This—as Ianthe reached suddenly beneath her chair, right arm still strangely flopsome—proved to be a great shiny wadded-up bundle. She tossed it lightly at you—you didn’t even try to catch it—and it landed in a lovely pool on the bed. It was a mass of the same thin and frivolous material that currently shrouded Ianthe: a robe in mother-of-pearl colours, all its wrinkles and creases disappearing as you tentatively shook it out. It had a hood. It had deep sleeves. That was all you needed. The colour was not going to become you, but it was hugely preferable to the turquoise shift. You squirmed inside it with unseemly haste. You pulled the hood deep over your head and did not bother to hide your sigh of relief. You were clad from the arms down to the legs, if not modestly; the whole rest of your face was on show.

And this was a neat stack of flimsy envelopes, the same as the first. The Harrowhark who had addressed them had taken the time to write their labels—apart from the numbers—in neat crypt-script. You flicked through them to count, and could not help scanning the requirements. Some of them were plain and stark. To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to give to Camilla Hect.

You wondered, mystified, if you had ever known the last name of Camilla the Sixth, a woman you could not recall interacting with at any point.

“I will remain in possession of the last two,” said Ianthe, having risen to stand. It was always difficult when she stood: she looked so completely like a shoddy wax cast of some more beautiful sculpture. “I will tell you openly that there’s one I get to open in case you die, which is fun.”

You flipped through. Your eyes fell on: To open if you meet Coronabeth Tridentarius. This was different from the other envelopes in that it was not written in cipher. You were not happy at the idea that Ianthe had spent any time with your code, and thought your past self complacent in the extreme. Ianthe’s eyes fell on it too. “You wrote that one in front of me,” she said. “I can summarise the contents … you are now pledged to me and by extension to Coronabeth, and I tell you for free that one of the riders is that you will never harm a hair on my sister’s head.”

“Your sister is likely no longer alive,” you said, seeing no reason not to say it.