Cordelia laid a hand on his arm. “I will require you to accompany me,” she said. “On the violin.”

Matthew chuckled, almost reluctantly. “She is clever,” he said, as Kellington, looking annoyed, strode off to retrieve his instrument. As he moved through the crowd, Cordelia, looking far calmer than James suspected she was, reached up and unpinned her hair.

James caught his breath as it fell down around her shoulders, spilled down her back, the deep red of rose petals. It stroked her bare brown skin like silk. Her glowing bronze dress clung to her as she reached back and unsheathed Cortana, drawing it forward. Every glittering light in the Hell Ruelle caught fire along the blade.

“I have always loved stories,” she said, and her clear voice carried through the room. “One of my favorite tales is that of the servant girl Tawaddud. After the death of a rich merchant, his son wasted all the inheritance he got until he had nothing left but one servant, a girl known through all the caliphate for her brilliance and her beauty. Her name was Tawaddud. She begged the son to take her to the court of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, and there to sell her for a vast sum of money. The son insisted he could not get such a princely sum for the sale of one servant. Tawaddud insisted she would convince the caliph that there was no wiser or more eloquent or learned woman in all the land but she. Eventually the son was worn down. He brought her to the court, and she came before the caliph, and she told him this.”

Cordelia nodded at Kellington, who had come to stand beside the stage. He began to play a haunting tune on the violin, and Cordelia began to move.

It was a dance, but not a dance. She moved fluidly with Cortana. It was gold and she followed that gold in fire. She spoke, and her low, husky voice matched the dance and the music of the violin.

“Oh my Lord, I am versed in syntax and poetry and jurisprudence and exegesis and philosophy. I am skilled in music and in the knowledge of the divine ordinances, and in arithmetic and geodesy and geometry and the fables of the ancients.”

Cortana wove with her words, underlining each one with steel. She turned as her sword turned, and her body curved and moved like water or fire, like a river under an infinity of stars. It was beautiful—she was beautiful, but it was not a distant beauty. It was a beauty that lived and breathed and reached out with its hands to crush James’s chest and make him breathless.

“I have studied the exact sciences, geometry and philosophy, and medicine and logic and rhetoric and composition.”