She walked among them. They looked at her with hard-chinned gratitude: thank you for gathering us here and using us so well. Thank you for showing us what we earn with our duty, pride and purpose and a fair piece of cash. The force of their love and respect filled her up like a sail and she tried so hard not to grin.

Now and then she stopped and asked an officer, “What’s the word, sailor?” And mostly the woman would answer, “Fair winds and following seas wherever you send us, mam.”

They would follow her anywhere. Not just the true salt but the wide-eyed octopus girls so young they were still all arm and leg, the careerists trying to illuminate their service jackets with merit, the lemon-rind convicts who would never work anywhere but a ship again. All hers.

It was her responsibility to deny them that loyalty. To take only those who could understand the sacrifice she asked of them.

That night she began to draw up transfer orders. The young and hopeful and ambitious would come off Sulane and Scylpetaire. She would take the hard and fierce and angry, the sea revenants and the orphans and the widows.

She would fill her two prize ships with those who did not fear collective punishment. But that would not be enough: the Throne was too subtle. Some of them would still be leveraged, compromised, ready to mutiny or murder her when she broke from the Hierarchic Qualm.

She needed the Bane of Wives.

*   *   *

AND then it was the day she had painted on that hidden stone, and in the morning she went out in disguise to the meet.

On the wagon-seamed downslope off the Ffynyrn Bramble—she had finally gotten used to pronouncing the Iolynic y, which made the name Faneern—two orphans played dam-builder in the runoff. A dead woman with gills carved into her throat lay in the mud upstream. Juris shouted, in her best Iolynic, “Children! Stay out of that water, it’s tainted!”

They recognized the Aphalone in her accent. They ran.

She saw more corpses as she walked. Beggars with faces burnt to shining parchments by riot acid hauled the dead in for hygiene bounty. They would see not a province admiral but a bare-faced brown woman in a homespun dress, hurrying through the muck. But Juris was not afraid.

Once the beggars must have been rebels. Part of the Coyote uprising that Juris had crushed, yes, damn it, that she had crushed, no matter how the Emperor tried to give the credit to Its Agents. Juris had beaten that Oriati fleet under Abdumasi Abd, the rebellion’s only hope.

She felt vain and stupid, telling herself that. Oh, Juris, you great hero, you stopped the uprising, nobody else did it, it was you! But she had to seize the credit. This was what the Masquerade did to navy women: took their triumphs away.