“You claim to have seen a great many things,” the First Speaker said.

Kiel shrugged. “I watch carefully. The point here is that a common foe makes for a fragile foundation. A single shift in the balance and alliances crumble.”

“A shift?” Kaden asked. “We’re about to take a sledge to the whole political edifice.”

“And we would do well to hope it doesn’t fall upon us,” Kiel replied.

Gabril shook his head. “Hope is for fools, but your councillor is right. I have shared ta and unleavened bread with these men and women, but there are those here tonight who would stab me in an eyeblink. Or you, if they see an advantage.”

“Remind me what keeps us from getting stabbed?” Kaden asked.

“This,” Gabril said, tapping his skull with his fingernail. “These,” gesturing to his knives.

“And this,” Kiel added, patting the leather case at his side.

Kaden took a deep breath and nodded. The work of the last few days felt a flimsy aegis, a few words inked on parchment, but if those words failed, it seemed unlikely that Gabril’s smarts or his skills with those knives would keep them safe.

The three of them were, by design, the last to arrive. Better to be waited upon, Gabril insisted, than to wait. Such blatant disrespect struck Kaden as an odd way to win a dozen suspicious nobles over to his side, but Kiel had agreed with the First Speaker, and so they had delayed their arrival enough that as they approached the center of the warehouse they found a small open circle from which the barrels and crates had been shoved aside. Someone had lit a few lamps around the perimeter and arranged a few of the lower crates as seats, but, with the towering stacks of merchandise on all sides, the space felt like the ill-lit bottom of a deep well.

The people there, most dressed in nondescript, deep-hooded cloaks like Kaden himself, sat or stood uneasily, as though trying to keep as much space between themselves as possible. A few held muttered conversations, but all conversation stopped when Gabril stepped into the circle of light.

For a moment, no one said anything. Then a wiry gray man, his face badly pitted by some childhood pox, leveled a finger at the First Speaker.

“You endanger us all by calling this meeting. Your notes—”

“—were coded,” Gabril said, shaking his head. “As they always are, Tevis.”

The man knocked the explanation aside with an impatient hand. “The tyrant could have broken our codes. . . .”

Gabril started to respond, but Kaden stepped forward into the lamplight. “The tyrant is right here,” he said, pushing back his hood, turning his head slowly, allowing everyone a nice long look at his eyes. For one heartbeat, two, three, there was no response. Then Tevis was reaching for the rapier at his side while two or three others broke out in exclamations, part fear, part anger.