The dead look on my face doesn’t have to be painted on. It’s close enough to truth to bring those memories close to the surface again. The detail about Dervani’s pistol was particularly good. How would Gavin know of a small secondary pistol carried by one of Dazen’s retainers?

“No,” Eirene whispered. “No.”

“My mother didn’t understand. She never saw battle. She thought running away made your father a coward. Truth is, every man only gets so much heroism to spend in a day, and your father had far more than most. He charged two warring gods, and would have made all the difference if he hadn’t been betrayed by a broken flint. When he charged me, he didn’t know I couldn’t draft any more, and after what he’d seen me do it was brave indeed … But more than that, my mother couldn’t allow herself to hate me for killing my brother. I was all she had left. So she blamed your father. She thought that if he hadn’t brought that pistol into my hand her other son would still be alive … I think she knew, rationally, that it wasn’t fair to blame him, and by extension your family. But she did. She knew she could keep herself from acting on the hatred she felt for you—for me, really—but she couldn’t keep a pleasant mask on her face while she did it. She might even have been right. I wonder sometimes, if I would have taken my brother prisoner if there had only been that javelin there, or would I have rammed that through his throat? The pistol made it easier, but … it’s an idle fancy. I was in a killing mood. My mother blamed your father, and probably believed that you would blame her in turn, if you knew the truth of what I had done.”

“You … you demon,” Eirene said.

“If it makes you feel better, I’m sorry that my brother’s war cost you your mentor, in addition to all else. By Orholam’s beard, I’d give two fingers to have your father back.” He wiggled his half-hand at her.

Karris, you told me once that there was something in me that wanted my own destruction. I denied it. I was a fool.

“Fuck you! Burn in hell!”

“One thing I knew about Dervani; he wasn’t a man to torture the helpless. Stubborn, they said, but honorable. He’s got that on you.”

It seemed like a stupid thing to do: antagonize a woman whom he’d just told such lies. But you have to let the fish swallow the hook if you want it to set right. If he was angry enough to say something so obviously stupid to her face, surely he couldn’t also be so coldly cunning at the same moment to weave a flawless fabric of lies, could he?

She stared at him, silent, arms folded, almost hugging herself, face inscrutable.

But Gavin had to play a bigger game. What was happening under the surface here was the real test. Eirene was the real power in Ruthgar. The satrapah, Euterpe Ptolos, was under her thumb. Eirene’s father Dervani had joined the Color Prince. Whatever else the man had been doing for sixteen years—and it had been Dervani, Gavin had recognized the man, if not immediately. Whatever else he’d done in the intervening years, Dervani had thrown in his lot with the pagans at the end. By driving a wedge between Eirene and her father, Gavin was really serving the Seven Satrapies, for if Eirene’s hatred blotted out all else, she might drag Ruthgar over to the Color Prince’s side.

Such a move would be stupid beyond belief. Those at the top have nothing to gain in a revolution like the Color Prince was proposing. Inviting an aggrieved army into your city? You shouldn’t even invite a friend’s army into your cities.

But hatred and envy birth self-destruction in every heart that gives them a bed to breed in. To dislodge the Guiles, this woman without children might be willing to risk losing all her family owned as well.

So I lie, in service of the greater good. As always.

Still she stared.

There was nothing to be gained now. If she felt pushed into a decision, she’d doubt it in the future. Whatever action she took, she had to feel that it was hers, and inevitable with what she knew, then it would be irreversible, and their alliance unbreakable.

The fingers? She might never pay for that. Or at least not for a long time. Gavin would have to bank the coals of his rage, let them glow warm under the earth. Someday. Maybe. But not today. Not soon.

He didn’t hold her gaze. He looked at her, glanced away, looked back, easing his shoulders into a slump, as if he felt exposed. Not a challenge. It was important to let her think this through.

Finally, she said, “After the wars, my family had estates everywhere, but many of them had been devastated. They required huge piles of gold to restore. Tens of thousands of danars to import vines for the vineyards, to buy new slaves for the cotton fields, to pay the tuitions of drafters and indenture them afterward, to rent and then finally to buy the river barges to transport our goods. New axes for logging, iron for the brackets of new water wheels, millstones which if cut from local softer stone would cost half as much but only last a third as long versus those we shipped in. But every time I would do my calculations in my father’s ledgers—actually, the ledgers my father’s steward Melanthes kept, but he died during the Blood War—every time, I would see these line items: ‘Cost of Hired Guards,’ and sometimes ‘Bribes to Blood Forest Conns,’ and ‘Losses to Pirates.’ And at the end of the year, ‘Repairs for Damage from Raids’ and ‘Replacement Drafters from Raids.’

“Eventually, of course, I filled those ledgers and moved on to new ones, but I left those columns. And I studied what those costs had been. Old Melanthes was our steward for forty-five years, and he could predict those costs within a few points per hundred after a while. When you know you’re going to lose one boat in ten when they make a Tyrean orange run, you know what sort of profit you need to make in order to justify trying next year. Over time, it matters. My father never realized that Melanthes was the real reason we even had estates by the time the False Prism’s War and the Blood War were finished, though we lost too many sons and daughters.” She took a deep breath. “But every time I picked up those ledgers to make a decision about shipping this or that, I saw those costs. I haven’t had to pay those.

“I’m very good with numbers, and I’ve compared my numbers to Melanthes’s. And what I’ve learned, what I can never deny when I see those columns laid out before me, is that I owe you, Gavin Guile. How much is a matter of what assumptions I make. For though those parts-per-hundred losses are unyielding—I would have lost men and treasure to raids and murder and piracy at some point regardless—when I might have lost them matters most. If you lose a prize stallion and a mare from a herd of hundreds, it stings. If you lose them before you ever breed the herd, it destroys you. So, I worked my abacus many different ways and calculated what I could. I chose not to quantify any emotional toll of losing family members or trusted servants and slaves. I also found it impossible to quantify the merely possible, but significant cost of my own lost time, should enough of my own close family have been killed that I would have had to marry and bear my own children. Women in my family have tended to have quick recoveries, but it was impossible to calculate how many pregnancies I might have suffered, or exactly how much work I might have been able to do while in the late stages of pregnancy or early stages of recovery. And of course, I didn’t assign any value to not having to marry or bear children—as I now don’t. Given my present wealth, I would pay a great deal more for such a privilege than I would have were circumstances quite different. You see you present me with conundrums.”