“I’m baggage?” the Blackguard inductee named Ben-hadad asked.

But Ironfist ignored him, noticing all the Blackguards looking at him, grinning their fool faces off. “What is this?!” Ironfist barked at them. “Lives in the balance. The whole point of the Blackguard, and you’re lolling about? Skimmer! Now!”

They scattered like deer at a musket shot, and only then did a small, satisfied smile steal over his face. He looked at Karris and sniffed. “The room slave told me your plan. Terrible plan. This one here will make it work, though.” He made a grudging motion to Ben-hadad.

“I … what?” Ben-hadad asked. His hinged spectacles, with their multiple lenses sticking up, looked like alarmingly distended eyebrows.

“The baggage.”

Ben-hadad looked nonplussed. Then, “Oh! Oh, the dress! What’s the dress for?” He pulled out of a bag the frilliest riot of a dress that Karris had ever seen.

“Lady White Oak needs a maid,” Ironfist said. “The dress is for you.”

Ben-hadad’s mouth dropped open. He looked down at the dress in his hands. Dislodged by his movement, the lenses on one side of his spectacles drooped.

“He’s joking,” Karris told Ben-hadad.

“He’s, he is?” Ben-hadad asked. Relief washed over his face.

Ironfist looked as close to smug as he got. “You do gears and whatnot. Machines?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben-hadad said, confused. “But I’ve never—”

“You’ll make one for Lady White Oak.” Ironfist seemed to stress ‘lady.’ “While we ride.”

So they’d started, in those hours before dawn, burning a fortune’s worth of magnesium torches to do what drafting they could early. It was enough to get halfway through building the skimmer.

Usually the Blackguards made sea chariots. With the difficulty of the drafting and the expense in life lost to draft so much so quickly, their craft needed to last more than a few voyages to be worth making. Thus they made heavier, durable, and slower craft.

Not this time.

But even with seven of them together, they couldn’t draft the craft as quickly as Gavin could have done it alone. The man could intuit the shape and density of luxins required, and, of course, didn’t need to communicate which luxin needed to go where to anyone else. He just did it.

Karris spent all morning as they crossed the waves trying to come up with a better plan. She had no doubt Commander Ironfist was doing the same. From his silence, she guessed he had failed, too.

Five exhausted Blackguards traipse into the middle of fifty thousand angry civilians whipped into a frenzy by the brutal chariot races and whatever lies the Nuqaba had dreamed up and do … what, precisely?

There just weren’t good options. Not with time running out. What could Karris do? Threaten the Nuqaba? With what? Bribe her? With what? Say that an army would avenge Gavin? Perhaps even true, but it would come too late for him.

She looked at Ironfist. “Could you…?” The woman was his sister. He kept a picture of her in his room. She knew he thought about her often.

“You don’t know the Nuqaba,” he said. He never called her his sister; he never used her name. “If she even sees me, this only gets worse.”

Dawn was nearly six hours past now, the sun perilously near noon.

Around the skimmer, the five drafters who’d come with her—two of the others had exhausted themselves building the craft and stayed behind, not worth the weight they would add to the skimmer—were all bent against the wind, cutting up the Great River past galleys and galleasses. Everyone other than Karris and Ben-hadad wore eye caps rather than spectacles, enduring the glue and the discomfort in a trade for keeping them on and being able to see even at these great speeds.

Everywhere, they attracted stares. None of the people on shore had ever seen a ship move at such speed, and though they might have heard rumors of skimmers and sea chariots, seeing one was different.

They angled the skimmer up river channels. Karris and Commander Ironfist both had been here before. The hippodrome was carved into Rathcore Hill—the smaller twin to Jaks Hill in an otherwise flat plain. But while the hippodrome complex was elevated above the floodplain, a deep canal had been dug to allow ferries to transport horses and goods directly to the hippodrome’s basement.

As they approached the vast iron gate blocking river access, Commander Ironfist looked at Karris. “New plan?” he asked.

They both looked at the defenses. The gate itself could be blasted open or opened by a guard at the counterweights. The soldiers guarding the gate and the hippodrome, ironically, were wearing Guile livery. The Guiles must be sponsoring these races, so they were in charge of the expense and manpower of securing the hippodrome during the race and clearing and cleaning it afterward.

It would have been a great stroke of luck if they’d had hours to call the Guile steward, convince him or her who Karris was, and enlist them to help. There was no time for that.

We could just kill them. Tragic, but their lives against Gavin’s? Karris was willing to make that trade.

But there were at least a dozen of them, most of them at the gate to the basement itself, where someone was shouting up the results to the races to them as they happened.

They could kill twelve, no problem. But how many more were around the hippodrome, within a minute’s run? Karris and Ironfist could get in, but what if Gavin wasn’t there yet? Or what if he’d already been taken above?

“The timing’s impossible,” Karris said.

Ironfist veered the skimmer into an open space between two riverboats. They spilled out onto the dock, ignoring the stares of the merchants and sailors. “Ben-hadad, Essel, guard the boat. Ben-hadad, that spot there.” He pointed out in the canal. “Make sure it stays clear. If it isn’t deep, make it so.”

“How am I supposed—”

“Your problem. Essel, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. Hezik, with us.”

“Ben-hadad, do whatever you’re going to do.”

He approached her warily. “This is not going to be comfortable,” he said. “Hold your left eye open. You can’t blink.”

She did and he lifted a tiny lens on delicate luxin fingers, swabbing the lens itself one last time to make sure it was free of dust—and then placed it directly on her eye. It was about as enjoyable as she’d guessed getting poked in the eye would be. She blinked.

“No—you weren’t supposed to blink—” Ben-hadad said. “Is it still in? Next one.”

They repeated the process. It took two tries, and left her streaming tears.

But she looked up at him and Ben-hadad said, “I’m a genius.”

Commander Ironfist grabbed her face in his meaty hands and turned her toward him. It was so disconcerting when he touched her face.

He looked troubled, but said nothing, merely nodding.

Ben-hadad had not only made almost impossibly thin blue lenses that sat directly on her eyes, he had patterned them exactly to the luxin patterns already on her retinas. To anything other than long study, Karris would appear to simply have blue eyes.

“How long?” she asked.

“A few hours. Try not to blink too hard.”

It would have been great, she’d joked, if she drafted blue. Ben-hadad took the criticism to heart, and had incorporated a bit of red luxin—which someone else had needed to draft for him, on a speeding, windy skimmer—into the lens itself, but only directly over the pupil. With the black pupil behind that dot of red, it was unnoticeable. One lens red, one lens green.