Later that afternoon I am at the elegant courtyard house in the Xihuo Triangle with Csilla’s knee in my back while she pulls my corset on so tight I can hardly breathe. It’s an item I rarely bothered with in Spira City and have not worn at all these past two months, traveling and dressing like a boy. I straighten my shoulders and grimace.

“Nice to see a waist on you again,” says Csilla, pleased with her work.

“I don’t know. I always wanted a brother,” says Dek, who has come by with a sleek, nickel-plated pistol for Esme from a weapons dealer in Dongshui.

Esme laughs at my expression. Easy for her, dressed as a manservant. I’d begged to simply go along vanished, but Mrs. Och preferred to have a role for me just in case, reasoning that I could always vanish if need be but could not spring into existence if I started out vanished.

“I was getting used to breathing freely,” I grumble. “I think I might stick to men’s clothes from now on. Take a leaf out of Esme’s book.”

“Oh, please no,” says Csilla. She yanks my hair back so hard I yell and fastens it deftly on top of my head.

“A brother I could call Jules. We’d be a fearsome pair,” continues Dek, carefully oiling the barrel of the pistol.

Csilla pinches my chin between her thumb and forefinger and frowns at my face, as if it isn’t up to snuff. “Honestly, Julia, you’re not bad-looking if you’d just put in a little effort.”

“Well, we aren’t aiming for beauty today,” says Esme. “Plain as plain will do just fine. Julia ought not to attract too much attention.”

No fear of that with Csilla nearby. She has been a great boon to the single New Porian dress shop in Tianshi. Today she is wearing a low-cut gown made of watered silk, with a ruffle of lace along the bust, her hair a fountain of white-gold curls. She is utterly contemptuous of the fashion in Tianshi. The women look like they are wearing drapes, she says. I thought so too when we first arrived, watching the ladies in their wide, stiff robes trotting around on dainty silk shoes. But the funny thing is that if you spend some time in a place, you start to see all its strangeness as natural, and I can imagine now how absurd and immodest Csilla’s dress might appear to the dignified drape-women of Tianshi.

Csilla dresses me in a plainer gown than her own, a dark blue piece that buttons to my chin, the idea being to make me look as young, and therefore as harmless, as possible. It is still the most elegant dress I’ve ever worn, and I do not like it. I am meant to be Ella Heriday, Lord and Lady Heriday’s daughter, an educated girl and my father’s secretary. I look like a miserable governess. I try to take a deep breath, and think that the appearance of a trim waist is hardly worth this feeling of having my lungs locked up.

“I suppose if you’ve been off buying weapons, you haven’t found out who collects the mail from the monastery yet,” I say to Dek.

“I have, actually,” says Dek. “Or Wyn has, I should say. A government employee brings the mail and takes it out twice a week, and there’s a basket of letters bearing Gangzi’s seal every time. Anything in particular you want?”

“I’d just like to know what he’s writing about. Can you get me one?”

“I reckon we can buy one off the mail carrier,” he says. “Mrs. Och gave us loads of money for bribes.”

Gregor wanders in with a bottle, more than half empty, of the amber-colored persimmon wine shijiu in his hand, and Csilla spins me to face him.

“What do you think of your new daughter?” she asks. He looks me up and down, unimpressed.

“Don’t know why you’re taking so much trouble with her clothes. Nobody’s going to look twice at her anyway.”

I suppose I can’t fault him for saying what I was just thinking myself.

“Put that bottle down,” says Esme. “You can’t turn up drunk.”

She is the only one who can say it. Esme and Gregor have a long history, dating back to the so-called Lorian Uprising, in Frayne, the year before I was born. Esme’s husband, Gustaf Moreau, was Gregor’s best friend and a leader of the uprising. Gustaf was captured and hung, along with countless others, the uprising was crushed, and somehow the grief and failure has kept them bonded all these years after. Gregor’s expression darkens, but he doesn’t argue with her. He puts the shijiu on the lacquered side table, throws himself down on the settee, and then looks at the bottle.

“No point going in sober,” he says. “I’m supposed to be a Fraynish aristocrat, remember? I grew up with the Fraynish aristocracy. They’re drunk all the time.”

“Maybe in your family,” says Esme. “But you’re supposed to be a scholarly nobleman, not the drunk, idle variety.”

I try to catch Dek’s eye, but he has gone back to polishing Esme’s gun, studiously avoiding looking at me.

“Rotten stuff anyway, shijiu,” says Gregor, still gazing at the bottle with a terrible longing. “Flaming Kahge, but I miss whiskey. What I’d do for a nice bottle of whiskey. Or rum. Give me rum. Anything but this fruity shijiu stuff. Barely taste it.”

“Then stop bleeding drinking it,” says Esme.

Csilla powders my face, her dark eyes bottomless and blank.

“Gregor’s right, nobody’s going to look at me,” I say, but she keeps at me like I’m a painting she’s working on.

Professor Baranyi comes in, and immediately the mood changes, becoming not exactly hostile, but guarded. When he sees me, the professor looks faintly surprised, as if he’d forgotten I’d be joining them. I wonder if he finds it as uncomfortable lodging with my gang as I do lodging with his. Probably slightly less so, since none of mine have any reason to want to murder him in his sleep; still, I reckon we’d both love to switch.

“Ah! Hello, Julia. Nice to see you,” he says.

I doubt it is particularly nice to see me, but I say hello back politely.

“Is Mrs. Och well?”

“Much as usual,” I reply.

“Well!” He looks around nervously, his eyes darting between Gregor and the near-empty bottle of shijiu a few times. “Are we ready?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be!” declares Gregor, rising with a flourish but spoiling it by staggering a little and then giggling.

Even drunk, Gregor cuts a dashing figure. He is tall and broad and graying at the temples, and while his drink-ravaged face could not be called handsome anymore, he has a kind of charisma about him that can at times affect even those of us who know him and his weaknesses all too well. He makes a fine Fraynish aristocrat. Whether he can pose convincingly as a scholar is another question altogether, and I have my doubts, even though the professor has been coaching him for weeks.

Csilla slips her arm through his to steady him.

“You look marvelous,” he tells her, and she softens against him.

When I was little, I thought Csilla impossibly glamorous, and she and Gregor struck me as very romantic in their moony-eyed devotion to one another—particularly compared to the endless quarreling I remember between my own parents. As I got older and lost some of my illusions, I came to see that drink has always been Gregor’s one true love, and that Csilla’s glamour is like lacquer painted over a brokenness I can barely fathom. Still, even knowing that they are bound above all by their shared disappointment—with life and with Gregor himself—when I see them gazing at each other this way, I envy them a little. I miss being in love and thinking it such a fine and unassailable thing.