Thirteen

Sisphe left immediately. I had no idea what she’d do. She could not shove three hundred bandits under a rug and animate a dead man.

I rode in Gossamer’s carriage on the way back. I sat with her and Vikare. None of us breathed a word. Gossamer leaned her head on my shoulder. Vikare watched my face with burning scrutiny. I looked out the window. We passed by the executioner’s garden. Three of the five dangling belonged to the Choir. I read the names ELISA PROSPERITY JONES, PANTASILA MAHK URPHE, and CLYDE LENIENCE BARKER on their marbled green-pink bodies, floral with mold. I knew Pantasila a little. She gave me tasks to perform when I was young and restless to death. Bade me chop wood and sweep the stairs and fetch us both lemonade. Her freckled belly and breasts hung low, her mouth agape, the ring plucked from her bottom lip, in some state-sanctioned insinuation that bandits did not join the ancestral congress. Flies bejeweled her open milky eyes. I mouthed the bleed. I loathed myself that I could not go and cut her down. I loathed the air itself.

Yann Chauncey. I’d seen and killed his assassin. I’d killed his assassin, not the man. The man had been in my sights.

Gossamer laced her fingers through mine. I held the delicate hand of my fiancée.

I’d kill him. I’d kill him. He’d be my father-in-law. I’d get near him. I’d see him soon and I’d kill him in private where nobody could intervene. I’d bash his head against the wall. I’d beat him with a crowbar and throw his body in the coals of his hearth. I’d undo him. I’d destroy him. I worried my thumb over Gossamer’s knuckles. When I died and they made her a widow, who would she marry next?

Didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered. She would be alright.

I brought her knuckles to my lips and kissed them. I looked at Vikare. Her attention scalded, for courtesy’s sake I ought return it. I nodded at her, stretched my swollen mouth at her. Tried to communicate with a glance that our deal was good.

She leaned her toe on mine, pressed down. She held me half-stomped for the rest of the ride.

Packing. Teriasa got me alone. I had been trying to fit unfittable things into a bag and she appeared in the dim light, Beauty’s shadow. More than any woman with the certificates to show it, Teriasa had authority. True elegance and might of word. How she must’ve led her Cisran Hereafterist literature boys, how she must’ve guided them before what happened! She pushed me onto the bed in my room and lay behind me, put her arm around my belly and dragged me close. Shock and adoration. I let myself be moved. The softness stung and I wept. She didn’t. She pressed her forehead between my shoulder blades and I let her hold me in silence. Eventually she said, “Dumb rag rabbit. What are you going to do?”

“Sisphe took a lurcher out. If she kills herself over it, she could be home late tonight. Call the Choir. Plan.”

“Plan what?”

“We’ve been pretending Horace is breathing for a decade. We’re delusion artisans. They’ll come up with something now.” A dangerous farce to burden my family with, but I had no idea how to avoid it. This was the culmination of the long play. They knew someone would come and war would follow. I just hoped it followed when we left again, not while we were there. The Choir’s might would be at our shoulders as we returned and fall on the enforcers as I murdered Yann Industry. No harm to the Fingerbluffs. “It’s not what I’d want for us.”

“Sisphe has been a maniac the past few days. She’s made me crazy with her. If the charades she’s already started rolling out work, even a quarter of them work, it’ll shape the war. Pretending is our strong suit.” She did not sound convinced of the words out of her mouth, but still said them in her punchy, darling know-it-all way. Night itself. I imagined her with Tullian praise dots on her eyelids. “How are you going to keep it up?”

“Be kind and quiet, if I can manage it. She wants ichorite. Ichorite is under azurine groves, and ours are the most beautiful in the world. She’ll be happy with what she sees. I just need to stay out of her way and keep her from looking at anything too closely.” My voice cracked. It hurt. I thought it’d show on the surface of my throat. “I didn’t get him, Sunny.”

“You will. You might’ve paused the big war, too. Don’t be cruel to yourself about this, it’ll make me so angry.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

She got up and brought my clothes to me. We folded them together.

Sometime later, nearly sleeping, we heard the boom. The crash trembled the floor and screaming followed it. I bolted out of bed, put my body between the noise and Sunny, that night she let me call her Sunny, but the sound was distant from us, came from at least a floor below. Sunny sank her nails into my hips and shoved her forehead against my shoulder. We were fully dressed. I wore her nightshirt. She breathed roughly. I listened past her breathing. A second shattering, smaller, then something like tearing canvas. People hollered. Horror first, then animal bellowing. I thought of crawly bar brawls, where all our anger from years of bludgeoning by the law and the wage and bad parents condensed into us beating each other unconscious with steins and wooden stools. Somebody was trying to kill somebody downstairs. Not a quick job.

I folded my arms around Sunny and felt hilariously small for a moment. The thought crossed my mind that I might have rivals here to destroy this continent’s rulership. A waiter with a hunting knife who sprung out of a wall to kill whomever came nearest. Or. Or could be Laith Herzeloyde getting her licks in on Princess Perdita Perfection Vaughn. Or the unseemly inverse. Vomit fluttered. I failed today. Would Herzeloyde? My nerves all fried and I couldn’t stand my own stillness, in a fit of omnidirectional passion and loathing I drew myself away from Sunny and the bed and slid to the floor, pawed through the dark until I found and opened my shut luggage, fished out my sawed-off shotgun and a bandolier we’d wrapped in my riding denim. I slung the belt over my shoulder and pulled the denim on, toed on my heavy boots.

“You don’t need to intervene,” Sunny said. She sat up and pulled the blankets around her, repetitively smoothed the wrinkles over her thighs. “Aristocrats bashing each other is them doing the work for us. You look like one of us. You can’t go down so armed.”

“What if somebody’s murdering Birdie?” I sniffed. “Ain’t no way of knowing.”

As was her power, Sunny produced a match from nowhere. She lit the candle beside the bed. Illuminated thus, I caught an edge of my reflection in an ornate gilt-framed mirror and physically flinched. My mouth was red and beestung, my tongue even redder, like cut fruit. I looked like I’d been sobbing. My eyes watered, seething bruisy pink splotches rimmed them, spilled down my nose and cheeks. This bad hours after having left Luster City. Spare me. My ringlets stuck out at odd angles. My whole face glistened, highlighted with oil-on-water swirls. It was the powdered-down fit serum. Incongruous harsh ammunition belt over Sunny’s frothy linen nightshirt, incongruous weapon brandished in my little twitching fist. I looked heinous. I looked like a lamb that’d survived its slaughter.

“Stay here,” I said.

Her face pulled. She didn’t like being told what to do, nor did she like the faux command some crawlies affected to prove their masculinity, but she’d do it. It’d be risking herself. She wasn’t a girl for fights.

I made my way around the bed and gathered her up, managed somehow with one hand around my shotgun, and eased her back down against the mattress. I smoothed her hair and pulled the buttery sheets high. I tucked her in, pulled the down comforter over her, repeated the process. She closed her eyes. I saw the little purple veins threaded through her eyelids. She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power. I kissed her brow. I loaded my gun. I shut the door behind me.

At the bottom of my descent, in a magenta damask room, a chandelier sprawled jaggedly on the ground. It looked like a smashed white cake. Glass and crystals crunched like snow under my boots. Pearls unstrung rolled in the seams of the mosaic floor. Aqua and mint green tiles for the Virtue Industry, a pearl-handed man. The crushed candles smoked; one still burned. Blood pooled a brilliant tangerine scarlet underneath the chandelier. I saw the boots, calves, thighs, hips of a woman among the spill. Laith Herzeloyde, it seemed. A shawl covered her face and upper arms. Her hands moved. She pressed her palms into the floor. She dragged her body minutely forward with the strength of her fingertips.

I hooked my boot under a broad gold hoop. The chandelier husk was heavy. It startled me with its bulk. I snarled, I kicked upright, the smashed-up chandelier flipped on its edge and clattered across the room.

Herzeloyde didn’t stand. She kept inching along.

Rest of the room. Fallen bodies, plainly dead—Gossamer Dignity’s bodyguard staff. They must have been drawn into the room, I couldn’t imagine all of them here by chance. Seven of them were dead in a longwise pile along the wall. Throats cut and head wounds, nothing elaborate. There were overturned chairs. Broken Bellonan vases. A maid whose name I didn’t know cowered beneath a table, cringed away from the corpses across the room. She looked young. She flinched from my gun and flattened her body against the exquisite wallpaper. She jabbed a finger left.

Left opened into another gallery. I stepped softly, led with the gun’s cut muzzle. Vases smashed here as well. Another dead bodyguard. Must be few left, if any. Gorgeous deep brown furniture had been snapped, splintered in quick blossoms. Smashed. Looked clubbed or slugged with a hammer. Art on the wall hung slashed or did not hang. Fragrant rough canvas ribbons curled along the floor. I followed the destruction’s curve. It led me another room deeper, this one finch yellow, then through a room whose walls were dressed in rich emerald velvet curtains, gathered and beautifully draped, another with mirrored panels that disturbed me. The mirrors too were smashed. Their cracks blazed like spiderwebs. All of them were shoulder height. The upper portions remained untouched but for the feathered spreading damage below. Deliberate damage. Quick tantrum damage.

I heard laughing.

I hugged the wall, my hips a breath away from dreadful mirror Marney’s, and entered the next room.

I watched Perdita and Mir leaving.

Perdita wore lilac taffeta and riding spurs clicking, clicking. She brandished a bronze candlestick. Around her waist, two long plaits were tied like belts. White-blond plaits. She’d sawed them off of Herzeloyde’s head. Her own hair was piled at her crown, stuck through with a fork, and I saw the muscle that bound her neck to her shoulders dripping sweat. Mir walked beside her. He held the second candlestick and spoke softly to her, gave her counsel. What pirate advice was this? Easy now, sweet bloodlusting girl, don’t sack your friend’s palace? Don’t break what can be stolen? They turned a corner, her fantastic skirts swaying around her ankles, her spurs jingling like bells, and Perdita whirled on something unseen and swung her instrument against it. It shattered.

Shouts erupted in that next room. A bloodcurdling scream in Dunn Drustish, then Helena, hoarsely: “Fucking think, skies above, think for one second the millions you condemn with your—”

“War on the Drustlands!” Dita’s voice carried. It trembled the glass fragments in the mirrored walls. “Baby Helena, so righteous and sweet! You’re deluded playing revolutionary. I am going to spatchcock this girl. I am going to burn Dunn Hall. I am going to rape her Hall head and strip the relics from her Shrine. I will kill everybody she has ever met. I will put them in a hole and pave it over. You, Helena, will be so rich when I am done. You will be flush and choked with Drustish gold. I will send a crateful to you personally. I will slap railroads across the smoldering mess I make and establish schools and proper hospitals and good industry, industry that will trade with Ignavia, that will support us in our campaign, because you’re fucking smart and will play along like a good girl. You’re dressed in fine clothes in this fine house because your father’s father’s father’s father had military might enough to hold down your piece of the mountains. We’re fucking warlords, Baronet Helena Integrity Shane! That’s the only kind of lord there is! Stand aside!”

Another shattering, and a choked sob.

I put my shoulder in the doorway.

Perdita stood over a stained glass portrait of Yann Industry Chauncey. It looked identical to the one that’d glared over me my whole childhood. Yann’s face was snapped below his left eye. Perdita stepped forward and his forehead shattered. She shook her arms out. The trophy braid belts swayed at her hips. She threw up the candlestick, it spun above her like a baton, she caught it with a flourish.

Mir kept close rank behind her. Protective stance, I’d say. I saw the ropes along his arms. I would not want to be caught in his grasp.

Across the room, Helena Integrity Shane stood in front of Strife Maiden Dunn Ygrainne. Ygrainne wept. Fury pinched her lips white. She shook down to the bone, and Helena leaned back against her, spread wide her hands. Helena wore a nightgown. Her makeup was gone, her eyes shadowed. She’d been sleeping, I’d expect. She walked Ygrainne backwards, edged her toward the open doorway behind them. I saw other observers there, Ramtha and Alichsantre in particular. Ramtha hyperventilated. Alichsantre touched her arm.

“This is a mistake,” Helena said. She jutted out her chin. “This is madness and if word of this spreads, Dita—”

“Word that a strife maiden slaughtered Goss’s guards and tried to assassinate me would be marvelous good for the cause!” Perdita stepped toward Helena. “Move aside. Last time I’ll ask. I’ll break your body, don’t think I won’t.”

Vikare entered through the far door. She brushed past Alichsantre and Ramtha, past Ygrainne and Helena, and walked directly into Perdita’s reach. She wore a nightgown so thin it looked like water. It warped the light. She looked like a revenant. Desire lurched in me, I stomped on it, but the sparks didn’t snuff. Her knife was drawn. She brandished it at Perdita Perfection’s throat.

“This is Dignity’s house,” Vikare said. “You shame yourself.”

“Nearly being slain in Dignity’s house is a smear on her honor, not mine.” Perdita tossed her head back. She took a step toward the knife, brought her chest to the tip. “You’re nothing. You don’t even have a title. It’d be a treat to beat you ’til you can’t stand up. Right, MirMir?”

“Step back, Vik,” Mir said.

Vikare’s eyes flew wide. Her face lit up, red at once, and she kicked her feet as she was dragged back. Instinct hit her, she dropped her knife, clawed in vain at the hands around her throat.

Alichsantre’s hands. Alichsantre had her in a chokehold. She pulled her back toward the door.

Mir stepped forward but Perdita thrust out the candlestick, blocked him.

“Well, I’ll be!” Perdita whistled. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Alich.”

“How dare you interfere in this,” Alichsantre said. “How dare you intervene in what isn’t yours to touch. I should have killed you at Wilton. I should’ve killed you and Gossamer, Gossamer, for dwelling among your betters and imitating what cannot ever be yours. My wealth is my birthright. My nobility is in my blood, my ancient, magic blood, my blood from the crater, first among ancestors, my power is ordained by fate, and you, you little rat, you grime, you’re a fucking merchant. Your money belongs to other people. You don’t exist. You don’t matter. You aren’t even Veltuni anymore, you shouldn’t even be called Vikare, you are not immortal, you are not my ethereal peer in eternity, you forsook it for a gimmick! You took out the ring! And now you stand between the hereditary rulers of this world, you put your body and your blade before the advancement of history towards its origin. You must answer for your arrogance. You put my eye out. You took my beauty from me. You took my marriageability from me. You stole from me, you steal from everyone in this room, this room which is fucking Ramtha’s, we stand in a summer home gifted to Yann by Ramtha XI, the only way such grandeur could be bestowed upon salesmen and polluters. We allow Gossamer to prance around in borrowed splendor because she’s a rich little piggie, but you, you Vikare mine, little Azurine, we will not suffer your arrogance. We will not suffer your hideous fashions and the mockery you make of prestige. We will not tolerate your cheapening of our style and manner in the guise of base progressivism. We will spare you your whorishness and your will to violence. I will spare you. I will take you home with me, you maimer of greatness, I will take you back to Cisra. I will take you home to my palace, which has been mine for a thousand years, which is the true inheritance of fifty generations of my name, and I will instruct you on your place. I will be your pedagogue and jailor. I will be your despot and father. I will fix you with my cruelty. You will be my bride.”

I pushed off from the doorway.

Vikare’s eyes rolled back in her head.

My finger bent. Warning shot in the ceiling. The sound clapped me, I curled my lip. Dust fell over us. Everybody in the room dropped.

“That’s enough.” I trod over the broken glass, hugged the edge of the room but brought myself toward the center. I reloaded, made a show of it. I scowled at my hands and the ache in my shoulder. I scowled at the mess. “Drop your arms.”

Perdita did slowly, bright pink. Mir didn’t but I knew enough of his culture from the pirates around the Fingerbluffs to know he wouldn’t, I didn’t press it. Alichsantre released Vikare. She collapsed to the floor, gasping, wheezing. She caught herself with her palms, I saw blue slivers of Yann’s glass face slip under her skin. Helena didn’t move. She panted, leaning back against Ygrainne, still openly weeping.

“If my father saw such rabble in his home.” I scraped my tongue with my teeth and spat. “There will be no more of this.”

“While you were sleeping, Velma, Dunn Ygrainne’s guard killed all Goss’s guards and moved against me.” Perdita peered over her shoulder at me, sugared party affect unfazed. She smiled sweetly. “Pardon the noise. It’s drowned out context.”

“Laith Herzeloyde moved against you,” I said. “Laith’s a border Hall. Or was.”

Something flashed on Dunn Ygrainne’s face. She hadn’t known Herzeloyde’s plan. I believed that.

“Laith was a border Hall,” Perdita repeated. She stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth and glanced upwards, considering. “That sounds familiar. It might have been, sure!”

Ygrainne’s face twisted. Helena’s did too.

Vikare picked the glass out of her hands. The glass looked like dyed sugar candy. She picked her knife up. I didn’t see her blink.

“There will not be war in the Drustlands,” I said.

Perdita offered her most dimpled smile. “New Bellona demands its making. It’s time, Velma. You can get in on this.”

“What d’you plan to pay your army with?” Frosty anger coated all my guts. Shutting up wasn’t on the table. “Won’t be Gossamer’s money and Susannah thinks you’re filthy. There won’t be Ignavian money in your fight. There could be Tasmudani money in the Drustish’s.”

She batted her lashes and rested her hand on the candlestick. She stroked it like a little dog. “Sound awful certain.”

“She picked me.” I kissed my teeth. “I am.”

Helena sighed so deeply I thought she’d collapse.

“Ramtha,” I said. “Can you help me help Herzeloyde? I don’t know this city. Who do we call?”

Next room over, Ramtha folded her hands and held them steepled to her lips.

“Oh, that’s funny. Is she alive?” Perdita hmphed. She played with the edge of her dress. “Stupid chandelier.”

“Goss’s doctor is still here,” Ramtha said carefully. Every syllable was round and over-enunciated, the consonants soft, the tone behind them so polished, like she had a marble in her mouth and was trying not to swallow it. She touched her ichorite dress, warped the sheen under the pad of her fingers, and turned her back on us. Square, practiced rib cage movements. “Alichsantre L. Let’s go fetch him together.”

Alichsantre watched Vikare on the floor.

“Countess,” Ramtha said.

“You invited me to this,” said Ygrainne. Her voice startled me. Its intensity. No anger or resentment, but an energetic tightness that everyone, even Perdita Perfection, cocked their head to better hear. “You brought me to this snake nest. Why?”

“You have my diplomatic sympathy and everything can be settled over drinks. It’s a party. These are my friends,” said Ramtha in that measured way. “If you were friends with us, we wouldn’t kill each other.”

Vikare started laughing. She put the knife in her lap and pressed her wrist bones to her temples.

“It’d be a great help if you fetched the doctor with Ramtha, Alich,” Helena said. She did not affect Ramtha’s politician’s bounce. She sounded dead tired and hoarse, like she’d been screaming. “Now, please.”

Vikare laughed louder. It sounded like she was coughing something up.

“This is fucking excruciating.” Mir put his candlestick on his shoulder and reached down, took Vikare by her forearm and helped her up. The knife clattered to the floor and Mir rested his boot on the blade. “Dita. You and me, we’re taking Vikare upstairs. Alichsantre, go with Ramtha. Helena, bring the strife maiden elsewhere. Velma,” he glanced over his shoulder at me, fixated for a moment on my gun, on the way I held it.

“I’ll do as I do,” I said.

“Huh.” He wiggled his jaw. “You sailed much?”

“Alich,” Ramtha said. “Let’s go. You’re embarrassing me.”

Ygrainne pulled away from Helena. She walked across the room, past seething stalk-still Alichsantre, past sweetly smiling bristling Perdita and laughing Vikare under Mir’s arm, and stood before me. She touched my chest. She looked at me with her eyes burning. “There will not be war in the Drustlands?”

I scuffed my toe on the carpet, ground a shard of glass into glitter. “We’ll remember these wrongs with our hands.”

Perdita’s ears pricked. Attention, not recognition. She didn’t speak Mors, or maybe any Drustish, but she knew the sound.

“Being the fastest this afternoon does not entitle you to threaten us with a firearm. Provincial roughness is hideous,” Alichsantre hissed. “This is not an acceptable way to—”

“You strangled Vikare,” Helena said. Her eyes stretched wide and she grinned, exhausted and exasperated. “You just strangled Vikare. You put your hands on her neck and strangled her. Think, Alichsantre. Velma killed an assassin this afternoon. Stop talking.”

Mir laughed. Vikare laughed harder when he laughed. She swayed against him, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and across the room worn Helena joined them, a spasm of her belly, then Ygrainne with a jolt, and Perdita, and as though in defeat Ramtha, everyone but Alichsantre, who made a bizarre expression, something that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t a grimace, a big juicy curve of shock and pain. Everyone churned around me. Ygrainne drifted away from me into the smashed-mirror room, and Helena followed her, with a swirl Mir swept Vikare up, Vikare who wept and gasped she laughed so convulsively, Perdita laughing too, a determined, bitter laugh, one that revealed that she was exactly what we knew her to be, and Ramtha laughed in anguish and absurdity and appeared beside Alichsantre and snapped her fingers, rolled her wrist, laughed harder and harder until Alichsantre crumbled and slinked after Ramtha for the doctor, tail between her legs, and suddenly I was alone in the ruined parlor. There was a hole in the ceiling and dust fell from the edges

I sat on the floor. I put my gun across my thighs. Yann I. Chauncey’s fucked-up face spilled across the floor in front of me. His ear and his thin mouth were near my left knee and his nose and bottom lash line were near my right. I reached for the little pieces and arranged them. I put his face together. He was missing pieces but I could make a legible shape with him.

That was him! That was the man in the walls of my factory. That was the man I did not kill today.

If I had killed Perdita, shot and killed Perdita and Mir and this whole cohort of junior rulers, Alichsantre’s hereditary rulers of the world, if I had killed everybody but Vikare, if I had killed even Vikare, would it stop the war? If Herzeloyde had killed Perdita, would Miles Exemplar, the older brother, have continued it on? Would the war machine simply replace Perdita with another chipper killer girl? Would there be a war machine without its players? Yes, surely. That’s history. Yes, of course! So said Gossamer, aristocrats are as fungible as workers. The cog spins or it’s replaced.

When I killed Industry, would his work die with him? Would the infrastructure that preceded and surrounded him, that allowed him to become himself, evaporate into fumes? Would ichorite sink back into the earth? Would all the things built out of it become what they’d been prior? Had I any idea what they’d been made out of prior? When they killed me, would Vikare miss me? Would war happen immediately and with extra gusto for my having been a sneak and a thief? Would Edna be back when I died? Would Edna, still pregnant, shrink from me for being what I am? How quickly she would’ve killed Industry! Years ago! Her lustertouched baby would be ten. Will the sun rise in the morning? Will the dawn come and with it, luck and bread?

But the blood spilled is worthy. It appeases the dead.

I cut my thumb on Yann Industry’s chin. The pain startled me. I shook out my wrist. A fruity bright drop of blood fell and splotched his shoulder. The hilariousness of the whole room revealed itself to me. What a lark, being Marney! The things I do for you.

Dawn came. I prayed. Sunny asked me what I was doing so I broke the rules and showed her. We spent a few minutes on our knees beside the bed. Praise the Torn, killed by Day, praise the Torn, killed by Night, praise the heavens who made the Torn, praise us, her and me, who remembered the violence and walked across it all our lives, lived to know it, to answer it. We grieved her fragile man. He hadn’t dangled. Cisra’s royal enforcement had shot every pamphleteer in the head and left the bodies broken where they fell. He still bled when Teriasa came home. He’d been good to her. He died at twenty-one. Teriasa aborted the baby. She came back to Ignavia alone. I kissed her knuckles. She kissed my forehead. I dressed up as Velma Truth Loveday and I went downstairs all packed.

The guests sat together around the awful ichorite table. Darya was absent, as was Ygrainne. Herzeloyde was absent. Susannah had, from what she said, slept through the whole affair. Alichsantre didn’t eat. Ramtha didn’t eat but pretended. Mir ate. Perdita ate. Mir and Perdita loudly spoke about Alichsantre’s outburst as though it had been the singular rudeness of the night. Helena had her forehead leaned against the table’s edge and read a book she held under the table. Mago looked miffed. He whispered to Susannah, or at her, about the Flip River delta, and how if only she’d agree, if only.

I passed them. They watched me go with their eyes but did not address me. Helena might have smiled.

Gossamer Dignity Chauncey and Vikare zel Tlesana waited in the chilly white corridor beyond the palm-frond courtyard. Gossamer wore a plain twill suit and a heavy wool coat, and Vikare wore a slinky dress that made me itch and furs that swept her ankles. There were faint bruises on Vikare’s neck. I felt dizzy looking at them, and a lurch of shame that I hadn’t killed Alichsantre L. Goss gestured to Vikare’s gown. She spoke in low, singsong remarks, and Vikare brushed her off with an implacable look, something around embarrassment. When Gossamer saw me, she turned to me, gestured at me with despair.

“Truth,” Goss said. “You’re fucking Vikare. Reason with her for me!”

I stopped walking. With effort I resumed, and stood nearby them, just out of arm’s reach. “Vikare is being reasonable,” I said.

“You don’t know the context! Bias! We’re riding a train from here toward the coast, and dressing your wealth is a death sentence! Everywhere a stone’s throw from Luster City is crawling with bandits. All my fucking guards are dead, and we are not telling my father until I get back and you’re my wife. We’ve got to stay sharp. Tell me you’d mug Azurine if you had the chance!”

Azurine must’ve been Vikare’s mortal name. Knowing was an intimacy that hadn’t been offered. For sake of politeness, I tried to push it from my mind. I dwelled instead on the question. Or assertion, it was an assertion. I felt floridly insane.

Vikare pulled a hand along her side, held back the furs to show me the dress beneath. I’d seen this bolt of fabric in her room. She might’ve made it while I was here. I liked craftswomen. I left faint. I’d already stolen so much fabric from her. “Go on, Truth. Would you mug me if you could?”

“No ma’am,” I said.

“But if you were a bandit,” Goss pressed. “Wouldn’t Vikare’s beauty be a beacon?”

“You’ve got to think like you’re a bandit,” said Vikare. “Or else you’ll prove me right.”

“I would love to prove you right,” I said.

“This is ridiculous. Your whole career as my wife will be conspiracy and treachery. I’m being mindful and reasonable with a contemporary understanding of our rail system’s risks. I am not being weird,” Goss huffed. “If anything, I am being a thoughtful and attentive ex-lover business partner baby genius to you. To both of you.”

“She’s not yet your ex-lover,” Vikare said. She herded us toward the door, and for that alone I would’ve collapsed at her feet. “You still have time.”

“All the time in the world. Now,” Gossamer said as she stepped out of her mansion into the brisk clear morning, turning her collar to the wind, “Vikare, my darling Miss Ichorite. Who’s a better lover, her or me?”

“It is a long train ride to the Fingerbluffs,” I said.

Gossamer glanced over her shoulder like me. There was such an incredible rush in that look—I felt like she knew something about me I didn’t, some ribbon of truth under Truth, under Marney. She liked what she knew. She showed me her teeth. “Hours of conversation. Get excited!”

There came a jolt of nervousness. Horace Veracity Loveday forbade the construction of a train station in the Fingerbluffs. The real one, twenty years ago. The actual awful man. His prudishness toward all advancement, which had initially allowed for and still remained the face of the collective effort animating the Choir’s grand charade, here posed a problem. There was no efficient way to arrive at the Fingerbluffs. There were trains that’d take a traveler one barony over, in sparse, traditionalist Olmstead, but there was nothing past that. The roads were skinny and rough, ox trails mostly. Fine for lurchers but tough for anything much bigger. That inhospitality didn’t translate well to a faux-aristocratic welcome, and besides that, I would be forsaking my lurcher in the pines where Sisphe and I had left it. Couldn’t take mine back. I didn’t know what I’d be taking back. We’d get off the train in Olmstead and fucking improvise. Maybe Sisphe would’ve sent for a cart? I could blame it on Truth’s father, but I wasn’t sure what we’d do when Gossamer inevitably asked to meet the man. I could show her some bones. Some worms whose grandparents might have dined on him.

I tucked my hair behind my ears. “Tell me about how the two of you met.”

Vikare’s stroked her long fur coat. I had no idea what animal comprised it. “Wilton.”

“Wilton School, our own dungeon. Yes,” Goss said. “I was enrolled late. Father wanted me to share his education, besides which his schedule demands the majority of his attention, and he hardly had time for an underfoot teenager, and with my condition, I needed near constant supervision, particularly at that age. So, Wilton. Temple to brutality. I was clearly Drustish, I had been adopted into new money, I was small for my age and fragile. I was smart. I was rough back then too, and reacted quickly and poorly to people trying to get ahead of me. In short, the bullying was awful. Just heinous. Vikare, little Azurine, being from merchant money, also had a complicated time. Children are cruel. They were especially cruel to us. But we’re smart, she and I. She decided she wanted to be my girl, so she brought me the schematics for what became our revolutionary textile industry. It was so clever. She’s innovative and assertive, wildly creative, and has great business sense. I knew we had to protect each other and become partners.”

“Then my mother,” Vikare said.

“Your mother,” Goss paused, “was responsible for some of the most stressful afternoons of my life. Vikare and her mother Tlesana struggle, shall we say. Vikare was not set to inherit any of Tlesana’s business. Not the money, not the house, nothing. It was all slated to go to Vikare’s older brother, Easun thu Tlesana, but of course Easun is sharp as a circle, and I refused to see my best friend desperate. So we lied to Tlesana. We had her sign over rights to the use of her textile mills and the workers employed therein under the guise that it was a relinquishing of Vikare’s debatable claim. We had Easun sign as well. I’m still not sure if it’s dawned on him.”

“Easun means well,” Vikare said.

Goss waved a hand. “He means nothing at all.”

I wondered what Gossamer thought of the violence that broke her home last night. The marks on her best friend. She must’ve noticed the bruises. Even if she didn’t care about Vikare’s wellbeing, and I wanted to believe she did, surely she’d care that her home was cracked up and riddled with holes. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. It was so frightfully huge that gesturing toward it felt ridiculous. Instead, “What about Susannah?”

A vein showed in Gossamer’s cheek. “I shouldn’t have. Poor little mouse.”

“She was too shy to even attend Lunarist Society meetings. It was cruel of you to fuck her,” Vikare said with a casual venomousness that made me flinch even without being its target. “Crueler still to invite her here.”

“Crueler than not inviting her? I disagree. My only available options were awful.”

“You could’ve left her alone.”

“And been lonely myself?” Gossamer laughed. I heard the whole house laugh with her, everyone laughing last night in the torn-up parlor, guts splitting and thighs slapping left and right. “I’d sooner die! One moment alone with myself is more than enough for the wolves to close in. You can’t be your own company if you’re a woman like me. We cannibalize ourselves. We remember things. Memory’s a scourge!”