Baru grinned like a barracuda, she was so hungry and so angry to eat his trust like a fishing line and to pull him down by it into the water from which he’d snagged her.

“What do I have to do to beat him?”

*   *   *

HESYCHAST was perfect.

He looked like an archon summoned up from the handbooks and the statuaries, invoked as incarnation of manhood: his lean height, his light-footed strength, his broad flat face composed against the masculine passions and yet, like a team of oxen in the yoke, still ready to move powerfully. His brown eyes were deep and bright and deeply folded, the image of classical Falcrest beauty. All his motions were demonstrations: you see, this is how it is properly done. He wore a wedge-shaped jacket with long tails, and trousers that cupped his narrow hips. She could have balanced two coffee cups on his shoulders.

Farrier had said, he will strike you in your wound.

She called down to him from her high throne. She wore her Library key ring around her throat, with the keys fanned across the jacket’s unbuttoned breast. She ought to have worn a gown, to conceal herself. Too late. She and Hesychast were alone, except for the dancing gull, which came and went on its own schedule.

“Welcome to the Elided Keep,” Baru said. “I am Agonist.”

Farrier had said, he will bring it back to the flesh. Always. He will say you couldn’t kill Tain Hu without dividing your brain. He will say you learned nothing, no discipline, no control. You only cut your flesh in two.

The eugenicist tried a stiff formal smile, and couldn’t hold it, and grinned at her in sparkling earnest. “Agonist! What a name! I see you have a gull problem? I’m very good with birds.”

Baru laughed. “Someone’s trained that gull to dance for food.”

Casually, and without malice: “Ah. Behavioral conditioning. Sounds like Caird’s work. I’ve been told he’s here.”

“Well,” she said, archly, “the bird is always plain about what it wants, so it’s welcome in my court. Tell me, Mister Torrinde, if you’re here to examine me, what do you see? A woman fit only for farming, fishing, and pleasure?”

He clasped his hands at the small of his back: chest out, chin up, hips cocked. He didn’t blink. His mask was the brown of Falcresti flesh, rimmed in Aphalone script, words from the Manual of the Somatic Mind: with discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul. Wait. No. That wasn’t from any Falcresti manual—that was an Aurdwynni saying, an ilykari saying. Why would he write that on his mask?

“I see a cryptarch without a hostage,” he said. “I had my Clarified vet your relationship with Tain Hu. She seemed very dear to you.”

Baru made a little wobbling scale with her hand: dear-ish.