hyo (n.) the sense of duty children have towards their parents and the expectation that they may need to make sacrifices for them out of respect.

Wait, for now. Distrust everything else, if you must, but trust the hours – they have carried you to this place.

This was an uncomfortable position to hold, eternally waiting: central lynchpin in a dynasty to which she could lay no true claim. Neither blood nor magic bound her to the Schreaves in the way that it ought. She was adrift in such a manner as no queen had ever been previously. In the quietest moments of the darkest nights, as her husband slept beside her, she might admit to herself – silently and subtly, lest the old man have expanded his powers to include telepathy – that it irked her.

Kasimira Schreave was too busy a woman to expand her reaction beyond mere irk.

Reiko Morozova was her shadow as she moved from the ruined ballroom to the ruined library. The abject tragedy of the palace's ruined perfection was made all the more striking by contrast with those elements which had survived the xrafstar's attack with beauty intact: they moved from a corridor whose walls hung in chunks from the foundations like so many broken teeth into a hallway where the oil paintings had barely been knocked askew by the concussive force of the stone beast's appearance. In the next corridor, walls covered in pristine tile mosaics, perfect in their geometric symmetry, rose to meet a ceiling which now lay on the floorboards in chunks of grey rubble. Very few windows had survived; there was broken glass everywhere, its glint oddly romantic amongst the dust. When they ascended the stairs, Reiko Morozova moved to go first, testing each step with her own weight lest it betray the queen to the simple horror of a plunge downwards.

The library lay in the spire above the ballroom, five floors above the ballroom; the library had lain above the ballroom. Kasimira did not believe you could fairly term this space a library; Kasimira did not believe you could fairly term this space a room anymore. Reiko Morozova stepped back from the threshold, bowing her head respectfully, as Kasimira moved slowly to the doorway and peered through.

She was staring into a void, the toes of her boots tilting dangerously into nothingness. She was, in this respect, fearless. Gods knew she had no fear of heights. She had belonged to the sky, once, as much as she had ever belonged to anything.

If her daughter was to be called angel, then Kasimira had long ago chosen to fall.

The xrafstar had emerged below them. It was no wonder that nothing had survived. Priscus had been tilting at windmills to even request that Kasimira inspect the remnants of what had once been a very great archive; worse than nothing, there was only abject devastation here. Instead of a simple empty space, the walls were pierced, here and there, by a few scarce floorboards, sticking from the brick like thorns, which had clung to their foundations in the explosion. There was a book clinging to a nail on one of those floorboards – not a book of any great importance, one of Silas's tomes of poetry – and then, even as Kasimira watched, a stray gust of wind caught it and sent it spiralling down towards the garden.

It had rained pages for days after the xrafstar's appearance, drifting down like hail out of the clouds of smoke over the palace. If they did not have Priscus, she thought grimly, if they did not have her, then they would be in dire straits indeed.

If she glanced down, she could see, a furlong below them, no larger from here than ants, the guards swarming in the ballroom below them. There, the little red line of Watchers fallen where Azula had left them, like a slash in scarlet ink across a grey piece of parchment.

She needed to say nothing, only crossed the throne room silently; he could read her as no one else could. He said, "Gone?"

"Utterly."

The old man nodded gravely. He was sitting on the steps which led to the throne, as was his habit. She thought that if they were ever to make a statue of the man, they would have to portray him thus: his features gravely arranged, his legs splayed, his hair organised in its usual ridiculous arete, his fingertips stained daisy-yellow, even as he lounged thus before the throne. It would have been a lesser display of disrespect, Kasimira mused wryly, if he had just taken her husband's seat.

She knelt, skirts pooling around her, and for a split second, it was as though they had been transported back in time twenty-eight years, to the night before the wedding. She had kowtowed thus then as well. He had looked at her with considerably less affection, had spoken to her with a tone that had been conspicuously less conspiratorial. She had refused to ask forgiveness – that had been Aviram's burden, and she would not take it from him.

For all the Schreaves revelled in tradition and in duty, Aviram had shirked both when it came to his wife. It would be their downfall, Priscus had warned them, and Kasimira had been young enough – stupid enough – to disbelieve him. How many dead girls hung in the dungeons, a testament to their short-sightedness? She could still remember how her husband had averted his eyes on the day that Sena had learned the truth for the first time. See that you do not share your father's hamartia.

Love was an ideal, heaven-lofty, but family… family was the duty, paramount-on-earth. It really would have all gone so much more smoothly if Aviram had refused to love her. As he ought to have done. As Silas must.

She wondered if Priscus still rued the day that his king had first set eyes upon her. Was she a disappointing Kasimira?

He said, his voice gentle, "you look tired, Kas."

She shrugged, and folded her hands over one another. The only jewellery she wore, her wedding band, glinted from her finger with the same dangerous gleam as the broken glass in the ballroom. "No more so than usual."

"And dressed for a busy day."

"I have some chasing to do."

"Not literally, I hope."

She said, ruefully, "the tagma have had no good fortune. I may have to join the pursuit myself."

He did not order her to do otherwise. He merely said, "I pity the xrafstar that attempts to evade you."

That was nearly enough to earn a smile from her. He knew what she had been before she became a queen. She said, "I know war. This doesn't feel like war, Priscus."

"That is," he said. "our enemy's intent."

He stood, and moved to stand over her, pressing a thumb onto her forehead. Zandik paste, she thought – its sting against her skin was almost nostalgic. She had been his apprentice before Asenath; they were bound together, Schreaves despite their blood, Schreaves despite the truth. Schreaves by choice.

She said, "what kind of a Selection can we hold with this shadow overhead? How can we trust them?"

"You? Trust?" He smiled as he stood back. "You are unwell, darling."

He had daubed a yellow cross onto her forehead, like a priest of the old faiths. He was the strangest of clerics, she thought, stranded as she was between true power and the shadow thereof.

He was not a xrafstar, and he never had been. She was not a xrafstar, though she ought to have been.

They would have to just keep forging this path together.

"Seven," he murmured. "Seven isn't a bad number."

She shut her eyes. Seven. It sounded an unreal number. If she was inclined towards smiling, she might have smiled. "Nine is a better number," she murmured. "Nine left to claim."

"Ah, Kas." When Priscus smiled, he looked like the younger man that he had once been. He had gifted to the cause wife and sister and daughter alike; the walls had been named for them, not for him. He was, as ever, a shadow. Did that make Kasimira a shadow twice over? She had known him now for more years than she had not; she knew that it was barely a passing moment from his perspective, naught but a fleeting dream between bouts of slumber, but he was kind enough to feign a mortal kind of love for her and for her children. "Don't get my hopes up, now."

Here was a girl wrought of hope itself: Kasimira found herself watching the Selected as she had once watched druj, caught between fascination and an odd, detached kind of disdain. There were eight remaining, for Arali and Txori and Nav had been eliminated, Mag Mell and Tiamat and Gjöll had been killed in the druj attack and Kass had slipped from Ganzir under the watchful eye of Kasimira's own son. She could list the remainder from memory: Vanth, Mønt, Aizsaule, Miecz, Leptir, Kelch, Voras and Obušek. Of this group, it was the latter that Kasimira found herself watching most closely.

Evanne Chae. Nineteen years old – she had been born in the depths of winter, so she should turn twenty years old soon. A family all dead. A childhood spent hungry and an adolescence spent in the army. It was rather like looking in a mirror, though this particular reflection had a prosthetic limb and a badly burned face, a legacy of what the xrafstar had deemed protection. She had not complained, Kasimira knew; she had just dug into the rescue operations, even as Reiko Morozova and her ilk circled her, vulturesque, in search of heresy or perfidy which could be repaid with the edge of a sharpened sword. She was, Kasimira suspected, entirely too altruistic to ever be the kind of queen that Silas would require, but Evanne Chae also seemed a survivor, which was a kind of selfishness in itself.

It was all complicated by her proximity to the xrafstar who had tried to kill king and heir alike. Though Asenath had urged a brutal kind of due diligence – after all, Lady Obušek would find it difficult to conspire with an enemy xrafstar from the bottom of a mass grave – Priscus had counselled restraint. This was an infiltration, insidiousness itself. The girl was likely ignorant of what, exactly, she had been standing beside. She had given her leg to her nation – she was too much a patriot to ever be an accomplice.

She had a shadow of her own, a pretty girl whose dullness was equalled only by her quietness -Eunbyeol Seo, similarly from an extinct province. Silas had been out with both of them; he had not come back scowling too much, Asenath said, which was really the most positive she had been about this process since the start, and a far cry from how he poorly he had received some of the other girls. There was Lady Vanth, a distinct offender, who Sena had described as too horrifically discurious for Silas to ever tolerate her presence for longer than a lunchtime; there was Lady Leptir, who had spent much of their shared time touching her hair as though afraid it would not be there the next time she reached for it.

Kasimira had listened to Asenath's feedback over dinner, and had been silently grateful that she had a daughter who would attent to such matters, who would pay heed to finding a good wife as well as a suitable queen. And Asenath was a clever girl, so much her father's daughter. She would remember to choose someone that Silas could tolerate, but never love.

The Selected girls were filtering past her now, freed from the confines of their classroom. None of them afforded Kasimira so much as a sideways look. That was typical. They would never have seen her face; they would assume her, as others did, a guard. They moved past her, not as a single shoal of girls, but in small groups of two or three, speaking quietly. They all looked tired; they all looked pale.

It was strange, Kasimira thought, how the Selected always seemed to split off into pairs or trios, as though they could thus whittle down the competition selectively. Didn't they realise they were being chosen, not as a gentleman selects a dance partner for her attractiveness and good temper, but as queen and defender? Kasimira was rarely grateful for petty pardons, but she did privately think it a boon that she had never been subjected to this whole torturous procedure. She was not sure that she – or the other girls – would have survived the process.

Certainly, she thought it entirely impossible that Aviram would have grown so fond of her in the end. Perhaps the world would have been glad of it.

Aviram had learned to love her despite her scars. She had never been self-conscious about them – they had been earned – but she knew her husband vainer than that altogether. For his sake, then, she left the lantern unlit as she slipped into his chambers. She sought out his bed by memory, her movement sure across the room, her fingers finding the edge of the quilt as confidently as one hand might find another. She peeled it back, and slipped a hand beneath the covers to take her husband by the wrist. His pulse was stronger than it had been, which gratified her, settled her heart a tad. She said, "how long ago did he leave?"

"Not much more than an hour."

"How do you feel?"

"Better now."

She knew that he could tell, even in this darkness, that she was smiling.

She had left an armchair beside the bed for stolen visits such as these; she eased herself into it for the minute she could afford to spend here, her movements scored by the rustle of blankets and gauze, as her husband straightened up in the bed. "He's helping?"

"As much as Death can ever be said to help."

"You sound tired." As Priscus had said to her, so she would say to Aviram – hadn't that always been the way? Easier to pass on advice than to heed it.

His words were pronounced as though through a noose: "I've been writing letters."

"They can wait."

"They ought not."

Condolence letters – to the families of the hundred dead. Gods, but he would have been happier as anything but a king. That was why he was a good monarch – it was duty, not avarice, which bound him to the crown – but the part of her that was more wifely than the rest ached for his sake. Silas had too much of his father in him. He would suffer similarly. Had Kasimira given nothing to her children but their coldness? It was for the best if that was the case.

This was what it meant to be a Schreave. The Chous could only aspire to such self-flagellation.

She said, finally, "you carry out your duties and I shall carry out mine."

He could hear it in her voice. She was not such an open book to him as she was to Priscus – she knew that she would not have so fascinated him in their youth if that were the case – but they understood one another. She wore him in the very marrow of her self; she suspected that his internal monologue bore her voice more often than not. He said, "you are to join the hunt, Mira?"

"Will you command me to do otherwise?"

He knew how long it had been since she left Ganzir. He knew how long it had been since she had hunted. He knew that, in times of such danger, it was utter anathema to consider abandoning her family to the predation of the infiltrating enemy and the tightrope of the Selection.

But sometimes one had to bring the fight to the enemy's threshold and force it over their hearth. The dynasty had not survived so long by defence alone. She was not queen in every sense that she ought to have been but she was – she would always – defend her king.

"I would never doubt you," her husband said. "Do what you think you ought. But consider the work that remains here. Consider the girl."

She nodded. "I will."

She did not need to glance at her watch to know that this was all the time she could afford to spend here with him. Nonetheless, it had done her good to even spend this much time at his side. She was not an empathic woman – truth be told, the hearts of others remained a greater enigma than the most esoteric of Priscus's arcanity – but her husband balanced her adequately in that sense. She bent over the bed, and pressed a kiss to his forehead in farewell.

"Rest well," she said, "Aviram."

In the darkness, there was a whispered response: "Kasimira."

And oh, when he said it like that, it almost sounded like the truth.

The excubitor had been smart enough to attempt no dishonesty and exercise no deceit; when he was summoned, he came. It was as simple as that.

She met him in the drawing room on the southernmost side of the palace, where the damage had been the least grave, and called him into the room with a gentle ring of the silver bell on the coffee table. He had entered, and bowed; she had inclined her head, to indicate that he was permitted to sit. Reiko Morozova was boring a hole into the back of his jacket with their stare.

"Captain. I am delighted that you could make the time."

She would not usually have described him as the sullen sort, but that was how he appeared today. His white gloves, usually so spotless, were greyed and dulled by long wear and poor upkeep; if she looked closely, she could see little pearls of blood around the knuckles. Was he such a wreck or did he appear thus by design? She did not think the man possessed guile sufficient for such a facade. He wore his heart on that sleeve, dishevelled and dirty though it may, on this occasion, be. He said, simply, "your Grace."

She smiled. "Did none of your squad wish to join us?"

He said, "you will forgive them. They have been working non-stop since the fall of the Wall."

"For all the good that it has done us."

Kasimira did not think she was imagining the silent smugness emanating from Morozova, stationed at the doorway, transparently pleased to have their sentiments parroted by the queen thus. Did it gall to have their lesser invited to convive with the queen like this while they were relegated to sparse guard duty, more furniture than soldier? Morozova had always been an easy sort to rankle, despite their open intelligence and clear ambition – a lifetime of second place had left something on their shoulder which went many times beyond mere chip. So, yes, they would settle for petty victories like these.

Captain Hijikata said, "we beg forgiveness."

She doubted that. She knew that her smile did not reach her eyes. "In my husband's convalescence, I will take your report."

If he was surprised to hear this, he hid it admirably. No doubt he would have already given an assessment of the situation to someone within the tagma hierarchy – he would not have expected the queen to demand answers thus. "There has been no sign of the stone druj since we engaged it by Wall Schreave. We have been engaging in limited search and destroy missions throughout Tiamat, to ensure that no druj reach Wall Schreave before the damage can be fully repaired."

"The druj left behind some… shed skin, did it not?"

He nodded. "Of a sorts – a kind of stone shell. The Scholars are examining it, but say that there is little to be gleaned."

The xrafstar had shucked its skin, then, and fled in human form into the city, exactly as she had suspected. And, as Evanne Chae had earlier confirmed, the xrafstar had clearly decided not to return to its hiding place amongst the Watchers of the tagma. It would be amongst the civilian population; it would have gone to ground. Kasimira felt her fingers itching to tighten over phantom swords. "And these tunnels you are exploring?"

His eyes tightened, but he had no other visible reaction to her question. He said, "the Scholars were concerned that the enemy might have gained access to the city through the catacombs. We are sweeping through them and sealing them as we go."

She nodded. "Admirable thinking. Illéa must be made a fortress once again."

"Yes, your Grace."

"You spent a night in Tiamat recently, did you not?"

"A small contingent could not return before curfew." He was a droll master of the understatement – he reminded her, in truth, of Aviram.

And yet, a night spent, and survived, in the druj-infested wastes – no, Aviram had never managed that. Truly, he was a man after her own heart.

She said, "I am grateful that there were no casualties. We suffered astounding losses. Every excubitor must be considered precious from now on."

He said, "in that case, allow me to beg a furtherance."

Kasimira cocked her head. Over his cloud of curly hair, Morozova was silently fuming. The queen said, "first class is quite as high as you can climb, captain, unless you have designs on my daughter… or perhaps the prince?"

He shook his head. Did he feel like a first-class excubitor? He had been elevated in the aftermath of the attack on Aizsaule, but he wore his pin like an afterthought and was preferred the title of captain to the rank of general to which he was now entitled. She thought it quite possible that his own subordinates did not even know of his promotion. And speak of the devil now – he said, "I have two members of my team still living. It would be helpful if they were ranked a little higher – we are spread thin most of the time, and I need to know that they will be able to decide their own orders if we are separated or if something happens to me."

She said, "they are recent graduates, are they not?"

"Not so recent."

"No," she agreed. "Sanav Mahesar never officially graduated at all."

"Call it a baptism of fire."

"I see. You want him elevated to third-class, then?" Asenath would have rolled her eyes. It traditionally took a year to rise a class; the excubitors were chewing through the hierarchy like it was mere cottonfloss.

Captain Hijikata's every motion was certain and controlled, including the slow nod he accorded her now, examining the fingertips of his gloves. "And I want Kaasik as my lieutenant."

"You've lost two in as many months, captain. You know what they say: to lose one lieutenant, tragedy. To lose two, carelessness. If you lose a third, it will seem cruelty."

"I'll lose," he said. "As many as you will accord to me."

Spoken like an excubitor. Kasimira Schreave almost committed that great sin of smiling.

There were worse choices. She had never met either of the captain's subordinates, but she had heard tell that the Kaasik girl was coming close to breaking records set some thirty years ago. Poor Swietłana Chou, Kasimira thought ruefully, she was no doubt shaking in her skirts.

"Consider it done, captain," she said. "And please – exercise caution in exploring those tunnels. You never know what might be hiding in the shadows."

Befitting the pure light with which she was associated, Asenath Schreave enjoyed little more than curating a space devoid entirely of shadows. When Kasimira sought out her daughter, she found her in the little cottage attached to the wall of the palace, where Kasimira had retreated in her early queendom to avoid the constant scrutiny of the court. It had been gifted to Asenath on the occasion of her betrothal, and when her betrothed had succumbed tragically to short illness, it had become a kind of all-purpose space in which the family could exist without fear of a maid or footman stumbling upon them. In keeping with Asenath's sartorial preferences, the cottage had been dressed in pastel colours, all rugs and throw blankets and fresh flowers draped around the rafters. The princess was sitting at the honey-coloured table in the centre of the kitchen, with a druj's heart lying on a plate in front of her.

She greeted her mother with a smile which belied the ichor staining her hands and the cuffs of her long-sleeved dress, setting down her scalpel and dipping her hands into the bowl of warm water beside her to clean the majority of the gore from her fingertips. "Good morning, mama – or is afternoon by now?"

"We're on the threshold between the two, I think."

"I quite lost track of time – you will excuse me."

"I rather thought," Kasimira said. "That your xrafstar would have distracted you from your little science projects."

"He's upstairs." Asenath smiled, blotting her hands on the teatowel. "Unfortunately, he's been wrecked by working with papa. I think it will be good for him – it will help him to get to grips with the curse – but the man is not in this world for the most part. I've needed Azula to put him out of his misery quite a few times now."

Her mother nodded. Truth be told, Kasimira felt the oddest kinship with the poor man. He was what she ought to have been, had followed a path that she had been expected to follow, and he had been crippled by it, hollowed out as though by a cancer. What a pity, she thought, that the watcher had not realised his Asenath was not quite enough like her father for mercy.

He should have kept clear of the royal family entirely. Hadn't he known what he was? Hadn't he known his heritage and the legacy chained thereto? Tied together, she thought ruefully, bound in a manner that she was not, that she had never been. She had chosen to champion this cause, but the only remaining descendant of Ignacja Szymańska had never been given an option.

It would have been better for him if he had leapt from the wall as she had. Did he know that now? In whatever hell the death curse had placed him, had he realised the folly of his choice – of continuing, selfishly, to survive?

Asenath said, "I heard you'd been to see the Selection. What do you think?"

"I think little of it, daughter my darling. I entrust it to your good sense."

She laughed. "Oh, you can opine a little. I won't take it personally."

"Has he any preference himself?"

"He is friendly with the refugee girls. It is… typically contrary of him."

"Dangerous," Kasimira said, "to boot."

"Yes," Asenath said, "but I can say that, mother, whereas you sound like a terrible hypocrite when you do."

Kasimira's mouth twitched in a half-smile. Evanne Chae would make a decent Kasimira, all told. Probably less hypocritical, to boot.

"Look what Salah brought me." Asenath had picked up the scalpel and prodded the heart, turning it over so that Kasimira could see the little green veins on its underside. There was something crawling in the uppermost atrium, something like a worm or a maggot. Kasimira watched it closely. Was this what Silas's heart looked like these days?

He came by it honestly, this sickness in him. She still remembered, more clearly than the day he had been born, the day that Priscus had performed the ritual. It had been the same day that Kasimira had taken her daughter by the shoulders, and held her very tightly, and told her in no uncertain terms that family – duty – came before all else.

To her credit, she had never forgotten. Asenath Schreave was everything her parents had dreamed that she might be. If Kasimira had been just a touch colder – if she had loved her children just a little less – she might have suggested that Sena take the curse for herself. Surely there was no one better suited to existence as a xrafstar.

Surely the war would be over as soon as it had begun, and their enemies carcasses before they had even realised that there was a fight afoot.

Wait, for now. Distrust everything else, if you must, but trust the hours – they have carried you to this place.

After all these hours, she was still chasing, running to stand still, a silent hunt for any task which would keep her from taking to the sky again with a sword in her hand. Yes, she would do that – yes, it called her, and yes, with Priscus' silent agreement and Aviram's tacit approval, the path had been set – but not yet. There was still business to be settled, knowledge to be catalogued, birds to be caged. And speaking of –

"Little bird."

She had returned to her study after lunch to find Azula had fallen asleep on the chaise nearest to the fire. The maid was ashen-faced, so that her pallor closely matched the grey colour of her uniform; her hair was prematurely white at the temples. Greying before she was even eighteen. Kasimira would have felt more sympathy, perhaps, if she thought there was the slightest chance of the young woman living past the age of twenty-five.

She knelt beside the armchair, and whispered again, "little bird."

Azula jerked awake, eyes wheeling. She had been nightmaring, no doubt, gasping shallowly for air. Perhaps Kasimira should have left her to it. Perhaps in her nightmare, she was, at least, at home. Instead of here. Was that better? Was that an aspiration?

Instead, she put a hand to the girl's cheek, very gently, and said, "you know, I could have you sacked for sleeping on the job."

There was a panic in her voice. "Lady Chou, I am so sorry –"

"Don't be silly." Kasimira forced a laugh. "You've been working hard. You did very well earlier."

She set the cup of tea onto the table. It had been brewed as Priscus had taught her first, all those years ago, when first she had eschewed her chosen path and embarked headfirst into apprenticeship. Azula did not look unlike Asenath at that age, if a little less acute, a little less cunning, more guileless and sweet-natured. Strange to look in the face of what you ought to be, Kasimira thought. Strange to see how badly it all could have gone, if only someone had loved you a little less.

"Drink this. It will help you to recover from all the effort you have spent these last few days."

Azula nodded the leaden-headed nod of the hungover and headached, sitting herself up with some effort and reaching reflexively for the tea. Kasimira sat back on her heels, and watched the girl closely. She looked tired, but no longer so distrustful as she had been; she moved her limbs loosely as she reached for the tea, and she drank it thirstily without the slightest hint of suspicion or apprehension. That was good, Kasimira thought. That was good.

After a moment, Azula said, "I am sorry, Lady Chou, I just..."

She shook her head. She needed say nothing else. She had been wrangling two separate xrafstars, Death and Wheel alike, one at Asenath's behest and one out of her own vestigial sense of deep loyalty. Kasimira could appreciate that. Loyalty was a good quality in a person. Marginally less valuable, of course, when it was loyalty to the enemy – but that could be eroded, as rust erodes iron.

"You don't need to make excuses, my dear, it is understood." Kasimira smiled, and plucked a biscuit from the plate on the table, so that Azula knew that these, too, were safe to consume. "I can't imagine that Nerezza Astaroth's mind is a restful place to be."

Azula's face contorted in that strange expression – half-doubt, half-regret, half-relief at being understood – to which she was so inclined. It was the face of a girl desperate for a mother, desperate for a place to belong, desperate to believe that she has seen beyond a set of lies to the brilliant, pristine truth – but not quite so desperate as to delude herself.

Best to lift it beyond delusion, then.

"I cannot protect you," Kasimira said, softly. "If I don't know what I am protecting you from."

Azula shook her head silently.

"You might not always be around to keep Nez's mouth shut for her, Zula. If you are protecting something – or someone – then..."

She could see Azula looking at her with those big, scared, Devil eyes of hers.

"Let me help," Kasimira said. "That's all." She sat back against the coffee table. What deliberate casualness this all was: the queen sitting on the floor with her arms draped around her knees as though she were still in the summer of her youth, her maid hunched over on the sofa with her teacup clutched between her hands as though it was her last hope of a water buoy, the only lifeline available to her. "Xrafstars are an endangered species around here, you know."

Azula had been equal parts shocked and scared when Kasimira had first used that term; now, she marked it no more than she would mark any other word. She trusted in Swietłana Chou, strange and unknowable though she found her lady; she trusted that she would have died a thousand times over if it was her death that Swietłana Chou desired. Did she think Kasimira a traitor to Illéa, or did she think the reality of Illéa a betrayal of all she had been taught, wherever she had come from? Hard to say – but Kasimira was a smart enough woman to have a decent idea by now.

"An endangered species," Azula repeated. She was silent for a very long moment, during which the fire crackled in the hearth and two maids burst out laughing loudly somewhere in the corridor outside the study, as though they thought they were alone. Then she said, hesitantly, "then where did Oroitz come from?"

Kasimira said, "I think that's my question, darling."

Azula stared at her, and then, tremulously, she began to smile.

The cursed queen smiled back. It did not reach her eyes.