The room darkened and spun. Shadows danced. The walls shook, and dust rained down.

Dust ceased to rain and shadows stilled and light returned. The notebook had not moved.

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” Seril asked.

“That book’s mine. I wrote every word myself. My name’s inked on the inside cover in my own blood, and worked in glyphs I created back when I thought I’d invented a game of catching stars and stealing souls. No one can take that book from me unless I let them, and even then there’s a limit to how much they can do with it. This book here,” she pulled a thick red-and-black tome labeled “Contracts” from the shelf, “this bears my name, but only in pen, and my first name, too, and lots of people share it. Besides, there are a few thousand copies of this edition. You could lift it without much effort. And this,” she returned the textbook and selected a dog-eared Cawleigh paperback from the lowest shelf, “I got this for two thaums from a secondhand dealer dockside. You could beat me half to death with this if you wanted.”

“I’m considering it.”

“The more proof you have something’s yours, the more you control it. That’s not even Craftwork, it’s basic Applied Theology. I can’t believe you don’t know this stuff.”

“How do your cells do what they do, Tara? How do the impulses that bounce around that magnificent magic-addled hunk of ganglia atop your spine work together to be a person? What laws do they obey? Can you describe them to me?”

“You used to be bigger than Justice. I want to learn what happened to all that power.” She realized, then, that Seril had grown very still. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.”

Tara squeezed back around to the couch and sat, hands interlaced, not looking at the goddess for a while. When she trusted herself to continue, she said, “I got carried away.”

“It’s fine, I said. Do you mind if I sit down?”

“No.”

She did, beside Tara. “There was a war, you know.”

“Oh yes.”

“Some days ‘was’ seems the wrong word, given how long the Wars lasted and how they shape us still. Everything Kos is, comes from his neutrality back then. His priests are brokers to the world—so he’s bound by your rules. Not so badly as the poor neutered godlings of Dresediel Lex, or for Spider’s sake the Iktomi, but still bound by treaties and contracts and worse. But I—you have to understand, back in the Wars it seemed your kind would break the world before the century’s end. Your power grew each passing year, and your claws pierced deeper.”

“We’re better now. More sustainable.”

“An argument for another time,” she said. “I fell in the battle that made the Crack in the World.”