Apparitor had vanished. Probably he was afraid of Farrier. She saw less of his people, Helbride’s crew, in the keep, except that Iraji kept popping up in the oddest places—fitting clean sheets in her chambers, resetting the pawns on the Great Game map, inventorying the whiskeys in the cellar she liked to sample.

“He’s spying on me,” she told Farrier.

“Of course. And you’d be wise to let him.” He sat cross-legged on the map of Falcrest, covering the divisions between ancient cantons and shrievalties. “That’s how we trust each other. A cryptarch you cannot spy on is a cryptarch you must fear. Agents are very good proxies for trust.”

But Iraji’s golden eyes followed Baru with a quiet nervous intensity she couldn’t blame on surveillance alone. “I wonder if he’s soft for me.”

Farrier was suddenly very busy with his pawns. “Couldn’t speak to that,” he said airily. “Today we play Farrier rules. You will be the Mbo. I will play Falcrest.”

It was the first moment of genuine uncertainty, unplanned weakness, she’d seen in him since he appeared. He was off-balance! She did not pause to analyze: she struck as Hu would’ve struck, by instinct.

“I could use a concubine with a little softness,” she said, pacing at the window. “It’s cold here. Maybe that woman who stands sentry on the east tower. I see her up there in the morning, alone, looking out to sea all flinty and intent. And I want to bring her a coffee and a quiet word for good work. What do you think? The climb must keep her firm, I like my women firm—”

“Remember,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “that under my rules, behavior is not fixed. A child raised under Incrasticism will behave Incrastically. Shall we begin?”

Curious. Very curious. Obviously he was displeased by her openness, but now that her tribadism was a fact of record, wasn’t it to his advantage? She’d proven she could control herself.

She began to move pawns.

Baru played the Mbo the way the Mbo played history. Open-armed, enormously affable, embracing invaders like eager guests. Farrier’s wheel of trade ships unloaded masterworks of craft and literature onto her shores, but the Mbo’s griots copied them, mingled them, made their own tributes, and sent them back to Falcrest inflected with a thousand years of dizzyingly various tradition.