builders knew how long crawling through bat muck and gnawing raw bones. She hoped she could remain glad to never know. 'But I don't believe anyone knew where I was.'
'Then how did you come to be there?' Perceval asked, just as Rien volunteered, 'We got help and directions from a necromancer.' Perceval turned back in time to see Rien's guilty glance at Gavin, but Gavin never shifted.
Tristen, however, craned over his shoulder to look at Perceval, then watched her walk back, balancing mugs, to sit again beside Rien. 'You're trusting of a stranger.' His tone ruined it, though—he might be trying for menace, but he only sounded avuncular.
Which, Perceval supposed, was exactly what he was. Their father's brother.
'Only strangers who can cook,' she replied. 'And anyone who would bury himself under a metric ton of bat shit to fool us deserves to. We mean to try to stop a war, Lord Tristen—'
'Don't Lord me,' he interrupted, the electric blue eyes narrowing in colorless sockets, 'and I shan't Lady you.'
'And so are all the forms of courtesy defeated,' Perceval said, but she smiled. 'So are you for war?'
'When I was free, I was for any war I could get,' he said. He touched the hilt of his broken unblade. 'Now that I am free again ...' He shrugged. 'Durance vile can alter your expectations. You think someone is machining this war, Perceval?'
'Ariane Conn,' she said, without hesitation. 'And somebody on the Engine side, too. Who is willing to risk biological warfare. And to arrange things so that I might be captured by Rule, so as to bring the contagion among them.'
That was dangerously close to topics Perceval was not yet ready to discuss—not without first gathering some intelligence—so she drank soup and then changed the subject before someone could pursue it. 'In any case, I'm feeling schooled. And I do not think your sister is the Commodore who is needed in Rule.'
'Commodore?'
'I'm sorry,' Rien said. 'La—I mean, Ariane killed your father.'
'Good riddance,' Tristen said, his woolly white braid sliding forward over his shoulder. Despite two elastics, the end was fraying. 'But how can she have declared herself Commodore, when I am legitimate, and so much older?'
For the time being, even Tristen seemed content to avoid conflict. They skulked and hid, Gavin their ears and Rien's unsettling, newly intrinsic sense of geography their guide. They saw no one else alive, and Rien was both grateful for and worried by it.
They might have been not too far from Benedick's residence on a straight line, but many of the corridors were blocked or ruined. Two days' careful and unobtrusive journey followed. Tristen acted impervious, Rien thought— but she also noticed that he slept propped in corners, and that she'd wake and find him staring into space or reading on a hand-screen he'd scavenged in one of the rooms they bunked in, his nose pressed almost to the display as if his sight were failing.
As they came closer to the border between Rule and Engine, the travelers saw at last evidence of Ariane's war. Foliage scorched and trampled by battle, a blasted bulkhead. A body, which Perceval knelt beside and brushed with her fingertips.
'His name was Alex,' she said, and rasped her hands over her stubble in the thinking gesture of someone accustomed to long hair. The prickles looked as if they must itch, but perhaps knights, like ladies, did not scratch.
Gavin seemed to have the knack of riding shoulders; when Rien hunkered to wait, he aided her balance.
Tristen, in his blue fleece and salvaged sandals, knelt, too. He placed one hand on the dead man's forehead, as if in benediction. And then he began to go through his pockets.
'Sir!' Perceval protested. And Tristen paused, and only looked at her.
They stared, back and forth a moment; Rien noticed the sameness in the shapes of their features. Though Perceval's face was squarer, and Tristen's was long, they were both thin and tall, with deep-set eyes. His nose wandered; hers was incongrously pert. Nevertheless, Rien thought the resemblance would have been striking if Perceval still had her hair, and if Tristen's was pigmented rather than wooly and white and if the line of his jaw was not concealed by the beard.
He glanced down, his lashes thick and ivory against his blue-tinged cheek, and drew the dead man's sheath and knife from his boot. There was a holster for a sidearm, but the pistol was not in evidence. Tristen, however, did pull two clips of caseless ammunition from his pockets.
Silently, he offered bullets and knife to Perceval.
'You take it,' she said, without looking at his hands.
They continued on.
They made camp when they grew tired, in another abandoned section of crew quarters. The irrigation system had failed here, and nothing but crisped brown stems grew in the beds and wall boxes. The air could have been fresher, for it—but there was running water from the taps, though it was cold only, and Rien, whose menses had started, took the opportunity to scrub herself with a soapy rag and wash her hair. Gavin stood on the edge of the basin and studied a cracked dry valve from the irrigation pipe, turning it over and over in his claw, before eventually putting it in his beak and swallowing it, like a chicken gagging down pea gravel for its crop.
Later, as they sat waiting for Tristen to cook dinner, Rien searched toiletry drawers until she found a cracked tube of conditioner. It had dried into a solid, oily cake, but it smelled all right. She rubbed it between her hands to oil the palms, stroked it into the drying frizz, and began picking through the tangles curl by curl with a heavy wide- toothed comb. It broke into ringlets, damp, but even with the oil on it, it would never stay that way.
Tristen was still flipping pancakes when they heard the voices. He set the spatula aside, turned down the induction plate almost as far as it would go—there was a click when it shut down—and glanced up at the overhead light. Turning it off would of course be incredibly obvious.
It didn't matter, Rien suspected. The smell of cooking was all through the air.
'Space,' she said, without breath, as the tromp of heavily shod feet approached. She slipped her comb into her pocket and crouched, wishing she had something on hand to use as a club; she'd feel far more comfortable with that sort of weapon than anything with a point.
But across the room, Tristen's hands were like bones on the black hilt of his appropriated blade, and that was reassuring. And it was reassuring as well that when Perceval stood, Pinion flaring like a cloak, and squared her shoulders, her face was as serene as any angel's. With only a glance between them, she and Tristen went to flank the door.
Rien could see the people advancing in her head. There was a sort of Y-intersection ten meters down the corridor, and they were coming along the left-hand path. She could tell from the echoes and the map in her head, and that was a very strange thing indeed. She strained, trying to pick out words, voices, but all she heard was a marching cadence, and it didn't sound familiar.
Not of Rule, then, and that was something. But it might be whoever had locked up Tristen, and it might be whoever in Engine had sent Perceval to die in Rule.
Gavin hunkered on the back of a chair, wings half up and neck elongated, as if he scented the air. And then Tristen's chin came up and a little smile lifted the corner of his mustache that Rien could see in profile. He slipped the knife back into its sheath on the belt he used to cinch his too-big trousers, raised his hands beside his head, and stepped out into the corridor, beckoning Rien and Perceval after with a tilted head and an arrogant little cup of his hand.
Perceval looked at Rien.
Rien shrugged.
Perceval shrugged right back, and turned to follow.
She stayed Gavin with a hand gesture. She'd given up trying to figure out how he maneuvered when his eyes were always closed, but in any case he was more effective backup than she. He froze in place, those fanning wings
