Yao looked well. Furious, of course.

The black stripes of the House of Acatl's war-paint twisted into a second scowl from the pull of her glare, but that was nothing new with Yaotl. Back aching from having hit stone, Izel pushed himself up so he might sit with his back to the wall even as she drew on him. His palms stung, scraped raw, but he was no stranger to small pains. It was a rare week where one of his fingers did not end up stuck in something.

"I should cut out your heart," Yao hissed, looming over him.

The point of the blade pressed into his uniform, nicking it, and he should have been worried but mostly he mourned he would need to have that mended now. Besides, it was only her leaf-dagger she had out and that meant she was posturing. If Yao had truly meant to kill him she would have reached for the sawblade at her hip.

Gods, and that was the one her royal uncle had gifted her wasn't it? The one with obsidian on one side and candlesteel the other. She truly had come here with the Grasshopper King's blessing.

"That is one way to get the last word," Izel noted.

He saw the twitch in her cheeks, the way it smoothed the lines of her face, then saw how the flicker of amusement turned into wick for a blackpowder charge of fresh anger. She grabbed him by the collar and Izel let her, putting a hand against the wall so he would not simply be hoisted to his feet like a prisoner. Yao pushed him against the wall, eyes harsh and teeth clenched.

"You think you can joke your way out of this, Izel?" she spat out. "That it'll all go away with a smile and a drink and a few pleasantries?"

He met her gaze, almost flinching at what he saw there. Not the anger but the wound. He wished there had been a way to leave without inflicting it. There hadn't. But it could have been a shallower cut, and that is on my head. He had run and hoped for the best, knowing full well that Izcalli made supper of such halfhearted wishes. But that did not mean he should let himself be roughed up.

"I think that knife is a childish affectation," Izel replied. "Use it or put it away, Yao. I'll not pretend to be impressed by a naked blade."

Calm, steady. Always calm, or they get to call you emotional. Izel saw the flash in those dark eyes, the quicksilver urge to cut him, that famous Acatl fury said to be from divine blood. But it passed and left behind a grudging acceptance of his words. Yao's fury was like the Kuyoka spring floods: forceful but fleeting, and when it ran its course she did not keep holding on to it needlessly.

"Fine," Yao said with a scowl, deftly sheathing the blade and withdrawing half a step. "A blade wielded without resolve is a dishonor on the hand that bears it."

Another piece of Jaguar Society creed duly spat out, a bone spur left after the flesh was swallowed whole. No blade is ever an honor, Izel thought. That was a lie killers painted their faces with so they could look in the mirror without flinching. Not that killers were the only ones who ever had a hard time meeting their own gaze on polished silver. Izel had his own dues to pay, he acknowledged as he tugged his uniform back into place and resisted the urge to dust his cloak. He met Yao's dark eyes straight.

"I am sorry," Izel said, "for avoiding you. I made that decision for my own comfort, not out of any greater need."

And that cowardice meant had not been there when his brigade fought for its life because he was too busy eating an entire cauldron of baked beans. It'd not even been a pleasant excess, leaving him feeling sick afterwards and cocooning in his sheets like a dying silkworm. For a fitful night of sleep, to add one last garnish of pointlessness to the evening.

Izel held no particular illusions about his skills as a fighter, but he could have carried Tristan away instead of letting Angharad run a footrace with a grown man on her shoulders while tower-sized mass of rage smashed through a temple pursuit.

Yaotl looked entirely unimpressed by the apology, scowl deepening.

"You have a great deal more to apologize for," she said. "And if you mean even a single word of it, you will resign from Scholomance immediately to return home with me."

Slow, silent movement caught his eye. A jaguar was looking down at them from edge of the hole in the roof, spots obsidian-black and chops freshly bloodied. The Night King's servant, drawn to arguments and discord. Or maybe simply keeping an eye on the descent of his master, for the House of Acatl's claim to descent from the lame god had more than a little truth to it. When he drew away it was to find Yao staring at him inscrutably.

"I will not be doing that," Izel said.

"Then your apologies are worthless," she replied. "Save your spit. You'll need it to grovel when you are back in Teskatlan."

Just the name was enough to have his guts clenching. He had thought the capital was the most beautiful city in the world, when he was a child. Every street a wonder. Then he'd learned that the gutter stones were not put in already red.

"I'm not going back, Yao," he evenly said. "Not-"

"Stop that," she sharply said, and he paused in surprise. "You don't get to call me that anymore, Izel. Not after you ran. My partner got to call me Yao."

She looked him up and down, sneering.

"You? You're just a stranger wearing his face."

His jaw clenched. That stung. It shouldn't have, he had made his choice years ago knowing all the bridges behind him were set alight. But he'd known Yao since they were barely more than children, two odd souls at the edge of the Calendar Court that no one cared enough about to watch over. To look in the eye the death of that friendship felt rawer than he had thought it would.

"Yaotl, then," he replied, voice tight.

Was that satisfaction in her eyes? Hers to claim, it must be said. Sown and reaped.

"I'm not going back, Yaotl," he repeated. "Not even if you do get me expelled from Scholomance. I would rather serve as a gate guard in some crumbling Watch fortress on a nowhere island than return to the Calendar Court."

Yaotl blinked, given pause. She was, he saw, genuinely confused. She didn't understand the reasons he had left, not really. It was on both their heads – neither had ever tried to bridge the gap all the way. Her because she did not care to see it, him because it would have been taking one chance too many. It was one thing to have open reformer sympathies, but to agree with the Fraternity? Such rebels were fit only to be candlewick.

"Barred from Scholomance, you will never become one of the greats of the Umuthi Society," Yaotl slowly said. "You will never sit on the Wednesday Council or be granted a workshop of your own. Only through the Calendar Court could you still pursue your work."

How little Yaotl truly knew of the world, for all her high birth. It was an open secret among Umuthi that the Republics aggressively recruited anyone who had washed out of the Deuteronomicon and the House of Livares was always looking to hire machinists to service the Harpooners. The Sacromontans actually preferred hiring foreigners, since they were less likely to be spies from their rivals. Not that it mattered, because rank and means were not what he left for.

"I did not leave Izcalli because I thought the Watch would better fund my work," Izel told her. "I left because I knew exactly what I would become if I stayed and I'd rather be dead than that."

Yaotl looked at him like he had gone mad, like she had never seen him before. It was the way she'd been taught to see the world. It was one thing to leave the Calendar Court for greener pastures, the kind of betrayal a Jaguar could understand even if it drove her to fury, but for some abstract principle? That was simply not how things were done.

"Your brother said you had a fit of lunacy," she slowly said, "but I did not believe him. He has a poisonous tongue."

That clarified which brother. Chimalli had never forgiven him for affirming he was a man, seeing it as an attempt to usurp his rights as the firstborn of Lady Cihuanen's children. Zeltzin's death had been the end of any hopes of reconciliation, the final sundering of their womb-kinship as triplets. Izel looked away from that old wound, which he suspected would never scar from the constant picking at it from either side.

It had to be Chimalli she was talking about. Given Izel's open lack of interest in joining the Doghead Banner, few of Father's other children had ever seen him as a rival. Those intent on inheriting Kukoya and its army had instead seen him as what he'd been trained to become: the Coyac man at court, the shield keeping noble daggers out of their house's back. And even among those who disliked him, none had ever turned as venomous as his only full-blooded brother.

"Chimalli spoke truly, this once," Izel said, then grimaced. "Is it him they are trying to marry you to?"

"What do you think?" Yaotl said, turning to spit in the dust.

The spurt of dust and wet traced the shape of a broken hearth for half a moment. As if Izel had needed to be told that.

"Half your brothers aren't even Izcalli, and of those that are only those born to your mother can be married into without making my name a laughingstock or a rebel banner."

He grimaced. His father had wed five times but only the last three wives had birthed children that could be called Izcalli by law. His own mother was the last of three: Lady Cihuanen was a baron's daughter and descended from the Seven Tribes of the Valleys. The other two wives were, respectively, the daughter of a ship captain - a bloodline sprung from the Trade sphere and thus too lowly for a royal match - and the relation of a Sunflower Lord and thus too highly born. Twining royal blood with that of the sunflowers was ever a dangerous thing.

"The Eagle Society might straighten him out," Izel said, not really believing it.

He had never known the Eagle Society to straighten so much as a lamp post when they could get a serf to do it for them instead.

"I don't care if they make him the mightiest warrior in all Izcalli, he's already said he wants kids," Yaotl hotly said. "I will not have children, Izel. I will not."

The heat there was not directed at him, not truly. There had been a reason Yaotl wanted the match so much more than he did – Izel had not been inclined to seek the full changing of his shape, given whose priests offered it, so for Yao he had represented a sure way of never having to bear children. It was half the reason Father had chosen him for the match over Chimalli: a Coyac at court with a royal wife was much less of a threat in the eyes of his rivals if they were not going to have children. Their presence could be waited out, like a rainstorm.

That he could serve as a shield for Yaotl did not mean, however, that he owed it to her. There had been other paths for her, like putting on the very black she now wore or half a dozen other bargains – only they would have cost her the Jaguar Society, while marrying Izel would not. There his sympathy died.

"So break the betrothal with House Coyac," he bluntly replied. "My father is in no position to protest and you have the right by law."

A woman could not be wed against her will, in Izcalli.

"And disappoint Uncle?" Yaotl harshly laughed. "He wants Doghead tied by blood to the throne. If I rob him of that, I am no longer his favorite cousin once removed."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

She crossed her arms, looking almost girlish for a moment.

"In a matter of months I would be married off to some northern count to shore up loyalty, and you know what that means."

That, as a wife of royal blood, she would be too precious a commodity to risk in war. Indeed, if she died on the battlefield the Grasshopper King might take great offense to it and the tetecuhtin, the counts of Izcalli, were the mightiest of the semi-hereditary nobles but still only that. Semi-hereditary. Those titles lived at the mercy of the Calendar Court and to slight its king meant your lands might just pass to another house after your death.

"I understand that my leaving put you in a difficult position," Izel delicately said. "It was not meant to-"

"You don't understand shit, Izel," Yaotl hissed. "I only learned you'd run when the temple elders dragged me off the proving grounds in the middle of the day, yanked me out of a spar to throw me in the street with all my possessions and told me I was no longer a nominee for the Jaguar Society."

He winced. Izel had hated the thought of spending any time as one of Jaguars, but Yaotl had wanted nothing more than to be one of them since she left the cradle.

"The whole capital knew by day's end," Yaotl said. "It was odious at court, Izel. Odious. 'Oh, princess, if only you had cared as much for your betrothal as your training you might not have lost both'. 'Perhaps you should not wear such fearsome warpaint, princess, it scared your betrothed all the way to the Watch'."

Her fingers jabbed into his chest, grazing a brass button.

"The rumors got bad enough that Mother got off the pulque long enough to arrange two formal duels so I could prove I didn't cheat my way to a Jaguar nomination and that wasn't why you ran off," she raged.

His eyes widened in disbelief. That had been the rumor spread?

"And then my parents tried pass me off to fucking Chimalli to avoid disappointing Uncle," Yaotl said, "and your prick brother graciously informed me that after I bore him three children I would be able to petition the Doghead for some supply role in his banner."

She spat on the ground, this time between his feet.

"Supply, like I haven't been training with a sawsword since I could walk and I couldn't slaughter my way through half your kin barehanded," Yaotl snarled out, but after she breathed in. Lowered her voice.

"So I did what I had to."

He could feel it was going to get bad, like the air just before a storm broke out.

"I swallowed my pride, went up the supplicant's stairs on my knees the whole way and begged the high priests of the Sacred Courtyard not to dissolve our betrothal," Yaotl said, and horror pooled in his belly. "I prostrated before Uncle to ask permission to join the Watch so I might bring you back, because you must have been misled."

She leaned in, face to face.

"And now you tell me the Watch didn't even make you some golden offer," Yaotl said. "That they didn't court you or offer you rank. That you shattered both our lives, our futures, for what – some kind of spiritual tantrum?"

She swallowed.

"Look, I know I'm not the easiest person to live with," she quietly said. "And we fooled around, but we never pretended it was love. But we-"

The way the light glinted off the curl of her hair around her ear, he could swear he saw a lizard's head – blue scales, white eyes. The scuttling messengers of Lady Coldstone, bringing her even-handed verdicts down from her mountainous throne. Justice, the dead season. A light touch on his shoulder startled him.

"You are seeing omens," Yaotl stated.

Not a question, because it did not need to be. Izel swallowed.

"Lady Coldstone," he admitted. "Your great ancestor, earlier."

"A grim cast of the dice," she murmured, then hesitated. "The Watch did not help you with…"

"Today is the worst day in years," he tiredly replied, passing a hand through the stubble of his hair. "And it is not something that the Watch can help with."

A god had given him a name. It would remain, save if that god was slain, and many had tried to slay the Laughing One. It had been no victory even for those who were victorious.

"You bear it gracefully," Yaotl said, looking uneasy. "That has been true of many burdens, over the years. It is why your father prizes you so."

His fists clenched. He saw where that was headed, like the stretch of a valley road from atop the mountain.

"I thought he would denounce you when it was brought up in court, or blame it all on me," she said. "Instead he laughed in Duke Cipac's face and asked why a father should mind his son taking up arms against the fading of the light."

Yaotl shook her head.

"Laughing at a Sunflower Lord in open court, I could hardly believe my ears. You truly are his fa-"

"Don't," Izel harshly said.

She had no idea what it really meant, to have the love of a man like Oxomo Coyac. How much worse it had been than his mother's utter indifference. Yaotl raised her hands in appeasement, then shook her head and put on a scowl when she recalled she was angry with him. Leaning in again, she kept her voice low – just shy of pleading, of urgent.

"He would forgive you leaving, I know it," Yaotl swore.

"There are many things I want of my father," Izel Coyac said with steel-edged softness, "but I assure you that forgiveness has never been one of them."

Her face hardened.

"Then what it is you do want, exactly?" Yaotl demanded. "Because I thought I knew, Izel, and that we were almost there."

It was a different kind of anger, this one. Less edged – blunt, like a mace. It was threaded with too much bafflement to cut.

"We had it made, Izel," she said. "A stint in the Jaguars and you could retire in honor as a royal astronomer to build your machines. And paying your dues on the field would have given you the right to speak in court, to argue for reforms."

She was not lying. The nature of his ken essentially guaranteed him a place as a royal astronomer, and he'd had a place at the Calendar Court with his name good as carved on it. He just needed to pay his dues. Fight in a flower war, put down a serf rebellion or two.

Murder so he might earn the right to preach against murder.

"When you stayed with us, two years back, you seemed-"

"I wasn't," Izel said.

She frowned.

"Whatever you were about to say, I wasn't," he continued. "It was the three months I spent in the capital with your family that decided me to leave, Yaotl."

"Is this about the serfs?" she slowly said. "Even my father agreed it was wrong after you spoke about the Song of Spheres. They really were sent to the White Temple, we sent someone to make sure."

His fingers clenched.

"There were twenty of us, between the five litters," Izel quietly said. "And we watched that Marigold Society merchant beat three men halfway to death for five minutes, for something we all knew they hadn't done – it was the road that bucked the wheel off, they were on the other side of the street."

But no one had said anything, because Marigold peddlers served the temples so why court the trouble and risk upsetting the Orthodoxy for mere serfs?

"Then you got out, my family followed and you made them stop," Yaotl said, almost encouraging.

Had he? The were still serfs, the three men, only now they were property of the White Temple and served the healers instead of their old owner. That merchant had been forced to pay their worth to their previous owner as reparations, which would have him tightening his belt for a while. That was all, though. That was the sum whole of what had been accomplished that day.

"The part that stayed with me," Izel quietly said. "That stays with me still, is when we all stood in front of that merchant I called out, how your aunt traded a look with your father."

"A look," Yaotl skeptically said.

"Like they were tolerantly amused about what I was about to do," he said. "A little fond, even. Oh, look at Izel Coyac, that soft touch."

He kept his voice even.

"And we let the man off, Yaotl. Your father, your aunts, they called it a sensible settlement. He walked away with a glorified fine, the wounded went off to the White Temple and that Marigold merchants gets to go on doing it where no one will care to stop him."

Yaotl spat to the side.

"Would you rather we'd slain in him broad daylight for beating serfs, Izel?" she said. "That is also against our laws, and the priests would have made trouble."

"I know."

He had not understood, that day, why something made him faintly uneasy. Like a black cloud in the distance. He had even been proud for a time, and that good mood was no doubt what Yaotl remembered since they had made pleasant use of it. But eventually he had picked out the thorn in his thumb, the pebble in his boot.

"There was no way to stop that man from doing this again that does not go against our laws," Izel Coyac simply said, "because our laws don't really care about what he did."

Yaotl let out an incredulous laugh, then eyed him for half a beat with something like horror when she realized he was utterly serious.

"You sound like an abolitionist," she said.

I have been abolitionist since I was nine years old, Yaotl, Izel almost told her. She took his silence as confirmation.

"You left over serfdom? Izel, you were born in Kukoya," she said. "It's the worst of the Old Candles, it eats more men in a year than the capital's lights do in a decade."

Of course it did. Kukoya was a glorified mining outpost snowed in half the year while the House of Acatl had poured ten fortunes into making Teskatlan's lights the finest of the New Candles. They barely required blood to work, not a single death on a good year. And the truth was that the means existed for even the worst of the Old Candles, the earliest works of the Antediluvians and the most damaged, to work as the New Candles did.

But it would be difficult.

It would be expensive.

And no one with so much as a speck of real power In Izcalli cared enough to do it.

"No," Izel said. "I left because I stopped lying to myself that I would be able to fix my home from under its roof. That I just needed to get a little more evil under my belt, just a little more, and finally I would be able to talk men out of greater evils."

This time he was the one who stepped forward and she the one to step back.

"I left," Izel Coyac said, "because you do not stop a machine by becoming a cog in it."

"You could have had a voice at court, Izel," she replied, leaning in forcefully as if to deny she had stepped back. "You threw that away to come here."

"Is that how you think it would have gone, Yao?" he laughed. "No. It would have gone like this: I'd have fought in some flower war then put on astronomer's robes, worked on calendars three months a year and my machines the rest. And exactly like you say, as a former Jaguar and your husband I would have had the right to speak in open court. To point out the horror we all pretend isn't horror because it is easier that way."

Izel bared his teeth.

"And for the rest of my life, it would go like this: amusement, a little roll of the eyes between those who rule us. Oh, look at Izel Coyac, that soft touch. And when it didn't matter, when no one important cared, they might even throw me a bone. And that would be my role, Yaotl. To be that one voice of disagreement: the harmless, eccentric, useless opposition."

His fists clenched until his nails bit it into his palm.

"Just another ornament of the court, as much part of it as the tiles and the garden."

"Then you should have fought to become more," Yaotl replied contemptuously. "To make your dream a-"

"A waking thing," Izel harshly interrupted. "To let strength part truth from illusion, to contest with the world until there is an answer. So goes the Dialectic of Night, that misbegotten disease."

Yaotl spat to the side.

"Do not blame Vesper for not bending to your will if you are not willing to fight for your dreams."

"You're not paying attention," Izel hissed. "It's a loop, Yaotl. To win by the rules of the Dialectic you have to kill, and to keep winning you have to keep killing until in practice the only thing you've dedicated yourself to is killing regardless of what you're trying to achieve."

She frowned.

"So you are… denying the Dialectic?" she hesitantly said. "Contesting it. That's what this all is."

It had begun hesitant, anyway. By the time Yaotl began to say 'contesting' the voice had firmed. By the time she finished the last sentence it had turned enthusiastic. And gods, but Izel understood why and his stomach sunk.

"No," he said.

"But you are," she purred. "You pit your strength against it."

"Yaotl," Izel urgently said. "Listen to me. This is not a game, it is not a trial or a bout. Those rules do not apply here."

"Those rules apply wherever violence is done," Yaotl Acatl replied. "And that is everywhere."

"You'll die," Izel told her. "I don't want to kill you, but you will die."

Because Song would put a bullet in Lucifer's own skull for either of her families, because Angharad spoke of crippling men with that same casual assurance Father had, because Maryam did not really think of anyone as people before she broke bread with them and because the very first time Yaotl became a hindrance on the path to getting Fortuna back Tristan would murder her in her sleep.

"So you wager," Yaotl said, 'acknowledging,' him with a nod. "And I wager this in turn: I will drive you from this place, Izel Coyac. I will prove the truth I choose and bring you back as my husband, to finish the lives we were meant to live."

And the part that broke his heart was how, beneath the scowl she still put on and the fierce look, he could see she was happy. Because the world made sense again. Because she had a war to fight to get everything she wanted, because things were a contest instead of dead stone. Gods, Izel felt sick. Like he was going to throw up.

"I'm sorry," he told her quietly. "That I was afraid to try when we were children. Before the gap got too wide."

She lightly touched his arm, smiled fondly. It ached like an old wound to behold.

"Do not worry," Yaotl said. "We will understand each other now, speaking in the one way that cannot lie."

She straightened.

"They tell me," Yaotl said, "that the Thirteenth fought and defeated the Nineteenth Brigade last year. That you came to be one of them through this and that is why no one wanted to take up the number."

Izel closed his eyes, squeezed his brain like a wet rag in the vain hope of dripping out something, anything that would talk her out of this.

"I will declare war properly then," Yaotl Acatl mused, "by taking up the mantle. When we next meet I will be captain of the Nineteenth Brigade. I have already found fitting warriors to lead."

He opened his eyes, desperate for any kind of omen, but all there was down here was the two of them and the mistake being made.

"I'm sorry," Izel told her one more time.

Gods, let it not be the last. Smiling like the young girl she should still have been, Yao touched his arm again and hummed before swaggering off, doing that flick with her hips like she still wanted him to look. Left him to stand there at that ragged hole in the ceiling, wishing a jaguar might be looking down. That any manner of god might care about any of this.

They didn't.

Izel Coyac watched the lights move in the distance, the world grind on heartlessly, and reached for the mace at his hip. Touched it, light as a feather. The truth is in the blow, he could almost hear his father say. The moment of contact that decides what gives and what takes. He remembered what it had felt like, cracking Tozi's skull. Easy. It had felt easy, in all the worst ways. Izel took his hand off the mace, almost ashamed. Would that he had other lessons to call on, any at all. But all he had was his hands and what he decided to do with them.

So Izel Coyac looked down at his hands, at the callouses he was proud of and those he wasn't, and decided to build something.