The blade stopped exactly one inch from Lloyd's throat.

He knew it was one inch because he had spent a great many years estimating distances, and because the edge, bright and cold and faintly humming with holy light, was close enough that he could feel the air change against his skin. He had not seen her cross the room. One moment she had been standing in the doorway with the dawn at her back. The next, the whole world had narrowed to a line of steel and a pair of furious gray eyes.

Six hundred and eleven confirmed victories, he thought. It was beginning to look like an understatement.

"Lloyd Vane," Elena said.

She said it the way people said the names of diseases. Her voice had lost its crack. It was low and steady and carried, in every syllable, the weight of three weeks in the dark.

"That's correct," Lloyd said.

"Operator. Optimization and Balance. Pandemonium." Her gaze flicked, briefly, to the little brass plate on the wall, and back. "You signed it."

"It's company policy. Every floor carries a designer's mark, for liability reasons."

"I read it forty-one times." The sword did not waver. "There is no other reading material in a looping corridor, Operator. I know every word of your plaque. I know that it says FOR ASSISTANCE, SEE EXIT. I know that the exit was a lie."

"The exit was not a lie," Lloyd said carefully. "It was a statement of fact. The exit existed. It was merely very difficult to locate."

The edge of the blade moved a fraction closer.

"For twenty-two days," said Elena.

"That is," Lloyd admitted, "above the median."

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Outside, a bird began to sing. The fire ticked in the grate. Elena stood with her sword at his throat and her jaw set like a drawn bow, and Lloyd, who had been trained to read the body language of people about to do something violent, noted three things in rapid succession.

Her hands were steady. Her stance was perfect. And her knees, very slightly, were trembling.

He made a decision.

"Would you like some soup?" he said.

---

The sword did not move for a count of five.

"I beg your pardon?" said Elena.

"Soup. I made a pot last night. There's more on the hook." Lloyd kept his hands open at his sides and his voice level, the way he had once talked a nervous imp crew out of a mutiny. "You've eaten a single bowl in the last four days, and I suspect you lost most of it on the porch. If you intend to run me through, I'd like you to have the strength to do it cleanly. A tired blade slips. It would be unpleasant for both of us."

Elena stared at him.

"Are you," she said slowly, "trying to bargain with me?"

"I'm trying to feed you. The bargaining comes after."

Her stomach, at that moment, spoke for her.

It was not a quiet sound. It was a long, low, aggrieved rumble that echoed through the front room like distant thunder, and it went on for what felt like a full five seconds. Elena's face, which had been the face of a righteous avenging angel, went through several rapid changes. First stony. Then startled. Then, very slowly, a deep and terrible red, from the collar of his borrowed shirt all the way to the roots of her hair.

"I will kill you," she said, with enormous dignity, "after I have finished eating."

"That seems fair," said Lloyd.

---

She ate three bowls.

She ate them standing at first, with the sword in one hand and the spoon in the other, in a posture of armed suspicion. After the first bowl, she sat on the edge of the nearest chair. After the second, she laid the sword across her knees. After the third, with the bone cleared and the broth scraped to the bottom, she leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and let out a long, shuddering sigh like a person coming up from underwater.

Lloyd watched her from across the room.

He had a way of watching people eat. It was a habit from his old work: you could learn a great deal about a person from the way they approached a meal. Some ate fast and furtive, as if someone might snatch the bowl. Some ate slowly, performing contentment. Elena ate like a soldier, efficiently, with total concentration, and the only sign that she was enjoying it was the way her free hand had curled around the edge of the bowl as if it might float away.

"This is very good soup," she said, in the tone of a woman reporting a battlefield defeat.

"Thank you."

"I want to be clear that this changes nothing."

"Understood."

"I am still here to avenge my honor."

"I assumed so."

"Good." She opened her eyes and fixed him with a stern gray glare. "Then we understand each other."

Lloyd refilled his own cup of tea and sat down across from her. He had found, over the years, that the best way to deal with a furious person was to be the least furious thing in the room.

"Would you like to tell me about it?" he said.

"About what?"

"The labyrinth."

Elena's mouth tightened. For a moment he thought she would refuse. Then, with a kind of grim reluctance, as if the words had been waiting a long time and had finally found a crack to come through, she began to speak.

---

"It started like any other dungeon," she said.

She was looking into the fire. Her voice had gone flat and careful, the voice of a soldier giving a report to a superior who might not like what he heard.

"We went in at dawn. Six of us. Myself, two knights of the Holy Order, a priest, a scout, and a mage. We'd been sent to clear the lower levels of Pandemonium because the Church had received word of a new floor, thirty-one levels down, that was producing unusual mana readings. A new construction." Her lip curled faintly. "A trap-floor. Our intelligence suggested that it was recent, and therefore unfinished."

"It was finished," Lloyd said.

"Yes. We noticed." She drew a breath. "The entrance looked ordinary. A stone hallway. We walked down it, and at the end there was a fork, and we took the left, because I always take the left. And then there was another fork, and we took the left. And then another."

"And you ended up back at the beginning," said Lloyd.

"I ended up at a different beginning." Elena's hands tightened on her knees. "That was the thing I did not understand for a long time. It was not the same corridor. The walls were different. The torches were different. There was a statue of a goat in one place and a fountain in another. I thought, this is a new section. I thought, we have made progress. And then I saw the plaque."

"For assistance, see exit," Lloyd said quietly.

"I saw it on the third day," said Elena. "It was the same plaque. The same words. The same small brass screws. And I understood, finally, that we had not moved at all."

She was silent for a moment.

"We lost the scout first," she said. "Not to death. He just stopped. He sat down in the middle of a corridor, with his back against the wall, and would not get up. The priest prayed for two days and then stopped praying. The knights kept up the discipline for a week. They made a rota. They shared what water we had. They said we would find the way if we kept faith."

She laughed, once, without humor.

"On the ninth day I found the mage crying in a side passage. I had never seen a mage cry. They are not supposed to. It turned out the passage looped back on itself, so I had been listening to him cry, from a distance, for about six hours, before I understood that I had been walking toward the sound the entire time."

Lloyd said nothing. He found that his tea had gone cold in his hand.

"By the fourteenth day," Elena went on, "I was not the Blade of Light anymore. I was just a woman in a very long hallway with a very good sword, which was no use at all, because there was nothing to cut. I could not fight it. I could not outrun it. I could not even hate it, properly, because it was so very neat." Her voice cracked, just slightly. "Do you know how tidy it was? There was not a speck of dust. Every tile was perfectly aligned. Whoever built that place had spent hours getting it right."

"Forty-one hours of design time," Lloyd said, before he could stop himself. "Plus six more for the lighting."

Elena turned her head and looked at him.

He closed his mouth.

"I cried for three weeks," she said, evenly. "I cried in front of the Holy Order. They carried me out on a stretcher. The imps who found me wrapped me in a blanket and gave me a cup of cocoa, and I took it, and thanked them, and wept into it while they patted my head." She straightened. "There is a song about it now. In the Church barracks. They sing it at night. It has a very catchy chorus."

"I'm sorry," said Lloyd.

And he found, to his own surprise, that he meant it.

It was a peculiar sensation. For six years, the people on the other side of his floors had been numbers on a gauge. Tracks in the dust. A column in a quarterly report. He had known, in the abstract, that each of them had a name and a face. He had designed, in the abstract, for their fear. But he had never sat across a table from one, in the pale light of a rainy dawn, and heard it described in her own voice.

I cried for three weeks.

He had made that. Carefully, lovingly, with lighting.

"I am not asking for an apology," Elena said. Her chin lifted. "I am asking for satisfaction. I have been stripped of my rank. The Church has suspended my stipend pending review of the incident. My commander has declared me unfit for field command until I have, quote, regained composure. Every knight in the Order has heard the song." She laid her hand on the hilt of the sword. "I came to find the man who did this, and I came to challenge him to single combat, in the old way, for the honor of the Blade of Light."

"I see," said Lloyd.

"I walked for three days."

"I know. I saw the footprints."

"I was following the north road."

"You were following a circle. A very well-formed one, if it helps."

Elena opened her mouth. She shut it again. Her face went red a second time, a deeper red than before.

"I do not," she said stiffly, "have a good sense of direction."

---

It was not hard, after that, for Lloyd to build the picture.

He had always been good at it. It was the thing he did best: take the scattered, contradictory pieces of a person, and fit them into a shape that made sense. He did it now with the cool, automatic competence of a man who had spent six years studying the way adventurers behaved under pressure.

She was a soldier of the Church, so she had been given orders all her life. Her talent had been identified early, so she had been moved from one assignment to the next without ever being asked what she wanted. She had been told where to stand, who to fight, and when to retreat. She had never, in all those years, been required to choose a direction on her own. She had followed the Church's roads. She had followed the Church's maps. And when, for the first time, she had found herself somewhere without either, she had simply... kept walking, in the one direction she had been taught.

Forward. Left. Never stop.

It would explain the circle.

It would also explain the thing that had struck him on the porch, the particular quality of her exhaustion. She had not collapsed because she was weak. She had collapsed because there was nothing left to push against. She had run out of orders.

"Where will you go," he asked, "after you've challenged me?"

Elena blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

"After the duel. Suppose you win. Suppose I fall to your blade, in the old way, with honor satisfied." He kept his voice mild. "What then? Will you return to the Church?"

"Of course."

"The Church that suspended your stipend."

"It is a temporary measure."

"The Church whose barracks sing songs about you."

She was silent.

"And how will you get there?" Lloyd said.

"I will..." She stopped. Her brow furrowed. "I will travel south. Along the road."

"Which road?"

"The... the main road."

"Do you know where it is?"

Elena looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes, the dawning, appalled recognition of a woman who had just been presented with a map and found that she could not read it.

"I have," she said, in a very small voice, "no money."

"No."

"And I do not know the way."

"No."

"And I am wearing your trousers."

"Yes," said Lloyd. "I'm afraid that's so."

There was a long, ringing silence.

Elena put her head in her hands.

---

He gave her a few minutes. It seemed the least he could do.

He busied himself at the hearth, banking the fire, setting the kettle on to boil, and generally making the small, clumsy, unobtrusive noises that a decent person makes while another person is quietly falling apart. When he turned around, she had lifted her head. Her eyes were red, but dry. Her mouth was set.

"Very well," she said. "You have made your point."

"I wasn't aware I was making one."

"You were. You were doing it deliberately. I was a fool not to see." She dragged a hand across her face. "You are a manipulator, Operator Vane. A very calm one. I have met your sort before. You sit there with your tea and your soft voice and you wait until a person has talked herself into a corner, and then you lay out the facts."

"That is more or less what I do," Lloyd agreed.

"I will not be flattered into submission."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"I will not be tricked."

"You'd see through me in a moment. You're far too perceptive."

Elena paused. She narrowed her eyes.

"Did you," she said, "just..."

"Observe that you're perceptive? Yes." Lloyd refilled her cup. "You identified my strategy within the first four minutes. You assessed the room before you entered it. You disarmed yourself of any false sentiment, and you held your temper until you had eaten. That is, I believe, the single most disciplined response to a hostile situation I have ever seen from a person in your condition."

Elena stared at him.

"You are flattering me," she said.

"Yes," said Lloyd. "Is it working?"

There was a very long pause.

Elena's gaze dropped to the table. Her ears, he noticed, had gone faintly pink.

"...Yes," she said, in a small and deeply resentful voice.

It was, he reflected, the most honest thing anyone had said to him in a month. He felt an unexpected flicker of warmth. He had thought she would deny it. He had thought she would bluster, or draw her sword again. Instead she had looked straight at the thing, and acknowledged it, and then, with a faint, grudging, rueful twist of the mouth, let him see that she knew exactly what he was doing and that she had chosen, for the moment, to let him do it.

She was not a victim. She had her own leverage, and she knew it. She was simply tired.

"I'd like to propose terms," Lloyd said.

---

He took a clean sheet of paper and a pencil.

"Three bowls of soup," he said, writing. "Two nights' lodging, including blankets and the use of a fire. Laundry of one set of undergarments, one cloak, and the lining of a breastplate. Medical attention, in the form of a poultice for the blister on your left heel, which you've been favoring since you walked in." He glanced up. "One pair of trousers, on loan. Total, at the standard rates in the village, forty silver."

"I have no money."

"I'm aware."

"Then why are you writing it down?"

"Because I want you to understand what you owe me. I'd like it in writing, so there's no confusion." He turned the paper around. "You'll note I've left the line for interest blank. I don't intend to charge any."

Elena looked at the paper. Then at him.

"You want me to pay you back."

"I want you to have an option other than starving in my yard." He set down the pencil. "I have a cabin that needs repair. I have an inn that needs a door that does not stick. I have a very large stack of firewood that has not been split. And I have a feeling, Miss Elena, that you are the sort of person who would rather work off a debt than accept a gift."

"I am," Elena said slowly. "I would."

"Then I propose a short-term arrangement. You stay until the debt is cleared. You work for your keep. You do not attempt to harm me during that time." He met her eyes. "At the end of it, if you still wish to challenge me to single combat, I will gladly accept. In the meantime, I would prefer to keep my head."

She was silent for a very long time.

Outside, the sun was fully up. Light poured through the new windows and fell in long, golden bars across the herringbone floor. The kettle began to sing on the hook.

At last, slowly, she picked up the pencil, and under his list, in a large, blunt, upright hand, she wrote a single line.

I, Elena, will be paying.

She set the pencil down.

"Deferred," she said, "not canceled. My honor will wait."

"I'd expect nothing less," Lloyd said.

She held out her hand across the table. It was large, callused, and absolutely steady. He took it. Her grip was crushing. She looked him dead in the eye as she squeezed, in the manner of a woman who wished him to understand precisely what she could do and had chosen not to.

"You are a terrible man, Operator Vane," she said.

"I've heard that," said Lloyd. "I prefer 'meticulous.'"

---

He found her the following afternoon behind the cabin, with an axe.

He had not expected much. He had expected, if he was honest, to have to demonstrate the technique. But she had taken one look at the woodpile, rolled up the sleeves of his old shirt, set a log on the block, and split it with a single, perfect, resounding stroke, so cleanly that the two halves flew apart and landed ten feet away in opposite directions.

"Oh," said Lloyd.

"It is not difficult," said Elena, setting up another. "It is a matter of finding the grain."

Crack.

"Most people," she added, "do not look at the grain."

Crack.

He stood with a basket of laundry under his arm and watched her work. She moved without wasted effort, a clean, rhythmic economy of lift and fall, and the pile of split logs on her left grew taller by the minute. There was a lightness in her, he noticed, that had not been there the night before. She hummed, slightly, under her breath. It was off-key. It was, he thought, the most human thing he had ever heard her do.

"I don't suppose," he said carefully, "you'd consider teaching me?"

She paused. She looked at him over her shoulder.

"You wish to learn to split wood?"

"I wish to know how to do it properly. I've been hacking at logs with an axe for three weeks, and Dorrin tells me I'm doing it in a way that makes his eyes hurt."

Elena considered him, with gravity.

"Your stance is wrong," she said. "Your grip is wrong. You swing from the arms instead of the hips. You are," she added, with a flat and solemn precision, "a disgrace to the axe."

"That's very helpful, thank you."

"Come here."

---

The Messenger Box rattled at dusk, while the two of them were hauling the last of the firewood into the shed.

Lloyd heard it from across the yard. He set down his armful. Elena looked up sharply.

"What is that?"

"Correspondence," he said. "From my former employer."

"Pandemonium?" Her hand moved to the place where her sword hung. "They are sending you letters?"

"One or two."

"They are demon letters."

"They are, strictly speaking, administrative."

She watched him cross the yard with narrowed eyes. He did not look back at her. He went into the cabin, set the lamp on the table, and opened the Box.

The parchment was warm. The ink was fresh. For once, there was a full page of it. He read it standing.

OPERATOR VANE.

I note that your last communication contained a query regarding the emotional state of a junior officer. This is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Fenwick has ceased weeping. He now merely sniffs, at intervals, in a manner I find distracting.

Your continued refusal to comply with the summons of the Legion constitutes a grave breach of professional conduct. I have consulted with the Judge Advocate. You will be pleased to learn that the penalties for desertion in wartime have been raised.

The Legion is making arrangements for your retrieval. Resistance will be treated as an act of rebellion.

Further, I wish to remind you that your pension, your dental coverage, and your seniority bonuses are contingent on your return to service.

You will report immediately. You will cooperate. You will take no further actions that might compromise the security of the Legion's interests.

Are you eating properly?

I have noted a decline in the quality of your handwriting.

In accordance with Article Eleven, the Legion reserves the right to take all necessary measures to ensure the return of its personnel.

You will comply.

-- M.

Lloyd read it once, from beginning to end.

Then he went back to the sixth paragraph, and read it again.

Are you eating properly?

It sat there, on its own line, between a threat of military retrieval and a reminder about dental coverage, without any punctuation to soften it, without so much as an indent. It had been written, he saw, in exactly the same hand as everything around it: sharp, slanted, military. But the ink was a shade darker. As if the pen had paused over it, a moment, before moving on.

She had asked.

She had been issuing threats for three weeks, and between the clauses and the articles and the warnings of imprisonment, she had asked him, in a single flat sentence, whether he was eating.

He read it a third time.

"Operator?" said Elena, from the doorway. "Is it a declaration of war?"

"Mostly," said Lloyd. His voice sounded odd in his own ears. "Yes. Mostly, it is."

"Mostly?"

"There are," he said, "some other elements."

Elena studied him from the doorway, with a very odd expression, a sort of narrow-eyed, cautious curiosity, like a general watching an enemy scout behave unexpectedly. She said nothing. After a moment, she turned and went out to the woodshed.

Lloyd stood alone in the lamplight, with the letter in his hand.

He knew exactly what he should do. He should file it. He should log the three divisions, note the date of their expected arrival, and begin planning a response: a series of defensive adjustments, an appeal through the proper channels, a polite refusal under Article Eleven. He should draft a careful letter in Form 9-C. He should send it off in the morning, once he had given it proper thought.

He took out a fresh sheet of paper.

He did not write Dear General Malina. He did not write a date. He did not cite a clause.

He picked up the pen, and he wrote two words, and he did not stop to look at them.

Yes. Are you?

The ink was still wet when he folded the paper. His hand, he noticed, was not quite steady. He had it in the Box and the lid closed before the part of his mind that sorted things into categories could catch up with the rest of him.

The gold lines flared. The Box hummed, softly, once, as though it were swallowing.

"Oh, no," Lloyd said, for the second time in two days.

He stood there in the empty cabin, with his hand flat on the lid, and listened to the sound of Elena's axe, outside in the dusk, going on and on.

It was not the sound of an enemy. It was the sound of someone, somewhere, doing something steady and good and right.

He stood and listened to it for a long time.