“Now,” said Lady Neku, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck and drag him close enough to bury her face in his hair. One of the retainers started clapping, and Lady Neku heard Nico groan.

“It’s a trap,” she whispered.

Luc pulled back. “What is?”

Grabbing his hair, Lady Neku yanked him down again, to general laughter from her brothers and a sigh from Luc’s father. Only family were allowed close, retainers being kept at a decent distance by silken ropes.

“All of this,” whispered Lady Neku. “Stay next to me at the banquet, I’ll protect you.”

Startled eyes stared down at her. Luc wanted to demand answers, he wanted to scramble away. It was all Lady Neku could do to hold the boy in place.

“Whisper,” she said.

Luc leaned close and someone started clapping again. “What’s a trap?” he asked, turning his head as Lady Neku’s hands twisted into his hair and dragged his ear to her mouth.

“Everything,” she said. “All of it.”

“Why?”

Lady Neku met his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve only just found out. But you’re in danger.”

“My father…”

Shaking her head, Lady Neku felt her face against his. “Too late,” she said. “It’ll be all I can do to save you.” A half dozen members of each family stood watching, a hundred servitors waited behind a silken rope. The boy clung to her, his body protected only by the sheet. Anyone could have killed him with a single thrust; she should be grateful her brothers had spared her that.

“We have to go through with this,” said Lady Neku.

Luc’s eyes widened. “I can’t.”

“Everyone’s watching,” she said. “You must.” If you don’t, thought Lady Neku, then Nico at least will know something is wrong and it will be much harder for me to protect you.

His lovemaking was angry and brutal, as if it was her fault everything had already begun to go wrong. This was High Strange, once called Katchatka Segment. What did he expect?

Lady Neku whimpered and sighed, closed her eyes, and clung to her new husband, burying her head in his hair. It was a command performance. So unexpected that she impressed even herself. When it was over, the face she presented to her family was streaked with tears. And the tears, at least, were real.

You did this, she told them, inside herself. You took away my friendship with Luc. You made him hate me.

Tradition allowed her to miss the banquet. In fact, tradition allowed her to hide her face from public sight for three days. Time for a new bride to live down the trauma of her public bedding. It was a d’Alambert family tradition. Lady Neku wasn’t remotely impressed by what it said about them.

“You’re sure you want to attend?” Lord d’Alambert stood with a cloak, ready to hide Lady Neku’s nakedness. A moon-faced servitor, moist-eyed in sympathy for the tears drying on her new mistress’s face, stood ready to escort Lady Neku to a waiting ship. “It would give you time to…”

Lady Neku smiled her sweetest smile. “I want to be with Luc,” she said, and all of the old man’s resistance crumbled.

The cloak he offered her was a faded shade of red, with slivers of amber sewn in patterns around the hem. It was lined with yellow silk and weighed so heavily that Lady Neku’s knees buckled as Lord d’Alambert draped it around her bare shoulders.

Having shown her mistress how to fasten the collar, the moon-faced servitor led Lady Neku to an alcove, so she could dress properly and compose herself. Of course I’m shaking, Lady Neku wanted to snarl. You’d shake if you knew what was about to happen.

“Leave me,” she demanded.

The servitor looked doubtful, which was interesting. Had the woman been from High Strange she’d barely have dared lift her eyes from the floor.

“I need time.”

Confusion, sympathy, and apologies…Lady Neku looked around the empty alcove and sighed. Struggling into her wedding dress, Lady Neku wrapped the ridiculous cloak around her shoulders and looked for the dagger she’d left under her folded clothes. It was gone.

“Oh great,” she said, just as Luc appeared in the doorway.

He blinked. A second later, Luc’s father was standing behind him, concern on his face. “Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Lady Neku, squaring her shoulders. It was only as she walked from the alcove to the candle-lit grandeur of the banquet that Lady Neku began to wonder how Luc’s anxiety had produced his father in the door behind him, with no words being exchanged. She should have paid that thought more attention.

The major domo had excelled itself. A white tablecloth spread the length of a table. Silver candle sticks and oil lamps flickered and gutted smokily in the breeze from a recycling unit. Overhead lights could have been used, and food could have been pulled from the Drexie boxes, but this was a banquet so fresh meat had been killed and old bottles had been opened.

Katchatka and d’Alambert, on the surface it was a triumph of diplomatic negotiation. Two families who had barely talked to each other in the time that anyone in the room had been alive now sat at the same table, preparing to celebrate their new alliance.

At one end sat Lady Katchatka, with Lord d’Alambert at the end opposite, in a chair of exactly equal size. Luc and Lady Neku were on d’Alambert’s right. Antonio, Petro, and Nico on their mother’s right, with Petro in the middle, so his brothers could support him discreetly, should Petro’s new body prove too weak to cope with the meal.

It was the seating that protocol demanded.

“Lady Neku,” said Lord d’Alambert, raising his glass. “Who will always have a place in our family.”

Raising her own glass, Lady Katchatka readied herself to make some equally facile reply and Lady Neku tensed, but all that happened was that her mother toasted Luc’s strength and intelligence, and lowered her glass again. One course drifted into two and then three, bottles of old wine emptied and were replaced, until the room began to blur slightly and Lady Neku forced herself to drink only water.

Could she have misunderstood?

The image of her mother and brothers in the Amber Study felt so real that Lady Neku was still wondering when her mother nodded to Nico. “If you would,” she said. “We should give Lord d’Alambert his present.”

Lurching to his feet, Nico staggered to a side table and grabbed what looked like a cushion. Only, when he returned, Lady Neku could see that the cushion supported a tiny battered-looking bowl.

“I understand,” said Lady Katchatka, “that you are interested in antiquity. This is the oldest artifact we possess. It is now yours.”

Nico put Yoshi’s bowl on the table in front of Lord d’Alambert. And in that moment, as the old man’s eyes fixed on fragile clay and Lady Neku began to rise from her seat, Nico struck, burying his dagger deep into Lord d’Alambert’s heart.

At least, that was what was meant to happen. What Lady Neku thought had happened.

Only the old man took the blade through his wrist, wrenching the dagger from Nico’s grasp with a single twist of his injured arm. From the expression on Lord d’Alambert’s face he’d already moved beyond pain.

And as Antonio cried out and Petro tried to stand, Nico died, his chest opened in a single slash that sprayed d’Alambert with blood. It was a miracle the old man could see to reach for Nico’s heart.

Lord d’Alambert killed Antonio with a single throw, catching him below the jaw and returning him to his seat. Petro died at the hands of Luc, who simply leaned across the table to slit the throat of the man opposite. Petro being too weak, drunk, or both to defend himself.

Sex and killing sounded the same, Lady Neku realised. All wet sucking and the slurp of broken vacuum. It even smelled the same, salt and sweet and shitty enough to leave her queasy.

“Wait,” she shouted, when Luc moved towards the final chair.