AFTER ANOTHER OF MY evening visits with Valka, I walked alone along a

colonnade that overlooked one of the castle’s inner courtyards. Below, a trio of brightly dressed courtiers sat inside an ironwork gazebo, playing at some holograph game by the soft twilight. The day had been a soaking one, not rainy but thick with steam—as was only too normal in Borosevo—and my clothes clung to me like seaweed to the body of a drowned man. A logothete stopped me, and we chatted awhile. My performance at dinner

with the grand prior had garnered me some small, brief celebrity. Ligeia Vas was not well loved, it seemed, as is often the case with the Chantry’s elite.

But that fellow was a Colosso fan and also recalled me from my time there. When we parted ways, he left with a photograph of us both taken with his terminal, and I with a thin, amused smile.

A new place is like new shoes, I’ve often found, and having lived in

Castle Borosevo for some months now, I felt the place breaking in around me, growing comfortable. The rounded arches of the colonnade and the pale sandstone walls beneath their red tile roofs were warm and inviting, scored in places with crawling vines and decorated with iron statues of dancing nymphs and legionnaires. Even the Umandh had become less strange, droning on their work crews as I passed them by. What is more, the servants smiled or bobbed their heads as I went by. I may have been a prisoner, but I had the run of my prison. And if my attendance on Anaïs and Dorian was tedious, my evening studies with Valka were anything but. We had shared a bottle of Kandarene red, as was our custom, and a laugh at the prior’s

expense, though I was careful not to give too plain an insult to the Chantry Synod’s appointed representative on Emesh.

Valka was under no such censure, and she had laughed, saying, “The look on that old ruin’s face! She looked like she would have had you shot if she could’ve!”

“She could have,” I said soberly, unable to keep down a smile of my own. Valka’s laugh was a deep, musical sound that escaped her chest from somewhere near her heart. It was not the laugh of some churlish courtier, trained to demure and girlish precision. No, she laughed like a storm cloud, like the sea. And she had broken on my grim demeanor like a wave against the sea wall at Devil’s Rest.

Thus I was deep in the question of her—in her foreignness and the way she made me feel half a fool—as I crossed the castle grounds on my way toward my chamber and bed. Perhaps an hour or two of drawing before

sleep, I thought. Just the thing.

Valka was still a mystery. Despite her diplomatic status, she was no kind of ambassador. What I did not then recall was that since everyone in the

Demarchy of Tavros holds voting power, any Tavrosi clansman might be

considered a representative of that strange, distant people. It was one of the many reasons Tavrosi guests are so often frowned upon at the courts of the Imperium. They complicate matters.

My rooms lay on one of the middle levels of the Sunglass Hall, one of the newer, less opulent buildings on the palace grounds, somewhat removed from the diplomatic apartments in the north wing. There were gaslights in the yard below the edifice, and I passed a lamplighter with his wick. I had thought the lights a symbol of opulence, as servants had to be paid to man them, but I realized later that they were only a safety precaution. With the palace’s power grid prone to outages, the gaslights ensured good visibility on the wall-walks and in the colonnades of the castle by night.

The man waved at me, smiled, and doffed his cap. A bird chirruped in one of the castle’s ever-present bits of greenery, and not long after, an ornithon rattled in answering challenge. I stopped, standing a moment in

contemplation of the unfixed stars. Pallino and I had met again a few times, on each occasion advancing our plans to buy a starship. Switch’s bond with the coliseum was nearly up, but Pallino had renewed his more recently, meaning we had something like another nine local months before he was freed from his obligation. That was more than a standard year, which meant it was in Switch’s best interest to renew himself, to earn another year’s pay

and allow the smallest overlap in their contracts. It was longer than I’d have liked.

But I let it go. For the moment I was fed, comfortable, and safe. And I harbored a flickering, private hope that when and if my plan came together and I left Emesh behind that Valka would come with me. It was not impossible. I wanted to travel the stars, meet xenobites. She was an expert in xenobitic cultures. Was there a future there? She was so much less cold toward me now than she had been at our first meeting, but though I dreamed, I did not delude myself. She had her own path to follow. But perhaps you will forgive a young man his dreams. I had suffered much; I had a right to dream.

“Boy!”

Mere steps from the door to the hall and solitude, I froze. I knew that voice, that lisping, aristocratic drawl. Before I could turn fully round, a hand seized me by the shoulder. Turning, I found myself face-to-face with Gilliam Vas. His mismatched eyes caught the gaslight, making the blue one shine. His white-blond hair hung lank across his misshapen face, and his teeth flashed between lips pulled back into a snarl as he backed me into the nearest lamppost.

“I don’t know who you think you are.” His breath smelled of something sweet—mint or verrox stimulant or both. I turned my head away, trying not to cough. “The count may find your baseborn antics amusing—Earth only knows why—but I will not tolerate such offenses. Not from you, and not at the expense of my family’s dignity. I pray you remember who it is we are.”

Deliberately slow, I placed a hand over Gilliam’s, prepared to duck at the waist and break his wrist if I had to. “If your family’s dignity hangs by so thin a thread, Your Reverence, that such as I threaten it, well . . . you

should rethink exactly how much it’s worth.” My words were a little breathy with surprise.

The priest blew air from his nose like a bull about to charge, and he rattled me against the lamppost so that I struck my head and cried out. “You dare to mock me? Me?” His uneven fingers twisted in the fabric of my tunic, as if it were a throat they held. “My family is older than you could possibly comprehend, you up-jumped little plutocrat.” He was stronger than I’d imagined. “If the count didn’t want you for whatever reason, and if you were not so beneath me, I would kill the man who so insulted my family.”

His hand still twisted at my shoulder, I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at him. I marveled at the fact that he—who should have been acutely attuned to the blood of those around him, intus that he was— could not guess my lineage. But then, I was short for a palatine, and

whatever else was unusual about my appearance could have been explained by the mere fact that I was an offworlder. No one in the palace had guessed my secret, so why should he?

“Perhaps you and yours should not act so belligerently. The prior interrupted a personal conversation with her rhetoric, and I am trying to go to bed, Reverence.”

From the spasm of muscle beneath Gilliam’s jaw, I knew it was the

wrong thing to say. His hand shifted, and his face swung even closer to my own, though he was now looking up at me. Up close in the light of the lamp, I could make out the heavy sheet of makeup he wore to mask his pitted complexion. Well applied as it was, his sweat had caused it to bead and run a little about the hairline and shine. “I’ll release you when I’m done, pissant,” he said. Then, incongruously, he released me, staggering back one uneven step. At arm’s length now, he spun and backhanded me

across the face with his other hand. I gasped in pain. The man had lived on Emesh all his life, and the intense gravity had put a strength behind that arm that was amplified by the thick ring he wore on his middle finger.

Not speaking, I massaged my mouth with one hand, glaring at the

shorter priest. There was only a little blood when I pulled that hand away. Had I been myself—Hadrian Marlowe, the son of a landed archon—I might have challenged the man to a duel for his insult. But I was not Marlowe, not anymore, not that day. Hadrian Gibson hung his head, his lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “You were a spacer,” the priest snarled, shaking out his hand as he glowered at me, “and so you’re barely better than a barbarian, so I will explain it for you.” The blue eye shone brightly in the firelight, but the black one drank that same radiance and seemed a socket, a hole in his waxen face. He raised that twisted hand again, as if to strike. I flinched and could have cursed myself for flinching. The chanter laughed,

and it was a sound like the smashing of priceless instruments. “There it is.” He pointed one finger directly at my face, the black mass of his ring gleaming wetly in the gaslight.

Gilliam put his hands behind his back and leaned forward, pointing his chin at me, offering it like a target. I think I turned to stone for a moment,

paralyzed by social convention. I could not strike him and remain here as Hadrian Gibson. Gilliam’s smile did not falter, and he said, “Aah, you can learn. You see, this is not the Colosso, myrmidon. We expect civility at

court, and no matter how well trained Balian thinks you are, a half savage is a half savage. Blood tells all.”

“Your Reverence is an expert on half savages, surely.” I was careful to enunciate the half, inclining my head to reference his condition. “It is good of you to stoop to my level. And such dedication! Tell me, were you born

thus, or did you pay a bonecutter to better relate to such as me?” Not for the first time, I wondered at the fire in the man. The hatred. Was it that his deformity spurred him to act twice as viciously in his role as palatine and priest? Or was it only that he saw in me someone beneath him? Was he

what all palatines looked like to the plebs?

Is this what Switch saw in me?

Gilliam hauled off and struck me again with the ringed hand. This time I did not gasp in pain, did not cry out. My hair fanned across my face, but I kept my eyes on the man. His chest was heaving, his blood up. “You’re lucky the count likes the look of you. Otherwise I’d have my cathars carve that pretty nose of yours for your insolence.”

“What do you want of me, priest?” I asked. “I want nothing of you.”

Gilliam looked at me as if his chair had asked why he’d pulled it from the table. Instead of rebutting with the usual snide remark, he asked, “Why are you here?”

I blinked at him, confused. “Excuse me?”

“I ask again: Why are you here? What lies did you tell the count? How have you suborned him? You and that Demarchist witch?”

Though the air was hot as ever it was in Borosevo, I think my sweat

changed to ice and imprisoned me; suddenly I could not move for cold. So that was it. There it was at last. An answer. Gilliam believed I was plotting some mischief with Valka, a spy and saboteur.

I scowled at the intus. “What are you talking about?”

“You consort with that Pale demon and cozy up with that backspace

whore . . .” He lurched toward me, teeth bared. “You insult the Holy Terran Chantry. Blaspheme at His Excellency’s table, and you think we’re all too stupid to notice? I know what you are, heretic.” He raised his hand again,

but I was ready this time. I didn’t even blink when he struck me, didn’t turn

my head away. His eyes bulged with fury, but there was a spark in them—a spark, I think, of fear. “Why are you smiling?”

“Do you really think the count would let me free if that were true?” I

spat red on the tiles. “Be realistic, Reverence.” He swung at me again, but I was more than ready now and bent away. His hand struck nothing, even on the backswing. Strong as he was, I was fast. I’d had to be, not only as a

child when Crispin was my only opponent, but again above the canals and on the rooftops of the city, and in the coliseum, too. I kept backing away, toward the stairs and my bed. Perhaps guards would come soon. They

would not stop the chanter, would not lay a hand on Gilliam, but audiences changed performances, and though everything we’d said and done had been recorded for the castle’s ten thousand eyes, the mere presence of other eyes might change the man’s behavior. The lamplighter was watching us, face fallen, and from my vantage on the steps to the hall I saw a pair of servants in the shadow of a colonnade, but they were all remote as stars. “I’m not your enemy, priest. I didn’t ask to be here at all.”

Gilliam collected himself, smoothing back his flaxen hair as he stood

straight as he would go. He spat, made a warding gesture. “Don’t you dare insult my mother again, boy, or I’ll have you thrown naked into those fighting pits of yours.”

I knew better than to respond.