Ormsment snapped over her. “Let me answer the riddle. Hush. Quiet. Let me answer that riddle about power. Who has the power here? Well, you’ve got the Emperor’s blessing. You’ve got your man in command of my navy, you’ve got Tau here wrapped around your finger, you’re well on your way to the war you want so badly. And I’m not willing to order my marines to storm an embassy full of innocents. So I can’t touch you.

“But I will not, I will not, stand for a world in which my honest sailors are sacrificed in the name of the Emperor’s intricacies. Actions must have consequences, do you understand?” She rose up and her voice dropped into her gut, into the low bawling roar of the sea officer crying against the storm, “I came to capture you, Baru Cormorant, and to hold you to account for those you betrayed. I came and I failed. I do not have the power to do it. But actions must have fucking consequences for the world to be good. I must make you face the consequences of what you’ve done.

“So I have sent Scylpetaire to take your parents.”

“Oh,” Baru said, as the world creased around her, a mark in the page, before this moment and after.

*   *   *

SHE’D thought that her mother and father would be safe from the Throne, inoculated against threat by Baru’s disregard for Tain Hu’s life.

But Ormsment had never known Tain Hu.

“I didn’t want to do it this way,” Ormsment said, her voice sober, her hands at ease, her shoulders set. “I don’t threaten innocents for their daughter’s guilt. It was Shir who convinced me, I want that known. Shir who was once the Emperor’s agent … like you.”

“I don’t … I shan’t…” Baru tried to decline to care. If she could only signal that she would let her parents die rather than surrender herself, then perhaps Ormsment would believe her, and spare her parents. All she had to do was visibly and convincingly not give a fuck.

But you can’t, can you?

No more than you could’ve let me die.

If I hadn’t had the courage to volunteer.

“So who now holds the power?” Ormsment bellowed the word, power, and the courtyard was silent. “You, or me?”

The power is yours, Baru thought. It is yours. The engine that manufactures all things is driven by the past: by hope and by sorrow, by fear and by rage, by all the passions and calculations of our past it conjures up the mechanisms that drive us forward into the carved channels of our futures.

And you have gone into my past, Admiral, and found the piece of the engine that drove me down this channel.

How can I go to Falcrest to outlaw the death of fathers if it will kill my last father?