Baru frowned in thought. He mistook that for confusion, and went on:

“Last century when Purge was new, everyone complained that military coup through the navy was too powerful, so play centered around control of the Admiralty. Then the Foreign Policies variant came into favor, wherein both players could lose if the Admiralty were badly compromised by intrigue. The metagame changed, people stopped focusing so much on the Admiralty.”

“Aha. That’s a very useful word, metagame,” Baru said, and went on to lose three more times, all by the narrowest margin, before she realized that Iraji was playing with her—always performing just a bit better than she could beat. Baru looked up at him with vengeful delight, infuriated and happy to be furious: “You’re a snake. If I keep losing, why can’t my player just have your player to dinner and stab him?”

“Ah, a simplicity!” He clapped. “The game presumes that all parties involved have guarded themselves against basic tactics like assassination and poisoning, which we call the Simplicities.”

“As I am guarded, here on Helbride, by my patron’s threat against your master’s hostage.”

“Just so.”

“So only more sophisticated tactics can reach me.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this effort to win my confidence.”

“You think I’m here to befriend you on Apparitor’s orders?”

“Aren’t you?”

Iraji touched the cards between them. Lacquer-painted faces stared up from the wood of the deck. Slowly, hesitantly, he stroked one of the faces: and then, with a duelist’s speed, he reached up to touch Baru’s cheek.

She froze. He had very steady warm hands, and his eyes were dangerously open. Not a seductive openness, half-lidded and open-lipped, but a curious kind of trust: stupid, cowlike, tactically foolish trust, extended to her like a line of credit.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I don’t believe you are what you pretend to be.”

“I— What?”

“I can see you are in agony, my lady. Why do you have to bicker with my lord? Are you determined to be nothing but edges and lye?”

So he was here for Apparitor. To pry, again, at Baru’s cracks.

“We’re rivals,” Baru said. “We must defend ourselves from each other.”

“The best rivals share a certain respect, don’t they?”

“In his rag novels, maybe.” But not, she thought, after one of them has decided the other is a monster, and after that monster has decided to send him home to his brother and a terrible fate.

“He is lonely! Not for a lover,” he smiled, quickly, and in pride, “but a peer. He has been on mission so long … the two of you could ease each others’ pain, if only you were friends.”