Father’s next wife had no use for Primus or his twin, and they had been sent away to live with relatives who had no use for them, either, but who did owe their father a debt.

And Primus had sworn, on the day he came of age, no one would ever have power over him again …

No one ever found out who’d beaten his father to death with his own scourge, or who poisoned wife number three, but by the time all other claimants to the family lands and fortune turned up dead, people had learned not to ask questions.

Isabelle ached for the child Primus had been, even as she loathed the bitter, grasping thing he had become. There was no experience of hers that could help him. He could not see any reality but his own.

But maybe that was the key. She pulled him into Forenzio’s memory and showed him the wreck he had made of the boy’s life.

Is this what you wanted? she asked. Did this make you safe? Did it give you control?

Then she pulled him into Lissa’s memories and all the relationships he’d ruined grasping for influence, and the merchant he’d destroyed trying to crush all his enemies. She showed him the senator he’d wrecked trying to make him a king, the clergyman he’d corrupted trying to become Omnifex.

Then she took him back and showed him his father, his face twisted in rage.

How many times are you going to let him win?

Primus’s pain unraveled like a tornado in Isabelle’s soul, blowing everything flat, leaving her empty and spent. Yet somewhere in the deepest part of her long memory, a child faced away from an angry father, and embraced his dying mother.

Isabelle surfaced into her own body with a gasp. She checked her timepiece.

Five minutes left.

She scooped up her tools and raced to the stern. She needed a longitude. She kicked open her sky chest and whipped out her Solar navigation book. She needed the angle of the Solar, and the precise time. She needed more hands.

Inspiration struck her with a clear, cold note. She needed all hands.

She turned to the breach of the everdream and shouted, All hands on deck!

Her ancestors rose at her command, gathering in a throng.

Forenzio, she said, man that sextant; get me azimuth of the Solar.

Aye, Capitaine, he said. But how?

Like this. She seized his ghost, grabbed the sextant with her spark-hand, and pushed his awareness into the instrument along with enough of her l’Étincelle sorcery to let him animate the device. She stuck it on its tripod and aimed it at the hole in the hull where the windows used to be.