Juris wished Shao would be more careful with her powers. An air of superiority made one a target in men’s circles. Sooner or later navy women had to make peace with that: or, if not peace, at least a cease-fire and a border.

A bee settled on her thigh. Juris smiled at it. Rage slammed against the back of her teeth, and the front of her skull, and rebounded: rage, rage, they died because you trusted her, they died on your watch. A bee would die after she used her sting, wouldn’t she? So she had to choose carefully when to strike.

Where the fuck was the agent?

Then a burly woman in forester’s skins came out of the alley across from Juris, hitching up her pants: briefly, beneath the tough denim, Juris saw a pale scar across a brown gut, and the edge of a strong fat thigh. She chased off the orphans cutting up the dead dog with blows from her hatchet’s handle. What a tableau. Aurdwynn in a painting: a forester pisses in an alley, orphans cut up a frozen dog, the forester curses and beats the orphans. Next the forester would probably eat the dog. Juris loved this place, loved the charcoal smell and the taste of wheat pancakes on a campfire, the shining rivers that smelled like ice. But king’s balls she was glad she hadn’t been born here.

The victorious forester knelt and, with care, covered the dog’s frozen face.

Then she looked at Juris.

King’s balls, her eyes! Blue as lightning-flash, and terrible, and Juris sat bolt-upright, for those eyes were proof. Eyes like Xate Yawa’s. Blue like a tropical crow, and mad, mad.

She was the Bane of Wives.

She looked nothing like Juris had expected, nothing like a usefully built navy woman with big shoulders and long legs. Rough sinew and loose muscle, instead, and a survivor’s pad of fat.

She chopped the frozen dog’s head from its spine, picked it up by its bloody ruff, and came over to Ormsment.

The bee buzzed up to the high collar of Ormsment’s dress.

The Bane of Wives underhanded the dead dog’s head. It landed on the bench next to Ormsment, thudded wetly, rolled against the inscription: LINGER AND APPRECIATE THE CLEANLY AIR.

“You’re the admiral,” she said, in a calm low voice.

“You’re the agent.” By officer’s habit Ormsment laid out her knowledge. “I read about you. You were on Sousward. Then in the Occupation, then sent to Mzilimake. You didn’t come back.”

“Open the mouth,” the Bane of Wives said.

“What?”

“Open the dog’s mouth.” She knelt to scour her hands with ice. “There’s something for you in there.”

After the black-footed corpse, surely a frozen dog wouldn’t kill her. Juris stripped off her good gloves and felt around under the dripping tongue. Something small, hard—a long flat stone.