“I want to breathe fire,” she said, flicking her fingers out in front of her face.

A bell tolled the quarter hour. Bitterlich turned his attention to the depot. “Time to go.”

“But what about—” Rebecca said.

“We’ll practice more after the staff meeting, assuming I have time. Right now I need you to go eat, replenish what you used. Then take a nap.”

Rebecca rolled her gemlike eyes. “I don’t need a nap.”

“You will after you eat,” he said.

Bitterlich left her at the mess hall and arrived at headquarters with several minutes to spare. He checked his uniform and straightened his cravat. It would never do to be late or disheveled. The Sanguinaire might not give him any credit for doing things properly, but he’d never hear the end of it if he did things improperly.

The war room was a flattened sphere. The whole floor was a raised platform that rested on a weighted gimbal that kept the surface level as the skyland tilted around it. In the center was the requisite table, round and carved of some heavy wood. To one side stood Capitaine Vrain, looking every bit as wooden as the table, and the base commander, Commandant Turenne, a big beefy Sanguinaire with a wind-burned face, and the sort of aggressive cheerfulness of a man who considered a twenty-kilometer hike before breakfast invigorating and declared ice baths a bracing restorative.

Bitterlich imagined all such men would die alone, their enthusiasm for healthy living proving fatal to everyone around them.

Bitterlich presented his salute, which Vrain returned.

Commandant Turenne looked Bitterlich up and down. “So you’re the pelter I’ve heard so much about. Counteragent and hero of the coup, my brother tells me. Damn strange world we live in, but I suppose it makes sense that the spymistress would employ an actual weasel.”

He laughed at his own joke.

Bitterlich did not react to the insult, the implication that his kind made good pelts, nor to the joke, though both made his blood boil.

“I am but a servant of l’Empire,” Bitterlich said.

“It’s good you’re here early, Major,” Vrain said. “We have business to discuss. We have received a directive from Madame. In light of Capitaine Isabelle’s apparent breakdown, she is to be recalled to Rocher Royale, assuming she regains consciousness.”

Bitterlich had known the news was coming, but it still hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. Being recalled was not, in and of itself, a legal penalty, but it was understood by anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of royal politics that someone who was recalled was also expected to resign. That would cut Isabelle’s last lifeline to society and make her an outcast in the very kingdom she had saved from war and coup.