We were heroes now.

My near-conviction on charges of “freedom” was instantly forgotten. As Hadalce—the woman with medical training that Roel had dragged over—treated our wounds, no less than eight women approached us, offering to sponsor Markus in the Renathion. I thanked them tiredly, a polite smile fixed on my face.

An hour ago these people had practically wanted to burn me at the stake, and they were not forgiven.

Lady Eloi’s offer was my favorite. The dvoli story had magically transformed from a tale of utter humiliation to a testimonial about my bravery, which she expounded on at length. Everyone’s masks were off by this point, the drama having unceremoniously put an end to the Starlight Ball, and when we made eye contact for the first time I saw glacial blue and utter indifference. The story, and the sponsorship offer that followed, weren’t for my benefit.

There was an excruciating bruise along the left side of my head where the commander had slammed her elbow into my skull and rattled my brain around inside like a pachinko machine. My thoughts were kind of fuzzy as a result, so I was probably missing the subtleties here. When Eloi was finished, I just did the head-tilt-shrug and gave her a rueful quirk of the lips.

“You’re too kind,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

We turned them all down, of course, as Roel had apparently decided we were hers now and argued exhaustively with anyone who seemed like they were genuinely trying to poach us. Kid was ferocious. She had citations and everything. The rest of the offers were pro forma, an indirect way of telling everyone they were on the winning team now. I hated it, but the commander’s actions had salvaged the mission out of nowhere, and I wasn’t about to throw that away.

I got filled in on the details between brown-nosers.

Apparently Abby hadn’t had any trouble slipping into the ball on her own. She’d been an infiltration specialist like me before taking a command position, but I have no idea how she managed that without a cloak. Once inside, she’d posed as a random noble and avoided conversation while she staked out the area. But at some point during the challenge she’d changed costumes, taken out one of the estate guards, and gone after us with the guard’s sword.

The plan wasn’t just hers: Val and Markus had been on a private channel with her during my speech, not wanting to distract me. I was annoyed at being left out, but on the other hand I was barely coherent without distractions from the team, so they probably made the right call.

Abby had led her pursuers on a winding route in the opposite direction from the ship before slipping into a compound that looked like a noble family’s estate. While the Jeneretti guards argued with the people securing that location, she’d hopped out a back window and escaped into the night.

We, on the other hand, got invited by Lady Obol to stay the night here, likely so she could regain some face after everything that went down tonight. That backfired spectacularly when Roel icily pointed out that she’d nearly been murdered right in this room less than an hour ago. The look on Obol’s face was priceless. After that, no one challenged Roel when she said we’d be returning to the Vitares estate. As soon as Hadalce cleared us to move, we were loaded into a couple of palanquins and shipped off.

No one seemed to know where Lirian was.

*

The first thing I noticed about Roel’s carriage was that it was pulled by a mechanical horse. The second thing was the armed guards—the Vitares were apparently taking no chances after the assassination attempt. Fair enough, I guess. I was gently shuffled into the carriage while Roel rapidly fired off every thought going through her head. Guess her adrenaline was still spiking. Markus made the proper responses at the proper moments. Or so I assumed; I was having trouble following the conversation. Eventually Roel ran out of steam and we made the second half of the trip in exhausted silence.

Roel’s sister Kuril was waiting for us when we reached the gates of the Vitares estate, the family’s last foothold in the city. It looked the part—there were subtle signs of disrepair all along the walls. The architectural style was distinct from the outer parts of the city—three stories high, rooms resting upon arches over open-air courtyards full of half-finished gizmos.

Kuril herself wore a simple shawl with scorch-marks and an expression of worry. I mentally put her in her late twenties, maybe ten years older than Roel. Might be a story there. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and she was wearing a sword.

When the carriage pulled in front of the estate, Roel staggered out, legs stiff from the ride, and ran straight for Kuril, who knelt and caught her in a hug. Within moments she was bawling into her sister’s shoulder. Guess everything was catching up to her.

Markus helped me out of the carriage. Turns out concussions make you light-headed, but I managed not to fall over in front of our new contacts.

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“Nice to meet you,” I said after Markus nudged me.

“Roel, get up,” Kuril whispered to Roel. After a moment, she did, and Kuril stood up, Roel standing sheepishly next to her and wiping away the rest of her tears. Kuril looked back and forth at Markus and me, her expression serious. “Godsmile, Lady Ajarel. And to you as well, Thala. I owe you a debt too great to measure.”

“I’m glad everything worked out,” I said a little blurrily.

“Is she alright?” Kuril asked one of the guards.

“She took a head injury while defending Lady Roel,” said Markus. “Nonlethal. It’ll heal in time.”

“Praise the gods,” she said. Though her words were relieved, her expression remained one of intense focus. “Inside, then.”

Markus helped me up the steps to the front door, where I stopped and said, “A friend of this House seeks—”

“No,” Kuril cut me off. “You owe us nothing. You will always be welcome here.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I said airily.

Markus and Kuril looked at me with concern.

“Let’s find her a place to lie down,” said Kuril.

*

I spent most of the next day lying down in a dark room and trying not to throw up. Concussions: the gift that keeps on giving.

While I recovered, Roel took Markus to the temple of Kabiades to get him enrolled. I tried to follow along on Markus’s feed, but after about an hour of that I felt worse and had to shut it off. Things worked out, though. Markus got enrolled without a hitch, although I did cringe a bit when they had him take off his clothes to compare him against a statue of Kabiades. He did well, although apparently he was a bit too bulky to be maximally attractive. They didn’t do ratings out of ten here, there was just some complicated system of graces and subgraces that I’d tuned out when Roel explained them to Markus. The bottom line, however, was that he was officially pretty enough to compete. Mission accomplished!

It was weird for me to think of physical appearance being part of athleticism. Like, American culture is pretty superficial in a lot of ways, but we don’t gatekeep people out of sports competitions based on looks. Explicitly, anyways.

“Lying to yourself is the enemy’s work,’” Val quoted at me when I asked him. “You say Markus is athletic because he’s in good shape. If he were obese, the thought would never occur to you.”

“Okay,” I said, “but, like, you could still be athletic even if you were fat.”

“I assure you, you would be completely surprised.”

“Not necessarily,” I insisted. Like, probably yes, but I had a concussion, so it wasn’t a fair time to ask. It’s bad to be prejudiced. “Anyways, my point is, looking athletic is etherically different than being athletic.”

“They are different, yes,” said Val. “Did they teach you about conceptual filters in Combat Theology? They must have. I suppose the operational question should be whether you remember it.”

I did remember, as it happened. For any given aspect, there’s a bunch of frequencies that almost match but not quite. Conceptual filters are feeding organs that gods develop to hit those frequencies. They’re also what new aspects develop from. An ascendant god will usually have a cluster of filters for every culture where they maintain a persona—so while prettiness was part of Kabiades’s identity over here, maybe on the other side of the planet they believed in a god of athleticism who was more about fairness or showboating or something.

My plan was to repeat enough of that back to Val to make him stop thinking I sucked, but my brain hurt, so I settled for a more elegant play.

“Concussion,” I whined.

“Let her recover,” said the commander. “Hang in there, Lilith. Val’s almost got the translation engines fixed. We’ll have you recovered in a week at most.”

I sighed and braced myself for the prospect of a week with nothing to do but think.

*

Turns out having nothing to do but think was exhausting, because while my thoughts are awesome, they are for other people to deal with. Fortunately for me, my period of mental torture was interrupted by the preparations for Markus’s first Renathion.

Rather than admit we didn’t know any of the local songs, they’d withdrawn him from the singing competition while putting him in massage. He was still in the Pentathlon, but his arm wasn’t moving right and there was no way he was going to win. (Abby had cut a bit too deep. Markus kept giving her shit for it.) In spite of what the old priest said, we were hoping Markus would do well enough at the massage competition that he could win laurels. Otherwise, we’d just have to hope that Val got the translation engines functional enough to patch him up before the next one.

Markus was actually a trained masseuse—man, I was going to be so cool when I was eighty—but the massage competition wasn’t just that part of it. While the contestant actually performed the massage, the judges grilled them on philosophy. And Markus didn’t know any Therian philosophy, but Roel had spent the last day going over the major areas of contention with him. It was better than nothing.

We weren’t just relying on Markus’s ability to improvise, of course. Both Val and Abby had gone out and tracked down some local philosophers, who they were paying for private lessons around the time Markus was scheduled for the massage. We’d feed him answers over his comm on anything he wasn’t ready to answer. We’d also rigged him up with an arm sling that could conceal a hand amplifier. When he spoke, regardless of the actual content, his words would seem extremely profound.

The morning of the competition found us gathering at the Vitares’ carriage, preparing to leave. Kuril was distant and not all that interactive—she’d been up late tinkering with one of the devices in their garage-equivalent. Roel had decided to come along, something I understood was unusual for her, but her head was still buried in her book. A different one than she’d been reading at the ball, which raised several questions about their manufacturing capabilities I was too brain-fogged to consider. Markus was his usual offensively chipper self, having shortened his morning PT to what I’d consider a normal amount of time “just to warm up for the competition.”

And me? I was jumpy.

“Gee, I hope no one tries to kill us again on the way to the temple,” I said.

“Don’t tempt the goddesses,” Kuril shot back. “They take issue with that kind of comment.”

“I’m sure their angels are watching over us,” said Roel.

Five blocks away, the commander was assembling a sniper rifle.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go with that.”