It hurt like—how had she thought of it at Sieroch? Like glass powder in her cup. Like glimmering motes in the flesh of her throat, in the sponge of her lungs, pumped into her blood so glass lodged in the small joints of her fingers and the lobes of her ears. It hurt. But if Baru could just find a problem to tackle, a maneuver to plot, a precision to execute with all her life and work at stake, then she’d be too full of cleverness to grieve.

These past few days she’d had trouble getting out of her hammock in the morning.

“Let’s make a plan for the Llosydanes,” she said. “Let’s do something. We’re cryptarchs, aren’t we? Let’s conspire.”

“No.” He stared listlessly at his bookshelf. She could trace his eyes’ passage over the titles. At Last, The Aurochime. Into the Next Manifold. I Awakened Crystodepsis. “No, let’s not. We can’t trust each other. They have Lindon, so I’ll look for their fucking Cancrioth, and they have Xate Olake, so I suppose Yawa will look, too. But you? Make your own plans. I won’t help you. Helping you helps Farrier, and I won’t be his pawn.”

Baru swallowed cold poisonous calm straight from the bottle.

“If Hu were alive,” she asked, “would it be different?”

“Of course it would.” He struggled back to his feet, suddenly electrified: “Have you been feeding that gull? The one who dances on the mast for food?”

“I— Yes, why?”

“Do you know who trained it to do that?”

“Farrier, I think.”

He grinned madly at her. “Farrier! Ha.”

*   *   *

AS Baru went out, the ship’s cook, an old Falcresti woman of darker color and weird very nearly Stakhi-rounded eyes, came by to ask Apparitor about the menu. Did he like his trout swimming in wine sauce and salt capers, or would he prefer it thinly cut, prepared in the Oriati style of glass and gauze? She had raspberries, too, from the Elided Keep’s interior gardens, which she could serve stuffed with fat caviar. Soon they would have to rely on preserved foods and sea catch, so he should eat richly while he could.

Apparitor looked up at her silently for a while. Baru tried to keep herself out of the way, in case he exploded in rage at the cook’s frivolity. But instead he leapt up and embraced the woman, bloody apron and all, just as he had smeared himself on Captain Branne when he came aboard.

“Munette,” he said, “I’ll have the same tajine from the same pot you’re serving everyone else, and you’ll lottery your fancy dishes to the keep’s survivors. You’re a marvel, you know that? Raspberries and caviar! A marvel!”

She shuffled and muttered. When Apparitor let her go, she looked crossly at Baru. “Does the Souswardi have a special diet?” she asked. “Will she require attentions?”