Nine

Baron Apparent Velma Truth Loveday existed. She was real and twenty-something years old. Visually speaking, she managed a delicate balance between anachronistic Rasennese conservatism and the trappings of a boardwalk pimp. She wore a bottle green jacket that billowed by her ankles when she walked, luxurious and melodramatic with an upturned collar and wide sharp lapels, a military fashion barely softened for aristocratic consumption that’d been a fashionable look twenty years ago but never since. Beneath this slightly moth-eaten extravagance she wore sturdy boots, neat black canvas trousers, and riding gloves that were not stolen, exposed leather braces over her linen shirt. She wore her shirt buttoned to her jaw. No skin showing, not one stripe, itchiness be damned. One dangly pearl earring, a string of pearls for the resin watch tucked in her back pocket, a modest showing of Stellarine piety and, to the learned, the habits of resin enjoyers. Sex! Sleep! Numbed-out brawls! She looked like a lamb turned rake. I wore Baron Apparent Velma Truth Loveday uncomfortably. My skin itched. It was war and brutal torture standing without a slouch.

Candor had worked so hard at this. She would’ve made our heir such a regular girl.

Sisphe, playing the role of charming Sisphe, normal secretary, thumbed through the invitations again. Her gloves looked so starkly black against the heavy cream paper. I watched her fingers move and wished the words she rubbed were larger. “Glitslough: Baron Abram Loomis is concerned for the health of dear old Veracity. They were school friends before Veracity’s agoraphobia advanced. He wants Veracity’s heir present to repair Veracity’s reputation and reintegrate him into the senatorial social strata. His daughter will be attending. Adorable. They’re Tullian, do you think that’ll be a problem in spotting you? Montrose: Baronet Helena Integrity Shane has written you a novel imploring you to attend the festivities for sake of contributing an unaffected voice to, I quote, ‘the claustrophobic and incestuous sprawl that is the Wilton School Lunarist Society’ in hopes that you can be a ‘dissenting voice with the strength of provincial pride’ and that you and her may act as ‘comrades and peers’ who ‘stand together for that which demands doing in service of the coming dawn.’ Hereafterist talk. Double adorable. Would that I could see Harlow’s face, that talk from a baronet. Last invitation is from the debutante herself. The whole note says, Loveday, Come join the fun. I might fall in love with you. Big money if so. Cordially, Goss Dignity Chauncey, written in her own hand.”

Tullian could be a problem. Once I would’ve liked to meet the Tullian baron family, when I was young and naïve enough to strive beyond what was immediately in front of me. I’d avoid the Loomis girl. I wouldn’t avoid the rich Hereafterist, who felt impossible, and thus must be proven with the naked eye. I toyed with my pearl earring. “It says ‘written in her own hand’?”

“She wrote the words written in her own hand, yes.” Sisphe folded the invitations crisply. She wore her disguise like she’d been born at it. She looked smart and quick. Aside from the fact that she was conspicuously covered, her presence on the drive up toward the estate would seem abundantly natural, even necessary. She had been theorizing and executing the aesthetics of her own subjugation for years. All her kidnappings were her choreography; where I excelled in mechanical logistics, she thrived where performance called. Even now, in the shadow of the Chauncey estate wrought ichorite gates, where I remained half Marney, she was immersed. Her body became discreet and orderly, excessive femininity reigned in, only suggested, briefly flashed; she walked with clean clicks, made direct eye contact, and didn’t bounce at all. Her largess hung around her in the air, but it was implacable in her posture. Unimpeachable. She should be walking a prissy exotic dog. “They’re all crawlies, miss.”

“Miss is awful,” I said. Them being crawlies was bizarre. A mercy for me, I wasn’t sure how I could sustain tactical interest in a young man, but odd. Stellarine law, and Tullian law for that matter, were particular about gender and its function. That function was fixed. Women with men in closed pairs. No fucking outside of those closed pairs. Fucking extraneously made your gender sticky and complicated. Veltuni law less so, Veltuni coming of age allowed for self-determination in all things, gender included, but the religious weight on reproduction and continuation of the ancestral congress meant usually that demonstration of fertility was necessary for accruing any sort of power, even if that meant fucking once for the purpose of pregnancy and then returning to whatever one pleased. The Oneness didn’t care at all. Actual Ignavian legal code was vague. It allowed for interfaith marriage and adjacent consolidation of debt and possession, an enormously progressive move by the revolutionary barons when Ignavia became itself two hundred years ago. Women could marry women in Ignavia under this code. They just didn’t. If they did, that’d be crawly of them, and being crawly was vile. “D’you think they’re more boycrawly or girlcrawly?”

“How about ma’am? Revenge for you saying yes ma’am to me at five times an hour every hour each day for a decade. I would guess girlcrawly. I would be delighted to be wrong.” She adjusted her stride and trailed behind me at a respectful distance. “You can be insane. Veracity is famously insane. Just commit to the kind of insane you are and I’ll wingman it. Are you thinking big insane or little insane?”

I looked at her. I looked at the grass.

“Medium insane.” She clucked her tongue. “What about sir?”

“Sir’s better.”

Faux Bellonan estate. High pitched roof and fingered columns, a broad veranda, a hulking squareness that suggested a garden courtyard in the belly of the house. It looked polished and smelled new. Behind us, the spires of Ignavia City broke the horizon in the otherwise endless pines. I forbade myself from looking at Ignavia City. Cataract clouds above us, a brisk southern breeze. I stared down the building that contained Yann Industry Chauncey. I could taste my own heartbeat. It was salty between my gums.

Barely moving my mouth I managed, “Do we knock?”

“Surely not.” Sisphe cleared her throat, then called into the evening air: “Baron Apparent Velma Truth Loveday is here!”

I wanted my mask. I widened my stance.

The door opened. Tullian girl, younger than me. She wore a bonnet and what would’ve been a standard maid’s uniform if the fabric didn’t gleam like that. It looked like a polished shell, skintight where it wasn’t billowing, so skintight I could see the slant of her ribs. She bowed her head. “Baron Apparent Velma Truth Loveday?”

“Yes ma’am.” I stood as rigidly as I knew how to stand. “With secretary.”

“With secretary,” the girl said. She didn’t lift her gaze. She had a pinkish complexion, I could see the lilac veins in her eyelids. “I’ll inform Mister Chauncey, thank you. Come inside if you please.”

“Mister Chauncey,” I repeated.

“Yes, Mister Chauncey is entertaining the other guests. Or will be shortly. She hasn’t come downstairs yet.”

She? I clenched my diagram. “What may I call you?”

“Oh. Birdie.” She took a backwards step that wedged the door wider.

“Thank you, Birdie,” I said. Without a backwards glance, clinging to a desperate faith that Sisphe was nearby and retained her cunning under duress, I walked past Birdie, through the chilly monochrome foyer, into the frondy garden courtyard where a party unfolded slowly, as though the scene was underwater, or the honeyed air had gone tar thick.

Bodies stretched on elongated metal chairs. Women, mostly, all within a few years of me in age. Service workers dressed identically to Birdie swept around the garden’s perimeter, strange shiny fabric crinkling against itself, and a smattering of dancers with corset strings drenched in glitz waved feather fans and whispered low witty nothings to whomever sat beside them. By my estimation there were nine guests, or seven, two with plus-ones, and none of them were Industry Chauncey.

Nearest to me was a lovely dark girl in a brilliant blue evening gown in that same stitchless fabric the maids wore who laughed from her belly with her head tipped back, and directly beside her on the luminous color-shifting abject little bench sat a sallow girl with an eye patch who did not laugh and looked aggrieved to be breathing. The sallow girl wore a silk sash across her chest embroidered with fifty bronze hands reaching for nothing. Cisran nobility. The happy girl’s accent sounded conspicuously familiar. Ignavia City, I’d guess.

Near the loathsome metal bench was a loathsome metal chair that held a Tullian girl who must be the Glitslough Loomis heir, whose comportment was so flawlessly Tullian that I felt like I might hyperventilate. Like any flawless Tullian girl, she did not speak unless called upon, and as nobody called upon her, she remained silent. She watched the galleries on the floor above us with acute focus. She had fresh lilies tucked in the straw of her bonnet. Somehow I tore my eyes off her.

Across the courtyard lounged a trio that watched the Tullian girl with open interest. They didn’t touch any of the horrible furniture. Most demanding of visual attention was a perky Roystonian woman. Clearly Roystonian. She wore gloves cut from an ocelot and a smattering of silk ribbons in her rigorously sculpted yellow hair. Her face was powdered white, and her features small, without any edges. She smiled unendingly. That’s Royston for you.

Beside her was a man. The man was a pirate. That is, the man was a prince warlord from the Crimson Archipelago. I wasn’t sure which prince currently held power on Jira, the archipelago’s federal center, but I wagered it was him, or would be him beyond year’s end. He wore gold and coral jewelry and his heavy brocade military dress coat dangled off his shoulders like a cape, arms free, the impossibly delicate fabric of his shirt sleeves shoved thoughtlessly over his elbows. He would need a new shirt in the morning. His arms were tan, scarred. He’d earned his place. Behind him, fussing over a bead on his epaulettes, was a man so pretty I nearly mistook him for a crawly. He looked stern, had a dart between his beautiful brows, more delicate bone than hair. An advisor, maybe? The princess and the pirate whispered loudly. She snorted when she laughed.

To my right, one dark woman sprawled across a metal bench, glorious with gold leaf in her straight-back braids, with proud round features and a studied ease, adorned in the flowing robes of a Tasmudani hierophant. I had never met a hierophant. I’d seen illustrations. She looked enormously comfortable, happy to be stretched out, and mouthed things slowly at the woman who swayed against the bench’s wicked back. The woman above her was tall and whippet thin, I could see the bone through the bridge of her nose, and wore a heavy stole over her slinky beaded dress. She had a frenetic air that peeked through the scene’s boozy languidity. She never stopped moving. The tall woman was stunning. She and the hierophant were rapt in one another.

Above, leaning from the second story gallery, was the girl on the riverboat who’d nearly killed me. She wore a dress that looked like poured quicksilver. She smoked a long cigarette and flicked ash down on the garden. She radiated displeasure. She didn’t seem to see me.

I recalled the sensation of her knife.

My blood foamed. I turned to Sisphe but Sisphe was gone. She’d floated over to the bench to my left, spoke brightly with secretarial crispness with the laughing woman in blue. The woman in blue seemed thrilled to talk to Sisphe, offered a stretch of the evil couch. Sisphe sat. She crossed her ankles and cozied into conversation. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen the girl on the balcony. During that raid, I’d been wearing a mask. Sisphe had not. Recognizing Sisphe seemed extremely feasible. Sisphe is hypnotic. Who’d forget Sisphe? Not the girl who’d nearly murdered me in her defense, surely.

Music drifted from nowhere. I glanced around for Birdie, desperate for anyone with a name I knew.

The sallow girl with the Cisran silk sash touched her glass with open contempt. She brought it close to her face, examined the lines of the stem, the breadth of the belly of the bowl, the tannins streaking a rim around the inside. She pinched the stem between her thumb and middle finger, held her trigger finger and her pinky at stiff, exaggerated angles. Agonizing, nonsensical way to hold something. She said aloud to the happy girl in blue, “Murky crystal, thicker than phlegm. My mother cannot drink from a crystal heavier than a calligraphy quill or her fingers will bruise.”

“Bubbly?” I flinched away and threw a hand behind me, touched where my rifle usually lived. Nothing. With effort I forced my lungs back into their pattern, and found the voice’s source. Standing beside me, head inclined, was the tall angular woman with the stole. She gave me a slow smile, flicked her attention from me to Sisphe then back. Deep-set eyes, dark and rimmed with pink. She looked like she never slept. This close she smelled like sweet cloves and yellowed paper. “You’re Veracity’s heir apparent, yes?”

I nodded sharply. Managed, “Yes ma’am,” then kicked myself.

“Helena Integrity Shane,” she said. She spoke with a low, smooth intensity, enunciated clearly but with more breath than required. “Montrose’s third baronet. I’m glad you came. May I show you around?”

“Yes ma’am,” I somehow said again. “Much obliged.”

“Are you going to offer me your arm?”

I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. Her inflection didn’t change. I offered my arm.

She quirked a brow, parted her lips in a little ah. Then she took it, touched me so lightly that it didn’t rumple the fabric. “Forgive me that I’ve entreated you to join me in the viper pit and don’t even know your given name and Virtue. I confess in advance that if your politics mirror your father’s, if we consider your father’s absenteeism a politic, you and I will be enemies come morning. Until then I would love to catch up. It’s a treat to be in the company of someone who hasn’t made themselves the pariah of even a single Lunarist dinner party.” She inclined her head toward me. The dark waves she had pinned around her head shifted. A loose curl fell free, bounced by the spoon of her collarbone. “In order, there in blue is Ignavia City Baron Apparent Ramtha thu Ramtha, that’s Ramtha XII. Wonderful girl, compulsively loveable, not here to woo Goss. They’re old friends and abstractly cousins, and already business partners beyond the point where marriage would bring further advantage. Beside her is the Cisran Countess Alichsantre thu Alichsantre, that’s Alichsantre L. If she smiles, leave the room. Flee. I could not begin to tell you what she wants. Sitting alone is Baron Apparent Susannah Loomis, whom I imagine wants to talk to you. She is about to inherit the Flip River delta. Besides that, she runs a literary magazine. Be kind, please. In the corner is Princess Perdita Perfection Vaughn. We call her Dita. She’s a hereditary military commander in Royston. She is personally, on an individual level, the most reprehensibly violent person I have ever met. She’s here seeking conquest cash. Beside her is Prince Mir of the Crimson Archipelago, fresh from usurping his older brother Hiram. He’s a shipping magnate. He wants the keys to Susannah’s house, so to speak. That’s Mago with him, his man. From what I understand, Mago was Hiram’s man until the hour of his death. Finally, there’s darling Darya, High Hierophant from North City, Tasmudan. She’s not here for Goss. She’s here for the negotiation circus. Now. What ought I call you?”

“Thank you. Loveday. Pardon, if you please, what do you want in this, Helena Integrity? And who,” my riverboat fighter dangled her wrists over the railing, her hair floating in a breeze that otherwise did not exist, “is that?”

“I want to prevent this continent’s auto-cannibalism.” She licked the corner of her mouth. “Why, that’s little Miss Ichorite herself. I suppose you wouldn’t have seen her before, I understand that your father has been obstinate about keeping the ichorite industry out of the Fingerbluffs. She’s everywhere in IC. They’re calling it Luster City now. It’s tongue-in-cheek but I’ve heard the formal proposal’s in motion. She’s Vikare zel Tlesana, of the Tlesana fashion empire. She’s Dignity’s dearest friend and the face of the Luster Revolution. Everything is faced in iridescent chrome in the shape of her famously perfect body. The past three years, they’ve managed to worm their way into every major industry operating out of IC. People eat food from ichorite cans with ichorite spoons wearing ichorite clothing, sitting upon their ichorite chairs in their ichorite homes beside the fabulous ichorite railway. Chaunceyco has an emergent monopoly on the building blocks of daily life. That’s largely on Dignity and Vikare.”

Different story than young Chauncey, labor champion. My birthplace would be poisonous to me. I wondered about the new lustertouched. I wondered if any of them had died by living in the city. It’d be an endless fit for life.

Helena Integrity paused. Without applying more pressure, she whisked me beneath a potted palm, and before my horror about the immensity of things I could no longer safely touch sank in, Helena said, “Loveday, forgive me my intensity. I am going to be frank with you.”

“Please,” I said.

“When Dignity picks her lucky victim, the world will immediately change. Dignity is enormously rich in liquid capital. Whomever she marries will immediately become the wealthiest aristocrat in the world. If that person is Dita, Alichsantre, Mir, or maybe Susannah, war will claim millions of lives. Darya can’t marry Dignity, her office doesn’t allow it. Dignity has no reason to marry Ramtha. That leaves me and you. Everyone here, Mir and Darya aside, went to school together. Wilton is a special place that mutilates the human spirit. It is a machine that produces baby tyrants. We were horrible to each other. Unspeakable to each other. Alichsantre looks so sour because she, like you, has seen Vikare reclining above us. Vikare took Alichsantre’s eye out. So. All the delicate indirect dancing negotiations that will determine the arrangement of wealth and power on the precipice of the ugliest war this side of the world has seen in centuries are being colored by years of hazing and hurt feelings. It doesn’t help that, being the astrologists we are, most of us have been tangled at some point or the next.”

“Astrologists,” I repeated.

“Lunarists. The astrology club.” She pursed her lips. “The society for women who prefer the company of women. Thus the overrepresentation of women, here. Poor Mir must not have been informed. That or he’s the most arrogant man alive, which could be fun.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re crawlies.”

Helena Integrity Shane went very still.

“That’s alright,” I said. She still held my arm, I put my hand over hers, scarcely brushing her knuckles. “I’m a boycrawly. Real old-fashioned. I just haven’t ever called it by that name before. What’s astronomy got to do with it?”

She breathed hard between her teeth, gave me a wary smile. “This goes to my point. You are an eligible stranger, truly a stranger. Be aware that some girls here might get . . . touchy, hearing that word. The Lunarist Society does considerable legwork to impress upon outside observers that we aren’t the things crawlies are assumed to be. For respectability’s sake.” She said the word crawlies with great care, like she’d bitten into a pepper, and didn’t want the sting to touch more than the tip of her tongue. Like she was surprised to have enjoyed the burn. “Tell me, Loveday. Do you want to see war in the Drustlands?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to see war in the Drustlands.”

“Then my dear, I will do my very best to make sure that Goss Dignity Chauncey falls madly in love with you. Darya will collaborate with me on this project.” She jerked her chin down. “Your beauty may well save the world.”

Something fluttered in my gut. The spit was gone from my tongue. I glued my molars and twisted my wrist, made a quick gesture of gratitude, two fingers curled, two spread, thumb jutted wide from the index. Helena Integrity didn’t notice. In my periphery, Susannah did. Quietly, I said, “Is Industry here?”

“Yann? No. He’s in IC I imagine. He’ll come around when Goss has made her choice.” She cocked her head to the side, listened with her right ear scooped toward heaven, then straightened up. “She’ll be here in a moment. Go look handsome. I’ll sow seeds.”

Industry wasn’t here? Tough. I widened my stance and forced myself to focus. Go look handsome was a difficult command to follow. I felt grateful for Helena, and a cloying tension. I was here with an express purpose, the fulfillment of which would kill me. I had to avenge you. Preventing the conquest of your homeland seemed not unrelated to avenging you. It would be a moral imperative regardless of your heritage. But understand that by this point my religion had been retrofitted to center you. I venerated you constantly. Discreetly but compulsively. I was possessed by you. In life you owned nothing, in death you are pledged every morsel in my mouth, every electric ripple in my skin, all the intensities of survival and destructive frivolity I experience. Every breath in my lungs is yours. You are the Torn Child, I am given to you, and my devotion to your memory is absolute. You are the abstraction of hundreds of workers smashed to gore and thousands of workers who bend and go brittle before and after your death’s blunt violence. Some of my memories of you are probably stories I told myself. I don’t know if you really swindled the foreman for his silver lighter and pawned it to buy us fresh fruit and hard cheese. I don’t know if your advice was always so crystalline, if you were always keen and clever, if you were as small as I remember you being. Nevertheless you had become inextricable from my sense of self. Your ghost lived in the meat of me. I was going to kill Yann Chauncey. I was going to kill him for you. Would it be deceitful to promise this other thing, this thing that I had not pledged to you, as a priority of mine? You told such fantastic stories about the Drustlands. You told me about the elkhinds, whose antlers grew from every part of their body, more thorn bush than animal, and the maiden wells where the souls of unmarried women would collect and pollute the water so that anyone who drank it became fertile but would bear children that were not their own. I could incorporate this into my project, couldn’t I? I remembered the smear made of Laith Hall.

Yes. No. I’d tell Sisphe. Harlow and Brandegor planned for war at home. Could that war have dual purpose? If we were victorious over Chaunceyco, would that not eliminate the funding source upon which this war depends?

Helena Integrity was no longer beside me. I hadn’t noticed her move.

I turned on my heel, and in the middle of the room stood the woman in the oil portrait. Gossamer Dignity Chauncey, in the flesh.

Gossamer Dignity Chauncey looked ill. She was a boyish, reedy, violently redheaded woman, who wore her hair bluntly cut and slicked back behind her ears. Glacial eyes under bruised eyelids, a lopsided grin too big for her face, long limbs and long neck. One slim ichorite hoop in her left ear. She wore a fur coat over a herringbone suit. The cane she walked with glinted like black licorice. She was not a tall woman, but she filled the entire room with her huge whirring vitality. The air sucked out of my mouth and floated around her. Plants bent to face her. The sky hung lower and the ground lurched up. She strode into the middle of the courtyard, up to a statute I hadn’t previously noticed in the haze of aristocrats, and struck it with the cane. She hit it like she intended to break it, a mean overhead swing, the kind I’d use to crush bone.

The statue shuddered, then coughed. It was a fountain. A trickle spilled from the serpentine urn’s mouth, flowed down to the shallow bowl of its base.

Goss stepped back. She threw out her hands. “Dinner!”

Immediately a stream of servants in identical ichorite dresses, Birdie among them, carried out a round ichorite table, hollowed in the middle, which they carefully placed over the fountain. In a synchronized flurry, the maids rushed past each other, returning seemingly without having left bearing ichorite platers of veal and lamb, braised peacock, blanched lamprey, a jewel box of sliced fruits and vividly green spiraled vegetables, a barrage of roots and sculptural loaves of bread and sweets on intricate racks, and milks, lots of little pitchers of milk, which were arranged around plates that they shuffled and dealt with a speed any gambler in the Fingerbluffs might’ve admired. The feast unfurled in one continuous motion, and Goss collapsed in a bigger, even more horrible ichorite chair, one that looked like a splash of water suspended in space.

This feast was a nightmare. I could touch nothing. I should eat nothing. The fit intensified just being near it. It was an elaborate array of poison, all of it was poison, all of it would make my gums swell until my teeth popped like buttons. My throat would shut and my heart would stop, I would seep the iridescent serum from every hole in my body and flood this courtyard and kill everyone. I stood perfectly still. I panicked.

Goss hooked one hand around the back of her chair, swung her knee up and hooked it on the spindly metallic arm rest. I didn’t have any illusion that I understood expected aristocratic conduct, but I sensed it wasn’t this. This wasn’t even expected Stellarine conduct. I stared in open awe and horror while heirs and performers swirled around me, took seats together around the table.

Someone’s feathers brushed me.

I jumped, my heart lurched up between my teeth, and the performer who’d brushed me spun and took my wrists. She looked at me, and in my peril I allowed myself to look back, and under the blunt bangs and full face of makeup was a scowl I recognized. My stomach flipped. “Teriasa?”

Sunny’s eyes shot wide. Her mouth popped open. She seized my big lapels and pulled me into a deep kiss, her tongue flicked between my teeth, my vision whirred and my breath caught and Sunny pressed against me, she fit her hands behind my head, pulled her lips up my jaw, took my earlobe in her teeth and hissed, “Marney, what the fuck are you doing here, you suicidal idiot!”

“I’m Velma Truth Loveday and I’m here to marry that redhead so I can kill Industry Chauncey,” I managed. Where was her skinny boy? Where was her family in Cisra? I doubted I made a sound, my lungs hung limp in my chest, but she responded against my chest like she heard me. She curled her fingers in my ringlets, yanked them, tsked as they sprung back into place.

“Like my doll? You’re insane. I hate you. I’m here to rob that redhead,” she murmured. “Okay. We’re a team. Play along.”

“Yes ma’am. Yes’m.” I’d missed her. Oh, sky.

She pulled back and slapped me. She wore the malachite bracelet. Its greenness traced an arc through the air.

Quick bright pain. I took it. After the ringing she caught my chin, jerked my head up, and said loudly enough for the room to hear, “You can’t just take something that good away from me, Loveday!” Her face was a knot of fury and, startlingly, shyness. She looked flush, on the magenta edge of tears. “You can’t show me paradise then abandon me!”

“I didn’t abandon you, sugar.” I dropped my voice low, felt protective of the vulnerability she wore. I knew it was a show, but I hadn’t braced for fake reactions, so everything I had came from my gut. I took a step toward her, angled my shoulders between her and the clearly keen aristocrats. “I did everything you asked of me, and then it was done. I’ve hurt you, though. I’m sorry about that hurt.”

“I’m a good girl, Loveday. I’m the best girl in the game. Don’t you forget it.” She sounded heartbroken. I couldn’t stand it. She broke away from me before I got my arms around her, and I took a step after her, but kept my arms down, in sight, lest they move against her wishes. “My heart is not a toy.”

“I’d cut down anybody who ever accuse it of being such,” I said. Why the fuck was she here to rob Gossamer Dignity Chauncey? Had her man wronged her? Had something gone wrong? “You’re brilliant, Teriasa. Knowing you made me richer. I—”

“That’s enough,” she said. She reached out, stroked my cheek with the back of her knuckles, then stormed away, collapsed into a chair beside Sisphe, who was happier than any human being had ever previously been.

I stood still, blinking.

Goss, Mir, and Dita zealously clapped their hands.

I sat. The only empty chair was between Dita and Alichsantre, and I stared straight ahead, looked at neither of them. I especially did not look at Helena Integrity. I wasn’t sure what her appraisal of the show might be. Oh, Sunny. Why are you here? The chair hummed underneath me. The clothes were thick enough that I didn’t immediately fall into a fit, but a fit felt inevitable. Conversation struck up immediately. Largely not about me. The aristocrats spoke avidly and quickly about nothing, about weather and the taste of the food I hadn’t touched. More laughter. Mir and Darya were in tears over something I couldn’t parse. Susannah was talking to Sisphe now, and she was smiling to herself with ideal Tullian demure, eyes downcast, hands fluttering between slight shapes. Curiosity, gratitude, more please, yes please. Ramtha spoke animatedly with a performer and Alichsantre, who contributed monosyllabic responses and didn’t take her eyes off her plate, occasionally elaborating on her opinions of the meal—wet, over-spiced, cheap, too lean, too experimental, sans technique. Dita caught my hand.

I looked at my hand in Dita’s hand.

Dita beamed. She was all scrunched nose and dimples, too cute for all her powder, then her big bright smile flipped, and she pouted at me. She stamped her slippered foot under the table. The sound was louder than a slipper ought make. Alichsantre jumped. “How come we haven’t met before? You’re pretty. You’ve been keeping yourself from me. That’s not very sweet of you.”

“I don’t leave the Fingerbluffs,” I said too curtly.

Her smile returned. Very curved. “Stern. I like that. What did you do to that whore?”

I took a moment. Turned to look at Dita properly and willed myself not to strangle her. “Exactly what she asked of me.”

“And what was that? I don’t know anything about these things.” She thickened her accent, made the th’s into lispy z’s. “I’m a student of the world and I would love to learn everything about you and your magic whoreslaying powers. I’m Princess Perdita Perfection, by the way. Aren’t you gonna kiss my knuckles?”

I broke her hold and caught her wrist, twisted it. Discomfort, not hard enough to bruise. “Probably not. Pardon.”

She grinned wider. The corners of her mouth went up, not out. She broke my hold with a strength I hadn’t expected, moved exactly how I had, down to the twitches, just faster. I smiled despite myself, surprised by her harshness. She twisted my wrist harder than I’d twisted hers. Pain popped behind my eyelids. There’s so much Helena Integrity had said to me. I tried to shuffle through the details quickly, landed on, this girl is a soldier. She didn’t look like a soldier. She was small-statured and curvaceous, she spilled over the neckline of her bodice, but I doubted she’d clear the height and weight requirements for the Enforcer Corps. Could the likes of her have destroyed Laith Hall? Could she slaughter farming communities of armed Hereafterist milkmaids?

As I marveled at this she flicked her wrist. Something tore between layers of my skin. The pain was throbbing bright and crystalline, a hilarious feeling. Then she lifted her plump, peachy hand, stripped of its ocelot glove, and pressed her first two knuckles against my bottom lip, a punch in slow motion. Feeling more than thinking, I brought my lips forward, kissed the air above her nails. Dita preened. She brought my hand down, set it in her lap, cradled it against the taffeta that swept around her thighs, and I hallucinated briefly that she and I had met in the bars in the Fingerbluffs. I would’ve pulled her apart. My tongue was numb and stiff in my mouth. Talking was difficult. I was very good at this. I knew how to do this. Adrenaline glittered behind my eye sockets and, blurring with the lurching florid early-fit symptoms, I elected to let my body move without close supervision. I trusted my sinew to twitch where it ought.

Across the table Darya had an arm slung around Ramtha’s neck, mirroring a performer whose bodice hung open, fell down across one shoulder and breast like a mother on a playing card. Darya and the performer swayed together against Ramtha, whose brow was smooth listening to whatever Darya breathed above her ear. Helena Integrity glanced at me occasionally, but seemed fixed on Susannah, who devotedly cut a strawberry into slices so thin they looked translucent. A slice curled off the edge of her knife. It looked like a blossom opening. It seemed believable for a moment that the details of my fit were real, that the swirling gemstone distortion on every surface was the truth of that surface, that everyone was glowing and glossy and melting into their chairs.

“It’s rotten,” said Alichsantre, “it’s crass.”

I wasn’t sure where Sisphe had gone. I turned my head to find her, looked across the kaleidoscope laughter of this whole continent’s legal heirs and all their pearly molars, and I couldn’t see her.

Princess Perdita Perfection Vaughn slid my hand down her knee. I understood mechanically, I walked my fingers along the edge of her frothy skirt until I found the ruffled hem. The little rhinestone pattern was heavy. Did she have diamonds tucked in this lace? Or coins? I imagined myself kneeling on the floor between her ankles with knife in hand and prying all the rhinestones loose. A worthy raid all on its own. Dita’s stockings were so delicate that the edge of my chewed-down nails might’ve torn them. It must take such precise care to roll them over her calves without the whole structure unraveling and falling apart in a mess of silver string. I touched her lightly, only the pads of my fingertips, traced the soft hollows behind her knee, along the seams of her full fleshy thigh, warmer, higher. I felt the livid muscle under her unfathomably soft skin. This fucking warmonger. I felt knuckles brush my knuckles. Somebody else’s knuckles.

I paused. Flicked my eyes up.

Goss Dignity Chauncey, to Perfection’s right, mirrored me. She traipsed a hand beneath Perfection’s skirt and looked not at Perfection, but at me. Her eyes were dead blue under her spray of red eyelashes. Eerie eyes, milky corpse eyes, spectral pale like a revenant’s. It looked like her pupils were a too-pale shade of blue. They reflected nothing. Dignity’s hand drifted against mine. A look flickered across her face, I couldn’t tell if it was annoyance or amusement. The corner of her mouth flickered. She mouthed, Hello Fingerbluffs.

Perdita Perfection reclined in her chair. She folded her hands politely and rested them on the table, rocked her head back, parted her pink mouth with a sigh. She was adorable. I wanted to thrash her. I blinked, looked back at Dignity, at the heir to the man who’d ordered the deaths of everybody I’d ever met before the age of twelve, at every promise of Ignavian progressivism condensed into one mortal girl, and had no idea how to impress her. Surely this couldn’t impress her. I needed to impress her so that I could kill her father. What was I to do?

Dignity hooked our index fingers together. She tossed her head to the side, nodded at a door out of the courtyard that led into some cavernous recess of this godless play-temple of a house.

It occurred with a jolt that if I took off even my gloves they’d kill me.

I had tattoos everywhere. Everywhere. My identity adorned my chest. I had a whip spider tattooed on my belly, on the stretch of muscle between my navel and my pubic hair. If I took my clothes off, Lady Atrocity would take it as kill me immediately. What had I thought? Had I expected propriety from the baron class? Perdita Perfection Vaughn wasn’t even a baron, she was a princess, and I had no concept of how to even begin to anticipate the actions of a Roystonian brutality princess. Fucking at the table? She’s a princess. Why not?

Dignity swept her thumb over my first and second knuckles. It was a soft feeling through the glove.

Sharp through the noxious pink haze came Birdie’s voice. She stood at the front door, but somehow her voice was clear enough that I heard it even through distance and my delirium. Birdie said, “Strife Maiden Dunn Ygrainne,” a pause, “and guard.”

The sultry heat that hung around the table dissipated. Sober winter took us. Dignity sat upright. Perdita’s head snapped down, her eyes on fire as a small, tight smile replaced her pouty panting. Across the table in a ripple, everyone’s posture went rigid. Helena looked grave serious and older, her smile gone. Mir put his hands behind his head and rocked onto the back legs of his chair, the posture of arrogant nonchalance I’d seen as prelude to innumerable bar fights. Susannah flinched back, Alichsantre leaned forward, Sisphe was still nowhere to be seen. Then, a shock to everyone at the table, Ramtha stood. She smoothed her preternaturally smooth ichorite dress and her infectious happiness, which I now understood was deliberate, softened. She looked each of us in the face.

“Beloved friends and peers, you inspire me every day with your commitment to your constituents. I am so moved to have such brilliant beautiful girls and Mir by my side, guiding me and demonstrating with their own diligence what positive thinking and initiative can accomplish. Our duties are great and our faith is greater.” Ramtha had a warm, inflective voice. I noticed now she dialed her IC affectations back. She chewed her language. Every syllable was considered. She spread her hands, affected the most casual iteration of a formal oratory stance I’d ever seen. She stretched a hand behind her, toward the door where Strife Maiden Dunn Ygrainne and guard had been announced. The darkness beyond her fingertips flexed as though it were soaked in tremendous heat. Slashed leaves nodded away from the opening, curling, bracing.

“I took it upon myself,” she continued, “in the spirit of concord and hospitality, to invite to this party one Miss Ygrainne of Dunn Hall, a recently elected strife maiden from the Drustish assembly. I’m so excited she came all this way! In all my correspondence with her, she’s consistently impressed upon me that she shares our values, and I am confident by the end of your little contest, Goss, we’ll all be bosom friends.”

The atmosphere itched. Any movement at all could’ve started a fire.

Delicately, Susannah said, “Contest?”

Gossamer stole her hand from Perdita’s skirt and stood up. She smoothed her hands down her fur coat, stroked the foxes as though they were still alive, and looked at Ramtha with an intensity I thought would kill her. She jutted out her chin. “Bring her in, Birdie.”

The door opened. Surely it had not groaned like that when Sisphe and I came inside.

A woman entered quickly, her tall pale guard one pace behind her. She wore gray traveling clothes. Ignavian traveling clothes, lambskin gloves and a tailored wool coat to her ankles, which she swiftly unbuttoned and swept back across her waist, showing the embroidered smock beneath. It was pretty and implacable. I’d never seen a garment like it. The woman, Strife Maiden Dunn Ygrainne, did not smile at us. Her square face was set. She folded her hands at the small of her back and clicked her heels together. Her guard, unquestionably the tallest and palest woman I’d ever seen, had pendulous white-blond braids down to her thighs whose motion continued even when she stood behind the strife maiden at attention.

Ygrainne said nothing. She looked at Goss.

“Strife Maiden–Elect Dunn,” Ramtha started.

“Ygrainne,” said Goss. “Is that your name, darling?”

“Dunn Ygrainne,” Ygrainne said curtly. She had a surprisingly high voice.

Goss didn’t blink. “Do you want to be my wife?”

“This depends. From what Hall did you hail in your youth?”

Gossamer Dignity Chauncey’s lips turned white. She straightened her posture, pulled away from Ygrainne.

“You are Drustish,” Ygrainne said. “Yes?”

“Funny plus-one you’ve invited, Ramtha. Plus-two. We lack adequate seating. No matter. I’ll make some for you.” Gossamer snatched up her cane with one hand, and seized Perdita’s sleeve with the other. Tension passed between them. Gossamer’s face tightened and Perdita’s unreadable sweetness got sweeter. Even if Perdita was stronger than Goss, her floating pink sugar sleeve was not, and Perdita stood after a moment, delicately accepted the offered elbow. Her eyes trained on Ygrainne. I half expected her to start barking. Gossamer inclined her head toward the Drustish women, then turned on her heel, stormed out of the courtyard. Perdita’s skirts billowed around them like a mist.

Ygrainne’s expression didn’t change. She sat in Gossamer’s seat. She had incredible economy of movement, no gesture wasted. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t touch the food. Her guard sat beside me, inclined her head and murmured something inaudible, then reached for a ribbon of meat. She pinched its purpleness and popped it between her teeth, chewed, swallowed. Nodded to Ygrainne. Ygrainne then made herself a plate, and slowly conversation bubbled up, thanks to the persistent unflinching friendliness of Ramtha thu Ramtha.

I had to follow Goss.

I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.

As I stood I fumbled around the bear trap of my memory for something, anything, Brandegor might’ve told me about Drustish politics. She’d spoken of the Drustlands so little after Laith Hall. That’s not what we did together. When she was drunk, sometimes Brandegor would boast about blood feuds between Halls. Her Hall, Mors Hall, had struck a feud with Shae Hall. Neither Hall was rich enough to settle the feud with gold or cattle. Instead, they’d snipe one another’s family members, heir by heir, until both Halls stood vacant and fell to rot. Brandegor sometimes told the story this way, that she had been the last soldier of a conflict that’d swallowed everyone she’d ever known. Sometimes when she told it, she spoke about her exile, because when it’d been her time to kill a Shae, she’d killed someone too precious. Her greed changed the stakes from war thralls and bull maids to Hall fathers and reap mothers. Sometimes the whole feud was her fault. She boasted about her upbringing, but the details were huge and fantastic, and I struggled to pan them for anything like comfort. I thought about a spat we had. She’d knocked me upside the head, then sat on the cliff beside me, held a dripping goat steak against my screaming eye. She’d said something about you. Something to comfort me about your loss.

In stiff Mors Drustish I said to the guard, “We’ll remember these wrongs with our hands.”

The guard looked at me. Steam-gray eyes spanned the world. She licked her fingers, not blinking, then said something in Drustish I didn’t understand. My ignorance must’ve showed on my face. The guard grunted. Under her breath in terse Cisran she said, “Find me alone.”

I stood up. Another glance around the table confirmed that Sisphe wasn’t here. Sunny wasn’t either. That gnawed. Mir and Darya watched me stand, the rest did not, immersed in talking to, or not talking to, Strife Maiden Dunn Ygrainne. I stepped around the table and crossed the courtyard, horrified at myself, horrified at the way the air tasted, and sick and starving and wet. The fragrant plants bobbed and slithered. Some night bird sang unseen. I found the door I assumed concealed them, opened it.

Memories rolled over me, ichorite exposure’s consequence. Sweat and ache and grinding teeth of every laborer who’d beat that table into shape. A worker who’s fallen across our feet and convulses because the metal had reached for him, it had felt him, it coils around his pulse and flutters. No help for us, the factory doors would not open, there were no breaks until shift’s end, and the man crawls under the assembly line while we hammer. Our backs scream, the spines in our muscles crunched, and the man underneath sobs, he spasms and claws his wrist, he weeps that the ichorite had touched him, not him it, it him, and we knew it to be true because as we beat the metal it licks the edges of our hammers.

Hallway.

Less barren than the front room, there was a carpet runner and a fresco. Bellonan heroes burying divine monsters. There was a staircase and a series of doors, two locked, one leading to a vacant parlor, the next a broom closet. I went up the stairs. I didn’t parse the information that’d been so quickly handed to me. I didn’t sift through anything. I needed eyes on the link to my target. I didn’t have socializing in me. I needed Sisphe for that. I needed Sunny, and I needed to throw myself on the floor and howl and beat my hands blue against the marble. I had a war. I had a role in that war.

I’d say I thought I’d play with them. I’d be coy enough to keep my clothes on. Veracity was insane. Maybe the gloves and boots could be control props. Not too far from the truth. I could do that. I could be unkind on request. I shook my hands out, yearned for the weight of my gun on my back. I rounded a corner. The courtyard faced me through the open gallery, supported by the occasional fluted column and a slender bone white banister.

Vikare smoked there. I saw her shoulder blades move. She wore her hair loose, it spilled over her shoulder, exposed the nape of her neck. Her silver dress looked like fresh ichorite, the raw glistening liquid we squeezed out of sludge in the foundry. It flowed over her body. She shifted, it traced the backs of her thighs. Without looking up she said, “They’re downstairs.”

“Pardon my intrusion,” I said.

“It’s not my house.” She took a drag and sighed. “Come here.”

I stood beside her at the railing. The dinner party looked happy from here. Candlelight looked gorgeous on the poisonous furniture. I thought about lamplights on wet pavement. Vikare passed me her cigarette and I accepted it with murmured thanks, held it to my lips. Mentholated. I liked the tingle in my throat. Real tingles made the delusional tingles bearable. I passed it back.

“Will you marry Gossamer?”

The rail was slick. I wanted to touch it barehanded. The cold would feel divine. I felt faint. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “That’s why I came.”

“Why?”

Would that I were Candor. Or Sisphe. Would that I were you. “I’m looking for love.”

“Liar.”

“I am.”

“Love is not enough.”

“It’s not,” I said. “Still, I like to look.”

“How will you spend our money?” Vikare blew a ring, then a ring through a ring.

I watched them melt into nothing. “Mostly I won’t.”

“You’re stupid.”

“Mhm.” Our was interesting. Funny to think I’d robbed them already. Could she have killed me if I weren’t so spent? Surely not. “I’d quadruple every Chaunceyco worker’s wage and halve their hours.”

Vikare looked at me with her eyes half-shut, her brows drawn low. Her bottom lip was overfull. I noticed the lack of ring again. Uncanny. “Why do I know you?”

“You don’t,” I said.

“I know you,” she pressed.

“You can’t know me. If we’d met, I’d never forget it.”

“Hold out your wrist.”

My wrist was a map of ink and scars. I inclined my head. “Forgive me. Not tonight.”

She stared unblinking, lovely and sullen, and lay down her wrist on the banister. The veins in her arm showed lurid green. She snuffed her cigarette against her pulse. Orange sparks and smoke. She didn’t so much as flinch. She tossed the cigarette down, pulled her arm off the banister, and pressed her hand against my breastbone. Her palm burned. “I’ll be there when you stumble, Fingerbluffs.”

“The attention’s an honor.”

“I will keep you down.”

She meant kill me. I knew she could kill me. I knew she would. She’d tuck her knife under my jaw and ram it through my tongue, through my soft palate, through the wet pink folds of my brain. She put out Alichsantre’s eye, Helena said. She’d put out my eye. She’d mutilate me. She’d dangle me from this balcony and give my body to the crows.

I put my hand over hers. “Are you in love with Dignity?”

“Not anymore.”

Below us, Goss reappeared on the scene. She was flanked by a battalion of shiny maids and bodyguards, who circled the table and swept away the dishes and trays. Gossamer’s voice echoed to heaven. The lungs on her! She said, “There are too many of you! Let’s winnow. Be up at dawn. Lo we go a-hunting. Stay behind and a servant will help you pack. Thank you for your company. As wonderful Ramtha said, you’re inspiring to look upon. My home is yours. Relax. Drink, fuck, unwind. Don’t be late. Sweet dreams.”

Ripples around the table. Susannah stood, I saw the candlelight glance off her bonnet. She moved her hands, I saw the posture of intervention, the pose the Night made the Day to beg truce. It startled me, how moved I was. It’d been a long time since I’d gone to see a Shrine. Gossamer didn’t see it. Gossamer was gone. My hand was empty. I touched my own breast. Vikare must’ve slipped away too. Everyone dissolved into vapor. I touched myself. Still breathing. Blood moving underneath my clothes. I was sick of my clothes. I pushed the rail away and sought my room.