I’d actually been honest with Ash when I claimed to have a “few things” to take care of, and now I proved it by making a beeline south through the Docks and Crow’s Foot to the Red Sash Sword Academy. Although Faith chugged after me like a poufy pink cloud, she declined to re-join or even audit my class.

“I’d love to attend,” she explained with apparent earnestness. “But I’m just not dressed for it! I’m afraid that this wire-reinforced lace might have a disarming effect on any student whose sword gets caught in it.” Holding up the top tier of her skirt, she dimpled as she displayed what was very much not wire-reinforced trim. “You wouldn’t want to leave a student helpless in my clutches, would you?” With a mischievous wink, she darted forward, pecked me on the cheek before I could react, and skipped off with a “Toodle-loo!”

Where she’d picked up that expression, I didn’t even want to know.

As I learned later from Irimina’s maid, Faith popped up at the Kinclaith mansion bearing a spirit bottle tied with a pink bow three times the size of the cylinder itself. Bounding into the parlor, she presented it to a delighted Irimina with a flourish and the declaration, “I have dedicated hours of meditation, spell-casting, and arcane research to preparing this beauteous bequest befitting a beautiful lady!”

“I do like presents,” remarked Irimina, daintily picking apart the wrapping with her long, elegant fingers.

(“Her Ladyship let me have the ribbon after,” the maid reported as an aside, twirling around to show off the bow in her hair. If Faith kept giving Irimina presents, she might very well start a fashion among the servant class. Gods help us all.)

As Irimina let the ribbon slither to the floor, Faith squeezed onto the settee next to her and leaned against her arm. “Inside this delicate crystal vial is the soul of one Iruvian assassin. Look at the swirls and spirals, the striations of blue and turquoise, as it beats against its cage, helpless to escape.”

“Yes, I can see that,” pronounced Irimina with a grim satisfaction that thoroughly unsettled the maid. Holding the bottle up to the light, she tilted it from side to side, watching Taji’s murderer’s soul tumble back and forth, feebly struggling to right itself.

Fishing up her lightning hook, Faith tapped the loop against the bottle, sending a little arc of lightning through the walls. In a pedantic way, she said, “Now look at how it squirms with the addition of a little electroplasmic energy.”

The lightning practically fried the soul. It went bluish-white, spun like a miniature cyclone, and then exploded into ragged pieces that crashed into the sides and showered to the bottom, where they slowly, painfully re-coalesced. Her rapturous face glowing blue in the light of the spirit bottle, Irimina followed the fall of every last fragment.

“Souls, if they aren’t fed, tend to go mad,” Faith continued her Spectrology 101 lecture. “It’s not clear whether the torture of a mad soul is quite as delectable as that of a sane one, but one can preserve a soul for years by feeding it little bits of electroplasmic energy, as I did just now. One can also shock it at unpredictable intervals just to watch it writhe. Or one can introduce it to a feral ghost that nibbles away at it as it screams in intense agony. So, Irimina – this is your present. What do you want to do with it?”

Without taking her eyes off the bottle, Irimina held out one hand and beckoned for the lightning hook. “Well, I suppose we should experiment to see what’s most effective.”

Faith pulled the lightning hook away and waited until Irimina tore her eyes from the bottle with an impatient frown. “Actually, I may have lied,” Faith confessed sweetly.

Irimina’s frown deepened.

“I may have two presents for you, but the second hasn’t quite materialized yet. Call it a potential present.”

Although the maid didn’t understand Irimina’s sudden look of terrible hope, I did.

I want her dead – not the Consul, I’m told I can’t do that, Irimina had hissed the day she hired us to kill Na’ava Diala. Judging from that level of vitriol, Elstera Avrathi must have ordered Taji’s murder herself.

Whether Faith guessed what Irimina was thinking or not, she explained in the same careless tone as before, “I have recently come into the possession of two somewhat interesting toys. I have been assured that they’re very cute, and I’ve been tasked by their previous caretaker with finding them a nice new home.”

(“A pair of dogs or cats?” I asked the maid, wondering if Faith were trying to give away Sleipnir. She only shook her head. “Worse, miss.”)

Irimina looked as if she were more interested in torturing Na’ava’s soul than acquiring cute, somewhat interesting toys.

Smoothly, Faith continued, “I understand that sometimes pretty little things are in grave danger from stray nefarious forces, so it would be best if they went to someone who would protect them. Say, someone who wanted to preserve her family heritage by adopting Polonia and Andrel.”

Recognition and then compassion (which the maid didn’t understand at all) dawned on Irimina’s face. “Oh, the Helker children. Yes, I read about that,” she said in a quiet and completely sincere voice. “That was very sad.”

Faith beamed in approval. “Yes, and now they need parents – or at least a parent – so I went to the person best able to make an equitable arrangement.”

(“Are you sure Mistress Karstas said that, and not Lady Irimina?” I asked skeptically. That really didn’t sound like Faith. “Yes, miss?” answered the maid, as if she didn’t quite trust her own ears either.)

“I understand that you’re interested in continuing your family name, but your brother has no interest in…reproductive success, shall we say.”

“Can you imagine Roethe’s children?” cried Irimina, recoiling. “The mind reels!”

Her little brother was notable chiefly for his outrageous fashion sense (he wore only white and silver, ever) and his even more outrageous habit of using said fashion sense as a way to bait other nobles into insulting it so he could challenge, duel, and kill them. I supposed that was what happened when you were orphaned at an early age and needed to vent your rage on a cold, uncaring world.

As a measure of her focus, Faith ignored the comment about Roethe’s potential offspring. “The Helker children have wealth – more than enough to support themselves – while you are a good person at heart, bear an aristocratic title, and, most importantly, have the power to protect them. There are many disillusioned Skovlanders who would look at them and see only the Helker resemblance, not the innocence of youth.”

Forgotten for the moment, the spirit bottle lay still in Irimina’s lap. “Those poor things,” she said, dazed. “I….”

“Probably need some time to think about this.”

With an effort, she forced herself back into the present. “I do. There are some…affairs I need to set in order first. But assuming everything else works out, I am absolutely willing to adopt them. You make a lot of good points and…and no one should have to grow up alone.”

In a low voice, Faith said, “I agree. Their situation is most unfortunate. I will make the appropriate legal arrangements, then.”

“Thank you.” As if to close a painful subject, Irimina very deliberately picked up the bottle again and shook it as a terrier would a rat. “Now, you should show me a thing or two to do to this present.”

Taking Faith’s arm, she drew her to a private study where the maid could not (and did not want to) follow, where presumably they experimented with myriad ways to punish Na’ava Diala’s soul.

While Faith was fulfilling her last promise to Tocker Helker, I was teaching my beginners how to fight in enclosed spaces, in case they ever found themselves facing fanatics in cupolas. Never let it be said that I loosed my students on Doskvol unprepared. In fact, a handful had improved so much that I might yield them to the intermediate class soon. Feeling an odd mix of pride and loss, I dismissed them all and ran upstairs to Mylera’s office for our weekly chat. Now more than ever, I needed to prove to myself – and Sigmund – that I could play peacemaker.

Mylera, as it turned out, had finally found a satisfactory purveyor of coffee beans, although given the state of Iruvian-Akorosian affairs, she wasn’t optimistic that she’d be able to import more any time soon. (Now that sounded like a new market for Irimina.)

“Diplomatic relations seem to have deteriorated unnaturally fast,” I remarked, fishing for anything else he might have said.

“Too fast. Someone’s pushing this,” Mylera declared, her dark eyes grim.

Recalling my own crew’s contribution to said deterioration, I cringed inwardly and made a mental note to investigate whether her “someone” were a nefarious, shadowy figure – or just the three of us. “Someone’s pushing it?” I asked innocently. “Who would do such a thing?”

Troubled, she picked up a coffee bean and turned it over and over in her fingers. “I don’t know,” she replied frankly. “But the average citizen of the Imperium doesn’t want another war. We just finished a thirty-six-year-long conflict with Skovlan. Nobody wants to jump right back into that. And yet – somehow – there’s a diplomatic frenzy.”

I had to confess, if only to myself, that I was mildly surprised a gang leader in Crow’s Foot kept abreast of inter-isle politics. “I can’t understand what’s going on there.”

“Like I said,” she repeated briskly, “I think someone has an agenda and is pushing it. As for who and what, I don’t know. I’m an Ankhayat; it’s not our department.” Tardily, and more quietly, she corrected herself, “I was an Ankhayat.”

Studying her remote expression, I thought of the turrets and curtain walls of the Ankhayat estate, which lay to the northwest of ours, and how they overlooked the Vaasu school where she’d spent her childhood training to captain a leviathan hunter. I thought of the whispers surrounding her exile, the way she never addressed any of the rumors, and I wondered, for the first time, what she thought of them. Softly, I asked, “Mylera, why did you leave Iruvia?”

She returned to Doskvol with a jolt, nearly crushing the coffee bean between her fingers. “Why did I leave Iruvia?” Her voice rose shrilly until she fought it back down. “Politics. What else?” In the face of my empathetic calm, she recited, “I got embroiled in inter-House warfare and did a lot of questionable things, and then it became clear that the House was going to throw me to the wolves. At that point I was done, and so I left.”

I nodded slowly, as if I knew exactly what she meant. Which I did.

Somewhat defensively, she informed me, “It’s fine. I don’t even – I never want to go back. I like life here. I’ve built something I can be proud of.” Did any exile ever sever all her ties to her homeland? Mylera still followed Iruvian politics – to a much greater extent than I, in fact. “Am I a little bitter? Yes. Just a little. But – politics. What can you do?”

“I suppose…,” I said dubiously.

“But you know. The things you must have seen.”

Oh yes. Oh yes, how I knew. For all the off-duty time I spent with the Lampblacks, Mylera had always understood me a lot better than Bazso ever would. Closing my eyes briefly, I nodded my comprehension and then, as if trying to change the subject – which maybe I was, just a little – I hinted, “Speaking of things you’ve built and are proud of, the Hive is trying to take all of that.”

Busying herself with her coffee grinder, Mylera raised her voice over the crunching. “Yes, it’s true. It’s true.” Abruptly, she set down the grinder with a thud and eyeballed me suspiciously. “Is this about the Lampblacks again?”

I took a different tack and deployed my (very real) frustration. “For someone who is usually very reasonable and very practical, you’re being – ” At her glare, I quickly amended the rest of the sentence. “Why won’t you just meet with them?”

Much to my surprise, she mused, “Maybe I should…. It might be good to have a truce, not to be fighting a war on two fronts.”

“It would certainly free up a lot of resources,” I agreed, watching her spoon ground coffee into the machine.

Since I was paying more attention to her hands than to her face, she caught me off guard when she whirled and gave me a long, hard look. “So something occurs to me, Glass: Why are you so very, very insistent that it has to be the Lampblacks?” I opened my mouth to point out that they were a major gang in the Crow’s Foot and hence a logical choice, but she overrode me. “Because there are a lot of other options.”

As indignantly as I could, I protested, “Like Lyssa? I offered and offered to investigate the Crows. You turned it down, remember?”

She dismissed it with an impatient wave. “No, I don’t want to ally with Lyssa. But there are the Billhooks. The Grinders. I could even look for assistance from other districts. So – why Bazso?” Planting her hands on her desk, she leaned forward and enunciated in a menacing tone, “What is he paying you to do?”

Lifting my chin defiantly, I met and held her glare. “The same thing you’re paying me to do.”

“Okay,” she snapped, “but which one of us do you actually work for?” Sudden, horrible realization dawned on her face, and in one swift movement, she lunged around the desk. “Or are you being an Anixis and playing both ends against the middle, in which case, to what end?”

It took every ounce of self-control I had, but I stayed seated, hands curled loosely around the armrests of my chair as if I had nothing to fear. “Which do you think it is?” I challenged.

She’d known too many of my family to be fooled. “I think it’s the latter, and I’d like to know what you think you’re accomplishing here.”

With her looming over me, fists clenched, face full of hate, it was hard to think, hard even to breath. “The greater good,” I proclaimed, but it came out weakly, more like a squeak than a ringing affirmation. “It does no one any good when the two most powerful gangs in Crow’s Foot are at each other’s throats.”

Mylera’s cold eyes held mine, held and judged and condemned me. With dangerous self-control, she demanded, “Why does House Anixis care what goes on in Crow’s Foot?”

Did she really believe that my House concerned itself with petty turf wars in downtrodden districts of Doskvol? “House Anixis doesn’t care,” I retorted. “I do.”

“So why do you care what goes on in Crow’s Foot?”

This time, my indignation was entirely unfeigned. “Because I live – well, lived – here.”

Perhaps the partial honesty calmed her, or perhaps she wasn’t actually mentally prepared to murder a fellow ex-noble exile right that instant. Pulling back so quickly that I nearly gasped in relief, she stalked around her desk and flung herself into her chair. “I need to think about this. Get out.”

I went.

On my way to the Temple to the Forgotten Gods, I dropped by the Leaky Bucket to have Sawbones check my arm, for once hoping that Bazso wouldn’t be there. Even though I knew that he wouldn’t mind about Sigmund, the nature of my, well, relations with my brother was…unconventional, to put it mildly. Bazso would take it in stride, of course; after the first shock, he’d simply raise his eyebrows, shake his head, and dismiss it as one more Iruvian quirk that no Skovlander could hope to penetrate – but I couldn’t handle it just then.

Naturally, my streak of bad luck held, and Bazso summoned me to his booth as soon as I entered the pub. “Sawbones said you had quite the adventure,” he remarked, scanning me up and down for any fresh, gaping wounds. (Lately, it seemed that every time I saw him, I sported a new injury.)

“You could put it that way.” Craning my head conspicuously, I pretended to search for the doctor. “Have you seen Sawbones?”

With a frown for my stiffness, Bazso ran one finger along my cast. “You all right?”

I’d have thought my body language answered that one.

Drawing the same conclusion, he told me, “He’s in the back.”

Although I’d hoped Bazso would respect physician-patient confidentiality, he drifted into the storeroom after me and hovered while Sawbones inspected my arm and mumbled about how fast it was healing.

No matter my mood, I had to warn the Lampblacks about the Red Sashes’ imminent overture. That was, as Mylera would put it, my department. Without looking at Bazso, I muttered, “I need to talk to you.”

“All right.” He immediately shooed Sawbones into the common room and lounged against the table, folding his arms comfortably across his chest. The relaxed pose didn’t fool me: His reaction time was just as short as Mylera’s. “What’s up? You seem really preoccupied.”

“Hmmm?” I was swinging my legs and contemplating the wood grain and stains, not all of them from food. “Oh, no, it’s nothing. You should get a message from Mylera soon suggesting a truce and a meeting.”

“Will I now,” he stated, carefully neutral.

I picked at a splinter on the edge of the table. “Yes. I think so, anyway.”

Bazso stayed silent long enough for me to glance up at him warily. Then he remarked thoughtfully, “You know, Isha, you’ve been working awfully hard on something I told you I didn’t want.”

“As it turns out, she didn’t want it either,” I said bitterly. “But it’s for the greater good.”

“Well, maybe,” he conceded, then confided in a rush, “I can see the Hive’s jaws closing. It could be worth it to spend an evening at Tangletown, see if we can hammer something out.”

“It’s a good idea,” I said listlessly.

“Yes.” He paused again, blue eyes considering my slumped shoulders, and came to a quick decision. “All right, Isha. You win this time. I’ll talk to her – if she sends me a message. I’m certainly not going to beg her to parley.”

“You’ll get a message,” I replied with a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. Mylera had been very angry, possibly even angry enough to hurt her own interests to spite me, although she wouldn’t view it that way. Fiddling restlessly with my cast, I added, “I might have to make myself scarce in Crow’s Foot for the next while.”

“Why?” he demanded. “What did you do?”

“It’s more what other people have done. Or will do.”

A little hesitantly, he offered, “Isha, I don’t want to impugn your abilities, but if there are more people after you than you can handle, I’ve got the boys.” He jerked a thumb at the door to the common room. “We can break their legs.”

It was so unexpected and so sweet that I almost laughed. “I don’t think it’s something where breaking legs will help, but thank you all the same.”

Bazso took a minute to process this revelation that there were problems that breaking legs didn’t solve. “Okay,” he agreed, more to humor me than anything else. “Hey, don’t be so sad.” He put a comforting arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him and pressed my face against his chest, feeling guilty over my own cattiness. “What happened?” he asked again, gently.

“It’s complicated,” I said into his shirt. “Promise you won’t hate me no matter what you find out?”

“Ummmmm.” Despite his soft spot for me, Bazso had, after all, survived this long as gang leader. He didn’t promise. “Isha, what did you do?”

I whispered, “I think I got in over my head in something.”

“You know, people say that about a lot of things.” Pulling back to arm’s length, he donned his faction leader hat and delivered an inspirational pep talk. “When the Lampblacks became a gang – as opposed to a bunch of guys who just lit lamps – everyone said that we were in way over our heads and that we wouldn’t last three months. But I ignored them, because I knew we had something. Often, when people tell you that you’re in over your head, you should ignore them, because you’re taller than you think.” Taller than Sigmund, the Patriarch, and Grandfather combined? Tall enough not to drown in the currents of House Anixis? “You’ve got a good crew, a lot of people who really care about you. You are extremely capable.”

So capable that I’d led my brother to my own doorstep and given away my game to Mylera. Capable indeed. I laughed a little, feeling bitter.

Blissfully ignorant of the implosion that was my life, Bazso assured me, “You’ll be okay. Just let me know if you need to break any heads, yeah?”

I laughed again, almost a sob. “I will.” I didn’t know what made me promise, “I’ll tell you what happened sometime.”

Bazso just nodded his understanding and left his arm around me until I finally pushed myself off the table and went to meet Ash.