He watched Jurand and Glaward talking to Rikke. The few survivors of those carefree times, laughing together, without him, and he ground his false foot into the lawn until the stump of his leg ached. He’d been thinking about sending Glaward away. Some foreign posting. So Leo wouldn’t have to look at his stupid face. So he’d have Jurand to himself. He’d won everything, and still he was endlessly angry, endlessly jealous. But then he’d lost everything, too.

He took a sour slurp of wine, watching Rikke plough through the throng. She didn’t work the crowd with Savine’s silky subtlety. She did it in a way all her own, with her big smile and her crazy eyes and that easy laughter and those wild gestures, wine sloshing from her glass as she threw up an arm.

He could’ve limped over. It would’ve felt good to meet her halfway, to find the honest smile he used to have around her. His face could still make that shape, couldn’t it? But she’d betrayed him, so it would’ve been a kind of surrender. The Young Lion might’ve suffered defeats, but he’d never surrendered. Never. Whatever it cost him.

So he stood there, patience wearing down, while Rikke chatted to Lord Isher. While she compared necklaces with Selest dan Heugen. While she fanned the hair combed over Dietam dan Kort’s head into fly-away wisps. It seemed as if she’d given every guest a compliment before she finally reached him, grinning as if there was no chasm full of broken promises yawning between them.

“If it isn’t Black Rikke.” The Northern words felt good in his mouth, he had to admit. “The beautiful and mysterious Witch of the North! You look well.” She looked better than ever, in her own mad way. No doubt Antaup would’ve been nudging and oohing and phwoaring at the sight of her even more eagerly than he used to. Had Leo not got him killed.

“If it isn’t little Leo, the biggest man in the Union.” Behind the regal bearing and the costume and the tattoos, did he catch a glimpse of that awkward girl he used to know? Used to love, even? The thought seemed to hurt, right in his chest. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” She leaned close, the smell of chagga on her warm breath bringing all those times they’d lain together rushing back. “Since fucking in a stable.”

He felt himself blushing, the way his mother always made him blush when a conversation didn’t go her way. “Everyone had fun that night,” he said, stiff and unconvincing, “and everyone’s having fun now,” managing to sound bitter, too.

“Not you,” said Rikke, watching him over the rim of her glass.

That flash of honesty might’ve shaken him from his gloom once. Now it pushed him deeper. “Fun is for people with all their limbs,” he grunted.

The sun had fully set and the party was turning wild. The pent-up terror of the Great Change released, maybe. Isern-i-Phail had pulled her purple skirts right up to her crotch and was showing a scar on her muscular thigh to Zuri, who considered it with her black brows high. Shivers, general’s jacket opened to his grizzled chest, was offering his drawn sword to Glaward, who looked like he might have cut his thumb on the edge as he studied the silver mark near the hilt. By the dead, a hillman had commandeered a violin and was sawing out a barely passable jig to gales of shrill laughter from a tipsy Isold dan Isher.