It made no sense. “What—”

“Wake up.”

I blinked. Blinked again. Opened my eyes. Instead of blackness, postdawn grey. I sat up, sheets still clinging to my sweat-soaked limbs. Behind the pale ghosts of lace curtains, the sky lightening in the east.

“Baraqel?”

“A lowly dream-smith thinking he could sully one of the light-sworn!” Baraqel sounded smug. Then in a more serious tone, “I see a hand behind him, though. With a more deadly touch . . . blue fingered. The L—”

“T-that was you? But, you’re so . . . well . . . such a pain.” I slid from the bed, each part of me aching as if I’d spent the night wrestling a Barbary ape. The room lay bare, the angel confined to my head again.

“I speak in the voice you give me, Jalan. I’m limited by your imagination, shaped by your conceits. Each of your failings diminishes me, and they are many. I—”

The last burning edge of the sun broke the horizon, turning a whole forest to gold. And the silence was golden. Baraqel had had his moment. I returned to the comfortable chair, pulling on my trews, but found I didn’t want to sit in it. I looked at the ladder-back and imagined Sageous there as he’d been in my dream, head severed and just starting to drop. He wanted me to have Snorri killed. His arguments had seemed sound enough, but although I lost more money at the card table than I won, I’d spent enough time there to know when I was being played.

• • •

By the time I’d washed and dressed, the day had entered stage east, cocks crowed, people with jobs to do bustled about them, and below the Tall Castle Crath City shook itself awake. A timid tapping turned me from my contemplation at the window.

“What?”

“It’s S-Stann, Your Majesty.” A pause. “Did you need a dresser or should I—”

“Go get my Viking and bring him here. We’ll take breakfast where they serve the best stuff.”

He scampered away, the sounds of his retreat fading. I sat on the bed and pulled out my locket. A patchwork thing now, each gem I’d sold leaving an empty socket to stare at me in blind accusation. It seemed fitting. Justice is blind. Love is blind. Another gem would buy me back to Vermillion in the comfort of a fine carriage. One more would buy wine and company at every stop. Two more sockets to watch my passage, to watch me leave a friend in a pauper’s grave and return to the shallows. I wondered if Baraqel saw my soul when he looked at me. Did it look like this? Bartered away, a little each day, buying a coward’s path through the margins of life?

“Still,” I told myself. “Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.” I thought of the cold North, and the horror-laden stories Snorri told of it, and shivered.