Tain Shir was born to a red moon and the flash of summer heat lightning. I swear in Devena’s name that she was born with one tooth already erupted, and that she bit me. We took her with us on our travels, and she grew up among revolutionaries, with words like freedom on her tongue.

Once, as we scraped our laundry in a Radaszic stream, she touched the scar on my thigh. Is that, she’d asked, what the dukes are like? A rot in us?

Her father, my brother, rubbed her hair and smiled. Yes, he’d said, so proudly. But a rot that we will cut away.

What about Mother, Pa?

She was born to aristocracy. But she made her choice to stand with us. Everyone has a choice, little blackberry.

Perhaps that was the moment that fate seized upon when it wrote Shir’s doom.

The Masquerade came on red sails, and with them a prayer of change: the masked people on the ships spoke of republic, and their Parliament where anyone could change the law. Shir was afraid of them. The wisest of us, although of course at the time we hardly knew it.

Like a gaggle of boys aroused by a hint of nipple, the dukes and duchesses all got hard for the new Masquerade trade and began to fight over it. In a blink they were at war and we, the antiroyalists, had our moment. I struck a deal with the Masquerade mission. And I kept my terms. I killed Duke Lachta with a little knife, and as his last breath bubbled from his throat, I wiped my blade on his white stacked linens and said, “Will that be all, Your Grace?”

Shir fought, too, on that night of reckoning. She killed. Not for the first time, I think.

My brother, “head of the revolutionary government,” signed the Treaty of Federation. So we gave Aurdwynn to the Masquerade, and at first young Shir rejoiced. But the new Incrastic laws were cruel like bleach—Aurdwynn, the Falcresti explained, had to be cleansed of sin. The land had to be scoured raw. In time their laws would ease, they assured us. If enforced well, and obeyed with enthusiasm. In time the laws would ease.

That, I think, we could have tolerated.

Then their fucking Parliament made an accomodation with the dukes.

The aristocracy would keep their stations and their privilege, in exchange for signatures on the Treaty of Federation. Falcrest’s Parliament had judged it impossible to profitably rule Aurdwynn without the dukes. Tax revenue would be unacceptably low for an unacceptably long time if the revolution disrupted industry. The duchies had to stand.

That we did not want to tolerate. But we went along with it. My brother and I acquiesced.