“Greetings from the North!” she screeched, and a strange entourage spilled through the gate and into the heart of the Union. At Rikke’s right shoulder came Isern-i-Phail, dressed like a duchess but walking like a docker, necklace of fingerbones around her neck and the toes of her heavy boots peeping under the lace hem of her skirt. Caul Shivers was on her left, oddly at ease in a braid-heavy general’s uniform paired with a savage-looking broadsword, metal eye glinting behind his hanging grey hair. There were hillwomen whose faces were stained with swirling tattoos. There were warriors whose faces were criss-crossed with scars. There were craftsmen of Carleon and ships’ captains of Uffrith, and all with odd specks and spatters of Union fashion: a crystal-knobbed cane, a machine-patterned shawl, a jewelled pocket watch. One hillman peered suavely through a monocle as though he’d been born wearing one.

“Savine!” And Rikke slipped between her outstretched hands and folded her in a hug. Savine could hardly remember the last time anyone held her that way, and she found herself squeezing Rikke back, as if they truly were old friends, with no jealousies or rivalries or backstabbings behind them.

She found herself both reluctant to let go and relieved when Rikke did, holding her out at arm’s length with that unsettling grin. Magic was not a thing one could sensibly invest in, of course. But looking into the black depths of the Long Eye she could not help wondering what Rikke might have seen with it. What she might know that Savine could not guess.

“Rikke. You are… a vision.”

“Ha! Vision. Saying you look good would be like calling snow cold, but I swear you look better’n ever. Motherhood must agree with you. Mother of the Nation, no less!”

“None of us came through the Great Change quite the same.” Savine glanced over at Leo, his hard face a pale spot among all those splendid uniforms.

“All both more and less than we were.” And Rikke swept a glass of wine from a passing tray, swallowed half at one gulp. “You remember my last visit here?”

“Chiselled into my memory.” Savine wondered how many people who had laughed, and drunk, and danced in the Hall of Mirrors that night were dead now. Half? More? A chilly gust swept across the gardens and it was the most she could do not to shiver.

“Not my proudest moment,” Rikke was saying. “Played a pigeon at a peacock contest, got caught by the queen in her son’s bed, then shat myself at a parade. What’s become of Orso?”

Savine tried not to sound strangled but did not entirely succeed. “No one knows.”

“Careless, for a country to lose its king. But I hear you found another, so no harm done, eh?”

Apart from that to the stability of the Union, the prospects of Savine’s children, her own position and the state of her marriage, all of which she had thrown into jeopardy by setting Orso free against all good judgement. “None that cannot be mended, I hope.”