Isabelle huffed a laugh. “Sweet on my mud-slurry face, my voice like a horse’s whinny, my head full of other people’s voices?” She shook her head, which felt like someone had filled it with iron thistles.

Marie tilted her head, fixing Isabelle with her owllike stare. “Did he say any of that?”

“Of course not. He’s far too polite.”

Marie considered that a moment and said, “No one knows how best to kill a l’Étincelle, given that there’s only one of you, but just now, I think I’d like to strangle you. You are smart, courageous, and compassionate. If the major can’t see that, he doesn’t deserve your interest.”

Isabelle appreciated Marie’s appraisal, even if she didn’t feel it. “I suppose this does make life less complicated. I have enough to do without navigating a romance.”

“Someone else will come along when the Builder wills it,” Marie said.

“Is that a promise or a curse?” Isabelle asked. “I wasn’t looking for anyone when Bitterlich showed up, and I don’t intend to start now that he’s showed himself out.”

“Why not? You have plans for everything, why make an exception for l’amour?”

The chorus’s spidery prickle crawled up the nape of her neck: Love is an emotion. A tool. You must wield the tool, not the other way around.

Isabelle clamped her hand on the back of her neck as if to catch and crush the insect. “For one thing, I mean to be the master of my own life. For another”—she tapped her temple—“I don’t know how much of me there will be in a year and a day.”

“Why a year and a day?”

“I seem to recall that’s the standard length for a quest in the old tales. Sounds more dramatic than just ‘next year.’ The point being that if I’m going to live every day as if it were my last, it seems rather unfair to hand some poor suitor only the last page of my book.”

“Not if it’s pure poetry,” Marie said.

“Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight!” Jean-Claude declared, slapping the last of his bounty cards on the barrel. The crowd gathered on the main deck broke out in guffaws and various aeronauts turned out their pouches and secret hiding places, only to find them devoid of cards.

Rebecca, standing at Jean-Claude’s side, looked as smug as a cat with feathers in her mouth. It had taken her only two days to recover the whole deck, even while maintaining a schedule of shipboard education that would have left anyone over the age of twenty completely knackered. She was learning knotwork, ship chores, reading, fisticuffs, and handmaid duties.

The aeronauts, ruffians by nature, didn’t think much of girls, but Rebecca had managed to squeeze through the bars of their collective prejudice into the category of kid, just like any other boy.