The lightning approached, and the drunk pirates watched it come.

“Lift anchor!” Gunner shouted drunkenly. “Wake the slaves. We ride the storm!”

A pirate saw Gavin and Orholam where they were chained to the mast and came to hustle them down to their bench. The last thing Gavin saw before he was pushed belowdecks was Gunner standing on the railing, balancing with the rigging in one hand and waving a gun-sword with the other. Lightning cracked, highlighting his figure.

“Ceres!” Gunner shouted, his cheeks shining with tears—or perhaps only rain. “Ceres, you bitch! Kill me if ya can! I defy you! I—” And then the roar of thunder blotted out all else.

Chapter 23

“Sir? You don’t seem surprised,” Teia said to Ironfist. “Did—did you know?”

“I look like a babe in the woods to you, nunk?”

“Sir?”

“The Blackguard is the best of the best. The houses try to get their hooks into most of our students, one way or another. They’ve been successful often enough that we’ve had to grow canny ourselves.”

“So you knew?”

“Come with me,” he said.

He put his ghotra on carefully and they walked to the lift. “When I look at you, ask me if I want you to stay at the checkpoint,” he said. He set the weights and they took the lift to the top, where the Blackguards greeted him at the checkpoint.

“The White in?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Samite answered.

Ironfist paused, looked at Teia.

“You want me to stay here, sir?” Teia asked. Ironfist was being this careful? With Samite? He was worried about his own Blackguards reporting … what? That Teia was accompanying him on a meeting with the White? Such a meeting would be innocuous enough, wouldn’t it? But that he was being careful meant that he was protecting even this from betrayal—by Blackguards he’d worked with for his whole adult life. Part of Teia wilted. She wanted the Blackguards at least to be pure. Something had to be pure and good, even if she wasn’t. It also made the guileless Blackguard commander seem more crafty than she’d ever considered.

“It’ll be fast,” Ironfist said, as if weighing it and dismissing the thought without too much thinking. “Come.”

They walked together to the White’s room. The Blackguards there announced him and Teia both—Teia was surprised that they actually knew her name. One should never underestimate the Blackguard, she supposed.

The White dismissed her old room slave and her secretary as they came in. The old woman had been drafting since Teia saw her last. It made her look healthier, but Teia knew it was only a veneer of health. If the White had decided it was permissible to draft, it meant she was planning to join the Freeing come Sun Day.

The White studied Teia as Teia studied the White. Teia wondered what the old woman saw.

“Aglaia,” Commander Ironfist said without preamble. “Trained her in theft. Has probably been keeping the items for blackmail. Explains Teia’s facility with disguises. She came to me. Unprompted.”

The White looked unperturbed by the revelation, or by how Ironfist had launched into it without warning. “When did you find out that there was no Lady Verangheti?” she asked Teia.

“Just before we left—wait, you know about that, too?” Teia said. Lady Aglaia Crassos had said that concealing her own ownership of slaves under the pseudonym Lady Lucretia Verangheti had allowed her to place spies in all sorts of places.

“If one is to go to the trouble of having spies, it behooves a lady to have the best,” the White said. She gave a small smile. “How did you figure out that she was going to blackmail you? Surely after Andross Guile forced her to sell you to him, you must have thought that you were free—free of her at least.”

“I did,” Teia said. The truth was more complicated. She’d thought she would be free until today.

Her first thought had been that Aglaia had sent Master Sharp to pull her back into her web. But why frame her for murder?

It wasn’t how Lady Crassos usually played things. As Lady Verangheti, she had been disciplined, making Teia steal harder and harder things, making her enmesh herself more and more in the web so that she would be fully caught before she thought to struggle. Lady Verangheti would have taken the steps one at a time: give Teia harder jobs until she balked, then reveal that Teia had been damning herself all along, then make her continue doing worse things until Teia would do anything at all. Such a spy—especially if she made it onto the Blackguard itself—would be an excellent weapon. And Lady Crassos seemed clever enough not to do anything that might break Teia out of her web early.

Like the shock of witnessing a murder.

Seeing a murder, Teia might logically go straight to Commander Ironfist and tell him everything. Lady Crassos wouldn’t risk that.

So why would she frame Teia for murder?

No reason. Literally. Lady Crassos hadn’t done it.

Before the Battle of Ru, her handler had been uninterested in the assassination Teia had seen in the marketplace. There was no reason for her to pretend that if assassination was what she wanted Teia to do. It would have been a great motivator: ‘If you disobey, Adrasteia, I can have you killed like that. No one can stop me.’

In fact, it was still a good motivator. A good motivator to not tell the White, or Commander Ironfist, or Kip, or anyone else, about Murder Sharp.

Teia realized her silence was getting suspiciously long. “I couldn’t really believe I was free, and I had this terrible feeling, and the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed that she would keep something of what I’d done to use against me. She’s … frightening.” Which was understating. “But how’d you know about this? Did you both know?”

Teia looked over at Ironfist. He stared back at her, silent. He said, “Adrasteia, in this game, one must either be as wise as serpents, or trust implicitly someone who is. I’ve always opted for the latter.” He inclined his head to the White. Odd how only moments ago he’d seemed jaded, and now he seemed the old Ironfist, too straightforward to be political. Teia wondered if it had something to do with his highly public loss of faith—and highly public regaining of it.

“Come here, child,” the White said. When Teia approached, the old woman examined her closely, studying her eyes with a sharp gaze. “Commander, is there a slight violet tinge to her eyes, or am I fooling myself?”

The commander stared at Teia’s eyes. “Could be. I wouldn’t see it if I weren’t looking for it, though.”

“Spectral bleed, then. Affects even the paryl drafters, apparently.” The White heaved a sigh. “Oh, child, if only you could be two separate girls. I should love to study both of you. But studying precludes using, and there is but one of you. Orholam knows best, one supposes. Still.” She cast her eyes skyward, though there was only ceiling there, as if gently castigating the creator of the universe. “Tell me, daughter, about your family.”

“That’s none of your—” Teia bit off her words, realizing who she was talking to. She swallowed. It was a perfectly neutral question, even friendly, but Teia had hoarded up the knowledge and the shame of her family for so long that any inquiry felt hostile.