the spy's sharp glances at her hands, her posture—her body language as a whole—that it wouldn't slip by.

"You told me to paint my own face." Kaolin smirked. "Though I don't think I took it in the way you meant it."

"I should've known you'd figure out who I was," Minerva said, redirecting the conversation. "You out of all people."

"Better me than someone else." Then, Kaolin touched on the spot they'd been avoiding—the subject that had festered like an infected wound. "Better me than someone like you—an assassin bent on justice."

Minerva nodded stiffly, though she wanted to put her face in her hands in misery.

"I saw your kill count," Kaolin continued. Now that she'd taken to purging the infection, it appeared she'd determined to see it through. "It's enough to damn you ten times over once they catch you. You're a dead woman walking."

When Minerva clenched her fist, the room fell into cold and darkness, the lamps snuffed out. Kaolin made no motion to relight them.

"You don't think I know that?" Minerva whispered. The feet of her mind were taking her where she didn't want to go—she clawed at the walls to try and halt their progress, but in vain.

The reading of murders. A hushed crowd straining to hear the infamous whisper of blade that would condemn the sinner. Red smoke pouring into eyes like silken strands of blood rust.

This wasn't nightmare material conjured up by her sickened mental state. It was all too real. She couldn't breathe.

Minerva pressed her eyes shut, tears squeezing out at the edges. She knew what it was like to see only red.

Kaolin's voice cut through the pain, but inflicted an even deadlier wound. "Charna was caught."

Everything she held so close threatened to break free in a torrent of emotion. She tamped it down like a fire, tried to rob it of air. Her voice sounded distant as a result. "What do you mean? That's impossible."

Kaolin walked to the window and pulled aside one of the heavy white curtains to let the natural light in. "From everything I gathered, she resigned as a Blood Shadow—set aside assassination as a trade since she'd hit the nineteenth kill. Somehow, she ended up with your mother, Phoenix Kin association I suspect, to do her dirty work short of murder."

"What changed?" Minerva prayed—to whatever god would answer—that the charge was not what she thought it was.

Kaolin paused as if she couldn't believe her own words. "She tried to assassinate the Empress last night and is facing a whisper of blade execution. They've kept it hushed, but I think she managed to take out more than half of the active Blackguard at the site of the attempt."

Minerva let out a silent cry and slid off her chair. Kaolin ran to her in alarm when she crumpled in a sobbing heap on the floor. "Don't touch me," she whimpered between the racking heaves of her body as it mourned.

"Perhaps we could try and rescue her?"

It was a hopeless solution and they both knew it. Kovine would have pulled all the stops to keep Charna contained and once a criminal stood on the platform, there was no going back. Any attempt at rescue would be certain suicide.

"At least once she's dead, we won't have to worry about her turning you in too," Kaolin offered.

Without knowing half of what she was doing, Minerva pounced on Kaolin and pinned her to the floor. "Don't you dare talk about her like that!" she yelled. Some of her tears dripped from her cheek onto Kaolin's. Her maidservant's eyes widened in fear.

"Kozakura, I—"

"Don't call me that," Minerva snarled. "If Charna turned me in, she'd be right to. You know why? Because maybe she deserves that sentence, but I deserve it more. She'll find no mercy from her own blade, but neither would I. No one ever does." Minerva slowly backed away from Kaolin, cautious in case she'd turn on her.

Minerva knew her actions warranted the death sentence more than Charna's, not in a twisted game of seeing who was more degenerate, or in a sentimental way where she'd offer to take Charna's place as the guiltier of the two. They were facts—the numbers didn't lie.

But Kaolin may have seen a glimmer of truth in that her tears weren't all shed for Charna. Some were out of fear for herself—a selfish response to the specter of death looming in sight.

If Charna—with all her intellect—had slipped, then it was only a matter of time before Minerva did the same. Even if she didn't die by whisper of blade, death would come for her in another form. And soon.

Her clock was ticking down.

Minerva had killed far more than twenty people in cold blood and Nemesis—goddess of retribution—would be coming to collect.

The price must be paid. At her hands, it would be a most painful one.