Isabelle said, “This was always going to be a race, and no amount of urgency will alter the wind in our favor.”

“That’s why we have a Windcaller,” Vrain rumbled.

Isabelle shook her head. “Hailer Dok can’t whisk us up there by himself. What we must do is make sure we get to the Craton Auroborea in one piece. We have the Conquest shard to guide us to the right spot and Dok to get us through the Bittergale. Those are advantages no one else has, which means they will be doing their best to obtain them from us. So keep your watches well. Vrain, I need you to report all of this directly to Comtesse Impervia, no intermediaries.”

“Yes, Capitaine,” Vrain said. “What shall we do with him?” He gestured toward Quill.

Isabelle regarded the sagax with as much capitainely gravitas as she could muster. “Is there anything else you have neglected to tell us?”

“You now know everything that I do,” Quill said, in the manner of one to whom a simple “yes” or “no” was anathema.

To Vrain she said, “I want his trunk and all his stowage to be carefully examined. As for the rest, he’s still a member of the expedition, and a passenger due all courtesy, but I don’t think he needs to be wandering about unattended after the injuries he sustained today.”

Quill’s expression darkened at this command but he wisely kept his mouth shut.

“Yes, Capitaine,” Vrain said.

Isabelle dismissed the audience. When everyone but Bitterlich had departed, she shut the door.

“More questions?” Quill asked.

“Just one,” she said. “What do you know of Don Pyros?”

Quill’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “He is my brother.”

Surprise took Isabelle aback. “You’re not a Fenice.”

Quill gave her a look that suggested she should know better and said, “The Fenice have their unhallowed scions too. If a child’s feathers don’t come in by the time they are fifteen or so, their clan assumes their sorcery is in its shell, and they give that child a vitera to try and wake the sorcery. So it was with me.”

Isabelle’s skin crawled. She had been drugged, limp and helpless, when her sister had placed her vitera on the back of her neck. She would never forget the pricking of her skin as the insect dragged its slimy abdominal sac to the base of her skull, or the hot-wire pain as it sank its needle proboscis into the root of her brain, or the horrid sense of dissolving into nothing when Maximus Primus and all his descendants had swallowed her whole.

Your duty is to your family, said the chorus.

I made my own family. Isabelle rubbed the back of her neck, groping for the enemy that was no longer there. It was no longer anywhere she could get at it.

She forced her hand back to her side. She had the chorus under control.