Rebel Blade

Book 3: The Burnished City

by Davinia Evans

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dragons & Mythical Creatures

Synopsis

From one of the most exciting new voices in fantasy comes the satisfying conclusion to Davinia Evans's wickedly entertaining debut trilogy full of monsters, mayhem, dangerous society ladies, and a dragon who holds the fate of the most famous alchemist of all in her claws. 
 
Siyon Velo has given magic back to the Mundane. But with it, monsters of myth have awoken to cause chaos in Bezim and--of course--everyone's blaming him. Hunted high and low, Siyon struggles against the rising tide of mystery, magic and mayhem threatening the city that's turned its back on him.

In the Flower District, Lady Sable has unleashed chaos. But in the Avenues, Anahid is desperate to keep her slippery secrets just a little longer, until Zagiri can join the forth and frippery of high society. With scandal stalking the sisters and revolution rumbling anew, the best--and the worst--they can do may not be enough to save their city...

The Alchemist must rise, or Bezim will burn.

The Burnished City Trilogy:
Notorious Sorcerer
Shadow Baron 
Rebel Blade

Release date: December 3, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Down by the hotmarket, there were bloodgulls competing with the mud-spattered alleycanal kids for discards and charity (and brazen theft). Siyon perched on a nearby arcade, feet braced wide in the gutter so his skewer of still-sizzling squid wouldn’t drip on his boots (though they’d seen worse recently). One of the gulls landed on a nearby girder, cocking a hopeful eye his way.

Not close enough for him to lay hands on, of course. But close enough for him to be sure. It gleamed, to Siyon’s stranger sight. And its legs and feet were definitely red. Red like the blood spilled in the gruesome murder of Papa Badrosani by the Bitch Queen’s underlings, twenty-odd years ago. The blood a flock of gulls had landed in, shrieking and flapping and driving the murderers away until Mama and her sons had come to retrieve the body. The gulls had been stained by Papa’s rage and vengeance.

Or so said the alleytales. Siyon would have sworn the Badrosani had spread them to enhance their own power. But this wasn’t the only story currently popping out of the nooks and crannies of Bezim’s long history and many strange beliefs. And if Siyon didn’t stamp and hiss, this story was going to steal the last of his lunch.

“Hey!” one of the kids called, from down on the street, all mud spatter and sharp eyes. “Grab the gull. The gutter alchemists pay good money for ’em; we’ll split.”

Too late. The gull took off with a frantic swipe of white wings, clawing its way over the skeletal remainder of the arcade’s crumpled dome.

The kid spat a curse that would have had Siyon’s ears boxed at that age, but there were no grown-ups in sight to be bothered with these children. Except, possibly, the gutter alchemists or other lower city folk they delivered to.

“Here.” The kid squinted up at Siyon. “Do I know you?”

“That’s what your mum asked,” Siyon shot back, but he was already pushing up from the gutter.

Because a kid who was willing to risk the rage and parasites of a lower city gull for the profit would definitely sell out the Sorcerer Velo. If not to the Council (bit high to reach) or to the inquisitors (because even down here, they had standards) then probably to Mama Badrosani. The cruel and callous queen of the lower city and all its scrambling poverties was making no secret of wanting to get her heavy-ringed hands on him.

Just to talk, she’d suggested, in a message carefully filtered through Redick, sergeant of the Awl Quarter bravi. Like Siyon was going to believe that. He’d lived down here for years, between fleeing Dockside and scraping a place in the Little Bracken bravi. He’d learned his first scraps of alchemy down here, from practitioners who patched up the bruises, cuts, and broken limbs of those who’d talked with the Badrosani. And if Siyon had learned one thing from the events of Salt Night, months ago…

Well, if he’d learned one thing, it was the extent of how badly he could fuck things up. Waking a dragon who trashed a quarter of the upper city, including the Palace of Justice itself, was a new low, even for him, but Siyon wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking he’d found something he couldn’t top.

But he’d also learned that he truly, desperately, utterly didn’t want to get anywhere near the barons. Probably none of the others were actually a centuries-old and stretched-to-insanity manifestation of a promise to the last Power of the Mundane… but why risk it?

As Siyon leapt to his feet, the kid shouted an alert, and another urchin popped up behind the rooftop gazebo—far closer than Siyon had realised. Panic sparked in his heels, and he scrambled in the other direction, up and over the peak of the next roof.

When he glanced back, there was far more distance than there should have been between him and the kid, staring agape. Between them, burning bronze footprints slowly faded from the roof tiles.

Fuck, it had happened again.

Siyon gritted his teeth, tugged at his satchel strap—slung across his body to be secure when he had to run—and kept going. He swung down inside the gutted arcade through a gap in the roof, and then out a window to cross a shallow, muddy canal on a scavenged plank bridge. On rooftops and makeshift paths and cutting through buildings, Siyon worked down toward the sludgy, sinking, tilting buildings by the water, where the bay had bitten hard into the fallen city.

The kids hadn’t followed, but he still took a circuitous route home. Mama Badrosani was watching, after all. Not to mention the bloodgulls. Alleytales said they reported straight to her; that’s how she knew everything that went on in the lower city. Siyon didn’t think she needed that, when every runner and thug and dodgy trader in the entire place was in hock to her one way or another.

He still kept a cautious eye on the pale winter sky.

Blame that—and half his mind still chewing on bloodgulls and other manifestations of magic—for Siyon not noticing the voices before he swung in through the once-second-storey window they used as their main entrance.

In the dim and dank interior, where the floor was warped by the damp that also crept in darkening waves up the walls, two people turned to look at him. Mayar had that sharp look on their face, like they might launch straight into insisting Siyon practice meditating, or moving a cup with his mind.

Like that had worked at all since he’d first woken up after Salt Night.

The other person was a fish from the school of every man Siyon had grown up around in Dockside—hair trimmed short to avoid getting tangled in rigging and nets; rough clothes faded to grey by salt and wind and washing; mud medallion on a short leather thong at his neck. Impossible to guess his age. The sea took very little time to beat everyone into the same hard-worn mien.

“And here he is now,” Mayar said.

“No.” Siyon considered climbing right back out the window again. But this was his home. Or at least his temporary squat in a totally decrepit building no one else wanted. “Whatever you think I can do for you: No.”

The other reason he’d prefer if no one knew where to find him: so people would stop asking him to fix every single problem they had. With magic.

The Dockside sailor squared his shoulders, like he was setting himself to haul in the nets. “Fine. I’ll ask the mudwitches.”

“Wait.” Mayar stepped between them. “Both of you, wait. Velo—” And Siyon didn’t like using that name in front of a Dockside man, but it wasn’t like there was any secret to his provenance. “This good captain wants protections placed on his boat. A whaling vessel, he says. One particularly at risk from the monsters of the deep.”

Siyon wanted to scoff at the superstitions of sailors, who’d traded tall tales of those very monsters when he’d been small and gullible enough to listen wide-eyed. Stories of tentacled monstrosities, or long and scaled worms, or just massive fuck-off fish. Now he was older, and taller, and knew the world.

Knew he might have made those monsters real.

Mayar had warned him, that the wisdom of the Khanates suggested it might be good that Mother Sa slumbered. That there had been wonders, but also monsters, in her world. Too bad Siyon had woken her, good and proper.

“You seen the dragon out there?” Siyon shot over Mayar’s shoulder, not quite as flippant as he sounded.

“Not yet,” the whaling captain replied.

“The mudwitches of Dockside can’t help you with that,” Mayar continued, as though neither of them had spoken. “They are limited to the mud and the people thereof. But Master Velo has access to far greater resources.” They fixed Siyon with a look. “And why would he have them, if not to use them?”

Siyon ground his teeth, and didn’t repeat any of the things he’d said the last time they’d had this argument. That using the resources was how he got into this mess. That he still had no idea what he was doing. That the city was skittish enough about him without him prancing around adding extra bait to the bucket.

But mostly because he was starting to wonder if the answer to why he had these powers was just that he’d been the only one. That he wasn’t the best choice, or even a good one. That this was all a desperate mistake.

“Also,” Mayar added quietly to Siyon, “we need the money.”

Unfortunately true. They didn’t pay rent, but food wasn’t cheap down here, if you wanted anything other than questionable fish. Siyon certainly wasn’t claiming his stipend from the Council any longer.

Siyon sagged against the water-warped sill of the window he still hadn’t quite finished climbing through. “Fine.”

The captain had brought his boat over to the Awl Quarter docks—for the ease of Master Velo, he said, with an emphasis that suggested he knew why Siyon might be avoiding his clan. The boat was called Bessie; he didn’t offer his own name on the muddy slog around the bay.

Once this area had been the beating heart of Bezim, bustling with the trade of the most prestigious docks. Now it was old tenements with their lower floors soaked through and washed away, and fruit bats roosting in the mangroves that burst up through the old shopping arcades. The only sign of old glory was a fringe along the riverbank, where the Awl Quarter made their safehouse in the old ferry terminal.

Amid their elaborately carved gondolas bumping at the pier, the whaling boat stood out like an osprey among gulls. She wasn’t a pretty thing, but she was solid, and well maintained, and had vicious-looking harpoons mounted fore and aft. Worth protecting. If Siyon could figure out how.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have power. He could barely sleep for it, sloshing and surging around him, tugging at every part of him like an urgent toddler. It came zipping out when he least expected it—like it had earlier, on the roof with the urchins.

But using it consciously had so far eluded Siyon entirely.

Mayar pestered him constantly to practice—pushing a cup, or lighting a candle, or wringing a little damp out of their walls. This wasn’t a cup, or even a building no one cared about. This was someone’s livelihood. Someone’s boat. It mattered.

With a sigh, Siyon reached for the knotted rope hanging down the side and walked his way up the hull and over the rail.

When he blinked—long and deliberately and reaching out into the plane around him—the boat (Bessie, named and cared-for and known) was already humming with bronze energy. A thing made from wood and hemp and tar and nails by human hands, human ingenuity, human effort. Shaped by tasks and ritual, by hauling together, by mutual and reinforced purpose. She was a shared talisman, a ward against the deep, as much as a tool of work.

Bessie absolutely oozed Mundane power. She glittered and gleamed, singing in the sunlight.

Was this how she looked to the monsters as well? Was this what drew them? Out in the deep ocean, far from the brazen blaring of Bezim, was a boat like this a beacon?

If Siyon added to that—if he reinforced her hull, strengthened her masts, charmed her bowsprit—would that just make things worse?

Voices intruded from aft, where Mayar was asking about the operation of the boat, with all the curiosity of someone who had never even seen the ocean until they came to Bezim last year. Siyon tried to tune them out, tried to keep his mind on the tenuous ideas he was plucking out of thin air.

When he reached out to the power around him, thick and burnished, it slipped and slithered like a live eel. But Siyon gripped it tighter, until its twisting stirred up other energies. A faint breath of Aethyreal potential. A murky memory of the Abyss. A bright burn of Empyreal affinity.

They didn’t stain and streak all over his vision now, except in these echoes. Siyon had woken the Mundane, and nudged aside the incursion of other planes. He’d managed to fix something. Right?

Not the time to worry about it, when he needed to concentrate on those echoes. On teasing them out, gathering them up, and using them to ward the ship. With one hand still knuckles-deep in the bronze Mundane, Siyon used his other hand to loop Aethyreal energy around Bessie’s masts, whispering of the wind, of discovery just over the horizon, of the mysteries of the sea. He smeared the sweltering ooze of the Abyss as far as he could reach down the side of the boat, letting it seep into the hull with its affinity for salt and thick, tarry certainty. He dusted the harpoons with Empyreal potential, gleaming with the swift strike of righteousness.

And when he let the magic drop, stepping back with satisfaction, Siyon found himself staggering, falling to the deck on knees and aching hands. Lungs heaving, eyes blurring, thoughts sluggish in his head.

It shouldn’t be this hard, surely. He should be free, and flying, and lifted up. He should go with the thick Mundane energy as it left his grasp, let it pull him down, down, down…

“Hey.” A hand on his shoulder, Mayar’s face behind the sparks dancing in Siyon’s vision. “You done?”

Siyon blinked in the winter sunshine, dizzy and disoriented. He felt like he’d stumbled back from a cliff’s edge. He’d done it—he’d used energy consciously.

But what had that been?

Anahid woke to early afternoon sun slanting into the bedroom that had once been Geryss Hanlun’s, and then Siyon’s, and now hers. The bustle of well-heeled commerce rose from the street below, a far cry from leafy Avenue hush.

This time half a year ago, Anahid would have been up for hours in the house she’d shared with Nihath, managing her correspondence and preparing to make and receive calls. At least no one expected her to host guests any longer, not since news of her divorce had sizzled around the gossip circuit. Which was just as well, because Anahid—or rather Lady Sable—had only gone to bed after the dawn bell called an end to trading hours in the Flower district.

A district that had more than enough complication to occupy all of Anahid’s time. She was already turning over all the tangled little problems as she pulled on a plain dress—the only sort she wore, these days, with no one about to help her into a fancier gown.

Well, no one who knew what they were doing. Though Anahid smiled to see a breakfast tray waiting on her dresser, with tea kept warm by the charms in the pitcher’s gilded etching, and a bowl of fresh—

“Mandarins?” Anahid asked, as she came down the spiral stairs into the main room, peeling the fruit eagerly. “Already in the market this early?”

A low, rasping laugh preceded Laxmi into the room. She was honestly no less confronting fallen than she had been in full demon manifest. Now she was a challenge not of scaled skin, hooves, and horns, but of flashing yellow eyes, ink-black curls tumbling over a shoulder, and dangerous curves barely covered by a loosely tied short robe.

More confronting, perhaps, so dangerously human. So reachable. Anahid found herself wondering, not for the first time, whether Enkin Danelani might have another change of heart, if he saw Laxmi like this. Or perhaps he’d preferred her not as a person, but as a threat made strange flesh.

It was none of her business, of course.

Laxmi sauntered over to swipe a segment from Anahid’s peeled fruit. “They’re local. And the merchant claimed there are firebees nesting in his orchard, helping the ripening.”

“But firebees are…” Anahid didn’t finish it. Didn’t say a myth.

Not when there was a naga in the Flower district, regularly harassing those who’d won big at the tables until they bought her a cone of candied walnuts. Not when all the lottery wheels were now encased in a fine filigree cage of silver charmed against the myriad luck-modifiers that every second alley alchemist was selling. Not when three different Houses had been dealing with infestations of pixie skinks, who liked to lick the residue of excitement off the soft furnishings.

Firebees—said to carry the warmth of spring in their drowsy buzz and faint golden glow—weren’t any more wondrous than a dozen other things Anahid had seen in Bezim since Salt Night.

“Don’t see why he’d lie about it.” Laxmi shrugged. “Most of the other shoppers visibly flinched at the news.”

Anahid wasn’t surprised. She had to brace herself to eat a segment, though the mandarin tasted bright and tangy. It seemed unnatural; it was unnatural. Except that nature had become a strange and wondrous thing itself. It made people nervous. And being nervous, Anahid had learned, was also a little bit exciting. “Did you order a box for the House as well?” she asked.

Laxmi smirked. “Nura was with me at the market.”

Anahid scoffed. “Do either of you ever sleep?” She crammed two more chunks of mandarin into her mouth and found her street shoes, where she’d kicked them under a couch last night.

“About as much as you do,” Laxmi said pointedly. “Going down to the House already?”

Anahid whisked a headscarf off its waiting hook. “Qorja has new Flowers to interview. We’re still two short.” They’d lost four, since Salt Night—one injured and two leaving the city to return to homes that might have been boring but were far safer than the city now seemed. One had been poached by another House.

A Zinedani House. A House not owned by an azata meddling beyond her concerns. The woman who wouldn’t bow to the Zinedani. The harpy who’d brought them down entirely.

Well, no, that had been Laxmi. The actual harpy, painting the walls with the blood of a dozen Zinedani thugs who’d assumed they had the upper hand. All Anahid had done was murder Stepan and nearly be strangled to death by Garabed, before Qorja had smashed a mirror over his head.

The memory turned her cold, the bright taste of mandarin turning to thick blood on her tongue and curdling in her stomach. Anahid forced herself to loosen her grip on the headscarf, before she tore the delicately beaded fabric.

Laxmi frowned at her hands. “Why do you still even bother with those things?”

Anahid swallowed hard, forcing the fruit pulp down. “In the hopes that I can make it until after Zagiri’s Ball before I bring the whole family into disrepute.” Despite her carelessness before Salt Night, the scandalous news of her position—an azata managing a Flowerhouse—had not yet escaped into society. To keep it that way, Anahid would haul on a hood and veil, let alone the simple scarf she’d worn her entire adult life already. She flipped it over her hair and snapped, “Are you coming?”

Laxmi came, of course. Three months since that night in the Badrosani theatre. Almost as long since Laxmi had walked, entirely human, into Sable House. And she hadn’t let Anahid down once in all that time.

She was solid at Anahid’s shoulder, a shadow and a shield both. Reassuring enough that Anahid didn’t flinch at the clatters and bangs from the building sites they walked past. There were plenty of them, after Salt Night. These days, it seemed more of the Laders’ Guild could be found in the upper city, working laborer’s shifts, than down in Dockside. Just as well the trade voyages had already sailed.

In the District, repairs were long finished, with only one House having been substantially damaged, and it having taken the opportunity to rename itself the Dragon’s Lair, complete with a new glittering statue out front. But the normality was a fiction; little remained as it had been before Salt Night. Not with Midnight vanished and his organisation splintering into squabbling gangs. Not with the Zinedani baron and his heir both dead. Garabed’s daughter—Marel Sakrani, who’d married into a lower-tier azatani family—had taken things in hand, but business had been substantially disrupted.

Or so Anahid had heard. She could hardly ask. Drop in for tea, introduce herself as the reason for Marel’s inheritance, offer her assistance. The very idea was appalling.

Zagiri would probably do it.

As though reading her mind, Laxmi said, “Lejman heard word the second daughter was back from the New Republic. Came in on the ship that arrived the other day.”

That would have been the first one to sail after reports of Salt Night had reached the far side of the Carmine Sea. Ruzanna Zinedani—the daughter who’d married a trader—now back to assist her sister.

Anahid said firmly: “It’s none of my business.”

Laxmi snorted. “Maybe now they’ll take their business in hand. Stop everyone skittering around like crab-legged imps.” She directed that at a runner edging past, who did scuttle around them in a manner unfortunately similar to a crustacean.

In the yard of Sable House, Qorja and Nura were in furious, hushed conference. The stage mistress oversaw the Flowers and all aspects of their business, and Anahid’s former housekeeper had now stepped into a new role as provisioner of the House. Anahid knew few more capable women, so it was alarming when they looked perturbed.

“We’ve lost more Flowers?” Anahid guessed. The roster was already stretched.

Nura shook her head briskly, though Qorja’s face tilted farther toward unease. “We may,” she said quietly, barely audible over the wagon unloading at the kitchen door. “If word gets out that we can no longer source sureties.”

The bottom dropped out of Anahid’s stomach.

She barely heard Laxmi asking, “Sureties? What are those?”

“Essential tools for maintaining the intimate health of the Flowers,” Nura explained politely and—by Laxmi’s deepening frown—entirely opaquely.

“Contraceptives,” Anahid summarised.

Qorja wrinkled up her nose. “And protection against diseases, parasites, and—these days—potential curses.”

“What’s happened?” Anahid demanded. “I thought our supplier wasn’t involved in any of the new gangs.”

“Maybe that was the problem. We’ve heard our usual provider was included in the last purge.” Qorja paused delicately before saying, “Perhaps if we got the inquisitors involved—”

“No,” Anahid interrupted, too abrupt. But her involvement with Inquisitor Xhanari had been a mistake she had no interest in revisiting. At least he’d stopped sending innocuous messages.

“A purge,” Laxmi repeated. “A Midnight purge?”

Except there was no Midnight any longer. Strange and inexplicable as he’d been, he’d held his tangled web of a barony together. Now parts of it were pulling in all directions, tearing apart like a wreck on a rock. But Anahid needed to shift this topic before—

“You have to step in.”

Before they got to this again. Anahid sighed and didn’t look at Laxmi. She knew what she’d see; that set to her jaw, that burn in her eyes, that determination. “It’s not my business,” she insisted.

But Laxmi had never been easy to ignore. “It bloody is. This mess has taken out your provider of—whatevers. How much closer does it need to get before you’ll do something?”

Nura looked hurriedly down at her ledger, flipping through the pages, and Qorja developed a fascination with the bed of one of her perfectly manicured fingernails. Neither of them wanted to be involved in this. Anahid didn’t want to be involved in this.

“Painting the walls in blood won’t find us a provider,” she stated through gritted teeth, glaring at Laxmi; she immediately received a glare in return. “Violence can’t bring back the dead.”

“Nor can hiding,” Laxmi spat.

Anahid wasn’t hiding. She was being sensible.

Before she could say that, Laxmi stalked away, grabbing one of the unloaded barrels and hefting it onto her shoulder to carry into the House.

Anahid ground her teeth, bailing the boat of her anger, until she could say evenly: “Where were we?”

Nura cleared her throat. “I can’t confirm that our provider has been purged. But nor can I find her anywhere. I haven’t heard from her in four days, and a delivery was due yesterday. I hunted down her workshop and found some other alchemist in there.”

This was the real problem. Her problem. Let the barons and those who would be one worry about jostling for position and resources. All Anahid wanted was to run her House in peace. That was all she’d ever wanted.

“Don’t we have another alchemist on retainer?” Anahid asked. “That Lyraec fellow who got snooty over the tampered lock?”

Nura’s mouth tightened slightly. “I made inquiry with him. He was… quite put out at the suggestion that he might sully his reputation with such things.”

That sort of attitude—entirely common among alchemical practitioners of the upper city—was why Midnight’s alchemical workshops had cornered the Flower district trade in the first place.

Anahid sighed and tilted her head back, scanning the sky as though there would be answers writ there. Along the top of Sable House, the star jasmine was crawling with pixie skinks, the little winged lizards nibbling at the tight-furled flowers.

Magic was alive in Bezim now. Sorcery was no longer a crime. There were more practitioners than ever, setting up in shops and stalls and trading door-to-door. But contraceptives were not an area where you wanted to trust in just anyone. It was right there, in the common District name for them: sureties.

You needed to be sure.

“How long until the situation becomes dire?” Anahid asked.

Nura exchanged a look with Qorja. “At current rostering, we can still cover the next ten days.”

But Qorja had already made mention of the problems that could arise if the Flowers found out. It was fair enough. They deserved safety and certainty. She needed to get it for them.

“Shake down every lead we have on a new provider,” Anahid instructed firmly. “Chase every option. This is our top priority. If we haven’t found something in the next three days…” She drew a breath. “I’ll go and see Nihath, and ask him to recommend someone.”

Qorja nodded and hurried out of the yard.

But Nura caught at Anahid’s sleeve, in a way she never would have as housekeeper. “Mistress,” she said, which was almost the same. “That will be an azatani practitioner.”

Anahid inclined her head. “Or one closely affiliated with the azatani, yes.”

Those were the circles her former husband associated with. The Summer Club, where a good quarter of azatani society dined and gossiped.

Anahid would have to tell one of them what she needed. And why. If she did that, there was little chance it would remain secret.

Nura folded her hands firmly. “I will find someone,” she vowed.

The Eldren Hall was sweating light, the golden stone almost glowing from within, powered by a small fortune in alchemical charms and the astounding self-importance of the azatani. Sparkling motes danced along the facade and twined around the four narrow towers. The stained-glass frontage burned against the gathering dusk, lending extra drama to the depictions of the higher beings of each plane. The angel’s sword and wings were appropriately flaming, the djinn’s eyes flashed, and the incubus was wreathed in malevolently glowing seaweed.

Among them was the noble portrait of an azatan, staring boldly into the future and clutching a sextant and scroll—symbols of rationality conquering wilderness. As she glared up at him, Zagiri told herself she was almost certainly not the only young woman grinding her teeth as she climbed these stairs, stewing over her parents. They were all climbing in a sparkling stream, proudly presented in pristine new gowns for the first official rehearsal of the Harbour Master’s Ball.

Probably none of the other sponsors were angry for quite the same reason.

“Father,” she tried again, keeping her voice low and her frothy skirts carefully out from beneath her feet, “of course I’m aware of what we’ve lost in the leadership of Syrah Danelani—”

Even if there was a terrible part of her that was faintly relieved. The prefect’s censure for what Zagiri had done to achieve her sorcery reform had died as well on Salt Night. Azata Markani had been injured too, sufficiently that rumour said she was retiring from public life. All things considered, Zagiri would still rather have Danelani’s hand on the helm of the city in these turbulent waters. She’d not flinch from the chance presented to them.

“Of course she is,” Zagiri’s mother chimed in at her other elbow. “She worked with the woman for months. Oh!” Kemella squeezed Zagiri’s elbow again, beaming. “I’m so proud of you. My little gull, all grown up! Your first rehearsal!”

Which Zagiri appreciated, but it wasn’t really helping right now.

She turned back to Usal, but her father just patted her net-gloved hand. “Your mother’s right, petal. This is a very important time for you, the start of your adult life, and it only happens once. You’re busy enough with this, and your bravi things. There will be other chances to get involved in politics later, if that’s what you want to do.”

“Not like this one!” Zagiri objected, loud enough that a younger girl in front of them glanced curiously over her shoulder before her mother nudged her back into propriety. Zagiri lowered her tone. “Not like a new Council commencement, Father. That’s when we could bring a proposal for alteration to the entire membership in a—”

But they were out of time, cresting the staircase, where Azata Malkasani waited in the portico, beaming in welcome.

“Who is this that comes to the heart of society?” asked the woman who’d been pestering Zagiri to sign up as a sponsor for three years now.

But this was all part of the ritual, as carefully choreographed as any of the dances they wo