“It’s just I hear so many times,” I said, launching my impersonation of her that made her blood boil, “my beast—my beast, I can’t do this or that or that and this—but then he shows up and your schedule’s wide open.”

“Seasmil.”

“Wide open.”

“Seasmil,” she said, culling a tone that started to bring me down out of webs in the rafters.

“Wide open as…like the Moliahenna River’s mouth after a damn flood.”

“Vandahl pen that?” she said, returning to bed.

—

“I’ll let you get to witchery then,” I said after we’d finished, climbing off of her. Irion’s most recent visit was to ask of Somyellia her major discipline. And she’d done her part. Somyellia had touched some warden who Morlia had somehow found a way to send barreling over to her. The curse had been locked by waves of her hand that she told me was passed off as nothing more than churlish girl anger.

Somyellia was happy to help. The House of Rogaire had wronged the House of Ordrid, and Irion—in this newfound severity Somyellia occasionally mentioned—was just tidying up family business.

Even the common-most dung-scooper on the common-most street knew that when the Conqueror’s campaign had swept over the peninsula, ending at the doorsteps of Maecidion’s keep, deals were struck and the land was renamed.

Yet after enough talks from the bottom of our pillows, I myself could orate the finer points in her family’s spiderweb of shifting powers and trickery.

The tale told within Ordrid confines was that after necromancy had been outlawed, and Maecidion and his kind were allowed to practice in secret, it didn’t take long for the freshly outfitted Metropolitan Ward, and the people cheering them, to look for a new threat to their newfound tranquility. Rinmauld Rogaire, father of the warden they all hated, was one of the chief legislators after the Conqueror turned to his unyielding seclusion. It turns out that law was the one magic blacker than necromancy. Extorting Maecidion had been both legal and lucrative. Keeping the House of Ordrid’s share of agreed-upon war spoils was payment for Rinmauld not sicking on Somyellia and Maecidion’s House the society that had as soon forgotten war as was quick to start a new one.

An Ordrid vendetta on the House of Rogaire had been talked about in dark circles for decades. For reasons not entirely explained, her cousin Irion had picked up the proverbial hatchet on behalf of the late Maecidion, and now apparently planned on burying it into the heads of the Rogaires who remained.