“I cannot in good conscience, until I know the fate of Protesilaus the Seventh. Anyone here could be guilty. Brother Asht. Here.” The chain mail–kirtled boy tossed the ring to his cavalier, who caught it out of the air and fished his own heavy key ring out of his pocket. Gideon noticed that their ring held a facility key and one other, in black wrought iron with curlicues. Colum the Eighth locked the two rings together with a very final click. “I’ll keep these until such a time as she wants them. Judging by our conversation, that may well be never.”

This was received with a brief silence.

“You callous bastard,” shouted Naberius, “you just went and heavied a nearly dead girl for her keys.”

Jeannemary said, “You’re just sorry you didn’t think of it first.”

“Chatur, if you say one more bloody word I’ll make sure you never get through puberty—”

“Hold your tongue, Prince Tern,” said Captain Deuteros. “I have bigger fish to fry than listening to you abuse a child.”

She stood. She took them all in, with the face of a woman who had come to a final conclusion.

“This is where the tendon meets the bone. This—key hoarding—cannot continue. I told you before that the Second House would take responsibility if nobody else had the stomach for it. That begins now.”

The slender necromancer in his pure Eighth whites had slid into a chair proffered by his nephew, and he sat straight-backed and thoughtful.

“Is that a challenge to me, then, Captain?” he said sorrowfully.

“You’ll keep.” The Second adept thrust her chin toward Palamedes, who had been sitting with fingers steepled beneath his jaw, staring through the walls as though discord was so intensely distasteful that he could only distance himself from it. “Warden, the Sixth is the Emperor’s Reason. I asked you earlier, and I’m telling you now: hand over what keys you’ve won for my safekeeping.”

The Sixth, the Emperor’s Reason, blinked.

“With all respect,” he said, “piss off.”

“Let the record state that I was forced into a challenge,” said Lieutenant Dyas, and she peeled off one white glove. She threw it down on the table, looking Palamedes dead in the eye. “We duel. I name the time, you name the place. The time is now.”

“Duel the Sixth?” squawked Jeannemary. “That’s not fair!”

A perfect babel broke out. Teacher rose with a curious, resigned expression on his face: “I will not be party to this,” he said, as though that was going to stop anyone, and he left the room. In the vacuum of his exit, Corona slapped both of her hands down on the table: “Judith, you coward, pick on someone your own size—”

“This is what happens, isn’t it?” The bad necromancer teen was in a stupor, still: he sounded wondering, not angry. “This is what happens with Magnus and Abigail gone.”

“Yes, I’m sure Magnus the Fifth would have issued us a strongly worded memorandum—”

“Ianthe! Not helping!—Sixth, you mustn’t accept—the Third will represent the Sixth in this, if they’ll consent. At arms, Babs.”

Her twin sister’s voice was thin and soft as silk: “Don’t unsheathe that sword, Naberius.”

“Ianthe, what—are—you—doing.”

“I want to see how this plays out,” she said with a pallid shrug, heedless of the growing ire in her twin’s voice. “Alas. I have a bad personality and a stupefying deficit of attention.”

“Well, Babs, thank God, has much better sense than to listen to you—Babs?”

Naberius’s hand was hesitating hard on the hilt. He had not sprung into action as proposed, nor had he flanked the commanding twin. He was staring at her pale shadow, knuckles white, hand still, with a resentment very near hate. Corona’s smile flickered. “Babs?”

Through all this, Palamedes had slopped the weight of his head into one hand, then into the other, scrubbing his fingers down his long face. He had taken his glasses off and was tapping the thick frames against the table. His nail-grey stare had not left Judith Deuteros, whose own gaze was as resolute as concrete.

“Default, Warden,” said the captain. “You are a good man. Don’t put your cavalier through this.”

Palamedes seemed to snap out of it all at once, squeaking his chair legs horribly on the tiled floor as he scooted it backward and away from the table’s edge.

“No, we’re doing this,” he said abruptly. “I pick here.”

The captain said, “Sextus, you’re mad. Give her some dignity.”

He did not even stand; just crooked his fingers at his cavalier. Rather than tensing up in anticipation, as Gideon might have, Camilla had relaxed. She shook her dark fringe off her forehead, shivered out of her hood and her cloak, swung her neck back and forth like someone limbering up to dance.

“Oh, I am,” he said. “Cam?”

Camilla Hect stepped on to the wooden table with one long, lean movement. She wore a long grey shirt and grey slacks beneath her cloak, and she looked less like a cavalier than an off-duty librarian. Still, this startled her audience except for Lieutenant Dyas, who vaulted up to the opposite side of the table, which creaked crossly beneath the strain. Dyas had not bothered to take off her jacket. She slid her utilitarian and bone-sharp knife out of its cross-hip sheath and laid it there for display. With her main hand she drew her rapier, plain-hilted, polished until it hurt.

The Sixth stared at her for a moment as though she had no idea of the protocol—and then she drew both of her weapons at once in a way that nagged at the back of Gideon’s brain. The rapier looked, like Gideon’s, maybe a million years old. It was the first time she had seen it in a good light, and here it looked as though it had never been designed to take an edge blow; the blade was light and delicate as a cobweb. The offhand looked like Camilla’s whole House had gone searching down the back of the sofa for weapons. They had come up with what looked more like a long hunting or hacking knife than a duelling dagger: thick, meaty, cross-guarded, with a single sharpened edge. The whole effect was sadly amateurish.

The lovely and miserable Coronabeth had shouldered forward to stand at the table too, positioned in the space between them. She called to Judith and Palamedes: “Clav to sac—?”

“Hyoid down, disarm legal, necromancer’s mercy,” said the Second’s necromancer calmly. Coronabeth sucked a breath through her teeth. “Sextus. Do you agree to the terms?”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” said Palamedes.

Gideon drew forward to them, leaning in to hear Corona saying in an urgent whisper: “Warden—that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She’s being an absolute cad, and I’m not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight.”

“Nor should you be.”

“Don’t let her make an example of you,” said the princess. “She’s picking on you because you can’t fight back, like a bully kicking a dog. She’s given herself leeway to hurt your cavalier very badly, and she will, just to scare Octakiseron and Nonagesimus—no offense, Ninth.”

The Warden of the Sixth drummed his feet on the floor percussively. He said, “So you’re saying her cavalier can do more or less anything to my cavalier, all in the name of making me cry uncle?”