The combat training was ridiculous. My instructor was one of the people I’d met during my evening at court, Hortensia Tolosa. She was eighteen and went by “Tezzy.” Cordus had gotten her in a trade of some sort with another Second soon after she saw through at age five.

If Gwen was a fiend, Tezzy was an ogre. She must’ve studied taekwondo in the womb. She made me feel utterly incompetent. I wanted to empathize with someone who’d been traded like livestock when she was a little kid, but it was pretty hard to feel anything but resentful.

I had bruises everywhere. They weren’t from Tezzy hitting me — she didn’t do that. They were from me falling down while she tried to get me to hit or kick her, or rather, a pad she was holding.

By my fourth lesson, she’d backtracked to just trying to teach me how to stand still. She’d have me assume a particular stance, then coach me on making it solid and resilient. Then she’d walk up to me and try to push me down. I always fell down. Always. I could tell she didn’t know what to do with me. It was the pits.

One morning — I think it was a Friday — Andy and Theo were looking sort of worried when I joined them in the dining room for breakfast.

“Hey, what’s up? Something wrong?”

“Lord Limu’s in the city,” Andy said. “Hank saw him last night.”

Limu. That’s who Williams and Callie thought I’d seen at the other end of the open strait.

“It’s bad that he’s here?”

“Dunno. We’re trying to figure it out,” Theo said. “It’s definitely unusual. The regional powers don’t enter each others’ territories without a good reason, except for formal events.”

“Maybe he was invited,” I said, remembering how Cordus had asked the green man about him.

Theo cocked his head. “You know something about this?”

“Who, me? I don’t know anything about anything,” I said, kicking myself.

The two men sat back and studied me, then shared a look. They clearly weren’t fooled.

Andy said, “Should we be worried?”

“I honestly don’t know. I’m sorry. You know how new I am to all this.”

He nodded, but an awkwardness came over the table that hadn’t been there before.

“Can you tell me anything about Lord Limu? Just public-knowledge stuff?”

“Well,” Theo said, “he controls most of the Pacific Basin. So, the Aleutians and southern Alaska; the west coast of North America; the west coast of South America down through northern Chile — that’s all him. And the coast on the other side, from Russia down through Papua New Guinea, and the little islands, like Hawaii. And all that ocean.”

“Australia, too?”

“No, someone else holds Australia and New Zealand.”