“Shir,” Yawa said. Baru knew that weight on her voice. It was old pain poorly hidden. “Don’t do this now. You don’t understand—”

A smoke bomb crashed into the water and gushed a gray-white cloud between them. The red mask vanished into the water and the mist.

“Finally!” Apparitor cried.

“What?” Baru shouted, offended on a deep and irrational level that things kept happening without her consent. “What?”

Iraji pointed Baru to the boats coming across the marsh from Helbride, armed with little hwachas. The rocket fuses glimmered like fireflies. Apparitor’s people had arrived.

“Come on!” a woman cried. It was Helbride’s Captain Branne, with her bronze eye glittering in the firelight. “We’re casting off!”

Tain Shir. Tain Shir was the cousin of Tain Hu. Baru remembered that now.

Why did it feel that she’d forgotten something else?

Why was she certain that she’d known Tain Shir as long as she lived?

*   *   *

HELBRIDE slipped from her hidden river into the shallow edge of the sea. Copper and wood tasted the waves. She raised wings of canvas, spruce, pitch-smeared rope and fir, and the sailors in her rig set her downwind. Scylpetaire tried to cut her off, but Apparitor had strewn mines to guard his exit, and the navy ship had to beat upwind to clear the threat.

“Isn’t that poetic?” he said to Baru. “They come to kill you for mining a harbor, and now they can’t get past my mines.”

Then he looked back to the marsh and the Elided Keep, and Baru watched all the jaunty swagger drain down through his jaw and throat until he was as pale and sickly as a strangled pig.

The marines were killing everyone. Their knives flashed at the throats of secretaries and librarians. Pale lapwings warbled and wheeled overhead in anger and the tide ran with the blood-yellow effluent of eggs broken beneath hobnailed boots.

Again Apparitor wept. “My house,” he said. “I left my house to die.”

Iraji touched his shoulder. Baru watched his fingers curl in reassurance. Experimentally she curled her own fingers against her own shoulder. It didn’t help.

And then she came walking out of the carnage.

The killing woman. Resplendent and profane in burnt muck, in broken eggs, in armor sprayed by artery blood. She paced them on the shore, pointing—promising. You think I won’t follow you across the sea, O Fairer Hand? You think I won’t follow you into the new names and faces you assume?

“What is she?” Baru whispered.

“That’s Tain Shir,” Apparitor croaked. He was bent with grief. “Your patron Farrier’s old favorite. She was supposed to be the living proof of his work … a foreign woman educated into a perfect instrument.”

“She’s your niece,” Baru said, to the right-hand void where Yawa stood.