She put the bar of her arm across his soft throat and slammed him into the windows. The whole great hive of glass shuddered at the blow. It was the first time she’d ever touched him in anger. He was looking up at her in alarm and hateful glee, I can move her, that’s what he was thinking, I can still provoke her.

Baru snarled in his face, “She was a traitor!”

“Yes, quite,” he choked. “An archtraitor. And you executed her for it. Will you give me an inch to speak, please? Thank you. She’s on file attesting to your illicit, ah, experimentation. And you executed her anyway. A great credit to your discipline. May I breathe now?”

Baru retreated two steps, back foot, then front. The ringing! The ringing! In Aurdwynn they beat the dirt out of their laundry with huge wooden clubs. Baru had helped, because it was fun to smash clothes clean. But Devena help you if you struck the club against a tree, or a rock. It would leap and quiver in your hand with a thrum that conducted itself, instantly, up your arms and into your jaw. And, with your teeth buzzing, you’d drop the club and swear.

Now Baru felt that same hum in her bones and brain and she wanted to come apart, her joints electing to unclasp each other, her sinews unbound, spilling her across the marble in a fan of gore.

“What are you going to do?” she said, breathing hard. “Try to circumcise me?”

“No, Baru, no.” He looked up at her with glittering wit, and pride, a hideous paternal pride that claimed credit for all that it honored. “Don’t you understand? I’m glad. So glad. I told you, Falcrest is saved. You’ve saved us all.”

“Why?”

“You loved her, in accordance with your nature.”

Baru shrugged: the hardest lie so well-practiced it was easy now. The hugeness of Tain Hu’s trust and love was all that made it possible to conceal that trust, that love: like a sail it could be folded up inside itself.

“Just one night,” she said.

“But that’s everything. That’s everything. You were out beyond the Republic’s reach, where you could have done anything you pleased. What would you have done if Hesychast’s rules were right?” He held up his hands. “Baru, he thinks you obey your nature. You could’ve run off with your duchess into the mountains and been with her. And yet you came back. You obeyed our laws. No one believed you could do it, Baru! No one but me!”

Falling: the world is falling. Nothing below her. Apparitor was right. That bastard Itinerant. He made you kill her. It was all part of his plan, everything, even the kiss, even the words kuye lam, even the drowning-stone: and thus she is lost.

But wait a moment. Wait now.

So what if Farrier expected you to kill me?