Grant slides the microphone up his sleeve and finishes tying his laces. He straightens up and nods to the guard. “Damned complicated boots,” he says.

“Sire,” is the guard’s brusque reply.

“On Maekyon we all used these things called flip-flops.”

“As you say, sire.”

He gives the guard a practiced golden-retriever grin and wave and continues onward, pausing for a half-bow to a giggling duchess.

The bathroom has a stone relief carving of an impaled Taiikari woman standing before a thicket of spears, her face tranquil and satisfied as the lance through her midsection kebabs her. A globe sits in one of her hands, a curved dagger in the other. Grant makes eye contact with her while he pees. He’d like to leave the Core as soon as possible.

He removes his earpiece as he washes his hands. The hissing and rustling noises of his boot’s insides are blessedly cut off. He returns at a brisk stride to Sykora’s ready room, ducking through the door and down to his wife’s level as she sits in battle meditation.

“No trick,” he whispers. Her face flickers in response to his breath. “Inadama is trying to lose.”

Sykora sighs. Her eyes stay shut. “The condition,” she says. “It was always going to be the condition. Her favor. She doesn’t want me home. She doesn’t give a damn about my children. It was always the third. She just burned through two unacceptables to get there and hide her intentions.”

“She’s doing all this for money?”

“Not money. Hellfire.” Sykora’s fingers steeple against her forehead. “She said she’d pick the export. She acted as though she doesn’t care, but she does. She wants something from me. Something specific.”

“It’s not the Pike, is it?”

“The Pike was made in the Core, not its sector. It doesn’t fulfill the remit. And it costs an order of magnitude over a hundred thousand marks.” Sykora straightens up. “No, I can’t guess at what it is she’s looking to take from me. I suppose we’ll find out.”

“Why would she do it like this?”

“Extracting payment for titles is forbidden,” Vora says. She sits in the ready room’s corner, running a whetstone across her Princess’s spear.

Sykora nods. “Doesn’t stop anyone, of course, but the Empress’s eyes are surely close onto this situation. And this way, I’m cornered.”

“So what do we do?” Grant asks.

“We do exactly what we were going to do,” Sykora says. Her crimson gaze opens and lands on him. She smiles. “I am going to go out there and bleed my mother. And then you and I will return to the Pike and prepare the way for our family.”

“I thought you’d be more upset about this,” he says. “Even if she loses, she wins.”

“Oh, no. No, no. She was too clever by half.” Sykora stands up. “I suppose she thought I’d turn her in, or refuse. So she did this, instead, to deny me any leverage. To force me to tender whatever she demands with no consideration permitted. It’s smart on its face, but she has overestimated me. And underestimated our family. Majordomo.”

Vora is immediately at Sykora’s side, holding out the honed spear. Different from the one Sykora brought in, and bare of any banner or flourish. A weapon of war.

Sykora’s tail wraps around her Majordomo’s and gives it a tight squeeze as she accepts the weapon. “She could have just extorted me in her dreadful little office. I would have kept it from the Empress. I’d have paid what was necessary, to keep them all. All my babies.” She counts them on her fingers. “Two daughters. A son. And the Black Pike. But now—”

She closes her fist.

“Now I get to have fun first.”

***

The Embassy of Blades’ central fight pit is open to the air, and ringed in with stone benches arranged like bleachers. A breeze cuts across the lip of the ring above, fluttering pennants where they cling to spears and banner poles.

Grant finds a seat in the midst of a murmuring row of nobles. He had gotten used to the Black Pike’s peerage of nobles, who had seemed, at his first experience of them, to be endlessly glamorous and ostentatious. The Taiikari who roost here are another creature entirely. Laden with bangles and baubles, painted and plucked, yes, even moreso than the Frontier nobles. But rather than the bright and belligerent colors and conversation, these Taiikari are almost entirely silent, and almost entirely monochrome. Black, white, and glittering gold are the only colors on display in the majority of their smartly slim cuts. Grant feels awkwardly like a bird of paradise in his carnelian uniform.

Not that any of them deign to notice him or comment on how out-of-place he is. Far from the unabashed ogling he’s used to, the nobles of Taiikar seem to be in a who canignore the Maekyonite hardest competition. The woman he sits next to gives a polite cough of acknowledgement and scoots over, but her eyes don’t meet his.

Sykora stands with Majordomo Vora on one end of the circular fighting pit in whispering conference. On the other, Inadama is silently absorbing final pointers from her own second, a strapping and scarred Taiikari woman with half her left ear missing.

The man playing the role Grant did, in the first duel he watched, is dressed in golden padding and cowled in black. The armiger, they’re calling him. He wonders why the translator picked that, and then remembers the translator is just an inert little lump in his brain. He’s thinking in Taiikari.

The armiger speaks in a booming, resonant voice. “This commences the matter-at-arms between Marquess Palatine Inadama of Taiikar and Void Princess Sykora of the Black Pike, to be concluded upon the second blood drawn.”

Sykora and Vora exchange a quick, bracing hug; then the Void Princess steps to join the armiger and her opponent at the ring’s center.

The armiger holds up a platinum mace, sleek and simply formed. “Gentlewomen,” he says. “Do you acknowledge one another’s right of arms?”

“I do,” Sykora says. Grant’s ridiculous brain furnishes an image of her in a white dress and a veil.

“I do,” Inadama says. Her face is as serene as Grant’s ever seen her; but on her forehead, there’s a sheen of sweat that shines in the daylight.

“Do you affirm your love of the Empress and her law, and dedicate this combat to her glory and advancement?”

“I do.”

“I do.”

“Do you agree that with this exchange your enmities will be settled?”

“I do.”

“I do.”

“Do you chance your lives, and acquit one another of their taking in the course of honorable and true combat?”

Sykora takes a moment to reply. “I do.”

“I do,” Inadama echoes.

“To your corners, then.” The armiger lowers his mace. “Glory to the Empress.”

“Glory to the Empress,” mother and daughter echo. They turn from one another and step to the edges of the ring.

There they wait for one another on slices of white and black painted across the sand. On opposite colors, like a yin-yang illustration. The audience, far more disciplined than a combat sport could ever call for, lean forward in their pews, set in rings above the combatants’ heads.

Atop the Embassy’s toroidal walkway, the Pike’s marines keep vigil, across from Inadama’s retainers. Time was Grant would look at a horned space soldier in black-and-red armor and be intimidated. Now those are his friends up there, and he wishes he was among them, and not here in the sterile pews.

“Set,” the armiger says. “Tilt.”

No motion. Not from either combatant. Just a held stare and a held breath.

Then Sykora’s spear flicks a circle, and Inadama leans on her heel, and they drop into a crouching, predatory orbit.

“Prince.”

Grant looks down. Narika of the Glory Banner is squeezing up to his side, past a prim Viscount whose anticomps flash with the disapproving shuffle he’s forced into. “It’s good to see you again,” she says.

“Majesty.” Grant gives her the prerequisite half-bow.

“I hope you don’t mind my sitting here. My original place was supposed to be with my half-siblings.” She points across the arena to a cluster of dusk-colored Taiikari in fine-spun tunics and gowns, who fall into whispering at her motion—they must be watching her. Or him. “Behold Inadama’s legitimate daughters.”

“Why the move, Majesty?” He finds he needs to keep his voice down; there’s little sound beyond the grunts and clashes of combat from the arena floor.

Narika shrugs. “What is there to say to them?”

“What is there to say to me?”

A brief and chilly chuckle from her at that. “I attended Sykora’s address. She told us how Eqtora was won. Unorthodox.”

“It was,” he says. “But it worked.”

Sykora shifts a foot. Inadama drops into guard. It’s easy to tell even with his inexperience how fearful the Marquess Palatine is of her warrior daughter.

“It did. Don’t misunderstand me.” Narika’s shiny black pants squeak as she crosses her legs. I’m quite impressed. You risked a great deal, and it paid off. You’re either astoundingly lucky or a genius.”

“Perhaps I’m an astoundingly lucky genius.”

Narika smirks. “Perhaps.”

In the ring, Inadama lunges forward with a picture-perfect thrust to Sykora’s frontmost thigh. Sykora spins with the blow in a leg-lifted pirouette, lashing out with a seeking riposte that nearly nicks Inadama’s ear. A library-lecture murmur spreads through the observing crowd. A smattering of applause. The combatants back away, Sykora shaking her calf out. No blood, not that Grant can see.

“One must imagine the Eqtoran Republic employed the same controls you did, when they were calling the shots,” Narika says. “But to what degree was it sacred to them? Does that excuse their use in a way that keeps us culpable? Does the way you harnessed it trouble you?”

“I think that the alternative would have been far worse,” Grant says.

“Mmm.” She nods. “Fair enough. It was a worthy thing, either way.”

Inadama and Sykora have locked up now, spears pushing, close enough to bite. The armiger barks his command of “Back! Back to your corners!” And they separate, slow and deliberate and empty of trust in one another.

“I think we would be friends,” Narika says, as the crowd noise rises between tilts. “If it wasn’t for your wife.”

Grant has had the same thought, but Narika is a Void Princess, and Void Princesses play games. Even now, Sykora is glancing at him, whispering to Vora. Is he part of some play by Narika to distract? “Maybe we would be. But I’m who I am, and you’re who you are.”

“True enough.” She falls silent at that for a few breaths, then smiles wanly. “The eternal condition of the Imperial subject, hmm?”

“What’s that?”

“To be who one is,” she says, and falls silent for a time.

Set. Tilt. Feet hissing across the sand. The scrape of metal. The way Narika chews her lip as she watches her sister and mother circle and clash is so disarmingly like Sykora.

“Majesty,” he says. “Was it you?”

“Was what me?”

“Are you the one who told the Empress?”

Narika’s eyes flit from the arena to him. “Yes, Majesty,” she says. “I am.”