mångata (n.) the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water; the glow of a river in the darkness.

"Lore wants us to go round. Mend fences."

"Making peace? Not like her."

"She might have a point."

"She might."

Kinga wrapped the stray laces of her boots around the knot and tucked them down beside the leather tongue. She'd propped her foot on the edge of the wall around Nav training grounds; Ghjuvan was sitting on the wall, pulling at the collar of his shirt and feeling abruptly ill at ease in the starched material, the heavy fabric of the checkered coat around his shoulders. Officer's dinners were a quasi-formal affair; it was the first time in years that Ghjuvan had given up a military uniform in favour of neat civilian clothes. The kind of clothes his father had worn every single day, as a simple matter-of-course, now seemed like a strange oddity from another world.

Kinga looked a little less self-conscious but perhaps she was just better at hiding it. It had, similarly, been years since he'd seen her in a dress – he wasn't sure if she shopped or stolen or sewn this one. It was plain black, wrapping around her shoulders and biceps, and, most unlike the skirts she'd worn back in Irij, coming down as far as her knees. As she lowered her leg, Ghjuvan caught sight of the dagger she'd strapped to her thigh, and wondered whether there was, in polite society, any specifications on the kind of knives that could be worn to a formal event.

She said, slightly nervously, "okay?"

"More than okay." He smiled as he rose. "Much more than okay."

"Thanks." Kinga twisted the hem of the dress in her fingers. "That coat suits you."

"I know."

She rolled her eye. "Why do I try?"

"It's not a sin to be self-aware, Kinga."

She grumbled, but did not disagree, as they descended the steps from the cadet quarters. They wouldn't be back here again, Ghjuvan mused – they were graduating for the second time in half-a-year. It was a much less emotional experience than leaving Sauer's custody had been; they had fewer friends here. They were leaving less behind. They'd arrived as refugees, with no belongings to their names, and what few items they'd accumulated in their time here had been the technical and permanent property of the tagma corps: their clothes, their bedding, their weapons. They'd be provided more, wherever they ended up, whoever they ended up serving, for whatever time they were left here. They could afford to pack light.

Kinga was pulling a brown leather jacket over her dress; it contrasted horribly, but Ghjuvan didn't have the heart to tell her as much, and he doubted very much that she would care much if he did. She had bound her hair up into a low, thick bun fastened at the nape of her neck. It made her look somehow younger, and far less martial, in appearance; it made her look much more like her sister, staggeringly like her sister. For now, she seemed to still be Kinga, moving as Kinga usually did. It came to him again: the way she had turned on him, that smile and that soft-spoken run, and the way the curse had burst from her like a beast shucking its restraints, an animal escaping its cage. She said, "does she have a point?"

"Lore? Usually." Ghjuvan sighed. "Never tell her I said that."

The sky was a most particularly, peculiarly, pearly tone, half-frosted with clouds. The sun had not set, but it was heavily veiled behind wreaths of mist and gloom that cast a strange, silvery ghostlight over the whole district, as though they were moving through a frozen daguerreotype. The whole day was steeped in a greyness that promised neither rain nor sunshine. Despite the early hour of the evening, the streets were largely desolate; it was quiet. News of the attack on Mag Mell must have finally filtered west. Kinga and Ghjuvan walked to Lorencio Suero's house, and were quite alone as they did so.

The quiet might have brokered some honest conversation, if either of them had been in the mood to engage in the same – Kinga was an easy person to spend time with, but for now she seemed quite subsumed in the quiet twitchiness and hesitation that most strongly marked her demeanour when they were ordered to stand down, to relax, to enjoy themselves. For his part, Ghjuvan wasn't particularly sure that there was much to talk about. What was he meant to say? The discussion in Ina's courtyard the night before – the argument – weighed heavily in his chest, turning over and over again, sticking in his ribs and lungs whenever he breathed in deeply. He liked the other Warriors, he thought, rather helplessly, so the idea of remaining in conflict with them for longer than a few tense moments… but it had needed to be said.

And it hadn't been that bad. Had it?

Kinga said, "we can swing by after this."

Ghjuvan frowned. "Should we?"

She glanced at him. She'd replaced her usual eyepatch with a plain white bandage, crisp and clean – all the better to disguise the occasional subtle twitching of the awful black eye hidden beneath. "No?"

"Might be better to stay out of the way." Ghjuvan shrugged. They were moving down Shesti Street at a fairly brisk pace: he had a long stride; she moved brusquely. "Just for now. Wait for tempers to cool."

Kinga chuckled drily. "Whose tempers?"

Ghjuvan grimaced slightly. They hadn't said anything unwarranted. They hadn't said anything untrue. They hadn't said anything unkind. He had specifically held himself back from anything of the sort. Not particularly delicately, or subtly, or tactfully, but he had refrained. He had held back. Kinga had been the one to snap. Kinga had been the one to rant about dead men and trust and chances. Kinga, who had a monster dwelling under her skin, just waiting for the chance to slip its shackles, had been the one to actually lash out.

Don't lecture her – me – either of us – about the reason we're here.

Okay. So maybe that wasn't entirely true. The thought of it - of the weight of Ina's gaze upon him, how sorrowful and furious she had sounded - it was almost unbearable.

Ilja shouldn't have stepped out of line, lecturing them like that, lecturing them about duty; Ina should have been more focused speaking to Eero, getting the answers that they needed, or insisted that they meet him as a group. Ghjuvan and Kinga had come straight from Mag Mell, with only a few hours sleep in a dead man's bed. There had been ichor under Ghjuvan's nails, ichor and skin and bits of other tagma. He had picked up Jooa's body in two pieces – then a third – then a fourth. Kinga's knuckles had still been bloodied. Some of it had been hers; some of it had been Hijikata's.

He'd told her not to. She hadn't heard him. He'd reached to stop her. She'd moved too fast.

Like she thought she could save him this time.

It hadn't been fair of Ilja, to criticise her, to snap at her, about that. She knew what she'd done, and why she'd done it. She wouldn't do it again.

She was smiling now, though, a marked change from the awful change that had overtaken her in that moment. She said, "I didn't realise tagma paid so well."

Lorencio's house was designed in the haveli style, a mansion with a facade adorned with exquisite frescoes and intricately carved stone pillars. Each of its floors was completed by a balcony as broad as a courtyard, fretted at the edges with exotic flowers and marble carvings that might have been animals or maybe abstract impressions of druj. Moving through the turquoise moon-shaped gate which separated house from street, Ghjuvan and Kinga entered an opulent courtyard dominated by an enormous stone fountain. Hijikata and Sjöberg were arrayed there, Sjöberg perched on the edge of the fountain and Hijikata leaning against one of the marble plinths. One of them waved, rather cheerily for the circumstances; the other just watched them enter, quite silently.

"You'll be fine," Ghjuvan murmured, before Kinga had the chance to say anything dire or dour about walking into the lion's den. "We'll be fine. Just smile and say nice things."

"Oh," Kinga said. Her voice came out darkly, filtered through a pleasantly bland smile. Ghjuvan had forgotten that she could look pretty, when she wanted to. "Then I'm as good as dead already."

It was a larger gathering than Ghjuvan had expected, though still relatively modest for the glorious affluence and luxury in which they were being hosted. Golden candelabras lined the oak table, which was already sagging beneath the weight of porcelain crockery and silver cutlery. The whole place was lit with candlelight, dousing everyone in amber light, giving everyone's eyes a strange golden light, a fire burning from within.

Lorencio Suero was a younger man than Ghjuvan had expected – but then, few in the tagma were old – not even yet fifty, but with the lined face and tired eyes of a much older soldier. He had a neat moustache and hair the colour of charcoal; the tips of his fingers were calloused though his palms were not, like a cartographer or scribe – right handed. He had a paler patch on his left coat sleeve where he customarily ate with his elbow on the table, and black white hairs on the hem of his trousers where a cat had rubbed against him earlier in the day. Ghjuvan noticed this in the moment that Suero shook their hands, welcoming them across the threshold with a fatherly smile – "Mannazzu, Kaasik, delighted."

Ghjuvan inclined his head respectfully and thanked him while Kinga looked about the room like she was waiting for the Illéans to – quite literally – pull the rug out from under them. "Thank you for inviting us."

"My pleasure."

Kinga said, smiling pleasantly, "you have a lovely home."

Ghjuvan wasn't sure why that unnerved him so much, but it did. Kinga with a smile was one thing, a pleasant change from the usual; Kinga being obsequious was something entirely different, and something entirely more disturbing. Luckily, however, Suero seemed charmed; as he offered them flutes of darkened champagne, he said, "it was more for my wife than me. I rarely leave the libraries. Rakel?"

He passed over Hijikata without a word, instead handing one to Sjöberg, and another to the first of the strangers who had entered the room after her. Relatively few, all things considered, Ghjuvan thought: Sanav Mahesar was adjusting his cuffs, chatting quietly to Sjöberg, and Suero had brought a small contingent of scholars to bolster the numbers. Hijikata had taken a seat at the table already, heedless of any decorum or etiquette; Ghjuvan went to join him, leaving Kinga to speak to Suero idly about the décor. She watched him go with a heavily lidded eye.

The chairs were heavy and ornate, finished with bronze studs. Ghjuvan said, "I think I made the right choice about the Schools."

Sjöberg laughed under her breath. "Only if you hit first-class fast and hard, Mannazzu."

Mahesar said, sounding slightly in awe, "Suero is considered a once-in-a-generation scholar. Under his stewardship, our understanding of the druj has advanced like lightning – the best there's ever been."

And Hijikata, on Mahesar's other side, said, seriously, "no shop talk until dessert."

Sjöberg made a face. "Not really sure I have much else going on in my life, captain."

"Then we'll sit in silence."

Ghjuvan thought that might have been a note of wry humour in Hijikata's voice, but he wasn't sure – Kane had always given him the impression of a man with a sense of humour that had been surgically removed early on in his career.

Mahesar's expression suggested that he considered this to be a fate worse than death. It was strange, seeing him out of uniform; he didn't look that much younger than Kinga, once he was out of the cadet's coat. Certainly, he was older than Azula and Hyacinth. Hyacinth. Ghjuvan wasn't sure why he had assumed Sanav Mahesar to be much younger than the Warriors; it was slightly unsettling to realise how wrong he had been. As though in desperation for something, anything, to stave off the silence, Mahesar turned to the Warrior opposite him and said, "how's your shoulder?"

Ghjuvan shook his head. "Just dislocated. Kinga was stressing about nothing."

"Really? Not broken or anything? You fell a long way..."

Hijikata's voice was a warning. "Shop talk."

Mahesar sighed deeply. Clearly his first time at one of these things as well, Ghjuvan thought amusedly. Sjöberg seemed a little more practised; she had finished one glass already, and was thanking Hijikata quietly as he poured her another from one of the dozen polished quartz decanters which littered the table.

"Talk with Chlebek didn't go well?"

"On the contrary." Sjöberg drank deeply. "If it had gone poorly, that would be the end of it."

The corners of the captain's mouth quirked. "I see."

"But it went well," Sjöberg said, "so now..."

"There is more?"

"Blessedly, more," Sjöberg said, "tragically, more."

"Well," the captain said. He was looking at Ghjuvan – he had very dark eyes, almost sunken from tiredness. Like Mahesar, like Suero, his age was hard to gauge, but he could not have been much older than Jaga or Decebal had been. It didn't matter which side of the ocean you were on, then. Some things stayed the same, no matter what. No matter where you were. No matter who you were fighting. "At least you had the sense to wait until she left the corps."

"Yeah," Sjöberg said, with a slight smile. "Saves you from mediating any messiness."

"Have you considered," Hijikata said, "not overthinking it?"

The look on Sjöberg's face suggested that this was, in fact, a novel proposition. She sipped her glass with an expression of exaggerated thoughtfulness, prompting a slight chuckle from Mahesar. On the other side of the table, other diners had settled to their own conversations, some of them decidedly more inane than others. To Ghjuvan's left, two scholars, both in waistcoats, were discussing the taxonomy of the red-robed druj killed in Mag Mell; to his right, Suero was saying, rather desolately, "I have no idea what Tejal used to do to keep them shining."

"Athangudi tiles?" Kinga smiled. She pushed her food about on the plate, leaving a streak of yellow sauce across the porcelain. "My grandmother always used a little bit of coconut oil to make them gleam, just mix that with a bit of water..."

"Does it work?"

"It seemed to."

"The trouble, I find," Suero said, "is the unfinished edges."

"Mm. The oxidation." Kinga caught Ghjuvan's eye, and winked. He smiled back, reflexively. She still had that slight tension in her hands, the twitchiness in her shoulders, that suggested she would nevertheless have been much happier on a rooftop somewhere with a sword in her hand. But she was fine for now, fine like this; it was a dinner, Ghjuvan thought, the furthest they'd been from mortal peril for quite a while now. They could relax, or try to.

"Easier said than done," Sjöberg was saying. Ghjuvan wasn't sure to what she was referring but he found himself, nonetheless, agreeing with her fervently.

Lorencio Suero had cooked the food himself. Much to Ghjuvan's surprise, this enormous place did not seem to have any servants to attend to it; it was Suero who carried out the serving dishes, Suero who cleared used plates, Suero who shanghaied a set of tagma – Mahesar among them – into fetching more bottles of port and darkened champagne from the cellar. Whiskey, as well, rich and golden, which he served to Kinga in a liberal portion. The dinner had concluded, but the drinking seemed primed to continue for another few hours.

"Can't tempt you, Kane?"

Hijikata shook his head. Ghjuvan relieved him of answering out loud, by accepting the bottle from Suero and pouring glasses for himself and Sjöberg. She was appreciative, offering him a quick cheers. Breaking bread with devils, Ghjuvan thought. What would Khalore say? What would Ilja think?

As the clatter of silverware around them signified the end of the meal, the general fixed Ghjuvan with a steady gaze and said, in a relatively friendly tone, "Kane tells me that the two of you are from Mønt?"

"We were," Ghjuvan said wryly, to an approving half-laugh from Kinga. Nonetheless, he could see the way her fingers had stilled around her fork, like she was preparing for the worst. This wasn't going to be an interrogation, he reminded himself. It was just casual conversation. And they were well-prepared. Weren't they? He rose from the table in concert with the others, as the conversation migrated into the adjourning lounge. "Kolesnitsagrad."

"Both of you?"

Kinga shook her head, apparently blithely oblivious to Hijikata watching her. "I grew up in the oblast," she explained. "But Kolesnitsa was our nearest town, so..."

Suero nodded. "Registration can be a devil."

"Tell me about it," Ghjuvan said, "my name's been spelled a few dozen ways by now. What about you, sir? Are you from Nav, originally?"

"No need for such formalities at dinner." Suero sipped his whiskey. "No, I grew up in Voras. But this was the largest School when I was coming through the tagma, and my wife preferred the air in the outer rings."

"Is your wife…?"

"Dead," Suero said, still smiling. "Dead six months now. She was visiting family in Tiamat. You understand."

He did. "I'm sorry." Ghjuvan's mouth was moving, but his mind was somehow detached from the rest. He wasn't really sorry. It was war. What difference did it make, that one of a thousand dead now had a name and a face and a home and a husband? He was drinking her whiskey. He took another sip; it scorched on the way down. He hoped he looked suitably sympathetic. "My condolences."

"I have my work," Suero said. "It has been a blessing. I understand you wish to join the Schools?"

"Yes, sir."

"You've trained more as an excubitor."

"Out of necessity," Ghjuvan said, clearly aware that he was breaking Hijikata's no shop talk rule. But the captain wasn't paying attention to them; he'd continued pressing Kinga on her claim about the oblast, and she'd lashed back with a question about his hometown in turn, so that now they were trading vaguely sardonic pleasantries about one another's background. "But I'm more of an academic at heart."

Suero looked like he found this less than believable. Maybe it was the breadth of his shoulders, Ghjuvan thought wryly, or the nose that had been broken three times. But he didn't question it. He just said, "the druj or the walls?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Which would you prefer to study?" Suero raised his glass to his lips. Outside the windows, the night was drawing down; the sky was slowly dimming, so that the windows all became strange, dark mirrors, reflecting back distorted versions of the dinner party all alight with red and orange gleam. Individual strands of Kinga's hair were afire with the same reflected light, turning her dark hair into an odd rippling display of combustible colour; shadows had pooled in the cleft of her collarbones, giving her a dramatic air of severity. She could be, Ghjuvan thought, rather beautiful sometimes - in a particularly savage way. "The druj? The walls? The history of the kingdom?"

Ghjuvan said, "would everything sound too cheesy?"

"Not at all. Intellectual curiosity is never a flaw."

"Spoken like a man who never met my father," Ghjuvan replied, and was glad to receive a relaxed laugh in response. Ghjuvan.

"We scholars are a valuable minority," Suero said. "It takes a certain sort."

"Moreso than the other branches?"

"Oh, yes." The general grinned. "Any old butcher can be an excubitor."

Ghjuvan had expected Hijikata to respond to this obvious barb, but a quick glance in the captain's direction showed that he was still sparring with Kinga – a chuckle, dry. He was saying, "I've yet to meet someone who thinks I look like a tailor."

"It's a more natural fit than I expected, actually."

A pause. Then, quite deliberately, running a hand through his cloud of black hair: "I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't intend the pun."

"Not at all." A slight shrug. "Just an indictment of… whatever that is." Kinga reached out a finger and gently flicked the ruffled collar of which she spoke, one eyebrow raised. It was almost like they were back at the academy, Ghjuvan thought, a little melancholy, sitting around the table at mess, always one sentence away from causing an inadvertent scrap. When had it stopped being that simple?

"My shirt?" Hijikata rolled his eyes, but he seemed amused. Ghjuvan. There was a scar curling over the edge of his collar, thick and jagged. "You're one to talk. An eyepatch isn't exactly haute couture, soldier."

She said, feigning a slightly wounded tone, "my maiming... out of season?"

"Yeah." Hijikata smiled. "By a few years."

"Ah. Someone should have warned me."

Lorencio clapped his hands together. "Shall we get started with the dancing, then?"

There was a general sentiment that they should; conversation and laughter lit up around the room, as individuals began to find their match and peel off from the group in pairs, calling out suggestions to Suero for the music. Ghjuvan relished, for a single moment, the frozen looks of discomfort that sprouted on Hijikata's and Kinga's faces as they realised how close together they were standing, the prospective difficulty of evading a request to dance.

"Kinga," Ghjuvan said. "Some fresh air?"

She looked relieved. "Oh," she said, "only if you insist."

They'd barely crossed the threshold when Ghjuvan ("Ghjuvan.") found his shoes sinking into soil. The air was laden with the scent of orchids and fresh bread, creeping cold and sweet along his neck. The world was dark around him, but for the slight glow of a lamp in a high-up bedroom window, and the wan light pouring from the bakery's backdoor. Khalore said, "hey, there you are."

"Could you not do that," Ghjuvan said, trying to keep his voice level, "while I'm around the enemy?" He sighed. "Or are you trying to get me killed?"

Kinga almost never called him by his name, for fear of triggering his curse – it was always you, or hey, or Ghju. Was she going to draw him back? He doubted it. Maybe she could make excuses for him – but without his equipment, it would take hours to make it back to Nav from Aizsaule. He sighed, deeply. At the beck and call of others, he thought, always coming when they called. It was exhausting in a strange, spiritual way. It made him feel less substantial, less like Ghju. Ghjuvan. They had only to call his name and – he didn't even have a choice.

Khalore blinked as he spoke, and then regarded him with shadowed eyes. She sounded slightly taken aback when she, at last, said, "I thought… you're meant to be here. With us."

"I know," he said. "Yes. I know. But we're… we need to do this one thing."

"It's important," Khalore said, bitterness leaking slowly into her voice. She'd been doing better. She sounded worse, now.

"Yes."

"More important than Hyacinth?"

What kind of question was that?

"There's nothing we can do for Hyacinth." That was true. There was nothing wrong with Hyacinth. Nothing physical, nothing medical. She was just… not there. Just gone. Just absent, for now, which left open the prospect that she would one day be not-absent-anymore. Were they really expected to sit about the room, doing nothing, fretting and fraying, just to be respectful, rather than continuing to pursue the Radiance?

"Or Zoran?"

"Lore." Ghjuvan wasn't even sure what she meant by that. What had Zoran done now? "You're not being fair. We still have a job to do –"

"We're a team, Ghjuvan."

A team, Ghjuvan thought, rudderless. A team without a leader. Everyone doing their part, not quite sure of how it would fit in with the rest. Everyone doing their best, convinced they were the only ones doing anything. Everyone moving in separate orbits, so caught up in their own grief and anger that they didn't even pause to think –

Ghjuvan?

"Oh," he said, "for fuck's sake."

The world around him rippled. Abruptly, all the yellows were orange, and the scent of orchids had been replaced by a smoky sweetness. The sun, balanced precariously on the edge of the horizon, was like a glowing coal in a spent brazier, and barely gave off light. Kinga was perched on the edge of the balcony with Suero's little black kitten in her arms, barely visible against the black colour of her dress but for its little yellow eyes. She said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"I wasn't sure if you'd gone."

"No," Ghjuvan said. The world was spinning slightly. It was so disorienting: one second, soil gave way under his shoes, pliable, soft; the next, he was on the bottom of a set of stone steps, posed as though in ascent, the ground solid beneath him. "It's fine, Kinga. I was hoping you would." He sucked in a breath, trying to ground himself back where he found himself, trying to adjust to the subtle difference in warmth and air pressure and light.

Her voice was soft. "Are you okay?"

"Khalore wants us back at the bakery. Mending fences."

Kinga didn't say anything. She just looked at him.

Ghjuvan said, "you were ranked first, Ki. You never –" He shook his head. "It never occurred to you? To take that role? To lead us?"

Smiling sadly, she said, softly, "no one wanted that, Ghju. No one." She straightened. It looked like the cat might have been asleep in her arms, and been woken suddenly; it mewled softly and burrowed its soft head into her chest, tail twitching slowly. "Should we make our excuses?"

He sighed. "No," he said. "One dance," he said. "One drink," he said.

"One more."

"One more," he said, "and then let's see."

Rakel rushed Ghjuvan as soon as they stepped back inside, insisting on a dance together; Kinga waved him off amusedly, right before she was similarly pulled away by Sanav. Ghjuvan was just relieved, more than he could say, that Tofana had insisted on the waltz as an essential element of the warrior's arsenal. She came from a more old-fashioned style of war-making, one in which waltzing and penmanship were as vital as a shotgun or a knife. The gender ratio had always been slightly off – Ghjuvan had usually found himself paired with Myghal, as Eifion had usually been matched up with Uriasz. That had been, in a way, a blessing; Myghal had two left feet, if anyone did. If Ghjuvan could dance with him, he could dance with anyone.

The tagma seemed quite determined to put that to the test tonight, however. Rakel was graceful enough, but after their first dance, Ghjuvan found himself pulled aside by a pretty female scholar who, Sanav insisted, had been eyeing him all night. After that, there was more whiskey, and another dance with the same girl, and another glass of wine. At some point in the whole blur of dancing and drinking, Kinga had vanished into one of the adjacent hallways of the mansion, quite unnoticed.

Ghjuvan was careful to ensure that was the case; he wasn't sure who would have taken note of her disappearance – Lorencio, maybe, if he wasn't in the velvet armchair by the fireplace, explaining something esoteric and arcane to his assembled students; Rakel, maybe, if she wasn't making a sport out of dancing with every single person present; Kane, maybe, if he hadn't become oddly fascinated by Lorencio's cat, which he had found wandering around by the balcony door where Kinga had deposited him. It was a strange gift from Kinga, Ghjuvan mused, that he could stay behind and have a good time and simply keep an eye on everything while she handled all of the actual work.

Of course, it couldn't last.

It was the slamming of the front door that alerted him, particularly when no one entered the lounge in the moments that followed. There had been a steady trickle of people joining the dinner throughout the night, usually scholars who had been held late at the Schools or paqudus stopping in to check on the event and ensure that the tagma were not plotting anything nefarious of which they should be kept abreast; on this occasion, however, there was a long moment of silence and then the soft rise-and-fall of quiet, intense conversation in the hall. Ghjuvan excused himself.

In the corridor – Kinga, braced against the wall; a man in a red coat, standing far too close, speaking far too intently.

Drawing closer, hesitantly, Ghjuvan said, "Kinga? Is everything alright?"

Her head jerked in his direction, her eye unfocused. Ghjuvan felt his heart thud. It was a peculiar sensation – like forgetting how many steps there were on a flight of stairs and stepping into nothing.

The man in red said, "your friend seems to be lost."

Just as he reached for her, Kinga swayed and stumbled into Ghjuvan, giggling. He felt her hand slip into his pocket as she tried to steady herself on his arms, unable to straighten herself to her full height. "There you are!" She smiled broadly as he lifted her back onto her feet. "I was – you were – I was looking for – did you know the water closet is indoors?"

"What will they think of next," he said flatly. "Time for bed, darling?"

"No, we should keep dancing –"

"Is she alright?"

Kane had followed him out, and was regarding them rather darkly from hooded eyes. He was probably the only one in the whole place that was sober; he was probably the only one in the whole place that could cause them trouble.

"Fine," Ghjuvan said. Kinga had pressed her face into his shoulder; he could feel her smile against his shirt. "Think she just miscalculated her drinks slightly."

"Oroitz," Kane said, "you're not causing trouble, are you?"

"No," the man in red said. He had a very cold, handsome face, with thick black brows and narrow eyes; his hair was slightly longer than it should have been, which suggested that he was of a relatively high rank. He was a watcher, and he looked familiar, and those two things shouldn't have been true together. "No, just trying to help out."

Kane said, "Lorencio's been waiting on you."

"Then I shouldn't keep him waiting for much longer." Oroitz took a step back, watching Kinga closely and giving Ghjuvan a sharp nod that didn't look entirely friendly. He pushed past them, red coat snapping, his boots incongruously loud on the polished, patterned tiles – clearly, he hadn't got the memo about formal attire.

"We should call it a night," Ghjuvan said, taking Kinga's hand. "Wouldn't want to ruin a good time."

Kane nodded. "Look after her."

"I always do."

They'd retreated a little down the corridor before Kane called them back. "Oh. And Kinga?"

She looked back.

Kane said, "if you're wearing a knife to a formal event, it should really be gold or silver. Bronze is just… tacky."

The smile on Kinga's face faded as a red blush creeped across her freckles. Ghjuvan squeezed her hand, silently warning her not to do anything stupid.

A dry smirk split Kane's face. All of a sudden, he looked his age – maybe five years older than Ghjuvan and Kinga, maybe a little bit less. "Have a good night, you two. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Ghjuvan had been about to compliment Kinga on her acting prowess when she tripped over nothing in particular on her way out of Lorencio's gate and stumbled off the curb. So she hadn't been entirely lying – but she was fine, just acting out on land what she usually acted out in the air with her hooks. If she made it back to the bakery without splitting her head open, Ghjuvan would be very proud of her.

He said, "that Oroitz guy. Do we know him?"

"He was on Wall Alliette when it fell."

"Will he recognise us?"

"If he does," Kinga said, her words a little more languid than usual, her voice lazier, "he won't know why."

Night had fallen – or risen, rather, gloom lifting up into the empty sky from the horizon, like smoke from a great unseen fire. The whole night had rather blurred by; Ghjuvan had been expecting to count the seconds as they passed, torturously, but instead the hours had rather slipped through his fingers like dust. Rakel and Sanav were good company; he was glad they had survived Mag Mell.

They had a long walk back to Aizsaule. Usually it would have been even longer, crossing into Vanth for transit, but Ilja had forged them two permits earlier in the week which admitted them to Wall Szymańscy. They could walk along the wall for a few miles, and drop back into the next district at their leisure. It could make for a nice journey, particularly if the stars were out – but a cold one, Ghjuvan thought, eyeing Kinga's bare arms and legs. She'd left her jacket; he hoped that was on purpose, and suspected it had been accidental. The whiskey seemed to have warmed her, however, for she seemed happy to walk without any particular briskness or brusqueness. More of a meander, really; they were walking mostly parallel to the wall at this point, searching for their point of egress. Behind them, Lorencio's house had been given over to the gloom; not even the faint strings of music could follow them this far.

Kinga said, thoughtfully, "Rakel and Oktawia… they're cute together."

Ghjuvan chuckled. "Unbearably so."

"Try to hide your heartbreak."

He shook his head. "Not my type."

"Rakel or Oktawia?"

"Either."

"Ah." Kinga nodded wisely. "You're more of an Ina guy."

Ghjuvan said, wounded by the accuracy of her statement, "I think everyone was at some point, right?" In youth, that much was forgiveable. Inanna Nirari was almost artistically designed for a first crush – pretty, and vivacious, and kind. It was understandable; Ghjuvan had been one of many.

Then again, some people never grew out of it.

Ghjuvan didn't see any logic in pointing out that he'd moved on from Ina a long time ago.

"Everyone," she agreed. "But I guess I never saw the appeal." Kinga's voice was stained with mirth, steeped in a kind of arch sardonicism. "What was it that did it for you? The eyes, I suppose?"

"Oh," Ghjuvan said, "you really can't talk."

Her voice brimmed with laughter. "What does that mean?"

"Pekka Hämäläinen is what that means."

"Oh," Kinga said, "you're drunk." She nodded sagely. "That explains it."

"Trying to avoid it only makes you look more guilty."

Her voice spiked with verve, her words half-strangled with laughter. "Guilty of what?"

"I just can't figure out your type," Ghjuvan said, "between Pekka and Ragnar... Kane… the Commandant..."

She punched him in the arm, laughing.

"Strong, maybe," he said, "silent."

"Good thing you never shut up, then, or we might be in trouble."

This conversation, and its inanity, its gleeful meaninglessness, had brought them as far as the river. It was painted with moonlight, pearly luminscence filtering down through the current like so much stardust. The water was paved over with a sky-lit roadway; as they crossed the little wooden humpback bridge which spanned it, Ghjuvan caught sight of their rippling reflections, the mere suggestion of their silhouettes splayed across the water. There was mist rolling in over the water now; it was shaping up to be a cold night.

Ghjuvan said, slowly, hesitantly, "Zoran mentioned… Krzysiek. You're meant to go home to Krzysiek. Is he…?"

"Oh, he's just… some guy." Kinga shrugged.

He tilted his head. "Some guy?"

"I grew up at his place. You know. My stary, my old man."

"Are you," Ghjuvan said, trying to hold back a laugh, "trying to say that he's your father?"

"Yeah," Kinga said, smiling slightly. She was getting better at recognising when she was being ridiculous; she seemed to do on purpose sometimes, just to see how long it took Ghjuvan to call her out on it. "I guess so." She shook her head, and scuffed her heel across the ground, leaving a long dark line in the dirt. "Not…. biologically. But we're both Szymanscy, so I went to live with him after Jaga left. My dad, I guess."

"How old were you?"

"Three years old," Kinga said. "He was…. I don't even remember. Twenty, maybe twenty-two?"

Ghjuvan shook his head, laughing in disbelief. The mental image – for some reason, in his head, three-year-old Kinga also had ragged hair and an eyepatch and a scowl – was almost too surreal to countenance seriously. "That poor man."

"Yeah," she said, "it was certainly a big adjustment for him." She smiled. "It gets weirder the closer I get to that age, you know? Like if someone just chucked a kid at me now and told me to make them a Warrior…"

"I get what you mean. My brother's twenty two," Ghjuvan said, and then, after a moment, he corrected himself. "Twenty three."

"Ghjorghju?"

He was slightly surprised that she'd remember; he was surprised again that she was able to pronounce it even half-passably. "Yeah."

"The one getting married."

"Probably married by now," Ghjuvan said, "the wedding was scheduled for the week after initiation."

"You make it sound," Kinga said, delighted, "like an execution."

"You're a bad influence on me, clearly."

They were passing under a gateway now, one of the wrought-iron thresholds which sometimes demarcated what might have once been a service road or a private driveway but which was now simply one of many narrow back-alleys forming the sprawling, serpentine map of Nav. It was a small tributary of Nishto Street, too small to ever have been given a name. Someone had twined the gateway with ivy and tiny flowers that Ghjuvan couldn't name – small and white, so white that they glowed slightly in the dark, like misplaced stars. Kinga said, "divorced by now?"

He chuckled. "You read my mind."

"You didn't like the girl?"

"Uliva? Never met her," Ghjuvan said. After a moment, he said, thoughtfully, "I'm not sure Ghjorghju did either."

"Didn't like her?"

"Didn't meet her."

"Well," Kinga said, "when you put it like that, you make poverty sound almost appealing."

Ghjuvan laughed. She had a point. He couldn't deny that she had a point. When he'd first joined the Warrior Programme, he'd been almost self-conscious of the differences which seemed to gulf between him and the other cadets: children who had been given or sold to the military out of desperation for money or honour or prestige. Ghjuvan's family were as well-off as Kur could be in Irij – certainly, they'd found that there was a ceiling, an upper limit, to how high they could rise before the regime started to turn the screws on them again. Nevertheless, Ghjuvan's family were among the wealthiest in Old Kur; they'd had an honest-to-god estate, even if that estate was not permitted to overspill outwith the boundaries of Kur internment.

People called them collaborators. Ghjuvan's father had always called them pragmatists.

And then Ghjuvan had been sent to Sauer's academy. He remembered finding out for the first time – that Khalore's family ran a failing tailorshop without the father that had run out on them when creditors had come calling one too many times, or that Myghal's family were considered comfortable because they got a good number of Irij customers into their butcher's shop, no matter if Myghal and his siblings sometimes had to sleep on the floor of the smokehouse when they didn't have money for heating in the apartments. That Azula's surname meant she-who-was-not-wanted, or that Ilja had escaped such a derogatory appellation by chance alone and the gift of a name which meant instead hide-yourself. That Kinga had lost every eligible relative she had to the grinding Irij war machine, or that there was still blood staining the cobbles in Maxon Square from where Inanna's father had been taken on her seventh birthday.

Ghjuvan had always kept his mouth shut about his life before, as much as he could, as much as was feasible. He'd never been one to talk about himself; it helped that, as the years passed, as he trained and fought and suffered alongside the other candidates, he started to feel less and less like Ghjuvan Mannazzu and more like just Ghjuvan, usually called upon as one of three (Mannazzu-Angelo-Enys) or as a ranked cadet (Ghjuvan-fifth-in-class). But he never forgot. He would never make the mistake of thinking that those differences in origin did not exist, did not matter, did not change how they approached matters at home in Irij and here in Illéa.

"Almost," he said, "almost."

They had reached the egress to Wall Szymańscy. The enormous wall of the city rose before her, impassive and immense. It was almost entirely featureless; its material was some strange smooth grey stone, without fracture or fault line to indicate where structures had been joined together. At its base, a set of wooden stairs rose a few feet before being swallowed into the narrow stone column which shielded the ascent. These long tube-like towers were apparent at intervals across the walls as shell-like structures to guide soldiers to the top of the wall; there, but distinctly apart from the actual shell of the wall.

There was a red-coated soldier there, one of the watchers, who accepted the papers Ghjuvan offered with an air of exhaustion. He eyed them, vaguely amusedly, and said, "good night?"

"Could have been worse," Ghjuvan said, at the same time that Kinga said, "depends on your definition of good."

Atop the wall, the air was frigid. It was as sharp and cold as a scalpel; it escaped past every thread in his coat, slipped down his neck and slid along his wrists. Kinga was shivering, slightly, but didn't seem to realise that she was. It would be sobering for them both, Ghjuvan thought, as they began their long walk along the Wall's great stone perimeter. It was broad enough for two horses to walk abreast, with space on either side – nonetheless, Kinga paced its edge, her boots threatening to slip off the edge every time she took a step. It was almost like being back on the obstacle course.

"Don't fall."

"Good idea."

She did a cartwheel.

The wall was deserted; they were utterly alone, two lone silhouettes on a wall that blotted out all hints of the sky. It was nice; it was peaceful. The stars overheard were slotting into place, gracefully, gradually. The constellations here were the same as they were in Irij, precisely the same; he wasn't sure why that had surprised him so much, the first time that he had noticed it, but it had. Such a strange hint of home, even here, even so far away, even on Illéa. He had expected to feel more of an affinity with the stars, some kind of resonance between the title of his curse and the night sky, but there was – there had been – nothing. Absolutely nothing. They were – they had always been – merely stars.

Kinga did another cartwheel.

The lights far below them were faint – amber stars, in contrast to the silver above. One of them, to the north, would belong to Lore, to Ina, to Zoran and to Azula. He would have to learn to include Belle and Nez with that; that would come with time. Would Zoran be alright? Khalore had not seemed urgent earlier, only sad, and bitter, and sad again. If it had been important – if it had been urgent – she would have said.

They were about halfway across when they decided to take a break. Kinga sat on the edge of the wall, her laces dangling into nothing; Ghjuvan reached into his pocket, to pry out whatever Kinga had slipped into his pocket earlier in the night. He withdrew something softer than he'd expected, a strange box-shaped object wrapped tightly in was paper.

"Butter," he said, rather calmly. "Butter?"

Kinga frowned. "Yeah."

He laughed. "I thought this was going to be something important, Ki."

"It is!" She wrenched it from him, shaking her head. "God, no one trusts me anymore, do they?"

"No one," Ghjuvan agreed, amused.

She unwrapped the brick of butter carefully, and held it up to what little moonlight had escaped the cloud cover to touch the top of the Wall. There were large, dark imprints on each of its six sides – key marks, Ghjuvan thought, she'd pressed a different key into each space to mark out its shape. He almost laughed; it was so staggeringly simple, so astonishingly stupid. "Very creative," he said, because he couldn't quite think of what else he could say.

"Well," Kinga said, "I was pretty drunk."

"Too much whiskey?"

"Not enough. It was a delightful vintage."

"Who taught you this," he said, "Nez?"

"Kaasik." She wrapped the slab of butter back in its paper and leaned over Ghjuvan to tuck it back into his pocket. Her hair had come loose, strands of hair falling in a wild array around her face.

He said, "did you get much dancing done? Or was it all drinking?"

Kinga said, "I dodged Sanav as soon as I could."

"And went sneaking about?"

"And went sneaking about."

"Well." Ghjuvan sighed, and climbed back to his feet. He pulled off his coat, his lovely coat, and held out his hand. "That won't do."

Kinga smiled disbelievingly. "Ghju. It's late. We're late."

"Humour me." He smiled as she accepted his hand; he pulled her to her feet. She was light, lighter than she had been; it felt like her bones were hollow. "Who knows when we'll get the chance again?"

"Careful now," she said, smiling. She looped her arms around his neck; he put his hands on her waist and drew her close, the better to hear her speak, softly, into his shoulder. "You might jinx us."