The lynchpin walked in. It was the Saint of Joy.

Your erstwhile teacher ignored you, folded into your alcove, and she ignored your sister, whose pallid eyebrows had shot up so fast and so far that they were in danger of breaking the atmosphere. Mercymorn wore a long slip of peach-coloured silk, and her white Canaanite robe was tucked over her forearms and had slipped entirely off her slender, aggrieved shoulders. She had scraped her hair into a merciless and shining coil at the back of her head, and she had no eyes for either of you.

She said, “You have some nerve.”

“Not remotely; I never have,” he said, affably. “Do you accept the terms of the offer?”

“Tell me what you’re—”

“Accept first.”

“I’ll accept if you swear on the sword,” said Mercy, with unholy eagerness.

He raised his rapier up within its scabbard. It had a bright conical hilt of what looked to be copper, with pricked designs all over it. “I swear by the sword of Alfred Quinque, best of men and cavaliers, that the details of your, ahem, business will not be told by me, or revealed by me, or let fall from the lips of my mouth nor the pads of my fingers—even though I think it will be the death of us,” he added. At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn’s frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief. “Accept.”

“Fine! I accept,” she said. Then she looked around herself, and said: “You do know the children are present? Should I kill them, or what?”

“Ignore ’em,” said Augustine. “Better you don’t know why they’re here. Look—I need you to fully commit to this one, Joy, and if you don’t, I will consider the oath I just swore tampered with.”

“Commit! Commit!!” she said scornfully. You noticed she was wearing short strings of apricot-coloured seed pearls in her ears; they vibrated as she folded her arms across her chest. “Stop wasting your breath and tell me the plan.”

“Once you hear it, whatever you do to me, don’t do it below the neck. None of my other shirts are pressed.”

“Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”

He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.”

You had a front-row seat to Mercymorn’s dreamy eyes going quiet; the eye of the tempest, before she reared back and punched him full in the face. There was not much force in that blow, which barely snapped his head back, but he whitened as though her fist had been a battering ram. He gagged, doubled over his washstand, and ejected a mouthful of teeth—a tumbling, plinking bowlful; he held his hand over his red and dripping mouth and closed his eyes, and after a few moments straightened back up, a trifle greyer, running his tongue over his regrown incisors.