Maybe I’ll kill them all. Aldo raised a weapon before the prince, which means I can kill him with impunity. But the others . . . executing nobles without a trial is something I could hang for. But if I don’t, we’ll all die anyway.

I raise my sword, ready to bring it down on Ariña’s neck.

The doors to the ballroom fly open. Someone shrieks. Nobles flee the ballroom like a receding tide, emptying the space. Others pour in, taking their place. They are armed with wooden swords and kitchen knives, pitchforks and blacksmith tongs. It’s Itzal and Tanix, along with the stable hands, the cooks, the stewards, and anyone else they could find.

Arturo is backing toward me, chased down by two imposter Guards. They swing their swords and he’s dodging as best he can, but he’s starting to slow with fatigue. I step in front of him, parrying with my sword. The impact wrenches my shoulder.

“Get back, Arturo. Find a weapon if you can. Help protect the prince.”

He scurries back as I parry another blow, then another. If we make it out of this alive, I’m going to make sure we recruits practice defending against two attackers at once.

They come at me from opposite directions; dodging one blow will send me right into the other. So I drop to my belly, roll away as their swords barely miss impacting each other.

I leap to my feet, guard up, only to find they have both been dispatched. A stable boy stands over one with a bloodied pitchfork. Itzal has walloped the other’s head with the pommel of his wooden sword.

“We took the bell tower,” Itzal says. He breathes heavily, and a bruise is beginning to purple his left cheek. “You could see the whole ballroom light up like a torch from there.”

The sorcerer’s fire was supposed to be the signal to ring the bells.

Itzal adds, “Rito is there with Guardsman Bruno and a few of the second years, holding it.”

“Guardsman Bruno helped!”

“He’s the only fighting Guard who heeded the warning. The rest are passed out in their quarters, some in the mess. Sergeant DeLuca fell asleep in the officers’ latrine, pants around his ankles.”

“The sergeant was poisoned?”

“The barracks were ransacked for uniforms. Red, it’s awful over there.”

The clashes around us are dying down. We’re going to be victorious after all.

“Itzal, great work. You and Rito, you saved us.”

He grins. “I think we all saved each other.”

Only a few small pockets of fighting remain, and our Guards, our real Guards, seem to have them well in hand.

“It’s not over yet,” says someone at my shoulder. Iván is propping up his brother, Juan-Carlos, who has sustained an injury to his knee. “We saw all those mercenaries in the Sky Wing, remember?”

“Right,” I say. “And others were looting estates outside the palace.”

“What do we do?” Itzal asks.

I have no idea. I’m about to say as much when Rosario steps down from the dais, Carilla once again like a burr in his side.