A quick stop at the Sweetwater Coffee Shop and a few words with Odrienne Keel assured me that she’d already mentioned my fake name to the playwright, and that he was expecting (or at least wouldn’t be surprised by) a visit from one Syra Hakar. At the Silkshore address she provided, I rang the doorbell and prepared a calling card for the butler.

Instead, the front door creaked open to reveal a middle-aged man wrapped in a faded, obviously much-loved silk dressing gown. Under a shock of chestnut hair that was streaked with grey (which I didn’t remember from the night of A Requiem for Aldric), Ian Templeton’s bright hazel eyes looked perplexed at the card I extended. However, he gamely accepted it and seemed reassured that the name on it matched the one that Odrienne had mentioned.

He tucked the card into one slouchy pocket. “Please, come in, Miss Hakar.” His voice was melodic, the kind that would sound pleasant raised in song during an evening with friends, but that didn’t quite meet the standards of Spiregarden Theater.

He waved me into a somehow charmingly messy parlor-turned-study. In front of a window overlooking the street sat a giant wooden desk, scattered with drafts, pens, and empty bottles of ink. Even all the mismatched bookcases that lined all four walls couldn’t hold his entire collection of books, notebooks, and loose sheets of paper. While he cleared off his single, well-worn armchair, mumbling apologies the whole time, I wended my way among precarious towers of notebooks and scanned the books. Unsurprisingly, a large number covered Skovlan and the Unity War.

“Please, have a seat,” Templeton invited, straightening awkwardly with an armful of books.

While he searched for somewhere to put them, I perched on the cushion and smiled shyly. “I’ve been a huge fan of yours for years, Mr. Templeton,” I explained haltingly. “I was at the premier of A Requiem for Aldric.”

The playwright looked suddenly stricken, as if I might be an Imperial agent come to trick him into self-incrimination.

To reassure him, I gushed, “It was so beautiful, so moving!”

Ducking his head, he dropped the books onto his desk with a thump. “Oh, well, that…that is very kind of you. I – it was a pity we never got to the second act.”

It really was.

“Do you think you’ll ever publish it?” I inquired. “I have the rest of your plays.”

Still wearing that sickly expression, he replied, “Oh, I…well, I’d love to publish it someday. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever written. But I’d also love not to go back to the Hook ever again, so, as you’ll understand, I’m a little hesitant….”

I sighed with genuine regret. “Fair enough.”

Relieved that he’d headed off that potential trap, Templeton sank into his desk chair.

“How do you come up with ideas for your plays?” I asked, gesturing around his study. “What inspired you to write about Skovlan?”

At the mention of his writing process, the playwright’s eyes lit up, and he started rambling away about how he’d stumbled across a book of Skovlander sagas at a secondhand bookseller’s in Nightmarket: “Beautifully illustrated with the most remarkable woodblock prints – oh, where did I put it? Where is it? Ah, here you are!” And he deposited a massive leather-bound tome in my lap, thumbing through the pages upside down until he came to the specific illustration he sought, of a princess with flowing tresses that reminded me of Queen Alayne’s wig in the performance. “You see?” he asked reverently, brushing the page with his fingertips.

I did see.

It was just the sort of thing Mother would love, and I resolved to hunt down another copy for her. Sigmund could send it home in the next diplomatic pouch.

“This is amazing,” I told Templeton. I turned a few pages, scanning the text and admiring the thick, creamy paper. “You know, it reminds me of a book of Iruvian folktales that my parents read to me when I was young.”

“Ah, Iruvia,” sighed the playwright, his eyes going dreamy. “Everything about Iruvia is – I would love to write a play about Iruvia.”

That was certainly an encouraging reaction – and one that made for a refreshing change from the usual “So, should we invest further in Iruvian interests, or should we divest right now before its economy collapses?” and “Iruvia is going to be invaded and crushed to bits unless we save it!”

Templeton had fallen into a reverie as he contemplated Iruvian history and culture through a purely artistic lens. “Everything about that isle is so….”

“It’s just fascinating, isn’t it?” I prompted.

“It is,” he agreed, with passion. “It’s so different from Akoros.”

In a dreamy tone, I listed some fascinating, different, and potentially inspiring aspects of my homeland: “The Well, the crystal spires, the obsidian mountains, the jet-black desert, and the endless stars….”

Templeton’s voice held pure yearning. “It practically begs to be on the stage.”

“Yes….” I echoed his wistful tone.

He drew a sharp breath, considering. “I should probably – I don’t know as much about it as I’d like. I mean, with the Unity War, I’ve met – well, there are so many Skovlander artists here, but I don’t know as much about Iruvian culture and folklore….”

Here I saw my opening. “Actually, I happen to know an Iruvian scholar.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! He’s a fascinating person to talk to: very charismatic, very knowledgeable.” (Also, very desperate for excuses to get out of Brightstone.) “I’d be happy to introduce you.”

“Yes, I would be grateful.” All of a sudden, Templeton drooped again and heaved a heavy sigh. “Although, given all the rumblings on the street lately,” he mourned, showing more political acumen than he had previously (and which perhaps Ironhook had beaten into him), “I do seem to pick the most fraught possible topics.” I prepared to head him off, but he did it himself: “Still, I can practically see the set already!”

“The stars,” I supplied, sweeping an arm across the ceiling. “The stars overhead.”

“Mmm.” He agonized a moment longer, then struck a compromise with himself. “Perhaps – perhaps if you could just introduce me. Perhaps, I could just write an outline….”

“One could view it as a plea for peace and understanding between our peoples,” I suggested.

“Yeah!” he agreed, seizing the bait. “That doesn’t seem like it should be too controversial or seditious.”

Poor, delusional man. Any play he wrote could only be seditious by the time he was done with it. But I soothed him, “I don’t see how it could be. We’re all part of the same Imperium, after all.”

By the end of my visit, I could tell that his trepidation about a second stint in “the Hook” was evaporating, and I figured that Sigmund could do the rest.

When I returned to the orphanage, pleased with the afternoon’s work, all of the children were missing. That was odd. Even accounting for the oddly un-rainy weather, a handful should still be loitering about the kitchen, hoping to cadge an extra roll from Mrs. Lomond.

After a bit of searching, I found all of them crammed into the largest classroom, practically piled on top of one another, for a special lecture. Spider and Azael huddled in the back, with their knees drawn up to their chins. Skirts tucked around her legs, Moth knelt demurely on the floor between her two best friends forever. Beetle jostled for space among a clump of her own students, while Mantis perched on top of a desk with his buddies. The youngest children, including Locust and his own best friend Kristov, bunched up on the floor at the front of the room. All of them were listening with rapt attention as Faith explained, “It is important that we look after our own. And, unfortunately, one of our own has recently fallen into some dire circumstances and obsessions regarding demons.”

Seriously? She was still going on about that? I’d have thought she would have tired of it by now. Maybe Sigmund would have ideas for a shiny new toy I could distract her with.

I started to back away down the hall, stepping noiselessly.

Faith’s voice followed me, “And to protect her from herself, we need to purloin from her personal possessions….”

Good thing I never kept anything valuable at Strathmill House.

Alas, Sigmund did not have any ideas for how to distract Faith. And, for all his intimate knowledge of demonkind, he also did not have any ideas for how to interpret Djera Maha’s blood.

After staring at the bottle for a long time, he confessed with some irritation, “I have absolutely no idea how to begin to figure out what is going on with this strange substance you’ve given me.”

As if to make up for his deficiency in the Whispery arts, however, he did know exactly how to impersonate an Iruvian scholar.

“That is certainly a part I can play for you,” he declared.

“I thought you could,” I replied, replacing the bottle in my pocket and wondering who among my contacts might know attunement. Mylera might be my only hope – because goodness knew Bazso had no truck with the arcane.

“I can’t imagine it would be too hard a part to play, even,” Sigmund couldn’t resist bragging.

Trying not to think about how I might have to visit Zamira Slane all by myself, I said absently, “Mmmhmmm, I thought as much.”

With a roguish grin, he tried to recapture my attention: “They say I’m very inspiring, even.”

That worked.

I poked him, ignoring his perfunctory “Ow.” “Don’t get too cocky.”

From my brother’s rueful look, he didn’t think he was in any danger of that so long as I was around.

To my combined dismay and relief, I somehow misplaced the bottle of Djera Maha’s blood after returning to the orphanage and never had to decide whether to make that trip to the Slanes’ infirmary after all. (Which was probably a blessing in disguise, since the orphans were still whispering that if they could just cure Miss Yara of her demon obsession, maybe she could finally confess her love to Miss Karstas.) In any event, Ash took his own vial to his mother for analysis.

“I have samples of a type of blood that I’m about to get more of,” was how he sold it to her. “It would be unwise to go into too many details, but I think you’ll find it extremely potent. And well worth understanding. More precisely, I’m trying to figure out what to do with it.”

Zamira, who was still wearing her cat ears pending special dispensation from Faith, cast a jaundiced eye over her son’s Skovlander disguise (which he’d been affecting more of late, to avoid wearing his cat ears), but she took the vial and shook it experimentally. “Where did you get this?”

“On a score. A very well-paying score,” Ash informed her importantly.

Attuning at the blood, Zamira remarked with a slight frown, “It’s electroplasmically active.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

Her voice went flat as she analyzed it further. “But it’s human.”

“It…is a dangerous fusion, is the easiest way to put it, I’d say,” Ash told her. “I suppose there are some things I should warn you about, so you can be ready…. That is, if things go really south, it would be wise to have a way to go elsewhere, or into hiding, it doesn’t matter which….”

His mother stopped his babbling with a gentle, “Ash. We’re Tycherosi. We already have that.”

“I know, but – ”

Whatever pogroms the Tycherosi were accustomed to in the Shattered Isles, they would be nothing next to the genocide that the Church of Ecstasy could unleash. Would unleash, if they ever discovered Ash’s role. To make his mother understand the threat, Ash gave a very high-level overview of the crystal spires and the Church’s plans for them, by the end of which, she’d gone pale.

“You have to stop them.”

“That’s what we’re planning to do,” replied her son with some asperity, “but the Church is probably the most powerful institution in the Imperium after the government itself – to the degree that there is even a distinction – so it’s not certain that any one of us can defeat it.”

“But you must,” she repeated soberly. And, as a measure of the seriousness with which she took the matter, she asked with no discussion of payment, “What do you need?”

Ash had come prepared to haggle. “Well, for a start, we need to make sure the orphans stay safe, and we need an exit plan along the lines that our people are so familiar with, so if everything goes to hell, the Tycherosi can vanish and take the Insect Kids and possibly some of the others with them.”

Zamira didn’t even need to think about it. She nodded at once. “Yes. I can arrange that.”

“And I will potentially have more of this blood, so we can look for buyers, although we might want to wait…well, I leave that to your discretion. In the meantime, if you learn anything from the sample that will help us take down the others….”

“I can study it,” she promised hesitantly. She shook the vial again, contemplating the way the blood sloshed back and forth. “But if this – ” she held it up – “is what it appears to be, then I’m not sure there’s going to be – ” She cut off that line of thought and finished instead with, “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can figure out anything.”

And with that, Ash and I had to be content.