“No,” I said. “No. Start at the beginning.”

Yu raised his eyebrows. “Which beginning, Seneschal-elect? The night the Beholder left Norge? The night we met you? Or the night we accepted a mission you’re safer if you know nothing about?”

“I’m safer knowing who you are.” I fired the words like shots. “I’m safer knowing what’s happening around me than I am blind and blundering around, one stray spark from burning everything down.”

Lang put a hand on my shoulder. His lean fingers and his thin lips were tense. “Selah, isn’t it enough to know the rules and to trust us?”

I shrugged Lang off. “It might have been, once,” I said sharply, “but not anymore. Trusting you and letting you keep me in the dark aren’t the same thing.”

“I agree,” Andersen said.

“Fine,” Lang snapped. He leaned over the map as if poised to spring. “Fine. You want to know the truth? You want to talk about sparks and burning things down? The truth, Selah, is that beneath your feet are enough guns to arm the resistance in old Deutschland and enough gunpowder to blow the Beholder to pieces.”

I stared at him.

I’d always thought the captain’s upturned nose and sweet-bowed upper lip looked refined—almost delicate. But his eyes were wild, and they lent an otherworldly look to the rest of his features.

The four sailors and I were silent, listening to the creak of Homer’s lamps on their hinges and the lapping of the water against the hull.

“To arm the resistance?” I finally breathed. “Why?”

This was why Lang had stood with Perrault—why he had insisted on continuing into the Imperiya. He wasn’t concerned with me. He hadn’t been thinking of me at all.

“Because the president of Zhōng Guó gave them to us,” said Yu simply.

“So the zŏngtŏng paid you off,” I said slowly, “to arm the resistance to the Imperiya, and you decided that it was all right to use my ship to ferry weapons across the Atlantic without telling me?”

Homer frowned. “This isn’t about cash, girl.”

“Then what is it about?” I demanded. “Because right now, I’m thinking about the political ramifications of Potomac undermining one great power on behalf of another. And my father and the Council don’t even know it’s happening.” I smacked the table.

“If you only understood—” Yu said.

“Then help me understand!” I shouted.

Andersen sighed. “The tsarytsya has done her best to break Deutschland. But her armies have met too much resistance. Yotunkheym is barely present in the Shvartsval’d now. The forest has grown wild, swallowed the Neukatzenelnbogen completely. The tsarytsya barely acknowledges Katz Castle.”

The Neukatzenelnbogen, I knew, was the home of the hertsoh and my Shvartsval’d suitor. But—Katz Castle. Were they the same place? Why did that name sound familiar?