In the spirit of all the strife—! Pyrex Imogen just wants Misery to show her hand first. This Archbishop is a crafty one. Misery keeps a smile on and picks the least offensive, most obvious question, the thing that would give away the least. “The person who fought me—who was that?”

“Ah.” A flicker of unreadable emotion. “I take it you are not familiar with the Imperial princess, then? That was the Lady Lee Alodia Lightning, younger sister to our dearest Emperor Lee. She can be a difficult character, who often acts of her own volition.”

“I see,” Misery says. “I’m sorry, I do not know as much about our esteemed Imperial family as I should. Information is hard to come by in the outer colonies.” She would normally never expose her ignorance to others, but in this case her naïveté is a weapon. After all, Misery was raised on a stonemining settlement in an isolated finger of a far-flung duchy. No one expects her to understand the inner workings of Church and Throne. Appear a harmless fool—the kind who might impulsively fling themself over the edge of a garden—and they’ll start to believe she’s genuinely harmless. That she can be controlled.

“Their mystery is by design,” the Archbishop tells her. “The Imperial family keeps their biographical data highly guarded, for reasons we can guess at, but only they can supply. I am sorry that your first meeting took place under, shall we say, less-than-auspicious circumstances. I hope you do not think poorly of us because of what happened.”

“Us? Is she not acting under orders of the Throne?”

“I can assure you that she is not.”

Misery takes another swallow of tea. Sweet and smoky. It tastes stronger, as if it’s been steeping in its little glass bubble. “How do you know that?”

“A remarkably complex question, with a remarkably complex answer. A simple explanation would be that I know the princess better than her grandmother. A fuller answer would be something best saved for another day. We are here to talk about you, after all.”

The Archbishop gives her nothing. With other people, thoughts and emotions are like veins of holystone in packed basalt, and Misery has the same uncanny ability to sniff them out. But Pyrex Imogen is all diamantine, all hullmetal, and it’s impossible to get a read out of them. There’s something different about all these saints that makes them impenetrable to Misery. Would that she could crack that shiny surface.

She’s going to try anyway. Misery will keep on trying even when the blood is running from her fingers and teeth.

“Now,” says the Archbishop, “it’s my turn.”