“Is that all you think about?” Itzal challenges.

Pedrón ponders. “No. I’m a deeply layered and complicated person. In addition to getting with beautiful girls, I often think about sword fighting. Oh! And food. I think about food a lot.”

I roll my eyes at him.

“What about you, Red?” Pedrón asks. “What do you want most in the world?” He waggles his eyebrows as though hinting at something scandalous.

I open my mouth to tell the truth, like I always do, but the words stick in my throat. It’s not that I want to lie; it’s that the truth is too precious and heartrending. So I say the second thing that comes to mind. “I want a girlfriend.”

Pedrón slams the table with his palm in a gesture of victory. “I told you all she liked girls! That’s why she won’t visit my bunk.”

“No, I just mean I want a friend who’s a girl. Someone my age. A few of the girls in the palace have been nice to me, but no one . . . It’s hard to be my friend, I guess.” The half-Invierno girl with a magic mark in her hair and slave tattoos on her feet isn’t exactly in high demand, even if she is a favorite of the empress.

“Well,” Pedrón says, “now you have Aldo.”

Aldo slams his spoon on the table and is halfway out of his seat, but he stops when I say, loudly, “Pedrón, if you insult someone one more time by calling them a girl, I will gut you.”

Everyone looks eagerly to Pedrón for his response. He surprises me by looking sheepish. “I guess now that we have a girl in the Guard, it’s not really a good idea.”

“It was never a good idea.”

“Whatever you say, Red.”

“And you.” I turn my fury on Aldo. “Stop acting like you’ve taken a sword to the chest every time someone calls you a girl. It’s not an insult. Girls are not cockroaches or rats or horse dung. We are people, and it’s perfectly fine to be one of us, so stop.”

Aldo blinks up at me, his brown eyes huge.

Pedrón says to me, “You’re kind of adorable when you’re angry.”

I have to leave, and I have to do it right this second or what I did to Sancho is going to seem like a cheek slap. I stand, sweeping up my bowl. “I’m going to take a nap,” I say, turning my back on all of them.

“That’s not a bad idea,” I hear Iván say, and the bench scrapes as several others rise from the table.

Somehow Iván and I have to meet and sneak away from everyone else to investigate Bolivar’s quarters. I’m sorting through possibilities as I dump my bowl with the rest of the dirty dishes, and I’m almost out the door when someone tugs on my sleeve. “Red.”

It’s Aldo, looking like a kicked puppy. “You were right,” he says. “I’ll stop being an ass every time someone compares me to a girl.”