And by this light Tain Shir beholds the immense grandeur of the ship that destroyed Cheetah.

Four hundred feet of golden-clad hull. A rudder like a door to heaven. Eight masts and their rigging is so vast that it might swaddle a baby sun on the first night of its radiance. Shir computes a crew of at least a thousand. Cannon peer through windows in the huge hull.

There is no nameplate. But great symbols down the flank speak in En Elu Aumor, the sacred tongue of the Pitchblende Dictionary. They say:

Eternal.

On the high rail, a tiny man stands silhouetted against lantern light. Shir sees the long horn of crabbed flesh jutting from the eye socket. The man is onkos. He bears the immortata. The cancer grows.

The Cancrioth has come out of its fastness to walk the world again. And Baru Cormorant will be with them soon. She must be taught. She must know that she will never gain her freedom by insinuating herself with her enslavers. She must learn that she can no longer expend those around her to pay the toll of her passage into power.

Shir will use all of Baru’s friends and companions to teach her.

And if Baru fails to learn, then Shir will retrieve from the place where she once hid him the man who she was tasked to capture and vanish on Taranoke fourteen years ago.

Baru’s father Salm. The very wheel and shaft of Baru’s mission. The man Baru has resolutely believed must be dead. For she has swallowed Cairdine Farrier’s protocols of grief, which do not permit any hope of reunion. And she has made death and loss the feet she walks upon.

Tain Shir will break those feet from under Baru and cast her down into the ash of those she treads upon.

Yes. She judges this fine ground for teaching.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sine qua non: Gillian Conahan, Marco Palmieri, and Jennifer Jackson.

Endless thanks to Rachel Swirsky, Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley, Max Gladstone, Yoon Ha Lee, Brooke Bolander, Mia Serrano, Alyssa Wong, Amal El-Mohtar, Ilana Myer, and all the others who talked me through this process. I couldn’t have done it without you.