Weeks, now, since Tain Hu had drowned. And it hurt to eat and breathe. It hurt to see the sun and the moon keeping to their course. It hurt to read, to plot, to mine secrets out of the texts in the Liminal Library. It hurt to sit on her bed and watch the oiled hinges move in exquisite silence, back, forth, back, forth, as she kicked the door open and shut.

Why did everything hurt?

Because everything kept working. Everything kept on as if nothing had happened. And Baru needed everything to hurt: Baru needed a sword for a spine, so that if she ever bent from her purpose, she’d be cut.

“Come up onto the battlements,” she ordered Iraji, and when he hesitated, “Come!”

A high daytime moon, a far horizon, great formations of birds above. Sea wind raked her hair. The sound of the waves that killed Tain Hu slammed down over Baru and made her suddenly cold and agile and furious.

The world should care! The moon should cover up its face in mourning!

Baru wanted to fight: anything, everything. She shrugged off her jacket. She kicked off her boots and she turned barefoot, toes clawing at the cracks between stones. With two curled fingers she hooked Iraji’s attention.

“Fight me,” she ordered.

“Last time,” he said, “you almost crushed my throat.”

“This time you can fight back.” She squared off in Naval System stance, hands half-curled to make a fist or claw an eyeball or crush a scrotum.

“Why do you want to be hurt?”

“So Hesychast can’t pick one wound from the rest,” Baru said.

He looked more frightened by that. But he put up his hands.

So they went at each other in wary sideways steps, and Baru felt in her body all the art of all she was: hiding her intent, denying to Iraji the flickers of muscle and stance that would betray her next blow, capturing ground, yielding it, trading a foot of territory for a better angle, hunting for information in the boy’s curled shoulders and half-hidden teeth, and all this was like the art of being a spy and a lord and a queen, all this was the game of learning without being learnt—and like that game all of it was a prelude to pain.

Iraji had a man’s height and reach. That was enough to win. He chose when to step in and take the hit, when to flow from strikes into grapples, and once they fell to wrestle across the tower-stones his long fingers and strangling arms gave him edge. Baru might be stronger, but she couldn’t match his leverage, she couldn’t get up at his throat when she had him in her guard.

“Your Excellence,” he said, after his punch slammed Baru’s half-blind skull against the tower stone.

“Again,” Baru said, smiling blood.