The poor dumb girl seemed to have developed a nervous tic. She looked at my face, then to her left, as if trying to scrub me off her vision. Perhaps she was afraid of me, remembering how close I’d come to ending her. Out of simple compassion I’d tried to keep her from getting involved in Aurdwynn—compassion for myself, mind, because I found her every dram as obnoxious as my brother thought her charming.

(My brother—)

Alas, she had an adolescent notion that her meddling was required everywhere. And Tain Hu liked her. That was what had kept me from driving Baru out of the game. Tain Hu stood up for her and my brother was glad.

(My brother is howling. His tears are filthy in the mat of his beard. His eyes are my eyes ringed in red, as if I’ve thumbed them down into his skull and his meat is welling up around them. He is screaming, screaming, I trusted you! Ku xu, I trusted you! They are taking him out of the courthouse, to the harbor, where he will be bound to the prow of a clipper and sailed round the sea till he dies—)

My brother took the revelation of my true allegiance very poorly. I’d see to him in a moment, he just needed (someone to treat him like a person, for Himu’s sake, Yawa, can’t you see what you’ve done to him? You wretched husk. The day he married into aristocracy was the day you stopped trusting him, your brother who kept you safe in the gutters, your brother who gave you the idea, Yawa, why can’t we be dukes? And instead of any comfort that would cost you anything you’re just going to give him) another dose of his tranquilizer.

I took a moment to count faces, while Olake’s howling had them distracted.

Hesychast, of course, fourteen years my junior and four years short of fifty. A ridiculously perfect meat-doll of a man. But he had kind eyes, and nervous fingers, and a deeply hidden desire to please. He’d been so shy in his recruitment that I very nearly had to stick my fingers down his throat (the third most common sexual fetish in Aurdwynn) and order him to compromise me: yes, I would serve as a deep-cover agent within Aurdwynn’s various conspiracies.

What did I want in exchange? Why—you know, it still stung how easily he’d accepted this answer—why, I would ask nothing but all the power he could offer me.

(When you are climbing a glacier you must drive pitons into the ice to secure your route. You must hammer them well. So I repeat to myself that I am the servant of Aurdwynn. I am the hierophant of the Virtues. I am nothing. The land and the people are all. Everything I do I do to save my home.)