Hope was a dangerous, unfamiliar country, and Arin was a trespasser there. For a week, she had been a ghost in Caldan's chambers, a collaborator in a war she didn't understand, her only payment the hollow promise that his spies were searching for Finn.
Tonight, the waiting was over.
"They will kill you if they recognize you," she'd said as he shrugged on a rough, homespun tunic, the simple fabric looking absurd on his prince's frame.
"That is why I will not be recognized," he'd replied, his voice a low murmur. He worked a dark dye through his silver hair, transforming the mark of his royal blood into the common, muddy brown of a thousand Gutter rats. With his hair darkened and his face smudged with soot, the prince vanished, leaving a stranger in his place—a tall, dangerous-looking man with eyes that still burned like molten gold.
He had handed her a knife, its leather-wrapped hilt worn smooth with use. "You know how to use this?"
