Breakfast, as it turned out, was where the war began.

Lloyd had known it would be difficult. He had sat up half the night drawing a seating plan. He had considered three configurations, rejected two, and settled finally on a long table with Elena at one end, Malina at the other, and himself in the middle, like a diplomatic buffer zone with a teapot. He had set out the porridge. He had set out the bread. He had, with a good deal of private anxiety, set a small vase of dried lavender in the exact center of the board, on the theory that nobody had ever started a fight over lavender.

He had not accounted for the chair.

It was a perfectly ordinary chair. It stood at the head of the table, on the left, where the morning light fell across it from the east window, and it had a slightly higher back than the others and a worn leather cushion that Dorrin had stitched. It was, by common consent, the best seat in the house. It had been Elena's for seven weeks.

Malina was sitting in it.

She had come down at a quarter to six, before anyone else, and had taken the seat with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had never once wondered whether it was hers. She had arranged her napkin. She had laid out her knife. She was now sitting with her back perfectly straight and her hands folded on the table, gazing at the middle distance, with the faint cold repose of a statue of a general in a town square.

Elena stopped in the doorway.

Lloyd, who was setting down the teapot, froze with his hand on the lid.

It was one of those moments. He had felt them before, in the Command Chamber, on the days when two senior officers who had been feuding for a decade were summoned to the same meeting. The air thickened. A pressure seemed to settle on the room, like the weight of a storm cloud against a window. He could hear the clock on the shelf. He could hear the ticking of the fire. He could hear Pico, somewhere above, in the rafters, quietly polishing a beam.

"General," said Elena.

"Champion," said Malina.

They said it in the same instant, with the same level courtesy. They did not look at each other. They looked at a point about two feet to the left of the other's ear.

"You are in my chair," said Elena.

"I am in a chair."

"It is the chair at the head of the table, on the left, beside the east window. It has a leather cushion."

"I had not noticed the cushion."

"It was stitched by a dwarf."

"It is a remarkably competent cushion," said Malina. She did not look down. "I will keep it in mind."

"It is my chair."

"It is Operator Vane's chair."

Elena turned her head, very slowly, and looked at Lloyd.

He opened his mouth. He found, with a faint cold sense of dread, that there was no possible reply that would not be taken as a declaration of allegiance. He looked at the porridge. He looked at the lavender. He looked, hopefully, at the ceiling.

"It's the house's chair," he said.

Neither of them seemed to find this satisfactory.

---

It escalated gracefully.

That was the most remarkable thing about it. In his years at Pandemonium, he had seen a good many feuds, and most of them had been loud. They had been messy, and sprawling, and full of shouting. This was nothing of the kind. It proceeded with a stately, glacial, perfectly synchronized politeness, like a pair of dancers executing a very old and very dangerous figure.

"I will pour the tea," said Elena, taking up the pot.

"I will pour the tea," said Malina, taking up the pot.

For a moment they stood there, each with a hand on the handle, locked in a kind of rigid, smiling stalemate. A thin thread of steam rose between them.

"It is customary," said Elena, "for the senior member of staff to serve the proprietor first."

"I am the senior officer present."

"You are a guest."

"I am a creditor."

"You are a debtor," said Elena, "with a bag of charms."

Malina's hand tightened on the handle. The china creaked.

"It is an honor," she said, "to be reminded by a person who sleeps in a woodshed."

"I do not sleep in the woodshed. I have a room."

"You slept in it for twenty-three days. Next to my operator."

"He is not your operator."

"He is a former subordinate of the Deep Defense Legion, and as such remains subject to the..."

"He is a free man," said Elena, "who gave notice."

"He was never released from service."

"He was released," said Elena, "on the fourteenth day."

"By whom?"

"By you."

Malina stopped.

She stopped completely, mid-breath, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes very wide. Something passed across her face, a swift shadow, like the shade of a bird crossing a window. Her horns, which had been a polished dark chestnut in the morning light, took on, for a moment, a faint warm blush.

It faded.

She let go of the teapot.

"Pour it," she said, in a toneless voice. "It makes no difference."

Elena filled his cup. She filled it to precisely the right level, with the flourish of a woman who has won a major engagement and is too well-bred to say so. She put the pot down. She looked at Malina with great solemn satisfaction.

It was the worst thing she could have done.

---

"You," said Elena, quite softly, "sent him a Final Notice."

"I beg your pardon?"

"On black paper." She had set down the pot. She did not raise her voice. But the room had gone very cold. "In white ink. Three lines. I watched him read it. I watched him sit at that table for an hour, with a face like a man at his own funeral."

"It was a lawful communication."

"It was a threat."

"It was a notice of intent to appear," said Malina. "It contained no threat whatsoever."

"He had not slept for seven weeks."

"Nor had I!"

It cracked out of her before she could stop it. It rang in the quiet room. Malina's mouth snapped shut. Her horns, for the briefest instant, took on a faint rosy tinge, and she turned her face a few degrees toward the window, as if the morning light had suddenly become very interesting.

"I mean to say," she went on, stiffly, "that the Legion has been inconvenienced."

"The Legion," said Elena, "has been writing to a man who was eating soup in a house he rebuilt with his own hands, while you sat in a chamber and tore up pages."

"How do you..."

"He is not a fool. I am not a fool. We can both count."

Lloyd, at the table, had put down his spoon. He was staring at the two of them with the slow dawning horror of a man who has just watched two clocks, set a minute apart, reach the same hour. He wished very much to say something. He could not think what.

"General," he began. "Elena. I think there may be some..."

"There is no confusion," said Malina.

"There is none," said Elena.

"She is a menace."

"She is a tyrant."

"She keeps my operator in a shed."

"She has kept him in a cage for six years," said Elena.

It was said quietly. It was not a shout. It was a plain, flat, steady statement, offered across the width of the table, and it fell into the room like a stone into a well.

Lloyd saw Malina's face change.

It did not collapse. It did something far more dangerous. It went still, and cold, and absolutely, utterly blank, like the sudden smoothing of a pond before the first bubbles of an eruption.

She put her hand on the table.

"Say that again," said Malina.

"No," said Elena. "I think you heard."

---

It began with the poker.

He never entirely worked out the sequence. It happened too quickly. One moment they were standing a table's width apart, with the morning light between them and the kettle ticking quietly on the hob. The next there was a flash of silver, and a crash, and the long table jumped a foot into the air.

Elena had drawn.

It was a beautiful draw, as clean and swift as a flash of lightning, and the long sword sang out of its scabbard with a high, pure, crystalline note. A thin golden light ran down the blade. She came around the end of the table in a single flowing stride, with her braid whipping behind her and her gray eyes blazing, and brought the sword round in a long shining arc.

Malina was not there.

She had moved with a speed he had never seen. She had gone over the table in a single smooth vault, scattering porridge, and she landed in a crouch beside the hearth, and her hand closed on the first thing it found. It was the poker. It was a long, thick, iron rod with a hooked end, and she swung it up, in one fluid motion, and met the descending blade with a ringing clang.

The sword and the poker locked.

For one frozen second, they stood face to face, a hand's breadth apart, with their weapons crossed between them and their eyes burning. He saw the sword bend. He saw the poker, which was a good strong poker, begin to bend in return. The gold light of the sword ran along the iron, and the iron smoked.

"You will not," said Elena, through her teeth, "speak of him as property."

"I have never..."

"You called him my operator."

"He is a trained officer of the Legion!"

"He is a man!"

They broke apart.

The poker had been left with a pronounced curve. Malina cast it aside, with a glance of cool contempt, and it rolled across the floor and fetched up against the leg of a table. She did not reach for the basket by the door, where her sword lay. He saw her look at it. He saw her measure the distance, and the angle, and the three seconds it would take, and discard the thought. She took a kitchen stool by one leg and swung it up, like a man swinging a mace.

"I will say this for you," said Malina. "You are not boring."

"I will say this for you," said Elena. "You are not subtle."

They went at it.

---

It was, in the technical sense, a magnificent fight.

He could see that. Even through the rising tide of horror, the old professional part of him, the part that had spent six years watching adventurers fight monsters in the dark, could not help noticing the quality of what he was watching. Elena fought like a river in flood. She was all long reach and driving power, every stroke a clean, whirling, flowing curve, and the sword in her hand seemed to be alive. Malina fought like a knife. She was a blur of short, brutal, economical movements, without a single wasted gesture, and she took the sword on the stool, and the poker, and a bench, and a stool again, and every parry came a hair's breadth sooner than the last.

They went round the room twice.

They went through the dining table, which gave way with a splintering crack. They went through three chairs. They went through the curtain on the east window, which came down in a long gray cascade and was trampled underfoot. A shelf collapsed. A set of cups went off the end of it, one after another, like a row of dominoes. The hearth screen toppled with a clang. The great copper kettle, which Lloyd had polished that morning, took a glancing blow from the sword and spun across the floor with a long dull ringing, and came to rest, curled in on itself, like a sleeping cat.

He stood in the middle of it.

He did not move. He could not have said why. He was standing beside the counter, with a napkin in one hand, and the whole room was coming apart around him in slow motion: splinters and plaster dust and flying crockery, two furious women, a falling chair. And he realized, with a thin, strange, tilted sense of wonder, that none of it was touching him.

Not one thing.

The chair had gone past his left ear by a foot. A fragment of cup had skimmed his right shoulder and missed. When Elena swung wide, her blade had gone high, an inch above his head, and she had checked it, so smoothly that he had not seen her do it. And Malina, who in the space of ten seconds had demolished a table, a bench, and a pair of shutters, had without once pausing taken care, each time, to throw her opponent toward the far wall, away from him.

Every strike. Every parry. Every spin.

They were fighting around him.

They were fighting as though he were a thing of glass.

He saw it all at once, with a cold and complete clarity, the way a man sees the shape of a coastline from a high ridge. They had both been doing it from the start. They were two of the most dangerous fighters on the continent, and they were furious, and they were doing everything in their power to stop him from being hurt.

It was not, he thought, a very comfortable observation.

---

Elena saw it first.

She was in the middle of a long sweeping cut, with the sword drawn back over her shoulder and the whole weight of her body behind it, when her eyes flickered, for a split second, to the left. She saw Malina's feet. She saw the angle of her hips. She saw, quite clearly, that Malina had planted herself directly between the swing of the sword and the end of the counter, where a small white earthenware cup with a chipped handle was sitting in the sun.

It was his cup. It was the one he had polished five times.

And Malina, with a half second to spare, had turned her back to the blade.

Elena checked her stroke.

It was a ferocious effort. She had to wrench the sword aside, mid-swing, with a force that sent a tremor along her whole arm. The blade went wide. It buried itself, with a thud, in the post of the stair. Malina staggered, and turned, and stood staring.

Neither of them spoke.

It was a half second. It was less. But it hung there in the dusty air, between them, like a held note, and he saw the knowledge go across two faces in the same instant.

Elena looked at Malina. Malina looked at the cup.

They looked at each other again.

"You were," said Malina, slowly, "protecting the cup."

"I was protecting the cup," said Elena.

"It is a very ordinary cup."

"It is his favorite."

"I know it is," said Malina, in a very quiet voice. "He polishes it."

There was a long, crooked, astonished pause.

The dust drifted in the shafts of light. The ruined curtain hung in a heap. Somewhere, a last piece of crockery rolled in a slow, spiraling circle across the floor and clinked to rest.

Then Elena wrenched her sword out of the post, and Malina took up the stool, and they went back at it.

---

"HALT!"

It came out of him without any conscious decision.

He did not know where it had come from. It was a sound from the very bottom of his chest, a hard, cold, flat, tearing sound, like iron dragged over stone. It filled the whole room. It was not loud. He had never been loud. But it was the voice of the Command Chamber, sharp and cold and absolute, the voice of a woman who had never once been disobeyed, and it cracked across the wreckage of the front room like a whip.

Both women stopped.

They stopped at the same instant, as though they had been struck. Elena froze with her sword half raised. Malina froze with the stool over her head. They stood there, locked in place, in the middle of a ruined room, in a haze of plaster dust, with their mouths open and their eyes wide and their muscles shivering with the effort of obedience.

"Stand down," said Lloyd.

It came out in the same voice. He could hear it. It was a good imitation. It was a very good imitation. He had been rehearsing it, in the garden, for a month.

"Weapons down. Both of you. Now."

The stool came down, slowly, as if it were being lowered on a rope. The sword dropped. The point touched the floor with a faint clink.

Neither of them said a word.

He stood by the counter, with his napkin in his hand, and found that his own heart was thudding wildly, and that his knees had begun, very faintly, to shake.

It was Malina who spoke first.

"That," she said, in a wondering and faintly outraged voice, "is my voice."

"I borrowed it," said Lloyd.

"That is the Command voice. It is the Third Imperative. It is not taught. It is not transferable. It took me eleven years to perfect." She turned her head, slowly, and stared at him. "You have been using it. On the Champion."

"Only once."

"On a duel."

"In a vegetable garden," said Lloyd.

"You stole it."

"I'm sorry. It was very effective."

Malina opened her mouth.

She did not say anything. She stood there in the debris, with plaster in her hair and a sliver of cup on her sleeve, and a slow, deep, unmistakable flush spread across her face from the collar to the brow. It reached her ears. And then, as he watched, the dark curved horns on either side of her head began, very faintly, to glow.

It started at the tips. A faint, pale, rose-colored light, like the first flush of a sunrise on a distant peak. It spread down the curve. It brightened. In half a minute, they were burning with a soft warm pink, like two small lanterns, and the light shone on her cheekbones and the wet shine in her eyes.

Elena began to laugh.

It started as a hiss. It bubbled up. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and it escaped round the edges, in great snorting, shuddering gusts, and her eyes began to water. She bent double. She leaned her forehead against the stair post, with her shoulders shaking, and she made a sound like a kettle coming to the boil.

"Your horns," she gasped. "Your horns are..."

"They are not," said Malina.

"They are pink."

"It is a trick of the light."

"They are," wheezed Elena, "glowing."

"It is a standard thermoregulatory response," said Malina, in a high, strangled voice, "to the exertion."

"It is not."

"It is a medical condition."

"It is the loveliest thing I have ever seen," said Elena, sliding slowly down the post to the floor.

From somewhere in the rafters came a small flat voice.

"This unit confirms," said Pico. "Horn luminance is currently one hundred and sixty percent of baseline. Cause: acute embarrassment."

"Be quiet," said Malina.

"This unit is only reporting."

"I will have you decommissioned."

"This unit will note the threat," said Pico, "for the record."

---

Lloyd looked at the room.

He did it slowly, with great care, as one looks at a patient after a long illness. It was not a kind sight. The dining table was in four pieces. Three chairs had been reduced to kindling. The east curtain lay in tatters on the floor. A long diagonal gouge ran across the planks, where the sword had bitten. The shelf by the hearth had come loose from the wall and hung by a single bracket. The copper kettle was crushed. The hearth screen was bent. The air was thick with plaster dust, and the morning light, falling through it, turned it to a haze of gold.

On the counter, undisturbed, in the middle of a ring of splinters, sat a small white cup with a chip in the handle.

He picked it up.

It was whole. It was not so much as cracked. He turned it over, and ran a thumb round the rim, and set it gently down again, in exactly the center of the shelf, with the chip toward the wall.

Then he took out his ledger.

"I will be preparing," he said, in a perfectly level voice, "an itemized assessment."

He did not look up. He took out a pencil. He licked its tip.

The silence in the room changed.

It was a faint, cold, creeping change, like the stillness that falls when a cloud covers the sun. Elena had stopped laughing. She sat up on the floor, with her back against the post and her hair in her face, and the grin was fading from her lips. Malina, on the other side of the room, had lowered the stool very slowly to the ground, and was standing with her hands at her sides, looking at the notebook with the wary stiff expression of a woman who has just heard a trap close.

"Operator," said Malina.

"General."

"There is no need for..."

"Table, dining, oak, six feet," said Lloyd, writing. "Four pieces. Irreparable. Chairs, three. Curtain, one. Shelf, one, damaged. Kettle, copper, one, deformed beyond repair. Cups, eleven, shattered. Hearth screen. Floor, damage to planking, approximately six board feet."

"I will pay for the chairs," said Elena, rather faintly.

"You will pay for forty percent."

"Forty..."

"Of the total. It's a proportional split. I'll set out the method."

"How much," said Malina, in a hollow voice, "is the total?"

Lloyd did not answer.

He was still writing. He wrote, and added, and ran a finger down the column, and crossed something out, and wrote a figure beside it. The two of them stood in the ruins of the front room, in the haze of golden dust, and watched him, with the helpless, tense, silent attention of two people watching a surgeon operate.

From the rafters, in the stillness, came a small clear voice.

"This unit has completed an estimate," said Pico. "Total property damage: three hundred and forty silver."

Nobody moved.

A fragment of plaster, loosened from the ceiling by the vibration, came down in a long, slow, spiralling fall, and landed on the floor with a soft, almost apologetic tap.

"Pico," said Lloyd, mildly, "I'd hoped to say that myself."

"This unit apologizes."

"It's quite all right."

"It was a precise estimate," said Pico. "This unit was proud of it."

He looked up, and for the first time that morning, he smiled.

It was a small, tired, rueful smile. It tilted one corner of his mouth. He looked from Elena, who was sitting on the floor with her mouth open and a spot of porridge on her chin, to Malina, who stood stiff as a pillar in the middle of the room with her horns glowing a tender, mortified pink.

"Well," said Lloyd. "Shall we talk about it over breakfast?"