Nonagesimus, I’m sorry. I was averagely good all my life. At least not criminally bad. I did a bunch of shit I’m not proud of—some of it I regret, some of it I don’t. I absolutely regret not kicking Crux down a flight of stairs and watching him go Oof, ow, my bones down each step, which now that I think about it does not help the case I am making here—I wasn’t absolute garbage. Maybe you’d agree.

But when I saw that tall hot glass of skank and heard her diffident Oh, you—like she’d never faked to your fucking face like she couldn’t see a corpse that was obviously there—like she’d never messed you up or messed around with you, like she’d never seen you vulnerable and smacked her pallid mummified lips—like she’d never put her hands on you, never made you want her, and never imagined there’d ever be a reckoning.

There would be a goddamn reckoning. Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her.

I said: “Do you want your ass kicked now, or do you want your ass kicked later, or both?”

“Please, let’s address this like gentlewomen,” said Ianthe, without much hope.

“Hell, no! I’m going to pull your whole ass off,” I said. “You want that? You want Harrow to grow you a new bone ass where I pulled off the old one? Let’s dance, Tridentarius.”

“This can’t be happening.”

“She’s not even into you, okay? It’s just the bones. She’s into bones.”

“One of the many aspects I possess that you now tragically lack.”

“Get down here,” I insisted. “Fight me.”

“Perhaps I should have guessed that the moment your footstep cursed this universe again, you would issue me these comedy challenges,” she said wearily. “What was your name again? Goblin? Gonad? Help me out here.”

“Your cavalier knew my name,” I said. “Corona knew my name. You know my name.”

She fell silent.

I said: “Gonad was pretty good. Mildly amusing.”

“Thanks.”

“Goblin wasn’t.”

“I haven’t had a good day. I’m very stressed right now. Give me a break.”

“You have three minutes of me being reasonable, and then I’m going to beat you so badly that you look like a Fourth House flag,” I said, and lowered my sword. “Is it over? Did you do the thing, you know, fight the whatever?”

“The Resurrection Beast?” she said. “No, if you must know. We engaged it for a while. Mercymorn went AWOL—nobody expected that. Then Harrowhark dropped. We had expected that, though I’d hoped … Things got difficult. After Augustine dropped out I was not about to stay down there with a two-person team. That creature is … large. I surfaced. And here I am. And here you are.”