Chapter Nineteen

While Mr. Caesar was speaking with his sister, his lover and champion was returning on foot to Lord Wriothesly's Folly to reconnect with his men, and especially with the specific man who had knowledge of magic. And it was as he entered that warren of alleyways that I caught up with him.

Having grown up in St. Giles, he knew these streets well, and there was a tension in the air that he disliked. He knew he was not being followed—at least by any material agent—but still there was a sense that something clandestine and unfamiliar had crawled into the district and was nesting there like a tangle of rats.

The atmosphere in the Folly was subdued when he entered, and Mistress Quickley watched him warily as he made his way to the bar.

"Long day, Orestes?" she asked.

"Went visiting with a young lady."

The landlady stared at him over an imaginary pair of spectacles. "That don't seem your sort of thing. In any way."

A little distance away, Sal and Kumar had been gambling money they didn't have at a game with crooked dice. Overhearing the comment, Sal turned his head towards the bar. "It's exactly his sort of thing. Forever rescuing people is the captain. It's his worst habit."

"I'll have to find a worse one then," Captain James replied.

Ordinarily, this would have raised a laugh from the company and that would have been the end of it, but Kumar was still looking concerned. "You should, Captain. We may be mere weeks from a fresh war with France and the men need you with them, not off—"

"Off what ?" asked Captain James with a tone that did not resort to menace, but reserved the option for a later date.

"Off chasing cock," said Sal, flatly.

Callaghan looked up from a corner where he'd been lounging and engaging in idle banter with the locals. "Not that we've a mind to keep a man from his appetites," he explained. "And the Caesar lad seems a pleasant enough sort once you get to know him. But you've put a fearsome lot of effort into this one."

A scowl settled onto the captain's face, decided it was comfortable there, and stayed. "Are you forgetting that an innocent girl has been turned to glass?"

"Bad things happen to innocent girls all the time," Jackson pointed out. He'd been lurking as he usually did in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to interject. "Why is this one different?"

"Because her brother had my back," the captain told him. "Same as I've got all yours."

It was hard to watch Jackson move without using the word slink, and he slunk out of the shadows now, hands never quite where one could see them easily. "But have you?" he asked. "Because it's beginning to look like you've roped us in to your private battles and we get nothing in return."

Laying his cards neatly face down, Kumar rose and put himself between the two soldiers. "I wouldn't go quite that far," he said in the restrained tones of the Eton-educated, "but while Mr. Caesar seems a fine enough gentleman—"

"Take it from me"—Jackson's voice was low, level, and sneering—"it's easy enough to seem a fine gentleman. That's how half the rackets in the world are run."

Ordinarily, the captain would have taken his men's concerns in the sincere-yet-blunt manner in which they were intended. But ordinarily, he would not have been drawn quite so much into either passion or fairy intriguing. "John's not running a racket. And what I did for his sister I'd do for any as need it."

"Like with that lass in Ciudad Rodrigo," said Callaghan.

"Or the gentleman in Salamanca," added Sal.

"Or that whole business near Talavera," Callaghan continued. "The thing is, Captain, we know you make a habit of this sort of thing"—he was wrong-ish in this regard; the captain's tendency to find those who needed him to find them was far less habit than it was destiny—"but normally it's in wartime."

Jackson nodded. "This though, this is in London. This is coming at us where we live."

"Again, I wouldn't be quite so dramatic"—Kumar raised his hands in the universal sign of placation—"but morale is becoming an issue. The attack rattled people, and the men are saying they don't think that'll be the end of it."

"There's been snooping," Mistress Quickley explained. "Word is a man was pulled out the river with a bullet in his head. Folks are asking questions and I'll not have my customers brung up before the magistrate."

The brave men of the Irregulars, Captain James knew full well, feared not the French, nor the roar of the cannon, nor the cutthroats and partisans that had haunted the hills of Spain. But many of them had a profound fear of the law. "I'll look into it," he assured her. "But you know me. You all know me. And when have I ever steered you wrong? Ever let you down?"

"Never," Kumar replied at once, Sal and Callaghan both agreeing in near-unison.

"Then again …" Jackson added afterwards, "there's a first time for everything."

And at that, Captain James nodded. He stretched, almost languidly, and then, pivoting sharply, he drove his fist into Jackson's gut, blocked the other man's instinctive counterblow, caught him by the hair, and yanked his head back, baring his throat like a lamb before the knife. "Let me remind you something, Thomas. When we met you were a harsh word and a nod from the gallows, and ever since I've trusted you with my life even though I've heard enough tales to know you deserve to hang six times over. You turn on me now, you'll wish you'd danced with the hemp all those years ago." He shoved Jackson hard away and watched him stumble into his fellow soldiers. "We clear?"

"As a mountain stream, Captain." Jackson's voice always had a whisper of menace in it, but the fact that his hands didn't go immediately for a knife suggested that the matter truly was settled. For the moment at least.

With a comradely instinct for defusing tension, Callaghan gave Jackson a hearty slap on the back. "If it's any consolation, I've been wanting to smack you one myself for a while now."

"I hate to say it," agreed Sal, "but you do bring it out of people."

While the men debated the finer points of quite how badly Jackson had it coming, Captain James turned his attention back to Quickley. "Where's Barryson? I need him."

"In the back," she replied. "But make it sharp. I'm beginning to think you're bad luck."

Captain James had never been considered bad luck in his life and did not like to be considered it now, but he refrained from passing comment. "Just get him out."

As was typical in the Folly, Barryson was summoned by an informal but efficacious relay of people shouting to people who shouted to people until he at last emerged, dishevelled and drunk, from wherever he had been hiding.

"Need your advice," the captain told him, without nicety or formality.

Barryson pressed his hands to his temples. "Not right now, Captain, it's too early in the morning."

"It's after sunset."

"Is it? Fuck." Then, after a moment's hesitation, Barryson looked suspiciously in my general direction. "Hold up, there's something here."

Around the room the Irregulars reached, quite uselessly, for weapons.

"Is it her?" asked the captain.

Barryson shook his head and then immediately regretted it. "Feels different. Familiar though."

"Something from the men in red?"

That drew a less committal reaction. "I'm a sorcerer, Captain, not a fucking encyclopaedia."

Always more drawn to action than discussion, the captain gestured for Barryson to follow him and led the grumbling vitki out into the streets of St. Giles. I followed, confident now that Barryson's powers would permit him to see me only if he wore the right runes over his eyes.

They darted down a sequence of alleys that would doubtless have confounded any mortal pursuer but which presented me—swift and airborne as I am—with no difficulties.

"Well?" demanded Captain James.

Blearily, Barryson scanned the skies and the shadows for me. "Still here."

Drawing his sword, the captain addressed a challenge to the night in general. "Show yourself," he demanded. "If you've a scrap of honour, show yourself."

I do not, of course, have a scrap of honour. At least not that I will permit mortals to judge. But it did strike me that it would hinder my collection of the narrative if I did not give these fellows something to which to attribute their persistent feeling of observation.

So I materialised.

I elected, in the end, to lean towards the dramatic and the gothic. Soldiers are superstitious folk and take omens and portents very seriously. Robing myself in darkness I took the form of a skeletal crone, traces of skin clinging in places to bones otherwise bleached white with age, eyes still incongruously bright in the sockets.

With commendable fortitude, Captain James levelled his sword at me. "What do you want, ghost?"

By way of answer I let out a long, rattling breath (how did I manage this without lungs? Reader, you take things far too literally) and pointed at an ambiguous space between the two gentlemen.

"It's death, Captain," Barryson declared. "Every soldier's constant companion. It was there when we fought the Lady as well. Looked like a crow then, though."

I had, I confess, been hoping for him to reach exactly this conclusion. The advantage of being thought the personification of an abstract concept was that one could come and go at will and arouse little suspicion. It would, regrettably, oblige me to take on a rather more sepulchral aspect while Barryson was around, in case he had the capacity to detect the inconsistency.

Bold, but not to the point of foolishness, Captain James continued to glare but made no effort to actually strike me.

"Just fuck off," he said at last.

"I think begone is more traditional," Barryson suggested.

This did not go down especially well with the captain, but he tried it anyway. "Fine. Begone. Leave us alone. We're busy."

Deciding that wordless was the best way to depart, I allowed myself to fade from view, and then to become a faint eddy of cold air, dancing morosely.

"It'll be the lad," Barryson said, once I was gone. "We had none of that until he showed up."

Captain James scowled. "Not what I wanted to ask you about."

"Never ignore an apparition." From how seriously Barryson was taking this, I was beginning to worry I might have overplayed my hand. "If there's death following you, it'll mean something."

"It means I'll be off to war soon," replied the captain. "As will you. But right now we've a glass girl and a blood cult to think about."

In the dark, Barryson shivered, and only partly because I'd blown an icy wind down his spine. "Those could both kill you just as dead."

"They could. But until they do, how about you help me out?"

Drawing himself to a semblance of attention, Barryson endeavoured to look slightly less of a disgrace to the uniform. "Of course, Captain."

"The lad's sister is falling to pieces," Captain James explained. "And she's made contact with a witch lives around these parts. Thought you might be able to help with one or the other."

Barryson picked at a tooth with his tongue while he was thinking. "Falling apart probably can't be fixed. I can paint her up with strength-runes, but I can't promise it'll work. Glass is still glass and it's made to break. As for the witch"—he gave a loose, insolent shrug—"could be anybody. The slums are swarming with enchanters. Most of them are frauds, but it's the ones that aren't you've got to watch out for."

"Come with us," the captain half ordered.

But Barryson responded to the other half. "This isn't my fight, Captain. The king's not asking me to do this."

"No. I am."

The words hung in the night a moment. I confess that I may have facilitated their hanging just a little.

"Fuck," Barryson said at last. "How many times have you saved my life?"

"Three."

"And how many times have I saved yours?"

"One and a half."

Barryson frowned. "You can't save half a life."

"That time at Cádiz was you and Sal together, you get half each."

"Fuck off."

Withdrawing to a more discreet distance, I let the wind die down. Captain James placed a hand on Barryson's shoulder and looked at him with a sincerity that—moving as I do mostly amongst the rich and the otherworldly—I am unused to seeing. "Come with us. Not for duty. Because it's right."

And Barryson sighed. That was the thing about men like Orestes James. They were very, very hard to say no to.

"Absolutely not," Lady Mary was insisting, back at the Caesar residence.

"It is the only way," her son was insisting back, although in truth his knowledge of matters supernatural in no way qualified him to make such an assertion.

"You are not taking my daughter to a gaming hell at this time of night."

"Well, we cannot very well go by day," Miss Caesar countered, still a little unaccustomed to arguing on the same side as her brother. "We are seeking a witch and I understand them to be nocturnal creatures."

Lady Mary frowned. "That is not a good argument for your safety."

"That Captain James will be with us is argument for my safety," Miss Caesar replied, her many recent experiences having rather altered her position on his acceptability as an escort. "And that I have been there before, and the witch did me no harm."

The elder Mr. Caesar, who had been watching the discussion unfold carefully but thus far avoiding comment, now ceased avoiding it. "That somebody chose not to harm you once is far from being proof that they will never harm you."

It was at around this juncture that Nancy entered, announcing the return of Captain James and the strange gentleman with the marks on his fingers. They were welcomed with all due grace and then dropped immediately into the heart of a family debate.

"There a problem?" asked the captain.

"Mama wishes to keep Mary at home," explained the younger Mr. Caesar. "She apparently believes doing nothing about the fact that her daughter is collapsing into shards of glass is the best thing for her welfare."

Raised to impassivity, Lady Mary made no reaction to the remark, but her husband reacted for her. "John, you will not speak of your mother in such terms."

Although he had learned to be acerbic for a range of very good reasons, Mr. Caesar had enough grace to know when he had gone too far, and too far he had, in this instance, gone. "I am sorry, Mama. This whole business has been hard for all of us."

"Hardest for the young lady, though?" suggested Barryson.

Miss Caesar gasped in adolescent gratitude. "You see how easy that is? Yes, as the gentleman says, this is my affair and I should be free to resolve it as I see fit."

"Resolving matters as you saw fit," the elder Mr. Caesar pointed out, "is what brought us to this in the first place. I do not wish to be harsh, Mary, but trusting unknown magic does not sit well with me."

Ordinarily, Mr. Caesar would have agreed. But if there was ever a time to eschew ordinarily it was when one's sister had been transformed into a rapidly crumbling mineral. "There is simply no way," he said, "that we can free Mary from whatever this sorcery may be if we do not at least consider engaging with sorcery ourselves."

Captain James nodded his agreement. "Barryson, anything to add?"

"Mebbes not that's helpful," Barryson admitted. "Magic can be tricky. I can try to do something about the"—he indicated the cracks that were beginning to creep up Miss Caesar's arms—"but not much, and there's no guarantee any witch'd be able to do more."

"So your advice is that we do not trust this enchantress?" prompted Lady Mary, well schooled in the art of telling people that they were saying what she wanted them to say.

"Don't trust her," Barryson agreed. "But see her. You'll never know if you don't, and the captain and me'll be able to keep her safe while we check."

"You promise?" asked Lady Mary, a little breathless and a little hopeful.

Being of an old faith, Barryson took promises seriously. But lacking convenient access to a sacred boar or a silver arm ring, he had little to swear on. "Hang on." He rummaged in one pocket and after a moment's searching drew out a handful of lint and loose musket balls. "Right, what did you want?"

Lady Mary looked—for want of a better word—flummoxed. "For you to promise to look after my daughter."

Nodding solemnly, Barryson closed his fist tightly around the bullets. "By Freyr, Nj?reur, and the greatest of the gods, I swear on my arms that I will bring your daughter back safe from meeting the witch, or else may my powder fail to catch and may I die on a French bayonet."

"I don't think you have to go quite that far," Lady Mary reassured him.

"He does," explained the captain. "The old gods don't fuck about."

The invocation of direct supernatural retribution against an innocent third party should their daughter come to harm didn't exactly allay the Caesars' fears, but it did at least convince them of the soldiers' sincerity and that they would protect Miss Caesar to the best of their abilities.

Somewhat more difficult for them to accept was the suggestion that Barryson be permitted to paint occult symbols on Miss Caesar's hands and feet in an effort to prevent them from fragmenting further. To this, too, however, they eventually conceded, and a surprisingly timid Miss Caesar—really, what worse did she expect?—extended one hand out to Barryson, who had, by this stage, set himself up in the middle of the parlour with a small parcel of pigments and brushes that he had brought with him for the purpose.

The experiment, however, proved unsuccessful. The surface of Miss Caesar's hands was cracked and, as the paint was applied, shifted almost wilfully, causing Barryson to stop before even the first rune was completed.

"Sorry, lady," he told her. "Magic won't hold. Can't strengthen glass."

Miss Caesar took her hand back, wiping the traces of paint away with a handkerchief. "Nevertheless I am thankful for the effort."

"Proper polite, isn't she?" Barryson observed to the room in general. "Anyway, can't be helped. We going?"

The finer folk of the family were not accustomed to being hurried, but there was indeed little to be gained by tarrying. And so Miss Caesar, her brother, Barryson, and the captain set out into the dark of the London night, intending to visit a sorceress.

Captain James had, in my entirely objective and correct opinion, been right. Covent Garden after dark was no place for anybody. The time the party had chosen for their excursion aligned infelicitously with the great flux of theatregoers making their various ways, in disparate states of drunkenness, to their homes or to other more temporary but perhaps more welcoming lodgings.

The ladies of that district, so infamous in their day and so well recorded by Mr. Harris in his list, were out in similar force. And while Mr. Caesar had no especial disdain for that profession nor its practitioners, their customers were another matter and not people he wished his sister to be exposed to. At least, not on the streets. She would meet many of them at balls and salons, but that could scarcely be avoided.

Nor, it was becoming apparent, could the society of rakes and roisters be avoided at their destination. The temple was, after all, a gambling hell as much as it was a house of the goddess, and such places attracted the wealthy and dissolute like iron attracts rust.

So Mr. Caesar was very, very glad of the military men beside him as they pressed through the crowds and into the temple. He had gambled a little, of course, it was the done thing for men of his age, but he had done so more for the appearance of the matter than out of any real love of chance.

Since my exile to the mortal world, I have learned to loathe crowds. The amount of time physical beings spend crammed into tiny, cramped, hot rooms that smell of sweat and desperation—and spend in them willingly no less—amazes me. Looking back, I can find in myself a profound empathy for what the dandyish Mr. Caesar must have been feeling in this moment. At the time, I was both invisible and immaterial and rose, insubstantial as smoke, to the ceiling, whence I could look down on the throng literally, as well as figuratively.

With as much confidence as she could muster, Miss Caesar walked forwards, hoping that Amenirdis would stop weaving amongst the tables and come to her side.

Captain James, however, was not so patient. He strode through the crowd trailing Barryson and the Caesars in his wake and put himself directly in the path of the hostess.

"You the witch?" he asked. And then when she looked around he followed up quickly with "Nell?"

Amenirdis gave an enigmatic smile. "Not a name I've used in a long time."

"Since when are you a sorcerer?" asked the captain, perhaps slightly more incredulous than was reasonable.

"Since when are you an officer?"

"Fair point."

Feeling, ironically given her predicament, overlooked, Miss Caesar spoke up. "Do you know one another?"

"We both grew up in the rookery," Amenirdis explained. "And both left it. And both returned."

Mr. Caesar cast a weary glance at Captain James. "Does she always talk like this?"

"Always did," the captain replied, "but I think she's got worse."

Doing her best to rise above the bickering, Miss Caesar looked at the witch almost pleadingly. "You said that if I needed you, I could come back."

"What I said," Amenirdis replied, "was that you would do well to stay, and could come back when you wished. I made no offer of aid."

"Then you will not help me?"

A patron, stumbling away from a hazard table, took two steps towards Miss Caesar with an expression on his face that could be best described as hovering between covetous and lascivious. He reached out a hand and had that hand immediately caught by Captain James, who twisted it at a sharp angle and turned the man away.

Amenirdis shook her head. "No."

A tension began in Mr. Caesar's fingertips and ran up his arms to his spine. "So we have entirely wasted our time."

She shook her head again.

"Look here, miss," Barryson tried. "I know how this all works, but it's crowded and we've been on a fuck of a walk, so what do you say we find somewhere to sit down and we can have a proper talk with slightly less riddles."

"If nothing else," I told Amenirdis, "it will make it far easier for me to follow what everybody is saying."

Staunchly refusing to react to that particular point, Amenirdis reached out and took Miss Caesar by the hand, leading her through the crowds and the tables and the statues of ancient gods to a narrow staircase and up to a set of rooms far dingier and far less conducive to raucousness than the halls below. They were cluttered with the prosaic necessities of life—cooking pans stacked higgledy-piggledy in a basin and clothes scattered over most surfaces. Only a tiny shrine in one corner of the room suggested its occupier had any tie to the old gods.

Captain James looked around at the chaos. "Fuck me, Nell."

"Amenirdis."

"Fuck me, Amenirdis. You have not changed."

Without waiting for permission, Barryson plonked himself down onto the bed that was the only free item of furniture in the room. "Right, let's get down to business. She's falling apart"—he pointed at Miss Caesar—"my gods don't want to do much about it. Yours might. Go."

The bluntness of the common soldier was still unfamiliar to Miss Caesar. "I don't believe we need to be so curt. We are guests here."

Amenirdis knelt with her back to her makeshift shrine and bid the others make themselves comfortable, which led to Miss Caesar perching on the end of the bed while her brother and Captain James spread out somewhat awkwardly on the floor. "You are guests in the house of a goddess, child," she told her. "And goddesses, as a rule, are not patient beings. It is better we speak quickly."

"Even though you've already said you're not going to help?" asked Mr. Caesar.

"You want a quicker answer than no?" Although I mislike mortals, I will confess that Amenirdis, like most witches, had a style I found acceptable.

"I want a quicker answer than ‘No, but keep talking,'" Mr. Caesar clarified.

The shrine was lit by candles, and the candlelight framed Amenirdis like a halo. "Then try this. I will not help her, but she will help herself."

The light inside Miss Caesar glimmered. "How?"

"There is to be a ball," Amenirdis began, "and before you ask, I know this because everybody with an eye to otherworlds knows it."

"She's right," confirmed Barryson. "The elf-court makes a fucking racket. They aren't subtle people."

Captain James stretched out his legs and crossed one boot across the other. "We know about the ball. What we don't know is how to play it."

"Like every queen," Amenirdis replied, a little gnomically, "and every goddess."

"But what does that mean?" asked Miss Caesar, half-plaintive half-hopeful.

"If it means anything," added her brother, rather more guarded.

Barryson made a what-can-you-do gesture. "She's a witch, you don't come to a witch for an easy answer."

"Maybe," Captain James conceded, rather begrudgingly. "But we didn't come for no answer either."

A half smile played across Amenirdis's lips. "The army has not taught you patience, Orestes James."

"Wasn't really meant to," the captain replied. "And as good as it's been to catch up, could you perhaps just tell us what to do."

"Please," repeated Miss Caesar, with more actual pleading and less frustration.

A deadly serenity crept into Amenirdis's voice. "Very well. Do this, and only this: Know your power."

"I do not have any power," Miss Caesar protested. And it was, I had to admit, quite a pertinent point.

"That is not what my goddess tells me."

And although her cousin had been rather burned by her own encounter with the divine, Miss Caesar could not help but be a little intrigued. "What does she tell you?"

"That we are the daughters of Nubian queens. The inheritors of the Mali empire and the legacy of Carthage. That our ancestors made the world quake before there was a Europe."

"With respect," Mr. Caesar replied, "I have learned not to trust goddesses. Besides, you're talking about ancient history."

And again, Amenirdis half smiled. "You want to know how to fight a creature made of ideas from a world where time has no meaning, and you think ancient history isn't important?"

"I—" Miss Caesar sounded hesitant at first, but grew surer as she spoke. "I don't see how it's the same as power."

A look that could almost have been pity entered Amenirdis's eyes. "You have the power you take. You traded your strength and your beauty for hands of glass. But you can have them back."

"How?" asked Miss Caesar, her voice carrying the unmistakable and wholly unearned note of hope.

"Can you please, " I asked from my position in the corner, "give away only some of our secrets."

"All magic is woven from stories," Amenirdis said, far more plainly than she had any right to and over my vehement protestations. "You need to make this story your own. You bargained for beauty, but you lost more beauty than you gained. Demand redress from the queen and she must give it to you; the lords and ladies of the Other Court are cruel and deceitful beings, but their laws are traps for them as well as for you."

This was … half a truth. And if I have to tell you even now that half a truth is worse than a lie, then I despair at you, I really do. Not for the first time I found myself wondering what Amenirdis's game was. To her servants—to some of them at least—Isis was every goddess and every power, so it was not impossible that the witch was seeking to serve Titania's ends. But either way I mistrusted her.

"That seems too simple," replied Mr. Caesar, edging unconsciously closer to Captain James for support and reassurance. "What do you think, Barryson?"

"I think you shouldn't fuck with elves," Barryson replied, although he had the courtesy not to look directly at Miss Caesar when he said it. "But if you must, then I'd always say to go in strength. And make an offering to Freyr."

Miss Caesar looked aghast. "An offering?"

"Boar," Barryson suggested. "Or horse. Dog if you have to, though there's less good eating on them."

Miss Caesar's eyes widened. "I would never eat a dog. Or a horse."

"When you're in the hills of Spain," the captain told her, "without supplies or reinforcements, and the French on every road and in every village, you'll eat whatever you can damned find."

"There is a reason that ladies do not go to war," replied Miss Caesar, piously.

Captain James shook his head. "Ladies go to war all the time. Every army drags women and merchants and children behind them."

"Not all women are ladies," Miss Caesar pointed out.

"A poor woman's blood's the same colour as yours," replied Captain James and then, realising that this was not the most sensitive analogy in the context, corrected himself, "as a rich woman's."

Amenirdis had been listening to this conversation with interest and now turned to look Miss Caesar in the eyes. "You have my advice. You may do with it what you will. And if the goddess speaks truly, we will meet again."

"May the goddess not speak truly?" asked Miss Caesar.

"She is more rebellious in her heart than a million men," replied Amenirdis, rather gnomically, "more choice than a million gods, more to reckon than a million spirits. Divinities are to be feared, child, not to be trusted."

Mr. Caesar's expression was growing increasingly sour. "That seems perilously close to useless. Must all witches be so vague?"

"Pretty much," said Barryson. "Magic is fucking weird and fucking complicated."

Amenirdis laughed, and for the first time there was the sound of St. Giles in her voice. "He's not wrong. The world is chaos. We try to understand it and to shape it, but we cannot unsee it."

Being the ranking gentleman in the group, Mr. Caesar should formally have taken control of the visit. But what should formally be, he was beginning to realise, was often not what should really be, or what actually was. After all, Barryson, rough though he may have been, understood the old gods as nobody else in the group did; the captain, though he may not have been a gentleman, remained an officer; and Mary, though she was somewhat younger and substantially more female than the rest of the party, was their whole reason for being there in the first place. Mr. Caesar, by contrast, was with them primarily to be supportive. And there was a liberation of a sort in that. So he let his sister take the lead; that, after all, was what the man he was trying to be would do. To his relief and my disappointment, it did not end badly. Rising gracefully to her feet, Miss Caesar bobbed a perfect curtsey to Amenirdis and thanked her for her hospitality. With her heart hidden from me by absence and Amenirdis's hidden by the blessings of the Lady of Ten Thousand Names, I found myself in the narratively uncomfortable position of genuinely not knowing what was going to happen next.

I understand that you mortals relish this feeling. And of all the things I fail to understand about you, this is by far the most perplexing.