“Grandfather,” a young man said. He was astonishingly handsome, as one might expect of the son of Gavin and Karris Guile. He had Atashian caramel skin, with strong brows and an aquiline nose, and wore a fine gray tunic with slashes of color to match the many colors in his light blue eyes.

She knew him! He was the one who tried to kill her in the fort on Ruic Head. Tripped her, knocked her sprawling, took her pistol, and then ordered his men to kill her. This, this was Kip’s brother?

The young man didn’t simply bow; he prostrated himself on the floor before the promachos.

I’m going to hate myself for this.

But Teia couldn’t bear to miss this conversation. Holding the cloak tight around her legs and looking down, she slipped between the big Lightguards and into the solar.

Andross Guile stood silently staring at his grandson. He didn’t seem impressed. “Up,” he said.

Zymun stood. “I, uh, I lost the coin you sent me, the pirates, you understand. But I can draw it from memory. I’m a deft hand with a pen. Penmanship, art, luxin designs, I excel at them all. And of course I know the phrase you told me to say when we met: ‘Of red cunning, the youngest son, shall cleave father and father and father and son.’”

“You don’t carry much family resemblance,” Andross said.

“And Kip does?” Zymun shot back instantly. “He’s darker than Gavin!”

Teia could see that Andross Guile didn’t much like being addressed as an equal. “How much do you know of Guile family history?” Andross asked.

“I know we rule,” the young man said.

“You know we rule?” Andross said, mocking. “And you presume to correct me?”

“Not a correction, my lord, simply standing up for myself. I thought you would appreciate—”

“I would appreciate the respect I deserve. You grovel in one heartbeat and ‘correct’ me the next?”

Zymun looked aghast. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, my lord. I know but little of the family history. The—folk—who raised me were not keen on teaching Guile history. I stand to learn.” He bowed his head, and if Teia weren’t already disposed to hate him, she would have believed him chastened.

“Hmm,” Andross Guile said. He said nothing for a long time. It stretched to an uncomfortably long time. Grinwoody stood still as a statue. Andross drank his liquor slowly, and Zymun finally squirmed, but didn’t say anything.

Finally, Andross said, “Well then, we shall begin your education, and perhaps at the end have a little test, to see if you have the Guile mind. If you fail, you’re useless to me, even if you are what you say. A stupid Guile is no Guile at all.”

Teia’s heart soared, while Zymun nodded with feigned confidence over fear.

Andross said, “During the Blood War, some prominent families began arranging marriages with an eye to war instead of to political alliances. The Guiles were the first of these. My great-great-great-grandmother Ataea was from a small noble family that supplied half of the horses for the chariot races in Ruthgar and Blood Forest, and almost all the champions. Galatius Guile was a drunk who was bent on wagering away the family fortune at those races. She rescued his fortune by telling him which horses to bet, and soon stole his heart. She convinced him that marrying down—to marry her—would be the bravest act of his cowardly life. It turned out to also be the smartest one. She, like many, despaired of the Blood War ever truly ending, so she brought the lessons of horse breeding to the Guile house. She was a savage but shrewd judge of character, and she kept a ledger book of genealogy. Her husband, like every other noble she met or could learn about, got a single line: ‘Galatius Guile: drunk, gambler, a bit dimwitted, blue eyes, no drafting, inspires loyalty in family and beyond.’ Later in her life, her journals got more extensive, noting skin tone, musculature, bravery, height, and relative fertility. It helped, of course, that she herself had eighteen children and lived to be a hundred and five years old. She arranged marriages that defied politics, bringing in the blood of the brilliant but impoverished, the hale but unconnected. Where other families fought over who would marry the beautiful or the rich, thus driving up the cost of acquiring those matches, she instead believed that having smart warrior-drafters would result in riches and power both—in the long term. She even birthed several bastards of her own from the great men of her day, and clearly noted the fathers in her book, with no apparent shame.

“In that first generation, she was either very, very good; very, very lucky; or both, because almost every child born was a drafter. That she was similarly lucky with several other attributes wouldn’t become clear for a few more generations. Which pleased her. After all, if other families are becoming smarter and more magical, too, where’s your relative advantage over them? In fact, no one would have even known the logic behind her scheme if she hadn’t infuriated one of her grandsons by refusing to let him marry a girl he loved. He rebelled and ran off to a Blood Forest family that gladly took his secrets, and later, when Ataea refused to pay his ransom, his life.”

“Nice people,” Zymun said.

But the sarcasm hit a wall. For a few moments, Teia almost took hope in how much Andross Guile seemed to dislike Zymun. Then she realized he didn’t much like anyone. Or maybe he’d just been so powerful for so long that he never bothered to conceal it when someone displeased him.

He was the opposite of a slave, and yet his constant truths were no more winsome than a slave’s constant lying smiles.

“No one has kept that book as well as Ataea Guile did, and war has intervened again and again, killing men and women before they could contribute their children to this family. Bastards have been brought in, and their patrimony concealed. But in eight generations of faithful record-keeping—and sometimes nine and ten and twelve, for Ataea researched the family before her time back as far as she could—the Guiles have learned a few things about what’s heritable, what’s highly heritable, and what seems to be a dice roll. Of course, I don’t believe in dice, but I understand that there are systems whose workings I don’t understand. A lesson you might do well to learn.”

Zymun looked appropriately chastened. “Yes, grandfather,” he said.

“Grandfather? Haven’t connected it yet, have you? All this I’ve just said, what does it mean?”

“My lord?” Zymun asked, and Teia could tell that he hadn’t been paying attention at all. Who takes their first interview with Andross Guile, with their entire fate in his hands, and doesn’t pay attention to the first thing he says?

“Do you think me stupid, boy?” Andross asked.

“Of course not,” Zymun said breezily, but it sounded like a lie. Who spoke so fearlessly to Andross Guile?

Andross Guile slapped Zymun across the face, hard.

Zymun’s fists balled and his whole arm tightened. Somehow, Grinwoody went from standing off to the side with a serving tray to being right there, serving tray vanished, ready to intervene.

“One of the things we’ve tried hard to breed out with every generation,” Andross Guile said. “Impulsivity. Those who can’t control themselves are always failures. I see this is a weakness for you. Expect it to be tested again. Seems endemic with the Guile blood, but the best of us translate it to boldness, nimbleness, readiness to seize an opportunity. The rest simply chase the first thing to come along, and lose interest before they run it down and capture it.