The will-cast animals had all been released, so someone—Tisis, no doubt—had procured the remarkably docile black stallion Kip rode when occasions required it. He swung into the saddle less than gracefully. To the general merriment of the Mighty, he was still a rather poor rider.

Beside Kip, Ben-hadad asked Winsen out of the side of his mouth, “Fluffles? You named your cat Fluffles?”

“What? Great name for a cat,” Winsen said. “If I ever do or don’t or did get one, I definitely may or may not have named it that. In some hypothetical fairy story land—or the real one—it may have happened. It’s just for the purpose of illustration.”

“You’re a dick, Winsen,” Ben-hadad said. “I love you, man.”

“Hairless cat,” Winsen said.

“Hairless? They come like that?” Big Leo asked.

“Oh, of course,” Ben-hadad said, light dawning. “Fluffles. The hairless cat. Not hypothetical, then.”

“Odd texture. Feels like foreskin,” Winsen said.

And that was how ‘petting the hairless cat’ entered the Mighty’s lexicon.

Chapter 71

“Andross, you motherfucker.” Karris had waited a week to say those words so she didn’t reveal she knew exactly what had happened in Paria immediately, but checking off “Curse out promachos” wasn’t quite as satisfying as she’d hoped.

“Yes?” he said, as if she’d simply called his name. He’d come into her room carrying two cups. “Kopi?” he asked, proffering a delicate cup.

“I thought we were working together,” she said. She didn’t take the cup.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Go on,’ his expression said. He lowered the proffered cup.

“That was no suicide. You killed the Nuqaba, didn’t you?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

She hadn’t expected him to admit it. Crafty old rat. “You… you ass! After all you and I went through drafting that ultimatum, you just assassinated her? She didn’t even have time to respond. I hated her, Andross, but she unified the Parian people. She could have led them to our defense. This is betrayal, Andross. Assassinating a Nuqaba? Are you mad? With how much we need Paria and how fraught the relationship between the Chromeria and the Nuqabas has always been?”

He put her cup down on a table. He sat in one of her chairs, taking his ease. He sipped his kopi.

When the silence stretched on, he looked up. “Oh! I’m sorry, I thought those were rhetorical questions. Done ranting? So soon?”

He made her feel powerless. Foolish. Like a child.

Uh-uh.

He moved to take another sip, as if thinking, and Karris’s foot flashed out. If she’d paused to think about what she was attempting, she wouldn’t have tried it.

Her foot swept between his seated legs, pushed forward, and kicked only the delicate cup as he tilted it to his lips. The cup popped into the air, jetting steaming kopi into Andross’s face and hair and across his chest.

Andross roared, blinded and burnt, but Karris was still moving. The killing instinct imbued by so many years of fighting had taught her never to wound a foe without following up to kill immediately. Karris kicked off half of the sole of her right boot, and, before he could lurch out of his chair, she stood balanced easily on her left foot with the blade of her right foot—now lined with an actual blade—pressed against his neck.

She caught the kopi cup.

The blade along the edge of her boot was thin. It had to be to be small enough to conceal in her boot sole and not interfere with walking, but against his neck it was plenty big enough.

Andross sat back down, but the rage didn’t leave his eyes. He raised one beringed finger and pushed her foot aside. She pivoted easily and brought her foot down, but stayed ready for an attack.

“That, my dear, was a miscalculation,” he said. His eyes flicked to the empty cup she’d caught in her hand.

She hoped it was because he was impressed. It had been damn lucky.

But she couldn’t back down. “I’ll decide that.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean for you. I meant for me. You took me by surprise. It doesn’t happen often.” He looked about for a cloth with which to dry himself, and, not finding one or a slave to hand him one, he made an expression as if to say, ‘What am I, among barbarians?’

He picked up a priceless lace pillow with a tiny shrug as if to say, ‘Oh well, when among barbarians, do as barbarians do.’ And he wiped his face and neck dry with the pillow.

It was a pretense, all this calm. The rage never left that deep corner of his demeanor.

Call that a victory, then.

The skin on his face was burnt. She couldn’t tell how badly yet.

But there was no retreat. A burnt face? He’d murdered that woman. Teia had damned herself in her own eyes because of this man’s orders. Karris couldn’t feel remorse.

“So,” he said, “any news on your hunt for Gavin?”

No no no. He was not going to get her derailed. Especially not into that. “Did you kill Satrapah Azmith, too?” she asked.

“Clearly not,” he said. “As she wasn’t a satrapah when she died.”

“Is that a yes?” she asked. Why would he admit to a murder he hadn’t committed?

“No. The woman was a complete idiot. My sources say she had a paroxysm when the Nuqaba told her she might not back her claim against us.”

So he hadn’t known Azmith was the Parian spymaster. Or—dammit!—was merely pretending not to. She said, “My sources suggested it might have been because we stripped her of her position, that she had a heart attack then. I thought her death might be on us.”

“I imagine the pressures of working with that lunatic Haruru for years had more to do with it.”

“Why kill her, Andross? If your assassin failed or had been discovered, you’d have plunged us into a war with two fronts. You’re not so rash.”

Andross gave a sour grin through his pain. “You didn’t know me when I was young, before I gave up drafting red for the same reasons you did. Back to using again, are you?”

Damn her light skin. Her blushes were obvious, and so was the light staining from using red again.

The truth was, she’d been drafting to try to spur on some feeling in her heart toward her son. She and Zymun had gotten off on the wrong foot, and things still weren’t going well, this many months later. He’d continually struck her as somehow off—no doubt that was an artifact of the abuse he’d endured. Her fault. Raised without a mother’s love, abandoned and abused by those who’d taken him on. Any flaws he had were on her. But she’d finally admitted to herself that she didn’t like him.