Falconé, dressed in courtesan silks, her great plume of yellow-gold crest feathers fanned, stood just to Isabelle’s left. Was she supposed to be here? She’d been with Isabelle at the Sacking of Galbarron.

Isabelle held her reply. Her gaze fixed on the orrery. Falconé’s reflection did not appear in the glass. She was a ghost stain, unreal. Her phantom visitors were coming closer together, even after she’d adjusted her potion schedule. If she shortened the interval again, would she have enough supply for the return trip? She tried to do the multiplication in her head and came up pottage. A month ago she could have done it without effort.

She closed her eyes until Capitana Falconé’s stain faded. The visions were so very like waking up suddenly from the middle of a dream. They were more real to the mind than the evidence of her senses until they had time to fade, and then they became absurd and disjointed, hard to remember. Yet she understood the advice Falconé had been trying to give.

She said, “Suggest to Fleet Command that they might detach a squadron to threaten the Sundered Isles. The Skaladin might think twice about committing to the trough if they think the Hoary Fleet is ready to pounce on their home port.”

“Yes, Capitaine,” Vrain said, and his gaze became distracted as he inhabited his bloodhollow back at the Cauldron. Watching his expression go slack, it occurred to Isabelle that perhaps the reason her Sanguinaire officers had not taken much note of Isabelle’s distracted fits was because it so closely resembled their own behaviors when they were visiting their bloodhollows. It never occurred to them that her moments of absence were unusual.

Isabelle withdrew from the chartroom, wondering whose advice Vrain had passed along. She never would have thought about sending a diversionary squadron if Falconé hadn’t nudged her. She was not sure which terrified her more: that she had understood the suggestion, or that it seemed reasonable to threaten war with the tyrant. War was the last thing she wanted.

But her ancestors weren’t helping her for her own benefit. They wanted her to be their puppet, to continue their dynasty and carry on a legacy she had not asked for. The inheritance they sought to impose was defined by war, power, lust, madness, and betrayal.

“Capitaine.” Vrain stepped out of the chartroom behind her, his face as grim as a tombstone. “I’ve just received urgent news from the Cauldron.”

Five minutes later, Isabelle and her line officers gathered around the orrery. The machine showed the Thunderclap on its approach to Joubert’s Folly. The naval base turned at the center of the Spiral Archipelago, with the rest of the skylands trailing around it like a ribbon in the hand of a dancer.