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Ha, and Mer is angry with her ? Lilari wants to scream. (She wants to ask forgiveness.) She wants to strangle him. (She wants him to lie with her in a world where survival doesn’t mean compromise; where inevitably they starve to death for their high-minded ideals.)

“Well,” she says, a spark of cruelty in her voice, “then I suppose you’ll be useless, won’t you.”

She turns away and he takes a breath so sharp she feels it in her lungs, like the puncture of a rib. “Come here,” he says. Softly commanding. Gently tempting.

As if in a trance, she pivots to face him. As if, in this moment or any other, he has only ever had to ask.

Mer scrubs one hand around his mouth, the thickness of his beard.

The look he gives her is one of pure, slow delectation.

His dark eyes follow the curves of her waist. Lilari feels a sudden, inescapable awareness of her nipples.

His lips part and so do hers. He leans ever so slightly toward her and she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe.

Then she takes a step to close the distance.

Then another, because the first didn’t seem like enough.

“If what you want from me is the seduction of another woman,” Mer says calmly, “then yes, you’ll find me quite useless.

I have only ever wanted one woman.” He leans away, such that she can grieve the distance.

So that she can watch his eyes linger with palpable curiosity on the motion of her throat.

Then he leans forward again, his nose ghosting along the edge of hers. His lips tracing the curve of her cheek.

He turns his head to speak in her ear, one hand rising to span the edge of her jaw, the line of her throat. “If anyone had offered me a choice, I would have chosen you,” he says. “All of you.”

His thumb brushes the edge of her lip and she is ravenous, delirious.

“Mer.” It has a cooling sound, some semblance of refreshment. Like this moment, if she allows it to, can offer her some hard-fought peace.

So when he steps away, it’s like dousing her with a bucket of ice. She realizes, belatedly, that the pain is still there, in his face. On his lips.

“I rather think I’ll do fine in there,” Mer says, adjusting his ludicrous tie. “Don’t you?”

Right , she thinks, and catches her breath, recommitting to the fallout of her plan. After all, it’s too late now to stop it.

***

Mer regrets his behavior. To a degree. Not the things he said (which were true) or the things he did (honest, if misleading and unchaste).

What he regrets is not doing more. He regrets not taking Lilari by the shoulders and saying for heaven’s sake, it’s not as if he wants this.

How can she possibly believe this is anything but the best he could scrape together of a life?

One hardly dreams of these conditions as a boy.

Certainly Mer hadn’t, too haunted was he by dreams of a girl he hardly knew (you know which one).

Imagine if he said that. If he got down on his knees and said Lilari, fuck the empire and their promises of sorcery and power, I’ll die with you in poverty and treason if that’s what you ask.

Can you imagine? If he said I’ll die for you, how could she say anything short of okay cool, then die?

He knows there is no future here, even if half an image blurs the edges of all his thoughts.

The partially materialized fantasy where he loves and is loved by the woman who was a friend long before she was a daydream.

Who is, perhaps, the only friend Mer’s ever had.

But anyway, that isn’t real, and worse it’s painful, so now here he is in the Mederico family’s private drawing room, sweating straight through all these fucking brocades, pretending to be the kind of man who can sweep a lady off her feet. Which, worst of all, is going well.

“God, but you can’t even imagine how terrible it all is,” sighs Lady Sabiyana, who wears a delicate birdcage mask.

She’s fingering the heavy jewel around her neck that Mer feels sure must be Adelion’s stolen trinket.

Now that he thinks of it, he actually recognizes the jewel – he’s seen it before, in a portrait that hangs in Adelion’s house, around the neck of his late wife.

Mer ponders how he’s going to slip it from around the neck of this beautiful, horrible duchess and regrets not writing the word ‘seduce’ on a slip of parchment while his mind was more at ease.

“It’s as if I don’t matter at all, do you know what I mean?

I’m just an object,” complains the wealthiest woman in three counties, “and you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it is here, the unrelenting heat.

And the natives! And Vorcanto’s so utterly draining, all his unavoidable wants and needs, his constant desperation for reassurance—”

“Indeed, has anyone considered how you must feel,” Mer manages, adjusting the black silk mask tied over his face until it sops up some of the sweat beading at his forehead.

“Yes, but it’s that precisely!” says Sabiyana, as Mer ponders whether he’s capable of whatever Moromaso would do under these circumstances. Kiss her? Disrobe her? Colonize her homeland? He misses Lilari as he thinks this. He can almost hear her laugh.

Before he can say anything, though, someone enters the room behind them, and Sabiyana gives a horrified little gasp that Mer realizes is pure theater. But then she realizes it is her friend, the Lady Elemora Mederico, and becomes bored with it all yet again.

“We’re busy,” Sabiyana says, reclining into Mer to the point of altering his balance. He fumbles for the chair behind him as Sabiyana purrs, “Was there something you needed?”

Elemora, in sharp contrast to Sabiyana, is nearly panting with apprehension. “What are you doing in here? Never mind. Dometico’s just arrived,” she says, hurrying to stash what appears to be bottles of liquor in the nearby drawer of an antique Imalian cabinet.

“Dometico? The pirate?” Sabiyana straightens as if to augment her bosom, a look of delight on her features. “Where?”

Mer’s chest tightens. His hand moves to the waistcoat where he’s stashed the spells for escape, wondering whether he’s light-fingered enough to grab the necklace at the same time. He’ll have to find Lilari, too – why did they ever agree to separate?

He realizes abruptly they never even made contingency plans for if either of them got caught.

“Somewhere. Anywhere. How should I know?” Elemora’s eyes slip to Mer before dismissing him in the same glance, and he’s relieved about what that means for Lilari until it occurs to him that, actually, he’s the only one who’s taken on any kind of risk.

It’s not a crime for her to be here. There’s the kidnapping danger, of course.

But if she was worried about her safety, why leave Nicano Asco’s at all?

Hmm.

“Fix your face,” Elemora snaps at Sabiyana while Mer contemplates things very slowly in his head. “Adelion’s just ridden up to the gates—”

“Adelion?” Sabiyana straightens with alarm, her first real sign of apprehension. She scrubs at her garish lipstick, shoving Mer aside to check her appearance in the glass. “What’s Adelion doing here?” she shoots over her shoulder.

“How should I know?” Elemora is fretting, hiding things, pointlessly tidying the room. Sabiyana, meanwhile, is busy adjusting her bodice, pulling it up until it almost looks prim. “Someone must have tipped him off—”

A brief, unsolicited image: Mer finding himself one slip of parchment short as he was writing the spells for this endeavor. Another: whatever was slipped furtively from the folds of Lilari’s gown into Nicano Asco’s waiting hands.

“Who?” Sabiyana cries, then throws her hands up in an apparent wail of suffering. “Oh, those ignorant sluts! We’re all going to be in for such a tiresome lecture, not to mention all the blasted fines—”

“Whoever it was had better hand over Dometico,” Elemora agrees. “Otherwise who knows how much interest he’ll shove onto the next tax—”

With that, Mer dismally concludes his math.

Lilari was never being kidnapped. Of course no one here would summon Adelion, who’ll employ all methods of pious usury now that he’s caught them in the act.

And Lilari never needed something so banal as a necklace.

What she needed was to pin Dometico’s crimes on Mer and then leave him behind for Dometico’s fate.

But why? To save her real lover, the murderous pirate?

It doesn’t make sense, but at the same time, of course it does – the part where it isn’t Mer. Mer, stupid Mer, who burns with something now, a confluence of shame and grief. All this time she was everything to him, and of course he was never anything to her.

Why had he ever possibly believed he might be? Just because for a single moment in a burning room, she’d almost looked at him like she could dream another future in his eyes?

The door suddenly slams shut, burying Mer in the consequences of his actions. So resigned is he to his doom that he scarcely notices the figure that materializes in the room, half-hidden in the shadows.

“Ladies,” says a cool voice that, despite its unlikelihood, Mer recognizes instantly. “If you wanted Dometico, all you had to do was ask.”

***

Let it be known! Lilari did not intend to do this. Mislead Mer, firstly, but also, the bit where she spent years impersonating a pirate.

Or rather, as a pirate, impersonating a man.

The truth is, Adelion’s butcher Kasalka came to the home of Lilari’s new betrothed to deliver her a private warning, which was that he knew who she was and what she’d done, and that Adelion would soon find out unless she paid his ransom.

The price: the jewel of Adelion’s kingdom.

But of course, Adelion didn’t care about actual, literal jewels.

Adelion cared about the trinket he’d kept behind bars, which Lilari had stolen a long time ago.