Both of Isabelle’s honor guards quivered with affront. To demand a Célestial woman take off her wig was tantamount to commanding her to disrobe in public. It was a humiliation and a prelude to degradation.

Isabelle held up her flesh hand to restrain her compatriots. She’d been expecting this, counting on it in fact, and hadn’t pinned her wig in place. She doffed her plumed hat and pulled off her raven tresses to reveal a head of knuckle-length mouse-brown hair, patchy on the right side where she’d been burned. It had been three months since she very publicly destroyed Brunela’s vitera. If she was going to become a Fenice and carry on her father’s line, she should have sprouted feathers by now. The lack of down or feather proved her claim was true.

She stepped forward and bent her head for examination.

All three of the Fenice moved in, combing her hair as if looking for lice.

He’ll break your neck … gut him now … filthy vermin, growled Isabelle’s ancestral chorus, a mélange of voices each talking over all the others. Between one voice and the next, the parquetry floor of Sireen’s throne room disappeared, and in its stead was a heap of sandstone rubble on which lay the broken corpse of her brother, Nunzio, from some life long ago. She might have reached out and touched his feathery crest.

Isabelle squeezed her eyes shut against the hallucination, a ghostly stain of her ancestor’s life that leaked into her mind like blood through cloth. It was maddening to see things she knew were false but that no amount of logic would allow her to dismiss. All of her senses insisted the corpse was there—the rotten meat stink of its decay got up her nose and made her gag—despite all the evidence reason could bring to bear.

She took a twice-daily potion that kept the chorus quiet and kept the ghost stains from leaking through, but the foul brew also made her thickheaded. She’d trimmed today’s dose to let her think more quickly and clearly during the tribunal. Apparently she’d cut down a little too far.

Finally Pyros stepped back and frowned. “It seems you are telling the truth,” he said, clearly disgruntled to find that his chosen prey had died without his help. How much of his life had he dedicated to this endeavor? How many lifetimes, just to find the job already done?

Isabelle opened her eyes. The ghost stain had faded, thank the saints. The chorus was still there, mumbling in the background like voices at a party consisting entirely of uninvited guests.