Finally he spoke in a voice as old and tired as the last breath of winter. “It’s an old story, goes back afore any of you is born.”

Everybody leaned in to better hear. Even Rebecca was rapt.

“Ever since we is declared anathema, the Gyrine are free. Every clan votes their own choir and their own capitaine. Sometime the clans work together, sometime they don’t. There’s really only two rules. One is that the Gyrine bows to no king: you picks your own leaders, and no one needs to serve a capitaine they doesn’t pick. The second is, no Gyrine ever kills another.”

“What happens if your clan picks a capitaine you can’t abide?” Bitterlich asked.

“You leave. You gets off at the nearest port. Maybe you finds yourself another clan who’ll take you in. Maybe you makes your own way.”

Djordji coughed again, long and racking, then lay back and sipped air like it was hot tea.

At length, he gathered enough breath to speak. “I is a young man when there comes a time that all the Gyrine are under threat. The dirtborn downs our balloons. Whole clans are lost. Enemies close in from all sides. A great gyre moot is called. All the clans gather at Flotsam and the capitaines tries to work out how best to respond. You imagines how that goes.”

Isabelle had no trouble picturing the dickering.

“My brother is capitaine and choir leader of the Tall Clouds. Kalo is his name, but the world knows him as Solitaire.”

Similce said, “Solitaire the pirate? The one who sacked Tyrant Xerxas’s tomb?”

“Aye,” Djordji said. “‘What’s the point of burying all that gold?’ he says. ‘The dead has no needs.’ We also whips the Vecci pirate hunters at St. Oppus, and takes the Aragothic treasure fleet out of San Corvus.”

“I can’t imagine why the powers of the world were mad at you,” Bitterlich said.

Djordji shrugged unrepentantly. “Gyrine say if you can’t keep it, you shouldn’t have it. Kalo, he argues that the clans should elect a storm king, one great leader to unite the Gyrine and take war to the dirtborn, put them in their place. He says we rules the skies and we should expect tribute from those who trespass in our domain. Never again will we lets them build warships. If they wants to use our skies they pays for the privilege.”

“That sounds … implausible,” Isabelle said.