Anneke was waving her arms around like a woman on fire, caught up in some animated conversation with a Ras Tiegan woman. It took Nyx a minute to recognize the foreigner.

The Ras Tiegan was Mercia sa Aldred, a diplomat’s daughter who Nyx had been charged with keeping alive six or seven years before. Mercia was a slim young woman now, with the flat face and tawny complexion of a Ras Tiegan. Her eyes were big and dark, half-lidded. As she turned to Nyx, the corners of her wide mouth moved up. Paired with her flat forehead, the broad nose, and strangely delicate frame, she was not a handsome woman. Mercia kept her hair uncovered now, but Nyx noted the scarf wrapped around her neck, stitched with the little x-shaped symbol that marked her as a follower of the Ras Tiegan messiah. No doubt she’d prayed to some minor god of diplomats before coming here. Ras Tiegans had minor gods for everything.

Behind Mercia stood two government-issued bodyguards. Nyx recognized their type. Former vets—underworked and overpaid. They wore loose, dark trousers and matching tunics. Their burnouses were less somber. Smoky gray instead of black. Both women had cropped hair and the peculiar hyper-awareness about them that came from spending too much time at the front. Veterans were always the first pick for government security.

A delighted smile lit up Mercia’s face. She made the leap from unremarkable to handsome when she smiled. Mercia stood in one clean movement, and even if Nyx hadn’t known her, the polite, easy way she stood to greet her with that plastered-on smile would have given her away as some kind of diplomat or politician.

Nyx hated diplomats and politicians almost as much as she hated babysitting their kids.

“Mercia sa Aldred,” Nyx said.

The smile broadened.

“You remember,” Mercia said.

“Where is everybody?” Nyx asked Anneke.

“How the hell should I know?” Anneke said. Her dark little face was scrunched up like a cicada husk. “It’s fight night. You don’t think the kids are going to hang around here with a couple old women, do you?”

“Anybody follow you?” Nyx asked Mercia. “Or can I take out you and your nannies and be done with it?”

Mercia’s smile vanished. “I—”

The bodyguards moved forward.

Nyx cocked the gun and leveled it at them. “Who’s first?”

“Lay off,” Anneke said. “She’s got something worth hearing.”

“There are a good many people back in Nasheen who’d pay for my head,” Nyx said. “I like it just where it is, thanks.”

“You’ve been taken off the lists,” Mercia said, quickly. Her hands were up now, gesturing rapidly as she spoke. “They’re even sending Chenjan terrorists home. Mhorian spies. Mercenaries, too. And bel dames. Anyone who moved against the Queen during the war has been pardoned. It’s part of the armistice.”