“Listen, Padre. You will have my confession, and you know what we are doing.” Sauce shrugged. “It may be vengeance for some, it definitely is for Giselle. For me, it is strictly business. When they scrag the Patriarch, that’s one job done.” She looked away, poured them both wine, sat back. “You’d try this line on Gabriel?”

“Every t-t-time,” Father Davide said.

She nodded, looking out the open side of pavilion at the quiet bustle of a camp at night.

“People did bad things to me once,” Sauce said after a long pull at her wine. “Cully helped me fuck them up.” She nodded.

“And that made it better?” Father Davide asked without a stutter. “Or is that just a s-s-story you t-t-tell yourself?”

“Isn’t religion a story we tell ourselves?” Sauce asked. “C’mon, Padre. It’s all a story. Yes, it made me feel better, and no, none of those bastards will ever have a chance to fuck with another girl, nor boy. Eh?”

Father Davide drank his wine.

Sauce looked at him. “How’re we going to win this without leaving a trail of blood?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Father Davide said, with a trace of bitterness Sauce had not heard before. “Sometimes I f-f-feel like the f-fucking court jester.” He took a deep breath, finished his wine, and rose to his feet. “But actions have c-c-c-consequences, my lady, and the k-killing of innocents . . .”

“The Patriarch?” she asked.

“Granted,” he said. “The m-men standing by the P-P . . .” He paused and looked away. “Patriarch? The foot soldiers from Firensi?”

She nodded.

“Honestly, my lady, I wasn’t here to d-d-debate the m-morality of our m-methods,” the priest said. “The d-d-duchess is n-not herself, but K-K-Kronmir said something as he d-died. He s-s-said,” and Father Davide paused again.

Sauce had time to wonder to whom priests turned when they were out of faith. Father Davide looked bad.

“He said,” Father Davide’s eyes locked with hers, “That the w-will is not the Necromancer.”

Sauce thought of her interview with the worm that had been in Kronmir. “Ahh,” she said. “I interrogated Kronmir’s worm.”

“You know I’m going to tell you that even the Odine are part of God’s creation,” Father Davide said in one go.

“Of course. From the same time he made mosquitoes and cockroaches, no doubt.” Sauce gave the priest a look, as if to say that her faith gave him a certain license, but he was nearing its limits.

He bowed. “I m-merely relate what K-K-Kronmir s-said. He d-died . . . with incredible c-courage.”

Sauce had trouble reading the priest in the candlelight. “And he would know, I guess,” she said. “Blessed Saint Michael.”

She called to her new page. “Alissa! I need to change the message.”

She then dictated it all: Kronmir’s death, his last words, and the curiously naive ragings of her captive Odine.

Who had complained bitterly of the perfidy of something it called the Fire.